What separates truth from the information we consume and share? Why do compelling stories hold more power than facts in shaping our beliefs?
According to Yuval Noah Harari, truth and information in human society have a complex relationship. He reveals how stories and shared beliefs—regardless of their truth value—unite people and drive social change.
Keep reading to discover Harari’s fascinating insights about truth and information from his book Nexus.
Yuval Noah Harari on Truth and Information
According to Yuval Noah Harari, truth is distinct from information. He asserts that information is knowledge that connects and organizes people: It’s the stories, beliefs, and ideas that can transform a random assortment of individuals into a cohesive social group united behind a common cause. Importantly, these stories don’t need to be true to be powerful—in fact, most information isn’t objectively true at all.
Harari explains that the disconnect between information and truth can actually be beneficial: The stories we share can create social bonds, instill hope, encourage optimism, and inspire people to work together to achieve great things. But Harari’s key insight is that we avidly consume and share information based on how compelling the story is, not on whether it reflects reality. And some of the most attention-grabbing, emotionally moving stories are demonstrably untrue.
(Shortform note: How long have humans been able to share information with each other? Perhaps for a shorter amount of time than anthropologists have traditionally assumed. While two-million-year-old stone tools were once thought to represent evidence of the cultural transmission of knowledge, some experts today think these tools might instead have been “latent solutions” individuals figured out on their own—just as chimpanzees spontaneously use sticks to fish for termites, rather than learning this strategy from one another. The artifacts suggest that the early stone tools, and presumably the mental and motor abilities of their makers, went unchanged for over a million years, unlike culturally shared techniques, which evolve.)
Harari says that history shows, again and again, that having access to more information doesn’t necessarily lead to a better understanding of the world or wiser decision-making. But before we examine how this paradox has played out throughout human history, let’s take a closer look at why we don’t place a higher value on the truth of the information we share.
Why We Don’t Care Whether Information Is True
Harari explains that there are multiple kinds of truth or reality, which helps explain why we often don’t question whether information is objectively true. He identifies three distinct types: First, there’s objective reality—the reality we can prove with the laws of physics and the facts of the world. An objective reality is true whether or not anyone is aware of it or believes it. Second, there’s subjective reality, which exists only if someone believes it. Third, there’s intersubjective reality, which emerges when a story is believed by a large network of people and exists in the communication and collaboration between them. For an intersubjective reality, it doesn’t matter whether the story is true: When enough people believe in it, it can influence the world.
According to Harari, intersubjective reality forms the foundation of many things we believe in, like our nations, economies, religions, and ideologies. This is how we give power to the institutions that bring order to our world, like governments, social hierarchies, or the scientific establishment: by buying into the stories they tell and accepting the vision of reality that emerges from those stories. Harari points out that what we’re looking for when we seek information about the world isn’t the truth at all, but a compelling story that helps us make sense of our place in society.
Balancing Truth Against Order
The world looks different now than it did when there were witch hunts in Europe, but society’s underlying mechanisms for spreading ideas—true and false—are still basically the same. Harari calls these mechanisms “information networks”: They’re a fundamental structure underlying our society, and they’re made up of groups of people who share stories that spread the truth (or circulate misinformation) and create order (or engender chaos).
In managing the flow of information among people, social groups have a choice to make: Do they want to prioritize the spread of truth, or control the flow of information to maintain social order? What we should hope for, Harari explains, is information networks that can help us strike a balance between truth and order. Enabling a flow of information that errs too far on the side of one or the other can have disastrous consequences.
As we saw during the Scientific Revolution, human society can flourish when we seek the truth. It pushes human thought forward when we’re open to questioning long-held beliefs and replacing disproven information with updated observations. But, Harari notes, a tradeoff typically occurs: An emphasis on truth comes at the expense of order. The perception that the facts are changing can be destabilizing. For example, Galileo’s discovery of the heliocentric nature of our solar system upended the religious societies of Renaissance Europe. Likewise, Darwin’s theory of evolution threw the Victorian-era understanding of the natural world into chaos.
On the other hand, if a society considers order its highest value, it can take control of the flow of information to achieve that end. (If you manipulate the flow of information, you can manipulate what people think and do.) Unlike in a democracy—where information is shared freely with citizens so they can fact-check it and correct errors and falsehoods, even those put forth by the state—a dictatorship doesn’t want open conversation. Authoritarian regimes selectively promote ideas without regard for whether they’re demonstrably true or untrue. The logic goes that if knowledge becomes too freely available, then the stories the regime is built upon could be thrown into doubt and potentially rejected by the state’s citizens.
How AI Is Changing Our Relationship With Truth and Information
Because humans are wired to seek out a good story rather than to pursue the truth, putting AI in a position to determine what ideas we’re exposed to could have potentially disastrous consequences. Harari identifies three main dangers: AI’s disregard for truth, its ability to manipulate and polarize us, and its potential to surpass human understanding of the world. For each of these threats, he offers specific recommendations for how we can maintain human agency and control over our information landscape.
Scientists have made it possible to build AI models that can generate language and tell stories just like humans. Harari contends that AI’s ability to create compelling stories and produce the illusion of emotions (and emotional intimacy) is where its real danger lies. When we talk to an AI-powered chatbot like ChatGPT, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that these systems aren’t human and don’t have a vested interest in telling the truth. That will only become harder to recognize as AI gets better and better at mimicking human emotions—and creating the illusion that it thinks and feels like we do. So it will only become easier for us to lose sight of the fact that AI isn’t prioritizing the truth when it selects and generates information for us.
Harari argues that we need to take deliberate steps to tilt the balance in favor of truth as AI becomes more powerful. While his proposed solutions are somewhat abstract, he emphasizes two main approaches: being proactive about highlighting truthful information and maintaining decentralized networks where information can flow freely among institutions and individuals who can identify and correct falsehoods.
