Learning to discern what is true is crucial for our times. I like to call relatively certain, carefully vetted truth, the “most likely truth.” It’s the level of certainty we have about most hot topics these days.
When you don’t know how to identify objective truth, you are unlikely to coincidentally happen upon it. You are more likely to settle on your unconscious, largely hidden, shadow proclivities and bias.
I identify three primary aptitudes for ascertaining most likely truth, with subcategories. All of them are major, lifelong cultivations and disciplines, so it’s wise to begin as soon as you can. These three primary aptitudes, or capacities, in order of primacy, are:
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
1) Embodiment wisdom: knowing how to discern subjective truth via your body, and to get clues about objective reality
2) Distress tolerance: being able to tolerate feely badly in the name of truth
3) Radical compassion: a primary disposition to want goodness for self and others
4) Willingness to suffer being wrong: another way of describing distress tolerance 
5) Feeling good: the cognitive and emotional reserves needed to withstand stress and difficulty, contributes to #3
CRITICAL THINKING
1) Tolerance for cognitive dissonance: being able to hold and wrestle through a sudden challenge to your beliefs
2) Solid working knowledge of logical fallacies (actually studying, practicing not committing them, and spotting them in others . . . not just professing you know how to critically think!)
3) Intellectual honesty: speaking and believing what is most likely true, which is largely dependent on emotional honesty/intelligence
SCIENTIFIC LITERACY
1) Familiarity with the scientific method and its contribution to epistemology (how we know what is most likely true)
2) Knowing the differences and interrelations of scientific hypotheses, theories, and laws
3) Appreciating quality tiers of evidence vis a vis peer review, study quality, and conflict of interest
4) Understanding the concept of falsifiability and burden of proof
All these aptitudes are informed by great minds, big hearts, courage, evidence, and the test of time. I do a deep dive into them here. Without these capacities, you are a lost boat. Because these aptitudes are not the focus of, or even included in, most education at any level, we have a populace bereft of knowledge, wisdom, insight, compassion, and “most likely truth.”
A bereft intellect, accompanied by life’s traumas that often belie such ignorance, contributes to a severely compromised collective. This is a systemic, soulful void. Add social media pundits and manipulation, sexiness over substance, greed and sociopathy, and you get the shit show we have today.
Please be a force for good and practice head and heart integration. We need you.
A Heart-Mind Compass for Troubling Times
