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Who to trust these days? Even when it looks, sounds or reads like factual evidence, it just may not be. Which means that so much could be anyone’s opinion, whether a self-styled commentator or a vetted authority. We can only truly make up our mind if we gather, test and store our own trusted facts.
Remove the made-up and the make-up.
The faked end-result may even be more convincing than the original, and you do not need to lie, invent, just present in a certain light.
Take Joe Biden wandering off during the D-Day ceremony. He actually did, but, with sharp editing, it looks like he just wandered off, losing it. The full length video shows he did wander, but to go shake hands in the public during the ceremony. You be the judge if this is better or actually worse.
This is why this blog touches on personal, political, social, cultural, even mundane events, like ice skating. Any of these topics has in common the curiosity to understand, and that starts with questioning. All topics are chosen because they can be broken down into bits, deconstructed into individually actionable components. Then I can recombine them into my answer, as much as you can recombine them differently into your answer.
We all have enough information access to find any of the building blocks to our answers anywhere, anytime. Or at least enough that it seems so.
But..
Access to information is not accessibility of information
The latest medical research? How was the colour blue invented? How to spot lizard people in the government? From the most advanced to the most bizarre. It is all out there. But this information, this data, means nothing if it cannot be transformed into an actionable understanding. And that starts, before any thinking, with the ability to trust the information, or at least the understanding of what it is meant to be.
That is where actual accessibility starts.
Accessibility of knowledge means that you must feel comfortable enough with the information shared with you in order for you to build your answers on it. It is not so much about chasing if the information is made-up, invented, as to how it is curated to look the most attractive. In either cases, you are being lied to – only the extent of it is the difference.
We meant well
It is rare that a data source will purposefully lie or deceive you.
The problem is most often not the facts, but their arrangements for a purpose. We are given canned interpretations, consciously or not. Not badly meant, but tunnel visioned.
Take the China moon landing. Pure fact. China spaceship lands on the Dark Side of the Moon. Done. You may have read about it in the Western media. Yes, a global first, fantastic technological achievement, a scientific leap, possibly a legal, political, commercial threat? A logical thought process, vertu neutral on the surface. Now, add the factoid that the lander took onboard ESA (European Space Agency) research components and measurement tools. Given the global tensions, is this not a prime example of what humanity can achieve together? But no. In the very expose of the landing, instead of starting with a full description of what/how/where, we have an unspoken assumption that the achievement is to have “landed”. Whereas it could be that much more.
We will tell you what to think
The traditional thought is to add to any collection of information, news, data, facts some sort of layer of intellectual authority to curate, filter, control and ultimately interpret.
Then again, no layer of intellectual authority can be fully neutral – be it shaman, druids, priests, theologists or university departments. Any authority will always add its own blend of intent. It will imprint its own take on what knowledge is and pre-set, pre-chew blocks of information and facts into something plausible, possible, believable.
Our daily reality has imploded into bits of facts lying around for anyone to pick up, haphazardly thrown together for clout, by individuals or organisations. We are all aware of it. The natural reaction to this is simplification: no-one can think about everything all the time. And so, as in ancient days, the natural reflex is to find an authority, individual or collective, hierarchical or crowdsourced, automated or moderated, to validate our findings. Issue being that no-one can self-analyse. Not even an AI. That is even what Jack Dorsey of Twitter/X says.
When did you started to acquire knowledge?
For me it started in kindergarten… and I quickly learned that knowledge is rather arbitrary.
Nursery teacher: “You need to take a nap, because it is good for you”. Me: “Better than chasing friends around the yard? Seriously?”. And when I overheard the teachers saying they can’t wait to grab a smoke while we sleep… the need for nape time did not sound like “trusted knowledge”. Well, nap time is not a scientific fact that I could confirm this week. Fact is, it actually depends on the child itself, which is impractical enough to organise any kind of mass education. By the same token, pink fluffy rabbits are not cute, despite generations of teachers telling you otherwise. And guns are cool. This type of information is not knowledge, it is education.
Kindergarten is possibly where I first learnt that facts, and scientific truth, are rarely monolithic.
Education is not only knowledge
The issue with school is that, from early on, understanding, knowing, is mixed up with a whole lot of other concepts that have actually nothing to do with knowledge, and everything with education.
Think back. How did you get to be the “blackboard monitor” in class? Trsl for a younger generation: the blackboard monitor is the proud responsible to wipe the chalk writings off the black board at the end of the lesson. Who decided on this incredible honour among my peers? The teacher of course. Teach the pupils that recognition depends on the whim of old people in authority? Done.
Education is knowledge, but also teaching intellectual and social authority.
The latest wave of subliminal ideas like, woke-ism, CRT, gender theories, only follow the 70s hippie theories I was taught at school. They are just the latest incarnation of social and intellectual debates instilled into teaching since ever, really.
You are taught how to think, but not the knowledge behind it
For years, you are told that as you are learning, your knowledge is increasing. True, but not entirely. Rather meta-knowledge, more than facts.
Maths is my favourite example of this. Maths is undisputed logical, factual, knowledge. So much so that it is a universal measure of intelligence: the PISA tests make worldwide news. Maths starts with counting sticks in pre-school, triangles and circles later on, until you reach year 8, where, for no apparent reason, pragmatic “two trains drive towards each other” maths become the “possibility of intersection of mathematical universes of discrete events”. The psilocybin realm of abstract algebra, where “universes” are “collections that contain all the entities one wishes to consider in a given situation”. I understand every word, but the point of it? It is “meta” knowledge, or TOS as American teachers call it. The whole point of this is to measure the ability to manipulate abstract concepts – that is literally made-up concepts – to solve hypothetical, hence made-up, problems.
I would have liked a little bit more explanation to fuel my motivation, but it never came. Who decided that maths was to be the gate keeper of education? In France, that were the guys who were on strike every other day …. Well, if you are the one making up the questions, the concepts as much as the solutions, that makes education more controllable. But that only remains my suspicion.
What did I miss?
Because of time, effort, convenience, mind space and priorities, we are often proposed with canned interpretations. The most salient facts are sometimes added, but always presented for effect.
And, as distrust continues to grow between what we are presented as incontrovertible truth and the actual practise, the chasm deepens between authorities and individuals.
Without a shred of doubt, Covid was a watershed moment in the world: “we never financed the people that financed the lab, but we will stop financing them so they can’t finance it”. Image may be NSFW.
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For me, I gather facts, I analyse the format, and then I check my own bias, my possible tunnel vision. The only way to stitch back reality is to build a knowledge stack you trust first. And weave it with your own or outside theories as long as they are confirmed by the facts you gathered. This is why and how I deconstruct life events into individual building blocks, to recombine them in a personally relevant answer.
I look for facts within facts.
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