"Just be for real, won't you, baby?
Be for real."
Leonard Cohen, "Just be real," 1992
Guest Post by Jim Sims
Degradation of Truth
I practiced law in Oregon and California for over 45 years. The courtroom has safeguards that establish whether information presented is sufficiently reliable to be considered. Society lacks such communication safeguards. Disinformation travels at the speed of light. Looking back from age 81, I didn't foresee what was happening to "Truth."
Truth arises from identifying relevant facts and issues that determine how a matter should be decided. Reaching truthful answers requires adherence to long accepted methods of research and verification—testing whether facts actually support a given proposition. Sharing verifiable truths, however, depends on communication.
One goal of higher education is to develop the cognitive skills needed to distinguish fact from opinion. Primary education, by contrast, often focuses on simple right-or-wrong answers. Yet, as Oscar Wilde observed, “Truth is rarely pure and never simple.” Facts evolve, and our understanding of truth must evolve with them. Human reasoning is shaped by instincts and emotions developed over millennia—particularly fear and self-preservation. To manage these impulses, societies created institutions and codes of behavior that rely on shared truths and agreed conventions. The reliability of those truths, however, depends on the rigor of the methods we use to verify them.
As a trial lawyer, I learned that motive in communication is inseparable from ethics and verification. Legal disputes revolve around facts, argument, and persuasion—and there are always winners and losers. In our culture, “winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing,” as Vince Lombardi said. Today, this competitive mindset has seeped into public discourse. Assertions of every kind are launched daily into a battlefield detached from verifiable fact.
Such an environment breeds factionalism—exacerbated by the speed and reach of modern technology. From the invention of writing to the internet and artificial intelligence, each leap in communication has expanded both the spread of information and the opportunity for distortion. Algorithms now amplify division by exploiting our instincts and data, targeting us anonymously and continuously. The social compact itself—the shared trust that binds communities—is an unintended casualty.
Factionalism, of course, is not new. The framers of the U.S. Constitution recognized it as a natural feature of human behavior. Washington, Madison, and Hamilton all warned that factions driven by ambition or corruption could undermine republican government. Madison argued that one advantage of a republic over a direct democracy was slower communication—distance and deliberation served as safeguards. He could never have imagined the instant, global communication of today.
Their warnings remain relevant. Madison cautioned that “men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs” might gain power through corruption and betray the public interest. Washington feared that such factions would enable “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” to subvert the people’s power and then destroy the very systems that elevated them.
Today, human instincts are still exploited to incite fear, division, and profit. The difference lies in the unprecedented speed and reach of digital communication. Information once traveled by word of mouth or print; now it spreads globally in seconds.
Madison saw two possible remedies for factionalism. The first—using government authority to suppress dissent—destroys freedom and democracy. The second—addressing the effects of factionalism at their core—requires an agreed method of inquiry and verification. This means insisting on evidence-based reasoning and resisting the temptation to treat unverified opinion as facts. Assertions drawn from “research” that merely recycles internet speculation or conspiracy are not valid.
Commercial and political messaging today preys on instinctual drives using data harvested from our online behavior—what we view, type, purchase, or share. Algorithms convert this data into targeted persuasion, while we remain largely unaware of how our information is used. According to the cybersecurity firm Imperva, more than half of current internet traffic appears human but is actually generated by bots and artificial intelligence.
When human factionalism meets automated misinformation, the result is a profound degradation of truth. Malicious, reckless, or careless communication spreads faster than ever, eroding the public’s ability to discern fact from fiction. The anonymity of the internet further enables cruelty and distortion by shielding people from accountability.
Truth has always required effort—careful verification, ethical motive, and shared commitment to accuracy. What has changed is the speed with which falsehoods travel and the precision with which they target our fears. To preserve the social compact, we must recommit to the disciplined pursuit of verifiable truth—before the very engines of communication that once promised enlightenment become tools of collective deception.
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5 comments:
I now get AI fictional videos on TikTox with my various science guys asserting things I know not to be real. Tyson DeGrass showed a video of himself saying things he didn’t say. I can still parcel out truth from fiction but it’s getting harder. Maybe we do need big brother to tell us what is real and true, but what makes big brother tell the truth?
Thank you, Jim. I now think that my attraction to the law and my enjoyment from it was rational thinking. I enjoyed trying to achieve it.
I remember when I first started using a computer on a personal basis and thinking that we could all become smarter, thus causing our discourse to become more rational. Daily access to the New York Times and to the great books would create a more educated populace.
How quaint. I opened a dormant social media account of mine the other day and found a cesspool of ignorance, with one commentator saying that the "free speech" contained therein was certainly worth $44 billion. It appears we are on our way to even more irrationality, not less.
"Don't believe everything you read on the internet."
---Abraham Lincoln
Nice, exceptionally well-written essay.
Bill Gates was interviewed on The New Yorker Radio Hour back in February this year. Among the many topics was his candid take the impact of technology on society. He talked about how “naive” (sic) he and his peers were to think that technology could only produce good things. They were completely blindsided by the destructive power of ubiquitous, immediate and ungoverned social media.
The irony is that AI tools are quickly displacing their inventors and developers, leaving AI to decide what AI knows and what AI does. At my work, we are forced to outsource our critical thinking and writing to AI. And it’s too easy.
An accurate description without a practical prescription (“we must recommit …”). The rules of evidence act as a filter to determine which facts may be reliable in a trial setting, but do not determine which facts are true. That is often determined by the intangible of credibility, of which motive is only one element. Other elements of credibility include the manner of testimony, defensiveness, limitations on accuracy of perception, and common sense plausibility. As it becomes harder to determine what is true in the era of AI, my decision rule is to disbelieve everything. For example, every unknown text and unknown telephone number is assumed to be a scam.
However, Jim is writing in the context of political factions. In this context, there are only opinions, which are neither true nor false. He also forgot to quote John Adams (an often forgotten founder among those referred to) who said “There is nothing I dread So much, as a Division of the Republick into two great Parties.” In my opinion, there is only one mono party, a two-faced Janus, which serves only the elites and not the working class.
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