The power of art is that it can connect us to one another, and to larger truths about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human.

When we have learned something, there's this thing called belief perseverance. Having learned something, we tend to cling to that belief, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

We really are living in an age of information overload. Google estimates that there are 300 exabytes (300 followed by 18 zeros) of human-made information in the world today. Only four years ago there were just 30 exabytes. We've created more information in the past few years than in all of human history before us.

Although it is easier to find information these days, it is easier than ever before to find misinformation, pseudo-facts, unsupported and fringe opinions, and the like. Children should be taught at an early age what constitutes evidence, how to detect biases or distortions in newspaper accounts, and that there exist hierarchies of information sources. In the medical field, for example, a controlled experiment published in a peer-reviewed journal is a better source than a blog by the Ginseng Growers Association, promoting the health benefits of their own product.

We can be skeptical, suitably skeptical, and we can trust news outlets, some more than others.

Librarians are more important than ever before ... are uniquely qualified to help all of us separate the digital wheat from the chaff, to help us understand the reliability of the data we encounter.

For the artist, the goal of the painting or musical composition is not to convey literal truth, but an aspect of a universal truth that if successful, will continue to move and to touch people even as contexts, societies and cultures change. For the scientist, the goal of a theory is to convey "truth for now"--to replace an old truth, while accepting that someday this theory, too, will be replaced by a new "truth," because that is the way science advances.