Sustainable Media Center Substack
At TED in Vancouver, I found myself asking a question that, not that long ago, would have felt philosophical, maybe even abstract. Now it feels immediate, and harder to avoid.
So, what does truth mean in today’s world, and does it still function the way we think it does?
The question first came up at a TED Brain Date. A small room, about a dozen people, no stage, no slides, just a circle that filled in as people realized what the topic was.
The group was a mix you only really get at TED. A journalist and NYU professor working in Ghana, focused on how students understand truth in a fragmented media environment. A PricewaterhouseCoopers consultant from India thinking about trust, incentives, and how organizations make decisions when the underlying data is uncertain. A former Reuters reporter now working on credibility scoring systems. An AI founder who has spent decades training language models and recently launched a product he described, somewhat provocatively, as a “lie detector for AI.”
We went around and talked about why we were there. What emerged quickly was that no one was approaching truth as a purely theoretical concept. The journalist talked about students who no longer default to institutional authority. They don’t begin with the New York Times or the BBC. They begin with what shows up in their feeds, or what aligns with their worldview, and they build from there. That shift changes not just what people believe, but how they decide what is worth believing.
