The Search for Truth

[unspeakablehorror]

Something that I think is not acknowledged enough is that even the most unscrupulous people don't lie all the time.  These people will often use a half-truth when it is convenient for them.  The response to this is sometimes to dismiss this statement as containing any element of truth simply due to the source.  But this feeds into the strategy of such unscrupulous types of casting their opponents as opportunistic liars. Thus I think that not only for the sake of ethics, but also practicality, the only good response to a half-truth is a more complete truth.  This means that when a claim is made, one should not assume the claim is false simply because the source is unreliable.  Instead, in the case where one does not have solid knowledge of their own about the claim, one should look at more reliable independent sources to try to understand if there is some truth to a statement.  And in this search for truth, it's critically important to understand what biases may exist in different sources, and to understand that no one has an inherent bias towards truth, not the people with the majority opinion, not their opposition, and not you or me.