There is an incessant debate over truth right now, the same as there ever is, branded this time as ‘fake news’.

It has everyone mistrusting everyone, everything – everyone but the least ethically or cognitively competent, willful or not. It’s the elephant on the chest of social media companies, traditional media companies fighting for business relevancy in a networked world, and we, the factually impaired.

In all of this, we focus on the lack of truth. Yet, where we find truth we find precision, and where we find precision, we find error. When we talk about fake news, we’re really talking about the innocuous stories fed to the media – social and traditional – that spread not because they’re good, but because they’re catchy. ‘Sticky’, as marketers would say.

The Basics

Truth itself is a fickle thing. We seek objectivity in our subjective experiences of life, and only when we master these subjectivities do we diminish error and improve the precision. Again, where we experience precision, we experience error – they cannot exist without each other.

There are seconds of truth.
There are minutes of truth.
There are degrees of truth.

It’s all trigonometry to an extent, which fuzzy logic measures by weight, but it’s there – particularly when reconciling two versions of the truth. When we get three versions of the truth, it gets more complicated. When we get 10 versions of the truth, it’s even more exponentially complicated. So we do what humans do – we simplify when we’re overwhelmed. When we’re scared, it might become about race or about people ‘over there’, a wide net that catches innocent and guilty simply to catch the guilty.

Aggregating Truth

All of this used to be more manageable when we had fewer versions of the truth. The Internet came along and gave us the metaphorical 10,000 monkeys typing out their own versions of Shakespeare all over the Internet. Most monkeys simply regurgitate the same stuff they read somewhere else, hoping to make their audience click around their site to get a little bit more advertising revenue. When you drill down, there are actually very few monkeys that come up with the best versions and they’re not the same all the time.

But the monkeys that come up with the most popular versions aren’t necessarily the best – and the best versions are not always popular. Network powered societies amplify this and we’re network powered, so much so we cannot truly conceive versions of truth as easily. Facts have become croutons on a low carb salad – almost extinct, if not extinct.

And it all happens faster. Where we might have gotten news once a day with the printing press, twice a day with the television, thrice with the radio, we have versions of truth on tap 24/7, where the first to cover something gets the prized advertising revenue no matter how uninformative and perhaps wrong the coverage is.

Because we simplify. It’s human nature. We ’round off’. We estimate. We guess. We find comfort in opinions and op-eds that get more clicks with less facts. And those that want to insert stories to spread can get their research done through aggregate data mined from social networks and your local grocery store.

We find in life that when the people around us make better decisions, we ourselves get better choices. We find that when we make better decisions, those around us get better choices.

And we find that the opposite is also true.

Rethink where you get your content. Re-assess your connections in what they share, reassess what you read and if none of it makes you uncomfortable, you’re not reading facts but your own fiction, cherry picked from the 10,000 monkeys including the ones who take joy in feeding nonsense to the masses.

Go find Shakespeare. Don’t trust the monkeys. An if you’re one of the monkeys, my word, at least try to get something in with the filler.