We all know that fiction authors are liars, writing about people and events that never happened. But nonfiction authors tell the truth, right? Well, perhaps the truth, but not the whole truth. Why nonfiction authors lie A nonfiction book has a point of view. It’s based on an idea. If the book is any good,…
Imagine that you had a friend who was a fairly good conversationalist but whose often got facts wrong. What would you think of such a person? Because that is what ChatGPT is. A bullshitter. This, surprisingly, is not a criticism. As it turns out, the AI required to figure out how to write a convincing…
Have you seen this photo? What an outrage. Trump’s Border Patrol is separating families at the border and putting children in cages. I’ve seen this photo all over my Facebook feed, on posts filled with rage. But there’s a problem. This photo is not what people think it is. According to snopes.com, this photo is…
No matter who is president, we’ll get over it. We’ll get past Trump. We’ll get past whoever comes next. But once we cease to believe that objective truth is the baseline for every discussion, we are doomed. I was reading Facebook the other day when a high school classmate of mine posted this: I had…
Truth is more important than anything else. Without it, all else crumbles. When I was a child, if you did something wrong, you got in trouble. But if you lied about it, it was much worse. If you told the truth about it, sometimes you wouldn’t get punished at all. “You told the truth —…
Starting today and for at least the next year, I will focus my work on this question: What is the evolving dynamic between truth and influence, and what should you do about it? What do I mean by truth and influence? Here’s how I define these terms: Truth refers to the insights that research creates….
In the wake of emotion comes an assault on the truth. Here are a few of the questionable or false things that surfaced in surprisingly authoritative places in the last week. The Las Vegas shooter was a liberal activist . . . except that he wasn’t. According to top search results on Google, Stephen Paddock,…
“That’s fake news!” “No, you’re fake news.” With all the accusations of what’s fake flying about, is there any meaning to the idea of truth? It’s a remarkably subtle concept. But, contrary to what President Trump told TIME Magazine, truth is not a feeling. The topic of the TIME interview was truth and falsehood. Trump said a…
At 140 characters, tweets lack context. Without context, there is no truth. So tweets are lies. Donald Trump’s tweets are lies, and so are mine. But they reveal a lot about what’s going on in our respective heads. What do I mean when I say that the truth demands context? Let’s start with one of my…