Entitlement

In a side skirmish of the culture wars, I was doing some fact checking on www.factcheck.org and stumbled on the following page: http://www.factcheck.org/specialreports/our_disinformed_electorate.html

It's a piece entitled Our Disinformed Electorate and it talks about how much bad information is passed on to the public and what the effects are.

Much of the disinformation comes from political campaigns, which are not required by law to tell the truth. I saw that last gem as a headline and was too disheartened to actually read what law or reasoning allows political campaigns to lie unchecked by anything. Unchecked by anything but Factcheck.org, according to Factcheck.org. And they also lament the fact that not enough people use their services, and belief in bogus disproved information is rampant.

They mention that many people still believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11 and Barack Obama is a Muslim. The article attributes much of the faulty beliefs to political leanings. It says, "We humans all have a basic disposition to embrace our side's arguments and reject or ignore those offered by an opponent."

This reminds me of quote that my wife often uses that was originally from the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own fact." My wife often states this when she see people spewing obviously wrong nonsense that is politically motivated to try to attack across party lines.

This has been pretty important throughout history right up to this day. I believe it was brought to a head under the Bush administration's War on Science. You go back to the people that thought that the Earth was flat, then the ones that thought that the Sun went around the Earth, then the people that thought that the earth was 6,000 years old, up to today, where a significant number of people don't believe in evolution. They are entitled to believe in God, they just don't get to tell high school students that evolution isn't true because they don't believe in it.

We live in a society that is prone to believe bullshit. How you can fix your problems, much less navigate in a world that you don't understand is beyond me. If this was a small fringe problem, I'd prescribe truthtelling and confrontation as an aggressive campaign to rectify the slide away from reality. It's just too widespread.

This week I travelled with a manager that proceeded to tell me (first announcing proudly that he got this from "Fox and Friends") that CO2 levels are going down and scientists are baffled. He was telling me that this means that all the global warming news is not true. He then proceeded to tell me that the Earth is constantly generating new crude oil, that it doesn't come from ancient decaying organic matter, and that it's a myth that we will ever run out of oil. Although I knew both of these stories were bullshit, I didn't argue with him. This guy is a business associate, in a position to negatively impact my income, so butting heads with him politically would not be a wise move. The sad thing is that he says he has an engineering degree (I don't know what kind).

When I got to a computer I searched for the Fox News reference for these stories and found them pretty quickly. A single search and about 20 seconds was all I needed to disprove either story. I found a NOAA chart of CO2 levels and saw that the levels do indeed follow a sine curve each year, oscillating up and down over a steadily rising average. Saying it went down and therefore the whole global warming theory is bogus is like saying the globe is warming or cooling based on the temperature of a single day in the year (something you hear all the time, I'm sure). This is like being on a boat in the ocean in heavy seas with 30' waves and believing that every time you ride up a wave, the entire ocean level is rising. The oil generation story was easy to find. Some Russian scientist put out a book where he claimed that Oxidation and Reduction reactions work in reverse deep in the Earth. This supposedly makes it possible for rocks to turn into oil, there's no further explanation of why this is a good thing for oil generation. Another scientist is quoted as saying that there's no way to prove or disprove what is going on deep in the Earth's crust, which sounds pretty generous to me. As far as the question as to whether or not crude oil is made from decomposed organic matter, the studies put that to rest decades ago. Oil reservoirs are found above mineral deposits called oil shale. Oil shale has fossils in it. Chemical analysis of the oil shale and the crude finds them to be identical. Crude oil is a fossil fuel. There is no evidence or proof of oil deposits that are not generated by organic matter.

The problem here is that there is a systematic program to cherry pick and disprove the parts of science that some people believe threaten their way of life. You can run, but you can't hide from the truth.