
Denialism: what drives people to reject the truth - denzil_correa
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/03/denialism-what-drives-people-to-reject-the-truth
======
andriesm
Maybe instead of calling peope "denialists" the respectful and correct term
would be "sceptic".

I.E. Someone isn't an evolution-denialist, but rather an evolution-sceptic.

Or vaccination-sceptic.

Or climate change sceptic.

This way the conversation doesn't shut down and people's minds don't block all
input. Maybe if you ask WHY are you a vaccination sceptic you can compare
facts.

------
posterboy
Simple, there is no truth. Null is the truest thing you will find. Believe is
a carefully stacked house of cards built on that, out of thin air, hanging in
the air.

~~~
Zuider
You mean like the way the natural numbers can be built from Church numerals?
Are you saying that nothing exists, or that there can be no true knowledge of
reality?

~~~
posterboy
I mean, "ex falso quodlibet" \- from wrong (assumptions) follow arbitrary
(conclusions). "Zero is ..." is a contradiction, whatever predicate follows
it.

In CS, null is false, indeed. Hence I'd rather use at least one underspecified
symbol, say 1, instead of to construct the initial element of sets.

~~~
perl4ever
Isn't null normally neither true nor false? Perhaps I've spent too much time
writing SQL.

Null = True is false Null = False is false

~~~
posterboy
In many algol like languages 0 == false == null, and all other numbers are
equivalent to true.

"Null" is e.g. German for zero, from Latin nullus, from ne (“not”) + ūllus
(“any”), from an older ūnus (“one”).

This is way more interesting though. It seems that words for zero are related
to the sun (an empty, shining sky, also consider the form), to grain, core,
again by the form (zero was also drawn just as a dot, historically), and to
root, which would explain why the zeros of a polynomial are also called the
roots.

~~~
perl4ever
I know, I learned BASIC, Pascal, C, C++, and Ada before SQL and Perl.

But see the way Ruby does it:

"only nil (Ruby's null value) and a special false object are false, all else
(including the integer 0 and empty arrays) is true"

vs Perl:

"The number 0, the strings "0" and "", the empty list (), and the special
value undef evaluate to false. All else evaluates to true"

The SQL way seems less like an arbitrary mess to me.

