…As Brushing Your Teeth
If you have ever read some of my articles, you’d know that commitment and discernment are among my relentless subjects for reflection. For a start you need discernment to know and decide what / who you’re going to commit to. These days, that in itself is a challenge.
Most people, I’d hope, are aware of the truth crisis within which we all live. Even for simple things, the question becomes: where and to whom do I turn for truth? This isn’t a rhetorical question. The difficulty is real.
I’ll give you a simple but interesting example: toothpaste.
Toothpaste is a day to day personal hygiene product (and not just an external one), that you use hopefully at least twice a day.
Therefore, if you’re health conscious, you’ll want to make sure that while your toothpaste does the job of cleaning your teeth, it isn’t ‘undoing’ you in some other ways because it’s packed with nasties. So, what’s true about which kind of toothpaste to use?
- Fluoride or no fluoride (neurotoxin)?
- SLS (Sodium Lauryl Sulfate) or no SLS (banned as a food additive in the EU)?
- Essential oils or no essential oils (endocrine disruptors)?
- Sodium bicarbonate or not (enamel abrasion)?
- And so on.
Do you trust your dentist recommendation? Should you not? After all, they’re professionals, they know best, don’t they? Well my new dentist told me to use Colgate Total. You see, it isn’t that simple to see clearly and choose confidently.
Adding to the complexity of finding out what’s true, we now face another layer of uncertainty in the form of what’s real. Let’s say you’re going to ask your favourite AI LLM (Large Language Model) platform to help you choose the right toothpaste based on your criteria (read “prompts”). Unless you already have the answer to what you’re asking, you have no way to check and verify that the response you’re getting is truthful, and in many cases it won’t be. Why? For the simple reason that LLM, such as ChatGPT, make things up all the time. They invent and “hallucinate” (a technical AI term) and it looks completely legit.
Moving ahead and assuming you’ve made your choice and ordered your toothpaste from Amazon. It has now been revealed after some lab studies were carried out, that about 80% of Amazon supplements do not meet the label claim for the active ingredients and about 20% on average have no active ingredients at all. Similar findings have been exposed for sunscreens. In other words, there is a not so small chance that you’re getting a fake product and it’s done so well, it’s hard to assess.
You might not relate to my example, you may find it alarmist or maybe overwhelming. I personally find it tricky, concerningly real and tangible. Whatever our personal views on this, it doesn’t take away that it mirrors aspects of our lives these days and illustrates why it’s getting more complicated to make decisions and informed choices.
Of course this will mostly concern those people who care about truth and reality. What’s hard to fathom but is nonetheless unavoidable to admit: many don’t care about the truth. This article isn’t for them.
So the next appropriate question is: how do we navigate this minefield we’re currently in?
- Be aware of the limitations of LLM (Harvard Business Review and ACM articles are interesting).
- Do some research, read and do not take any single opinion at face value, even if it comes from an “expert”.
- Use search engines (aka: Google, Bing, Yahoo!) over LLM (aka: ChatGPT, Grok, etc.).
- Combine your search engine research with human experience (that means interacting and speaking with people).
- Explore forums and communities around your topics of interest whilst keeping a healthy distance (Reddit can be a good starting place).
- Even when it’s overwhelming and contradicting, and you just wish someone would tell you to choose “this” or “that”, never lower your critical thinking.
- Last but not least, listen to your intuition too, follow your signs even if it doesn’t always eventuate as something specific.
The cost of intellectual laziness can be higher than we realise. We may have to spend more time than we used to doing research and deep diving before we decide on something as seemingly simple as a toothpaste.
But I also wanted to highlight that no field is being spared, so our discernment must be on all fronts. That itself is a commitment to ourselves.
Main – Photo by Kaboompics.com
