Slate goes meta on Balloon Boy. Some good questions here about the accuracy of law enforcement in determining veracity.
posted by Jimmy Havok on Nov 2, 2009 - 30 comments

Crap Detection 101 Howard Rheingold offers a fairly in-depth primer on media and internet BS detection. Lots of links to resources for enabling critical analysis of various information sources included.
posted by telstar on Jun 30, 2009 - 17 comments

Lies We Tell Kids
posted by Navelgazer on Dec 24, 2008 - 157 comments

Brain reorganizes to make room for math. But does math easily lead to truth? Is it really just beauty?
posted by twoleftfeet on Nov 23, 2008 - 31 comments

Truth's Caper : essay by Simon Blackburn on Sokal's Hoax.
posted by Gyan on Aug 18, 2008 - 175 comments

Who can remember the color of a stranger’s belt, and the precise angle of the back corner of an old movie theater’s lobby, but not the number of his own apartment, or any of the movies he saw? What kind of memory is that?

The Memory Addiction of Augusten Burroughs
Ruthless with Scissors
Augusten's Blog [more inside]
posted by anotherpanacea on May 1, 2008 - 28 comments

Worship the Trilobite. [Via Pharyngula.]
posted by homunculus on Jan 16, 2008 - 32 comments

"You Don't Understand Our Audience" --what John Hockenberry (formerly of NBC, now at MIT Media Lab) learned about network news--good guys and bad guys, the "emotional center", synergy, facts, and why fewer and fewer watch nowadays.
posted by amberglow on Dec 31, 2007 - 65 comments

Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach. "The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies (PDFs) show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths." [Via Firedoglake, more at MindHacks.]
posted by homunculus on Sep 5, 2007 - 53 comments

I appreciate you for reading this article. I resent you for snarking in the thread without reading it.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Sep 5, 2007 - 293 comments

The Spirit Of Truth.
posted by hama7 on Apr 10, 2007 - 22 comments

Stripping The Gurus. Sex, violence, abuse and enlightenment. Chogyam Trungpa, the Dalai Lama, Zen masters, exposing the reality behind the facade of various spiritual teachers. Geoff Falk also writes about the spiritual beliefs of rock stars.
posted by nickyskye on Jun 5, 2006 - 66 comments

Their view is that psyops can be directed toward global transregional audiences. My view is that that’s not possible because it directs psyops against our own friends and allies and even at our own public. ... In Mind Games, Columbia Journalism Review thoroughly examines the disintegrating lines between Public Affairs, Psy-Ops, IO, the public, and the truth. Some old friends are mentioned too: the Lincoln Group, the Rendon Group, the Pentagon, our own media, and others. If truth is our greatest weapon, as Rumsfeld has said, how can the administration hope to prevail in an information war when it is not honest with itself?
posted by amberglow on May 1, 2006 - 21 comments

What is the meaning of life? Answers range from pithy pseudo-psychological to the annoyingly flash based AND pseudo-psychological, the Christian, Muslim, and Sikh and other. Other people think they've figured it out, and their answer is different at least. Some people's answers just get strange and pseudo-scientific. And of course we can't forget Monty Python .
posted by sotonohito on Apr 23, 2006 - 45 comments

Truth Markets. Invest in truthiness.
posted by I Love Tacos on Apr 6, 2006 - 32 comments

Diogenes the Cynic sought One Honest Man. Lately we have had some wonderful examples that would seem to confirm the philosopher's most cynical suspicions. And then along come some Honest {quicktime movie} Women and it's just so refreshing.
posted by fourcheesemac on Mar 26, 2006 - 13 comments

Fallacy Files
posted by Gyan on Feb 11, 2006 - 16 comments

Newsfilter: PBS Station Nixes Show On Terrorism. Following last-minute cries of protest from Muslim leaders last week, a Public Broadcasting Service affiliate in Dallas canceled the premiere of a documentary on the roots of Islamic terrorism.
posted by semmi on Feb 10, 2006 - 29 comments

Nutjobs all over America have reported seeing aliens silently wafting over their trailerparks in big ass triangular spaceships. Could the truth to these sightings be a little closer to home?
posted by zeoslap on Feb 6, 2006 - 50 comments

Don't Even Think About Lying fMRI is poised to transform the security industry, the judicial system, and our fundamental notions of privacy. I'm in a lab at Columbia University, where scientists are using the technology to analyze the cognitive differences between truth and lies. By mapping the neural circuits behind deception, researchers are turning fMRI into a new kind of lie detector that's more probing and accurate than the polygraph, the standard lie-detection tool employed by law enforcement and intelligence agencies for nearly a century.
posted by robbyrobs on Jan 5, 2006 - 62 comments

Mathematical proofs in sanus, with some visualization from Martin Wattenberg's The Shape of Song. "The music here...is a raw and unadorned representation of the mathematics itself, involving few human preconceptions beyond a basic mapping needed to accommodate the Western tonal scale."
posted by Rothko on Dec 4, 2005 - 13 comments

"What's the matter sweetie? Can't sleep?"
"No, no. I was just going over my answers to the polygraph test your dad just gave me."
posted by Rothko on Nov 7, 2005 - 17 comments

On Beauty and Being Just, by Elaine Scarry, and an interview with her in Salon. It's up to you.
posted by semmi on Sep 27, 2005 - 11 comments

Did the discovery of evolution lead to Darwin's agnosticism, as claimed? Carl Zimmer wonders. More importantly, can evolution be reconciled with Christianity?
posted by daksya on Aug 11, 2005 - 90 comments

Gödel and the Nature of Mathematical Truth : A Talk with Verena Huber-Dyson
posted by Gyan on Jul 29, 2005 - 77 comments

...One of the reasons truth seems so difficult to describe is that we have conflicting beliefs about it: we sometimes think it is discovered, sometimes created, sometimes knowable, sometimes mysterious. When we use the idea in ordinary life-as we do when we agree or disagree with what someone has said-it seems a simple matter. Yet the more we stop to think about it, the more complicated it becomes. It would be nice if we could sort out, once and for all, everything we thought about truth-to find out the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the truth, as it were. Nice, but practically impossible. The thesis of this book is much simpler. Of the many things you could believe about truth, there is at least one that you should believe: truth matters. Truth, I shall try to convince you, is of urgent importance in both your personal and political life..
'True to Life' and 'Who Cares About the Truth?' are two excerpts from the first chapter of True To Life: Why Truth Matters by Michael P. Lynch, about whose philosophical thought was written Lynch's Metaphysical Pluralism and about whose book was just written The Truth Wars, believe it or not.
posted by y2karl on Jul 26, 2005 - 7 comments

Godel's theorems have been used to extrapolate a great many "truths" about the world. Torkel Franzen sets the record straight in his new book Godel's Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse. Read the introduction (PDF). If you want, check out his explanation of the theorems.
posted by Gyan on Jun 29, 2005 - 65 comments

What Was True. From the mid 1950s through the early 1980s, William Gedney (1932-1989) photographed throughout the United States, in India, and in Europe, and filling notebook after notebook with his observations. From the commerce of the street outside his Brooklyn apartment to the daily chores of unemployed coal miners, from the lifestyle of hippies in Haight-Ashbury to the sacred rituals of Hindu worshippers, Gedney was able to record the lives of others with clarity and poignancy. Gedney's America is a nation of averted eyes, and broken automobiles, and restlessness, a place Edward Hopper would recognize, but so, also, Walt Whitman.
posted by matteo on Apr 27, 2005 - 11 comments

"What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Can't Prove It?" For its 2005 "World Question," Edge.org invited a "who's who of third culture scientists and science-minded thinkers" to respond to the following: "Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the "esprit de divination"). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" They received 118 responses, some of which are also excerpted here. (See also 2003, 2002 discussions).
posted by pardonyou? on Jan 4, 2005 - 69 comments

Why truth matters.
posted by rushmc on Sep 8, 2004 - 41 comments

The dicey dynamics of exposing untruths. An interesting bit in the Columbia Journalism Review on why journalists tend to focus on politicians' small lies and let the big ones slide.
posted by gottabefunky on Sep 10, 2003 - 39 comments

Why bother figuring out universal truths for yourself when someone else has already done it for you. Find out how a neurotic comedian, a sausage magnate, a genome decoder, and the world's most famous nuclear power plant safety inspector distill life's truths into twenty or so insightful and humorous statements.
posted by euphorb on Jul 25, 2003 - 17 comments

Intellectual Dishonesty
Intellectual dishonesty is pure poison to the enterprise of the law. Yet countless examples show intellectual dishonesty has now become a routine, expected part of American discourse. The most obvious half-truths and hypocrisies are greeted with shrugged shoulders and a grunt of "what did you expect?"
Is the ultimate goal more important than truth, honesty, integrity and "playing by the rules?" Or, put another way, does the end satisfy the means? "Restoring honor and integrity" would indicate not.
posted by nofundy on Mar 6, 2003 - 12 comments

Richard Rorty was written a longish, but accessible essay detailing the progression of the Western idea of "truth". He states that truth, in the redemptive sense, was first interpreted through religion, then philosophy and now literature. The intellectuals are no longer asking what is true, but seeking new ways of understanding the world around us and our place in it. To question truth, one employs logic and belief, but to find new modes of understanding one uses the imagination. "The great virtue of our new-found literary culture is that it tells young intellectuals that the only source of redemption is the human imagination, and that this fact should occasion pride rather than despair."
posted by elwoodwiles on Jan 20, 2003 - 14 comments

Crackpots and the Nature of Truth If you're a busy guy like me, you take on faith a lot what is promoted as scientific truth. But there's usually a "crackpot" minority who may find a few data points which don't fit the orthodox scientific theory and claim them as evidence of a conspiracy or mass delusion. On very rare occasions (and this is probably NOT one of them), they may even turn out to be right. For this reason, the unaligned unscientific masses find it easy to side with the crackpots. Those within the orthodoxy often take the position that confronting the minority in a fair and open debate would unduly dignify the minority's position. Unfortunately, the orthodoxy at the same time often loudly denounces the minority's position as "unscientific," but doesn't go much beyond that. To be sure, the minority's position often is truly "unscientific" because, for instance, it's unfalsifiable. The orthodoxy seems to be missing golden PR opportunities in articles like this. If the orthodoxy is truly concerned about winning converts away from the crackpots, shouldn't they AT LEAST take advantage of these opportunities to say a few words about what science is and is not, to inject some of the basic concepts of science (hypothesis, experimentation, theory construction, falsifiability, etc.) into the popular memesphere?
posted by ZenMasterThis on Dec 24, 2002 - 28 comments

I know this much is true... For years, I have said that the greatest thing about the modern state of the US is that we hold nothing as "True". I was wrong. Apparently our "Truths" were just sleeping; now everyone seems to have some, and they're proving to be as divisive and factionalist here as elsewhere. So - apart from any particular issue - are there "Truths", or are there just perceptions of an issue? And, just to keep some edges sharp, in answering, are you at all religious?
posted by Perigee on Sep 19, 2001 - 77 comments

Flutterby wonders what the difference is between those who have faith in media and those who see them as "an unending stream of barely edited press-releases."
posted by Mo Nickels on Oct 6, 2000 - 5 comments

Down on Mickey D's? Spending way too many sweaty, sleepless nights trying to get the image of a mad clown out of your head? Try McSpotlight - a behemoth mass of anti-burgerflogging data, legal issues, rumors, and other juicy McInformation. Be sure to test your McDIQ with the The McSpotlight Quiz.
posted by grant on Dec 2, 1999 - 0 comments