Ramblin' with Roger

“How do you know what is true?” I find this to be a fascinating question. In mid-autumn 2025, a couple of guys came onto my porch and knocked on my door. Looking through the front window, I assumed that they were from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

I could have ignored them, I suppose, but I’m always interested in conversing about issues of faith. Indeed, I’ve talked with Mormons before; I even have a Book of Mormon, which I suppose undercut one of the young men’s talking points. (I’ve TRIED to read it, but it hasn’t grabbed  me.)

One of the guys was from Utah (no surprise) and the other from Arizona. The one who did much less of the talking was the one who asked, “How do you know what is true?”

Part of it is observation. If I let go of a pencil, it falls. Some of it has been drawn from what I’ve read. When I was a kid, I absorbed the entire Encyclopedia Americana, plus its annual updates. And, as often noted, I received the World Almanac almost every year from 1963 to 2018, and devoured a lot of random statistics.

823 years!

This is why I was so quick to debunk that Internet myth that a particular calendar pattern happens only every 823 years. There’s a LOT of stuff online I don’t trust. When someone states something as fact, and I haven’t seen it, I often ask where they saw it. When they say, “On Facebook” or “the Internet,” I’ve been known to press for more information; what site on the Internet, for instance.

There’s someone I’ve known IRL, and a person I know indicated that he died. But I’ve seen nothing like a news article or an obituary, something I could use to verify. I’m loath to share faulty information. When I hear a famous person has died, I wait until I’ve seen the news in two or three historically reliable sources. It’s one of the reasons I’ve subscribed to GroundNews: to see other, diverse sources.

But I’m also willing to recognize that our understanding of information changes.

When my father painted my ceiling to reflect the planets in the Milky Way, there were no moons around Mercury and Venus, one around Earth, two around Mars, 12 around Jupiter, nine around Saturn, five around Uranus, one around Neptune, and none around Pluto. The inner  planets would be the same, but Jupiter has at least 95, Saturn has 274(!), Uranus has 28, and Neptune has 16. Pluto is no longer considered a planet, but the largest of its five moons, Charon, is half Pluto’s diameter.

This doesn’t mean science was”wrong,” but that more information has been gleaned. I get frustrated when the result of additional knowledge is presented as “they were lying to us” without a soupçon of proof.

Uh-uh

As an information specialist – my title for a time – I’m discouraged when misinformation or disinformation is readily disseminated. This is not new – I read about Bob Denver’s “recent” death in 2012 when he passed away in 2005. 

But the algorithm is far more robust now, and that was before the onslaught of Artificial Intelligence. I find information nearly every day that is reductive at best, summarizing other sources, often poorly. And sometimes it’s just wrong to conflate people with the same or similar names. 

When I was first online in the late 1990s, I took it upon myself  – now it sounds ridiculous – to “correct the Internet.” Now it’s nigh unto impossible, and it frightens me how resilient BS can be.  Neil deGrasse Tyson gives us pointers on what to believe on the Internet and what not to believe.

It’s not a new problem, though. “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” -Isaac Asimov, scientist and writer (2 Jan 1920-1992)