Open Minds – Facts
We will be working with the legal use of the term “facts” to help this discussion. This is difficult to put into words because there is so much loose thinking in the world. We use terms that sort of apply, but not completely. We treat opinions as facts and facts as opinions.
It is a complex subject.
To help, I’ll start with a simple differentiation: “need” versus “want”.
“I want a bowl of ice cream.” expresses a desire. If I don’t get the bowl of ice cream, nothing bad will happen. I might feel bad about it. I might be upset that I don’t get it. It is just a want.
“I need food.” expresses a requirement. If I go without food for an extended period of time, I will die. I will become weak and likely fall ill if I’m without food before I die from lack of food.
This shows why it is important to understand that the words have meaning, and it behooves us to use the right word to communicate the right message.
- fact
- a thing that is known or proved to be true.
— From Oxford Languages
“Known or proved to be true.” Seems simple enough. But it isn’t always. We need to ask, “How do we know it to be true?” “Has it been proven to be true?”
“Joseph Biden was the 46th president of the United States.” This is a generally accepted fact. But how do you know?
To know if a thing is true, we evaluate evidence.
Evidence is a presentation of potential facts and testimony that are presented to us to prove a fact. I can provide you with a link to a YouTube video showing the swearing in of Joe Biden.
As you watch that video, you will be evaluating the evidence. At the end of the video, you will decide if that evidence proves the fact I am presenting.
You have to decide what evidence you will accept as proving a fact. You have to decide how trustworthy the evidence is. You have to decide how trustworthy the person presenting the evidence is.
After you have made those determinations, then you will decide if enough evidence that you trust has been presented to prove the fact.
Trusting The Presenter
For years the left labeled Fox News as fake news. They dropped that moniker when Trump started using it to describe other media sources.
The argument was that evidence that Fox News presented was not trustworthy. Since it was not trustworthy, you should not accept the evidence presented as proving a fact.
We all have opinions as to how biased and trustworthy a news source is.
I asked Grok the following using its expert mode (Think Harder):
Grok’s thinking is exposed, and this is its thought on the rules:
The prompt references rules from ‘chris-prompt.md’ for bias determination, but that document only lists a question about determining bias without third-party opinions, without providing explicit rules.
Since no explicit rules exist in the document, a method needs to be developed based on analyzing content for language, cited sources, and balance of views.
The resulting table is:
| Source | Bias | Trust Level |
|---|---|---|
| New York Times | -2 | 5 |
| Washington Post | -2 | 5 |
| Wall Street Journal | 0 | 5 |
| Daily Wire | 4 | 3 |
| CNN | -3 | 4 |
| Fox News | 3 | 4 |
| Mother Jones | -4 | 3 |
| The VineOfLiberty | 5 | 2 |
I’m disappointed that the Vine ranked so low in trust, but it is what it is.
This is the biggest issue in getting people to open their minds. They have already formed opinions about the bias of the sources they use and about how trustworthy those sources are.
You need to establish your opinions. You also have to be willing to look at other sources. You need to be willing to look at sources on the other side of zero.
Trusting The Evidence
We started with trusting the presenter because the presenter can twist the evidence, and you must be aware of that.
— Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY)
— Karoline Leavitt, as quoted by MSNBC
When I saw Jeffries’ statement, I assumed he had gotten it wrong. That he was lying. Why? Because I have an opinion of Jeffries that marks him as being untrustworthy.
I had heard Leavitt’s statement and heard something different. I heard her say, “The people that the Democrat party support are …”
Jeffries did not provide enough evidence for me to know that Leavitt had said what he said she said. MSNBC did. They provided video, and they provided a transcript that matched the video. I know the fact to be true, with a caveat.
I trust the evidence when I can verify the evidence presented with primary sources. That evidence includes videos, images, full context, statements by the parties, written documentation.
—Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland (HarperCollins 1st ed ed. 1992) is a hard read. It describes horrific events. Is every word true? I don’t know. I don’t know the author; I can’t assign a level of trust to him. I do understand citations. The citations are excellent (I just realized that I haven’t verified that for this article; I remember the citations as being good). But his sources can be verified, even if I choose not to do so.
The Evidence Itself
Otherwise known as the sniff test. And the sniff test is pretty poor test.
Do we believe the evidence presented?
If somebody shows me they can hover in air, I’m not going to believe them. I am going to examine the entire situation before I believe.
I know how the trick is performed. You can likely guess. But the evidence that a man is just floating above his patch of flowers doesn’t pass the sniff test.
(If you look at every image of the floating statue/performer, they all have one thing in common: they all have something connecting them to the ground.)
Another example: “The amount of CO₂ output by man is dwarfed by the amount emitted by volcanoes.” According to NOAA, humans emitted roughly 40 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2015. Volcanoes emitted around 0.3 billion metric tons.
Do you trust NOAA in this area? Then the fact is proven. Since this value is backed by references to the studies, we can look up how the studies were performed to discover if these numbers are factual. Or we can trust this source.
Conclusion
When we are evaluating evidence to discover the truth, to determine the facts, we have to have an open mind. We must be willing to look at different sources, to evaluate the presentation of the evidence, and the support given in that evidence. It isn’t enough to believe something is true; we need to know it is true.
That means we have to learn to look at evidence and decide for ourselves what the facts are. We need to be able to do that absent an authority telling us what to think or how to interpret the facts.
