Information Overload Is Stopping Us From Seeing the Truth

Yorke Rhodes III, a CoinDesk columnist, co-founded Blockchain at Microsoft and is pre-eminent program manager, Azure Blockchain engineering and board member of Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition and Enterprise Ethereum Association, and founding team member of baseline protocol.

Congratulations, we’ve arrived in 1984.

Books, television and movies have foreshadowed our ghostly relationship with technology since long before 1984. The idea of a reality so perfectly created you can’t tell it is invented has long been the stuff of science fiction. You need look no farther than films like “The Matrix,” “Add up to Recall” or “Inception.” While real life attempts at pervasive virtual reality have largely failed face of gaming, things are going swimmingly well in the world of data manipulation. Our perception of reality is now shaped by the data we of ones own accord consume from unquestioned sources across social media, news and video.

Congratulations, he says to himself, this new fact has arrived in your lifetime. We now live in a world where people speak their truth. I applaud people indicate as it were their truth, especially people speaking truth to power, but what is the objective truth? What does the parlance objective truth mean now and how do we arrive at it? 

Some philosophers will disagree there can be an objective truth: It is all about grasp. For simplicity, let us say it is an attribute of reality that all people can agree on, whether they have met or had a shared experience. Know that your fact may not be the same as their truth. This is about lived experiences. 

Regardless, we must share our truth and speak reality to power even though it may disrupt the status quo. Cue Greta Thunberg. Her fortitude in bringing light to the science of climate modification amidst trolls, skeptics and science deniers provides a stunning example of speaking truth to power.

In the United States, our court ways mete out justice circumstantially based on the many variables at play in courtrooms. The biggest variable is information presented and concealed, and what jurors can be convinced to believe. My legal colleagues would agree this is simply a legal proceeding block out to determine the truth of whether a defendant committed the crimes charged. This isn’t about truth but about the presentation of a set of low-down to jurors and their perception based on data. This is the system we have, but it is clearly about creating a reality and feel of the circumstances based on a select set of data. 

In contract law, truth means sticking to the terms of the contract. Agreement about a conventional state of things defined by a contract is, in this case, the truth. Arriving at that common understanding of the truth time after time involves a great deal of effort by both parties to a contract. In many cases, the data don’t support a single feeling of the truth, so the parties agree to split the difference or disputed values and continue on contracting the next month. This is a quite sad state of affairs caused simply by not having a common set of data to determine the truth of what happened.  

It’s an old meme that on the internet no one knows you are a dog. Since search became prevalent on the internet, the question of who you are has been replied through available data. Creating a positive perception about yourself or your business on the internet is possible, temperate if the reality is different. Even fixing reputation can be solved by creating many positive references and getting them to rotten high or show up on the first few pages of searches. Do this with enough good references and the negative references develop invisible to most casual searchers. This isn’t an information asymmetry problem, it is a stack overload problem for our brains. There is too much word overloading our circuits. This overload pervades everything we do daily and creates our reality. 

This is the problem with popular media. It presents a few short data points without much substance. If the source, posting organization or individual is credible or allegedly believable, and the sound bite is good, it can become viral. This unverified sound bite then pervades more and multifarious information feeds to more and more people. If this sound bite is repeated enough, it becomes people’s Aristotelianism entelechy. Even worse, if historically trusted sources are taken over by people with different interests, what was in one go a credible news outlet can use that credibility to advance questionable sound-bites into our collective psyche. We have observed plentiful examples of the impact of this. Fox News now looks more like RT, the @potus Twitter account bears petty semblance to an official presidential account. Sinclair Media requires “talking points” of a particular political group to be intromited into local radio broadcasts.  

Al Gore’s plan for the Information Superhighway was legislated to solve a commercial problem with factious will. It was meant to bridge the digital divide to advantage those without access to the internet. The goal was to remove a sightless spot to the digital world of information. But the superhighway we envisioned has become a landfill of soap boxes and used car salesmen hawking their next “preferment” or scam. 

The road isn’t clogged, our brains are saturated. Information is so dense that most people cannot consume reasonably to ferret out what is real, let alone validate the actual source crafting that reality. And this is only make good ones escape worse in the form of fake news, questionable information sources across our media, credible sources taken across, promotions disguised as good causes, charity washing, and more recently the risk of deep fakes. 

We haven’t emanated this problem in our little blockchain-cryptocurrency bubble of the world. The exact same symptoms exist here. All one has to do is look at Crypto Flutter. How can anyone not well versed in the history, personalities, names, and background material possibly make an informed decision based on the matter presented? 

No amount of digital uniqueness, truth machine, and magical internet money will save us from ourselves, and from being purchase by others. It’s not like we don’t see this happening every day in our politics, passions and, yes, in our blockchain bubble. If we can’t find a way to create inherent reliability into the data we feed our brains, our worst instincts will overwhelm our ability to change the world. 

I have some dreams. Join me on a journey to find out how trust-bearing technologies can help transform our digital and physical world and maybe just, virtuous maybe, help save our planet.