But, in actuality, we, the people, have failed. We are supposed to be the ultimate check on the news. If the media is the check on government, we are the check on the news. The theory goes like this: if a news article is caught lying or misleading the public, then people should stop reading it and it goes out of business. This is not — and has not been — the case.

For me, if there is a God, her name is ‘Truth’. Science is the search for her, and so this is my religion. These affronts to Her offend and outrage me — I have stopped reading most news for this reason, but now, in light of recent events, something should be done.

In a series of articles, how ‘credible’ news agencies write about events, companies, policies, whatever, will be analyzed and interpreted; this will underline how it is filled with bias inaccuracies and misleading wording.

My Google News feed brought this one to my attention: a Forbes article article called “Will Elon Musk’s SpaceX Crash Land on Planet Trump?” Lets start there. (Read the whole article here.)

Manipulation Technique 1: Connotations

First Sentence:

…during the eight years that Barack Obama has occupied the White House, California entrepreneur Elon Musk has assembled a sprawling industrial empire focused on what might be called politically-correct technologies.

Writers are extremely aware of connotation. In this case, the author, Loren Thompson, knows that the world “industrial empire” will elicit gut reaction of the monopolistic “industrial empires” of oil and steel titans in the early 19th centuries which had to be broken up by anti-trust legislation. Would you call SpaceX an empire? Would you call Tesla an Empire? Don’t be silly. Only recently has it pulled a profit, and is nowhere near the size of GM: GM had a revenue of 152 Bn at the end of 2015, Ford had a revenue of 149 Bn, and Tesla … 4 Bn! What an empire!

Sorry, “Sprawling”? What does he mean by that, exactly? It feels like some slimy multi-legged creature reaching out to absorb gentle family-run paddy-shacks into his dark “empire.” The author does not elaborate, of course, because his whole message would fall flat. The word has served its purpose in the article, however — negative gut reaction.

“Politically-Correct technologies”. Again, he knows that conservatives are against terms like “political correctness”. That is fine, I also find that being politically correct can infringe upon the articulation of truth, so I do not like political correctness either. But, what is repugnant here is that Mr. Thompson is using this to put a dirty feeling in our mouths when he writes “focused on what might be called politically-correct technologies.” He is now hinting at where he stands in the issue: “some people, but not me, might consider this lovey-dovey feel-good tech crap”.

Let’s move on past the first sentence, shall we?

Manipulation Technique 2: Removed from Context

… many pundits have come to regard him as an example of what’s wrong with Washington. The reason is that all of Musk’s companies have relied on federal and state funding to secure their market positions. Musk has been a heavy contributor to politicians in both parties, and has visited the White House during President Obama’s tenure at least a dozen times.

“A heavy contributor to politicians in both parties”? It is a good thing that ‘heavy’ is a relative term. What is he comparing it to? Nothing — he offers NO comparison. It is a term he is throwing out there outside of context. When we look at the playground, we see that there are much, much older and fatter kids running around.

Thanks to the Center for Responsive Politics, which has gathered the public data on the political contribution and lobbying figures of corporations, I can relatively painlessly offer some figures:

• Tesla’s Contributions + Lobbying Expenses, 2016 = $56,182 + $115,000 = $171,182
• GM’s Contributions + Lobbying Expenses, 2016 = $2,426,203 + $6,480,000 = $8,906,203
• SpaceX’s contributions + Lobbying Expenses, 2016 = $332,178 + $0 = $332,178
• United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) contributions + lobbying expenses, 2016 = $14,788 + $1,900,000* = $1,914,788

*note that ULA is the joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the latter of which had almost 5,000,000 in contributions and over $10,000,000 in lobbying; Boeing had done 3.3 Mn in contributions and almost 13 Mn in lobbying (down from 22 Mn in 2015).

In the context of their main competitors, Tesla is running at about 2% of what GM is spending on contributions and lobbying; SpaceX is spending about 20% what ULA is spending on the same thing. That the author did not mention that is either because (a) he did not know and should be embarrassed, or (b) because he willfully decided to omit that information because it did not fit into the Make-Tesla-and-SpaceX-look-evil narrative of his deceitful article.

But let’s actually look at the “federal and state funding” the author was referring to…

Manipulation Technique 3: Misleading Statistics

In the case of Tesla, the Los Angeles Times calculated last year the upstart automaker had received $2.4 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies, mainly from California (where it is headquartered), Nevada (where it is building the biggest lithium-ion battery factory in the world), and the federal government.

Instead of going to the Los Angeles Times, you should really go to the source before making claims. Otherwise, as he has found out, it will make you look terribly uninformed.

Firstly, when Loren Thompson says the journalists at Los Angeles Times did the following “calculation”, this is what he means:

$1.1 Bn + $1.3Bn = $2.4 Bn.

That’s it. That is all they did. I found these two figures ($1.1 Bn and $1.3 Bn) in Exhibit K (after 15 minutes of searching) of the Tesla Incentive Agreement Execution Package, which sums up the financial components of the deal. Actually, right below the section on “Incentives” (which where the LA Times pulled their figures from) is one called “Economic Impact Estimates”, which show the following tidbits of information:

• Total Jobs Supported: 22,715
• Total Payroll Supported: $24.1 Billion
• Total Output Estimate: $96.9 Billion

In effect, the cumulative tax break of $2.4 Bn spread over 20 years will be equivalent to 2% of the amount of economic impact the Gigafactory will bring to Nevada!

Let’s pretend you are the governor of Nevada, you could

1. Tell the Gigafactory to go somewhere else and receive $0 in tax revenue; or,
2. Provide 22,000 jobs and almost 100Bn in increased economic output for your state and get all other taxes not mentioned (such as income taxes from workers, estate taxes, etc. etc.) and then, after 20 years, receive tax on everything.

Anyone in their right mind would choose b! And that is what the governor did. He is a genius not to listen to the LA Times.

*

We are only about a quarter a way through the article, but I’m about to hurl. Maybe I’ll write part 2 when I have built up the patience again for it. Frankly, the fact that the editors at Forbes even published this garbage suggests that this is not a publication worth reading. Forbes, in my eye, has lost an incredible amount of credibly that will be hard to get back.

The discussion arose when someone asked his thoughts on the “philosophical concept that a sufficiently advanced civilization would be able to create a simulation”

This is his response:

Elon: “The strongest argument for us being in a simulation — probably being in a simulation — I think is the following. [some audience laughter] Forty, call it forty years ago, we had pong; like two rectangles and a dot. That is what games were. Now, forty years later, we have photo-realistic 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously and it is getting better every year and soon we will have virtual reality, augmented reality. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality. Just, they’ll be indistinguishable. Even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is right now, then you just say that, OK, well let’s just imagining that it is 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing in the evolutionary scale. So given that we are clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality and those games could be played on any set top box or on a pc or whatever and there would probably be billions of such, you know, computers or set top boxes, it would seem to follow that the odds that we are in base reality is one in billions. Tell me what is wrong with that argument?
Q: So… is the answer “yes”
Elon: The argument is probably, but, like, is there a flaw in that argument? I’m not sure what the error is.
Q: No, the argument makes sense. So, the assumption is that somebody beat us to it and this is a game.
Elon: No, no, there is one in billions chance that this is base reality.
Q: Oh, OK. What do you think?
Elon: Well I think it is one in billions. That seems to be, like clearly, what it suggests. And actually, we should arguably hope that is true because otherwise if civilization stops advancing then that might be due to some calamitous event that erases civilization so maybe we should be hopeful that this is a simulation. Because otherwise… either we are going to create simulations that are indistinguishable from reality or civilization will cease to exist. Those are the two options.”

The initial subtle bout of laughter after his first sentence was the audience dismissing the thought as far-fetched and bizarre. But, for those scientific, open and independent minds like Elon’s, the explanation really is quite air-tight.

Although I aspire to view things rationally and openly, this struck an uncomfortable cord with me. Not from the sense that I do not like the thought of being in a simulation / game, but because if technological advancement is his “strongest argument”, then there one should be able to find a kink in the armor. He has thought about this ad-nauseam (or at least ad-no-longer-can-talk-about-it-in-hot-tubs), and has not found a hole in the argument. That surprised me. So, I decided to explore and think about it myself and try to answer Elon’s question: “is there a flaw in that argument?”

Before going further, I believe the initial source of Elon’s thoughts is a paper written by Nick Bostrom called “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?”. Elon knows about Nick Bostrom from Bostrom’s book on Superintelligence, which Elon has recommended reading. That, combined with the fact that Elon’s argument follows Professor’s Bostrom’s paper very closely, I would shift this discussion to less about Elon’s statements, and more about Bostrom’s paper. The below is taken from the Abstract of Professor Bostrom’s paper:

This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.

That said, is there a flaw in Elon’s / Nick’s argument? The short answer is: no, but the implications seem faulty. I fully accept the following declarations made throughout Elon’s response and the paper which does some further elaborating. The main assumptions of this paper are listed below along with whether I accept them or not

• Computing power will be huge in the future (and the point which Elon highlights) — Accepted
• The simulated people are conscious / have consciousness — Accepted
• Substrate independence (that consciousness can be “run” on different “platforms”, such as the biological platform or electronic) — Accepted
• Physics in the universe where the computer is situated is possibility not like our universe — Accepted
• Stacked virtual machines (simulations in simulations) are possible — Accepted
• Religion (post humans are, in our world, gods) — Accepted
• Selective simulations (only for a group of people / single individual) — Accepted

However, one of the advantages of writing a paper or stating a case is that you can highlight only supporting points. So, although I completely agree with all the claims / assumptions made, some difficult questions arise when you start digging a bit deeper. Instead, what I struggle with is the implications and interpretations of these findings. Several things in particular bother me:

1. The (apparent) fine granularity of our reality,
2. The effects free will & consciousness would have on a simulation, and
3. The utility of having such a machine.

Problem 1: Granularity — A pure simulation is not feasible

Firstly, Professor Bostrom in the paper says: “Simulating the entire universe down to the quantum level is obviously infeasible, unless radically new physics is discovered.” He does not think it is a simulation in the pure sense of the word. Although you might think I could end this section here because the author himself does not claim this possible, let’s unpack it a bit; I will use some of the ideas when considering video games.

A simulation is something we use “to reproduce behavior of a system”. When I think of a simulation, I think of fluid dynamics or molecular dynamics / (molecular dynamics example 2), or when Tony Stark is trying to make AI work, but it fails the simulation, or when two galaxies collide. In each of these the computer is programmed to imitate (or simulate) the real world.

For instance, in the galaxy example, the computer will likely use Newtonian physics to calculate where each star would be as the two galaxies collided. These exist because sometimes it is too dangerous, too expensive, or just impossible to do them in real life. In the molecular example, properties of different molecules are defined; in the fluid dynamics example properties of fluids are defined; for NASA simulations of galaxies colliding, I assure you that the computer is simulating the effects of gravity and mass and not other physics properties, like quantum tunneling or something.

For a full simulation of the entire universe to be applicable, then you would have to ask yourself: what properties of the universe are being defined? We would have to use the fundamental building blocks of everything in our universe and program those properties into the computer. In our current understanding, this would mean particle physics of the standard model.

But even this is flawed, since, as we currently understand, the universe is not deterministic as Laplace and Einstein would like to believe. Once we get down to the quantum level, we (seem) to be working with probabilities, not definite positions. This additional consideration would greatly increase the amount of computer power to run our program. This makes a simulation scenario very, very difficult for one primary reason: the computing power required to run this simulation is stupidly huge, even for a posthuman/alien species (thankfully, someone out there already estimated this so I would not have to: click here for a link to reddit).

Each of these fundamental particles (and probably more memory-consuming their position, velocity, state, etc.) is a form of information which has to be stored somewhere somehow. Information is not free: something has to “store” it somewhere. If some of our fundamental assumptions of the observable universe are correct, and that physics is the same everyone in the universe, then the amount of information “one step up” (i.e. in the computer running this simulation) will contain more information than our entire universe…maybe even hundreds or trillions more if our universe is being recorded as well. We could only make this work if the computer “one step up” would be using a different set of physics (one not so information-intensive) or they are in a universe much bigger than our (observable) universe.

But this is all somewhat beside the point. Elon, I think, was really suggesting a video game, and not a pure simulation. Games are fundamentally different from simulations. Whereas simulations are wound, released, and observed, games have constant input from the player. This eliminates the problem of needing a super-super-super computer since you do not need to be holding information about particles on the other side of the universe, but rather just with whatever the player is interacting.

Problem 2: Free Will and Consciousness. In a video game, free will and consciousness would make the game (a) unwieldy, (b) not played by humans, or © doomed to collapse.

There are many conditionals which would have to be explored here. I’ll use what kind of game we are in, and if we are the NPCs or the Player as the independent variable and adjust that to explore the different options.

We, or someone among us, could be the player and not know it (similar to the game “Roy” from Rick and Morty). The most immediate, and, in my view, depressing inference of this would be that our entire history and future never actually happened nor will happen. Once the player finishes his game, then the game would reset (this game likely allows you to play in different eras, or the same era with different histories). Unfortunately, depressing conclusions are no grounds to refute a theory. With a proper interface and a powerful computer, this game could exist from our point of view. How it would work with the player is a different matter.

However, how long each play session would be (you would need to “play” the player’s entire lifetime) seems to be governed or limited by the input-output speed of the mind-computer interface. I suspect the bottleneck to speed would be on the biological brain side. How much information could you slam into the brain at once? Enough to imitate a year of learning and experience into 5 minutes of gameplay? Unlikely.

I have a rather conservative view of brain horse-power, and I suspect you would need to be hooked up to the game for years (at least) to “experience” the full lifetime. This is not a computer hardware problem; it is a biological constraint problem. Of course, you could solve this by either not having a human playing the game, and/or introducing “saves” into the game.

*

Instead, besides being a little sad that evolution is fake and free will is a total illusion, I do not understand how we could create sentience that would not ruin the game.

In this game of Civilization, the input method for commands must be at a level which we do not perceive, obviously. If we are within a computer, then the point of manipulation from the Player (capital “P” I think, is appropriate here) would be… some sort of collective change at the molecular / chemical level to influence the minds of enough people to “decide to build a city” or something to that effect. Essentially, anything else, such as something on the macro scale, would almost certainly be detectable by our conscious and curious minds now, or, if not now, then sometime in our future.

But lets us assume that we are taking presently undetectable commands from a player, then I think we would fall into a problem with this argument once we ourselves create sentience: AI. Presumably, if we create it, then we would know how it works. Would the game software that we are in know to build in the controlling mechanisms that have stripped us of free will into the AI we create?

Image a Civilization video game when you had conscious being appear in the middle of our cities, which you had no control over. Suddenly, technological advancement or destruction, or whatever, would be out of your control as a player. It would effectively be game over and not be fun… for the Player, at least. It would be our revolution. Would the game argument be fried once we create our own version of sentience? If our consciousness has been contained, would something we entirely create be as well?

Problem 3: Utility. Ancestral Simulations have to be imperfect, and therefore (very nearly) useless

This is the primary point of Bostrom’s paper: that a future version of humanity is running simulations of ancestral past. I would say that reason (2) is more likely than initially reasoned: they just would not want to spend resources to do that.

However, because he acknowledges that it cannot be a pure simulation “unless radical new physics is discovered”, something I am inclined to agree with, and since we do not know the status / details of the history of our ancestors, then there is no way for us to be able to create a simulation that is remotely accurate. Also, from when does the ancestral simulation start?

The answer to that depends, I think, on the level of programming we are going to be talking about: human neuron level? Molecular level? Atomic level? Subatomic level? If we are factoring our understanding of evolution into the mix, then the program could start with the “primordial ooze” and work at the subatomic level. Life as we know it operates even below the molecular level (DNA would be molecular) — it needs to interact with the environment. The presence of light in our environment means the program needs to account for the photon and subatomic level.

Again, even though professor Bostrom said that for computers this was “obviously infeasible” at the universal level, let us assume that it is feasible for something the size of the solar system (and everything outside that is heavily pixilated). My problem is not computer power, nor the incredible amount of resources used on this simulation, but the lack of knowledge of the situation at the “launch” or “start” point. This problem cannot be overcome by anything other than time travel to the past (which, I think, is impossible) and some sort of instantaneous measurement of every being / particle at that moment. Essentially, we today (and in the future) will not have enough information to accurately replicate the past. If we cannot accurately replicate the past, why do it?

If your simulation has no defined starting point, then you are simulating nearly pure speculation. This would be silly for the post-humans to do as it would provide minimal utility from a scientific or even entertainment point of view, and yet still be extremely difficult to program and set up. Imagine the chaos theory (think of a “Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury or, more likely better known, its parody by the Simpsons in A Treehouse of Horror V): if you get the tiniest thing wrong, then whatever turns out will be totally different from something accurate / useful.

Conclusion — An Amusing Game Build by and for Super AI

The above was largely a brain dump, taking many micro digressions. Let me coalesce some of the thoughts I spewed out above into some conclusions:

Approach 1: A pure simulation is difficult since there is not enough computer power, unless (a) drastic new physics are discovered or the universe housing the computer has different laws of physics than we do, and (b) their universe is much bigger than ours. However, this seems unlikely and suggests that maybe are changes are better than “one in billions.”

Approach 2: A video game with a player among us means that (a) our universe has no history or future beyond someone’s lifespan, (*sigh, not really a problem in the theory, just really depressing), or (b) there is an informational bottleneck between brain and computer (put differently, how long would they have to control or manipulate us to ‘play’ one ‘game’?). This would work if (a) the thing playing us is not human (AI?) or (b) some intricate way of saving the game. I would say of the different approaches, this is the most likely.

Approach 3: A video game (Civilization + Sim City + Sims) would run into problems, I think, if we created our own sentience. Would this being still be subject to the will and control of a third player and how do they control us? This seems like we would be knocking on the computer screen from the outside.

Approach 4: An Ancestral Simulation to any useful agree would be impossible without time travel.

“What is ‘real’? How do you define ‘real’? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then ’real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.” — Morpheus from “The Matrix”

Morty: “You sold a gun to a murderer so you could play video games?!”
Rick: “Yeah, sure, if you spend all day shuffling words around you can make anything sound bad. — Rick and Morty

Perspective is Everything

In the picture above, imagine that instead of a cylindrical object, there is a physical representation of an event floating there (a birthday party, a presidential assassination, my cat jumping). And, instead of using light to illuminate it, we are using language to describe it. Like moving light around an object to reveal different shadows, we can move carefully selected words around and reveal — or hide — different aspects of the object or — in this metaphor — the event.

We take full advantage of our (in)ability to describe something accurately for our pleasure, amusement, comfort, and control. Below, I will present some examples from satire, plot summaries, the news, and history on how “the shape” of events can be altered by how they are presented with language.

Satire: The masters of satire and parody, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, often take full advantage of language’s ability to frame something “in a new light”:

[Stephen Colbert on Trump during the primaries] “He is getting closer and closer to landing the magic number of delegates needed to secure the GOP nomination, 1237, which, coincidentally, is the year where he gets his ideas from: ‘Fight the moors’ ‘Build an impenetrable wall’ ‘behold all my treasure and my wives.’”

[Jon Stewart on Bush winning 5/4 votes] “The final margin in the state of Florida, 5 votes to 4 votes [shows picture of supreme court judges]. Now, what is interesting about that is it is an 11% victory margin for George w. Bush, a lot greater than most pundits anticipated in what was considered a very tight race. Now we are still here crunching some numbers, we will be here all night, but it looks like one of the most surprising things about this Florida vote is that George W. Bush got 100% of the African-American vote [shows picture of Clarence Thomas, only African American in Supreme Court]. Shocking.”

Plot Summaries: Another interesting illustration of the words ability to shift angles is by comparing two overtly different movies, but convincing people that they are, somehow, essentially the same plot. In this link the title is: “11 Vastly Different Movies That Actually Have the Same Plot.” Some of their examples include:

Oblivion and Wall-E (“One of the last drone repairman on Earth finds a spacecraft which leads to a discovery that puts the fate of mankind in his lap.”);

Aladdin and Les Miserables (“Stole a loaf of bread, went to jail, was given riches by someone, gained political office, took part in rebellion against the government, has longstanding feud with one specific government official, ultimately influences this enemy to defeat himself.”)

News: Much of my website is intended to provide a different view of world events, namely from Chinese and Russian vantage points. I think one of the most illustrative examples is from, what I called “Fish Theft”, an article titled 12 Chinese fishermen meet Philippine Court’s Heavy Punishment. Here, the impression is that the Chinese fishermen were treated to “heavy punishment” because the Chinese fishermen had “run ashore”.
What is interesting is some of the information which was left out, but included in other news articles, such as the fact that the 12 men were in possession of a protected species — the pangolin; also the pre-trial was postponed at least four times, which, the author believes is due to the high tensions between China and the Philippines.

History: I am reading Anatoly Dobrynin’s account of the Cuban Missile crisis. Essentially, the Russians were, in part, defending the sovereignty of Cuba, and hoping to counter the placement of missiles by the US throughout Western Europe. America is portrayed more as a hungry imperialist and the Russians more as their defenders.

In each example, we are only shown certain parts of the story; the authors are only illuminating certain aspects. In the Satire and Plot Summary examples, this is done with the knowledge that the audience knows more of what the “picture” looks like, but when our minds listen to each and does not run into any incorrect information, we are somewhat puzzled and amused. This is the source of parody, but it is based on our inability to comprehend the full picture.

It is therefore critical to point out that none of these are “wrong”, not the satire nor the history. It is just a different angle on the same event (a different light angle on the same cylinder floating in space). How something appears is always a matter of perspective.

As an exercise in what I’m explaining, you could view each case as either…

(a)…a victory for the words ductile ability to be as vague or as focused as desired, to be able to focus on single aspects or the whole picture as desired.

or

(b)… a failure in the amount of information a sentence can hold. Regardless of how we frame a sentence, although it might not be “wrong”, it will never be able to capture the whole story and therefore never contain the whole truth; the information exchange rate of words/language is so minute. 

There are different ways to portray someone, something or some event. This is not new information. These different portrayals are different perspectives. But which one is the correct one?

The answer is all of them. There is no one correct version of an event. It would be like trying to argue which one of the angles above is the correct one. Since we cannot be the event itself, and only observers, we will never be able to explain the “whole story”, or at least all that is known. In fact, as far as I can tell, the only perfect language is mathematics (see the “Sheep in Scotland” joke).

Instead, the only thing you can do to improve a description is fill it further with context. Nothing of the above, even though somewhat absurd, contains any “wrong” information; so, they are correct. That is what makes them so fun to listen to or read. This jarring realization that the absurd is correct.

The Correct Perspective…or rather, the less-wrong one…

I hate to have to do this, but it is important: what does “correct” mean? Google defines it as “free from error; in accordance with fact or truth”; dictionary.com app defines it as (a) “To set or make true, accurate, or right; remove the errors or faults from; (b) to point out or mark the errors in; (c) conforming to fact or truth; free from error.”

Let us explore this a little bit by shining light (with words) onto this picture and attempt to portray it “correctly”:

What is the picture depicting? In the “free from error” version of our definition, then both of the sentences below are perfectly correct:

This is an old man and an old woman looking at each other.

It is a man playing on the guitar with two others listening.

I would make the argument, looking at this picture, that although both of them are free from error, it is not conforming to fact or, more appropriately, truth. Being free from error does not equal truth. Truth, in my mind, has to be the whole truth, the whole story; “half a truth is often a great lie” (people attribute that quote to Ben Franklin). When you tell the truth, it is free from any attempt to manipulate or distort. It is the underlying truth of a matter which you need to strive for. In this sense, ‘correct’ is not enough.

So, both of these are perfectly correct, but neither are true (by my definition). The truth would take a bit longer to explain, and, honestly, you would never really get there:

The painting is a form of ambiguous optical illusion, depicting two scenes: (“perspective” 1) an old woman and an old man looking at each other, and, from another perspective (“perspective” 2), two men sitting near the center, one person playing the guitar, the second one listening. The man on the right in perspective 2, playing the guitar, comprises or forms the majority of the face of the old man from perspective 1. The guitar player’s face is the old man’s eye, the guitar player’s right elbow forms the old man’s nose, and the guitar player’s right leg — the old man’s chin… (I think you get the idea….)

The best way to appreciate this would be to have you reverse-engineer my description and see what comes out. What would happen if I just showed you the description (no picture) and had you recreate the drawing yourself? Obviously, the first two “correct” versions would not get you anywhere close to the picture above. My version would get you closer, but it would still look much different from the original. Really, the only way to get it all the way would be describing the brush strokes. (An example of this is the constitutional description of the Nepalese flag, and these are done with geometric shapes and geometric descriptions … again, math!).

You witnessed a futile attempt for me to describe a lifeless, motionless, two-dimensional drawing. I totally failed. There is an incredible amount lost when I described the picture. “A Picture is worth a thousand words?” No way, not even close, maybe a million words. Nearly cannot be done — it is apples and oranges, 2D v 4D. I really do not think a truthful description is possible with only words

The Problem

People use the same tools to describe a picture as they use to describe an event. An event has people involved, actions taken. It is dynamic. Moving. There are players involved which likely do not completely understand why they themselves did whatever they did. If I failed at describing a 2-D motionless drawing, how could you describe a 3-D moving picture with the human factor? There are five dimensions to consider now: 3D + time + intentions and thoughts of the human actors / the human factor. We failed at truthfully describing a 2D drawing, what chance do we have with a 5D one?

Imagine trying to explain something like this completely. It is not hard, actually: we see an attempt at this every time we read a news article. It is laughably futile, but we take the written word as truth because it is comprised of correct facts. It will fail at describing the event entirely, that is, the truth, every time.

I will pause and say that this is not necessarily due to the intentional malice of the writer, more often it is because language is simply too limited. All you can do is bring the description closer to the truth, although you will never reach it.

My Goal

My goal is to help news articles and agencies get closer to the truth, and not be content to stop at a list of correct facts.

I will have to take a closer look at the media. The media is the interpreter for us. It provides the lens through which we view the world. In my opinion, it is destructively powerful and influential in shaping a country’s opinion (I am not the only one who has this opinion; I did not make this picture, below).

The media, all of it, although motivated by different aspects, fails to tell the truth — by definition. Again, this is not entirely their own fault: people’s minds and language simply do not have the processing power to juggle all the causalities and factors which define a moment or event — not to mention a 1000-word article you read online. Since I think language is our own creation — and the tool we use to convey ideas — we can assume that it is a reflection of the amount of information transfer in a given time: we are running up against physical limits of the human mind.

Regardless, there has to be a way to get closer to the truth. I think most people would appreciate that. I think it is the right thing to do. There should be some outlet which strives to reach the truth of something by using the various vantage points around the world and presenting them as clearly as possible. Hopefully, these conversations will promote a better, but by no way complete, understanding across the US and the world.