We have a truth problem, America. Fake news is retweeted and Facebook-shared as if it were real. And a large percentage of Americans believe shit is true that’s completely not true. Like 67% of Trump voters think the unemployment rate went up under Obama — when it actually improved drastically. Like 39% of Trump voters think the stock market went down under Obama — when it actually improved drastically. Like 40% of Trump voters think that Trump won the popular vote — when he actually lost it by almost 3 million votes. And so on and so forth.
What this points out, I think, is that for a lot of Americans, truth is not something you seek out. Truth is not a hypothesis that is constantly tested against reality to validate that it’s true. Truth is an absolute, handed down by an authority figure. When they were a small child, truth was what their parents said it was. When they were in their sad little K-12 schools, truth was what the teacher said it was. If they went to college, usually to learn a trade of some kind, truth was whatever the professor said it was. But of course that’s not, well, true. A lot of what we were told back then turns out to actually not be true. It was the best that they could do with what information was available to them, but continued testing found that their hypothesis was, well, false. Pluto is not a planet, it’s just a big Kuiper Belt object, for example…
What is sad is that in today’s world, it’s ridiculously easy to actually go the sources of information and get the information directly. I don’t need to trust news reports on the stock market. I can go to NASDAQ’s web site directly and look up what the current stock prices are. I don’t need to trust that the news media did the job on the Sandy Hook shooting. I can look up the phone book for Sandy Hook and call people directly and ask them if they heard about the shooting and if they knew any of the people who lost children there. I don’t really have to trust anyone other than my Internet Service Provider and my phone company, though it makes it easier once I find secondary sources that do this work for me and who have proven trustworthy once I test some of their work against my own work and other third party sources that have also proven trustworthy in the past. But it seems like most people think truth is something handed down by authority figures, rather than something you explore and find out for yourself, and they choose whatever authority figures tell the “truths” that they want to hear. Facts have become whatever we want to be true, rather than something continually tested against reality to validate that they’re true. No wonder we are so fscked.
Conversely, there are things that you can’t really test. At that point, you can’t make any statements. You wonder why I haven’t posted anything about what’s happening in Aleppo, for example? Simple: I can’t validate a damned thing except that there’s a lot of fighting and people are dying, something that every side admits. Beyond that, all I have are the statements of the various sides and of refugees who’ve fled, all of whom have their own agendas and most of those that don’t have an agenda know little more than what I’ve already said — that there’s a lot of fighting and people are dying. I can’t condemn things that I can’t verify are happening. There’s no way for me to test any of these statements coming out of Aleppo. It’s certainly too dangerous for me or any citizen journalist to go there and see what’s happening for myself, and there’s no working phone service there even if I spoke Arabic (which I don’t). Thus I assign them all to the “unverifiable, thus won’t say anything about it” bucket. Which is a big-ass bucket, BTW — there’s a *lot* of things I don’t talk about because of that.
Remember: Truth is something you test by testing it against reality. It isn’t something that’s handed down to you by an authority figure. If you can’t test it, it isn’t truth, it’s just an interesting hypothesis. Bigfoot is helping Hillary Clinton with the recount in Wisconsin. How do you test that statement? You can’t say it’s true or it’s false until you say, “how do I test that statement?” And then either do so, or find multiple trusted people who themselves have done so. Until you test it, all it is, is an interesting hypothesis. \But simply accepting a statement as fact because it came from a trusted person like me, who would never lie to you about the recount process in Wisconsin? Dude. Stooo-pid! Just sayin’.
– Badtux the Reality-testing Penguin
Actually Tux, sounds like you’re talking about the “Scientific Method” as applied to news and information, eh ?
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Yep. The scientific method is an application of this concept of reality-testing to, well, science.
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We don’t have a truth problem. We have an intelligence problem.
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Aannnd, just on time, a Sandy Hook truther showed up and posted something disgusting. You aren’t seeing it because I’m not subjecting you to that insult to your intelligence, but basically, I can call any police department in the Sandy Hook area and ask them a single question, “was there a buncha kids shot at Sandy Hook Elementary back in 2012?” and they’ll say “yup.” I can call any hospital in the Sandy Hook area and ask them, “were there a bunch of kids brought in to your emergency room from Sandy Hook Elementary back in 2012?” and they’ll say “yup.” I can call random people in the Sandy Hook area and ask them, “do you know anybody who lost their child at Sandy Hook?” and find dozens who’ll say “yes, that was tragic.” Some of them may even be police officers who responded. I can look at the minutes of school board meetings in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre, posted on the school board’s very own web site, and see the condolences that occurred at school board meetings. I can look at the budget of the school district, posted on the school board’s very own web site, and see the bills for the repairs to the school needed to clean up the blood and repair the doors and windows.
In short, the hypothesis “kids got killed at Sandy Hook” passes the verification test — there is an easy way to verify that it happened, and I can validate it with random people from the phone book, local hospitals, school board budget and minutes, and local first responders, I’m not reliant upon the “liberal media” or Obama or whatever to verify what happened. I can talk to actual people who were there or know people who were there, actual people picked at random from the phone book.
Yet still, there are people who deny that it happened, for bizarre reasons that elude me. The evidence they present for their hypothesis is all hypotheticals — “the parents didn’t grieve the way I grieve, thus they were all crisis actors!” being a favorite one. They harass parents of children who died at Sandy Hook, they call the local police departments demanding an investigation of the “fake shooting” at Sandy Hook, they call the local hospitals and accuse them of being part of some vast conspiracy. They don’t call random people in Sandy Hook, but that’s because they’re not interested in testing their hypothesis that “Sandy Hook was a fake shooting”, they’re interested in making accusations, and making accusations to random people who know those who lost their children at Sandy Hook Elementary is not likely to get them a response that they appreciate. We, in short, have people willing to believe batshit crazy bullshit just because they read it somewhere on the Internet and want it to be true. Now, scale that up to a factor of ten, and you have a toxic stew of people believing things nationwide that simply aren’t true, and acting on them — a recipe for disaster in any country, but especially a recipe for disaster in a democracy that has nukes.
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I suspect that the Sandy Hook truther also believes we never went to the moon and that the earth is flat…and that Trump will be the greatest president we will ever have.
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The scientific method is a way to search for the truth, but with more and more tests, a proposition can only be given a better and better chance of being true. I don’t think you will find a scientist who claims to have discovered the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. (They want every witness to swear or affirm that, but if they could do so, there would be no need for a second witness,) We are left to (1) either believe authorities or (2) accept that everything is, to differing degrees, hypothetical and subject to revision as we learn more. You write, “If you can’t test it, it isn’t truth, it’s just an interesting hypothesis.” I would say that it is still a(n) hypothesis, but a more likely one.
When you state “Pluto is not a planet, it’s just a big Kuiper Belt object, for example…” that is not a matter of truth, but of definition. Astronomers can define it as a planet or something less than a planet, but that does not change the object.
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