You can usually find "truth" relatively easily by seeing what two opposing sides tend to agree on. Sometimes they'll both be wrong, but more often than not they're probably right. So both the US and China claim there was a Chinese made balloon and the US shot it down. So it's pretty safe to say that's all true. Was it a weather balloon or a spy balloon? This is where the key point is a willingness to accept uncertainty.
But I do not agree on the 'preponderance of sources' argument as a means to finding truth. As a contemporary example, consider the COVID lab leak stuff. You had large numbers of scientists making declarations in journals that it was literally impossible, fact checkers declaring the concept clearly debunked, government calling it dangerous disinformation, the media running endless stories calling anybody who dared even think about a lab leak as little more than crazy conspiracy theorists of the flat earth type, and more.
Until one day, everything changed and the lab leak was perfectly okay to discuss. There was no silver bullet, just a geopolitical recalculation. And it turns out among those scientists were people directly involved COVID related gain of function research. Those journals somehow couldn't discover such an absurd undeclared conflict of interest, even though a simple search or CV reference would tell all. The media suddenly did a hard 180, and you even had mainstream outlets actively mocking how absurdly "obviously true" it was that the virus came from a lab leak.
We live in an era of disinformation being coordinated and deployed at scale, and now human-like text-generation is about to enter the picture. When my logic runs contrary to a million sources - I'm going with myself. If I'm wrong, at least I believed something that I felt seemed like the truth, and could presumably defend. By contrast believing in something that seems false (and increasingly often turns out to be) simply because of a mountain of pressure? That would feel just awful to me.
But I do not agree on the 'preponderance of sources' argument as a means to finding truth. As a contemporary example, consider the COVID lab leak stuff. You had large numbers of scientists making declarations in journals that it was literally impossible, fact checkers declaring the concept clearly debunked, government calling it dangerous disinformation, the media running endless stories calling anybody who dared even think about a lab leak as little more than crazy conspiracy theorists of the flat earth type, and more.
Until one day, everything changed and the lab leak was perfectly okay to discuss. There was no silver bullet, just a geopolitical recalculation. And it turns out among those scientists were people directly involved COVID related gain of function research. Those journals somehow couldn't discover such an absurd undeclared conflict of interest, even though a simple search or CV reference would tell all. The media suddenly did a hard 180, and you even had mainstream outlets actively mocking how absurdly "obviously true" it was that the virus came from a lab leak.
We live in an era of disinformation being coordinated and deployed at scale, and now human-like text-generation is about to enter the picture. When my logic runs contrary to a million sources - I'm going with myself. If I'm wrong, at least I believed something that I felt seemed like the truth, and could presumably defend. By contrast believing in something that seems false (and increasingly often turns out to be) simply because of a mountain of pressure? That would feel just awful to me.