People today are no worse at discerning truths from untruths than people in the past. We have always been very bad at it, but why does it seem to cause such big problems for us today?

In the ancient past, there was no means of mass distribution of information. People believed a great number of different things, some true, many false. There were no narratives (i.e. important shared beliefs) that were consistent on a large scale, but the individuals also lacked a clear awareness of that global narrative inconsistency. This was fine, because we didn’t coordinate at any significant scale. People lived and produced in many small, fragmented “bubbles of reality” (e.g. tribes, villages), mostly isolated from other bubbles. For this kind of life, local narrative consistency was enough. The global narrative fragmentation did cause problems, such as frequent inter-group violence, but the dissonance didn’t bother the individuals in their day-to-day lives.

In the more recent past, when the means of mass distribution of information came into existence, things changed. The high costs associated with the mass distribution of information meant that it was only accessible to a few people. These small number of elites (first religious institutions, later traditional media and governments) centralized information dissemination, and were able to create large scale narratives that were more or less consistent. Most individuals lived under these “globally consistent narratives”¹. It didn’t matter that people were bad at discerning truths from untruths, as there was only one set of dominant narratives for most of them. Inter-group violence still happened, only the groups got bigger. The local bubbles of reality of the ancient past became regional, national, and eventually international bubbles. We could coordinate at very large scales in this system because everything within a centrally controlled bubble was consistent.

Today, with the invention of the Internet and the rise of social media, things changed yet again. The cost of the mass distribution of information dropped to zero, so everyone has come to possess the means of global information dissemination. With this development, the fact that people are bad at discerning truths from untruths suddenly became significant, as it introduced a new problem. It caused a mass fragmentation of narrative bubbles of reality, resulting in a world similar to the one in the ancient past when there were no globally consistent narratives. Only now everyone is aware of this inconsistency. This dissonance is felt explicitly by everyone, and greatly hinders our ability to coordinate globally, which we have come to rely on in the modern world.

What can we do about it? The simple, somewhat naive answer is to get people to be better at discerning truths from untruths. While I do agree that we need to work on improving citizen education, it won’t help solve the problem on its own. Given our limited individual cognitive capacity as well as lifespan, we have to rely on socially distributed information for most things, and that will always be exploitable. Instead, I want to look at a few structural solutions.

We can give up our desire to coordinate at very large scales (i.e. globally), and retreat back into a world similar to the one from the ancient past. This does not mean that we will have to give up our modern skyscrapers and move into wooden shacks. After all, our current technologies already exist, and we can continue to benefit from them. But it does mean giving up the fundamental blessing of modernity: progress and growth. Radical nationalism and isolationism are some of the practical manifestations of groups trying to go down this path. The cost however, seems too great to bear.

We can also re-centralize the means of mass distribution of information, and in a sense, return to the more recent past. This means strictly regulating mass media and everything on the Internet. Given the borderlessness nature of the Internet, it would also require the tight control of information flow from the in-group net with the global net (assuming there are people in the world who do not wish to go this route). When done successfully, this could once again bring about a centrally disseminated consistent narrative that allows for effective very large scale coordinations. Of course, all the disadvantages of such centralized systems would come along as well, such as being more prone to catastrophic systematic failures. From the way it seems today, some countries in the world have chosen this solution. But for the existing developed liberal democracies of the world, this seems like a regress to a form of totalitarianism, and not very appealing at all.

What if we don’t want to give up our desire to coordinate globally, nor our individual freedom to information? These two parameters seem to be at odds to one another, but maybe with a hybrid approach we can at least improve the situation from our current predicament. On one hand, we need central, consistent narratives, for without them we cannot coordinate effectively at scale. But we can reduce and limit the resolution of these global-level narratives. On the other hand, individual freedom to information, coupled with our inability to effectively judge what’s true, means that the more granular beliefs will always be somewhat fragmented. So let these more specific opinions, the higher resolution narratives, exist mostly at the local level. This means that from the highest level of governance (e.g. national or multi-national) to the lowest (e.g. municipal or neighborhood), the narratives communicated should follow a gradation of resolutions, from the lowest to the highest.