Facing misinformation, disinformation, the rise of the term “brainwashing,” AI-generated content, pervasive non-educated influencers, social media algorythms pushing towards extremes, it is objectively hard to shape the truth. An influencer promoting a cryptoscam, entire countries throwing independent media under the bus supporting only pro-government media alive (say “hi!” to Russia), politics bull- and batshitting non-stop in social media so nobody can make sense of what will happen and what is the truth in this chaos. In this context, it is only natural for people to feel the trustworthiness is decreasing.
But trustworthiness arises not only from a source itself but also from our perspective on it. It comes from inside of us as a subjective interpratation. You may doubt the scientists regarding mRNA vaccines, but you lack ten years of education to truly understand the subject. How trustworthy is your perspective in this case?
Everyone has a bubble around them made up of facts, beliefs, sources we read, listen to, and watch, personal experiences, our interpation of others’ experiences. Being at the center of this bubble is exactly the point from where we subjectively doing our best to determine what is trustworthy and what isn’t. This knowledge bubble has two main measures:
- The enormity
- The fuzziness.
The enormity is how big of a bubble it is. For those who are a curious and deep-diving person, it will be huge with multiple topics and facts overlapping each other and creating new conclusions and questions expanding its already big volume.
The fuzziness more or less is how effectively the bubble helps to determine trustworthiness. For example, if you’ve read an article online about CRISPR gene editing technology, that’s a good start; your bubble has expanded in those short ten minutes. But the topic itself adds more fuzziness to the bubble as it is not yet eloquently presented in your head. But dive deeper and read one or two books around how CRISPR actually works, where it is applicable, its constraints, etc. And not so suddenly, the fuzziness of your knowledge bubble decreased. As a result, it becomes much harder to persuade you that CRISPR-edited tomatoes should be banned.
Actually, both the enormity and the fuzziness affect how good your knowledge bubble is in assessing the trustworthiness of a source. If it is a small-radius bubble and you are I-shaped idividual and not so fuzzy in a particular topic, then the bubble is still not so reliable in the real world as it lack of connections with other topics. Conversely, if you have a basic understanding of many topics but your knowledge in each is shallow, then the enormity won’t compensate for the fuzziness.
The more trustworthy you knowledge bubble is, the easier to distinguish an objective trustworthiness in original sources.
It is also easy to say “I don’t trust online media anymore!” or “I don’t read books; it is a waste of time.” But it is hard to replace these mediums with other ones to prevent the knowledge bubble errosion and, hence, the ability to assess the trustworthiness.
Be curious and dive deeper.