Usingdata

The truth is a very small substance of all information in the world.

First of all, it's costly. If you want want to write a truthful account of anything you need to research, you need to gather evidence, to fact check, to analyze. That's very costly in terms of time and money and effort. Fiction is very cheap. You just write the first things that comes to your mind.

The truth is also often very complicated because reality is complicated, whereas fiction can be made as simple as you would like it to be, and people prefer usually simple stories.

And finally the truth can be painful. Whether the truth about us personally — my relationships, what I've done to other people, to myself or entire nations or cultures — whereas fiction, you can you can make it as attractive, as flattering, as you would like it to be.

So in this competition between truth, and fiction, and fantasy, truth is at a huge disadvantage.

If you just flood the world with information most information will not be the truth, and in this ocean of information if you don't give the truth some help, some edge, the truth tends to sink to the bottom, not rise to the top.

Kara Swisher & Yuval Noah Harari on Tech Bros, Witches & the Information Flood. Yuval Noah Harari. October 16, 2024. At 10:58.

“It’s really based on an analogy, if you will: that seemed to work in other times - that the idea of having access to the collective works of humankind has been a win.”

— From an interview with Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, WFMU’s Radio Free Culture, October 9, 2012

The full quote:

Ken Garrison: When I was telling my wife about what I was going to be talking with you about, she had a naïve but kind of profound question, which is “Why are you doing this? Why are you trying to archive the entire world and the entire internet?”

Brewster Kahle: It’s really based on an analogy, if you will: that it seemed to work in other times - that the idea of having access to the collective works of humankind has been a win. So, we all look back to the Library of Alexandria. And by going and pulling together the works from all over the world and translating them then into Ancient Greek, they were able to come up with fantastic discoveries. They knew how big the world was. They knew it was round. They knew how big it was within a couple percent. Euclid authored “Elements,” which is what it is I still studied as geometry in high school. So, fantastic things can come of it if you can leverage the works of other people. And the reason why I got involved in the whole area of building the library back in 1980 was just kind of on that analogy and the thought that technology allows us to do this and it seems like a good thing to do.