We got to that state when we started talking about so much information that it is impracticable to have a human read all of it, let alone provide a truth judgement for all of it. Even getting computers to read all of it is a significant engineering effort.

Simply getting computers to understand the statements is one of the holy grails of AI research; let alone determining if they are true.

> How did we get to the state where the "truth" is such an elusive concept?

Look into the fields of epistemology and the philosophy of science, in particular the works of Karl Popper such as The Logic of Scientific Discovery. The "truth" has always been an elusive concept. Outside the realm of mathematics, it's rather difficult to objectively prove most things "true".

Two days ago, partisan advocacy site ThinkProgress ran an article with the headline "Brett Kavanaught said he would kill Roe v. Wade last week and almost no-one noticed". The reason no-one noticed is because he said nothing of the sort and ThinkProgess knew as much. One of the fact checkers partnered with Facebook labelled it as false, they attached the usual warning, and this made ThinkProgress and a chunk of the left-leaning press furious. They accused Facebook of "defaming" and "censoring" them to "appease the right wing", claiming that this was actually some kind of partisan attack on the truth.

That, in essence, is how we got here. There are plenty of loud, vocal defenders of "truth" out there, it's just that the loudest and most vocal of them define "truth" to mean "what our side believes".

It was a bad headline, for sure. I see more attention grabbing headlines every day.

Why would you expect the truth of basic statements to be easy to establish? Science is hard and many basic questions are debated by experts. Political consensus is difficult.

Science is not a public endeavor. Science is conducted by trained professionals. Besides the training, there exist filters (self selection, academic tests, etc) which ensure the scientific community has a higher than average connection with "the truth".

The public at large has never been particularly well connected to truth. One difference now is that, in the past, the public at least respected and trusted scientists, academics, etc. Nowadays they're scorned.

I think humility of knowing how little any single individual knows, and how much "details" matter, would be much better attitude for everyone to take, rather than thinking the truth is easy, even for seemingly basic stuff.