[garylkz]

From my totally biased understanding, truth is what groups of people agreed on, people believe what they believed in. Even though people agreed on the same thing, each of them would have different interpretation of the truth that they believe it, with certain levels of overlap.

[the_af]

> truth is what groups of people agreed on

I would call this "consensus" or "mainstream knowledge", or something like that.

Truth exists regardless of whether people agree on it. I suppose about some things we cannot ever claim we know "the truth", though in common speech we agree to call widely held beliefs as the truth, for simplicity's sake.

[garylkz]

Ah yes, that exactly

[diggan]

> truth is what groups of people agreed on

But just because a bunch of people agreed on it, doesn't mean it's "absolute truth", like how doctors for a long time didn't want to wash their hand, because they didn't believe in germ theory. Countless of examples where we've ("scientists" and/or humans) all agreed on something, which later turned out not to be true.

And believing that truth is just "consensus between people" would lead to people never trying to go against that, even if their truth seems more truthy than the "established" truth.

[garylkz]

Yes, it's truth as in "consensus" but not the absolute truth, and I don't think we are going to reach the absolute truth anytime soon.

You're assuming that everyone will agree on the truth just because it's the "truth", but why do you think we no longer believe that earth is the center of world?

There will always people who questions the truth and did research and study about it, discovers new observations of the subject and replace the existing if it convinced the majority.

It's question that lead us closer to the truth (occasionally it does the opposite). That's why we made new discoveries, and that's why you are here questioning about the truthfulness of truth.

[RiverCrochet]

I have a different take. The more that people cannot disagree with X, the more X is truth. This is separate from fiction and intentional misrepresentation of events.

When you directly witness something happening with a few others, you can't disagree about what you saw, so that is high truth (assuming no intentional mispresentation). Of course sometimes even here you may not all have seen the same exact thing at the same exact time.

Video of events tends to be up there as well. Of course I mean raw, unedited video and not edited clip-montages of stuff interspersed with commentary, opinions, etc. Even raw video is not guaranteed to be high or complete truth if it's omitting other things that were part of an event.

When we get into things like testimony, opinions, second-hand accounts, anecdotes, and commentary, then we're in the world of low truth (and sometimes its complete absence) and a high chance of deception. Hence the need for heuristics, trust, narrative detection, asking who benefits, etc. Which may not arrive at any truth other than the direction someone is wanting you to go.

Science is interesting because it's reports are a form of testimony, but specifically extending an invitation to be reproduced so it can be directly witnessed again. This alone makes it more trustworthy than things like "here's the testimony of a dead person we can't even talk to anymore" or "everyone seems to accept X so X must be true" - and that last one is dangerous today because many people use social media as a proxy for "everyone" but it's very easily manipulated.