it's one crucial topic imo

internet altered the way society communicates and why, a lot of discussions now end up by "show me your sources" aka "what is the truth" and it's often centralized into some accepted source like wikipedia

where there simple single point of 'truth' like that before ?

my 2cents is that humans are not meant to live in one global absolute truth and we all lived in relative fuzzy reality before, it was slow and imperfect but not as easy to tamper with

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graemep 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Showing sources is not a bad thing. The harm is not questioning sources. A lot of people rely on poor sources. Whatever what the first result in Google historically, and now LLM summaries.

	▲	agumonkey 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		maybe my viewpoint is weird but i think this distorted human interactions on multiple domains. of course we all wanted to communicate faithful information, but now any discussion turns into a religious difference, and the escape is of course "who has the truest source". people don't necessarily understand the content, they just defer the validity to an official third party, so basically we're back to zero.. but we're all debating everything now. and it makes me think that locally, we chatting, was never meant to exchange rigorous information, but mostly to share opinions lightly, more emotional than rigorous and scientific

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whynotmaybe 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not so long ago, the "truth" was mainly given by the priest or the mayor.

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nephihaha an hour ago | parent | next [-]

For priest or the mayor read "trusted or official sources" nowadays. I believe that is the current euphemism.

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ajsnigrutin 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And now it's given by the mainstream media, which is mostly owned by a few very rich people and pushes the same type of propaganda as before (but now globally).

	▲	amanaplanacanal an hour ago \| parent [-]
		There was a point where I would agree with that, but we seem to be moving past that. The "truth" seems to be coming more from social media influencers than mainstream media now. It's kind of a shit show.

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pydry 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

We still live in that fuzzy reality. Not much has changed.

It doesnt really matter if the whole world has access to the same information if the whole world trusts completely different sources.

For better or worse we trust those sources exclusively because of tribal affinity.

I doubt many people in the US could be persuaded to trust Global Times over the New York Times even if you could prove it had a better prediction track record. Wrong tribe.