By Nick Enfield With the power of the vote comes the responsibility to make our choice an informed one. We need true and relevant information. But just when we need it most, election season puts it further out of reach. Not only do we struggle against pernicious...
By Nick Enfield When you “like” a story online, you’re not just telling your social media followers that you like it, you’re also exposing them to that story. And they, in turn, can expose others, and so on. We are interconnected in ways we can hardly imagine,...
Julianne Schultz, Griffith University In October 2005 Stephen Colbert was just starting his eponymous show. It is somewhat chilling to realise that this was when he came up with the word truthiness: it seems so now. It has taken a while to reach maturity and morphed into...
By Nick Enfield The problem is not that people don’t care. It is that our circle of regard for truth is irrationally small It is often said that “people don’t care about truth”. But is this really the case? Imagine you are falsely accused of cheating in...
Jennifer Byrne, University of Sydney I’m a regular biomedical scientist, although in one sense I’m perhaps a bit different, in that I really like the process of writing. From speaking with colleagues and teaching postgraduate students about the process of scientific writing for more than ten years,...
When we talk, we follow certain ground rules, which are set out in what philosophers call “language games”. Each game has its own set of rules - but problems arise when not everyone is clear which game is being played. Perhaps most important is the informing...
By Nick Enfield Science can’t exist without telling a story. The question is not whether we should use it, but how we should use it best Scientists often struggle to communicate the findings of research. Our subject matter can be technical and not easily digested by a...
False beliefs about language and speech underlie legal precedents that allow jurors to be “assisted” by unreliable transcripts of forensic audio. The Everett Collection/Shutterstock Helen Fraser, University of New England This article is part of an ongoing series from the Post-Truth Initiative, a Strategic Research Excellence Initiative at...
John Keane, University of Sydney This article is part of the Revolutions and Counter Revolutions series, curated by Democracy Futuresas a joint global initiative between the Sydney Democracy Network and The Conversation. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in...
By Nick Enfield, 1 September 2017, The Cube Magazine // B // Truth.Pages 36-41. Originally published on The Cube Magazine ...