It has finally gotten to the point where nothing that we hear or see on-line or in the news can be trusted at face value. For example, the November 22 issue of The New York Times that shows up in my email each morning has a very interesting article showing extremely life-like computer generated faces. These images are being used to trick us into thinking that “real” people are posting “real” information on social networks and other places. It turns out that neither are real, neither the people nor the information. I recently posted a blog about things to do to protect yourself from corvid-19, all of which was untrue because the source I had used was promulgating lies and falsehoods. (I consider them to be lies because the original poster went to a lot of trouble making it look “official” and had, or should have had, correct information). This problem seems to have invaded most of our normal channels for obtaining “easy” information (just Google it you say?).

We are faced with a major problem of trying to decide what to believe. We are told to “check it out” – but where can we do that with confidence? It appears that we (all of us) are under attack by someone or something. Perhaps it is just disruptive people, perhaps it is just “true believers”, but more than likely it is other governments or groups within our country that are attempting to gain control. The problem is that there is an actual conspiracy mixed in with our normal chattering back and forth, and disagreeing with each other, as individuals.

The method of “attack” is to create chaos and confusion, pitting people against each other through fake accusations, fake information and now fake people. We are all defending our “truth” and accusing all the others of lying. It used to be that we didn’t think the other was lying, we just thought that they were mistaken – having made a mistake. That caused a lot of confusing and discussion, but at least we could discuss things in an attempt to unearth what the actual truth might be. That seems to have gone away – there is now no way to change opinions by unearthing facts, many people are working out of faith, not facts, and are just using their version of facts to advance their agenda. If an untruth is identified, they just shrug it off and try another version of yet another bit of fake news. Whether or not the “facts” are correct doesn’t seem to have much to do with it.

The problem is that even if you are a person that is a seeker of truth, a seeker of facts, a person that believes that the scientific approach is the best way that we know of to advance our knowledge and understanding of “how things actually are” – how do we do that? We almost never have personal access to the data, the process by which data was created, or the process by which it was analyzed. This results in the only “facts” that we have, are actually conclusions (hopefully based upon something substantial). We end up having to believe, or accept, some source as being a “trusted” source. I go to science journals, what I think are unbiased news programs, books written by supposedly knowledgeable and trustworthy individuals, etc. I have a solid and extensive background in science and related fields, so I compare what I read and hear with what I “know” (or at least think I know) to determine if it fits into my understanding of how things work. I talk to multiple people, check multiple sources of science based information, and do what I can to ferret out “the truth” – always knowing that part of the scientific process is that new information often leads to new conclusions. Theories are just theories and call always be proven wrong, but never proven true. That doesn’t mean that they have no value, it means that science is only able to know about what it knows about – and there might always be unknown unknowns lurking out there to be discovered. However, it has also been shown to be amazingly correct and useful over an extremely wide range of topics. It works, but there is always a hint of a “maybe” it is different. Almost always the new theory incorporates the old, but extends it into new areas.

I wish I had an answer of how to convince us all to keep open minds in the face of a constant barrage of obviously false information, and work together to find the truth – accepting that we won’t always be right, but that we can get better. I am pretty certain that our basic goals and basic needs are quite similar, but we can’t even seem to have conversations that allow us to discover that simple fact.