All news is fake news, because all reports are to some extent ‘made up’ by the time they are received by a mediated consumer distanced from the original source. ‘Fake’, from the Latin facere (to make, to do), is a member of the family of making words that includes fact, factory, fashion, artificial, and face. It is ironic that the standard test for whether news is ‘fake’ is to subject it to ‘fact-checking’. Facts themselves are things – artefacts – that we make through artificial processes of Creation and Production. Any ‘fact’ deserving of the name is something established by some process involving human skill and judgment. What matters is not whether news or facts are made up – they always are – but how they are made up and what relation there is between the thing at source and the thing as made up for public reception. Public reception also plays its part in the broadcast of fake news. We therefore need to think in terms of ‘receiver responsibility’, from the case of the journalist who receives the factual grain of a promising story to the editor who publishes journalists’ copy to the online user who re-tweets a tweet.

This chapter deals with how the past influences the present and the future: that is, how the personal history/biography of an individual explains the present and predicts the future. It describes in detail a very specific area in psychology assessment called biodata, which is an attempt to ‘score an application form’. While there are different methods, they all rely on giving weights to past experiences, which have been shown to predict future behaviour. It tests the claim like you can ‘see leaders in the school playground’: meaning there are many early markers of later behaviour. Much of the chapter looks at describing what does and does not constitute real biodata and the evidence for its validity as an assessment technique. The second half of the chapter looks at how psychologists have examined autobiographies, psychobiographies as well as ‘typical’ biographies to look for the clues to the motives and behaviour of individuals. Features such as birth order and the misfortunes of youth are thought to have a powerful impact on individuals. An example of this approach is the analysis done of Mrs Margaret Thatcher.

This chapter will analyse how the duration test limits the capacity of persons experiencing episodic impairments from being defined as disabled for legal protections and support. Attribute-based remedial interventions target a particular group. Sorting society is challenging, especially when it is being applied across large populations with complex and varied experiences and needs. This chapter will analyse how some definitions of disability require that a medical condition is experienced for a particular duration of time before that condition will be regarded as a disability. When length of impairment is used in this fashion, the duration of a medical condition becomes an arbitrary factor that determines an entitlement to protection and support. This chapter concludes that the decision to leave persons with episodic disabilities without adequate protections and support is not based upon a medical assessment, cost to employers or adherence to international norms. Instead, the arbitrary decision to deploy duration tests is based upon a failure to conceptualise how ability diversity manifests.