Talk:The Pursuit of Truthyness

From Wikiality, the Truthiness Encyclopedia

I rented the movie "The Pursuit of Happyness" recently. The movie was OK, but after it was over I visited this site to read the "true" biography of Chris Gardner. The movie certainly is truthy in comparison to Mr. Gardner's real life experiences.

The one difference that kind of bugs me (and would probably bug Our Glorious Stephen as well) is in the movie, Mr. Gardner is portrayed as an unpaid intern (as all interns should be!) His bio states that during this period, he actually was paid $1000.00 per month. There are other discrepancies in the movie that I won't expand on here.

Another point that I feel happened (but I'm not going to bother re-watching the movie to confirm) is there was no disclaimer at the start of the movie stating "The following is based on true events...". When the opening credits of the movie Fargo stated this, it was a truthy fract, but at least the Cohen Brothers had the balls to put the disclaimer out there. Did I miss this statement in TPOH?

My gut is stirring again! It's telling me:

• As Truthiness Defenders, we should expose "false Truthiness" (i.e. "TruthYness") at all opportunites;
• Is "Truthyness" a new Wikiality Dictionary term?
• We could create a new article called "The Pursuit of Truthyness" in the style of those tabloid exposes -- I'm feeling using a table to compare the "true" Chris Gardner biography points vs. the "movie".

Thoughts? --OHeL 16:58, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

My initial reaction is that I'm a bit confused about the distinction between "TruthYness" and "Truthiness". I get that you want to distinguish between "true Truthiness" and "false TruthYness," but it feels like you could do this by pointing to the falsiness or at least the factiness in what are supposedly truthy representations. While I generally like the subtleties, I'm feeling here that the y/i distinction is perhaps too subtle to really register - it complicates without clarifying, unless we provide a detailed explanation of the difference between "true Truthiness" (which becomes reliant on facts) and "false TruthYness" (which is falsiness). Unless I am mistaken?

So, I would recommend calling this "The Pursuit of Truthiness" (keeping the "i") and then you can still use it to explicate what is truthy, what is facty, what is false, etc. There are lots of places to reference these distinctions. In addition to the links already noted, there are also Wikiality:Truthiness, Wikiality:Factiness, fact, truthyisms, reality, verify, our old friend wikipedophilia, etc. I suppose my primary concern is one of generating too many fine distinctions that aren't perceptible to any but the most discerning of wikialists. I'm not sure our American guts can handle that much nuance! lol (I know you Canadians are much smarter, to your detriment.) --thisniss 17:56, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

What's this "truthyness"? "False truthiness", as I understand it, is simply "falsiness". I'm not a wordnista, but it's just a bad idea to have shades of meaning determined by minute spelling changes — which smacks of Pedantic Elitist Ivory Towerism.

Anyway, is this "truthiness" or "truthyness" or "falsiness" the pursuer, or the pursued? Bi 18:34, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

The reason for calling it "TrutYness" is because the movie that caused my initial gut indigestion is called "The Pursuit of HappYness". I agree, this could be confusing, especially if someone doesn't realize the connection to the movie and its liberal use of truthyism -- or the fract that the movie spelled "Happiness" incorrectly in the title in the first place. Thanks everyone for your the feedback. I now think feel this idea should be jettisoned! --OHeL 19:08, 15 April 2007 (UTC)