On truth

On Truth

It can escalate to a bewildering experience to exchange arguments with my better half. While my main source of information is still public (local) radio and newspapers as 'Der Standard' and 'Die Presse', she relies mainly on the internet. I just ended a dispute with her on the phone (she is presently in Colorado, US) by interrupting the line. She remained stubbornly convinced that a former democratic candidate for presidency mistreated systematically a great number of innocent children.

What is truth? For me, information received from my sources comes close to it. But I also know from my professional experience as scientist, that absolute truth is nothing but a philosophical category never to be reached with certainty. We can never be sure of anything. Whatever you are convinced of, in the next moment you can wake up from a dream and all is wrong. Those of us blessed with (at least fragmentatory) memories for dreams will testify to those convincing lectures provided to most of us by our liminal consciousness.

The 'gold standard' for testing whether any of our experience is real or not, is not by pinching yourself, but by asking your neighbor whether he / she can see the same as you. We need a witness; and two witnesses are better than just one, especially if they were not in contact with each other (independent witnesses). Such witness is not always easy to find, and even more difficult to verify. In Journalism this strategy runs under the term 'check and double check'. Investigations into the 'truth-content' of any claim can be quite wearisome. At least they will require a few phone calls.

On first glance, the internet should facilitate inquiries into claimed events or facts. However, in its present state this gigantic 'information' network seems to create more confusion than clarity if recruited for a reality check. A search into any kind of matter will always return thousands and millions of opinions of anybody with access to a terminal or smart phone, but will yield only very few documentations of real events. In addition, any event claimed as real may in fact (A) show something else, or (B) may be fabricated altogether (e.g. by image processing software).

Diligent news media invest some ressources into checking and re-checking their news (human ressources and a lot of money). They can only afford this investment by selling their news to the interested public and by income from advertisements. Most 'news', however, litter the www by investing 100 or less $ / € per annum (often egalized or surmounted by income from advertisements), with zero investment into verifying its truth-content. For naive consumers this makes no difference; they 'buy' the news (especially if it meets their prejudice) without careful inspection of the scource.

In our free market we always hope that quality will prevail. Unfortunately, this rarely happens. Often rubbish comes in nicer colors. Common people prefer excitement to the (often boringly plain) truth. But what can be done? Can we 'improve' the internet? Can we block contents with explicitly wrong content? 'Explicite wrongness' may have similar epistemological problems as 'explicite truth': Neither can be assured with absolute certainty.

One way out of the dilemma might be the introduction of a 'quality label' for internet sites. While it appears impossible to read in detail the whole www, robots and spiders do this all the time since decades. With the continuous improvement of KI algorithms, it might soon be possible to find "the pearls in a sea of rubbish" (so to say). Maybe, after such an improvement, the internet will bring us really a few steps closer to truth.

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