In Ode on a Grecian Urn John Keats said "Beauty is Truth, Truth is Beauty. That is all ye know on Earth and all ye need to know". Keats dealt with the idea of permanence. That which has permanence is Truth, which is Beauty. that is a fact treasured. To T.S. Elliot, Keat's famous line is meaningless.
Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem “Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare” reinforced the idea of Keats. Euclid, of course, is the most famous mathematician of all. 'Beauty' here refers to the idea of Truth, and Millay is saying that Euclid has looked at Beauty bare, meaning he has analysed it thoroughly, and confirmed it and it is crystal clear. The reference to "O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day" is that Truth is indeed Beauty, as true as Christ is the Truth and the Way.
But to us laymen, what is Truth? Learned men have dwelt on this for centuries and today we have not gotten any clearer. Drawing on many philosophical theories of Truth, such as pragmatist, coherence, identity, deflationary and correspondence theories, most people will still be nonplussed.
Some time back, a good friend shared something he came across with our Whatsapp group. I pointed out it was most likely to be false. Friend asked how do I go about checking if something we see on the internet is false and I thought this is something actually worth sharing. How do we tell if something we read or see on the internet is true or false.
The movie Da Vinci Code is based on the eponymous novel by Dan Brown which is, I would say, inspired by the 1980s block-buster seller non-fiction book Holy Blood Holy Grail. The search for some mysterious treasures led the authors of HBHG to some pseudonymous documents in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. This cache of documents included a genealogical table of names purportedly to be elders of a society called Priory of Sion. The names included historical luminaries such as Isaac Newton, who were leaders of a secret group dedicated to protect the bloodline of Jesus. The documents were eventually tracked to a man called Pierre Plantard. Long after HBHG went to print, it came to light Plantard was a rascal with criminal records of fraud. It was all a hoax.
Like millions, I was fascinated by the book when it came out and failed to observe the insinuation and supposition, nor distinguishing the factual and the fact-ish, nor highly contested interpretations presented as established truth. This underlies the foundational requirement to discern Truth is a critical mind. As the character Sir Leigh Teabing in Da Vinci Code said "the con of men runs deep". The HBHG authors did not set out to cheat. It is an interesting non-fiction, but not convincing under the microscope.
Pierre Plantard forged and planted the documents physically in the library and hope for people to stumble across them. Today, just about anyone having the ability to post anything out there for whatever reasons, can do so easily. And these can be promoted and shared and amplified. In our internet world, it is now far more difficult for the ordinary folks to discern Truth when we are faced with hundreds and thousands of Pierre Plantards everywhere.
Digital apps allow photos to be compromised easily, CGI creates crazy realistic videos. There are simple apps that allow you to create a conversation by simply using one single image of a person. One can make Abraham Lincoln come alive and sing Majulah Singapura. We now live in a dangerous world of doctored information.
Take for example the following 2 videos:
This is a video advertising a ground-breaking device invented by a teenager that could drastically shave off electricity bills by 50%. It first appeared in 2020 and was widely shared. The energy saving device is still on sale online. (5 mins but no need to watch to the end)
This video shows who the teenager really is. (9 mins.) Interestingly, watch it when it talks about the use of nano graphene layer. This is already in your body if you have had the mRNA jabs.
We deal with things which are physical or abstract. With physical things, what is fact used to be absolute Truth. It is no longer so simple nowadays, as the above videos demonstrate. With the abstract, we have to deal with opinions. We used to say if the opinions were backed by scientific data, it is the Truth. Trust the science, so they say. Now with disinformation, misinformation and information suppression, scientific opinion is on shaky grounds.
There is nothing wrong with independent opinions. Everybody has a right to express their opinions. Opinions need to be contested in the market place of ideas, especially on medical studies. It is not an issue of Truth. You only need to appreciate 2 things - (1) Do not confuse opinion as fact. Even if Einstein makes an opinion does not make it the Truth; (2) Beware of those who have an agenda. The great lesson in the pandemic is seeing how medical professionals can be easily bought out or forced by Big Pharma and government to support a single narrative, even when objective Truth does not support their opinions.
What we really want to know is the Objective Truth which is something that corresponds to reality, independent of whether you agree with it or not. That sounds simple and straightforward, right? Unfortunately, people are coloured by individual perceptions, biases, agendas, and Truth tends to be subjective. At this moment in history, the cultural upheaval in the US has basically killed objective Truth amongst Americans.
How then are we going to know what is the real Mccoy. The code to live by is no one is going to show you the Truth. You need to search for it yourself.
I live by a simple guide. If I read or see something that I have doubts, but it is of no importance, then I simply ignore it. We all have too much things on our plate. If it is something I am interested in, I will try to authenticate it.
My first line of defence against falsehood is common sense. Anything that is highly improbable, is almost likely to be false. Take the above advertisement video for example. Wouldn't anyone want to have a gadget that cuts energy cost by 50%. Wouldn't such a gadget be in the market years ago instead of waiting for a 16 year old kid to invent it? This type of 'impossible' posts are in the millions in the internet, especially now swarmed by tiktok.
Next I apply simple context reasoning. This is interpreting the current input, ie what I read, view or hear, in the light of previous experience and knowledge. It calls into play both spatial and temporal contextual information which means placing the current input against a time and space context. This is where a person's knowledge base is key. Of course I am not an expert in a hundred fields, but like most people, I know many areas superficially and one or 2 fields reasonably well. Generally, I find 2 knowledge base that serves me well to understand developments in the world around us are History and Current Affairs. It is sad that our educational system has more or less abandoned History in pursuit of STEM curriculum. Without a knowledge of history, one is like a fish swimming in the water which it cannot see. As for current affairs, one needs to be well read. Unfortunately, most youngsters today learn current affairs from 10 second tiktoks or 144 character twitter feeds.
One needs to apply critical thinking to whatever we read, see or hear. This is the power of rationalising or walking through something logically. I apply 3 ways to how I reason things out:
(1) Deductive reasoning deals with certainty. I start of with a known conclusion and find the reasons to prove that conclusion. This is what some call the 'duck test'.
Very unfortunately, Singapore may have received accolades for our standards in educational system, but we have also been equally criticised for churning out students with low critical thinking skills.
The above 3 ways of trying to understand what's before me are internalised approaches. Other steps I may take are :
Learn something about the authour. Often the authour is a give-away. They could be pre-eminent in the subject, activists, mouth pieces of Big Tech, Pharma, Finance, etc. In typical cynical mode, I often perform a search for scandals of the name. This is a treasure trove that provides some understanding of the purpose of the authour. It is important to gauge if the authour is sharing information or promoting an agenda. Early in the pandemic, when the first Lancet report came out to promote the zoonotic theory, my name search told me immediately that it was a planted propangandist article.
There are of course many people out there who writes the occasional hit pieces in their blogs. I am absolutely suspicious of all those famous journalists from the western mainstream media who have mostly turned into political hacks, mostly persuaded by lucrative payouts from liberal NGOs. But I have respect for those bloggers with specialist industry knowledge.
But the one thing that is beyond my comprehension is why do folks share articles with no names of authours. When I am in receipt of such articles or videos, I never waste time with them despite click bait headlines.
Who checks the fact checkers. I do look up some fact checking sites, but only to obtain contrarian views which I will further try to authenticate. When it comes to politics and various contentious areas, such as the name Trump, vaccines, globalism, Ukraine, election integrity, etc, all, and I do mean ALL, fact checking sites are biased towards conservatives. The reason is very simple. Good guys do not plan to control your minds. The bad guys plan years ahead, every step, every angle they will cover. All those fact checking sites are funded by left wing or Democrat money, manned by leftist activists taking a cue call from some central think tank. Soros' money is everywhere. But that does not necessarily invalidate them all. They provide some balance to the excess from the right.
I try to do some simple authentication. There have been times where I wrote to the authours. My simple authentication is to look at 2 or more different sources of information. That's the least I can do. But this is getting harder. Big Tech search engines use A1 algorithms which will place the answers to your query hundreds of pages behind if it is not in line with liberal narratives. That is why for sensitive political issues, I use the Russian Yandex search engine.
Check out the website. The old saying rely on trusted websites no longer holds. Mainstream news media have all turned into unreliable political hacks or have sold out to moneyed-interests. As for other websites, sometimes we can glean useful information that provides the answer to the motivation for the article or video. Sometimes I do a 'whois' search. This search will display certain registered information about the website such as who owns the site and contact details. Some sites may have a privacy setting in which case ownership and contacts are redacted. Generally, authentic sites do not have privacy settings on. Good guys have nothing to fear and want to show they are authentic. The bad guys do not want to be exposed. To do a 'whois' search, one place to go to is www.lookup.icann.org/en/lookup. Just enter the URL of the website. Note that the search is only on the first level domain name. Eg my site here is www.chem-post.blogspot.com. This is a second level domain name. Whois search is only possible on www.blogspot.com.
Do a reverse image search. This will throw up various places where the particular image has appeared. It is possible to track back to the source of the image, or it may provide useful places to investigate. In the advertisement video above, I did an image reverse check which eventually led me to the real teenager Alex Pinkerton. It's very easy do do this. There are various sites that does this. To do this with Google, simply go to www.images.google.com and this page appears:
Simply copy the URL and paste into the search box and click the camera icon. Alternatively, drag an image into the search box, or upload a filecopy of the image from your computer and click the camera icon.
If you think all these are too bothersome and laborious, well it's a question of how much you value Truth.
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But to us laymen, what is Truth? Learned men have dwelt on this for centuries and today we have not gotten any clearer. Drawing on many philosophical theories of Truth, such as pragmatist, coherence, identity, deflationary and correspondence theories, most people will still be nonplussed.
Some time back, a good friend shared something he came across with our Whatsapp group. I pointed out it was most likely to be false. Friend asked how do I go about checking if something we see on the internet is false and I thought this is something actually worth sharing. How do we tell if something we read or see on the internet is true or false.
The movie Da Vinci Code is based on the eponymous novel by Dan Brown which is, I would say, inspired by the 1980s block-buster seller non-fiction book Holy Blood Holy Grail. The search for some mysterious treasures led the authors of HBHG to some pseudonymous documents in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. This cache of documents included a genealogical table of names purportedly to be elders of a society called Priory of Sion. The names included historical luminaries such as Isaac Newton, who were leaders of a secret group dedicated to protect the bloodline of Jesus. The documents were eventually tracked to a man called Pierre Plantard. Long after HBHG went to print, it came to light Plantard was a rascal with criminal records of fraud. It was all a hoax.
Like millions, I was fascinated by the book when it came out and failed to observe the insinuation and supposition, nor distinguishing the factual and the fact-ish, nor highly contested interpretations presented as established truth. This underlies the foundational requirement to discern Truth is a critical mind. As the character Sir Leigh Teabing in Da Vinci Code said "the con of men runs deep". The HBHG authors did not set out to cheat. It is an interesting non-fiction, but not convincing under the microscope.
A side track: Dan Brown actually lifted off HBHG to write his fiction Da Vinci Code. HBHG was co-authored by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. Baigent and Leigh sued Brown for copyright infringement and lost. You cannot patent or copyright 'ideas'. This may be of interest to those following Jeanie Tay's case against the NUS professor who lifted her architectural ideas. Is Jeanie's case copyright infringement or plagiarisation ?
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Pierre Plantard forged and planted the documents physically in the library and hope for people to stumble across them. Today, just about anyone having the ability to post anything out there for whatever reasons, can do so easily. And these can be promoted and shared and amplified. In our internet world, it is now far more difficult for the ordinary folks to discern Truth when we are faced with hundreds and thousands of Pierre Plantards everywhere.
Digital apps allow photos to be compromised easily, CGI creates crazy realistic videos. There are simple apps that allow you to create a conversation by simply using one single image of a person. One can make Abraham Lincoln come alive and sing Majulah Singapura. We now live in a dangerous world of doctored information.
Take for example the following 2 videos:
This is a video advertising a ground-breaking device invented by a teenager that could drastically shave off electricity bills by 50%. It first appeared in 2020 and was widely shared. The energy saving device is still on sale online. (5 mins but no need to watch to the end)
This video shows who the teenager really is. (9 mins.) Interestingly, watch it when it talks about the use of nano graphene layer. This is already in your body if you have had the mRNA jabs.
We deal with things which are physical or abstract. With physical things, what is fact used to be absolute Truth. It is no longer so simple nowadays, as the above videos demonstrate. With the abstract, we have to deal with opinions. We used to say if the opinions were backed by scientific data, it is the Truth. Trust the science, so they say. Now with disinformation, misinformation and information suppression, scientific opinion is on shaky grounds.
There is nothing wrong with independent opinions. Everybody has a right to express their opinions. Opinions need to be contested in the market place of ideas, especially on medical studies. It is not an issue of Truth. You only need to appreciate 2 things - (1) Do not confuse opinion as fact. Even if Einstein makes an opinion does not make it the Truth; (2) Beware of those who have an agenda. The great lesson in the pandemic is seeing how medical professionals can be easily bought out or forced by Big Pharma and government to support a single narrative, even when objective Truth does not support their opinions.
What we really want to know is the Objective Truth which is something that corresponds to reality, independent of whether you agree with it or not. That sounds simple and straightforward, right? Unfortunately, people are coloured by individual perceptions, biases, agendas, and Truth tends to be subjective. At this moment in history, the cultural upheaval in the US has basically killed objective Truth amongst Americans.
How then are we going to know what is the real Mccoy. The code to live by is no one is going to show you the Truth. You need to search for it yourself.
I live by a simple guide. If I read or see something that I have doubts, but it is of no importance, then I simply ignore it. We all have too much things on our plate. If it is something I am interested in, I will try to authenticate it.
My first line of defence against falsehood is common sense. Anything that is highly improbable, is almost likely to be false. Take the above advertisement video for example. Wouldn't anyone want to have a gadget that cuts energy cost by 50%. Wouldn't such a gadget be in the market years ago instead of waiting for a 16 year old kid to invent it? This type of 'impossible' posts are in the millions in the internet, especially now swarmed by tiktok.
Next I apply simple context reasoning. This is interpreting the current input, ie what I read, view or hear, in the light of previous experience and knowledge. It calls into play both spatial and temporal contextual information which means placing the current input against a time and space context. This is where a person's knowledge base is key. Of course I am not an expert in a hundred fields, but like most people, I know many areas superficially and one or 2 fields reasonably well. Generally, I find 2 knowledge base that serves me well to understand developments in the world around us are History and Current Affairs. It is sad that our educational system has more or less abandoned History in pursuit of STEM curriculum. Without a knowledge of history, one is like a fish swimming in the water which it cannot see. As for current affairs, one needs to be well read. Unfortunately, most youngsters today learn current affairs from 10 second tiktoks or 144 character twitter feeds.
One needs to apply critical thinking to whatever we read, see or hear. This is the power of rationalising or walking through something logically. I apply 3 ways to how I reason things out:
(1) Deductive reasoning deals with certainty. I start of with a known conclusion and find the reasons to prove that conclusion. This is what some call the 'duck test'.
Remember in 2021 parliamentary debate on foreign competition in the job market, Lawrence Wong criticised the PSP's rhetoric on foreign talent as racist and xenophobic When PSP strongly rebuted the allegation, the Minister said :
"Look - if it looks like a duck, if it walks like a duck, if it quacks like a duck, it is a duck"
(2) Inductive reasoning deals with probability, and yes, it's the so-called science and data-based. Bear in mind that science is not God. Data do not lie, it's the interpretation part that's tricky. If there is something that people has learnt in this pandemic, it's that even the authorities lie through mis-use of data.
(3) Abductive reasoning deals with educated guesses. Abductive reasoning is primarily to provide hypothesis for further studies. That is why I find no pleasure in presenting the common narrative. Instead I am motivated to always try to come up with an out-of-the box answer..
(2) Inductive reasoning deals with probability, and yes, it's the so-called science and data-based. Bear in mind that science is not God. Data do not lie, it's the interpretation part that's tricky. If there is something that people has learnt in this pandemic, it's that even the authorities lie through mis-use of data.
(3) Abductive reasoning deals with educated guesses. Abductive reasoning is primarily to provide hypothesis for further studies. That is why I find no pleasure in presenting the common narrative. Instead I am motivated to always try to come up with an out-of-the box answer..
Very unfortunately, Singapore may have received accolades for our standards in educational system, but we have also been equally criticised for churning out students with low critical thinking skills.
The above 3 ways of trying to understand what's before me are internalised approaches. Other steps I may take are :
Learn something about the authour. Often the authour is a give-away. They could be pre-eminent in the subject, activists, mouth pieces of Big Tech, Pharma, Finance, etc. In typical cynical mode, I often perform a search for scandals of the name. This is a treasure trove that provides some understanding of the purpose of the authour. It is important to gauge if the authour is sharing information or promoting an agenda. Early in the pandemic, when the first Lancet report came out to promote the zoonotic theory, my name search told me immediately that it was a planted propangandist article.
There are of course many people out there who writes the occasional hit pieces in their blogs. I am absolutely suspicious of all those famous journalists from the western mainstream media who have mostly turned into political hacks, mostly persuaded by lucrative payouts from liberal NGOs. But I have respect for those bloggers with specialist industry knowledge.
But the one thing that is beyond my comprehension is why do folks share articles with no names of authours. When I am in receipt of such articles or videos, I never waste time with them despite click bait headlines.
Who checks the fact checkers. I do look up some fact checking sites, but only to obtain contrarian views which I will further try to authenticate. When it comes to politics and various contentious areas, such as the name Trump, vaccines, globalism, Ukraine, election integrity, etc, all, and I do mean ALL, fact checking sites are biased towards conservatives. The reason is very simple. Good guys do not plan to control your minds. The bad guys plan years ahead, every step, every angle they will cover. All those fact checking sites are funded by left wing or Democrat money, manned by leftist activists taking a cue call from some central think tank. Soros' money is everywhere. But that does not necessarily invalidate them all. They provide some balance to the excess from the right.
I try to do some simple authentication. There have been times where I wrote to the authours. My simple authentication is to look at 2 or more different sources of information. That's the least I can do. But this is getting harder. Big Tech search engines use A1 algorithms which will place the answers to your query hundreds of pages behind if it is not in line with liberal narratives. That is why for sensitive political issues, I use the Russian Yandex search engine.
Check out the website. The old saying rely on trusted websites no longer holds. Mainstream news media have all turned into unreliable political hacks or have sold out to moneyed-interests. As for other websites, sometimes we can glean useful information that provides the answer to the motivation for the article or video. Sometimes I do a 'whois' search. This search will display certain registered information about the website such as who owns the site and contact details. Some sites may have a privacy setting in which case ownership and contacts are redacted. Generally, authentic sites do not have privacy settings on. Good guys have nothing to fear and want to show they are authentic. The bad guys do not want to be exposed. To do a 'whois' search, one place to go to is www.lookup.icann.org/en/lookup. Just enter the URL of the website. Note that the search is only on the first level domain name. Eg my site here is www.chem-post.blogspot.com. This is a second level domain name. Whois search is only possible on www.blogspot.com.
Do a reverse image search. This will throw up various places where the particular image has appeared. It is possible to track back to the source of the image, or it may provide useful places to investigate. In the advertisement video above, I did an image reverse check which eventually led me to the real teenager Alex Pinkerton. It's very easy do do this. There are various sites that does this. To do this with Google, simply go to www.images.google.com and this page appears:
If you think all these are too bothersome and laborious, well it's a question of how much you value Truth.
