> As humans, we care about forming true beliefs and avoiding false beliefs. We want to know, understand, get things right. We want to avoid cognitive error and ignorance. These are our twin epistemic aims.
Unfortunately, I think there's much evidence that most people would verbally agree with this but their subsequent actions would reveal that they choose to seek out, and believe as true, information that confirms rather than challenges their already established beliefs.
In other words: the Righteous Mind by Haidt.
That's simply the function of narrative using words. How can anything built subjectively in symbols and cause and effect reach consensus, correlational objectivity?
They can't. Language is for confirmation bias first and foremost. It embeds the illusion of subjective perspective in every statement.
We quit language, replace it, or go down for the count.
"It feels as if the whole world has been transformed into images of the world, and has thus been drawn into the human realm, which now encompasses everything. There is no place, no thing, no person or phenomenon that I cannot obtain as image or information. One might think this adds substance to the world, since one knows more about it, not less, but the opposite is true: it empties the world, it becomes thinner. That’s because knowledge of the world and experience of the world are two fundamentally different things. While knowledge has no particular time or place and can be transmitted, experience is tied to a specific time and place and can never be repeated. For the same reason, it also can’t be predicted. Exactly those two dimensions – the unrepeatable and the unpredictable – are what technology abolishes. The feeling is one of loss of the world." Knausgaard
Anyone in the dating market should know this instinctively by now, that it makes reading most news or puff pieces of this sort comical.
Case in point, votes on comments. Especially Reddit.