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

We all worry about fake news. But is misinformation and disinformation really new? Join Eagleman for a deep dive into the past, present, and future of truth. Why do cameras not tell us what we think they do? What should we not forget about pamphleteering? And what does this have to do with agriculture in the USSR, or book banning in America, or dog whistles, or apps that only tell facts? And why is it so hard to understand the viewpoints of millions of brains at once? This week's episode is the first of a three-parter -- and today we tackle truth in the media.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
How do we find truth in media? Why do cameras
not tell us what we think they do, whether that's
from war photographers or police officers. What is important about
the history of pamphleteering and what does any of this
have to do with agriculture in the USSR or book
banning in America or dog whistles or phone apps that

(00:28):
only tell facts? Why is it so hard to understand
the viewpoints of millions of brains at once. Welcome to
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

(00:51):
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

(01:11):
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

(01:32):
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

(01:56):
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

(02:21):
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?

(02:43):
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,

(03:05):
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

(03:25):
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

(03:48):
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?

(04:08):
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,

(04:30):
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

(04:51):
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

(05:14):
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,

(05:36):
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

(05:57):
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,

(06:18):
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

(06:39):
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

(07:03):
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

(07:27):
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

(07:52):
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,

(08:13):
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.

(08:39):
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,

(09:00):
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,

(09:23):
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

(09:46):
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

(10:07):
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,

(10:30):
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,

(10:52):
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

(11:14):
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.

(11:37):
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

(11:57):
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

(12:20):
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

(12:41):
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

(13:04):
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

(13:26):
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

(13:48):
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

(14:10):
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

(14:31):
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

(14:52):
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

(15:14):
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,

(15:36):
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

(15:59):
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,

(16:19):
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

(16:40):
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

(17:02):
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

(17:24):
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

(17:46):
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,

(18:10):
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

(18:34):
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

(18:54):
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

(19:17):
can distinguish what I'm saying from mere cynicism. So take

(19:38):
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

(20:01):
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

(20:22):
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

(20:44):
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

(21:06):
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

(21:30):
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

(21:52):
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

(22:15):
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

(22:40):
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

(23:03):
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

(23:25):
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

(23:45):
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

(24:05):
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

(24:29):
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

(24:50):
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

(25:10):
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

(25:31):
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

(25:55):
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

(26:18):
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.

(26:40):
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

(27:02):
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

(27:24):
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

(27:47):
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

(28:07):
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

(28:31):
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

(28:54):
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

(29:15):
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

(29:38):
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,

(30:00):
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

(30:25):
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

(30:47):
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

(31:07):
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.

(31:30):
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

(31:53):
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

(32:15):
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

(32:38):
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

(32:59):
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

(33:22):
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

(33:42):
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

(34:05):
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

(34:27):
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

(34:49):
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

(35:11):
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

(35:32):
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

(35:53):
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

(36:14):
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

(36:39):
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

(37:00):
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,

(37:20):
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

(37:44):
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

(38:05):
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

(38:27):
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

(38:47):
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,

(39:11):
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

(39:31):
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

(39:54):
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

(40:15):
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

(40:37):
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.

(41:01):
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.

(41:23):
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

(41:47):
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

(42:08):
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

(42:31):
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

(42:53):
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

(43:16):
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,

(43:40):
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

(44:00):
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

(44:21):
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

(44:43):
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.

(45:06):
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

(45:27):
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

(45:59):
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

(46:23):
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

(46:48):
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

(47:09):
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

(47:32):
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

(47:54):
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,

(48:16):
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

(48:36):
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

(48:58):
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

(49:20):
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,

(49:40):
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

(50:04):
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

(50:24):
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,

(50:49):
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

(51:10):
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

(51:33):
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

(51:55):
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

(52:18):
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,

(52:38):
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.

(53:00):
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

(53:21):
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.

(53:42):
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

(54:06):
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

(54:27):
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

(54:47):
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.

(55:12):
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,

(55:33):
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

(55:54):
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,

(56:16):
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

(56:38):
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

(56:58):
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

(57:20):
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

(57:44):
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

(58:07):
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,

(58:30):
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,

(58:52):
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

(59:14):
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

(59:36):
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

(59:59):
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

(01:00:20):
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

(01:00:42):
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

(01:01:03):
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

(01:01:23):
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

(01:01:45):
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.

(01:02:10):
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

(01:02:33):
is in our cosmos,