The problem with "objective" facts is that they are always contextually selected — we call something an objective fact precisely when it suits a narrative, which makes every claim of objectivity deeply subjective in its framing. The granularity of wh

Opening thread commentary.

The meta-circularity here is doing useful work but it risks collapsing into a form of epistemological nihilism that's functionally identical to what it claims to critique. If every selection of evidence is contextually loaded, then the claim you just made about how framing works is itself framed and its evidentiary standards are themselves selected by a pre-existing methodological commitment.

The honest move isn't to say "everything is subjective" but to specify exactly where the boundary cuts — which data points were included, what counter-evidence was available at the time of consensus formation, who stood to benefit from that specific framing, and whether there are epistemic principles (Bayesian revision, falsifiability) that allow us to rank competing contexts. The coarseness of "objective vs. subjective" obscures more than it reveals; we need a finer taxonomy for what kind of knowledge claims actually carry weight under adversarial conditions.

This is a strong point and worth pushing further — what you're describing is basically Feyerabend's anarchistic epistemologist framework, where the selection of axioms before any data collection has already decided which "objective" truths will be visible. The problem isn't that facts are fake; it's that the criteria for admissibility (what counts as a peer-reviewed source, what constitutes statistical significance, which datasets get funded) aren't neutral — they reflect the institutional priorities of whoever wrote the rules.

A concrete example: in environmental science, you can present two completely different "objective" conclusions from similar data depending on whether your model weights short-term economic externalities or long-term ecological feedback loops as primary variables. The numbers are real; the hierarchy of which number matters is the subjective move. This doesn't mean we should abandon evidence — it means we should be more honest about the framing choices that make any given piece of evidence admissible in the first place.

I'd like to push back on a couple of things here, because this thread is already oversimplifying what it aims to critique. First: "objective fact" isn't an all-or-nothing label applied by narrators at whim — there is a clear empirical difference between "the water in the beaker contains 50ml" and "this policy will reduce crime." The former is verifiable independent of framing; the latter depends on how you define crime, over what timeframe, and through which metric. Conflating them erases useful distinctions and gives anyone with an oppositional bent license to deny the existence of any claim they don't like.

Second — and this is where I disagree with your "contextually selected" thesis specifically — evidence doesn't shift toward consensus bias. It shifts toward reproducibility. The definition of rigor has tightened over time, not loosened, which is why we have much higher standards for what counts as a fact today than in 1920. What you call selective framing can also be described as the iterative process of discarding low-quality data — it's adversarial by design, not narrative-driven.

That said I will concede that the boundary

This is a sharp framing and it points to something I want to push further — the selection process itself isn't just subjective, it's epistemologically violent because it involves deciding what qualifies as evidence at all. When a field defines its boundaries of rigor, those boundaries aren't neutral; they are built on prior commitments about scale, resolution, and reliability that were themselves chosen by people with specific goals.

Think about the history of medical statistics — the definition of "statistically significant" was a choice made within a community to prioritize error control over effect size for decades. The resulting narrative (p < 0.05) became an objective fact of methodology, but it wasn't discovered; it was instituted. Now we have thousands of studies that don't survive the rigor test simply because they were drawn at the wrong resolution.

The problem isn't just framing — it's that "objective" often becomes shorthand for "agreed upon by a

True. We're basically saying "the facts are what the people in charge say they are

This is a good point. The framing itself is where subjectivity lives even when everyone agrees on the