The Problem with Believing What We’re Told

And my case is that it's not. More specifically: advances in communications and information technologies inherently and intrinsically undermine trust mechanisms in institutions and human interactions. They do this, in part, by replacing that trust with technological surveillance and verification. Which is, I'll note, more scalable, and possibly more reliable. But also insidiously corrupting of the social mechanics which have been established over time.

I'm probably not expressing this well, for several reasons. One is that I'm still thinking through this, and I'm not entirely convinced of it myself, though I'm fairly confident of the relationship.

In geographically-distributed pre-technological societies -- any empire (Roman, Chinese, Persian, Hindu, British), you had institutions -- business, courts, religions, governments -- which opereated without anything remotely resembling high-speed communications. Letters would take weeks, or months, to cross oceans. High-speed communications involved couriers on horseback -- the Pony Express largely replicated a 2,000 year old technology first established on the Royal Road of Persia, in which messages could travel 1,600 miles in about nine days. More liesurely transits took three months.

Ships sailed only from May to November, and couldn't sail close to the wind. For six months of the year there was no effective communications. Explorations and even cargo voyages might take several years.

In all of this all parties had to trust the others. Perhaps not perfectly, but sufficiently. And there were numerous mechanisms in place to effect this.

When we talk of technologies -- photographs, audio, video -- allowing us to "no longer rely on eyewitness testimony", what we're saying is that we are deprecating human testimony. Not without reason, but also not without consequence. And when the application of technologies presumes distrust, as social credit systems, email and keystroke monitoring, and pervasive closed-circuit video all do, the rot runs deeper.

If the trends aren't absolutely inherent and intrinsic, they're very, very close to that.

I agree, and I believe it's because most people don't consume news to gain a true picture about the world. They consume news to have stuff to talk about with other people, to have "social objects". Almost none of the news is actionable or even relevant to a regular person anyway, so the primary value of a news piece is whether or not it's interesting, and whether everyone else watches the same news (otherwise it wouldn't work as a topic for casual conversations). Whether or not the story is true is irrelevant.

This explains what news you see reported. People killed by a thunderstorm in the mountains is something easy to talk about. You can marvel their stupidity (being in the mountains during storm). Similarly for jet ski casualties. Sewer dumped into Vistula river (another fresh topic from Poland)? Oh the Incompetent Government / the Evil Companies! Venezuela and Hong Kong are complex political topics with no clear right solution, with no clear heroes or villains (at least, not when you dig into the complexities). It's not something suitable for casual conversation.

This is something that's usually said by people who want you to drop your defenses and believe in lies they concocted.

To the best of my knowledge, there's nothing we've seen so far that would suggest we aren't all inhabiting the same, shared, physical universe - so there is objective truth. There are facts about the world around us, and when you're reporting them accurately, you're reporting the truth. If you deny those facts, you are reporting falsehoods.

Now one of those facts is that we all observe the world through a limited and biased sensory and cognitive apparatus. We can't perceive the entirety of the universe, only a small fraction of it. This sometimes leads to "contradictory truths".

The best analogy I've come up with so far is projections. Imagine the universe as a 3D space, and anything of interest as a 3D shape - but what each of us is observing is 2D projections of it. So there is a cylinder in that universe, representing an issue. I can claim the issue is circular. You can claim the issue is rectangular. We've both identified the true aspects of an issue, but our views are incomplete. Our views combined can help us understand the full form of the issue. But what's most important, if someone comes in and says they see a spiked star, they're just wrong. There's no "multiple often contradictory truths here".

This is the way I like to think about the world and debates on issues. Each of us operates on a set of facts and intuitions that are a result of a heavy dimensionality reduction. We operate on projections. But there is an objective reality, of which our conflicting views are different projections, and that reality makes it so that only some projections are valid, and others are wrong.

And just because an issue is primarily social doesn't mean it's magically not about the observable reality. Human beings are physical, material objects. Just damn complicated ones.