Trump, Fake News and That Dress

In many ways, Donald Trump has done the world a favour.

Let me start by discussing dresses. A few years ago, an infamous photo began circulating the internet. It was of a dress, but the colour of the dress was a matter of some debate. Some thought it was blue and black. Others thought it was white and gold. What was sensational was that we our found ourselves disagreeing on this with the person next to us while we both looked at the same photo.

We all think that the one thing we can rely on is the evidence of our own senses but suddenly we were confronted with the idea that what we see is not what others see. Our minds were blown.

Our minds were blown again when, last year, a humble multi-billionaire from New York decided to run for the Whitehouse. We all laughed and turned to our friends and said - ‘well, it’s obvious how this is going to turn out, isn’t it.’ What was amazing was that, a year later, we all realised that ‘obvious’ result of his campaign was not the same ‘obvious’ result for everybody. Some of us had been seeing him as blue and black, others had been seeing him as white and gold.

When the person next to you disagrees with you on something that seems obvious, it is very easy to dismiss them as an idiot. After all, what fool can’t tell what colour something is. This is a dangerous approach. Once you start dividing the world into geniuses who understand the truth and idiots who disagree with you, it’s very difficult not to find support for your own opinions. You could be wrong, after all, but right minded individuals agree with you and the only counter-arguments you can find come from those who are biased, misguided or muddle headed, and therefore not worth the scientific paper they’re written on.

Much has been made of the echo chamber – our tendency to listen to those we agree with and ignore the views of those that we do not.

The insidious side of the echo chamber is that knowledge of its existence allows others to challenge the very validity of the things we believe in. Cries of fake news abound, and the weak minded can be convinced to disbelieve everything they previously thought to be irrefutable. Meanwhile the strong-minded sit in their ivory tower, utterly convinced of their own correctness and unwilling to change their minds simply on the basis of ‘evidence’ or ‘facts’.

When the debate on the dress was raging, the thing that upset most people was this sudden lack of solid knowledge of the world. If you couldn’t believe the evidence of your own eyes, what could you rely on.

At the company I was working at, we bought the dress in question. It was blue and black. Not blue and black sometimes, if you looked at in the right light. Blue and black always and for everyone. It turned out that, despite the photo being incredibly subjective, the underlying reality was absolute.

Sometimes, it is easy to get caught up in the idea that there is no solution. That the world is a confusing place, and reality is increasingly what we make of it. In truth, reality is only subjective when seen through a single filter. When looking at just an ambiguous photo, the underlying truth is evasive because we have no further information to base our conclusions on.

But, by highlighting fake news, by making us think about what is true and not true, Donald Trump has given us the incentive to cut our way through. Even in a world full of lies and fake news, there is always an objective truth out there to be found. We just need to avoid thinking it's possible to spot that truth from only a single source. The more we listen, compare and contrast, the more we can filter out the fake, untrue and inconsistent and replace uncertainty with data.

The truth is out there. Sometimes you just have to listen.