Original subtitles

(park parking lot)

I'm Mr. Beat.

This whole pedaling a bike thing is tiring.

That's why I'm thinking about getting an electric bike for real.

So how do I know which one to get?

If I just look at ads, ALL OF THEM seem to be high quality….if I just look at prices…that

narrows it down sure.

But let's say I narrowed it down to two e-bikes that appeared to be the exact same quality

and same price.

Now, both advertised that each was better than the other.

So how would I know which one to get?

Hold up.

(slams brakes) This reminds me of a bigger question.

(green screen)

How do we know if something is true?

Clone: well, we know it’s true if I SAY it’s true, ok punk?

(Mr. Beat punches clone)

Clone: Ow!

Why did you do that?

Mr. Beat: You’re not the real Mr. Beat

Clone: Yes I am

Mr. Beat: (looking to the camera) Don’t believe him.

I’m the real Mr. Beat

Clone: No, I’M the real Mr. Beat.

Don’t believe HIM

Mr. Beat: Now they’re confused.

How are they going to know the truth?!?

They don’t know who to trust.

Clone: Why should they trust either of us, anyway?

Mr. Beat: Yeah, ya know…that’s actually a good question.

Why SHOULD they trust us?

Clone: See, I told you I’m not the clone (realizing Mr. Beat has left)

Wait…where did he go?

Mr. Beat?

Where did you go?

I mean…clone…where did you go?

(park) I’ve been thinking A LOT lately about how

many folks disagree about what is or isn’t the truth.

(turn) I mean, different people can be given the exact same information, yet those people

can interpret that same information differently.

(turn) So is it even possible to truly know if something is true? (looking up to the heavens)

What IS truth?

(back patio) According to my favorite book, the DICTIONARY,

“truth” means “the quality or state of being true.”

(long pause) hold on now…that can’t be right…

Oh ok here we go….I’m sorry… “truth” ACTUALLY means “a fact or belief that is

accepted as true.”

What the heck.

What is going on with my life.

Nah man.

Truth just means what we accept as reality.

“We” meaning us humans, of course.

Well humans make mistakes all the time, don’t we…

so what if all of us get reality WRONG?

Well yeah.

(shrugs) We get reality wrong all the freaking time.

But that's ok.

As long as we humans have the shared goal of working together in order for our species

to survive, it doesn't necessarily matter that what we accept as reality is a bit different

from person to person.

(green screen) Now, when the differences of what we perceive

as reality DOES threaten the survival of our species, that's when we have a problem.

This is why I made this video that you're watching right now.

At least, I THINK you're watching right now?

(Knock on camera) hello?

-How to find out if something is true-

(green screen) Finding out if something is true is always

a process.

Clone: Wait, is what you just said true?

Shut up.

Clone: Ok

When people talk, they are constantly making claims.

Often, those claims are just opinions.

Well, ya know.

That’s just, like, your opinion, man.

That said, many of our claims are facts.

That’s a fact.

(park) So how do you know something is a fact or

opinion?

Well, in order to explain this best, we need a claim.

Does anyone have a claim?

Mrs. Beat: Picking your nose causes cancer.

Great.

That works.

To find out if picking your nose really causes cancer, you can either do your own research

and analysis……or trust what experts answer in response to that claim.

The fact is, we all can’t possibly be experts about everything.

(turns) Ain’t nobody got time to learn everything about everything.

(turns) Therefore, we must listen to experts.

-Expert Consensus-

(green screen) But how do we know if someone is truly an

expert?

First of all, experts are basically the closest thing we have today to fortune tellers.

They know sooo much about a topic that they are often able to predict the future with

their knowledge.

Now, I wouldn’t call myself an expert when it comes to anything, but because I’ve made

videos about and wrote a book about every single presidential election in American history,

several viewers care to hear what I have to say about FUTURE presidential elections.

I can’t predict the future, no one can.

(pause) but… based on my knowledge of American presidential history, many of you clicked

to watch my video in which I predicted who would win the election of 2020.

And I don’t mean to brag, but since I predicted correctly in that video, it’s reasonable

to conclude that several more might trust that I will predict it right in 2024.

No offense to young people, but most youngin’s are not experts on anything.

Why?

Well, experts spend thousands upon thousands of hours studying very specific topics or

learning very specific skills.

Assuming a 30-year old electrician began their career as an electrician right out of high

school, they likely spent at least 28,000 hours of their life installing and maintaining

electrical equipment.

I’d say that the electrician was probably an expert, even if they have just one-star

reviews online.

Most youngin’s haven’t figured out what they want to specialize in, so it’s not

possible for them to become an expert yet.

But quantity doesn’t equal quality.

For example, what if that same electrician spent most of those 28,000 hours drunk?

Oh, maybe that explains all those one-star reviews.

Experts have credibility, or the quality of being trusted and believed in.

If they were correct so much in the past, surely they’ll be correct in the future.

(back patio) Interestingly, there has been this rising

trend to NOT trust certain experts.

Notice the key word is CERTAIN.

We still generally trust plumbers, landscapers, architects, and engineers, but increasingly

there’s lot of folks who don’t trust politicians, managers at corporations, journalists, teachers,

doctors, or even scientists.

It’s obvious why a lot of us don’t trust politicians and people who run corporations.

This is because of incentives.

Follow the money.

Yeah, it really is often as simple as “follow the money.”

You see, it sometimes doesn’t matter that someone is an expert at something.

We SHOULD be skeptical of an expert if it’s proven that they are rewarded for making certain

claims.

Put another way, they may be motivated to make a claim based on rewards that they cannot

get simply by telling the truth.

Even though they might risk losing their credibility, it might be worth gaining other rewards like,

yeah…mainly just money.

But that doesn’t fully explain why people increasingly are not trusting journalists,

teachers, doctors, or scientists.

After all, they’re all not super rich.

Well, some doctors make pretty good money, but teachers and journalists?

Most of them barely make enough to pay the bills.

Well, there is research to support that the reason why this phenomenon is happening is

because many folks feel that powerful people are using journalists, teachers, doctors,

and scientists to push their own interests.

Other research supports that, because the internet makes information so easily available

to all of us, we can easily find evidence that backs up whatever we already believe.

And what we already believe is often directly linked to stuff we are extremely familiar

with.

Here’s the thing…people DO tend to trust journalists, teachers, doctors, and scientists

that they agree with already.

More on why that is in a bit.

Nearly all of us consume media, so we must be experts at journalism, right?

Nearly all of us went to school for our entire childhood, so we must be experts at education,

right?

Nearly all of us are intimately aware of our own health, so we must be experts at health,

right?

Nearly all of us have EXISTED our entire lives, so we must be experts at science, right?

Ok maybe that last one was a stretch.

Anyway, it is important to recognize that sometimes experts are divided, so that leads

to the next way to determine if something is true or not.

-Doing your own research-

(park) So what if you just wanted to do your OWN

research?

(turn) Well, you can.

But it’s not gonna be easy, and it requires this thing called critical thinking.

Critical thinking is a way of deciding whether a claim is always true, sometimes true, partly

true, or false.

It also includes creating new claims based on reason and evidence.

I made a video teaching you how to critically think, and I encourage you to watch that as

well, but I made the video 10 years ago so eh, you know what…just stay here and watch

this video.

Yeah.

The first thing you do is come up with a hypothesis.

A hypothesis is an assumption made based on limited evidence as a starting point for further

research.

(green screen) So let’s go back to our claim.

Wait, what was the claim?

Clone: (picking nose) Picking your nose causes cancer

Oh that’s right.

So we MIGHT have limited evidence that picking your nose can cause cancer if we noticed that

a lot of people who answered that they picked their nose a lot also happened to get cancer.

Clone: (picking nose) Well DOES it cause cancer?

Well my hypothesis is that it DOES NOT.

And cancer experts already agree with this, but remember…

Clone: We’re doing our own research!

(grossly looks at booger on finger)

Right.

(grossed out)

(patio) The first thing to be clear on is the definition

of “cancer” and defining the parameters of picking your nose.

Cancer has a clear definition, but…regarding the picking of your nose…is it picking your

nose once a week on average, once a day on average, once an hour on average, once a MINUTE

on average?

Well I don’t think anyone has that many boogers.

And how deep does the finger have to go into the nose?

Ok I think you get it.

Once you figure that out, you need to gather evidence.

This is often gathered through observation and experience.

This process is called empirical research.

Experiments are carried out to either support or go against a hypothesis.

So ya need an experimental group.

A group of nose pickers that will closely monitor, and then track them FOR THE REST

OF THEIR LIVES.

Good luck with that.

A good experiment also includes a control group that is used as a baseline for comparison.

Put simply, a control group is a group in an experiment not being tested.

The control group should be treated identically to the experimental group except for the independent

variable being tested.

So get yourself a control group to also closely monitor to compare to the nose pickers, and

then track them FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES.

Good luck with that.

A good experiment also is randomized, meaning the participants are divided by chance into

separate groups.

A good experiment clearly identifies the independent and dependent variables that can affect it.

A variable is something that is likely to change.

An independent variable is one that does not depend on any other variables in the experiment.

A dependent variable, as you probably guessed, depends on other variables in an experiment.

If you are following a nose picker around for a long period of time, they’re going

to pick their nose in different places.

Heck, they’ll probably move a few times.

They’ll encounter different people and circumstances that almost certainly will affect their nose

picking habits.

Those are all variables that can alter the experiment, man.

A good experiment is easily replicated, meaning it can be conducted multiple times in the

exact same way.

It has a large sample size.

This means you’re not just going to look at 20 nose pickers.

Or even 200.

Or even 2,000.

The more the merrier.

A larger sample size increases the reliability of the results.

A good experiment also uses reliably accurate methods for data collection.

I could go on and on, but generally ya just don’t mess around with experimentation.

It’s meant to be a long, tedious, and difficult process.

Also, there are many types of research.

I’ve been mostly referencing scientific research, but all of THESE are types of research

that I won’t get into to keep this video shorter.

(park) But say you don’t want to conduct original

research because again, (turns) Ain’t nobody got time for that.

-Analyze the sources- If you don’t want to blindly trust experts

or dedicate your entire life to research, you can also just analyze, or break down into

smaller and easier parts, the sources of claims.

breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts in order to gain a better understanding

of it.

How do you know something is a good source?

Well, I like CRAAP.

I mean, I like the CRAPP test.

Here…just here…look at this

CRAPP stands for Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose.

Currency is about how timely the information is.

If the source is from 1972, it’s likely not as reliable as something from 2023.

We’ve learned a lot since then after all.

Relevance is about the importance of the information for our needs.

Who is the intended audience?

If you’re not a kid, you probably shouldn’t be referencing a kids book.

Is the source actually useful for informing you or does it just distract you?

Authority is about who’s responsible for providing the information.

Who is the author?

Who is the publisher?

Who paid to produce the content?

Who sponsors it?

What are the author’s credentials, affiliations, or biases?

Remember, EVERYONE is biased.

Including myself.

For example, I am biased to favor people with mullets.

For some reason, when I see a mullet, I just trust the person more.

Anyway…accuracy is about…um…yeah…accuracy.

Does the information cite its sources?

Has it been reviewed by other experts?

Does the tone of the writing seem free of emotion?

Are there basic spelling and grammar issues?

And finally, Purpose is about the REASON why the information exists.

Is the purpose of the source to inform and teach, or entertain or persuade?

Most of the information you encounter on a day-to-day basis is in fact, propaganda, or

misleading information meant to promote a cause.

Propaganda is everywhere, man, whether we realize it or not.

One of the best things we can do when analyzing sources is something called corroboration.

Corroboration is a type of independent evidence that supports other evidence.

If you have multiple sources that clearly did not work together all reaching the same

conclusion, that conclusion seems more credible.

Now, corroboration can be overwhelming.

Today there are literally thousands of news sources at our fingertips.

These sources range in size, shape, and bias, from social media accounts to large media

conglomerates, and it can be straight up confusing sifting through it all.

(green screen) That’s why I believe this video’s sponsor

is a perfect fit for the topic of media literacy.

Ground News is an app and website specifically designed to help you with media literacy.

They collect media sources and articles from all over the world and package them by story

to help you better understand what you’re reading.

Ground News

has definitely helped me become more media literate, and I highly encourage you to try

it yourself.

If you use my link you’ll get 30% off their all-access Vantage Subscription.

Go to ground.news/mrbeat or click the link in the description to check out Ground News

and help support an independent news platform working to make the media landscape more transparent.

(patio) Ok, so yeah that was a sponsor.

I want to point out that I was going to make this video anyway, before Ground News reached

out to me.

Other than the ad itself, they didn’t tell me what to say for this video.

Regardless, I want you to critically think about the ad’s role in this video.

How does the ad affect the video?

Does it change your perception of the information in this video?

Anyway, since much of the sources of information we consume is MASS MEDIA, I also want to bring

up the five filters of mass media as explained in the classic book Manufacturing Consent,

by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky.

Basically, Herman and Chomsky argued that all mass media has to pass through these five

filters before it reaches us.

(Ownership, Advertising, Sourcing, Flak, and The Common Enemy) Ownership meaning that the

information has to be approved by the media companies that own the media, and these owners

ultimately just want to make money.

Advertising meaning that the information can only be presented through advertising since

that’s the main way media makes money, and any media that scares off advertisers tends

to not make it to us.

Sourcing meaning that, since media companies heavily rely on just a handful of sources,

they are often at their mercy.

Flak meaning that individuals and organizations often talk trash about media, and these media

companies…uh…don’t want that, so they alter what gets covered to prevent that.

And finally, The Common Enemy.

Media companies are more likely to cover something if it creates fear and hatred, mostly because

it makes them more money but also because it’s useful in helping people accept authority.

Herman and Chomsky focused on the common enemy being Communism, but it really could be anything

to get the masses afraid and hateful.

It’s really difficult to analyze the credibility and reliability of the sources that contain

information about picking your nose causing cancer because….uh….well…there are virtually

NO sources that contain information about picking your nose causing cancer.

Moving on…

-Logical reasoning-

(park) So there’s this little website called Twitter,

and I recently Tweeted, “I’m done.”

It was intentionally cryptic, especially considering the fact that I went silent on the platform

for three days afterward.

As I predicted, the Tweet confused and worried a lot of folks.

Most were just like “with what?” or posted a Joever meme.

But there were soooo many others with different interpretations of what I meant.

Michael said “with supporting ranked choice voting?” which was a good guess since I

did a livestream criticizing ranked choice voting the day after the Tweet.

Evan inferred that maybe I was done with the Royals.

Uh, they are having a bad season.

Daniel implied I was done with Twitter.

But only Web got it right.

I was just announcing that I was done editing my Andrew Jackson video.

Yeah I admit I Tweeted that as a social experiment for this video.

But the point was to show you that context matters.

You had no context with that Tweet…or nearly all Tweets for that matter.

Man Twitter sucks.

Wait a second…why did I get so many likes on this Tweet?

What the heck?

Anyway, despite having no context, lots of people confidently filled in the blanks, didn’t

they.

Removing context is just one way we fail to use logical reasoning, the way we painstakingly

use our brains to arrive at a conclusion by breaking down claims in a more broad way.

It also requires critical thinking.

Because information is constantly manipulating us, often the best way to use logical reasoning

when encountering new information is to just be aware of logical fallacies.

I made a video about logical fallacies that you maybe could watch after this video, and

that one actually holds up pretty well, so you can…yeah, watch that.

In the video, I call out logical fallacies made by Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro in an episode

they recorded on July 22, 2020.

And yes, I made logical fallacies myself in that actual video, and I’m grateful commenters

pointed that out.

But if you don’t want to watch that video then SHAME ON YOU.

How DARE you.

I’m just kidding…that’s ok.

You don’t have to watch it.

Shame on you.

Shame on you.

Oh…shame on you.

But if you don’t want to watch that video, logical fallacies are simply common errors

in reasoning based on bad logic.

In my opinion, the two most common logical fallacies that most of us are regularly guilty

of are the strawman fallacy, in which we misrepresent someone’s argument to make it easier to

attack, and the cherry picking fallacy, in which we pick out only evidence that fits

an argument we already have.

So, is it logical to assume that picking your nose causes cancer?

(long pause) No, absolutely not.

The only reason why I even brought that claim up is because I wanted to work in picking

your nose into one of my videos and I figured this was the best way I could do that.

There was also a bunch of cool stock footage I found with people picking their nose and

I was like, “I gotta use that somehow.

I’m not picking my nose right now.

I’m not picking my nose.

-Now we’re ready to make our own claim-

(green screen) So, does picking your nose cause cancer?

No.

That claim is mostly false.

That said, we should be open to the fact that later research could demonstrate evidence

that it is true.

-Conclusion- One of the best places to figure out the truth

is a courtroom trial.

I recently served on a jury, and I was amazed at how we worked together to attempt to critically

think to find the truth with the limited evidence we had.

In deliberations, we relied HEAVILY on corroboration since we mostly just had witness testimonies

to go off of.

We also heard testimony from experts who listed their credentials-experts who had different

conclusions about the same evidence.

Yeah my brain got a lot of exercise that week.

But even trials have lots of manipulation.

Lawyers, in particular, are EXTREMELY skilled at manipulating juries.

(patio) Most politicians used to be lawyers, by the

way…just saying…

Heck, even some witnesses are good at manipulating us.

It can be tough in the courtroom not to let our emotions get in the way of only looking

at the evidence.

But hey, just as much as we are logical creatures, we’re also emotional creatures.

In fact, when it comes to emotional issues that tap into our values, beliefs, and identity,

we often ditch logic and confirmation bias takes over.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out information that confirms or supports

our prior values, beliefs or identity.

In fact, when we encounter information that goes AGAINST our values, beliefs, or identity,

it hurts.

That pain we feel when this happens is called cognitive dissonance.

Brain scans even show that the part of our brains that is activated during a physical

threat is the same part activated when someone attacks our values, beliefs, or identity.

But it’s important that we stay curious and not get too comfortable with ANY belief.

(park) Finding out if something is true or not is

a process.

A constant process that will continue for the rest of your life.

And it’s a painful process.

Critical thinking actually kinda hurts, but, as with most things, the more we practice

it the easier it gets.

Heck, you may already be good at it, you just never realized it.

For example, when you get a suspicious email and your bull crap detectors go off in your

head thinking it’s probably a scam- that’s your brain jumpstarting into critical thinking

mode.

Many philosophers argue there is no such thing as an absolute or objective truth.

Although science always seeks the truth, nearly all scientists would agree that any of their

conclusions could not ever be absolute.

It’s best to think of knowledge existing on a spectrum.

On one end of the spectrum is absolute certainty.

On the other end is complete cluelessness.

Almost all truth is in between.

The more evidence we have, the more certain we can be, but I’d be careful of anyone

claiming absolute certainty.

After all, as I just pointed out, even scientific knowledge is unsettled.

Here’s a similar spectrum but with scientific knowledge added.

Notice how “hypothesis” is over here near “completely clueless” and “theory”

is not all the way over to “absolute proof.”

Science is also a process.

With more and better evidence, all scientists can do is reduce uncertainty.

I am pretty confident with this next claim.

You ready for it?

Let’s go.

Let’s do this:

Nothing is ever black and white.

Everything is shades of gray.

Nothing is ever this or that.

You may GET with THIS and THINK you can get with THAT.

Our brains are wired for shortcuts.

We love only having two options when it comes to truth.

We like to think something is true or false.

But almost always it’s somewhere in between.

Figuring out where on the spectrum the truth lies is freaking difficult, so it’s often

best to just trust experts, but blindly trusting experts is not good either.

And remember- we trust experts based on their effectiveness at predicting the future.

In fact, our best way to know if something is true is if it can predict the future.

By the way, I’m going with the electric bike company that says its bike will last

15 years and when I look around I see a lot of their bikes on the road that are 15 years

or older.

And finally, don’t forget how emotions drive what we perceive as truth.

We like to think something is true because we want it to be true.

We tend to believe what we want to believe.

And unfortunately, personalized algorithms often keep us trapped into only seeing what

we want to believe.

(green screen) Whatever truth you are seeking, I challenge

you to open your mind and suspend your judgment.

In my opinion, one of the most liberating things you can say is “I don’t know.”

Please let me know in the comments if I left anything out, or, more importantly, got something

wrong.

I’m sure you can trust those experts in the comments, as long as they explain why

they’re credible and cite their sources, amirite?

Anyway, I’m not an expert on epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, but I do have

a master’s degree in history, a bachelor’s degree in education, and a bachelor’s degree

in journalism.

Also I’ve been teaching for about 14 years.

Hopefully that means you trust me at least a little bit.

Thanks for watching.