Regardless of what you think about this step I find it disconcerting that we can now disagree on facts. For example: - whether crime is up or down - whether the earth is warming or not - how many people live in poverty - what the rate of inflation is - how much social security or healthcare costs - etc These are all verifiable, measurable facts, and yet, we somehow manage to disagree. We always used to disagree and t…
Take inflation for example. Measure inflation in terms of gold, broken arm repairs, hamburgers, or houses and any will give you wildly different figures. The government preferred index prices a basket of goods but the particulars of the basket may not match you or anyone you know, and various corrections are necessary but are themselves subjective. An often disputed one is correction for goods substitution-- if steak goes up people buy less steak and more rice. The current preferred model of the government chains these corrections even though in reality you can only replace so much steak with rice before it's all rice and no steak. These indexes also have corrections for goods increasing in quality-- the price went up but its because the thing got better, not because inflation. etc.
yadda yadda, I don't mean to import the debate here but the point is that there is something to debate particularly when the statistics don't match a person's lived experience -- when the things they need to live are rapidly increasing in price-- especially when politicians are abusing the stats beyond the breaking point (I think of the time when the Biden administration was crowing about something like the rate of inflation increase no longer increasing. What a jerk! ... or is that a snap? ;) ).
And even when the fact itself isn't really in dispute there is often plenty of room for reasonable people to debate the implications or relevance.
When people confused these subjective issues for "basic axioms" and then impose their understanding as "facts" it's extremely problematic and highly offensive to people whose experience has taught them otherwise.