Truth is a Lost Game in Turkey. Don’t Let the Same Thing Happen to You

This refashioning of a post-truth, post-fact Turkey has not happened overnight. The process has involved the skilful and wilful manipulation of narratives. We gave up some time ago asking the astonished questions “How can they say or do that?” some time ago. Truth is a lost game in my country. In Europe and America, you still have time to rescue it – but you must learn from Turkey how easily it can be lost.

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We found, as you are now finding, that the new truth-building process does not require facts or the underpinning of agreed values. We were confronted – as you are being confronted – by a toxic vocabulary: “elite”, “experts”, “real people” and “alienated intellectuals”. The elite, with experts as mouthpieces of that oppressive elite, were portrayed as people detached from society, willing to suppress the needs, choices and beliefs of “real people”.


Events moved quickly. Those who believed experts should be excluded from the truth-building process, and that the facts were too boring to be bothered with, became the most active participants in a reconstruction of their own truth. The magic word was “respect”, with the demand that the elite, since they were so out of touch, should respect real people’s truth.

→ The Guardian

The Voice in Your Head

Given that thoughts are a jumble of fragments and pieces, it occurred to me that a recorded transcript of those jumbled pieces actually might not be very illuminating. It might not even be intelligible. Meanwhile the (admittedly much more arduous) process of writing down my thoughts had been surprisingly enlightening. In one swoop, my brain was capable of detecting the patchy notions swirling in my mind, filling in their gaps to make them whole—that is, adding the stripes—and then evaluating them for their credibility and value, or lack thereof.

In other words, my own brain was a brain decoder. It required a lot more effort than merely using a digital recorder as I’d imagined, but it was also a whole lot more sophisticated—say, a trillion times more—than anything scientists have conceived of inventing.

→ Guernica Magazine

Kanye West Is A Human Being

Long life to The Outline, Joshua Topolsky’s new venture :

The pattern is by now familiar: a famous person makes a comment that inspires controversy and, in turn, sets off a public discussion about a number of serious issues. By the end, nothing is illuminated and someone has probably haphazardly apologized, publicly. It’s part of a broader flattening of the worlds of entertainment and news. In the online ecosystem where the two reside — more than 60 percent of adults in the US get their news on social media — everyone competes for attention by appealing to the same core emotions.

→ The Outline

The Astrophysicists Who Faked It

Credit : LIGO/Axel Mellinger

In science, the question of when to believe is a deep and ancient problem. There is no universal answer, and evaluating the merits of any potential discovery always includes considering the prior beliefs of the people involved. There is no way around this.

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This was the genius of the fake signal injection: Whatever the prior belief of an individual scientist might be, it gave him or her reason to doubt it. A scientist who believed that the current generation of instruments was simply not up to the task would have to allow for the possibility that it was. A scientist tempted to elevate a signal because of the benefits of a real detection would have to temper his or her enthusiasm to avoid making a false claim. The fake injection bugaboo forced us to keep an open mind, apply skepticism and reason, and examine the evidence at face value.

→ Nautilus

It’s ugly 

New lows :

The fact that APB has positioned itself as protecting users from ads, only to then say it’s going to allow ads it deems acceptable to those who pay for it, has caused real shock. “Amazing how the goalposts keep changing for their users, whilst publishers are indiscriminately targeted. It turns out Adblock Plus actually want to serve you more ads not less. True colors revealed.”

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“They’re allowing users to block ads, and then on the other side basically taking a cut from publishers to allow ads to run on the site even though they are the ones blocking the ads. It will be interesting to hear how much of a cut all three parties are taking, and how they are actually in the mix,” she said.

→ Digiday