Truth = Utility

We have officially entered the post-truth era. With the rise of deep-fakes, lying politicians, and Surkovian disinformation campaigns, it's hard to get a handle on what truth even is. For a few months I was deep in a skeptical hole where I had truly lost grip on what I considered "real", and I had to claw my way out by getting real silly and coming up with a formal definition that we might all agree with. I'll define terms shortly and it'll be clear that I'm abstracting away many messy details, but I will try to convince you that this basic structure agrees with many of our informal intuitions and is useful for decision-making -- potentially even serving as an objective function for the automated scientists of the near future. Even better: perhaps it can be used as an objective function for search-systems or newsfeeds, only returning the top results as ranked by their truth-value.