I would put it the other way around: that we're all very bad at separating truth from fiction. That's what's terrifying to me. How many people are genuinely bot

I would put it the other way around: that we're all very bad at separating truth from fiction. That's what's terrifying to me. How many people are genuinely bothered by how hard it is to find truth? How many people even think it is hard? Every caste has a different way of dealing with this uncertainty, but I'd say very few cultures systematically accept that they have no idea what's true and what is not. Every group has a different heuristic that they consider "good enough." Some groups appeal to morality (although each group has different moral guidelines). Some groups appeal to simplicity or aesthetics. Analytically oriented people tend to use probability as their crutch, telling themselves that any truth they deem "unlikely" would be a waste of time to investigate. When any of these groups is wrong, they vehemently maintain that their heuristic is appropriate and sound. They made the right decision based on what they knew, they tell themselves. The process is infallible, even if the result is unfortunate. Because the uncertainty of truth terrifies me, I try to keep an open mind. I would hope that this open mind affords me a better "truth ratio," but that's impossible to measure. Every single day I'm disheartened by how hard it is to find actual truth. Even something as simple as checking the sources on a news article can be so difficult (or impossible) that there's no practical way to judge its reasonableness. The more viewpoints you hear, the more you realize that it's impossible to discriminate between them with any sort of actual accuracy; you just rely on heuristics once again. "Oh, this girl stated her argument much more coherently than that guy, so I'm inclined to believe her." Now your heuristic is rhetoric, which may or may not have anything to do with truth. When you try to do your own research, you're swayed by the quantity of arguments or the coherency of the sources or how they match up with what you already think you know. You just make guess upon guess upon guess. At the end of the line you have academic studies, but no individual is an expert in more than a couple things, so no individual is qualified to vet/interpret/understand the vast majority of the academic literature on the subject. We just make a guess, or we appeal to probability again (i.e. "it seems to me like more academics are saying this, so that's the most likely truth. I'm going to assume anything else is wrong"). I'm not trying to downplay the importance of science or academics here; it's the best we have. But those who are "waking up" to reality after this election—if they follow the thread far enough—are destined to come to an uncomfortable conclusion: there's a limit to how "right" you can ever be.