What is ground truth anyway?

From facts to fake-news how do we build real knowledge and overcome our own biases?

Phases of Understanding : image by author

Viruses, climate change, vaccines, trade policy, we now live in an environment where virtually any position and knowledge will be challenged, even when most experts agree. Unfortunately getting people to agree on who the experts are is just as hard as agreeing on whatever it is they might be experts about. Yet we must use experts or we will fail in cases where specialized knowledge is truly needed. We wouldn’t ask just anyone to do life-critical surgery or to fix our cars — those require experts. The same holds true in many other areas. Yet in this modern age, it seems anyone with an opinion can be heard even when specialists already know authoritative answers. This essay represents a journey from raw observations all the way to having skill in area. In essence how do we know what we know?

Settled Knowledge or Just Bias?

It’s easy to dismiss people who just don’t “get the facts”. But a quick glance at even deeply accepted scientific knowledge shows just how hard reaching solid definitive knowledge really is. How can we settle on something that’s close to the “truth”?

Here are just a few ways this issue of seemingly settled “knowledge”, or perhaps even bias, might be viewed:

Crowd Wisdom — If we take a large poll and examine questions for which there is a large majority answer have we reached an accurate authoritative result? Is there really wisdom in crowds? Does consensus necessarily point to bonafide knowledge if only it could be harnessed?
Working Knowledge Already — Sometimes we have a way of solving a specific problem already. Since we have a working “model” it must be correct, right? What about better ways to improve our solution? What if our solution turns out to be limited to just a few variations of the problem we thought it generally solved?
How do you pick competent and trustworthy Experts? The problem of being laymen is how do you pick a competent expert? Even if the expert is competent, how do you know they are operating in your best interest?
Wisdom of the Ancients — Sometimes there is a belief that is handed down that is so strong we don’t accept clear evidence to update or overrule that belief
Echo Chamber — Sometimes a belief is so strong that we only accept information that confirms our previously held positions. Even more so we only then accept as valid, sources of information that confirm our existing positions. Fox News and CNN show this on a daily basis where both networks provide colored coverage of the news which appeals to a certain relatively set audience.
Golden Source — Sometimes regardless of our knowledge or skill there is a certain source or person who if we hear information from we treat it as a nearly irrefutable fact. At first it seems like a variation of “We only hear what we want” but it’s not. From Golden sources we allow ourselves to hear “real” information — even something which doesn’t agree with our native thought process — but we don’t question when this trusted source may fail us.

In these areas we must push ourselves to look at new information and find reliable ways of discarding new but faulty information.

Here is a take on some of the ways that bias holds up our beliefs and might prevent us from accepting new ideas.

Wisdom of Crowds

There is a school of thought that if we can harness the knowledge of many people then we can achieve better results or at least protect ourselves from decisions made from hasty or incomplete knowledge. However, there are a couple issues here. The first is that new knowledge — perhaps just discovered by a single individual or small team — will not be known or by members of the public. It is important that the crowd be willing to accept this new knowledge or the majority will reject it — vote it out if you will. I like to think about Einstein and relativity here. His insight was so alien, so different, that it took years for people to truly grasp that his insights were in fact correct.

An incredible example of the limitations of crowds is a chess game that occurred in 1999 between Garry Kasparov and the rest of the world. In this game, a single person — played a chess game between 4 world-class masters who each suggested move ideas which were then voted on by a large online community. The masters and the community of voters were also permitted to use whatever computer analysis they wished and this was often reflected in the community’s discussion about which moves to adopt. Yet despite this mass collaboration, Mr. Kasparov won. How is it that the community, even aided by computer analysis, could lose to a single person?

We know how “it” works already

For those in scientific and engineering domains there is a bias to take well working techniques and models and treat them as gospel. This is especially true when these models work very well for designing new products and processes. The following anecdote of history shows that we should always be watchful to gaps in our models — even when they work well.

While nearly everyone accepts the sun centered solar system model and ridicules the old geocentric (earth centered) view of the solar system now, this wasn’t always so. For nearly a thousand years, most people in western Europe accepted that the Earth was the center of the known universe. At that time there were just 7 known planets of the solar system along with the stars. It’s convenient to think that this was a naive view of overly religious non-scientific people limited to the knowledge of that early time. However the Ptolemaic model actually worked. It predicted — correctly — lunar and planetary events with stunning accuracy with its complicated “epicycle” models. To challenge this model it would take new knowledge and observations that no amount of model wrangling could fix — and this only came with Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and better telescopes in the 1600s. Even today we have models that may work well but have stunning limitations — so we must always be vigilant when we’re up against the limits of our models.

Another example is the difference between the laws of motion as formulated by Issac Newton and the laws of relativity and later quantum mechanics as formulated by Albert Einstein and others. Newton’s laws work perfectly in the everyday life experience that we have. When you lean against a table, accelerate a car, throw a ball — all these interactions perfectly obey the laws as formulated by Newton. For nearly three hundred years Newton’s laws perfectly explained every possible interaction between objects that both people and scientists could imagine or test.

However as electricity and magnetism became better understood it became clear that at certain scales Newton’s laws just didn’t match the reality of scientific observation. To explain light, electromagnetic fields, and gravity new understandings about the interaction of energy and matter were needed. This gave birth to quantum mechanics and relativity respectively.

Quantum mechanics demonstrated that interactions between subatomic particles are probabilistic — in other words when two particles interact the same way the same result doesn’t always occur. This is something completely alien to Newton’s laws where every action has a precisely determined result. This so troubled Einstein that he uttered the quote (paraphrased) “God doesn’t place dice with the universe!”. Yet quantum mechanics has stood the test of time precisely because a large number of experiments by a vast scientific community have established that the interactions are indeed probabilistic in nature even though that runs counter to our everyday experience.

Ironically both Newton and Einstein are correct. It is a matter of scale — at the atomic particle level trillions of times smaller than we can see, the probabilistic nature of the universe is revealed. However when we look at something the size of a baseball or a car then the effects of those tiny interactions are too small to be measured and so we converge on Newton’s solutions.

Einstein’s relativity theory worked at very large scales. At the size of planets and solar systems we see the stretching of time and space — requiring tweaking to Newton’s laws to explain things accurately — and yet these adjustments also aren’t something we can’t see on an everyday basis. One simply can’t hold a planet in one’s hand….

So here we have models that work but as more information becomes available our model needs to be updated, sometimes in the most unintuitive ways, and as this number of ways grows the knowledge to even understand all the adjustment becomes laborious to obtain and accessible to a smaller audience.

Curse of the Laymen

We go to experts when we don’t have the insight and skill to solve a particular problem. In fact that is why we have experts in the first place. Doctors, Lawyers, Farmers, Engineers — you name it — having deeply trained skills which make a big difference. The thing that makes an expert an expert is that when examining a problem (with the same information as a layman) an expert can see and understand much more about what is actually happening. Usually they can do this faster and with better accuracy. It is the very essence of why we seek out experts for our health, cars, and other specialized matters. However in this day and age of self-help books, websites, and YouTube videos we have lots of experts showing us how the experts “do it”. However seeing how an expert does their thing doesn’t necessarily convey to us the expert’s true skill. This may seem obvious in something like surgery but we’re all surprisingly quick to dismiss experts in more common areas. This sentiment can be summed up like this:

Everyone can cook but not everyone is a chef.

In other words, knowing the basics about something is not the same as mastery of the subject.

In no arena is this more clear than in economics where laymen become policy makers without any training. Worse yet endless amounts of media punditry obscure what little true knowledge about economic planning and thought should happen at a national level. However there are people really trained to look at trade policy and monetary supply. They might not always get it right just like a surgeon might miss something, but trusting them might still be better than having untrained politicians make monetary and trade policy.

A problem with being a layman is how to pick an expert to solve your problem? By definition the layman lacks the exact knowledge needed to make an accurate judgement. This is why people fear car mechanics — we know there are good ones and bad ones are out there — but which ones? One way to deal with being a layman is to trust others — perhaps a crowd. Indeed review sites like Yelp do just that — presumably aggregating numerous real experiences to a specific service. This might work well for restaurant reviews but probably not so well for doctors. After all, how do people know if the reason they don’t feel better after visiting a specific doctor was something that doctor could have actually fixed or something inherent in their condition that isn’t fixable? Even if we can find a competent expert we still need assurance they are acting in our best interest and not taking advantage of us. Building trust is a difficult issue.

We see this issue of not trusting experts come up in several other contexts now — vaccines and anti-vaccers, climate change, monetary policy. How should the public pick experts and even when we find competent ones how do we assure their alignment with our best interest? Perhaps just as challenging is that when the experts correctly pick the right course of action -but it’s outside of our experience- are we willing to defer to them?

Wisdom of the Ancients

One of the tried true things to try when things aren’t going well is to look at what worked before and use that in the current situation. The pluses to this approach are that it gives consistency and a playbook by which to operate that all can see. Laws work this way all the time. For example the 1st amendment was designed to give citizens free speech and rights of public gathering. This wasn’t so that citizens could say whatever they wanted — it was meant to provide a rigorous mechanism so that citizens could audit the government. However recent times have shown that free speech in electronic form has consequences far beyond what the original framers intended. How do we interpret this ideal when dealing with modern technology?

There are many themes of this with religious contexts as well. Some ancient knowledge is deemed supreme — rightly or wrongly — and it’s difficult to adopt new information that would be in conflict with this old way of doing things.

Echo Chamber

Sometimes we have a belief that is so strong we only accept views that support it. In this case we often look for supportive sources — in the media, specific acquaintances and only pay attention to ideas which already agree with our own. It’s often hard to see gaps in our understanding until we are rudely confronted with another view that has some hard truth to it.

To quote Mike Tyson:

“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”.

So too with ideas and views that aren’t challenged. Ignorance really is bliss and its why top scientific publications require peer review. It’s the rigor of seeing whether ideas can stand up to scrutiny.

Golden Source

Related to the “Echo Chamber” is the idea of a Golden Source. There are certain people, certain institutions in our life that if we hear an idea from that source we accept it but if we hear the same idea or information from another source we reject it. I write this during the COVID19 pandemic of 2020. For many on the right side of the political spectrum Donald Trump or Fox news represent an acceptable place to hear new ideas. For many on the left side, it is CNN, Washington Post or even Johns Hopkins university are treated as irrefutable sources. Its easy to call out Trump’s inconsistencies but many might be stunned to find gaps in the Johns Hopkins data as discussed here and here.

Let us be Watchful

In the age of the internet, perhaps the most important skill we must develop is how to integrate new information so that we can build as high a quality understanding of our world as possible. We all have limited time so we can’t spend all of our time researching every piece of news…

So here are a few thoughts towards framing our way of seeing the world a little more clearly:

Always be vigilant if new information “makes sense”. If a news article or report goes against our understanding it’s our job to go find some other sources to see which might be a better view — our currently held view or the new view.
Sometimes a given narrative is one-sided — Is there a way to look for bias? Perhaps if re-framed from another or opposing view does the information still seem true? If true in both contexts then it may stand up well.
Verification — We must constantly look to see if we can find other trusted sources that shed new light on something. Any information which has some shred of ground truth is almost always in one of two categories

Established — something that lots of people have been able to verify and we can cite those sources and explanations
New — an event has happened and as a result the information around it is uncertain and changing. When this happens, unless that information is literally life altering, perhaps it is best to wait for more information to accumulate across several preferably trusted channels.

Observations ⇒ Facts ⇒ Knowledge ⇒ Skill

Interestingly information slowly assembles in a continuum from observations to skill. Observations, Facts, Knowledge, and Skill represent a strength of understanding about a specific topic. Here is a rundown:

Observations — An observation is a description of something that has happened, from a specific point of view. When news events are breaking, we get a blast of video snippets, pictures, or eye witness testimonies. These are all just pieces of a puzzle. Some of those observations may be reliable and some may be suspect. Eyewitness testimony is often cited as unreliable but in the absence of better quality information is often treated with more weight than might be wise.
Facts — A fact is a piece of information which holds up to scrutiny and is, generally speaking, verifiable. Good facts should be testable and unbiased.
Knowledge — Knowledge is the aggregation of facts into a working model. Once I know enough about a car I can explain what it is and how it is used to anyone. Even a child can explain how a car works and what it does even if they can’t drive it.
Skill — A skill means the aggregation of knowledge to the point that someone can use that knowledge to achieve repeatable reliable results. For example many people can describe what a car is, how it works, and what its for. However a subset of people have a skill — how to drive a car — which can then be put into action.

Perhaps for any issue we feel passionately about we should think where our personal knowledge is on the continuum from Observations to Facts to Knowledge to Skill.

Assertions and Opinions

As a people exposed to ideas from both news and acquaintances we must be good at telling apart assertions and opinions from observations, facts, knowledge and skill. When someone says something they are making an assertion. It may be true or may not be true. Even if it is not true that doesn’t mean the person was necessarily expressing ill will. It could be they are just misinformed or that a newer model (like the scientific discussion earlier) hasn’t revealed itself yet. It’s on us to see if their assertions hold up to scrutiny — or we may find ourselves swayed by inaccurate information.

Opinions are different. Opinions are the expression of someone’s belief in a particular subject. When should we trust an opinion?

“Everyone is entitled to opinions but no one is entitled to their own facts”

This is a famous quote from late US senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. While everyone can state whatever they wish we are not obligated to give opinions with little to no basis in fact our blessing or time. It’s our duty to see if those opinions hold up or we become slaves to wild allegations and fantasies often to our own detriment and cause pain to others.

Final Thoughts

It is tough to force ourselves to be more vigilant and to learn how to learn better. We must start to set higher standards for picking our experts and validating statements and facts. We must be tuned to our biases and accept new information, not cautiously but aggressively, with an aim to making sure we have a good grip on the facts and what is likely to be true. Sometimes we may find that long held beliefs need to be updated or even thrown away, just as an earth centered view of the solar system was done generations ago.