I’m a regular watcher of YouTube videos on various (semi-)educational topics, like How To Cook That, Thunderf00t and many others not relevant to this post. I just now watched Sabine Hossenfelder’s What Problems Could Quantum Computers Solve?. At around P5m50s, there are two images comparing what Pinterest says you will achieve, and what someone actually achieved, following some recipe for buns.

Logical reasoning is amazing. Being able to convince someone else with a sound argument feels great (to me.) Flimsy arguments like “ugh, they do so in country X, so it can’t be wrong” makes me feel like a con artist. See also Appeal To Nature and related logical fallacies.

It is well known that convincing (or teaching) someone must be done from the perspective of what that other person already knows. You can’t teach someone quantum mechanics using math formulas if that’s not something they are used to. And that’s the rationale for us wanting arguments based on logical reasoning. An alternative, sadly also in active use, is evoking enough emotions to make a “truth” stick. For instance, following “you will not leave me” with violence, thereby associating “leaving” with pain. These truths tend to not stick as well, though. They require faith, and can be up-rooted by small changes in circumstance. E.g. a better-than-before opportunity to flee.

However, watching that meme picture of the video influencer scene, made me realize that what we have lost is not the truth, but causality. A few hundred years ago, there were only two convincing ways of making an argument: by voice, or by writing. Paintings, while prevalent, weren’t used for argument’s sake, so let’s ignore that.

If you heard someone speak, you could have doubted their reasoning; their motives. If you read a letter, you could do the same. Because both modes are limited in terms of communication speed, there would always be some ambiguity. You simply cannot write every detail your brain thinks about a topic, or the recipient will lose interest. Your imagination would have tried to back-fill causality, based on its existing knowledge, context and emotional state. But if you saw someone perform an act, the causality would not have been left to your imagination. (Ignoring, for a moment, the case of hallucinations.) What happened second must have come after the first, and if they happened close to each other (in time and space,) they very likely had a causal relationship.

This, I argue, is no longer true.

Now, it is easy to cut, edit, re-shoot video, and to stitch together a photo that breaks this causality assumption. Even on the phone. Photos and graphic design work on spatial causality while recorded audio work in the temporal domain. Video is of course the most potent deceiver, since it can do both. Add to this that bright colors trigger our reward center, and it’s easy to see that humans have always wanted to use paintings as arguments.

I never liked the “post-truth” moniker from a few years ago. The truth has always been subjective, in that real-world information often have different possible interpretations. What matters is that we can no longer say “B, because A,” even if we are watching A happen. It is too easily manipulated. Who knows if that perfect bun was from the same batch as the video used to describe its making. Perhaps the beautiful deep dwelling with pool wasn’t excavated by hand by two people.

For more than a hundred years, we could look at casual photos and expect them to be unadulterated. It required significant effort to retouch a chemical photo. Professionals, like magazines, of course had the resources to do so, but family photos? Nope. The problem is we still expect that to be true. New generations will not have this baggage, so this bad expectation will settle over time: I’m not too worried about that. But for now, we need to stay vigilent about the post-causality information being spread.