Ep40 "Is there any such thing as true news?" (Truth Part1)

Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford, and in these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Today's episode is about truth in media? What is the truth? We all know about fake news, and we've all been living with concern about the ease with which misinformation and disinformation spreads. We see this in social media feeds that become social

echo chambers. We see this when people are likely to believe information that confirms their existing beliefs, and they're less likely to be exposed to opposing viewpoints. People generally seek information from sources that agree with them and therefore they're not even aware of the full picture. That can be dangerous as it leads people to making decisions based on

false information sometimes. So against this background, I started receiving calls from various academic colleagues back in twenty twenty, and they told me they wanted to submit a grant to the National Science Foundation to get funding to figure out or propose how to get truth back into the media. And they were asking me if I would be a part of their grant. Specifically, they were worried about this

spread of misinformation and disinformation. They saw so many tweets that had assertions in them, and sometimes these were out and out lies, but much more often something they felt was a twisting of the truth, a spin that they didn't quite like. And so they felt, why can't we use the tools of science to figure out how to make social media or a news organization simply tell the truth? What algorithms could you put into place, What system for

checking veracity could you implement? Now? I was flattered that they called, but I challenged them on their fundamental assumption. I asked them, what do you mean by truth? Because what I was afraid of is they meant their truth, and a little bit of probing turned out to reveal

that for the most part that was the case. Whatever they happened to believe politically, that was the truth, and whatever the other side of the political spectrum was saying was simply untrue, whether that was by ignorance or deception or malice on the part of those other people making those other tweets. And so I'm making these next three episodes about truth, and I want to be clear that I'm not pumping for any particular political side here. No

side of the spectrum gets favored here. Instead, I'm looking at this as a neuroscientist. I'm looking at this in terms of human behavior. What I'm interested in are the illusions and cognitive biases that we are all subject to. So let me start very generally about how we all come to believe our own truths. So I did an earlier episode on this where I asked the question, why do we all believe that we see the truth? Clearly?

Wherever you look on the political spectrum, each person feels, look, I know the truth, and I just don't understand why other people can't see the truth that's so clearly arrayed in front of us. All. My only explanation is that they must be trolls, or misinformed, or Russian bots, or stubborn, or just doing what their friends are doing without thinking

about it very deeply, or whatever. But what's clear is that there is a true answer, and I see it, and if I could just shout loudly enough in all caps on Twitter, everyone would come to agree with me. So that is how we generally feel about everything in our world of political opinions. But that's rarely made explicit. And in my next book, called Empire of the Invisible, I call this the illusion of complete knowledge, which is to say, we each feel that we believe our internal

model is essentially correct and complete. But the fact is that we each follow a very thin trajectory through space and time, and that forms your beliefs, and you grow up in a particular house, in a particular neighborhood, and a particular culture, and that shapes what you think is true. There's a great quotation from Oliver Wendell Holmes Senior, who wrote, quote, we are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe. The record may seem superficial, but it

is indelible unquote. The end result is that each of us ends up with an internal model in our heads that is woefully incomplete, but we each believe, Yeah, I read the right news stories, and I see the right tweets and watch the right TikTok videos, and so I know what is correct. Now, if you want to hear more on how we come to derive our notion of the truth, please listen to episode sixteen, which is titled

why is everyone who disagrees with you? Misinformed? But today, what I want to concentrate on is the next step, which is that these colleagues were calling me and asking how to get truth back in the media, and that really got me thinking about this old and fundamental philosophical question, is there such a thing as the truth? So for clear definitions, let's agree that for decidable propositions, there is

an objective truth. But what I'm probing for the rest of this episode is the local version of truth, the question of whether our subjective truths approximate or even can approximate, the object truth, and why we each believe that we have an advantage with this. Now, if you have been listening to this podcast for a while, you probably know that I am pathologically optimistic, but I'm a little bit

cynical about this notion of finding truth. I think the search for truth for most people is really just a search for confirmation of what they already believe. And so I want to give a very clear argument about why this notion of finding truth is mostly illusory and why it typically just means I want to see my version of the truth in print. And I want to argue why I think we would be better off as a society if we were able to distance ourselves a little

bit from this illusion. So let's begin with a fundamental point which will help us frame everything, and that question is is all this fake news and the misinformation and distant information? Is this new? Because nowadays we discuss this all the time, these concerns about the ease with which disinformation spreads, the problem of fake news and echo chambers, and so the background assumption which I hear a lot is that people used to be better about the truth.

You could turn on the news and you would know that the folks there were telling you the truth. I recently heard someone argue that back in the old days, everyone got their news from the same source, from watching Walter Cronkite speak on television, but that is patently untrue. This is simply retrospective romanticization, and it's important for us to see why. So let's start with newspapers from let's

say fifty years ago. The first time I was exposed to newspapers was in my grandparents' generation, and I learned that in every major city there were at least two newspapers, one that aligned with your political views, and the others were the rags that you would never deign to pick up. The different newspapers in any city had diverse angles and non equivalent coverage for the politics and war, economy, and whatever.

The newspapers appealed to different audiences, and from an economic angle, this is the only reason why you could have multiple newspapers, because if they were saying the same things and had the same opinions and appealed to the same market, there would be no reason for more than one. And beyond newspapers,

there was a surprising proliferation of rags. Just do a Google image search on National Inquirer headlines and you'll see thousands of stories of people who are kidnapped by space aliens or a mermaid cemetery discovered, or Hillary Clinton adopts an alien baby. And there were many, many rag newspapers. I'll give you just one example, the English paper The Sun in nineteen eighty nine, and note this was before

the Internet. The Sun covered a disaster at the Hillsboro football Stadium in England in which the South Yorkshire Police made a bunch of wrong decisions about crowd control and ninety seven people died in a human crush, and most of the newspapers pointed out that it was the fault of the police doing crowd control, but the Sun newspaper reported, under a huge headline that read the truth that people were scapegoating the police and that the real cause of

the disaster was unruly Liverpool fans. They had caused the whole thing. So I'll skip all the lawsuits and hearings that resulted from all this, but this coverage from the Sun was shown to be the fakest of fake news, and the paper later called it the most terrible blunder in its history. I raised this as one of the countless examples of the way that news ran wild in all directions well before the Internet. And I'll come back

to this topic next week. But the point for now is that fake news has always been around, and in many senses it can be argued that it was more important in damaging than it is now, precisely because if there were fewer places to get one's news, each venue had more eyeballs. In other words, if I start some website now and write some fake news on it, maybe I'll get one hundred or one thousand views, but that's very different than having a million viewers for the Sun newspaper.

So the idea that everyone got their news from cronkite on television has no basis. In reality, people got most of their news from newspapers and rag newspapers, and also from pamphlets. Pamphleteering was a big thing that doesn't exist much anymore, but anyone who is my age or older might remember seeing these things. As a kid, you'd write your address on a list and a pamphlet would get

mailed to your inbox. Snail mailed no different than subscribing to a newsletter and getting that in your electronic inbox. And I remember as a kid finding a pamphlet from the American Nazi Party on the ground, and it was full of the most horrific things about Blacks and Jews and Hispanics and so on. But that's how people would get their news. You would sign up for whatever fit your political model and what you wanted to arrive in your inbox. The point is you could get any kind

of misinformation or disinformation that you wanted. There was no difference between that pamphlet and something you might read on four chan or some website or watch on TikTok. And let's address this question of echo chambers. Beyond newspapers and pamphlets and so on, we all watched disinformation spread in real life from flesh and blood friends who repeated factually

incorrect stories purposefully or on accident. And because we're very social creatures, we tend to listen to those people around us, whether in our family or our neighborhood, or our college friends or our culture. More generally, that's where we get our information, and that is what shapes our limited model of the world. So there's nothing new about echo chambers. Humans have never needed social media for that to happen.

I remember when I was a little kid, I was talking with my grandmother about an election that had just concluded in her state, and she said, dumbfounded. I don't know a single person who voted for that man, and she was telling the truth. She didn't have acquaintance with anyone who felt differently than she did, even though that

was obviously over half her state. From time, I'm immemorial, we always hang out with people who think generally like us, and so whenever our candidate loses an election, we immediately cook up excuses. People don't know who to vote for. They were intimidated into voting for him. The election was rigged, They were tricked into voting for him. There are so many dumb young people or old people, or poor people or rich people who have no idea how to see

through his deception. We are all veteran experts at offering up explanations every time our candidate doesn't win. So in most discussions that I'm in, social media takes most of the heat for the fake news, But perhaps the question we need to ask is whether there's something new about the behaviors that arise in social media, or instead whether fake news always emerges from thousands or millions of human

brains interacting with one another. Next week's episode, I'm going to dive deeper into the issue of truth in social media and why the Internet may actually be enormously helpful for exposing the truth. Wait for next week's argument. You might be pleasantly surprised by it, but for now, let me just emphasize that it is illusory to believe that people in previous generations did not suffer the same biases

in their fact gathering and meaning making. Let's not get trapped in a romanticization of earlier eras, because it limits our ability to see the bigger picture about human behavior, and instead it misdirects our attention to Zucker, TikTok or musk as though that's the core problem and if they didn't exist, everyone would be happily obtaining only true news, just like we used to do back in some illusory time. Now, from a neuroscience angle, why do we think that the

truth used to be clearer? It's mostly because we have terrible memories. I mentioned in an earlier episode that I saw a bumper sticker that said make America America again, and everyone seemed to like that sticker from whatever side of the political spectrum. Because we each have impoverished memories, and we believe that when we were a kid and not really paying attention to politics. Everything was simpler and

everyone generally agreed with one another. But it's only because we were children and not generally thinking about the kind of polarization that happens in a society to generate events like the Chinese Communist Revolution or the Russian Revolution, or Nazism in Germany, or fascism in Italy, or polepot in Cambodia, or the massacre of the Tutsi in Rwanda, or on and on, looking at what has just happened in the past century, all before the existence of the Internet. So

that's the first point I want to make. We have terrible memories about whether things were truthy in the past, and we tend to always think they were. And in an upcoming episode, I'm going to cover a great new Nature paper about why we think that morality is declining, which it turns out people erroneously believe in every generation and have for about two thousand years, and we will

see it's exactly the same issue, very bad memories. But all I want to emphasize for today's episode is this fact that the concern about truth is not new, but as we will unpack further, very very old So, returning to the present time, I said no to all these invitations to collaborate on National Science Foundation grants because I thought the endeavor was misguided. The heart of the problem is believing that there is one truth and you're the one with access to it while the others are trolls,

were misinformed. Most of us find it difficult to take the perspective that there are billions of heads on this planet, and they each have their own internal cosmos with their sense of what is right and what is wrong. So there are multiple perspectives on essentially everything. Now, that's not equivalent to saying that everyone is factually correct when they're commenting on something that happened. I am not making a moral equivalence between different positions, some of which are closer

or more distant from the objective truth. Instead, what I'm pointing to is the complexity of a world made of lots of individual brains and the difficulty or often impossibility of getting to the truth or knowing when you actually have it. In other words, let's assume that the truth exists independent of any individual, but it's not the case that people can eat easily get to it. When I say your truth and my truth. I don't mean that

this is actually the objective truth. I mean that all we have are our perspectives, and this is for the most part all we ever have access to. And I'll give you lots of examples in this episode so you can distinguish what I'm saying from mere cynicism. So take

any economic truth. Is inflation rising because of the president's policies or the policies of the president before, or does it have very little to do with that and more to do with foreign policy or an inherent diminishment of technical capacities, or because of bad luck with a number of hurricanes or earthquakes, or because of chain technologies which

another country now has the lead on, or whatever. The answer, of course is that it might involve all of these and one hundred more factors, because the economy is a dynamic, emergent property of the behavior of hundreds of millions of humans. So, if you are interested in publishing only the truth on your social media site, which story do you publish? And the related problem is whose truth do you publish? Based on different points of view, there may be many different

perspectives on the same event. Any real world event is complex with thousands of different viewpoints. Take something like a battle that happens between two countries. What's the right way to tell that story? From the point of view of a young breadmaker who sees the effects of the invading army, or the elder statesman who has many complex relationships that can strain his next moves if he wants to be

remembered to history or re elected. Or the point of view of a soldier on the ground who has no idea why bombs are suddenly falling when this wasn't part of the original mission plan that he was told about. Or the seamstress who is apolitical and only cares about her children and can't believe the mess the world has gotten into. There are a million ways to tell the story, and anyone can choose whatever shoes they want. Just look

at the October seventh massacre of Israelis by Hamas. Some people choose to tell the story from the point of view of the Israelis, some choose to tell from the point of view of Hamas, same event on the ground, but diametrically opposed interpretations of the meaning. So what does it mean to tell the truth? Whose truth? Every person in the world has a different perspective on which facts matter in the telling of a story, and that's why I was a little scared about my colleagues's idea of

let's make sure the media tells the truth. But I'm just getting started and I want to unpack this much further. Okay, so next maybe you'll say, look, at least we can tell scientific truths, and a lot of people when they think about this issue of truth in the media, they'll cite issues about COVID, for example, and misinformation around that. So look, I'm a scientist and I would love to pump up my own field, but the fact is that science is not infallible. Now, let me be absolutely clear

about something important. The scientific method is the best toolkit humanity has ever had. And what is special about science is that it is willing to knock down its own walls. And this feature is a necessary part of how modern science progresses. So that means it can change, and that is part of its greatest strength. That's not a weakness. However, it does mean that the notion that we can make sure to always have clear scientific truths is inherently misguided.

So just look at COVID nineteen A sudden pandemic took over the globe, and literally thousands of laboratories were trying to figure it out all at once. But the culprit was sub microscopic. So how do you figure it out? Well by doing lots and lots of experiments and trying to get things straight. But you remember that in March of twenty twenty, it wasn't the least bit clear what was going on with it. Was it something left on doorknobs?

Did we need to wash our groceries? People were coming home and getting undressed in their backyards and hosing the kids off, and they were wiping down their cardboard Amazon boxes with tons of disinfectants. And you remember that the Center for Disease Control announced in March of twenty twenty that masks would not do any good, and then they soon changed their mind and said everyone should wear masks. Now, was this deception at play? No, it was figuring out

new data and new recommendations on the fly. And for any of you who followed the scientific literature for the past several years, you know there were hundreds or maybe thousands of new papers on COVID nineteen that came out every month. And what that represented at every moment was that the story was evolving, and sometimes and evolving understanding

involves a change in direction. So if you are a newspaper or a social media company that is only going to publish the truth, what does that look like in March of twenty twenty? Do you publish that there's no point in citizens wearing any masks and you suppress any voices that say otherwise because that was the official word of the Center for Disease Control. I'm not criticizing the

desire to have truth. I'm merely pointing out the naivete of thinking that they're there is a single knowable version of the truth that should be published, and maybe thinking that science will always have access to that truth, and that if you do the right things and consult the right experts, you can guarantee untouchable guardrails. That's the kind of thing that led to deep troubles for the Soviet Union when they assigned their nationwide agricultural oversight to a

man named Trophime Laishenko. Lashenko was a biologist who felt that he knew the truth about proper farming practices, and so he dictated these to Russians across thirteen time zones and an enormous variety of climates and soils. In Soviet style, this truth of how agriculture should be done was implemented with an iron fist, and the mass starvation that resulted from Lashenkoism is generally considered one of the factors that led to the downfall of the USSR. But Lyashenko believed it.

To him his agricultural recommendations were the truth, and if he could just get the others to see his truth, everything would be so simple, and he wouldn't have to imprison or execute the biologists who couldn't see the truth as clearly as he could. So all this means it's not as though we can just turn to science and say that will give us the truth. Science is the best set of tools we have ever developed, but let's not pretend it can always answer everything. And by the way,

science is really not about truth. Instead, it's about falsehoods. All science ever seeks to do is clarify our thinking by ruling out things that are incorrect. But that's not equivalent to telling us what is a fundamental truth? And just one more note here, Even where there is science, each individual will interpret it based on his own internal model.

An economist's friend of mine pointed out that if you say the majority of scientists think that the vaccines are effective, people on the other side will take that as proof that the scientists are in on something devious, because why else would so many scientists be agreeing with something so preposterous. So we're talking about some of the challenges of knowing the truth, and now I'll turn to the issue of why the truth is so hard to get straight for

any society. First, everyone says they're just seeking the truth, but I'm a little skeptical, And I'll just give a random example from the Israel Hamas conflict. There are a lot of people who describe themselves as feminists who came out very strongly pro Hamas immediately after the October seventh attack in Israel, and so I mentioned online that I was intrigued by the cognitive conflict and compartmentalization that is

required for a feminist. To watch, for example, the video of the twenty two year old German Israeli Shawnee Luke, who was a young peacenick at the music festival, and there she is on video, stripped mostly naked and stepped on and spat upon by Hamas gunmen screaming and pumping their rifles in the air, and she was clearly unconscious or dead. And as you probably know, there have been many reports of rape and general mutilations, and this is

currently under investigation by a UN committee. Now, in the fog of war, it's not always easy to know precisely which reports to believe. But here was the video of Shawnee Luke, and it was filmed and released by Hamas, so no one could even accuse it of being propaganda. And I found myself surprised that amid all this brutal activity, which included the slaughter of twelve hundred civilians, that some

feminists were coming out cheering Hamas. So I mentioned this irony online, hoping that people could come to analyze a very complex geopolitical situation without giving up what they claimed were their core beliefs. And immediately one woman wrote to me to say that the accusations of Hamas's violence against women quote had all been debunked. Now, this is a chess move that's as old as the hills. You take a horrific event that just happened, and you simply pretend

it didn't happen because it's not consistent with one's narrative. Now, I'm not saying this to criticize the woman who wrote to me, and we exchanged a few messages about this issue and about the notion of truth, and when I pointed out the details to her, including for example, the SHAWNE. Luke video that we both had seen, she took back the statement that the brutality against women had been debunked.

But strangely, she ended by telling me that her only mission was to make sure that people tell the truth online, and I believe her that she feels that is her mission, but that didn't stop her from saying or believing whatever she wanted to counter what she found inconsistent with her internal model. So my cynical statement is that it's actually quite rare that any of us actually search for the truth.

We generally search for consistency with our belief structure. So we all talk about wanting truth in media, but we are all happy to dismiss evidence if it's not aligned with our preconceived notions, with what we want to be true. We watched this in two thousand and one with the massacre at the twin towers, conspiracy theories blossomed. We saw

this with the moon landing in nineteen sixty nine. If you didn't want to believe it, there's always a story you could cook up about how the government filmed this in a Hollywood studio. Now that story is not consistent with the facts on the ground, like that you can see with telescopes the artifact that we left on the moon. But the only point I want to make here is that there is always room for people's internal models to

discount or dismiss what does not fit for them. It goes without saying that we all want the most truth that we can have on our media, but we have to face this facet of human behavior. We each have our own stories and narratives, and it's typically not easy for us to incorporate new data that contradicts our internal models.

So while everyone is on board with the idea of making sure that news stations are telling the truth as best as they possibly can, we should just note that people are not as receptive to stories that contradicts their models as we might believe. Because you can always pull the intellectual ripcord of saying, well that is fake news, it doesn't fit my model, so it must have been an AI generated video, or a larger government conspiracy at play,

or whatever we want. Now, beyond manipulating stories, we should note that more commonly, we tend to simply ignore chunks of stories. This is what psychologists refer to as a confirmation bias, which is that we seek out information that confirms our existing beliefs, and we ignore or dismiss information

that contradicts those beliefs. You can test this yourself by raising the issue of book banning to people who are on the left or the right side of the political spectrum, and you'll extract the same immediate reaction out of both of them. They'll say, yes, book banning is an anathema to free speech, But ask them to consider the books that their own side is trying to ban, and you'll generally find a surprised look here, because it's easy to

see the bad on the other side. But the truth is that both sides are putting equal effort into banning books. For example, in this country, the right tries to ban books like gender Queer or All Boys Aren't Blue? Or the Hate You Give or books with sexually explicit passages and on the left side, there are calls to ban books like To Kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn and books by Doctor Seuss. Groups on the left have burned Harry Potter books because of outspoken opinions on trans issues

by the author. They've worked to persuade the publishers to rewrite Raouel Dahl's children's books. Both sides love the idea of giving a haircut to the library so that the books that remain are the ones that are consistent with their worldview, and according to penn America, there were at least twenty five hundred book challenges from middle of twenty twenty one to twenty twenty two that affected about seventeen hundred book titles, and these challenges were from the right

and the left. But both sides are better at noticing free speech violations from the other side, and their own efforts to squelch books aren't seen as violations but simply

obvious things that anyone would want to do. And all these problems we have with seeking truth has to do fundamentally with the fact that our internal models are limited, and you combine that with the fact that the world outside of us is made of billions of brains doing their own thing, and we see that real world situations quickly grow to a complexity that our internal models just

can't handle. For example, I saw someone tweet the other day that the situation in the Middle East is a very complex geopolitical situation, and immediately she got hundreds of replies saying it's not complex, it's very simple. And then they tweet their clean brief story, their talking points on whichever side they are, So you can find diametrically opposed

simple stories. What's interesting about societies is that people can and do take any path they want through the yarn ball of history to come to whatever conclusion they want to Why. It's because although society is fueled by ideologies, fundamentally ideologies aren't anything physical. They are beliefs held by the only actual things on the ground, which is enormous collections of human brains. So I'll give just one more quick example about the difficulty of truth, and this is

something I've just been observing for a while. Imagine that somebody makes a tweet about something and it seems innocent enough, but then some comment er accuses the statement of being a dog whistle. In case you don't know. A dog whistle is this device used by dog owners that can be heard by the dog, but is not heard by

humans because the frequency is too high. So the idea of a dog whistle statement is that the person is saying something that his followers and acolytes will understand, but the rest of the community won't detect that it happened. So surely there exists dog whistle tweets, But the difficult

challenge lies in the interpretation. So each time a public statement gets made, some fraction of the population believes with certainty that is a dog whistle, and despite the innocent seeming statement, the person is really calling for jailing or eradication or genocide or whatever. As predictably as gravity. Other people are then motivated to point out that nothing of the sort was ever said, and that the commenter is

being ridiculous to suggest so. But the first commenter is certain that this is what was meant, it doesn't have to be said because that person's followers know full well what was meant. Now, this happens on all sides of the political spectrum, even though as usual, the diferent sides will say that this craziness only happens on the other side.

So what's going on here again? This has to do with the differences in people's internal models, And you can read through the comments and understand the internal models of each person. The person who points out, my god, he never even said that has a particular kind of model, and the person who says, yes, but this is what he actually meant has a very different kind of model.

And then the person who feels that the accusations are an overreach can be accused of being deceptive or an apologist, and the person who says it's a dog whistle can be accused of simply trying to smear the original poster with the lowest of accusations and moral pollution. So when you watch a Twitter thread unfold, you are watching the basic action reaction physics of different internal cosmosis coming into conflict. And this leads us to the question about groups of people.

All the time, we're faced with questions about how do Russians feel about this, how do Ukrainians feel? How about East Coasters or West Coasters? How do liberals feel or conservatives feel about some issue? Now, assessing the position of some group of people is a totally reasonable question. To ask, but essentially it is impossible to answer unless you're willing to take on the fact that in any group there's

a massive spectrum of models. Now, maybe all you want in some circumstances is just to know where the average opinion is, or if the distribution is so narrow that it can tell you what the group is actually going to do on the ground. But if you really want to understand the truth about something, it requires a different level of detailed examination that typically does not get done. Just take as an example the way that we always

look at economics. Politicians and pundits will typically take a position about how people are going to behave this is what people will do in this situation. But really, any such model is doomed to be incorrect, either partially or mostly, because populations of humans are very heterogeneous, they're very different from one another. So take for illustration, the debate about

sending people a stimulus check. Some politicians say that if you send people checks, people will use it to buy food, and others will say no, people are going to use it to buy drugs or alcohol because brains don't have

particularly good ability to resist temptation. And suddenly you've got this free money sitting in front of you, and others will say, okay, well, look, maybe they'll spend a little of it on something stupid, but this gives them the opportunity to invest the rest of it, which builds a cushion, and it's very important for their lives, and so on

and so on. One can find countless opinions on what a person will do when they find a check in their mailbox, and whatever your opinion is will probably navigate the way you vote on this point. But the fascinating thing is that none of these points of view represent the truth. The only meaningful approach to any economics problem is to understand that there is a spectrum of attitudes in the population, and then you make models based on that.

This is called agent based modeling. Because different people will do very different things when they receive a stimulus check. Some will buy food, some will buy drugs, some will invest. And this is similar to the debates about the optimal way to help with the homeless population. Is the heart of the problem about mental illness or is it about laziness? Or is it about hard workers with a difficult time

getting work. It's all of the above. It's heterogeneous, and the reasonable approach is to understand that any one size fits all solution is not going to solve the problem. So when we ask for truth in the media, we are always faced with this question whose truth? How can we ever summarize a population of people as having any particular truth, And this issue of the diversity within any community is what makes the search for truth in media complicated.

In any community, let's say during wartime, you have the doves and the hawks, you have the mothers and the fathers, and you have the young men with nothing to lose, You have the saints, and you also have the psychopaths. And this is a theme I've talked about a lot on this podcast, is just how different people are on the inside. Now, the issue when things start heating up between two groups of people, let's say the Palestinians and the Israelis, is that each side chooses to show the

videos that maximumly agitate. So we see those who are pro Is post videos of Palestinians doing horrific things, but presumably that's not representative of all Palestinians, most of whom are just looking to love their family members and make their way in the world, and pro Palestinians post videos of terrible things that Israelis do, like an Orthodox Jewish settler saying awful things to a Palestinian woman, or an Israeli soldier roughly handling a Palestinian youth who's just been

caught throwing rocks. But similarly, that doesn't represent the majority of Israelis who are just looking to love their family members and to make their way in the world. So this comes back to the central question of truth in the media. Is it untrue if I show a video of someone on the opposing team doing something terrible, I mean, it's not untrue, there's the video. Does that count as truth in media? If you find the worst of the other side and you magnify that, is that or truthy?

Or if you have the video but suppress it, is that more truthy. What this illustrates is not simply the complexity of truth in the media, but more broadly, the naivete of feeling that you could put in a grant and find the one truth and a good news station can just present that. So let's now return to this issue of truth in the media and ask the question of whether there are any technologies that you could develop that could do something to improve it. So one of

the ideas that people constantly reinvent is the following. They say, could you just tell facts in the media, nothing but the facts, no editorial overlay. Now that's a lovely aspirational idea, but it may not be possible to achieve. Now that might seem like a surprising statement, So I want to give several examples to make this very clear. Okay, So first you might challenge me and say, look, you can't be saying that there's no such thing as a fact, right,

because there are many examples of facts. For example, if you could independently verify from multiple sources, you could say truthfully that a rocket was launched from this location at this time and landed at this location at that time,

and that is simply factual. And I agree. But what's interesting is that so little of what happens in the world actually falls into that kind of simple category, because there's often debate about what happened and what were the triggering issues, and how far back to look for those triggering issues. But even if you had all the facts, fundamentally,

there are always different ways to tell a story. So from time immemorial, people have had concerns about the way that journalists or historians might portray a war when they wrote up a description, because the words they choose allow them to spin sentiment. It's very difficult to tell a story mutually. You have to choose which verbs you use and which adverbs, and who's the actor and who's the subject. And if you choose this different ways, you can get

very different emotional spins on the same story. Is this aggressive dog bites man or is it dog defends itself against aggressive drunk or is it heroic dog protects its owner. You can have the same verifiable facts, but very different ways of telling the tale. Now, this issue is far from new, and if you're interested in a terrific book, read The Great War and Modern Memory, which is about journalism in World War One and this issue of how

a story gets told. So the question I want to ask is are there any solutions to this issue that a writer can spin a story. Well, when photography came along and it became popular for the press to have photographers on battlegrounds, this seemed to be a great solution because if you capture a scene just by pressing the shutter button, then that's the truth of the matter. There's no editorializing. It's just the photons of what was there now.

Although we have photoshop now, they didn't have that back then, and so an untouched negative really represented the truth of what happened out there or did it. Pretty soon people started realizing that even the war photographer makes choices which things do I snap a picture of? And which things do I not snap a picture of? And if I am going to take a picture of something, how do I set my position and the direction of my camera so that I'm in I'm meaning certain things in the shot,

or making sure that certain things are outside the frame. So, as it turns out, while war photography might be better than just narrative, it doesn't achieve the vaunted title of truth. A photographer still has to make choices about what to give you and whoever it is, they have some agenda, consciously or unconsciously, And there's another aspect to the neutrality

of cameras that's counterintuitive. There was a large outcry in America after a man named Michael Brown was shot and killed by police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, and this led to legal debates that resulted in police officers all wearing body worn cameras on their vests to document their interactions with the public, because this way we can all see the truth what actually happened. And that seems like a

pretty good idea. So it came as a bit of a surprise that it has turned out to be so so complicated in courts of law to determine the truth of what happened. Why because what the camera sees is not what the police officer perceives. For example, there was an officer who ended up shooting an unarmed young man, and he said the kid turned to him with a look like a demon, and the officer felt certain that his life was in danger as this kid charged him.

Now that's how it occurred for him. Now, for different people who watched the footage from his vest camera, they might see it in different ways. Some might interpret the footage the way the police officer did, and others might see an innocent young man who does not appear very aggressive. And that's exactly what happened. For the jury who watched this, some felt one way, some felt another. And this is what happens all the time with jurys who watch footage

from police cameras. The point is that if you are the officer and someone is charging at you and pulling out something that you're interprets as a weapon, the camera tells a story, but it's not your story, not what it was like from inside your head, and your actions are not determined by the objective footage. They are determined by the script running in your head. Now, just to be crystal clear, I'm not making a justification for a

police officer shooting an unarmed man. But I am saying that we all live inside our own internal models and a camera does not solve that. So I want to come back to this endeavor of making true news. Could we come up with some technology, something better than photography, like a news source that just tells facts with no editorial. So some thinkers hypothesized maybe there is a way to do this with modern technology that doesn't involve any editorializing

of the facts. What you do is you make a phone app and you have the citizens of that neighborhood just post facts. People just enter an incident, but there's nothing that follows. They post there is a fire on this block, or there is a stray dog on the loose at this corner. Or there's a car accident on this street. You just enter the fact without any speculation on how it occurred or advice on what to do next. Maybe you could get citizens to arrive at something closer

to the truth this way. So this app exists. It's called Citizen, And the idea with citizen is how can we get to a place where we know the information around us in a way that's not pushed through social media and opinion filters. You can just say the facts and you don't need to do anything to impose your opinions or inspire action. So that seems like a great idea, But what's most interesting is the failure of that idea.

So I watched when a friend of mine in Palo Alto downloaded the Citizen app in twenty twenty, right when there were riots breaking out in various cities, and he got the information on Citizen that there were riots about to break out in various locations in Palo Alto. According to what he saw on the map, there were people gathering and possibly they were armed, And so he went out and bought a gun that evening to be able to defend his family in case his house was raided

or torched or worse. Well, as it turns out, there were zero riots in Palo Alto. But what you had was a bunch of anxiety that spiraled. People felt they were doing the right thing by noting on the app, Hey, I saw five guys standing on this corner. Because those guys looked like they were cooking something up. They looked worrisome, and why were they just standing there not going somewhere. And it's better to share information than not right. And

so the whole thing quickly spiraled out of control. And this is typical of people on the ground reporting. I know a woman who was at Northeastern University in twenty twenty two and the director of the Immersive Media lab called nine to one one because he had just opened a package and it exploded and injured him, and the case contained an anonymous violent note directed at the lab. So law enforcement swooped in with two bomb squads and

a large portion of Northeastern's Boston campus was evacuated. Now this incident was bizarre because the guy, it turns out, had totally faked this and it was a setup to make him look like he was the victim, and he was doing this to get attention, but no one knew that this was a fake thing at the moment. Instead, everyone thought a real bomb had just exploded, and everyone

was justifiably panicked. And what happened was word rapidly spread on the Citizen app that there were six other bombs on campus, and soon enough everyone believed that there were also two gunmen on campus, and of course nothing had happened except for this one faked nine one one call.

So the idea of saying, ah, we can get to the truth if people just put in what is happening and don't add commentary, this is a defunct idea now, because the problem comes from a diversity in the population, not of political opinion in this case, but just anxiety. An anxious person will see the five people standing on the street corner and say, I think they're up to something, and so their threshold for sharing what they see as

a possible threat is different than someone else's threshold. Someone else might think, well, I want to see actual weapons before I post this on Citizen, And there's no single view that's correct here. It's just a difference in people's personalities. So this is why the idea of a just the

facts app gives zero guarantee of surfacing the truth. So this is why I was skeptical when my colleagues wanted to write grants for how to restore truth in media, first because the issue of restoring to a past time when there was truth is illusory, but more importantly because of the typically overlooked complexity of the endeavor. But they figured, if we can just put some government money behind it, we can get media to just say the right thing,

the truth now. F Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote the test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. So what does a more mature approach to truth seeking look like. Well, the first thing involves a willingness to weigh the data and

change one's mind where appropriate. One of the deep tragedies about what's happening in the Middle East right now is that most people feel like the right thing to do is take one side or another with clarity and certainty, even though the situation is messy. And as I said before, you can reach into the history and pull out many different stories depending on the path you take. My intuition is that a lot of people feel as though it's important to take a side because otherwise you are wishy washy.

But I believe a passage into maturity requires us to try to understand what is happening in the world and to struggle with different points of view. Israelis and Palestinians are two groups of people that are not distant genetically. They both love their children, they love their families, They laugh, they cry, They're both groups of human beings with all the complexity that's entailed by that. That's the fundamental human level.

Now on top of that, you have this very deep history of socio political complexity where people are born into a situation. You either pop out of the womb and find yourself a Palestinian or you find yourself in Israeli and you try to figure out the world that way. A mature view attempts to seek solutions when you have the crashing momentum of millions of heads, each with their

own world model butting up against one another. I want to emphasize that even though this episode might have sounded a little bit cynical about the idea of finding the truth, we can of course get ourselves closer a meaningful education, we'll teach children or adults to not simply accept information at face value. We always need to consider the source. We need to evaluate the evidence as best we can. We need to consider the context. But what I'm talking

about today goes even step further. I'm pointing to the importance of having skepticism about our own models. The fact is that humans have gotten everywhere they are because of our capacity to do logic. But that's actually not the typical way that we decide our political positions, even though we believe it is. Instead, we are social creatures who

are driven by the narrativeatives of our in groups. And even if we try to use logic for all our political propositions, we're simply too limited by the complexity of the world and the number of players on the ground in any political situation. So objective truth exists, and seeking it is what we should all be doing. But let's not be naive in thinking that first we have privileged access to it, and second that we can just do something to surface the truth so that everyone can see

it as clearly as we can. The road to seeking truth involves questioning our own internal models, digging into the limitations of our beliefs, recognizing what we don't fully know or don't fully understand. So at the center of this is a call for intellectual humility. It only takes about thirty seconds of surfing around social media to see that people have many different perspectives about everything going on. One possibility is that you see the truth and everyone else

is confused or obstreperous, or trolling or misinformed. But another possibility is that you, too are sailing around within the bounds of your own internal cosmos, believing that only you see the real truth, and wanting to write government grants so that everyone else can see it as clearly as you can. So my advice to my colleagues who wanted to write these grants, engage in dialogue with people you trust, who you think are smart, and try to steal man

the other side. If you haven't heard that term, this is the opposite of straw manning, which is a technique for misrepresenting an opponent's argument to make it easier to attack. Steel manning is a technique for strengthening an opponent's argument so you can better understand it. To steal man inn argument, you first need to understand the argument as well as you can. You identify the premises and the conclusion, and you work to understand the assumptions that underlie the argument.

You try to understand the argument from your opponent's perspective. What are they trying to say? What are their goals. I'm not saying you have to come to a conclusion of agreeing with the other person, but this is an extremely valuable technique to say, Okay, I'm going to put myself in a totally different pair of shoes, or more exactly, in a different brain with a different world model, and I'm going to see how to try on these different

assumptions and different ways that I might believe that argument. Now, again, this doesn't mean that in the end you need to adopt the other person's point of view, but I believe if you take on this intellectual habit, you will find yourself a little more seasoned in your worldviews, which just means that you will be slightly less able to say, I think this complex situation is actually really simple, and hence I'm willing to dehumanize this other group of humans

just based on some fundamentally arbitrary label like which deity they happen to eve in, or how much melanin they have in their skin, or which side of the tracks they're from. So, in wrapping up, I find it unbelievably fascinating that just during my lifetime, we've gone from a world in which media meant one kind of thing, and we got to see the invention of the Internet, which took off just over a quarter century ago, to the revolution in Ai, which took off just over a year ago.

And in each of those eras, the search for truth maintains many similarities, but there are also some subtle changes. So today's episode is about the challenges of knowing truth, and in the next two episodes, I'm going to address the technologies that we're surrounded with now and how those influence the search for truth. So in next week's episode, I'm going to address the Internet and social media. Is there something about the Internet that's causing there to be

less truth? Could it be argued that the existence of the internet causes more truth. We've changed the way we get news such that everyone has a bullhorn? Now does that change the way we do sense making? And I think you'll find some surprises here because the big picture is not what you might expect. So that's about truth in the age of the Internet. Then, in the third episode of this series, I'll tackle what artificial intelligence means

for the future of truth. What does AI mean for what you see on a video, what you hear in somebody's voice, or what you read online. We'll address lots of things here, like the fact that AI has already opened the door to deep fakes. We'll ask whether AI needs to be sentient to be scary, and whether AI gives a way to undermine our species traditional methods of

sense making. I'll just end this episode with a quotation from Arthur Schopenhauer where he says truth is no harlot who throws her arms around the neck of him who does not desire her. On the contrary, she is so coy a beauty that even the man who sacrifices everything to her can still not be certain of her favors. To be continued, go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast

for more information and to find further reading. Send me an email at podcast at eagleman dot com with questions or discussion, and I'll be making episodes in which I address those Until next time. I'm David Eagleman, and this is in our cosmos,