Honest question: is it just me or is it getting harder to determine what is factual and what is not? It seems like the US has begun to splinter such that there are two different sets of "facts" on many issues, but of course that is not how facts work. Nevertheless, when doing research and investigation is it often hard for me to pin down the truth behind any of the "facts" that are thrown at me, whether that's by the partisans, by the media, or just by random people on HN etc.
In a free society, people are free to speak about the world and how they see it. This is practically the job of a journalist: observe, record goings-on and ask insightful questions that generate understanding.
But now people that don't cleave to the consensus opinions of the crowd are essentially discarded based on the post-modern view of dubious "lived experience", suspect motivation, etc.
Back in the day, truth was what UPI, AP, CBS, NBC, and ABC agreed it was. All five outfits were in competition to break stories, but also all five were pretty centrist, and they had no effective competition. You either watched the evening news, or you read the paper, or both.
Now the various arbiters of truth diverse very strongly from each other. CNN is (picking a number) maybe 20 times as far from Fox as NBC was from CBS.
When the different sides are so far from each other, and both are constantly spewing how right they are, how do you tell what's true?
It's becoming harder to trust information at face value. Everyone has an angle and everyone is using their platform to push their angle. But personally I don't feel I have a hard time determining truth to a high degree of accuracy. A well-honed power of Inference to the Best Explanation is a superpower in today's disinformation economy. Truth has a way of fitting together cleanly without loose ends and without unexplainable coincidences. Fabricated stories have rough edges and requires leaps of faith. These leaps are easy for true believers to make, which is why the media environment seems so splintered.
Train your ability to model the world and judge whether new information fits with the current model or requires substantial revision. This is a powerful guide to whether the new information is true. Of course, this requires you have the ability to dispassionately analyze information and judge how well events fit together. If you're a partisan or an emotional thinker, IBE won't do you any good. The truth is available for those who are capable of dispassionate analysis. If you're not, then you're doomed to a steady diet of falsehoods and a worldview that diverges from the truth.
If I was part of the intelligence community, I would be supporting this "balkanization" of the US.
I find that many in the US are quick to blame and suspect foreign adversaries behind everything where the intelligence community makes just as much sense (to me).
Reminds me of Scott Adams recent Robot Reads News cartoon (couldn't find a link) where the gist of the joke was: "There is no evidence yet that Russia is behind the leaks. That is so Putin!"
Does anyone else feel this way?