Tag Archives: Truth

Easy lies and the hard truth

This is a brilliant comic by Shencomix.com.

Lies are soft and squishy. They can be whatever shape you want. They are convenient. [They fit into any world view.] The Truth is hard and spiky. Hard to embrace. Worth embracing.

I’m absolutely amazed at how many (smart, educated) people are sucked into conspiracy theories and exaggerated (and clearly misrepresented) statistics that fit their world view… even when the theories are debunked.

Example : A US educator that I know shared this October 25, 2019 Joe Biden Tweet, which was a response to another tweet from a Washington Post article on pandemic preparedness:


This is the top reply which has been retweeted 71 times and liked 359 times at the time of me sharing this:


It’s absolutely ridiculous that someone with such influence can spread a conspiracy theory that the pandemic was planned. But it’s convenient. It fits her world view.

The problem is that is so much easier to cherry pick lies and convenient half-truths than it is to actually embrace and meaningfully interpret facts that don’t match biased opinions.

Sometimes lies are easy and the truth is hard… it’s spiky… But we want to live in a society where the hard truth is embraced, even if it isn’t something we want to hear.

Some more related posts:

Trying to find the Truth

I enjoy seeing funny quotes attributed to the wrong people. Like these two examples:

Abe Lincoln fake internte quote

Use-the-Force-Harry-Gandalf

The second one is an assault to the senses of fiction and science fiction fans. When the joke is obvious, there is comedy in the creation of these fake attributions. However, we are living in an era where Truth seems more and more subjective.

What’s scary about this is that I consider myself fairly objective, but I’m finding it harder and harder to know what to believe. What I do know is that newspapers today come with tremendous bias, and something as simple as this chart from two years ago is even more exaggerated now, with papers moving further towards the extremes:

News-Bias-MarketWatch

Here is an example of something that I know little about, and feel that the more I read, the further I am from having a clear understanding of where to put a value on what’s true: Hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19.

The first article I read was from the Washing Post (dated May 17th, 2020): The results are in. Trump’s miracle drug is useless.

Excerpt: THE HYPE over the drug hydroxychloroquine was fueled by President Trump and Fox News, whose hosts touted it repeatedly on air. The president’s claims were not backed by scientific evidence, but he was enthusiastic. “What do you have to lose?” he has asked. In desperation, the public snapped up pills and the Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization on March 28 for the drug to be given to hospitalized patients. On Thursday, Mr. Trump declared, “So we have had some great response, in terms of doctors writing letters and people calling on the hydroxychloroquine.”

Now comes the evidence. Two large studies of hospitalized patients in New York City have found the drug was essentially useless against the virus.

Next I read an Article from the Washington Times (Dated April 2nd, 2020 – about 6 weeks before the article above): Hydroxychloroquine rated ‘most effective therapy’ by doctors for coronavirus: Global survey.

Excerpt: Drug known for treating malaria used by U.S. doctors mostly for high-risk COVID-19 patients.

An international poll of more than 6,000 doctors released Thursday found that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine was the most highly rated treatment for the novel coronavirus.

The survey conducted by Sermo, a global health care polling company, of 6,227 physicians in 30 countries found that 37% of those treating COVID-19 patients rated hydroxychloroquine as the “most effective therapy” from a list of 15 options.

Of the physicians surveyed, 3,308 said they had either ordered a COVID-19 test or been involved in caring for a coronavirus patient, and 2,171 of those responded to the question asking which medications were most effective.

So, the ‘evidence’ presented in the second article came well before the the first article was printed. Which article holds more ‘Truth’?

First, if you had to guess, which of these newspapers is more Left-of-Centre – Liberal and which of these papers is more Right-of-Centre – Conservative?

Let’s have a look at the sources on MEDIA BIAS/FACT Check. (Full disclosure, I have not checked the reliability of this website.)

Here is the bias of the Washington Post:

Washington Post MediaBiasFactCheck

Compared to the bias of the Washington Times:

Washington Times MediaBiasFactCheck

Take a moment to read the final, bolded comments that I clipped from this fact check website about each paper. They would suggest the Post being more reliable than the Times because of a lack of fact checking at the Times. That said, the source for the survey linked to in the Times article checked out when I looked into it. The same source, Sermo, is now toting Remdesivir use more than Hydroxychloroquine, and even then stating that, “Remdesivir Seen as Only Moderately Effective”.

I don’t have the time or mental energy to go fact-checking every article I read, but I do find myself evaluating the source of the information a lot more. However, quite honestly, even when I do that it has now become blatantly easy to read the bias of the reporter woven into almost every news article that’s based on a ‘hot’ topic. How can you look to the news for objectivity when that objectivity is blatantly disregarded?

I’ve now started reading headlines with the following ‘BS Filter’ as a lens: “Does this article headline anger me, or try to anger me? If the answer is ‘yes’, I either ignore the article, or I open it with my ‘BS detectors’ fully engaged. Click bait articles tend not to be focused on sharing any kind of ‘Truth’.

In this day and age of abundant information, I thought Truth would rise above the BS, but that hasn’t been the case. Neil Postman said,

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

It seems that there is an information war on both our capacities to think, and our capacities to seek the Truth.

3 sides to every story

It was my sister many years ago who said this to me the first time, but I’ve heard it many times since. There are 3 sides to every story: The first person’s perspective, the second person’s perspective, and somewhere in between there is the Truth.

We all want to feel that our experience is the Truth, but in reality we can’t always see where the other person is coming from. Relationships often have perceived truths that limit us from seeing the full Truth that lies in the middle. Our bias doesn’t have to come from malice, it can come from innocent ignorance. But when we see the bigger Truth, when we are reflecting back on a conversation, we can sometimes see our own flaws in perspective if we are honest with ourselves.

When this happens, we need to decide if it is more important to come back with the new Truth (or at least our perspective of it), or is it more important to concede that our truth was wrong, and think about how holding on to that truth affected the other person? Because even at this new juncture there might still be 3 sides to the story. Pause and reflect again. Maybe the relationship is more important than the Truth?