Our relationship with the truth

Trouble at the mill

One of the things that keeps me awake at night is a worry that the truth is becoming less important to us. What we increasingly seem to seek is information which complements our existing world view. Confirmation bias is the devil on one shoulder of all us, whispering sweet nothings in our ears as we absorb the three thousand pieces of content slammed in our faces every day as we navigate a complex world.

If truth was a commodity like copper, palm oil or soybeans we’d be in a world of trouble. There’d be half-a-dozen stories every month about someone taking a run at truth and analysts would be breathlessly predicting a gloomy future at every turn. It’s good truth isn’t publicly traded, ditto love, compassion, empathy.

Sidebar: The leader of the free world displays a flagrant disregard for the truth, decide for yourself how helpful that is.

Heroes & villains

Many professions have, at their core, an implicit relationship with the truth.

Marketers take the truth and create what they call messaging, which is a nice way of saying reality distortion field. Ask Douglas Adams or Bill Hicks about this the next time you bump into either of them.

Politicians take the truth and do something similar. Their version of the truth is called spin and is insidious since whereas marketers try to sell us something, politicians are supposed to work for us. One of my heroes, Armando Iannucci, has some thoughts on spin.

Scientists though, are at the vanguard of truth analysis, spending most of their time discovering and improving truths about the world, to by and large, make it better for us. Despite their painstaking, process-orientated hard work, we often prefer what my father would describe as crackpot views, the opinions of our friends or content syndicated through social media. And this makes no sense, to me.

And finally, though I’m sure there are other professions, journalists try and find truths for us through a code of standards and ethics.

It wasn’t always like this

It turns out the truth is a big topic. I had a quick look at the wikipedia page when I began writing this piece and it stretches to over eight thousand words. Philosophers, mathematicians and the folks over in the religeous community have all had their say at one time or another.

Truth was of some interest in the ancient world. Lethe, the antonym of the Greek word for truth, alitheia, literally translates as oblivion. This fairly aggressive stance makes me smile, if something isn’t true then it has no value, it is literally nothing.

Definitions of truth have been woven into our language, like Boas’ assertion that eskimos have fifty words for snow, we have more than one to describe truth.

Two of my favourites are axiom, a statement regarded as being self-evidently true and verisimilitude, the appearance of being true or real.

What’s next?

To some extent, what we try and do at sensation.io is to find truths about human nature. We are data scientists, codifying large datasets of emotionally resonant data to find answers (truths) to questions. The truth is something I think about in the daytime too so let’s bring this piece home by thinking about a couple of questions.

Is discovering truths important and if we find them what value do they have for us?

I’m gonna take a leap into the known and assert that the truth is something we should dilligently seek-out/attempt-to-ascertain, ignoring the devil of confirmation bias, irrespective of channel and that its discovery is of value. For example, I think the white-hatted men carrying torches in Charlottesville earlier this year are racist and understanding that is of high value.

The internet continues to take us down a conflicted and meandering road, simultaneously enabling our curation of social personas based on a variation of our own truths while exposing us to what I can only describe as insidious nonsense. I mean, pizzagate, really?

My view is that amid all this noise and distraction we must somehow rekindle a desire to find truths. The behemoth social networks must do their part but we all must listen to the voice of the angel on the other shoulder whispering a plaintive song of contemplation.

We must think more, we must just fucking think.