The Sydney Initiative for Truth (SIFT) is concerned with the need for evidence, nuance, trust, and reason in today’s ever-noisier infosphere.
SIFT’s interdisciplinary researchers aim to understand and remedy the ‘post truth’ crisis. Through philosophy, linguistics, political science, public health, media, environmental science, and data science, we are investigating a range of issues around truth, including the quality of public discourse, commercial influence in research, historical trends in ‘truth decay’, cognitive biases, political and media spin, fake news, power and claims to truth, the role of language, and the decline of trust in expertise.