New information

Three terms explain what often happens when we encounter new information.

Indefatigable popularizer Malcolm Gladwell has come up with the term “default to truth” to explain people’s tendency to believe things too easily, which makes us ripe for propagandists. If things are presented that jibe with our values, we’re easy to convince. Which is also why simply sowing doubt can be so effective.

The internet flat-earth society is a joke to journalists, but it’s also… there, on the Internet. You can look it up. The Internet’s ability to bring people together under a common yoke — people who would never connect in real life — is something Mark Zuckerberg figured out in a way nobody had previously, and now we have social media as a result, possibly the biggest social phenomenon of the 21st century. Social media provides anyone and everyone the “tribe” they need to convince themselves of the thinking they share in common has to be right.

This has led some who study such things to theorize that there may be no objective reality to the world at all, at least none that humans will ever be able to actually discern.

Researchers learn things that are later deemed wrong. We know next to nothing about very many things, or far less than we think we do. People are not swayed by this “research” in any case. We are awash in a vast sea of emotion and subjectivity, and objectivity is at best a scrim.

Where does all this leave us? The bindings on both objective and subjective truth now may seem to us to be unravelling.

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