Full disclosure — I have a lot of blogs. Medium, Substack, WordPress.com… this site, my startup site. That’s probably not the complete list but it’s what I can think of offhand. These sites are separate for a number of different reasons, the two most important being:
(1) Branding/messaging
(2) Privacy
Why do I lump brand and message together? Because once you have established a brand (be it “the brand of you” or be it a new venture you hope to sell for somewhere at the fashionable end of the neighborhood of seven figures) you have to stay on-message.
For instance, I recently took down one of my earliest posts on lotusrose.substack.com. The reason was that it was an opinion piece masquerading as fact. It made a very broad (and in my view, plausible) assertion but provided no hard evidence to back it up. This doesn’t measure up to my own standards for objective, fact-based journalism.
Lotus Rose is a journalism site, focused on sustainable and socially responsible investing strategies for retail and day traders. The articles are based on my own experience and online research. I provide citations and believe that the work stands on its own merits. While future predictions (such as the value of the Dow at the end of 2023) cannot be evaluated as true or false, any other information cited should have a source, whether or not it is made public. My memory is crap so I make a lot of notes and copy-and-paste a lot of links. This served me well as a journalist for American City Business Journals in the early 2000s, when I published several hundred print and online articles for ACBJ and other publications (including numerous features and covers). I have clips on everything from banking to restaurant reviews. I don’t recall ever receiving a single complaint about the facts, much less any situation that required a retraction.
Writing will always be my first love. (Sorry BWT, you came along 13 years too late.) Too bad the work didn’t pay a little better, or that is what I would still be doing.
Objectivity may be hard to come by — a mythical island of truth, an invisible city shimmering on the horizon of an ocean of uninformed groupthink — but facts are as real as any other construct we can assemble from the abstract building blocks of language.
What is my definition of a fact? Something you can evaluate as a Boolean statement.
i.e. Imagine a hypothetical function, truth(x) that evaluates the truth or falsehood of a variable. The variable may be a string, an integer, a real number, or the product of another function. Because the output type is defined as Boolean, it will always return a value of either true or false.
Now imagine that you have a sophisticated AI text reader that can parse the value of short statements (we will say up to 1000 characters in length). The task of this AI is to evaluate the statement described in the fact as either true or false. Empty, null, and undefined values will also be counted as false. Keep in mind; the function can be wrong or right in its assessments, just as newspapers and police eyewitnesses may be right or wrong about their facts. The important thing is that this function will always return a value of either yes or no (true or false).
This is my definition of a fact. It can itself be expressed as a fact:
The paragraphs below provide a rigorous definition and test for the term “fact”:
What is my definition of a fact? Something you can evaluate as a Boolean statement.
i.e. Imagine a hypothetical function, is_factual(var) that evaluates the truth or falsehood of a variable. The variable type is defined as a string. Because the output type is defined as Boolean, it will always return a value of either true or false.
Now imagine that you have a sophisticated AI text reader that can parse the value of short statements (we will say up to 1000 characters in length). The task of this AI is to evaluate the statement described in the fact as either true or false. Empty, null, and undefined values will be counted as false. Keep in mind; the function can be wrong or right in its assessments, just as newspapers and police eyewitnesses may be right or wrong about their facts. The important thing is that this function will always return a value of either yes or no (true or false).
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Anyway, it’s possible I will re-post that earlier article on this, or another, site. I haven’t really decided yet.
I have this week off from my day job, because I am recovering from surgery. It went well.
I will be posting more about the outcome, but I want to wait until everything has healed and I am completely out of the woods. I do claim to be superstitious (and that is a fact). Looking back on the previous two decades, tempting fate seems to be something I excel at. In the meantime, I will be reposting a few other older blog posts that seem to fit better here than anywhere else.
Trigger Warning: One or two of these may address the topic of religion…
