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I have a different take. The more that people cannot disagree with X, the more X is truth. This is separate from fiction and intentional misrepresentation of events. When you directly witness something happening with a few others, you can't disagree about what you saw, so that is high truth (assuming no intentional mispresentation). Of course sometimes even here you may not all have seen the same exact thing at the same exact time. Video of events tends to be up there as well. Of course I mean raw, unedited video and not edited clip-montages of stuff interspersed with commentary, opinions, etc. Even raw video is not guaranteed to be high or complete truth if it's omitting other things that were part of an event. When we get into things like testimony, opinions, second-hand accounts, anecdotes, and commentary, then we're in the world of low truth (and sometimes its complete absence) and a high chance of deception. Hence the need for heuristics, trust, narrative detection, asking who benefits, etc. Which may not arrive at any truth other than the direction someone is wanting you to go. Science is interesting because it's reports are a form of testimony, but specifically extending an invitation to be reproduced so it can be directly witnessed again. This alone makes it more trustworthy than things like "here's the testimony of a dead person we can't even talk to anymore" or "everyone seems to accept X so X must be true" - and that last one is dangerous today because many people use social media as a proxy for "everyone" but it's very easily manipulated. |