> no one knows what's real anymore, who to listen to, what to believe.
It's a myth that "trusted news sources" were more truthful before the internet. It's just that the internet has exposed all the propaganda going on.
Professional historians well know that historical accounts tend to be more propaganda than factual, which is why they always look for independent corroboration. Archaeology has rewritten many accounts of things like battlefields, even modern ones.
This is probably true. In the past we have stable worldviews - but they were not very accurate, now we have much more information. It is now possible to build more accurate models of the reality - but overall do people build more accurate models or maybe they just use the additional information to dig themselves deeper into their biases?
I think people go between two modalities for understanding information, shallow and deep or selective and generalized. We, globally, have more information, but information alone is relatively flat. Knowledge can seem to form feedback loops. I'm not sure if the models are more accurate as a consequence. The models themselves are mathematical objects. One domain of knowledge can easily map to another domain of knowledge through a mathematical model (up to isomorphism, meaning, they share the same model, use a different vocabulary, but that's besides the point, the literal mathematical model connects the knowledge domains).
The obvious thing is knowledge uses math. Knowledge uses mathematical objects to model the world. You can keep seeing patterns from one knowledge domain to another, but it doesn't mean they are connected by the model intrinsically, that is, that the model is the thing generating the knowledge. The model is just a model. Math is filled to the brim in ways of making models of things. The model can be representative of a full data set and closed under the data set, or the model can be representative of a prediction. In an open system, there is no mathematical closure. So in an open system that is producing knowledge, something has to be the ground. The mathematical models.
I don't know how this relates to bias, or digging oneself into a bias, but I do know that after enough cycles of going in a feedback loop, it can converge.
Worldviews are always difficult. You never have all the information. There's always more information. If there's not more information, people will invent new ways of making more information.
This is always the dilemma with data versus theory.
It's a myth that "trusted news sources" were more truthful before the internet. It's just that the internet has exposed all the propaganda going on.
Professional historians well know that historical accounts tend to be more propaganda than factual, which is why they always look for independent corroboration. Archaeology has rewritten many accounts of things like battlefields, even modern ones.