The Knowledge

I think, therefore I am.

Beyond that, it's all subject to debate. While I don't think that I'm seriously mentally ill, I am aware of the fact that I don't have much of a genuine means of proving, or falsifying, what I believe that I know about the world. After all, the vast majority of it is secondhand.

I understand the general knock against that form of skepticism. It does, after all, call into question the idea of absolute knowledge, and absolute truth, and, as such plays into the hands of people who would cynically claim that neither exists. But for me, the fact of the matter is that most knowledge comes down to trust, either in sources or in one's senses. After all, I recently developed a mild, if ongoing, case of tinnitus. The near-constant tone that sounds in my ear is not "real" in the sense that it has an external cause... there are no sound waves involved. Rather, it's closer to a form of auditory hallucination. I understand this, and have learned to discount the noise. At least, I think that I understand it. After all, were you to ask me to prove that there was no noisemaker, I couldn't... at least, not without doing quite a bit of research into how sound works, and is detected, and putting together (or otherwise sourcing) a machine to search for (and presumably not find) the sound. But then, how would I know the machine were operating properly? At some point, I would simply have to trust that what I thought to be true was, in fact, true, and would have to ask that you do the same.

If case you hadn't guessed where I was going with all of this, the same idea is at work with the reports of Russian atrocities in the war in Ukraine. Ukrainian and other outlets show pictures, and the Kremlin, along with some segment of people within Russia, claim that it's all fakery. What's the truth of the matter? Technically, I have no idea. I am, after all, on the other side of the planet, more or less, from the events in question. I have seen none of the evidence for myself; I have to take the word of people who claim to have been there. Could they, as the Russian government claims, be lying? Yes. Hoaxes are a thing. And in this sense the question is less about what to believe than it is about who to believe. And from where I sit, it's a low-stakes proposition. No matter who I choose to credit with the truth, I still have to go to work tomorrow, as I still have bills to pay. A certain degree of allegiance to one side or the other is about all that's really at issue for me.

For many Russian citizens, there is a certain level of pride in their home nation at stake, but overall, the consequences are minimal for them, too. So I'm unclear on the utility of looking for them to make a different choice, outside of the faint hope that some sort of popular uprising would depose President Putin. Accordingly, I think that news coverage would be better served being less incredulous that Russians would be so quick to believe their government and dismiss the evidence that sways others. A greater focus on and understanding of how people deal with information that can't personally validate might be a more useful journalistic tack.