A three-step process for finding truth online

👋 We’re back!
Issue #264: confessions of a healthcare comms lead, executive orders, and brown noise
By Harris Sockel

Jon Krakauer, bestselling author of several blockbuster nonfiction books including Into the Wild, took to Medium last week to respond to a YouTuber who claims there are significant factual errors in his 1997 book about an Everest climbing disaster, Into Thin Air.

This is kind of personal for me. Into Thin Air is not only one of my favorite books, it’s one of the first books of narrative nonfiction I ever read. I was assigned it as summer reading before 11th grade, after it was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The book chronicles Krakauer’s experience climbing Everest in ’96 and a deadly storm that killed eight people and left several others stranded on the mountain. It’s riveting. It’s nonfiction, but it’s just as engrossing as the best novel you’ve ever read.

Most of the accusations outlined in the post concern the position of climbers on the mountain and how prepared or unprepared the crew was for the storm. I won’t get into too much detail, but I do want to briefly touch on the tactic this YouTuber is taking (as alleged by Krakauer) — because it points toward a universal law of the internet.

“There’s an axiom about online discourse known as the ‘Bullshit Asymmetry Principle,’” Krakauer writes. The less vulgar term for it is Brandolini’s Law, named after an Italian programmer who postulated that the energy it takes to refute a single falsehood is an order of magnitude larger than that needed to produce it.

In other words, distortion happens fast. Getting to the truth is a slower process.

Mike Caulfield, a who studies the spread of rumors and misinformation for a living, has a three-step process for finding the truth on the internet, and I think back to it often whenever I’m confronted with (a) someone who seems overconfident about questioning an established fact, or (b) anything that feels out of my depth:

• Check for previous fact-checking work
• Go upstream to the primary source
• Read laterally, which basically means “Google your sources” (you can do this easily with a minus search term, e.g. if you want background on the Wall Street Journal but don’t want a bunch of results from the site itself, search: “-site:wsj.com Wall Street Journal”)

Most importantly: Give the truth some time! Krakauer’s post is the first of what will be eight separate chapters of commentary — and (as a huge fan of this book for going on 20 years) I’ll be following closely.

👓 We’re also reading…

• Kathleen Murphy, former head of comms for her state’s BlueCross BlueShield affiliate, recalls arguing with the company’s Chief Medical Officer over a denied claim to a child who needed lifetime IV nutrition therapy. Murphy had no choice but to issue a bland statement explaining in deliberately arcane language why the claim was denied, but as she sent it she was shaken. “I wanted to scream,” she writes, “but I had a job to do. So I opened my laptop and composed an email.”
• FDR issued 3,721 executive orders over his 12 years in office, the record by far (second is Woodrow Wilson at 1,803). Most of FDR’s orders sought to remake the federal administration — but what he did not do, and what’s unique to Trump’s approach, is use an EO to “create and empower a small team of individuals to enact sweeping and substantive reform on the federal civil service, without the consent of Congress.” (Peter Stanley Federman, Assistant Prof. of Policy and Global Studies)

✨ A top highlight on Medium from last week

“We can disagree and still love each other — unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression.” (Tee Mugayi)

Your daily dose of practical wisdom

If you (like me) work from home and can’t bear the silence… but are too distracted by music… try white noise? Or brown noise, featuring lower, more calming frequencies a la rushing tides.

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