How we made a free market for truth
Wondering why everything is so crazy-making these days? This explainer will help.
Hello. So you think you know what’s true and what’s false? Who you can trust and who you can’t? Well let’s see, shall we. We’re going on an exploration of the history, psychology and economics of how we form our sense of what’s true. Buckle up, this is big topic. Which is as it should be.
Let’s start with some fundamentals…
- For the purposes of this article, we can define truth as being ‘an accurate description of what happened in reality’. Truth is not what we think happened, or feel happened, it’s what actually happened.
- It’s worth flagging from the get-go that this is a highly logical and rational interpretation of ‘truth’. It leaves little room for the subjective, transcendental or intuitive. But in its objectivity, this is a space where it’s possible for people of different beliefs to come to a common understanding — because we prioritise the facts we know over the fiction that ‘feels right’.
- The problem though is that lately, we seem to be less able than ever to agree on basic facts, let alone on beliefs. Is Trump a fascist leader or a nation’s savior? Are vaccinations the solution to Covid or a route to totalitarian control? Is the BBC the bastion of unbiased reporting, or the most Remoan-y news org in the world? You see, things got tricky.
- So…what’s happened, and why is it so hard to come to a common understanding of what’s true? Well, that’s what this article is about.
Basically the first challenge is that there’s a lot to make sense of…
5. I mean A LOT. Just imagine the sheer volume of facts, events and experiences that have occured on this planet since the beginning of time. Those events are near infinite: like stars in the sky. Our brains can’t even fathom the volume of things that have happened on a global scale to make up our current reality.
7. Those events are also related. One event or experience will influence the next. Actions have consequences, creating a dynamic reality where events and experiences are constantly interacting to create new events and experiences.
8. Put together, the volume of events and the relationships between them is a mind boggling concept for the human brain. Whether you’re trying to remember your own life experiences, or you want to get a solid sense of our history, it’s easy to see that the sheer scale of the happenings in our reality is pretty damn complicated to make sense of.
9. Luckily, to ease our addled brains, we humans have a trick up our sleeves. To make sense of such a complex and noisy world, we have over time evolved the capacity to ‘draw’ conclusions. A bit like drawing constellation lines between stars in the sky. We connect the dots between Event A and Event B, and we can then tell a story about what it means — that’s a conclusion.
10. Over time, we might see the same conclusions happening again and again. So, this is just what happens all the time, we think. And with that, our conclusion transforms into a belief, which we might also call a ‘truth’. We’ve come up with what we think is an accurate way to describe our reality.
11. With me so far? In short, in this argument, our sense of what is true is formed by the conclusions we draw about the events in our experience. Which begs the question, why are we drawing such different conclusions? Or to put it another way, why do you see Orion, when I see Taurus?
It all starts with religion…
12. To answer why it is we’re drawing such different conclusions, it helps to go back in time a bit. In the far off past, this job of ‘drawing’ conclusions was something only a few people were technically allowed to do.
13. In fact, 2000—ish years ago, it was the job of the priests to join the dots and communicate conclusions in order to form a common understanding of what was true. They were the truth-makers. Should an alternative conclusion be drawn to the one sanctioned by the church, it would be squashed. Witches and heretics burned at the stake — the classic. And so, until the middle ages, the clergy held the monopoly on truth.
14. Over time however, other powerful people began to recognise that controlling truth was a pretty valuable thing. So in the 1500s, the means of communicating truth was wrestled out of the hands of the clergy and into the hands of royalty (thanks Henry VIII), and then into the hands of governments (heh Cromwell), before settling in the hands of general elites to share new theories about reality in the 1700s (enter the age of enlightenment).
15. The good news? Truth was no longer a monopoly, and thanks to the printing press and growing literacy rates, there grew a thriving marketplace for perspectives and ideas about what was happening in reality, challenging traditional — and often biased or even just plain false — narratives about what was true.
16. However, this cacophony of perspectives on truth gave rise to a new question: how do we judge what is actually true when there are loads of different ideas about truth?
17. The answer — science. And so by the late 1800s and 1900s, scientists were tasked with this most challenging of quests: to discover and share the highest quality and most accurate version of truth possible. To settle debates through rigorous analysis and control testing, and to determine which conclusions were truly true by analysing events free from bias.
Finally, a version of truth we could all get behind…
18. This was revolutionary. Until that point, bias was a consistent feature of truth creation. For the priests, conclusions were drawn to support faith in God. For royalty and governments, truth was made to support power and control. For elites, to support fame and influence. But for scientists, non-bias was the goal itself. The lower the level of bias in their conclusions, the better they were regarded as scientists. And so finally, we had a solution to the question of who can tell us what’s true— ask science. The only people with an incentive to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
19. So for a while, the concept of truth was settled. In the age of science, truth creation was deliberately designed to be unbiased and evidence based. Religions lost their footing, governments gave up some of their truth-making power. The slow and mammoth task of drawing conclusions from infinite numbers of events was placed in the steadiest of hands. Science became the arbiter of truth.
20. The problem with science however was that it was slow. Really slow. Events and experiences would happen, and it would take science a very long time to work out what they meant. Moreover, science was costly, which meant conclusions were broadbrush and generalised. “In general, x equals y,” it would say. But for some, ‘x’ might equal ‘z’. For others, there may be no ‘x’ in the first place. And so for the individual lives of a growing literate population, science was failing to provide answers to the questions that were relevant to their day to day.
21. Enter journalism. A handful of media organisations saw the gap in the market for truth, and set themselves to the task of finding facts and reporting truth at pace. This meant connecting events and drawing conclusions, to help their audiences make sense of a complex world, on daily basis. Some bias was inevitable due to the speed news gathering and differences in editorial perspectives. But the marketplace for truth was still relatively small and fairly well controlled. Fact-checking, source scrutiny and balancing opinions were all held high as key principles for quality journalism, making for a reasonable approximation of what was true.
22. This worked fairly well for a while. We had a handful of media organisations competing with slightly different perspectives on a common set of conclusions, governments keeping a tight lid on classified or confidential happenings it didn’t want us to know about (shhh), and science playing the long game to settle any outstanding scores.
23. And so for ordinary individuals like us, sense was made. The constellations in the sky of stars were mostly mutually agreed. We could all look up, and know we were all looking at the same thing. When attempts were made to manipulate truth, like Nixon’s insistence he didn’t sanction DNC break ins, or Blair’s insistence in Iraq’s WMD, they were easy to spot, because we all understood the order of things.
24. But it also seemed like these truth organisations would sometimes…miss things. Or that they would focus on truths that seemed far from the day to day lives of most people. Or that truth was just a bit, well, dull. For large groups of people, the marketplace for truth just didn’t seem to serve them.
The bit where it all gets complicated
25. Enter social media. Almost overnight, everyone and anyone could set themselves up as a citizen journalist and publish their own conclusions on how different events are connected, at zero cost. Which seemed helpful, because at the same time, the internet multiplied the volume of events and experiences we had access to by about a billion. The night sky no longer looked quite so ordered, as billions more stars suddenly came into view, which meant there was new space for everyone to play a role in drawing lines between the stars.
26. For a while, this felt GREAT. A phenomenal revolution in creating a better quality of truth. For no longer were conclusions drawn by a handful of distant journalists or slow scientists or biased politicians. The people suddenly had the power to decide what was true. Now, we had access to every event from a million angles. Up close. On smart phones. Narrated on the ground by people who were actually there. Or who said they were actually there. Or who denied the event ever happened in the first place.
27/ Which is where the issues started. Because it seemed that as we entered the 2010s, the primary arbiters of truth were no longer the bias-fighting scientists, or the fact-checking journalists, but an army of self-motivated individuals. And one thing we know from the science is that individuals are pretty terrible arbiters of accurate truth.
28. Psychologists call this ‘motivated reasoning’, which is to say that without the confines of unbiased scientific conditions, we humans find it near impossible not to apply bias in our conclusion-making. Given the opportunity to draw meaning from a series of events, we are highly likely to draw conclusions that a) favour us, b) feel good to us, and b) appear congruent with our own experience, which will typically be inaccurately remembered.
29. In short, we prefer conclusions that makes us feel good over those that don’t…even if they are factually less accurate. And what makes us feel good? Belonging. Safety. Validation. Kudos. Purpose. And so in a world where we can access unlimited information about unlimited events, it is now in everyone’s power to draw their own set of conclusions about what’s happening in the world, and build a version of truth that might not be factually accurate, but that we unconsciously choose anyway because it makes us feel right, and special, and part of something bigger than ourselves. And just like that, objective truth has been sacrificed in favour of self esteem.
30. But there is worse news for truth. Because it turns out that humans are not only bad arbiters of truth, we are also pretty lazy when it comes to conclusion-making. Armed with all this information, we would still rather someone else do the heavy-lifting of conclusion-drawing. Which leaves a gap in the market for a new set of truth-actors: media organisations, new thought leaders and quasi-cults prepared to join the dots between events to tell us what’s true, but do so in a way that first and foremost appeals to the motivated reasoning of their audiences. They worked out there was money to be made in prioritising conclusions that help the audience feel strong/valid/right/justified, over and above what might be an accurate description of reality.
31. For these new truth actors, the truth marketplace could not have been easier to crack. As tech publishing platforms absolving themselves of regulatory responsibility for what is published in their spaces, the barriers to entry for new players were virtually non-existent. Production quality is both easy to achieve, and easy to ignore, as audiences increasingly associate production value with untrustworthy mainstream sources. And the returns are potentially huge: if you can build an audience. Because an audience means revenue. It means power. It means fame. And once mixed with the world of politics, it means votes.
Welcome to the free market for truth
32. Which brings us to now. Where after years of monopolies and oligarchies, we now inhabit a dynamic free marketplace for truth. In the absence of regulation or entry barriers, infinite versions of truth are now possible, connecting together different events in both logical and illogical ways, each targeting new and niche audiences whose particular set of interests were previously ignored in the more oligarchal/monopolistic truth marketplace.
33. The impact of this a massive mixed bag. On the plus side, at the one end of the market, this wholesale democratisation in the creation of truth is resulting in the explosion of a far more nuanced, truer set of conclusions about our founding histories. Free from the bias of an elite, white-led, Euro-patriarchal set of truth arbiters, new truth researchers are thumbing back through the commonly-held historical archive, to question the validity and inclusivity in the way past conclusions were drawn. Pointing out what was left out and what was included in the conclusions which have come to form our common understanding of what’s true. This is one of the benefits of free markets: in the face of competition and more information, actors should be able to deliver a better quality product — in this case, a better quality of truth.
34. But in a free market, quality is also usually pretty variable. And at the mass market level, lower quality versions of truth can quickly find a mass audience, fuelled by motivated reasoning and a hunger for an explanation, fast. At this end of the market, exploitation of truth is simple and consequence-free, operating behind the shield of free speech, and with support of large audiences who just ‘feel’ this grade of conclusion-making ‘rings true’.
35. Which explains where we are now. A time where at the high quality end of the market we are upgrading truth to include the stories and experiences of communities typically ignored by the truth arbiters, and at the lower quality end, we have an explosion of conspiracy theories and circular logic, anti-vaxx and covid-denial, new world order and Q-Anon, the Fox News opinion broadcasting, all capable of winning large audiences by appealing to motivated reasoning over accuracy.
36. But perhaps things are changing. For a start, as the truth market is maturing, we may begin to see it lose some of its heat. As the market has become more saturated, the new truth actors must invest more and more to win audiences, developing their own independent truth fiefdoms in order to sustain their business model for truth-creation. Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, the BBC, Evgeniy Lebedev, RT News, Al Jazeera, CCTV. New entrants are still possible, but those days of citizen journalism are mostly behind us. Establishing sustainable market share means bringing a smart new strategy to serve a sizable audience previously uncatered for in the current mediascape.
Which raises the question, what will happen next?
37. Will the market for truth stabilise? Evolve? Implode? The thing about objective truth is it can depend on the events of the day, and those events are always changing. The actors and narratives will need to flex and evolve to keep making sense of things, which means there will always be space for old actors to die and new ones to rise.
38. In the worst case, in the absence of regulation, those fiefdoms where differences in truth are distinctly at odds will spill over into physical violence. From time to time, fiefdoms will rise that are founded on extreme or dangerous ideological grounds, where creating harm and hurt is built into membership. They used to say that in times of war, truth is the first casualty. These days, it might be the casualty of truth that creates the war.
39. In the best case however, the freedom in the market for truth could over time incentivise higher degrees of media literacy and quality awareness among audiences, curbing the more extreme ends of truth bias and motivated reasoning, and favouring progressively more accurate and high quality truth-makers. Basically, over time, we should just all get a lot better at recognising what is true, and what isn’t.
40. And I also wonder if part of the challenge we are facing today is that we are still reeling from the market shock that came with the sudden democratisation of conclusion-making after thousands of years in a monopoly/oligarchy. Perhaps in time we might become used to a less monopolistic approach to truth-making, and be more tolerant of the diversity in perspectives at play.
So what do we do about it?
41. Which leaves the question: what do we do now, as individuals, to exercise our influence in this new market for truth? Like all marketplaces, ultimately us as an audience that has the power. I think there are 5 things we can do to be better consumers of truth.
42. First, we need to remember that truth still exist, even if it’s hard to see. It is possible to find a close-to-accurate representation of objective truth. It requires us to focus more on what we know happened, not what we think or feel happened. It means Sherlock Holmes-levels of investigatory prowess. It means screening out a lot of the noise and commentary around truth, and zoning in on facts.
43. Next, we need to recognise that we are now in a dynamic marketplace for truth, which means it is in the interests of most news sources to ‘spin’ truth to appeal to their audience. In the absence of clear information on the facts, reading at least two sources on truth will help us keep in mind that in a complex world, truth is presented in a way that isn’t always accurate.
44. Third, we have to recognise that all individuals, even you, even me, are usually poor judges of what is accurately true. We all have intrinsic biases which affect pretty much every conclusion we draw. There is even evidence to suggest that the more educated you are, the less aware of your biases you will be. So take a second before you get righteous about what you believe to be accurate. You are most probably wrong.
45. Forth, there are things you can do to counter your biases and improve your truth literacy. That means check your sources. Challenge your own reasoning, and ask yourself what biases you hold, and it might be that a particular conclusion ‘feels right’ not because it’s true, but because it serves your world view. Stay aware of the dominant truths in the market, and who is funding them. And hold your truths lightly, for there may be better quality ones available to you.
46. And finally, in this market for relative truth, it is worth remembering some absolutes. Nothing lasts forever. Nothing is fixed, including your own identity and biases. Within that, we all have the potential to influence the world around us by getting better at recognising truth. And when in doubt, kindness is always a good choice. I believe these things are absolute. For all of us.
47. But then I would, wouldn’t I?
What do you think — is there anything else we can do to be better consumers of truth?
And to reiterate, what I’m talking about here is material truth, which has its own limitations in helping us understand the world. I’ll write something more on a more transcendental or intuitive perspective on truth at some point…watch this space…
