Can We Trust What We See and Hear?

An insight about the processing of information

Introduction

The majority of what we learn is through information spread by others to us, but is the majority of what we hear true? How can we differentiate facts and fiction? Fake news has become such a big problem in recent years that it has come to the point where some people just don’t believe anything they hear.

This, especially in times of the CoViD-19 pandemic, is a problem, which gives us the question: How can we trust what we see and hear? The answer is the filtration of data in three aspects. The likeliness of truth, defaulting to truth and basic human perspective.

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The Likeliness of Truth^

Firstly, in order to filter out the good info from the bad info, we need to assess the likeliness of a certain piece of information to be true purely from the content and the way it was said. Faulty content is more or less straightforward and I’ll explain it further in the next section, basically, there can only be such a believable case. Most things said, though they don’t seem like it, are standard black or white pieces of information.

The part that confuses people into believing the lies are the outstanding ways in which they are told.

This is exactly what scammers specialise in. James Veitch, a meddlesome comedian who specializes in repelling scammers by out-scamming them, explains that scammers purposely write their scam calls and emails so ridiculously but then make them sound reasonable. This way, the only people who would actually respond are the most gullible people, who are the easiest people to scam.

Therefore, even though the likeliness of the content to be true in such situations would be very low, there are still few that would get tricked by the presentation of the information and would end up believing it anyway.

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Diving further into the presentation of information, we will now look into the case study of Ana Montes, displayed beautifully in Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers.*

Ana Montes was a DIA agent that was convicted of being a Cuban spy. However, she was actually only convicted five years after the suspicion first came about. Why is this? Because not only was she able to fool all her interrogators into thinking she was innocent, but she also had the likeliness of truth on her side.

She had a brother and a sister who were both in the FBI and worked on exposing Cuban spies and threats, she had a boyfriend who worked at the Pentagon whose job was Latin American Intelligence, his job was to go up against spies like her.

With all her family connections around her, there was just no way that anyone would suspect her of being the spy. It was a perfect cover, and the best part was that nobody, not the brother, sister, or boyfriend, saw it coming. In fact, when she was arrested, people were crying out in disbelief.

With all this in her pocket, all she had to do was sit and smile through the interrogations and she’d be all good. It is unknown where her mistake occurred that ultimately had her arrested five years later, but even with that, she evaded the U.S. Government and successfully spilt classified secrets to the Cubans, all because of the natural bias of likeliness of truth.

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Defaulting to Truth

Secondly, we need to process our data while trying our best not to default to the truth. Defaulting to truth isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just that it can be misleading sometimes.

So what is defaulting to truth?

It’s similar to the likeliness of truth except that this form of misconception is from the content/evidence, whereas the misconception in the likeliness of truth is from the presentation of information.

Earlier, I said that most pieces of information are more or less straightforward, and while this is true, there are some cases of grey, where the information presented by one may not be what it seems, and in reality, another set of information presented by various others may override your existing information set.

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Facts are words, but are words facts? Is it really the case that the more content you have about a topic, the more likely it is to be true? Simply, no. Because the 759-page document you have about flying pigs may just be 759 pages of lies, whereas a 6 line article about why pigs don’t fly may be perfectly factual, thus winning the debate with a smaller word count.

This is the story of Bernard Madoff.* (While I did learn about him from Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers, the perspective of the story I will use isn’t exactly the same as Gladwell’s.)

Bernard Madoff was an investor in New York with flowing white hair who had a fund that certain companies were investing in. His profits were skyrocketing, but not in a good way, and nobody could figure out why.

When he was arrested for operating the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, the portfolio manager of one of the hedge funds that invested in Madoff’s company was interviewed about his perspective on Madoff.

The manager explained that he had doubts, but he didn’t want to call Madoff out on it, on the account that he may have been wrong. Gladwell explains that this manager had doubts, but not enough doubts, which caused him to default to truth. If we go deeper than Gladwell’s explanation, we can discover why he defaulted to truth specifically.

It all comes down to basic evidence and material. Everything mentioned so far was that his profits are sketchy but big, he’s a well trusted, certified U.S. investor, and that he had flowing white hair. There simply wasn’t enough evidence to have a big enough doubt to call him out on it. Comparing it to Poker, Madoff bid a big bluff, but the manager didn’t have a strong enough hand to call him out on it.

However, the evidence displayed turned out to be big and weak, and the opposing evidence that called him a fraud was much more reliable, despite it being substantially smaller in quantity.

The person that called him out, in the end, was named Harry Markopolos and he had sent in a case proving Madoff’s guilt years before Madoff was caught, but it was never reviewed because the SEC didn’t think it was substantial enough to make a difference.

“I gift-wrapped and delivered the largest Ponzi scheme in history to them, and somehow they couldn’t be bothered to conduct a thorough and proper investigation because they were too busy on matters of higher priority. If a $50 billion Ponzi scheme doesn’t make the SEC’s priority list, then I want to know who sets their priorities.”

Malcolm Gladwell, quoting Harry Markopolos

Looks can be deceiving, and sometimes the smaller set of information turns out to be the stronger set.

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Basic Human Perspective

Finally, the easiest one to understand and relate to, basic human perspective. This area is self-explanatory. This is the part of our processing that is unique and purely unmeasurable. It is our interpretation of the information we have.

A classic example is an experiment where you put a person on either end of a certain number and have them tell you what the number is. One end will identify it as a ‘6’, and the other end will identify it as a ‘9’. It’s about the perspective that you view certain pieces of information.

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A good case study about this would be the Chamberlain-Hitler incident.*

It’s 1938, and the world is on the brink of war. The leader of the Allied powers, the UK, had just changed its leader, to Neville Chamberlain. He hoped that he could bring the war to its end before it had even started, and he’d be seen as a hero if he succeeded.

With this in mind, he organized many meet & greet sessions with the Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler. They met multiple times and negotiated peace and freedom to all people around the world.

While Chamberlain thought that his dreams were coming true, Hitler also thought that his dreams were coming true, his enemy wanted to sue for peace before he had even started!

Winston Churchill even described Chamberlain’s visits to Hitler as “the stupidest thing that has ever been done”. However, Churchill’s judgement against Chamberlain’s isn’t exactly fair.

Churchill got the advantage that he was looking upon Chamberlain’s actions with Hitler and learning from it, meanwhile, Chamberlain had to experience it all on his own, and Churchill could only call Chamberlain’s tactics stupid because he’d already seen it fail, at the moment perhaps his verdict might have been different.

Going back to Chamberlain, he was becoming friendlier with Hitler by the second, he was falling under Hitler’s spell. Hitler managed to convince him that things would turn out fine and that no war would happen, which of course is not what happened.

Both Chamberlain’s judgement of Hitler and Churchill’s judgement of Chamberlain fall under this category of perspective and human instinct. We see one side of the picture and that side is what shapes our views. However, by opening up more sides we can get a better sense of the whole situation.

This is exactly how court cases go, you get both sides of the story, and then you make a verdict based on which case is more likely by content, and more likely by presentation (which ties it back to everything above).

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Conclusion

Based on everything above, how do we filter real information from fake information? Three key aspects: Content, presentation and interpretation. If a piece of information passes all three filters, then it is most probably true.

Filtering information and trusting certain data is especially important right now with the CoViD-19 virus and it is crucial that we listen to the right instructions and practice the right protocols. Staying safe and containing the virus is the #1 priority, you decide whether to trust that or not.

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* Many pieces of evidence, analysis and references are either based on or tied to Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know. All credits to Gladwell for those particular case studies marked with a star.

^ For those who have read the book Talking to Strangers, the likeliness of Truth is not an area of focus, I have split his section on ‘Defaulting to Truth’ and added deeper analysis to both subsections to show that content and presentation are two independent topics.