500 Words — Day Thirty: Truth and Evidence
I tend to avoid talking about current news events and politics because in the given media landscape, I think we tend to overexaggerate the importance of particular day-to-day events instead of viewing larger underlying trends that take months or even years to evolve. I recently had an interesting conversation with a colleague of mine who was very into conspiracy theories. Some interesting words were brought up in that conversation, and excluding the specifics of that conversation, I found three interesting words that were brought up a lot: truth, malicious, evidence.
Truth is an interesting word and often comes up in conversation often in the form of skepticism. This skepticism is often towards what I like to consider as the standard or orthodox position. The key thing here is that ‘the truth’ is in question. One could easily jump to the conclusion that the orthodox position is meant to mislead or deceive when leads us the to second word, malicious. Given the huge amount of data, it isn’t hard to find holes in some orthodox positions, but when holes exist, the curious mind naturally asks ‘why’. I have found that when the orthodox position is very contrary or antagonist to a position a person holds, they’ll tend to attribute those holes to malice as opposed to ignorance or some other hidden reason. But this viewpoint is often purely intuitive speculation and built on the assumption that this person that doesn’t hold my beliefs is a bad person. Such assumptions are not strong, which comes to our last word, evidence. While people may feel that the official position may be misleading or what not, most people need evidence to convince themselves. The internet is happy to supply that evidence. If we think about the truth again, a lot of arguments have holes in them which leads us to a skeptical position. But from that position it is really up to the individual where we go next. My conspiracy theorist friend decided to pursue evidence in favor of the orthodox position being driven by malicious people with malicious intentions. He was easily able to find it and define a new truth for himself. He seemed pretty convinced.
I can see his perspective. I’m also a pretty skeptical person. I see holes in all sorts of arguments including those held by the orthodox position. But my philosophy isn’t to make assumptions of why those exist, but just to reflect on human nature. Where my friend sees malice, I see laziness or selfishness. Where my friend is quick to find evidence, I’m skeptical of the new stuff, perhaps even more than the old stuff. What is the intention of the heterodox position holders? I don’t really know. Makes it hard to just immediate accept those positions. I would rather sit back and listen and view the trends.
Ultimately, I feel that most people are susceptible to confirmation bias. They seek out evidence that supports their positions and they rarely question it. There’s also an excitement that comes from investing in heterodox positions that you’re “fighting the status quo” or in the case of some conspiracy theorists that you’re “fighting for the good guys against the evil ones that control the world.” This is not to say that conspiracy theorists aren’t right, they very may well be. I just see a lot of incentives by opportunists to take advantage of the exciting nature of certain orthodox positions to build audiences around alternative evidence. With so much more competition in the news media realm, there’s a huge incentive to drive content that is more entertaining that necessarily true. Which given our current media sphere, makes the holes in the orthodox position even more apparent, and the evidence in heterodox positions significantly more attractive.
