Speaker 1: How do we find truth in media? Why do cameras
Speaker 1: not tell us what we think they do, whether that's
Speaker 1: from war photographers or police officers. What is important about
Speaker 1: the history of pamphleteering and what does any of this
Speaker 1: have to do with agriculture in the USSR or book
Speaker 1: banning in America or dog whistles or phone apps that
Speaker 1: only tell facts? Why is it so hard to understand
Speaker 1: the viewpoints of millions of brains at once. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and
Speaker 1: an author at Stanford, and in these episodes we sail
Speaker 1: deeply into our three pound universe to understand why and
Speaker 1: how our lives look the way they do. Today's episode
Speaker 1: is about truth in media? What is the truth? We
Speaker 1: all know about fake news, and we've all been living
Speaker 1: with concern about the ease with which misinformation and disinformation spreads.
Speaker 1: We see this in social media feeds that become social
Speaker 1: echo chambers. We see this when people are likely to
Speaker 1: believe information that confirms their existing beliefs, and they're less
Speaker 1: likely to be exposed to opposing viewpoints. People generally seek
Speaker 1: information from sources that agree with them and therefore they're
Speaker 1: not even aware of the full picture. That can be
Speaker 1: dangerous as it leads people to making decisions based on
Speaker 1: false information sometimes. So against this background, I started receiving
Speaker 1: calls from various academic colleagues back in twenty twenty, and
Speaker 1: they told me they wanted to submit a grant to
Speaker 1: the National Science Foundation to get funding to figure out
Speaker 1: or propose how to get truth back into the media.
Speaker 1: And they were asking me if I would be a
Speaker 1: part of their grant. Specifically, they were worried about this
Speaker 1: spread of misinformation and disinformation. They saw so many tweets
Speaker 1: that had assertions in them, and sometimes these were out
Speaker 1: and out lies, but much more often something they felt
Speaker 1: was a twisting of the truth, a spin that they
Speaker 1: didn't quite like. And so they felt, why can't we
Speaker 1: use the tools of science to figure out how to
Speaker 1: make social media or a news organization simply tell the truth?
Speaker 1: What algorithms could you put into place, What system for
Speaker 1: checking veracity could you implement? Now? I was flattered that
Speaker 1: they called, but I challenged them on their fundamental assumption.
Speaker 1: I asked them, what do you mean by truth? Because
Speaker 1: what I was afraid of is they meant their truth,
Speaker 1: and a little bit of probing turned out to reveal
Speaker 1: that for the most part that was the case. Whatever
Speaker 1: they happened to believe politically, that was the truth, and
Speaker 1: whatever the other side of the political spectrum was saying
Speaker 1: was simply untrue, whether that was by ignorance or deception
Speaker 1: or malice on the part of those other people making
Speaker 1: those other tweets. And so I'm making these next three
Speaker 1: episodes about truth, and I want to be clear that
Speaker 1: I'm not pumping for any particular political side here. No
Speaker 1: side of the spectrum gets favored here. Instead, I'm looking
Speaker 1: at this as a neuroscientist. I'm looking at this in
Speaker 1: terms of human behavior. What I'm interested in are the
Speaker 1: illusions and cognitive biases that we are all subject to.
Speaker 1: So let me start very generally about how we all
Speaker 1: come to believe our own truths. So I did an
Speaker 1: earlier episode on this where I asked the question, why
Speaker 1: do we all believe that we see the truth? Clearly?
Speaker 1: Wherever you look on the political spectrum, each person feels, look,
Speaker 1: I know the truth, and I just don't understand why
Speaker 1: other people can't see the truth that's so clearly arrayed
Speaker 1: in front of us. All. My only explanation is that
Speaker 1: they must be trolls, or misinformed, or Russian bots, or stubborn,
Speaker 1: or just doing what their friends are doing without thinking
Speaker 1: about it very deeply, or whatever. But what's clear is
Speaker 1: that there is a true answer, and I see it,
Speaker 1: and if I could just shout loudly enough in all
Speaker 1: caps on Twitter, everyone would come to agree with me.
Speaker 1: So that is how we generally feel about everything in
Speaker 1: our world of political opinions. But that's rarely made explicit.
Speaker 1: And in my next book, called Empire of the Invisible,
Speaker 1: I call this the illusion of complete knowledge, which is
Speaker 1: to say, we each feel that we believe our internal
Speaker 1: model is essentially correct and complete. But the fact is
Speaker 1: that we each follow a very thin trajectory through space
Speaker 1: and time, and that forms your beliefs, and you grow
Speaker 1: up in a particular house, in a particular neighborhood, and
Speaker 1: a particular culture, and that shapes what you think is true.
Speaker 1: There's a great quotation from Oliver Wendell Holmes Senior, who wrote, quote,
Speaker 1: we are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs
Speaker 1: of our tribe. The record may seem superficial, but it
Speaker 1: is indelible unquote. The end result is that each of
Speaker 1: us ends up with an internal model in our heads
Speaker 1: that is woefully incomplete, but we each believe, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: read the right news stories, and I see the right
Speaker 1: tweets and watch the right TikTok videos, and so I
Speaker 1: know what is correct. Now, if you want to hear
Speaker 1: more on how we come to derive our notion of
Speaker 1: the truth, please listen to episode sixteen, which is titled
Speaker 1: why is everyone who disagrees with you? Misinformed? But today,
Speaker 1: what I want to concentrate on is the next step,
Speaker 1: which is that these colleagues were calling me and asking
Speaker 1: how to get truth back in the media, and that
Speaker 1: really got me thinking about this old and fundamental philosophical question,
Speaker 1: is there such a thing as the truth? So for
Speaker 1: clear definitions, let's agree that for decidable propositions, there is
Speaker 1: an objective truth. But what I'm probing for the rest
Speaker 1: of this episode is the local version of truth, the
Speaker 1: question of whether our subjective truths approximate or even can approximate,
Speaker 1: the object truth, and why we each believe that we
Speaker 1: have an advantage with this. Now, if you have been
Speaker 1: listening to this podcast for a while, you probably know
Speaker 1: that I am pathologically optimistic, but I'm a little bit
Speaker 1: cynical about this notion of finding truth. I think the
Speaker 1: search for truth for most people is really just a
Speaker 1: search for confirmation of what they already believe. And so
Speaker 1: I want to give a very clear argument about why
Speaker 1: this notion of finding truth is mostly illusory and why
Speaker 1: it typically just means I want to see my version
Speaker 1: of the truth in print. And I want to argue
Speaker 1: why I think we would be better off as a
Speaker 1: society if we were able to distance ourselves a little
Speaker 1: bit from this illusion. So let's begin with a fundamental
Speaker 1: point which will help us frame everything, and that question
Speaker 1: is is all this fake news and the misinformation and
Speaker 1: distant information? Is this new? Because nowadays we discuss this
Speaker 1: all the time, these concerns about the ease with which
Speaker 1: disinformation spreads, the problem of fake news and echo chambers,
Speaker 1: and so the background assumption which I hear a lot
Speaker 1: is that people used to be better about the truth.
Speaker 1: You could turn on the news and you would know
Speaker 1: that the folks there were telling you the truth. I
Speaker 1: recently heard someone argue that back in the old days,
Speaker 1: everyone got their news from the same source, from watching
Speaker 1: Walter Cronkite speak on television, but that is patently untrue.
Speaker 1: This is simply retrospective romanticization, and it's important for us
Speaker 1: to see why. So let's start with newspapers from let's
Speaker 1: say fifty years ago. The first time I was exposed
Speaker 1: to newspapers was in my grandparents' generation, and I learned
Speaker 1: that in every major city there were at least two newspapers,
Speaker 1: one that aligned with your political views, and the others
Speaker 1: were the rags that you would never deign to pick up.
Speaker 1: The different newspapers in any city had diverse angles and
Speaker 1: non equivalent coverage for the politics and war, economy, and whatever.
Speaker 1: The newspapers appealed to different audiences, and from an economic angle,
Speaker 1: this is the only reason why you could have multiple newspapers,
Speaker 1: because if they were saying the same things and had
Speaker 1: the same opinions and appealed to the same market, there
Speaker 1: would be no reason for more than one. And beyond newspapers,
Speaker 1: there was a surprising proliferation of rags. Just do a
Speaker 1: Google image search on National Inquirer headlines and you'll see
Speaker 1: thousands of stories of people who are kidnapped by space
Speaker 1: aliens or a mermaid cemetery discovered, or Hillary Clinton adopts
Speaker 1: an alien baby. And there were many, many rag newspapers.
Speaker 1: I'll give you just one example, the English paper The
Speaker 1: Sun in nineteen eighty nine, and note this was before
Speaker 1: the Internet. The Sun covered a disaster at the Hillsboro
Speaker 1: football Stadium in England in which the South Yorkshire Police
Speaker 1: made a bunch of wrong decisions about crowd control and
Speaker 1: ninety seven people died in a human crush, and most
Speaker 1: of the newspapers pointed out that it was the fault
Speaker 1: of the police doing crowd control, but the Sun newspaper reported,
Speaker 1: under a huge headline that read the truth that people
Speaker 1: were scapegoating the police and that the real cause of
Speaker 1: the disaster was unruly Liverpool fans. They had caused the
Speaker 1: whole thing. So I'll skip all the lawsuits and hearings
Speaker 1: that resulted from all this, but this coverage from the
Speaker 1: Sun was shown to be the fakest of fake news,
Speaker 1: and the paper later called it the most terrible blunder
Speaker 1: in its history. I raised this as one of the
Speaker 1: countless examples of the way that news ran wild in
Speaker 1: all directions well before the Internet. And I'll come back
Speaker 1: to this topic next week. But the point for now
Speaker 1: is that fake news has always been around, and in
Speaker 1: many senses it can be argued that it was more
Speaker 1: important in damaging than it is now, precisely because if
Speaker 1: there were fewer places to get one's news, each venue
Speaker 1: had more eyeballs. In other words, if I start some
Speaker 1: website now and write some fake news on it, maybe
Speaker 1: I'll get one hundred or one thousand views, but that's
Speaker 1: very different than having a million viewers for the Sun newspaper.
Speaker 1: So the idea that everyone got their news from cronkite
Speaker 1: on television has no basis. In reality, people got most
Speaker 1: of their news from newspapers and rag newspapers, and also
Speaker 1: from pamphlets. Pamphleteering was a big thing that doesn't exist
Speaker 1: much anymore, but anyone who is my age or older
Speaker 1: might remember seeing these things. As a kid, you'd write
Speaker 1: your address on a list and a pamphlet would get
Speaker 1: mailed to your inbox. Snail mailed no different than subscribing
Speaker 1: to a newsletter and getting that in your electronic inbox.
Speaker 1: And I remember as a kid finding a pamphlet from
Speaker 1: the American Nazi Party on the ground, and it was
Speaker 1: full of the most horrific things about Blacks and Jews
Speaker 1: and Hispanics and so on. But that's how people would
Speaker 1: get their news. You would sign up for whatever fit
Speaker 1: your political model and what you wanted to arrive in
Speaker 1: your inbox. The point is you could get any kind
Speaker 1: of misinformation or disinformation that you wanted. There was no
Speaker 1: difference between that pamphlet and something you might read on
Speaker 1: four chan or some website or watch on TikTok. And
Speaker 1: let's address this question of echo chambers. Beyond newspapers and
Speaker 1: pamphlets and so on, we all watched disinformation spread in
Speaker 1: real life from flesh and blood friends who repeated factually
Speaker 1: incorrect stories purposefully or on accident. And because we're very
Speaker 1: social creatures, we tend to listen to those people around us,
Speaker 1: whether in our family or our neighborhood, or our college
Speaker 1: friends or our culture. More generally, that's where we get
Speaker 1: our information, and that is what shapes our limited model
Speaker 1: of the world. So there's nothing new about echo chambers.
Speaker 1: Humans have never needed social media for that to happen.
Speaker 1: I remember when I was a little kid, I was
Speaker 1: talking with my grandmother about an election that had just
Speaker 1: concluded in her state, and she said, dumbfounded. I don't
Speaker 1: know a single person who voted for that man, and
Speaker 1: she was telling the truth. She didn't have acquaintance with
Speaker 1: anyone who felt differently than she did, even though that
Speaker 1: was obviously over half her state. From time, I'm immemorial,
Speaker 1: we always hang out with people who think generally like us,
Speaker 1: and so whenever our candidate loses an election, we immediately
Speaker 1: cook up excuses. People don't know who to vote for.
Speaker 1: They were intimidated into voting for him. The election was rigged,
Speaker 1: They were tricked into voting for him. There are so
Speaker 1: many dumb young people or old people, or poor people
Speaker 1: or rich people who have no idea how to see
Speaker 1: through his deception. We are all veteran experts at offering
Speaker 1: up explanations every time our candidate doesn't win. So in
Speaker 1: most discussions that I'm in, social media takes most of
Speaker 1: the heat for the fake news, But perhaps the question
Speaker 1: we need to ask is whether there's something new about
Speaker 1: the behaviors that arise in social media, or instead whether
Speaker 1: fake news always emerges from thousands or millions of human
Speaker 1: brains interacting with one another. Next week's episode, I'm going
Speaker 1: to dive deeper into the issue of truth in social
Speaker 1: media and why the Internet may actually be enormously helpful
Speaker 1: for exposing the truth. Wait for next week's argument. You
Speaker 1: might be pleasantly surprised by it, but for now, let
Speaker 1: me just emphasize that it is illusory to believe that
Speaker 1: people in previous generations did not suffer the same biases
Speaker 1: in their fact gathering and meaning making. Let's not get
Speaker 1: trapped in a romanticization of earlier eras, because it limits
Speaker 1: our ability to see the bigger picture about human behavior,
Speaker 1: and instead it misdirects our attention to Zucker, TikTok or
Speaker 1: musk as though that's the core problem and if they
Speaker 1: didn't exist, everyone would be happily obtaining only true news,
Speaker 1: just like we used to do back in some illusory time. Now,
Speaker 1: from a neuroscience angle, why do we think that the
Speaker 1: truth used to be clearer? It's mostly because we have
Speaker 1: terrible memories. I mentioned in an earlier episode that I
Speaker 1: saw a bumper sticker that said make America America again,
Speaker 1: and everyone seemed to like that sticker from whatever side
Speaker 1: of the political spectrum. Because we each have impoverished memories,
Speaker 1: and we believe that when we were a kid and
Speaker 1: not really paying attention to politics. Everything was simpler and
Speaker 1: everyone generally agreed with one another. But it's only because
Speaker 1: we were children and not generally thinking about the kind
Speaker 1: of polarization that happens in a society to generate events
Speaker 1: like the Chinese Communist Revolution or the Russian Revolution, or
Speaker 1: Nazism in Germany, or fascism in Italy, or polepot in Cambodia,
Speaker 1: or the massacre of the Tutsi in Rwanda, or on
Speaker 1: and on, looking at what has just happened in the
Speaker 1: past century, all before the existence of the Internet. So
Speaker 1: that's the first point I want to make. We have
Speaker 1: terrible memories about whether things were truthy in the past,
Speaker 1: and we tend to always think they were. And in
Speaker 1: an upcoming episode, I'm going to cover a great new
Speaker 1: Nature paper about why we think that morality is declining,
Speaker 1: which it turns out people erroneously believe in every generation
Speaker 1: and have for about two thousand years, and we will
Speaker 1: see it's exactly the same issue, very bad memories. But
Speaker 1: all I want to emphasize for today's episode is this
Speaker 1: fact that the concern about truth is not new, but
Speaker 1: as we will unpack further, very very old So, returning
Speaker 1: to the present time, I said no to all these
Speaker 1: invitations to collaborate on National Science Foundation grants because I
Speaker 1: thought the endeavor was misguided. The heart of the problem
Speaker 1: is believing that there is one truth and you're the
Speaker 1: one with access to it while the others are trolls,
Speaker 1: were misinformed. Most of us find it difficult to take
Speaker 1: the perspective that there are billions of heads on this planet,
Speaker 1: and they each have their own internal cosmos with their
Speaker 1: sense of what is right and what is wrong. So
Speaker 1: there are multiple perspectives on essentially everything. Now, that's not
Speaker 1: equivalent to saying that everyone is factually correct when they're
Speaker 1: commenting on something that happened. I am not making a
Speaker 1: moral equivalence between different positions, some of which are closer
Speaker 1: or more distant from the objective truth. Instead, what I'm
Speaker 1: pointing to is the complexity of a world made of
Speaker 1: lots of individual brains and the difficulty or often impossibility
Speaker 1: of getting to the truth or knowing when you actually
Speaker 1: have it. In other words, let's assume that the truth
Speaker 1: exists independent of any individual, but it's not the case
Speaker 1: that people can eat easily get to it. When I
Speaker 1: say your truth and my truth. I don't mean that
Speaker 1: this is actually the objective truth. I mean that all
Speaker 1: we have are our perspectives, and this is for the
Speaker 1: most part all we ever have access to. And I'll
Speaker 1: give you lots of examples in this episode so you
Speaker 1: can distinguish what I'm saying from mere cynicism. So take
Speaker 1: any economic truth. Is inflation rising because of the president's
Speaker 1: policies or the policies of the president before, or does
Speaker 1: it have very little to do with that and more
Speaker 1: to do with foreign policy or an inherent diminishment of
Speaker 1: technical capacities, or because of bad luck with a number
Speaker 1: of hurricanes or earthquakes, or because of chain technologies which
Speaker 1: another country now has the lead on, or whatever. The answer,
Speaker 1: of course is that it might involve all of these
Speaker 1: and one hundred more factors, because the economy is a dynamic,
Speaker 1: emergent property of the behavior of hundreds of millions of humans. So,
Speaker 1: if you are interested in publishing only the truth on
Speaker 1: your social media site, which story do you publish? And
Speaker 1: the related problem is whose truth do you publish? Based
Speaker 1: on different points of view, there may be many different
Speaker 1: perspectives on the same event. Any real world event is
Speaker 1: complex with thousands of different viewpoints. Take something like a
Speaker 1: battle that happens between two countries. What's the right way
Speaker 1: to tell that story? From the point of view of
Speaker 1: a young breadmaker who sees the effects of the invading army,
Speaker 1: or the elder statesman who has many complex relationships that
Speaker 1: can strain his next moves if he wants to be
Speaker 1: remembered to history or re elected. Or the point of
Speaker 1: view of a soldier on the ground who has no
Speaker 1: idea why bombs are suddenly falling when this wasn't part
Speaker 1: of the original mission plan that he was told about.
Speaker 1: Or the seamstress who is apolitical and only cares about
Speaker 1: her children and can't believe the mess the world has
Speaker 1: gotten into. There are a million ways to tell the story,
Speaker 1: and anyone can choose whatever shoes they want. Just look
Speaker 1: at the October seventh massacre of Israelis by Hamas. Some
Speaker 1: people choose to tell the story from the point of
Speaker 1: view of the Israelis, some choose to tell from the
Speaker 1: point of view of Hamas, same event on the ground,
Speaker 1: but diametrically opposed interpretations of the meaning. So what does
Speaker 1: it mean to tell the truth? Whose truth? Every person
Speaker 1: in the world has a different perspective on which facts
Speaker 1: matter in the telling of a story, and that's why
Speaker 1: I was a little scared about my colleagues's idea of
Speaker 1: let's make sure the media tells the truth. But I'm
Speaker 1: just getting started and I want to unpack this much further. Okay,
Speaker 1: so next maybe you'll say, look, at least we can
Speaker 1: tell scientific truths, and a lot of people when they
Speaker 1: think about this issue of truth in the media, they'll
Speaker 1: cite issues about COVID, for example, and misinformation around that.
Speaker 1: So look, I'm a scientist and I would love to
Speaker 1: pump up my own field, but the fact is that
Speaker 1: science is not infallible. Now, let me be absolutely clear
Speaker 1: about something important. The scientific method is the best toolkit
Speaker 1: humanity has ever had. And what is special about science
Speaker 1: is that it is willing to knock down its own walls.
Speaker 1: And this feature is a necessary part of how modern
Speaker 1: science progresses. So that means it can change, and that
Speaker 1: is part of its greatest strength. That's not a weakness. However,
Speaker 1: it does mean that the notion that we can make
Speaker 1: sure to always have clear scientific truths is inherently misguided.
Speaker 1: So just look at COVID nineteen A sudden pandemic took
Speaker 1: over the globe, and literally thousands of laboratories were trying
Speaker 1: to figure it out all at once. But the culprit
Speaker 1: was sub microscopic. So how do you figure it out?
Speaker 1: Well by doing lots and lots of experiments and trying
Speaker 1: to get things straight. But you remember that in March
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty, it wasn't the least bit clear what
Speaker 1: was going on with it. Was it something left on doorknobs?
Speaker 1: Did we need to wash our groceries? People were coming
Speaker 1: home and getting undressed in their backyards and hosing the
Speaker 1: kids off, and they were wiping down their cardboard Amazon
Speaker 1: boxes with tons of disinfectants. And you remember that the
Speaker 1: Center for Disease Control announced in March of twenty twenty
Speaker 1: that masks would not do any good, and then they
Speaker 1: soon changed their mind and said everyone should wear masks. Now,
Speaker 1: was this deception at play? No, it was figuring out
Speaker 1: new data and new recommendations on the fly. And for
Speaker 1: any of you who followed the scientific literature for the
Speaker 1: past several years, you know there were hundreds or maybe
Speaker 1: thousands of new papers on COVID nineteen that came out
Speaker 1: every month. And what that represented at every moment was
Speaker 1: that the story was evolving, and sometimes and evolving understanding
Speaker 1: involves a change in direction. So if you are a
Speaker 1: newspaper or a social media company that is only going
Speaker 1: to publish the truth, what does that look like in
Speaker 1: March of twenty twenty? Do you publish that there's no
Speaker 1: point in citizens wearing any masks and you suppress any
Speaker 1: voices that say otherwise because that was the official word
Speaker 1: of the Center for Disease Control. I'm not criticizing the
Speaker 1: desire to have truth. I'm merely pointing out the naivete
Speaker 1: of thinking that they're there is a single knowable version
Speaker 1: of the truth that should be published, and maybe thinking
Speaker 1: that science will always have access to that truth, and
Speaker 1: that if you do the right things and consult the
Speaker 1: right experts, you can guarantee untouchable guardrails. That's the kind
Speaker 1: of thing that led to deep troubles for the Soviet
Speaker 1: Union when they assigned their nationwide agricultural oversight to a
Speaker 1: man named Trophime Laishenko. Lashenko was a biologist who felt
Speaker 1: that he knew the truth about proper farming practices, and
Speaker 1: so he dictated these to Russians across thirteen time zones
Speaker 1: and an enormous variety of climates and soils. In Soviet style,
Speaker 1: this truth of how agriculture should be done was implemented
Speaker 1: with an iron fist, and the mass starvation that resulted
Speaker 1: from Lashenkoism is generally considered one of the factors that
Speaker 1: led to the downfall of the USSR. But Lyashenko believed it.
Speaker 1: To him his agricultural recommendations were the truth, and if
Speaker 1: he could just get the others to see his truth,
Speaker 1: everything would be so simple, and he wouldn't have to
Speaker 1: imprison or execute the biologists who couldn't see the truth
Speaker 1: as clearly as he could. So all this means it's
Speaker 1: not as though we can just turn to science and
Speaker 1: say that will give us the truth. Science is the
Speaker 1: best set of tools we have ever developed, but let's
Speaker 1: not pretend it can always answer everything. And by the way,
Speaker 1: science is really not about truth. Instead, it's about falsehoods.
Speaker 1: All science ever seeks to do is clarify our thinking
Speaker 1: by ruling out things that are incorrect. But that's not
Speaker 1: equivalent to telling us what is a fundamental truth? And
Speaker 1: just one more note here, Even where there is science,
Speaker 1: each individual will interpret it based on his own internal model.
Speaker 1: An economist's friend of mine pointed out that if you
Speaker 1: say the majority of scientists think that the vaccines are effective,
Speaker 1: people on the other side will take that as proof
Speaker 1: that the scientists are in on something devious, because why
Speaker 1: else would so many scientists be agreeing with something so preposterous.
Speaker 1: So we're talking about some of the challenges of knowing
Speaker 1: the truth, and now I'll turn to the issue of
Speaker 1: why the truth is so hard to get straight for
Speaker 1: any society. First, everyone says they're just seeking the truth,
Speaker 1: but I'm a little skeptical, And I'll just give a
Speaker 1: random example from the Israel Hamas conflict. There are a
Speaker 1: lot of people who describe themselves as feminists who came
Speaker 1: out very strongly pro Hamas immediately after the October seventh
Speaker 1: attack in Israel, and so I mentioned online that I
Speaker 1: was intrigued by the cognitive conflict and compartmentalization that is
Speaker 1: required for a feminist. To watch, for example, the video
Speaker 1: of the twenty two year old German Israeli Shawnee Luke,
Speaker 1: who was a young peacenick at the music festival, and
Speaker 1: there she is on video, stripped mostly naked and stepped
Speaker 1: on and spat upon by Hamas gunmen screaming and pumping
Speaker 1: their rifles in the air, and she was clearly unconscious
Speaker 1: or dead. And as you probably know, there have been
Speaker 1: many reports of rape and general mutilations, and this is
Speaker 1: currently under investigation by a UN committee. Now, in the
Speaker 1: fog of war, it's not always easy to know precisely
Speaker 1: which reports to believe. But here was the video of
Speaker 1: Shawnee Luke, and it was filmed and released by Hamas,
Speaker 1: so no one could even accuse it of being propaganda.
Speaker 1: And I found myself surprised that amid all this brutal activity,
Speaker 1: which included the slaughter of twelve hundred civilians, that some
Speaker 1: feminists were coming out cheering Hamas. So I mentioned this
Speaker 1: irony online, hoping that people could come to analyze a
Speaker 1: very complex geopolitical situation without giving up what they claimed
Speaker 1: were their core beliefs. And immediately one woman wrote to
Speaker 1: me to say that the accusations of Hamas's violence against
Speaker 1: women quote had all been debunked. Now, this is a
Speaker 1: chess move that's as old as the hills. You take
Speaker 1: a horrific event that just happened, and you simply pretend
Speaker 1: it didn't happen because it's not consistent with one's narrative. Now,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying this to criticize the woman who wrote
Speaker 1: to me, and we exchanged a few messages about this
Speaker 1: issue and about the notion of truth, and when I
Speaker 1: pointed out the details to her, including for example, the SHAWNE.
Speaker 1: Luke video that we both had seen, she took back
Speaker 1: the statement that the brutality against women had been debunked.
Speaker 1: But strangely, she ended by telling me that her only
Speaker 1: mission was to make sure that people tell the truth online,
Speaker 1: and I believe her that she feels that is her mission,
Speaker 1: but that didn't stop her from saying or believing whatever
Speaker 1: she wanted to counter what she found inconsistent with her
Speaker 1: internal model. So my cynical statement is that it's actually
Speaker 1: quite rare that any of us actually search for the truth.
Speaker 1: We generally search for consistency with our belief structure. So
Speaker 1: we all talk about wanting truth in media, but we
Speaker 1: are all happy to dismiss evidence if it's not aligned
Speaker 1: with our preconceived notions, with what we want to be true.
Speaker 1: We watched this in two thousand and one with the
Speaker 1: massacre at the twin towers, conspiracy theories blossomed. We saw
Speaker 1: this with the moon landing in nineteen sixty nine. If
Speaker 1: you didn't want to believe it, there's always a story
Speaker 1: you could cook up about how the government filmed this
Speaker 1: in a Hollywood studio. Now that story is not consistent
Speaker 1: with the facts on the ground, like that you can
Speaker 1: see with telescopes the artifact that we left on the moon.
Speaker 1: But the only point I want to make here is
Speaker 1: that there is always room for people's internal models to
Speaker 1: discount or dismiss what does not fit for them. It
Speaker 1: goes without saying that we all want the most truth
Speaker 1: that we can have on our media, but we have
Speaker 1: to face this facet of human behavior. We each have
Speaker 1: our own stories and narratives, and it's typically not easy
Speaker 1: for us to incorporate new data that contradicts our internal models.
Speaker 1: So while everyone is on board with the idea of
Speaker 1: making sure that news stations are telling the truth as
Speaker 1: best as they possibly can, we should just note that
Speaker 1: people are not as receptive to stories that contradicts their
Speaker 1: models as we might believe. Because you can always pull
Speaker 1: the intellectual ripcord of saying, well that is fake news,
Speaker 1: it doesn't fit my model, so it must have been
Speaker 1: an AI generated video, or a larger government conspiracy at play,
Speaker 1: or whatever we want. Now, beyond manipulating stories, we should
Speaker 1: note that more commonly, we tend to simply ignore chunks
Speaker 1: of stories. This is what psychologists refer to as a
Speaker 1: confirmation bias, which is that we seek out information that
Speaker 1: confirms our existing beliefs, and we ignore or dismiss information
Speaker 1: that contradicts those beliefs. You can test this yourself by
Speaker 1: raising the issue of book banning to people who are
Speaker 1: on the left or the right side of the political spectrum,
Speaker 1: and you'll extract the same immediate reaction out of both
Speaker 1: of them. They'll say, yes, book banning is an anathema
Speaker 1: to free speech, But ask them to consider the books
Speaker 1: that their own side is trying to ban, and you'll
Speaker 1: generally find a surprised look here, because it's easy to
Speaker 1: see the bad on the other side. But the truth
Speaker 1: is that both sides are putting equal effort into banning books.
Speaker 1: For example, in this country, the right tries to ban
Speaker 1: books like gender Queer or All Boys Aren't Blue? Or
Speaker 1: the Hate You Give or books with sexually explicit passages
Speaker 1: and on the left side, there are calls to ban
Speaker 1: books like To Kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn and
Speaker 1: books by Doctor Seuss. Groups on the left have burned
Speaker 1: Harry Potter books because of outspoken opinions on trans issues
Speaker 1: by the author. They've worked to persuade the publishers to
Speaker 1: rewrite Raouel Dahl's children's books. Both sides love the idea
Speaker 1: of giving a haircut to the library so that the
Speaker 1: books that remain are the ones that are consistent with
Speaker 1: their worldview, and according to penn America, there were at
Speaker 1: least twenty five hundred book challenges from middle of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one to twenty twenty two that affected about seventeen
Speaker 1: hundred book titles, and these challenges were from the right
Speaker 1: and the left. But both sides are better at noticing
Speaker 1: free speech violations from the other side, and their own
Speaker 1: efforts to squelch books aren't seen as violations but simply
Speaker 1: obvious things that anyone would want to do. And all
Speaker 1: these problems we have with seeking truth has to do
Speaker 1: fundamentally with the fact that our internal models are limited,
Speaker 1: and you combine that with the fact that the world
Speaker 1: outside of us is made of billions of brains doing
Speaker 1: their own thing, and we see that real world situations
Speaker 1: quickly grow to a complexity that our internal models just
Speaker 1: can't handle. For example, I saw someone tweet the other
Speaker 1: day that the situation in the Middle East is a
Speaker 1: very complex geopolitical situation, and immediately she got hundreds of
Speaker 1: replies saying it's not complex, it's very simple. And then
Speaker 1: they tweet their clean brief story, their talking points on
Speaker 1: whichever side they are, So you can find diametrically opposed
Speaker 1: simple stories. What's interesting about societies is that people can
Speaker 1: and do take any path they want through the yarn
Speaker 1: ball of history to come to whatever conclusion they want
Speaker 1: to Why. It's because although society is fueled by ideologies,
Speaker 1: fundamentally ideologies aren't anything physical. They are beliefs held by
Speaker 1: the only actual things on the ground, which is enormous
Speaker 1: collections of human brains. So I'll give just one more
Speaker 1: quick example about the difficulty of truth, and this is
Speaker 1: something I've just been observing for a while. Imagine that
Speaker 1: somebody makes a tweet about something and it seems innocent enough,
Speaker 1: but then some comment er accuses the statement of being
Speaker 1: a dog whistle. In case you don't know. A dog
Speaker 1: whistle is this device used by dog owners that can
Speaker 1: be heard by the dog, but is not heard by
Speaker 1: humans because the frequency is too high. So the idea
Speaker 1: of a dog whistle statement is that the person is
Speaker 1: saying something that his followers and acolytes will understand, but
Speaker 1: the rest of the community won't detect that it happened.
Speaker 1: So surely there exists dog whistle tweets, But the difficult
Speaker 1: challenge lies in the interpretation. So each time a public
Speaker 1: statement gets made, some fraction of the population believes with
Speaker 1: certainty that is a dog whistle, and despite the innocent
Speaker 1: seeming statement, the person is really calling for jailing or
Speaker 1: eradication or genocide or whatever. As predictably as gravity. Other
Speaker 1: people are then motivated to point out that nothing of
Speaker 1: the sort was ever said, and that the commenter is
Speaker 1: being ridiculous to suggest so. But the first commenter is
Speaker 1: certain that this is what was meant, it doesn't have
Speaker 1: to be said because that person's followers know full well
Speaker 1: what was meant. Now, this happens on all sides of
Speaker 1: the political spectrum, even though as usual, the diferent sides
Speaker 1: will say that this craziness only happens on the other side.
Speaker 1: So what's going on here again? This has to do
Speaker 1: with the differences in people's internal models, And you can
Speaker 1: read through the comments and understand the internal models of
Speaker 1: each person. The person who points out, my god, he
Speaker 1: never even said that has a particular kind of model,
Speaker 1: and the person who says, yes, but this is what
Speaker 1: he actually meant has a very different kind of model.
Speaker 1: And then the person who feels that the accusations are
Speaker 1: an overreach can be accused of being deceptive or an apologist,
Speaker 1: and the person who says it's a dog whistle can
Speaker 1: be accused of simply trying to smear the original poster
Speaker 1: with the lowest of accusations and moral pollution. So when
Speaker 1: you watch a Twitter thread unfold, you are watching the
Speaker 1: basic action reaction physics of different internal cosmosis coming into conflict.
Speaker 1: And this leads us to the question about groups of people.
Speaker 1: All the time, we're faced with questions about how do
Speaker 1: Russians feel about this, how do Ukrainians feel? How about
Speaker 1: East Coasters or West Coasters? How do liberals feel or
Speaker 1: conservatives feel about some issue? Now, assessing the position of
Speaker 1: some group of people is a totally reasonable question. To ask,
Speaker 1: but essentially it is impossible to answer unless you're willing
Speaker 1: to take on the fact that in any group there's
Speaker 1: a massive spectrum of models. Now, maybe all you want
Speaker 1: in some circumstances is just to know where the average
Speaker 1: opinion is, or if the distribution is so narrow that
Speaker 1: it can tell you what the group is actually going
Speaker 1: to do on the ground. But if you really want
Speaker 1: to understand the truth about something, it requires a different
Speaker 1: level of detailed examination that typically does not get done.
Speaker 1: Just take as an example the way that we always
Speaker 1: look at economics. Politicians and pundits will typically take a
Speaker 1: position about how people are going to behave this is
Speaker 1: what people will do in this situation. But really, any
Speaker 1: such model is doomed to be incorrect, either partially or mostly,
Speaker 1: because populations of humans are very heterogeneous, they're very different
Speaker 1: from one another. So take for illustration, the debate about
Speaker 1: sending people a stimulus check. Some politicians say that if
Speaker 1: you send people checks, people will use it to buy food,
Speaker 1: and others will say no, people are going to use
Speaker 1: it to buy drugs or alcohol because brains don't have
Speaker 1: particularly good ability to resist temptation. And suddenly you've got
Speaker 1: this free money sitting in front of you, and others
Speaker 1: will say, okay, well, look, maybe they'll spend a little
Speaker 1: of it on something stupid, but this gives them the
Speaker 1: opportunity to invest the rest of it, which builds a cushion,
Speaker 1: and it's very important for their lives, and so on
Speaker 1: and so on. One can find countless opinions on what
Speaker 1: a person will do when they find a check in
Speaker 1: their mailbox, and whatever your opinion is will probably navigate
Speaker 1: the way you vote on this point. But the fascinating
Speaker 1: thing is that none of these points of view represent
Speaker 1: the truth. The only meaningful approach to any economics problem
Speaker 1: is to understand that there is a spectrum of attitudes
Speaker 1: in the population, and then you make models based on that.
Speaker 1: This is called agent based modeling. Because different people will
Speaker 1: do very different things when they receive a stimulus check.
Speaker 1: Some will buy food, some will buy drugs, some will invest.
Speaker 1: And this is similar to the debates about the optimal
Speaker 1: way to help with the homeless population. Is the heart
Speaker 1: of the problem about mental illness or is it about laziness?
Speaker 1: Or is it about hard workers with a difficult time
Speaker 1: getting work. It's all of the above. It's heterogeneous, and
Speaker 1: the reasonable approach is to understand that any one size
Speaker 1: fits all solution is not going to solve the problem.
Speaker 1: So when we ask for truth in the media, we
Speaker 1: are always faced with this question whose truth? How can
Speaker 1: we ever summarize a population of people as having any
Speaker 1: particular truth, And this issue of the diversity within any
Speaker 1: community is what makes the search for truth in media complicated.
Speaker 1: In any community, let's say during wartime, you have the
Speaker 1: doves and the hawks, you have the mothers and the fathers,
Speaker 1: and you have the young men with nothing to lose,
Speaker 1: You have the saints, and you also have the psychopaths.
Speaker 1: And this is a theme I've talked about a lot
Speaker 1: on this podcast, is just how different people are on
Speaker 1: the inside. Now, the issue when things start heating up
Speaker 1: between two groups of people, let's say the Palestinians and
Speaker 1: the Israelis, is that each side chooses to show the
Speaker 1: videos that maximumly agitate. So we see those who are
Speaker 1: pro Is post videos of Palestinians doing horrific things, but
Speaker 1: presumably that's not representative of all Palestinians, most of whom
Speaker 1: are just looking to love their family members and make
Speaker 1: their way in the world, and pro Palestinians post videos
Speaker 1: of terrible things that Israelis do, like an Orthodox Jewish
Speaker 1: settler saying awful things to a Palestinian woman, or an
Speaker 1: Israeli soldier roughly handling a Palestinian youth who's just been
Speaker 1: caught throwing rocks. But similarly, that doesn't represent the majority
Speaker 1: of Israelis who are just looking to love their family
Speaker 1: members and to make their way in the world. So
Speaker 1: this comes back to the central question of truth in
Speaker 1: the media. Is it untrue if I show a video
Speaker 1: of someone on the opposing team doing something terrible, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's not untrue, there's the video. Does that count as
Speaker 1: truth in media? If you find the worst of the
Speaker 1: other side and you magnify that, is that or truthy?
Speaker 1: Or if you have the video but suppress it, is
Speaker 1: that more truthy. What this illustrates is not simply the
Speaker 1: complexity of truth in the media, but more broadly, the
Speaker 1: naivete of feeling that you could put in a grant
Speaker 1: and find the one truth and a good news station
Speaker 1: can just present that. So let's now return to this
Speaker 1: issue of truth in the media and ask the question
Speaker 1: of whether there are any technologies that you could develop
Speaker 1: that could do something to improve it. So one of
Speaker 1: the ideas that people constantly reinvent is the following. They say,
Speaker 1: could you just tell facts in the media, nothing but
Speaker 1: the facts, no editorial overlay. Now that's a lovely aspirational idea,
Speaker 1: but it may not be possible to achieve. Now that
Speaker 1: might seem like a surprising statement, So I want to
Speaker 1: give several examples to make this very clear. Okay, So
Speaker 1: first you might challenge me and say, look, you can't
Speaker 1: be saying that there's no such thing as a fact, right,
Speaker 1: because there are many examples of facts. For example, if
Speaker 1: you could independently verify from multiple sources, you could say
Speaker 1: truthfully that a rocket was launched from this location at
Speaker 1: this time and landed at this location at that time,
Speaker 1: and that is simply factual. And I agree. But what's
Speaker 1: interesting is that so little of what happens in the
Speaker 1: world actually falls into that kind of simple category, because
Speaker 1: there's often debate about what happened and what were the
Speaker 1: triggering issues, and how far back to look for those
Speaker 1: triggering issues. But even if you had all the facts, fundamentally,
Speaker 1: there are always different ways to tell a story. So
Speaker 1: from time immemorial, people have had concerns about the way
Speaker 1: that journalists or historians might portray a war when they
Speaker 1: wrote up a description, because the words they choose allow
Speaker 1: them to spin sentiment. It's very difficult to tell a
Speaker 1: story mutually. You have to choose which verbs you use
Speaker 1: and which adverbs, and who's the actor and who's the subject.
Speaker 1: And if you choose this different ways, you can get
Speaker 1: very different emotional spins on the same story. Is this
Speaker 1: aggressive dog bites man or is it dog defends itself
Speaker 1: against aggressive drunk or is it heroic dog protects its owner.
Speaker 1: You can have the same verifiable facts, but very different
Speaker 1: ways of telling the tale. Now, this issue is far
Speaker 1: from new, and if you're interested in a terrific book,
Speaker 1: read The Great War and Modern Memory, which is about
Speaker 1: journalism in World War One and this issue of how
Speaker 1: a story gets told. So the question I want to
Speaker 1: ask is are there any solutions to this issue that
Speaker 1: a writer can spin a story. Well, when photography came
Speaker 1: along and it became popular for the press to have
Speaker 1: photographers on battlegrounds, this seemed to be a great solution
Speaker 1: because if you capture a scene just by pressing the
Speaker 1: shutter button, then that's the truth of the matter. There's
Speaker 1: no editorializing. It's just the photons of what was there now.
Speaker 1: Although we have photoshop now, they didn't have that back then,
Speaker 1: and so an untouched negative really represented the truth of
Speaker 1: what happened out there or did it. Pretty soon people
Speaker 1: started realizing that even the war photographer makes choices which
Speaker 1: things do I snap a picture of? And which things
Speaker 1: do I not snap a picture of? And if I
Speaker 1: am going to take a picture of something, how do
Speaker 1: I set my position and the direction of my camera
Speaker 1: so that I'm in I'm meaning certain things in the shot,
Speaker 1: or making sure that certain things are outside the frame. So,
Speaker 1: as it turns out, while war photography might be better
Speaker 1: than just narrative, it doesn't achieve the vaunted title of truth.
Speaker 1: A photographer still has to make choices about what to
Speaker 1: give you and whoever it is, they have some agenda,
Speaker 1: consciously or unconsciously, And there's another aspect to the neutrality
Speaker 1: of cameras that's counterintuitive. There was a large outcry in
Speaker 1: America after a man named Michael Brown was shot and
Speaker 1: killed by police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, and this led
Speaker 1: to legal debates that resulted in police officers all wearing
Speaker 1: body worn cameras on their vests to document their interactions
Speaker 1: with the public, because this way we can all see
Speaker 1: the truth what actually happened. And that seems like a
Speaker 1: pretty good idea. So it came as a bit of
Speaker 1: a surprise that it has turned out to be so
Speaker 1: so complicated in courts of law to determine the truth
Speaker 1: of what happened. Why because what the camera sees is
Speaker 1: not what the police officer perceives. For example, there was
Speaker 1: an officer who ended up shooting an unarmed young man,
Speaker 1: and he said the kid turned to him with a
Speaker 1: look like a demon, and the officer felt certain that
Speaker 1: his life was in danger as this kid charged him.
Speaker 1: Now that's how it occurred for him. Now, for different
Speaker 1: people who watched the footage from his vest camera, they
Speaker 1: might see it in different ways. Some might interpret the
Speaker 1: footage the way the police officer did, and others might
Speaker 1: see an innocent young man who does not appear very aggressive.
Speaker 1: And that's exactly what happened. For the jury who watched this,
Speaker 1: some felt one way, some felt another. And this is
Speaker 1: what happens all the time with jurys who watch footage
Speaker 1: from police cameras. The point is that if you are
Speaker 1: the officer and someone is charging at you and pulling
Speaker 1: out something that you're interprets as a weapon, the camera
Speaker 1: tells a story, but it's not your story, not what
Speaker 1: it was like from inside your head, and your actions
Speaker 1: are not determined by the objective footage. They are determined
Speaker 1: by the script running in your head. Now, just to
Speaker 1: be crystal clear, I'm not making a justification for a
Speaker 1: police officer shooting an unarmed man. But I am saying
Speaker 1: that we all live inside our own internal models and
Speaker 1: a camera does not solve that. So I want to
Speaker 1: come back to this endeavor of making true news. Could
Speaker 1: we come up with some technology, something better than photography,
Speaker 1: like a news source that just tells facts with no editorial.
Speaker 1: So some thinkers hypothesized maybe there is a way to
Speaker 1: do this with modern technology that doesn't involve any editorializing
Speaker 1: of the facts. What you do is you make a
Speaker 1: phone app and you have the citizens of that neighborhood
Speaker 1: just post facts. People just enter an incident, but there's
Speaker 1: nothing that follows. They post there is a fire on
Speaker 1: this block, or there is a stray dog on the
Speaker 1: loose at this corner. Or there's a car accident on
Speaker 1: this street. You just enter the fact without any speculation
Speaker 1: on how it occurred or advice on what to do next.
Speaker 1: Maybe you could get citizens to arrive at something closer
Speaker 1: to the truth this way. So this app exists. It's
Speaker 1: called Citizen, And the idea with citizen is how can
Speaker 1: we get to a place where we know the information
Speaker 1: around us in a way that's not pushed through social
Speaker 1: media and opinion filters. You can just say the facts
Speaker 1: and you don't need to do anything to impose your
Speaker 1: opinions or inspire action. So that seems like a great idea,
Speaker 1: But what's most interesting is the failure of that idea.
Speaker 1: So I watched when a friend of mine in Palo
Speaker 1: Alto downloaded the Citizen app in twenty twenty, right when
Speaker 1: there were riots breaking out in various cities, and he
Speaker 1: got the information on Citizen that there were riots about
Speaker 1: to break out in various locations in Palo Alto. According
Speaker 1: to what he saw on the map, there were people
Speaker 1: gathering and possibly they were armed, And so he went
Speaker 1: out and bought a gun that evening to be able
Speaker 1: to defend his family in case his house was raided
Speaker 1: or torched or worse. Well, as it turns out, there
Speaker 1: were zero riots in Palo Alto. But what you had
Speaker 1: was a bunch of anxiety that spiraled. People felt they
Speaker 1: were doing the right thing by noting on the app, Hey,
Speaker 1: I saw five guys standing on this corner. Because those
Speaker 1: guys looked like they were cooking something up. They looked worrisome,
Speaker 1: and why were they just standing there not going somewhere.
Speaker 1: And it's better to share information than not right. And
Speaker 1: so the whole thing quickly spiraled out of control. And
Speaker 1: this is typical of people on the ground reporting. I
Speaker 1: know a woman who was at Northeastern University in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two and the director of the Immersive Media lab
Speaker 1: called nine to one one because he had just opened
Speaker 1: a package and it exploded and injured him, and the
Speaker 1: case contained an anonymous violent note directed at the lab.
Speaker 1: So law enforcement swooped in with two bomb squads and
Speaker 1: a large portion of Northeastern's Boston campus was evacuated. Now
Speaker 1: this incident was bizarre because the guy, it turns out,
Speaker 1: had totally faked this and it was a setup to
Speaker 1: make him look like he was the victim, and he
Speaker 1: was doing this to get attention, but no one knew
Speaker 1: that this was a fake thing at the moment. Instead,
Speaker 1: everyone thought a real bomb had just exploded, and everyone
Speaker 1: was justifiably panicked. And what happened was word rapidly spread
Speaker 1: on the Citizen app that there were six other bombs
Speaker 1: on campus, and soon enough everyone believed that there were
Speaker 1: also two gunmen on campus, and of course nothing had
Speaker 1: happened except for this one faked nine one one call.
Speaker 1: So the idea of saying, ah, we can get to
Speaker 1: the truth if people just put in what is happening
Speaker 1: and don't add commentary, this is a defunct idea now,
Speaker 1: because the problem comes from a diversity in the population,
Speaker 1: not of political opinion in this case, but just anxiety.
Speaker 1: An anxious person will see the five people standing on
Speaker 1: the street corner and say, I think they're up to something,
Speaker 1: and so their threshold for sharing what they see as
Speaker 1: a possible threat is different than someone else's threshold. Someone
Speaker 1: else might think, well, I want to see actual weapons
Speaker 1: before I post this on Citizen, And there's no single
Speaker 1: view that's correct here. It's just a difference in people's personalities.
Speaker 1: So this is why the idea of a just the
Speaker 1: facts app gives zero guarantee of surfacing the truth. So
Speaker 1: this is why I was skeptical when my colleagues wanted
Speaker 1: to write grants for how to restore truth in media,
Speaker 1: first because the issue of restoring to a past time
Speaker 1: when there was truth is illusory, but more importantly because
Speaker 1: of the typically overlooked complexity of the endeavor. But they figured,
Speaker 1: if we can just put some government money behind it,
Speaker 1: we can get media to just say the right thing,
Speaker 1: the truth now. F Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote the test
Speaker 1: of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold
Speaker 1: two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and
Speaker 1: still retain the ability to function. So what does a
Speaker 1: more mature approach to truth seeking look like. Well, the
Speaker 1: first thing involves a willingness to weigh the data and
Speaker 1: change one's mind where appropriate. One of the deep tragedies
Speaker 1: about what's happening in the Middle East right now is
Speaker 1: that most people feel like the right thing to do
Speaker 1: is take one side or another with clarity and certainty,
Speaker 1: even though the situation is messy. And as I said before,
Speaker 1: you can reach into the history and pull out many
Speaker 1: different stories depending on the path you take. My intuition
Speaker 1: is that a lot of people feel as though it's
Speaker 1: important to take a side because otherwise you are wishy washy.
Speaker 1: But I believe a passage into maturity requires us to
Speaker 1: try to understand what is happening in the world and
Speaker 1: to struggle with different points of view. Israelis and Palestinians
Speaker 1: are two groups of people that are not distant genetically.
Speaker 1: They both love their children, they love their families, They laugh,
Speaker 1: they cry, They're both groups of human beings with all
Speaker 1: the complexity that's entailed by that. That's the fundamental human level.
Speaker 1: Now on top of that, you have this very deep
Speaker 1: history of socio political complexity where people are born into
Speaker 1: a situation. You either pop out of the womb and
Speaker 1: find yourself a Palestinian or you find yourself in Israeli
Speaker 1: and you try to figure out the world that way.
Speaker 1: A mature view attempts to seek solutions when you have
Speaker 1: the crashing momentum of millions of heads, each with their
Speaker 1: own world model butting up against one another. I want
Speaker 1: to emphasize that even though this episode might have sounded
Speaker 1: a little bit cynical about the idea of finding the truth,
Speaker 1: we can of course get ourselves closer a meaningful education,
Speaker 1: we'll teach children or adults to not simply accept information
Speaker 1: at face value. We always need to consider the source.
Speaker 1: We need to evaluate the evidence as best we can.
Speaker 1: We need to consider the context. But what I'm talking
Speaker 1: about today goes even step further. I'm pointing to the
Speaker 1: importance of having skepticism about our own models. The fact
Speaker 1: is that humans have gotten everywhere they are because of
Speaker 1: our capacity to do logic. But that's actually not the
Speaker 1: typical way that we decide our political positions, even though
Speaker 1: we believe it is. Instead, we are social creatures who
Speaker 1: are driven by the narrativeatives of our in groups. And
Speaker 1: even if we try to use logic for all our
Speaker 1: political propositions, we're simply too limited by the complexity of
Speaker 1: the world and the number of players on the ground
Speaker 1: in any political situation. So objective truth exists, and seeking
Speaker 1: it is what we should all be doing. But let's
Speaker 1: not be naive in thinking that first we have privileged
Speaker 1: access to it, and second that we can just do
Speaker 1: something to surface the truth so that everyone can see
Speaker 1: it as clearly as we can. The road to seeking
Speaker 1: truth involves questioning our own internal models, digging into the
Speaker 1: limitations of our beliefs, recognizing what we don't fully know
Speaker 1: or don't fully understand. So at the center of this
Speaker 1: is a call for intellectual humility. It only takes about
Speaker 1: thirty seconds of surfing around social media to see that
Speaker 1: people have many different perspectives about everything going on. One
Speaker 1: possibility is that you see the truth and everyone else
Speaker 1: is confused or obstreperous, or trolling or misinformed. But another
Speaker 1: possibility is that you, too are sailing around within the
Speaker 1: bounds of your own internal cosmos, believing that only you
Speaker 1: see the real truth, and wanting to write government grants
Speaker 1: so that everyone else can see it as clearly as
Speaker 1: you can. So my advice to my colleagues who wanted
Speaker 1: to write these grants, engage in dialogue with people you trust,
Speaker 1: who you think are smart, and try to steal man
Speaker 1: the other side. If you haven't heard that term, this
Speaker 1: is the opposite of straw manning, which is a technique
Speaker 1: for misrepresenting an opponent's argument to make it easier to attack.
Speaker 1: Steel manning is a technique for strengthening an opponent's argument
Speaker 1: so you can better understand it. To steal man inn argument,
Speaker 1: you first need to understand the argument as well as
Speaker 1: you can. You identify the premises and the conclusion, and
Speaker 1: you work to understand the assumptions that underlie the argument.
Speaker 1: You try to understand the argument from your opponent's perspective.
Speaker 1: What are they trying to say? What are their goals.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying you have to come to a conclusion
Speaker 1: of agreeing with the other person, but this is an
Speaker 1: extremely valuable technique to say, Okay, I'm going to put
Speaker 1: myself in a totally different pair of shoes, or more exactly,
Speaker 1: in a different brain with a different world model, and
Speaker 1: I'm going to see how to try on these different
Speaker 1: assumptions and different ways that I might believe that argument. Now, again,
Speaker 1: this doesn't mean that in the end you need to
Speaker 1: adopt the other person's point of view, but I believe
Speaker 1: if you take on this intellectual habit, you will find
Speaker 1: yourself a little more seasoned in your worldviews, which just
Speaker 1: means that you will be slightly less able to say,
Speaker 1: I think this complex situation is actually really simple, and
Speaker 1: hence I'm willing to dehumanize this other group of humans
Speaker 1: just based on some fundamentally arbitrary label like which deity
Speaker 1: they happen to eve in, or how much melanin they
Speaker 1: have in their skin, or which side of the tracks
Speaker 1: they're from. So, in wrapping up, I find it unbelievably
Speaker 1: fascinating that just during my lifetime, we've gone from a
Speaker 1: world in which media meant one kind of thing, and
Speaker 1: we got to see the invention of the Internet, which
Speaker 1: took off just over a quarter century ago, to the
Speaker 1: revolution in Ai, which took off just over a year ago.
Speaker 1: And in each of those eras, the search for truth
Speaker 1: maintains many similarities, but there are also some subtle changes.
Speaker 1: So today's episode is about the challenges of knowing truth,
Speaker 1: and in the next two episodes, I'm going to address
Speaker 1: the technologies that we're surrounded with now and how those
Speaker 1: influence the search for truth. So in next week's episode,
Speaker 1: I'm going to address the Internet and social media. Is
Speaker 1: there something about the Internet that's causing there to be
Speaker 1: less truth? Could it be argued that the existence of
Speaker 1: the internet causes more truth. We've changed the way we
Speaker 1: get news such that everyone has a bullhorn? Now does
Speaker 1: that change the way we do sense making? And I
Speaker 1: think you'll find some surprises here because the big picture
Speaker 1: is not what you might expect. So that's about truth
Speaker 1: in the age of the Internet. Then, in the third
Speaker 1: episode of this series, I'll tackle what artificial intelligence means
Speaker 1: for the future of truth. What does AI mean for
Speaker 1: what you see on a video, what you hear in
Speaker 1: somebody's voice, or what you read online. We'll address lots
Speaker 1: of things here, like the fact that AI has already
Speaker 1: opened the door to deep fakes. We'll ask whether AI
Speaker 1: needs to be sentient to be scary, and whether AI
Speaker 1: gives a way to undermine our species traditional methods of
Speaker 1: sense making. I'll just end this episode with a quotation
Speaker 1: from Arthur Schopenhauer where he says truth is no harlot
Speaker 1: who throws her arms around the neck of him who
Speaker 1: does not desire her. On the contrary, she is so
Speaker 1: coy a beauty that even the man who sacrifices everything
Speaker 1: to her can still not be certain of her favors.
Speaker 1: To be continued, go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast
Speaker 1: for more information and to find further reading. Send me
Speaker 1: an email at podcast at eagleman dot com with questions
Speaker 1: or discussion, and I'll be making episodes in which I
Speaker 1: address those Until next time. I'm David Eagleman, and this
Speaker 1: is in our cosmos,