Paula Penfold pens a great take on Truthiness in her Not the News Substack, essentially on how people opt to believe things that just feel right…

“…when information is fast, contradictory, or emotionally loaded…“…yeah, perhaps but I think if we drill a bit deeper, that’s a bit of an easy out for people who are too vain to admit they might have it wrong. It’s more important for them to be right and be seen/perceived (yes, not quite the same things) as being right.

Many people work in environments where information is fast, contradictory and/or emotionally loaded but don’t have the luxury of just acceptiong it coz in feels right…doctors, pilots, military commanders (Trump regime and Putinista excepted), firefighters etc etc etc people whose lives or who have the lives of others in their hands, can’t do this.

I think it’s just personal, in the case of our cooked communities, and institutional, the case of those agencies that stray from the path of truth and light in favour of clicks and likes, laziness that enables this…too lazy to do the little bit of legwork that enables a change of mind…

I was thinking on this just yesterday in response to Shona Tinkler’s LinkedIn post that touches upon this. I think that the underlying point of her post is that time spent in developing critical thinking skills is never wasted; and when those skills are properly developed, even in the most chaotic circumstances, truthiness has less opportunity to take root…

Shona’s post touched a real chord as so many of us have to, every day, rapidly sift complex and often contradictory information in often chaotic envrionments to develop and implement a course of action, to coordinate a scene, to get the job done…

A long time ago, probably not long after we moved on from horses, I had a CO – not sure which as we had so many good ones – who was in the CP one day when something or another went down.

Everyone was running around, talking over each other on the radio, emotions were high as they say…he was sitting in his chair with a cuppa and I said to him “Sir, shouldn’t we be doing something?” with a strong unspoken implication of “NOW!!!”. The response was that this thing would still be going on when he finished his coffee and by then, everyone should have settled down and be able to give him the info he needed…

I always remembered that and put it into effect when I was posted to an operational headquarters; that five or so minutes it takes to brew a cup of tea – coffee is too instant and defeats the purpose – was enough to get over the initial surge of adrenaline and give everyone a chance to settle down and get their heads in the game.

As Shona says, it’s not about having the training – we had that and much as we may not have appreciated our time at Army Schools, it was pretty good training…although this is someone we might not have really appreciated until out in a world where perhaps training was not quite what we were used – it’s about being about to manage (using this much-maligned word in its most positive sense) any given environment and situation and get on with doing what we’re there to do…

And even now, where there’s not really the time or means to do it for real, I still pause for a metaphorical cuppa, size up what’s happening around us, who’s who in the zoo, suppress any internal wibbling (coz that’s a real thing) and THEN get on with what we’re there to do…

Stop, think, act…

Truthiness is the conceptual equivalnet of just leaping straight to ‘act’…and contrary to popular truisms, firefighters DO NOT just run into burning houses…