Fake news, truth, beliefs and biases

An essay on how we may be looking at this all wrong

Of all the things you could believe, which ones do you accept as truth?

Many things influence what we think is true. We may tend to think that because we are smart or know who to trust, that we know better than those who do mistakes around us. Or maybe we think all those people out there doing what we think are mistakes from our perspective just don’t see what’s right in front of them.

Have you ever stopped and thought, if we all feel this way, what’s going on here? We can’t “all” be right if some ideas contradict each other, but we can definitely all be wrong.

I’m writing this to build on the idea that it’s probably neither. I’m a mathematician by training, so you would think I would hinge on the idea that truth is absolute and there are irrefutable statements out there that no one can contradict. What I’m going to discuss here is the idea that truth is a relative concept and there is no such thing as absolute truth.

What is truth, really?

We all throw the word around, but we almost never stop to think about what we mean when we use it. Neil deGrasse Tyson put it in a really nice way while appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast where he discusses three kinds of truths he can conceive:

• Objective truth: A statement that is verifiable whether you want to accept it or not. Those truths are usually discovered by science and can be verifiable repeatedly, which gives them credibility and allows them to widespread and withstand the challenge of time.
• Personal truth: Statements you personally believe in. They can be religious beliefs, things that you feel are “right” or “wrong” (e.g. your own interpretation of decency), basically anything that you believe to be true just because you came to accept it.
• Political truth: Statements that are known because they are being repeated all over the place. Note how this kind of truth is drastically different from the other two, and whether we know if a given political truth is objectively true or not, we still know them and we still know what they’re talking about.

I would like to add another one:

• Mathematical truths: Statements that are true regardless of interpretation based exclusively on axioms and logic. Here we’re talking about things like “the area of a rectangle is equal to the product of its width and its height”. Basically, it’s the kind of truth that when you understand the assumptions and the context, you basically agree on the validity of the statement, given that you are smart enough and patient enough to go through the argument to figure that out.

There are certainly other kinds of truth, but note how they all define different things, and none of them seem to universally define “truth”:

• Mathematical truths and objective truths are not the same. A mathematical truth is an abstraction, something that allows us to reason. An objective truth is more tangible and has real-world consequences. There’s a difference between expressing the formula for the area of an abstract rectangle, and knowing the area of your window to know how much light you get in your appartment in the afternoon; one is very general, but its benefits in your life only come in once you apply them to deduce other things (or as mathematicians do, to deduce other statements that then also have the same potential).
• Political truths tend to be very far from the objective truth. For example, homosexuals cannot donate blood” was accepted as true for a very long time in Canada, and it is only until recently that the Canadian government decided to review its opinion on this and screen homosexuals the same way heterosexuals are screened for blood donations. By “very far”, I don’t mean that one is super true and the other one is super false; I mean that the motivations behind accepting something as true in one case vs. in the other case tend to be drastically different. Science tends to be very efficient at creating long-lasting objective truths, but it is also very slow to sink in, whereas political truths can jump in very quickly based on people’s current emotional interpretation of the situation.
• It can be quite tricky to entangle political truths and objective truths from personal truths. For example, medical personnel in a hospital working double shifts constantly might find it very hard to understand why people do not accept the objective truth that if a vaccine, even if it doesn’t prevent COVID propagation, reduces the severity of infections and therefore keeps hospital capacity under control to better treat patients, is definitely worth turning into a public safety concern and implies the political truth that we should vaccinate as much as possible. But at the same time, people who hear conflicting arguments about how vaccines work may find it weird to be required to take a vaccine that they believe might make them sick, especially if they heard of relatives suffering from the vaccine and not the disease, regardless of the very tiny probability of people to whom this happened. The conflict of the political truth of necessity of vaccination from a governmental point of view for public safety concerns and the personal truths that “I heard of a person who X-Y-Z that suffered from the vaccine” makes that person be against the idea of vaccinating themselves. (I probably took the most tricky political vs. personal truth conflict in the history of all time as an example, so don’t start a debate in the comments, just bear with me that people holding these truths indeed exist and let us stay on the “what is truth” debate.)
• Among mathematicians, you would be surprised how often mathematical truths go one-on-one against personal truths, especially when it comes to the infamous Axiom of Choice; the idea that if you have a collection of non-empty sets, you can pick an element in each of those sets and form a new set out of those elements. As intuitive as this statement might sound, this has some far-reaching consequences such as the ability to divide a three-dimensional ball in 5 pieces, translate and rotate those pieces, no dilation, stretching or distortion of any kind, and get two identical copies of the original ball. This statement (and many others) were so counter-intuitive for some mathematicians that they fought fiercely against the use of the Axiom of Choice (widely accepted today among mathematicians), but it wasn’t without decades of investigation into what happens when we don’t assume it to hold. In fact, one mathematician, Henri Lebesgue, is very well-known for having such a strong belief in his right to use the Axiom of Choice in his arguments that he repeatedly denied using it and instead claiming to rely solely on common sense. (Nowadays, mathematicians consider the Axiom of Choice as an axiom that can be accepted or not, but it is considered obscure to do work in areas where it is not assumed.)

After all of this, we still don’t seem to have a universal agreement on what it means for something to be true. So, what is truth?

Truth is relative

All these sorts of truths we described above have one thing in common: there’s nothing absolute about them. Let me explain a little bit what I mean by that.

• Objective truths are as true as the experiments behind them. In fact, most experiments these days rely on statistics, and thus statistical tests are used to derive the veracity of the hypotheses. That means that if something is deemed “too improbable to be false”, it is accepted as an objective truth. You can see how mistakes can be made in the experiments, whether it be in the underlying assumptions, the execution of the experiment, or the applicability of the experiment to prove/disprove the chosen hypothesis, etc. So these so-called “objective truths” in fact rely on a variety of factors that make them reliable yes, but at the same time far from being absolute, and taken out of context, these objective truths can become flat-out wrong.
• Political truths are more commonly known as “propaganda” or “fake news” but it’s actually better to say that they’re the kind of statements people talk about. So anything that falls in the category of gossip, viral content on social media, political campaigns, fake news, media in general, all falls under the category of political truths (or falsehoods). Considering those truths as objective or personal can often have strong (good or bad) consequences.
• Personal truths are probably the worst candidate to qualify as an absolute truth, since these are usually beliefs held by a single person individually. They can be shared, of course, but that doesn’t remove the fact that those beliefs are personal and unique to each individual, and even when they are shared, the individual usually has its own interpretation of that belief which makes it more unique than the parts it has in common with others.
• Even mathematical truths are not good candidates for absolute truths; in fact, mathematicians are very aware that their constructions rely on axioms, and the rest is deduction; so if you change the axioms, you change the outcome. That sounds much closer to relative truth than to absolute truth, if you ask me. That’s also why mathematicians are so careful in choosing definitions and axioms; if they get them wrong, they’ll either deduce things they are not interested in, or not be able to deduce nothing at all, so definitions are the bread and butter of every mathematician. Most mathematicians are known for defining ground-breaking concepts rather than proving theorems, contrary to what people believe.

So what we are left with, by looking at the broad list of examples we have in front of us of how people conceive truth, in my opinion, is that truth should not be considered absolute, but rather relative. This will give a much more solid ground to spread discussions worth having.

How often have you been in a situation where you believe in A, and someone else believes in B, and the statements A and B contradict each other, yet you can’t seem to bring your point across, and neither does the other person? That’s not so hard to explain when adopting the point of view of relative truths. I’m going to try to build an analogy.

Think of our belief system as the blurry painting of some vegetation, like trees. If some branches are clearly visible from the picture, call that an argument that goes from one point in the image (an assumption) to another (a deduction). When the image is blurry, it’s not really clear what the argument is, or even if there’s an argument at all. When people don’t make sense, you may feel like their painting is a sea of lichen painted with a sponge, but when you speak to highly articulated people, you look at a beautiful Van Gogh. Some people don’t like Van Gogh; they prefer to look at simpler paintings that are easier to interpret or more aesthetic instead of profound. We basically have preferences in how we like to construct and discuss our beliefs; this can be personal preference but also a survival mechanism: shaking up your beliefs too often may feel dangerous and unstable, so you prefer things that keep your belief system as intact as possible, regardless of how good for you those beliefs are.

How can we interpret the previous four kinds of truths mentioned before with this analogy?

• Objective truths would most likely land in your painting whether you like it or not. If a doctor tells you you have cancer, you may deny you have cancer, but you still know you have cancer. Even if 10 years down the line you’re still alive, and another doctor told you you were misdiagnosed, for those 10 years, you had cancer because the truth was given to you as objective. That’s what makes it an objective truth. It presents itself as something you cannot deny.
• Political truths tend to spread across multiple paintings a little bit like bacteria or pollution. They might be innocent and just take a little bit of space, but they spread fast and are recurrent across many paintings. You can often tell from which era a given painting comes from by looking at those since objectively false political truths tend to eventually die slowly over time.
• Personal truths are what make your belief system unique; you may have borrowed some of them from other people but you gave it your own personal twist or you interpreted those ideas in your own way. The expression “you need all kinds of people to make the world” depicts pretty clearly that personal truths can look like pretty much anything.
• Mathematical truths are like painting patterns. They would show up across literally all paintings but not because they were put there on purpose; rather it is embedded in the idea of painting itself. Because we are reasoning creatures, we are going to follow patterns, and they’re going to show up in our way of thinking. (I am not implying by that that we’ll be perfectly logical people, of course not! I am referring to patterns such as cognitive biases, statistical fallacies, confirmation bias, etc.) We all suffer from these patterns whether we like it or not.

I think seeing truth as a relative concept in itself, and not try to dismiss people discussing truth as a concept that is clearly defined and anyone playing with it just trying to mess with your head, is going to make it much easier to interact with each other. For instance, there’s no point in debating personal beliefs in a rational way; even if the rational aspect might explain why something is an objective truth, it won’t convince anybody to dismiss their personal truths that are assumed for let’s say emotional reasons. Instead, a discussion with the goal of understanding each other’s emotions might shed much more light on the situation. On the other hand, there’s no point screaming and threatening someone to convince them to change their mind if they know something is objectively true to them; the facts they have in hand are telling them to stand their ground, so trying to understand the situation with reasoning would be a better way to go. This is something I’ve been told often during my childhood when trying to understand people who were more emotional than I was, but that’s not exactly where I’m going with this.

So, what now? What should we believe in?

We’ve heard of the scandals surrounding Facebook and its content curation algorithms that spread fake news during elections. What if what was really happening (and still is happening) is that it was spreading personal truths from all kinds of people, and we now just begin to witness, at scale, how people’s beliefs are very far from being objective? Or what if we just realized how malleable people’s beliefs are, and we are just beginning the discussion of what we should do with that information? We could start having a discussion that’s as crazy (but in my opinion necessary) as : should we really try to do our best to bring everyone’s beliefs systems closer to objective truth, or would that cause more harm than good? That sounds like a crazy question, but we won’t know the answer until we ask it, and answering it might lead us as a species to invest trillions of dollars to build on its answer, so I don’t think the question should be taken lightly.

This article was heavily influenced by the Veritasium channel on YouTube, I encourage you to check it out, it has a lot of very interesting content. I was writing more technical content before, but I realized after a little while that it wasn’t very stimulating for me, so I’m giving it a try again with more mainstream content with an intellectual flavor to it. If you like the content, feel free to comment and spark discussion, I’d love to hear from you!