Truth in the Post-Truth Era: It’s Not That Complicated
Why you don’t need to worry about lying politicians, fake news, or filter bubbles
A lot has been said recently about ‘post-truth’. If you’re at all interested in understanding our culture, the term seems to show up everywhere. The usual narrative runs like so:
Each of us lives in our own bubble. Increasingly, we become so secure in our bubbles that we start accepting only information, whether it’s true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that is out there. As a result, our individual abilities to separate accurate ideas from wrong-headed assertions are deteriorating. All we do is reject evidence that contradicts our favorite politician by declaring the source to be unreliable on the very grounds that it tells a different story than the one we’d like to be true. Consequently, we’re poorly informed and, more and more, unable to spot false claims for what they are.
For example, in The Death of Expertise, Cornell philosopher Shaun Nichols worries that “the average American” has base knowledge so low it has crashed through the floor of “uninformed”, passed “misinformed” on the way down, and is now plummeting to “aggressively wrong”. And this is playing out against a backdrop in which people don’t just believe…
