The future of truth
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Welcome to the LSE Events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences. I'm glad to see that 33 degrees didn't

preclude you to be here today. It's wonderful to see so many of you and welcome to the LSE's panel, The Future of Truth, which forms part of the LSE Festival Visions of the Future, taking part this week and this is the final day of very interesting events. My name is Dr. Paola Romero and I am a guest teacher of

of the Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the LSE. I'm pleased to be here to welcome our speakers for today and to introduce them to both the people in the audience, but also our online audience.

I will start by introducing Jason McKinsey Alexander. He's a professor of the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the LSE. Jason's research interests include evolutionary game theory, the philosophy of social science and the philosophy of society.

His most recent book, The Open Society as an Enemy, a critique of how free societies turned against themselves, was published by the LSE Press in 2024. It's open access and Jason will be kindly signing copies at the end of this event.

Charlie Beckett is Professor of Practice in the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE and the founding director of POLIS, LSE's think tank for research and debate around international journalism and society. And he was lead commissioner for the LSE Truth, Trust and Technology Commission.

One of his publications, particularly relevant for our panel today, is titled Wikileaks, News in the Networked Era from 2012. Finally, but not least, I have the pleasure to introduce Hardeep Matharu, who is the editor-in-chief of Byline Times, an independent investigative news site and monthly print newspaper covering what the papers don't say. So I advise you to have a look.

She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a John Schofield Trust Senior Fellow. Welcome all. Today we'll be exploring the question, how do we defend and promote knowledge, evidence and informed debate in a world where trust in traditional media has been eroded and where the line between fact and fiction has been blurred?

For those in social media, the hashtag for this event is hashtag LSC Festival. So I would like you to put your phones in silent, please. This event is being recorded and hopefully turned into a podcast. There will be a chance for you to put questions at the end. Please raise your hand and please present yourself, your name and affiliation if you want. And for the online audience, there will also be an opportunity for Q&A.

And that is my very long spiel. So let's get going. I wanted to open the conversation today with an open question to all of our speakers. And I wanted to start with John Stuart Mill's view on truth and falsity. And Mill thought that we should be free to believe the wrong thing. And I find that thought very interesting.

And according to Mill, we learn by confronting errors and by learning to spot misinformation. And we should be free to sort of shop around in the market of ideas. So my question to kick off the discussion is, do you think that this is a good way of thinking about our age, particularly given the amount of information that is out there in the market of ideas? Yes.

Whoever wants to take the lead. Shall I kick off? I'll kick off. I'm next to you. Yeah, I like the Mill quote a lot because, of course, you know, we all have our own truths. And as a journalist, I don't, or as an academic, perhaps, I don't, I want to be able to have my own opinions. But I've been on a rather strange journey on this one, a rather kind of contradictory journey, if you like, which is that

I used to be a journalist and I worked at places like the BBC where they do care a lot about trying to be evidence-based and balanced and reflect different perspectives and think critically, all those nice things. And indeed, you know, here at the LSE, we are very much about trying desperately to find real evidence for the causes of things rather than just opining. And

In 2016, there was a moment when it wasn't quite a Damascene conversion, but you remember in 2016, there was an election in America and this weird guy with kind of ginger hair and stuff and bizarre views got elected. And of course, that could never happen again. But at the time, I remember being in America and I was at a conference of lots of liberal journalists and

There was a presentation by a fantastic researcher called Jonathan Albright, and he was one of the first people to map so-called fake news, the misinformation. You've probably seen those wonderful kind of diagrams that look like maps of the universe with the fake news spreading from different little nodules through Facebook and across other platforms and so on. And the American liberal journalists thought this was a revelation because, of course,

They were in crisis. They had called the election wrong. They hadn't understood why people would vote for somebody like Donald Trump. And indeed, their profession, you know, the idea of, you know, the fourth estate was being challenged profoundly by this happening. So they thought this must be the reason why this is all happening. It's all this misinformation. No one believes in the truth anymore. And that's why, as you mentioned earlier,

You know, I said we should, the LSE should, you know, explore this crisis of information. And we called it the Truth, Trust and Technology Commission because it was partly looking at the platforms and how they spread it. But the first two words were kind of there with kind of English irony. The idea was whenever you say the words truth or trust, and Jason knows more about this than I do, if you say those words at the LSE, people immediately say, you can't use those words. What do you mean by those words?

but we did and it was it was interesting report but it it

sowed seeds of doubt for me. And I've now gone almost fully the other way, which I don't really think there is something called misinformation. I'm certainly still somebody who believes in evidence and good arguments based on facts and so on. But I think that there's been a profound moral panic, basically, on the part of people like me, you know, nice liberal academics or journalists who think

talk about when somebody disagrees with them, they say, well, they don't know the truth. And I think there's a weird paradox going on there. Thank you, Charlie. Hardeeb or Jason?

Oh, sure. So I think I would disagree a bit with what Charlie just said. And so in thinking about the Mill quote and people's right to make mistakes and to believe things, even if they are false or, say, not based on evidence, I think that there's actually something to be quite worried about that idea from Mill.

And the reason for that is when people believe things which are mistaken, insufficiently evidenced and so on, those beliefs aren't inert. Those beliefs often entail actions that people will take and will cause people to do things or to act in ways in society to promote certain causes that can create bad outcomes for other people. And so...

opinions which are misinformed or beliefs which are not kind of grounded in the facts or the truth actually can have great negative social consequences. And I worry that the time that we're living in right now is a time that actually encourages people to have beliefs which are

not necessarily grounded in fact. Why is that? Well, if you think about what beliefs do, quite often beliefs serve as signifiers of the group that people belong to. And those beliefs with this social signaling function can cause people to believe things which may not be grounded in evidence simply because that is an indicator of the group of which they're a part.

I think it's interesting that when you look in the U.S. context, something like 25 to 30 percent of Republicans believe some or all of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Now, you have to ask yourself, why might that be? And so...

Given this, I think that we have to think about the social consequences of beliefs that are insufficiently grounded in the facts. Think about why they are so kind of useful from a social point of view to persist and what we might try to do as a society in order to combat them. Absolutely.

Yeah, I mean, I think there is something to be concerned about in terms of what is just happening around us in terms of the information space and how we consume what's happening around us and view that. But I think, I mean, there's a difference between information, factuality, reality and the truth. I don't think these things are interchangeable. I think they mean different things. And recently, sort of in my journalistic work, I've

beginning to think about the truth, which is Charlie says, I mean, everyone has their own truth. You're my, my truth. You have your truth. You have your truth.

If there ever was this sort of philosophical notion of the truth that we could agree on, that certainly isn't the case now. And I think things like social media and avenues in which people can express their beliefs in a social context as well has increased that notion that the truth is something we're carrying around within us and our heads and our hearts. And that is perhaps different from reality.

which is perhaps, you know, the consequences of what happens on the ground as a result of certain decisions. And obviously those take place in a social and political context. And it's been really striking to me that just in my discussions with people with regards to, for example, what's happening with Donald Trump in America, some put forward the argument, well, you know, as soon as reality really hits America,

enough people who voted for him will not want to vote for him again and it's all sort of going to get a lot better. And they sort of cite Brexit here and Liz Truss's mini-budget and sort of, you know, when it really comes to it and people see the chaos and the destruction that's caused, they'll suddenly see the light. And I think even that...

It has to be questioned because I think there's a difference between things that people are aware of abstractly that are happening in the society around them and things that affect them personally, actually affect them personally. But this notion of the truth and reality, I think, is different. And I think in some ways what I really always think is missing in these conversations is that, you know, in a way, the ultimate reality is complexity.

complexity is how life works. I mean, it's just a very small example of this. I mean, what do I mean by complexity? That contradictory thoughts and feelings and ideas can be held by one person, one organisation. You know, it's all part of it. And in 2017, so a year after Brexit happened or the EU referendum happened,

I wrote about the story of my parents, who were immigrants, Indian Sikh Punjabi immigrants. My father was from British Kenya. He grew up under the empire. And my mother was born and brought up in India. And both of them migrated here about 40, 45, 50 years ago. And me and my siblings were born here. And they voted for Brexit. And I really explored this in my journalistic writing. And a lot of people found it

They couldn't believe that immigrants had voted against their own interests and voted for Brexit, which was a campaign heavily driven by immigration.

And I really explored this and I thought it's more complex than that. Identity is more complex than that. We are complex people who can have contradictory ideas. And for my parents, it was very contradictory. I mean, they're almost, as people say about migrants, they're more British than the British and felt, well, we're British. Why are other people from Europe coming here? But at the same time, they felt very in touch with their identity identity.

as Indian immigrants, and especially sort of the imperial implications of Britain having been in their countries and, you know, not always behaving questionably and then feeling, well, the sort of allegiance, if there is one, that Britain should have should be with people from our countries, from the Commonwealth. So,

There's a host of things. I mean, they were illogical. They were sort of psychologically driven, emotionally driven. You know, there was a lot going on when I actually spoke to my parents as to why they wanted to vote this way. But what I'm trying to get at is I was so struck by so many people that were so surprised by that.

Because for me, I was like, yeah, of course, it's really contradictory and complex. And most of it's unconscious. They don't even walk around thinking this is why we want to vote for Brexit or it's because of the empire or because we don't feel like immigrants, but then we still feel like immigrants and second class citizens. You know, what I'm trying to get at is...

Truth and reality are different things and reality is all about complexity. And what concerns me about the era that we are in is we have closed the space for complexity and nuance and we are all becoming narrower and more simplified because of it and that has consequences.

That's excellent. And I think that's something that you have touched upon, but the other panelists as well, is this connection between truth and rationality, truth and reason, whether it's irrational to hold certain beliefs. It seems to me that in the, at least in the realm of politics, is rationality irrational?

is politics the realm for rational belief or is it the realm for beliefs that are connected to what Jason was saying about membership, about emotions, about community? What are we aiming at when we're saying, I want to hold, I want to make sure that my beliefs are

are trustworthy, evidence-based, rational? Are we even capable of doing that? Or are we idealized in a kind of virtuoso agent? But that's really in the abstract. We are not like that. I think it's actually undesirable. I think rational politics is undesirable.

Because if without emotions and ideals and even fantasies and imagination, you wouldn't have any progress without the feeling of compassion. Yeah.

You know, why do I want a bigger health service? Why do I want better children's services? It's not just because I think it's a good thing rationally for society. It's because I care a lot about it. Perhaps I'm feeling guilty. You know, it's an emotional response and it's about my identity and about the way I was brought up and so on. So, you know, we would not have, for example, women wouldn't have the vote if we were rational because, you know, back in the early 20th century, it was seen as irrational and against all the evidence that

to trust women with the vote. So if we'd acted rationally, we'd never have had progress at all. So I think there is a kind... And I think it's actually a...

I slightly disagree with you about the complexity thing. I think we're actually over, it's over complex in the sense one of the burgeoning good stories in journalism is the rise of data journalism. It's unbelievable how much better the news industry has got at using data to tell incredible stories, often based on reality, which I think is a great distinction. There's reality rather than the truth.

And I think that that actually shows people things are more complicated. And if you want to deal with them, you've got to have both, you know, the rationale of good data interpretation. But you've also got to have that emotional commitment to want to make change and to disagree with people. I think that, you know, politics without conflict wasn't

I'm going to get the quote wrong, but, you know, William Blake, who said that there is no progress without opposites. You know, we shouldn't be frightened of that. And I think there's a danger with all this moral panic about misinformation that we're actually going to get in the way of more politics, real politics. Jason?

Right. So just one thought to perhaps provide a slight counterbalance to what Charlie just said. So I completely agree that there is a very important role for emotion and personal affect to play in politics.

But I think that there is a real danger that happens if we remove entirely space for rationality and reason and politics. And let me give two examples. The first has to do with the nature of the Brexit referendum. And I'm not actually being a Remainer or a Brexiteer here. But what I want to just point out is the way in which the referendum worked.

The question that people were asked to vote on was whether or not the UK should stay in the European Union or to leave. Now, the thing that's difficult about that question is that staying in the European Union was the status quo. That was a fact that everyone knew. But when it came to leaving the European Union, there wasn't actually a concrete alternative.

Basically, every person was able to treat that question as a blank slate upon which they could project whatever idealized understanding that they had about the world that was to come. And so when people voted to say, yes, we should leave the European Union, what was that actually a vote in favor of?

You could have had 20 million people voting yes on that question, each of whom had 20 million different idealizations for what world should have been realized by that. A second example. What's wrong with that? Because you don't actually have a concrete policy manifestation that you're supposed to see realized. And you don't know whether or not the 20 million idealizations that people have are actually mutually consistent in a way that could actually be carried out in action.

A second example would be Donald Trump's absolute genius in running for office on the slogan "Make America Great Again." If you give a speech and you say, "I'm going to make America great again," to an audience of 50,000 people and they all cheer, what are they actually agreeing upon? It's unclear because each person could have their own conceptual understanding of what it means to make America great again.

So in my book, I call these types of concepts Rorschach concepts because like the Rorschach test, it's essentially the meaning is a projection by people onto what is being talked about. If we remove rationality from politics entirely or even to a large extent, we create cases where we can cultivate the apparent illusion of agreement where people actually are on very different places in policy space. It's really interesting about

and psychological projection, I think there's huge amounts of that that is going on in politics today, I would say. I think when people feel that they don't have other sufficient outlets to express what they feel is going wrong about their lives or what they perceive is at fault around them, they find the more toxic versions of that finds expression. And I think a lot of that's happening with the sort of pop,

populism of today, Donald Trump, perhaps Brexit, you know, it's like there's nowhere else to channel why we feel things are going wrong and no one's listening to us. And so when we are asked to vote once every four years or in a referendum, we're going to go with something that comes from here and it is a projection. But I mean, it's a really good question, isn't it? I

I mean, it's interesting. I mean, this whole discussion about the truth and how do we hang on to it, I think has to be situated within a wider context.

actually, which is that society has rapidly changed in the last 30 to 40 years. I mean, social media is one thing, you know, there's an information revolution, but it's not just that. It's how people work, where they work, you know, there's a lack of secure housing, jobs, and

community isn't what it was. You know, that now means different things to different people. People's local areas don't provide those collective spaces. You know, I think how people form their personal and social identities has shifted. And I think into that space, technology and social media has come along and really, in some ways, provided huge amounts of opportunity for people in that regard, but also

matters. And I guess that this shift is a big thing.

And I'm not an expert on it. I'm not an academic. I haven't studied it sociologically. But Zygmunt Bauman called it liquid modernity. So we're all sort of in this society, which is rapidly changing around us. Even the use of smartphones. I mean, the extent to which we do that now, even compared to 10 years ago, absolutely incredible. And it's kind of the revolution no one really voted for, right? It just arrived. But nowhere do I see...

Well, very rarely in our politics or in our journalism do I feel that that is even talked about. That, you know, of course people are going to be a bit, you know, all over the place and feel like their lives are dissatisfying or that the pillars that they structured their lives by and got their community and identity from, they've all shifted and they don't even know why. I think all of those are valid concerns. I don't think politics and journalism speaks to them necessarily.

in large part. And then the question becomes, well, if people need a more visceral, emotional, psychological expression of that and need to have that reflected around them in the messaging that they're hearing from journalists, traditional journalists or from politicians, then surely those professions themselves need to look at themselves and ask how they can shift.

I would say. And I think politics is, I mean, there's always the cliche about MPs are far removed from their constituents. They don't live the same lives. But I think there is another type of alienation, which is it's a system that sort of operates up here, as is sort of established journalism. It operates up here and life is like here. And I'm not, I think we always need to question for

What do people think is relevant about those systems to their lives day to day? And those day to day lives are a mix of concerns about, you know, how am I going to pay my rent? What do I do in terms of progressing my career? What are the opportunities? Why do I feel so alone every day? Why is my only connection through social media? It's a whole practical questions and big questions, but nowhere is this being recognized. And so once every four years when people are asked to vote,

Viscerally, they're like, let's go for that person who's going to spice things up a bit. So, Hardy, you've anticipated a question I had prepared for you. And it seems to me, from what you're saying, that journalism should be

aimed or tackling these kinds of problems, when you talked about reality, you know, reality, the stuff out there, people, job insecurity, economic insecurity, alienation. Do you think that that's what journalism in today's world should be about? Let's call them maybe social problems, or at the same time, journalism should also be worried about objective truth, if those

Two things are different, they say social problems, social expectations and something like objective truth. How do you see what you do? I critique. I mean, not personally always what I do. I'm always thinking about what I do. I critique the industry in which I'm a part of. I work in the independent media sector and help to set up an independent platform for the reason because I felt that there were certain things

structural issues within the established press, which do remain, which no one in the media wants to talk about, which I find bizarre. So you're a reflection of your own worries in a way. Yeah, like I question. I think we should be questioning. But I think Charlie made a good point that there is...

Like fantastic journalism out there, whether that's through data, through investigative sources, you know, that is out there. But how does that resonate with people? You know, how does that get to the people it needs to reach? I mean, I don't know how you go beyond the silos that we're all in. You know, the people who want factual, objective information will reach.

seek out those sources. But also, I think it's about, I mean, there's a lot of journalism out there as well, that's all about telling people what to think, you know, the tabloid press, it's all about telling people this who should vote for and Nigel Farage was going to win the next election already four years to go. And, you know, there's a lot of that. But what about somewhere in between where you have that rigorous, sort of factual, you

and investigative underpinning, but actually make it resonate with people. You know, we hear a lot about the economy and economic growths.

what does that mean for people and their lives? Keir Starmer talks about an island of strangers, and he's tapping into an alienation, which I'm not sure he actually was referring to. It was a speech about immigration, but there is a lot of alienation out there. And there are practical ways you can address that in people's lives. But let's at least recognize that there are some of these problems. So I think it has to be a mix. But I think journalism and politics needs to

look at how it can be more human. I really do. Thank you. Jason, I would like to ask you a question of something I was reading in your book, and I got a slight pessimistic vein from some of the arguments you present there. And there you talk about this idea of epistemic closure. This is how you call it. And as I understood it, it's a situation where people develop a system of beliefs that looks quite

quite consistent and strong, but one of its features is that it's closed, it's hermetic, it doesn't accept counter evidence. So what incentives could people have to have more robust evidence-based belief if being in that

closed circle, particularly when you're a proper member of the circle and you value being a member, what incentives do you have to think otherwise? Okay. I think that that's a really fascinating question. And I think in order to answer that, I have to kind of pick up a point that Hardeep just mentioned regarding alienation and some of the other deep psychological issues that people are grappling with. So when we think about beliefs and we think about why people believe the things that we do,

We need to recognize, I think, that beliefs actually can have two different roles. Sometimes they can just be vehicles of information and mention reasons and evidence and so on. But sometimes beliefs can also take on a second function and try to address certain sociological aspects that people need to try to help them make sense of their place in the world and to make sense of the reality in which they find themselves.

And if you look at certain communities, you know, the epistemically closed communities where people believe false or dangerous things in ways that don't seem to be responsive to evidence, part of the reason those beliefs are not responsive to evidence is because it's a way that people can make sense of the world around them and to try to understand their place in it, even if the beliefs that they used to do that aren't actually factually grounded. So

If you think about some of the communities, say, like the incels, who have a set of kind of dangerous sociological beliefs about how they understand the world around them, those beliefs provide a way of people to make sense of the situation in which they find themselves. And some people who believe in, say, conspiracy theories or other things, that is a way of them for trying to make sense of what's going on around them. The reason why, say, concern for truth isn't

dominating the reasoning process is because that's not...

what is actually relevant for the person, right? Trying to make sense of the reality in which they find themselves and addressing real psychological and sociological needs is something that those kind of false misinformed beliefs is doing. And when we recognize that, we recognize that if we are concerned about false misleading beliefs, we actually need to try to tackle the underlying social problems like alienation or whatnot that people are actually grappling with and they're using these false beliefs to try to deal with.

That's very clarifying. And I want to go back, and this connects to the sense of alienation, because there was another alien in the room, and that's AI, right? We couldn't not talk about it. And I want to pick up on Charlie's point about data journalism. I found that very interesting. So I'll just pitch my AI question to you, Charlie.

Because you're also working, I understand, on this specific problem. So I read in The Guardian that the MIT Technology Review said recently that large language model chatbots, and this I quote, are notoriously bullshitters. Coming from MIT, I thought that was interesting. So the question is, how are we to trust people?

what is nowadays for our students and for ourselves as well, our most common source of knowledge and information. Yeah. If they seem to be the problem themselves.

The machines, yeah. Well, I think I have a problem with the trust word anyway, that I don't think you should. You know, as a journalist and indeed as an academic, I don't trust anybody particularly. And I hope that my students don't trust me in the sense that implicitly that they think that everything I say is unchallengeable.

And with artificial intelligence, especially with generative artificial intelligence, you know, the chat GPT one, which gives this wonderful impression of being kind of having human intelligence and so on. And of course, it doesn't. We know that it is a word prediction machine. It doesn't know anything factually. It's just very, very good at giving you answers that are useful, useful.

And, you know, incredibly useful. You know, the power of these technologies is quite extraordinary. And generally speaking, will be hugely beneficial in many interesting ways. Where there's a problem is when you treat it like a truth machine. I work with news organizations all around the world using AI.

or experimenting with it and so on. And the only times I've seen damage or mistakes made is when people misuse it, you know, in the same way that you might misuse any kind of technology, that people do trust it too much. You know, so I think that I don't think we should worry too much about AI somehow being

a vast amount of misinformation. We've already got vast amounts of questionable information out there. And in many ways, you can use the AI to counter some of that. Where I do think that there is a big question for us all is about the AI will make even more present in our lives is how do you understand why

what you are reading or seeing. You know, I think that's a useful question at any point. You know, it used to be that people would say, don't believe what you read in the papers. Don't trust journalists. And I thought that was, you know, pretty good advice back then. And I think it's similar now with, uh, with AI tools. There is a vast amount of hype, uh,

There are people on both sides, people who say it's the end of the world, it's the end of truth as we know it. I don't think it is. And I think that most people here in this room, I'm sure, have used it in some ways and found it very useful, almost uncannily useful, in a way a little bit frighteningly useful. And therefore we can see that it could have misuses as well. I think we have time for one final question from me.

And then we'll go on to you, which I think will be the most interesting part. And the final question is, it's an easy one. Is there a future for truth? Should we or can we be optimistic about its future? Or should we be at least sceptic about it?

its possibility if you accept the premise of the question, which is that there is such thing as truth, that it is valuable and that we can access it. Maybe whoever wants to pick up. And if you don't tell me if you're an optimist or a pessimist, I will have to make you vote. OK, so try to address the question, please. All right. Thank you, Paola, for that. Yeah. So I have to confess, I think I'm somewhat pessimistic about the future of truth. And the reason for that, I think, relies on a couple of different things.

So one of which is that, as I've already mentioned, is that

a lot of things that people believe can be false or based on misinformation. And those beliefs can persist because they actually have relatively few implications on their day-to-day life. The number of things that people actually have to believe that are really true are pretty small and hyper-specific local knowledge, like how do you cross the street without getting run over, right? So we can have these abstract theoretical beliefs take on these huge significance, uh,

if you like, machines for what people think in ways that truth is largely irrelevant. Coupled with that is the fact that we live in an attention economy. And so if you think about what the algorithms drive on social media and what people pay attention to,

That's also a powerful incentive for disinformation to spread because what keeps people's attention on social media is not necessarily going to be strictly correlated with things that are true or well-grounded in evidence.

And so the fact that you have this incredible profit motive that's aligned with the spread of misinformation and then the fact that some misinformation has very few implications for day-to-day life, it's going to be quite challenging to turn it around.

I think it would require a return to something like some of the Enlightenment values that people just care about truth in itself and they care about having beliefs that are founded in reason and evidence. I think it would be good if society moved more in that direction. But disclaimer, I'm speaking from a position of bias because I'm a philosopher and wouldn't I say that anyway?

We expected no less. Hardee? I'm skeptical, not cynical, in my work as a journalist. And a lot of people always say to me, God, there's no point. Everything is...

is wrong. And I say, well, let's not be cynical. We need to look at what's actually happening. I mean, it's really interesting that, yeah, I think to a large extent, there are serious things to be concerned about. I don't think in a way it is surprising the moment that we're in.

as we've been discussing, there are major things that people are grappling with in their own lives as society has shifted. And so in a way, the ultimate reality of where we find ourselves is truth has undergone a transformation in itself in terms of what it means to people and what it means to us collectively. That is where we are at.

that is perhaps not such a surprising position given how much change we have experienced politically, socially, psychologically, personally. And I think that...

If our journalists and our politicians can accept that and excavate it and help people to make sense of that experience and try to alleviate some of the rough edges of that experience and understand what people need, not just as voters or consumers or citizens, but as humans, I think that there is...

you know, a lot of potential as to how we keep going through this time of immense change. But if they continue to bury their heads in the sand and not accept that things have all changed, then I think that that will continue to give ground to

People, leaders, organizations, figures, groups, movements that come along and present quite a simplified version of things that at least people can grab onto. So yeah, I'm skeptical. I think there are a lot of problems. I don't think any of this is going to get solved anytime soon. I don't have any solutions. I think we're living through change and all we can ever do is exist in that. But we need to be helped to understand it and make sense of it because a lot of the aloneness people feel is

And it is that God, how do I live? How do I be a human and exist? No one's really talking about that except in the premises of social media. And there we go. And that's why we're here. Hi. I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy.

LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question. Like, why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or, can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for LSE IQ wherever you get your podcasts.

Now, back to the event. Charlie. Yeah. I disagree about that people aren't talking about it. I think people are talking about it all the time. In answer to your simplistic binary about optimism versus... It's already been altered. There are two more options. Yeah. I guess I put myself in the optimistic camp, if only because I think, and this is obviously...

Completely agree with your pessimistic definition. But I think pessimism can be so often nostalgic and conservative with a small C and a big C. And this is why I think that so often it's we look at the, you know, the kind of negatives or the harm of something and try and ascribe the fault to

to the wrong thing. So social media didn't create the fact that we've got a fragmented politics. It's because our class system has disintegrated over the last 30, 40 years for reasons which Hardee mentioned, things like where we work and so on. And social media, as again, Hardee did say, has sort of come into that gap.

And every time something goes wrong, we find evidence of that horrible thing online. And therefore, we make the completely illogical assumption that somehow social media has caused those things.

And I think it misunderstands, well, even just taking social media, which of course is a plural. So you can never really generalize about it. Everyone has a different social media. You know, you all behave differently. You follow different people. So to generalize about social media causing things is hugely simplistic. And for example, you will find pedophiles on social media. You'll find people spreading ghastly conspiracy theories, uh,

But you'll also find 99% of it being incredibly connected, often very positive, creating the kind of social bonds that you were saying have somehow dissipated and often related to very much to real life connectivity and real life relationships.

solidarity and relationships that people have. But nobody talks about it because it just happens. You know, it doesn't make the news that, you know, hundreds of thousands of people had a nice time on Facebook today. You know, it doesn't make the news, does it? And so I think there's a real danger that when we do the same thing in academe, we're constantly looking for the flaws in things. And that's good because we hope that, you know, we can solve them.

But I do agree very much with Hardy that there is all the solutions that people suggest, like the lunacy in Australia of banning social media for under-16s. I think it's one of the most bonkers laws I've ever thought of and very unhappy under-16s in Australia. Please join me in thanking our panel. Thank you.

So we now open the floor for questions. And as I said, please keep them short. Introduce yourselves and your affiliation and I'll be checking the online as well. I've seen the person at the back first and I'll be alert to other hands. Thank you very much for an interesting exchange. My name is Jackson Makas. I'm a master's student here in international political economy. And I'm

I was wondering earlier in the talk, I found Hardeep's delineation of the difference between truth as a function of what can maybe be sort of crudely summarized as essential moral principles at an individual level versus reality, which is more observable happening in the world, but of course,

interpretable in different ways. I found this an interesting reference to some of my own personal impressions researching the decline of truth, which one of the main conclusions I come away with reading a lot of this related literature and also hearing your exchange today, which thank you very much, by the way, if I haven't mentioned. One of my biggest observations is that

In a sense, many may agree to an extent that with the decline of strong modern social institutions, that whether it's the community surrounding, whether it's a bit more of a traditionalist society that has been thawing into what we live now in the West, which is generally a society that is more open to different forms of identity, different forms of expression, and as well, maybe throwing in another tangible example there, the decline of shared spaces of both

um, uh, both religious significance in the sense that it fosters community, but also in the sense that there is an added sense of social obligation through being historically in the West of Christian. Now that that's been declining to what extent, and I'm wondering if, if, um, I ask everybody to what extent do you believe that the decline of various forms of social obligation over the past few decades in the West is feeding into, um,

the general incongruity of people's personal realities and their inability to agree on shared social principles, if that makes sense. This is sort of the Neil Postman thesis, and I don't really believe it. I think it's much more that Hardeep was talking about. There's a vast amount of change happening. Immigration is overwhelming for some people. The

The cliche, I don't recognize my neighborhood anymore, i.e. it's full of brown people suddenly. So I think things are definitely changing, certainly, but they're reformulating. And yeah, we don't all go bowling together anymore, perhaps, but we do tons of other things. I see endless associations and connectivity that people do, and they do have mutual connections.

you know, they share values or they share a tolerance of not having the same values, which I think is just as important. And that's where I go back to the, you know, the pessimism being conservative, the idea we could all go back to when we had shared values. No, we did not. The 20th century was riddled with global warfare. You

Was this some sort of harmonious period when we all shared values? No, it wasn't. It was one of the most ghastly periods in some ways of human civilization. So I reject the premise of your question, if you like. And I think the harking back to that is, I think, dangerous. You end up with Farageist, Trumpian politics of illusion. Jason? What?

One thing to add to that is that while I agree that there was never a golden period where everyone all agreed in terms of their value commitments and their overall sense of society...

I do think that the question you ask about are the decline of social obligations or the decline of people's sense of what it is that they ought to do can be connected with, I think, a greater fragmentation that modern technology and social media allow. Cal Sunstein talks about the future of news where he gives an example of

People get in, say, a personalized news feed. I think he calls it the Daily You, where you see the stream of stories in the feed that the algorithm selects for you. What that does is it kind of removes a sense of a collective shared experience that people had before in terms of a way of suggested thinking about the world. Think back, say, 30 or 40 years where newspapers were the primary source of information.

Now, there were different newspapers, but at least when people read, say, the New York Times or the Telegraph or whatever, there was a common news platform that gave a particular framework for which to think about the world.

What do you get even with people having all of these positive community experiences on social media? They are all hyper-personalized. And so the idea that there's a kind of a common shared narrative about how to think about society or even frameworks for talking about social obligation is much more fragmented than it used to be. So I would offer that as a partial takeaway.

commentary on terms of what I think may have changed. It's just not true, by the way. Sorry. Research shows that Sunstein is largely wrong on this. The research shows that people who go online seeking news actually go across a much wider range of perspectives.

The real problem is the person sitting at home watching Fox News all day, and they never actually even bother to go online except when it's to say something offensive. So it's just not true. And in the past...

Yes, it was wonderful because people like me did say, this is the news. And I don't care what you're interested in. This is the news. And we decide what's important. You don't. And if you're interested in other things, then you won't be able to have nice byline times that will give you alternatives. And, you know, people are just as much in their lanes, in fact, more so than they are now.

because if you read the Telegraph, you didn't then go off and read The Guardian, did you? You know, if you read The New York Times, you didn't then go off and read The Wall Street Journal, not very often. So I think this is, again, another unhelpful myth. Whether it's true that it's the same with the filter bubble thing, which Sunstein also gets wrong with respect. You are in a filter bubble now.

I have a really rational intelligence set of identities and experiences, but you are in a filter bubble because you disagree with me. You know, filter bubbles are really good. They're your identity. They're your values. They are who you are in your story. And why are you telling me to get out of my filter bubble? You know?

The important thing is that the thoughts bubbles can all talk to each other. I think I'll pick up on a few of these points. Good question. I think, yeah, we need to have a sense of who we are. And we all do that in different ways. You know, our values or identities. That is always quite, quite personal. I think people are looking for meaning. And I think they're looking to believe in something which...

which I think is why we get some of these social media communities and allegiances forming around certain issues which are often about questioning the established system. So I think people are looking for meaning, they're looking to believe. I think how...

How they find that has probably shifted as part of the big changes I'm talking about. I think there are two other points of fragmentation that I want to mention, which I think is interesting and part of the mix, which is in this period of huge change, people have experienced that differently. So for some people...

They are feeling like the jobs they used to have, which used to give them a huge sense of identity and community and pride and a huge source of esteem, that they've gone since the 1980s. Their town centres have sort of been...

neglected by the government. There's no investment in anywhere apart from London. Leveling up, there was a point to it. It didn't happen. Everything is shifting. New people are coming into their towns. There's so much talk about things that sound as if they're woke. That is one experience of people rooted in place who don't feel that

or there's any wider care being put into how they're experiencing their lives. That is very different from, you know, we call them digital nomads who are travelling around with their laptops and, you know, having creative briefs and actually are experiencing...

in a way, a more privileged form of alienation, constant comparisons and endless insecurity within themselves. Nothing is ever meaningful enough or enough in any way. It doesn't matter where you go. It follows you around. These are very different experiences of alienation. And the second thing I would say is, again, there's another very... There's an estrangement, which I see through my work, between, again, this kind of

media politics thing and the big kind of national conversations or issues that we're looking at. And that's the contrast to what's happening on a grassroots level, you know, of people coming together doing book clubs and death cafes and walk and talks and community that, you know, there's so much that's going on. It's not all

It's not all bad, but those two things don't seem to meet. The national political doesn't seem to come down and the grassroots doesn't seem to go up. I'm going to take a question from the online audience and maybe we'll have a chance to have Jason's view again. Please. I have a couple of short questions. The first one, do speakers believe that Popper's definition of truth as the critical capacity to question claims is still valid in our hyper-connected world? That's from Xavier Gonzalez-Gomez.

And another, what about science and evidence? When we think of major challenges like climate change, is there a problem with a nuanced view of what truth is? Well, let me just jump in and try to answer that. I mean, I think, right, so I think that there are a number of things at play here. So first of all, regarding Popper's view on critical rationalism and apportioning your beliefs in light of the evidence.

I think that that is certainly true within its remit, but I think kind of going back to the distinction that was made earlier between truth and reality, I think of the areas where it makes sense to talk about apportioning one's beliefs in line with the evidence makes most sense when you're talking about, say, beliefs that are related to the natural world, physical reality, the kind of tables and chairs and things that it makes sense to talk about true beliefs that are grounded in facts.

Where things get more complicated is when we think about the social world and we think about social reality and norms and practices and the values and the aims that we're all trying to see realized in society.

Those aren't amenable to evidence in the same sort of way that a physicist would go about trying to answer questions. This becomes a much more collective effort in how we socially construct our values and our beliefs. And I think in that framework, it becomes a lot harder to think about what the relationship is between evidence and belief. And I think this is an area where maybe there is an open question about evidence.

whether it does make sense to talk about truth as much when we think about the nature of social reality. Should we have nuanced views on issues like climate change? Is climate change in the realm of the tables and the chairs?

So I would say that climate change is, well, whether or not climate change is happening is certainly in the same realm as, you know, facts about tables and chairs, as is whether or not it's anthropogenic or not. Now, the question is, what do we do in response to that is something that falls within the realm of social value and the construction of, you know, what it is that we want to try to see realized. And this is where things can really get quite difficult.

because people have different value bases which recommend different responses all the way from the net zero Green New Deal to the

who would be perfectly happy to have humans go extinct because we're the largest source of threat to the natural world that exists, right? Which one of those two options you opt for is going to depend on moral values, right? Which are not responsible to evidence in the way that beliefs about physical reality are. Yeah. No, I agree on that. And I think it's part of...

sort of what needs to be learnt is that people's objections to making changes that are going to affect their lives, which they feel will be detrimental when they already have so much on their plate with the cost of living prices, etc. I think that has to be factored into how you talk to those people if you're looking to get

changes on the climate crisis, which I agree with you is completely real and coming our way. It's already here. Thank you. I would like to take a question from the audience, just in the second row. Hi. Thank you very much for the conversation. Really interesting. My name's Kaya. I was a master's student in the Department of Media and Communications last year, doing strategic communications, and I work in climate. So I thought I'd jump in at this point, because that's where my research is and that's where my work is. And I feel that

This idea of facts and emotion and identity, when it comes to climate, I feel that we have been leaning on facts and that doesn't seem to have worked really in the wide scale. Obviously, we had progress, but it's not at the scale that we need. And so I'd like to push you a little bit on the on the solutions side. I know you said you didn't have any solutions.

But I this concept of nuance and complexity, I think, in terms of the response to climate change particularly is very relevant because it is super complex and hyper local and yet also a global problem. So there's a lot of tensions there. And the politics seems to on the left, you seem to lean more on facts and on the right, things.

There's a lot more emotion and it seems that it's harder to counter that. And I'm wondering if these kind of human stories that you're talking about in journalism, but also in academia, are there ways that we can inject more emotion that kind of anchors in the truth that is in the reality of particularly climate change? This reality exists and help people feel that as a truth that relates to them.

rather than explaining it to them in very technical, scientific, factual terms? Very quickly, I'm not sure that it's a question of explaining it better or even convincing people better. I'm afraid I think climate change right now is all about power.

It's all about power. And if you want to, you know, arrest, I agree completely with what Jason was saying. You know, this is now not in the realm of do you prove it anymore? Is it the truth? It's all about how you get people to give up power.

their their own interests you know it's not about getting us all to shower once less a week or something this is about serious industrial economic political power and it's very depressing because um all the the trend if you like seems to be in that sphere is going the wrong way okay

30 seconds? Well, just a really quick response. I think what I would say to this question is that commenting on the Brexit election, Aaron Banks was quoted as saying that the Remain campaign was based on facts, facts, facts, and it didn't emotionally land with the voters, right? You have to make an emotional connection. I think the difficulty with climate change is that whereas it has been based on facts, facts, facts for such a long time, it's very difficult to motivate people to act emotionally.

from facts alone. You need to get the emotional connection to do that. And the question is, when you're asking people to make sacrifices, when you're asking questions about economic and political power, how do you actually find a way of making that emotional connection that will actually lead people to act? It's a very difficult problem. I mean, there, I

I think the philosopher John Broome described climate change as like the hardest problem humanity has ever had to face because it seems structurally designed to leverage every kind of bad cognitive bias we have to getting us to do the wrong thing. Right.

And it's, yeah, I wish I had policy recommendations. I don't know what to say. I mean, even the thing about it's a lovely day today because it's so hot. Well, exactly. I think the only thing I'd add is absolutely. I think that is absolutely the challenge. How do you get people to emotionally connect with something that they don't viscerally feel?

actually. And so all the headlines of, you know, LA was burning. Are we remembering this now? And it was shocking to see. It really was. But we've all got to ask ourselves the question, how many of us felt viscerally and emotionally affected by that? I probably didn't because I'm so far removed from it. And I think that's the problem. How do you get people to emotionally connect with something that viscerally and psychologically is so big and far away? So it's such a challenge. And I think you're right. It is

Perhaps it is the existential challenge of our age. Thank you to Charlie, Jason, Harbeed for this very rich and polemic panel. Please stick around for the festival. Jason will also be signing and selling and signing some books in the back. And I think they deserve a big round of applause.

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