Am I just making things up? Well yes…as Yuval Noah Harari asks “How can myths sustain entire empires?”. Human culture and society is something we made up. The knowledge we’ve gained through our cooperative social existences and cognitive arms races are sourced out of our brain. Though the environment can influence our subjective experience and we can use instruments and devices and systems to record, measure and analyze the world around us, we are still, fundamentally, trapped in our heads. 

That said, There is such a thing as truth. Thanks to scientific consensus(taking advantage of the dilution of our subjective biases) we can use our knowledge to influence the world with some idea of what our actions will do in the future.

Today, the question of truth is contentious, we have to consider the impact of misinformation, disinformation, and historical gaps of knowledge. So it is important to be thorough, and you do that by reading a lot. PHDs are made by one wannabe scientist, reading probably around a thousand papers, and science is made from hundreds of thousands of PHDs, and then millions of technicians, interns, undergrads, and badass dreamers. 

Climate change is one of these contentious subjects, despite having millions of people in agreement and developed knowledge surrounding it based on empirical data and easily observable phenomena. So despite our cultural and human inability to maybe be united in our understanding it is something that undeniably exists outside our heads…and yet from our fingertips. As PBS Science Youtuber Matt O’Dowd claims “…Our main geological impact is, of course, climate change.” 

So check my sources, and be critical, and read a lot, and have fun learning. I may be wrong about stuff, and so much is unknown, our current theories of physics lead to the possibility of two universes or even infinite ones. One of my favorite works of media on misinformation and understanding comes from the host of Cautionary Tales, Tim Harford, who points to “our curiosity” as our best tool in combating misinformation. So let’s get curious.