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Seeking Truth, Part 2
18 June 2026

Introduction

 

This is a second attempt at last month's discussion: we managed to get started, but ran into several technical difficulties.  Steve has agreed to start us off with his concerns about the Climate Change narrative, which were interrupted last time.

 

We looked at conspiracy theories some time ago.  This is the other side of that question.  Some people are clearly misled into believing all kinds of wrong, irrational and dangerous ideas - but how do we avoid such mistakes?  If we are seeking truth, where do we look?  Where should we look?  How can we test the things we are told?

 

It's easy to get tied up in words here.  First year philosophy students may be set, 'What is truth?' as an essay title, in the same way that they might be set 'What is freedom?' - not in the expectation of a plausible answer, but to help them achieve a little more intellectual humility and awareness of the limits of their current understanding, and as a way to shake some of their certainties.  Some important related words here are 'truth', 'knowledge' and 'reality'.  The branch of philosophy which deals with these topics is called 'Epistemology'.  It's a  massive subject, and I would like to completely avoid it if possible.

 

The practical problem we face is the obvious one: how do we go about seeking truth, in a world filled with so many lies?  This has always been a challenge, but in a world so influenced by social media and AI, distinguishing what can be trusted - and when it can be trusted - is even more difficult.  I constantly hear simple advice; many people have told me, "You can't trust the BBC."  But who can we trust?  And how do we go about checking claims and sources which seem legitimate?

 

Who - what sources of information - do you trust, and why?

 

 

Background

 

Trust, of course, is not a binary thing.  You can trust someone to know the latest football results, but not to give you an unbiased account of the latest Parliamentary debate - or vice versa.  You can trust their intentions, if not all of their information.  You can trust that the facts are accurate, as far as possible, but not that they are complete.  You want to know all the relevant information - but who defines what is relevant?  In talking about trust, we probably need to talk about the boundaries of that trust - on which subjects, to what extent?  What assumptions and biases need to be allowed for, in interpreting what we are told?  And what are our own assumptions and biases, shaping how we interpret the information we receive?

 

Sandy writes, "Our multi-lingual daughter was working for the Goethe Institute in Zaporozhia Ukraine teaching German language and German culture in 2014 at the time of the coup in Kiev. I asked her if she could clarify what was happening there. Her answer was that she read the German news, the Ukrainian news and the Russian news and after that she knew less than she had before. So where do we get information?"

 

Listening to contradictory information is difficult.  But it becomes less difficult when you know you are listening to a perspective, not to objective fact.  All truth is partial; all views (all helpful views!) are from a particular perspective.  Picasso painted faces from multiple perspectives, but these images look nothing like a real human face - wonderful art, perhaps, but not much use if you are searching for a missing person.

 

And a lack of knowledge can, itself, be knowledge.  Socrates claimed to know nothing, and was the wisest man on earth because he was the only one who knew he knew nothing; everyone else was fooled by the ideas they thought they knew and understood.  At least, that's the story, and as a parable I think it is still useful.  As the old saying goes: someone with a watch knows the time; someone with two watches is never sure.  It is often helpful to have an idea of the time; but, sometimes, it pays to have an idea of how uncertain you really are about the precise time.

 

I recently had a conversation about the news coverage of the Brexit debate; I was asked, "Why weren't we told the facts?"  But we were told the facts: informed people wrote detailed articles, citing sources and backed up with references.  Sometimes, they went on live TV and participated in debates.  The facts were all there, for anyone interested in looking.  But, unsurprisingly, the facts were not enough, and the loudest voices won.  The people with the greatest financial backing were able to pay for most of the advertising, and they were the ones who had the loudest  voice and the greatest impact.

 

The question in my mind - a question, at least - is: what can we do to help build a society in which the next vital decision is not made simply on the basis of who can spend more and shout loudest?

 

 

Discussion Notes, from 21 May

 

Mark's initial concern: to have a meaningful discussion, you need an agreed basis on which to talk, and that is increasingly difficult to find.  We, as a society, don't share an agreed source of authority - we don't believe the experts, but we don't have a better alternative.

 

There are some experts that people (many people?) do trust, but the deeper problem is with experts who have agendas - and even more so when they have agendas but don't acknowledge them.  And we like experts who challenge the status quo and received wisdom, but it's almost impossible for the public to distinguish between an expert challenging the status quo on the basis of their specialist knowledge and experience, and an expert in one field using that status to challenge the status quo in an area they know nothing about.  (Like, maybe, an evolutionary biologist talking about morality and religion?)

 

And many people do reject experts simply because they work in the field and therefore they are part of 'the system'.  Michael Gove did a public rejection of 'experts', which seemed to hit a nerve with many members of the public.  Similarly, the BBC dragged in Nigel Lawson (not an expert!) into climate change debates because 'we need to have balance'.  (See 'Further Thoughts on the BBC' below.)

 

Trust is harder, more difficult, in cyber space - where 'nobody knows you are a dog.'

 

No-one has perfect knowledge, but we value truth.  There is a tension here.

 

We have to recognise that some of us have more truth on some subjects than others.  Opinions are not all equally valid, because some opinions have a stronger basis in reality.

 

We struggle to define truth.  It was suggested that, in practice, it can be roughly understood as what we can all agree on - but, at times, what everyone agrees on is discovered to be false.

 

We need to distinguish between the data and the interpretation, between the data and theories about the data.  We have all this data, but how does it fit together?  The truth must be in there, but it is often hard to tease out.

 

The data says the climate is changing, but there are valid questions about the reasons for this.  There are other major and long term ecological issues which can be sidelined by the climate change argument.  Steve is not sure that all the work to combat climate change is worth doing, and thinks some of it is a distraction from other more important issues.

 

Moving away from an oil based economy seems a smart move, whatever you think about climate change.

 

It's a complicated topic, and inevitably simplified for the public.  Steve thinks this is why people are not trusting the story, but if the experts are in agreement about the large story, surely they are the ones who should be listened to?  The common challenge is that "they get paid to research this, so of course they say it's a problem," but the climate scientists would much rather be working on something with more potential for new discoveries and career development.  While a lot of money is being devoted to the area, it is spread among a lot of people and projects, so nobody doing the work is there because they are motivated by the money; they focus on the climate science because they believe the subject is important.

 

[At this point, we lost the video connection.]

 

 

Further Thoughts on the BBC

 

It seems clear that the BBC is not an entirely unbiased source of information - but, then, neither is GB News.  Nobody and nothing is unbiased, so we need to understand the nature of the bias in order to adjust for it.  There are two regular complaints made about the BBC: it is selective in its news coverage, and it is desperate to appear fair.

 

It is selective.  This is a complaint which can validly be made against any news source, and it boils down to this criticism: the corporation does not share my values and priorities.  Things I consider to be unimportant are given air time, while things I consider to be important are given less time, banished from the prime-time slots, or ignored completely.  The basic answer to this must be: make a noise, explain why other people should care about the things which are important to you, encourage others to say they agree with you.

 

It tries too hard to be fair.  Presumably this is a policy designed, in part, to distinguish the BBC from other news sources which push a clear message, but it means that the BBC is committed to a operating a very simplistic version of balance.  In a well-publicised speech, Emily Maitlis said that many journalists now self-censor in order to appear balanced and avoid backlash, and production teams aim to provide a false impression of balance.  "It might take our producers five minutes to find 60 economists who feared Brexit and five hours to find a sole voice who espoused it.  But by the time we went on air we simply had one of each; we presented this unequal effort to our audience as balance. It wasn't."

 

 

Discussion Notes, from 18 June

 

Steve:

 

There seems to be a great deal of certainty about climate change, which he finds difficult.  (But this is a pragmatic and popular certainty: news items these days tend to assume the reality of climate change, but the people working in the field all recognise that we are dealing with probabilities, not certainties; however, the experts all agree that the probabilities are very high.)

 

Is the climate changing?  Yes, probably, but it has always been changing.  (Yes, but the climate has rarely - maybe never - changed as rapidly as it is today, apart from events like the meteor that killed the dinosaurs.)

 

Is human activity to blame?  This is less certain.  (But if we are not the main cause, this means we will have to do even more - not only to undo the damage we have caused, but also to undo the natural changes, so the task is even harder and more costly.)

 

What can we do?  This is even less certain.  (This is a political question.  What are we able to do is an engineering question, and what are we willing to do is largely an economic question.  What we should do is to respond to this challenge alongside all the other important challenges we face; how we rank and prioritise these challenges is, again, a political decision.)

 

How much of the atmosphere is CO2?  Around 432 ppm, or 0.043% of the atmosphere.  (But the scientists know this.  And it has increased massively in the last few hundred years.)

 

CO2 was much higher at times in the past.  (Yes, and the climate was much warmer as a consequence.)

 

Oil is a wonderfully powerful fuel.  It gives us all the equivalent of 43 servants - it has massively improved our standard of life.  (But there is little point in having a good quality of life if your children are all going to starve as a consequence.)

 

There are crises of all kinds, partly because of an emphasis on economic growth - this needs to be addressed.  Climate change seems to be the only priority, which means the other issues don't get properly addressed.  (Fair point: we need to address all the serious problems we face, not just pick one.)

 

When there is an official narrative which doesn't add up, and alternative narratives are dismissed - that raises Steve's suspicions.  We should be honest and open discussions.  Steve believes that there is a 'false consensus'.  (But it is not clear what 'alternative narrative' is actually being missed.  If the scientific community is ignoring important facts, someone somewhere ought to be getting a lot of publicity from the climate change deniers as they identify these important facts.)

 

Steve notes that we are social creatures, and there is a very real pressure on us to conform to the beliefs and practices of our community.  So there is a pressure on people to accept the climate change narrative.  (Yes, this is how human societies work.  But this is not the only factor at work: there is also a pressure on people to succeed, to win, to beat everyone else and stand out; in anthropological terms (whether you are male or female) to be the 'alpha male' who gets the most and the most fertile mates.  And this is particularly evident in the scientific community, where you make your name and succeed in your career by challenging the current orthodoxy.  If there was a serious problem with the current climate change narrative as understood by the scientific community, many scientists would be shouting about it.)

 

Mark: we have seriously underestimated the impact of climate change, and the risks of passing climate tipping points.

 

Dereck: a Christians in Science meeting identified a number of serious problems we face, including water supply, food security and climate change.

 

Brian: the fossil fuel companies are funding the 'research' which challenges the climate change consensus; they have a clear vested interest.  It's hard to find published challenges which are not funded by vested interests, which should tell us something.  They are adopting the same tactics which the tobacco companies used to throw doubt on the link between smoking and lung cancer.

 

How do we transition away from fossil fuel?  There are no easy answers.  Wind turbines produce noise which is harmful.  (But there are several recent studies showing that land covered by solar panels can also become greener with vegetation if they are slightly raised off the ground - the panels reduce evaporation, while allowing rain the reach the land, so grass continues to grow, and grazing animals can produce both food and income, while reducing the need to mow the land.  So, sometimes, there are win-win options.)

 

Capitalism requires continual growth, which is a basic issue.  Agreed: we need to address the economic problems, but the does not mean we have to ignore the environmental ones.

 

Mark: So how do we find the truth?  It has to be backed up by evidence.  At some point, we have to outsource the evidence to experts.  We allow experts to build our roads and electricity grids.  

 

Paul: we can see that glaciers are melting; coral reefs are bleaching - this is all measured and recorded.  Is there any serious doubt that this is happening?  Steve thinks there is some doubt, but cannot immediately point to the evidence.

 

What would convince Steve that climate change is true?  He has a high standard of what he considers to be truth, something which is absolutely true, a 'hill I would die on'.  But, in the real world, we have to act without absolute proof - you are never absolutely certain that the GP has diagnosed the problem correctly, but you still take the prescribed medicine.

 

The core problem seems to be the cost of climate mitigation activity, but much of it is activity we want to do anyway: Don has vivid memories of being chocked by vehicle fumes, and feeling that there ought to be better things to do with oil than burning it.  We all want to aim for a more efficient and more stable economic environment.

 

We tend to adjust our estimation of probability based on what we want to be true.

 

How do we create a desire within ourselves to actually know the truth?

 

We can trust an idea more when many independent people who have a greater understanding and are able to test for themselves all agree on it.  Multiple sources of information are important.

 

How do I know what is true?

"The truth is rarely flashy, easy, or tailored to our biases. It requires sustained effort, nuanced thinking, and continuous skepticism. Being well-informed remains the strongest defense against manipulation.  If we must argue online, let's at least argue with facts—and remember humility. Even the best fact-checker occasionally gets fooled."

 

It's not the individual facts, but how they all fit together.

 

Mark again recommended Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

"Children of Time follows two intertwined storylines. One centers on the evolution of a civilization of genetically modified Portia labiata spiders on a terraformed exoplanet, guided by an artificial intelligence modeled on a human terraformer’s personality. The other follows the remnants of humanity aboard an interstellar ark ship, seeking a new home after Earth’s environmental collapse, only to discover the planet is already inhabited by a new intelligence."

 

 

Further Thoughts

 

From Paul.

 

Please also take a look at We are not truth seekers on the main JH? site.  I probably should have pointed to this page before the discussion.

 

Steve says that he is not convinced by the climate change narrative; he has doubts, or maybe he thinks there is room for reasonable doubts; there is a possibility that the threatened problems will not happen.  Okay.  But if it is essentially true, perhaps not in every detail, but if the main claims are anywhere close to the truth, then if we do not respond quickly and effectively to this challenge, human civilisation comes to an end.  Not in our lifetime, but that does not change the morality of the situation.

 

Here is an analogy which I attempted to share a couple of times during the discussion, but the conversation moved on each time.  There is a possibility that climate change may stop without our help; there is a possibility that it will not be the disaster we - the people who have studied it - anticipate.  So: imagine you are in a car, driving on a minor road up to a crossroads, a junction with a busy major road.  There is a warning sign telling you to stop at the junction.  You can choose to keep driving: don't slow down, just drive straight across the junction.  After all, an accident is not certain - there is a real possibility that you may not crash.  But would you?  Maybe you are in a hurry, maybe a delay will be costly.  But, while a delay may be costly, the real probability of a crash means that not delaying will very probably be far more costly.  There are no certainties here, but what would you do?  And what should we do, faced as we are with the very real possibility of a climate change disaster?