The public narrative is filled with fake news, alternative facts, lies, and distortions. The "political pundit and chattering commentator class" is calling this the "post-truth" era.
It's essential to understand some basic cognitive science if you're going to keep your sanity while staying connected to the post-truth "real world."
To start, what you experience as external reality is not the true nature of external reality. You experience your mind's simulated model of it. The external world is dynamic, but your mind's model of it is fixed.
Your internal model of external reality has a specific level of resolution. The higher your model's resolution, the more accurate it represents the external world; you see more detail. External reality is not black and white but has lots of grays.
For example, let's take something we can agree we think. How long is the shoreline around Lake Michigan? According to an online search, it is 1640 miles around. So, is this the real truth or an alternative fact?
The answer to that question requires that we know the unit of measure the observer used to determine the answer. A different way of saying this is, we need to know the degrees of resolution used in the measurement.
If you measured the distance in increments of feet and not inches, you'd get a different answer. Inches will measure irregularities in the shoreline that feet won't.
You can take it all the way down to measuring it in Planck lengths [1], and the measured length of the shoreline would increase to infinity.
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