Too much Disinformation
Most everyone remembers a situation when they asked a friend, “How ya’ doin?” and they hear, in grisly detail, too much information (abbreviated as TMI). You make a mental note to not ever ask this person how their operation went.
As H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) is said to have said, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” It’s acerbic but it’s wrong; it is not inclusive enough --- it should include, to some extent, everyone.. We all have been taken in one time or another because we are ruled by our emotions first, reason second. To be fair, there are other theories that claim emotion is not necessarily the enemy of reason but complements it.
However, for the purposes of this column, I will be assuming that emotions and reason are mostly antagonists.
Many of the Iowa Caucus voters admitted that even on the day of voting their final decision was not yet formed but would probably be based on a last minute gut feeling about the candidate. If he or she doesn’t feel right about a candidate then that’s a deal breaker; emotions trump reason. Reason, however, gets its chance after the gut has voted and is very, very good at rationalizing our choices.
So the question becomes whom do you trust? Trust of information is usually based on a gut feeling you experience towards the source of that information. The longer you feel that the source has worked for you over a long enough period of time, the greater the trust grows ( the New York Times was founded 170 years ago and I trust its reporting second only to the Christian Science Monitor), On the other hand if you believe the source to be biased, your trust is, at best, a maybe. We have evolved to trust members of our clan more than outsiders. This is not necessarily a bad thing because this trait is more likely to get our genes into the next generation and it will contribute to our clan’s long-term survival.
Before newspapers were widespread, before radio and television began to saturate the airwaves and before the Internet connected everyone to everyone, folks turned to friends, colleagues, neighbors and relatives to help them make up their minds about who to vote for and who to vote against. Why? Simply because they trusted them. Our new technologies, especially the Internet, have added a vast amount of data and information to help us make useful decisions. (the short answer to your question is: Data is unorganized facts that are not useful in and of themselves --- but after the data is organized by some rule or classification system, it can become useful Information). But the fact is that we are drowning in data that are not even facttual so that even if they become organized we cannot call it information, it is actually disinformation and we cannot really trust it.
So the problem becomes TMD (too much disinformation) because we have no precise way to disentangle disinformation from information, Even if we could disentangle the actual information from the disinformation we will still have the problem raised by Groucho Marx, “ “Who you gonna’ believe --- Me,, or your own eyes?’” which is a comical way of saying that reason will always be trumped by emotion at least in the short run. Sometimes we are saved by Reason finally returning after a bad decision based on a gut feeling and changing course accordingly.
This process is particularly evident during election campaigns. Since shortly after the dawn of time, lawyers and politicians have been distrusted.Most all politicians have studied law Shakespeare put it best when he wrote in his play, King Henry V1
“Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled o'er, should undo a man?”
In modern English he is saying what Dickens said a couple cenuries later,“the law is an ass” so watch out for lawyers. He goes on to have one of his characters utter the well-known phrase, “First we kill all the Lawyers”. Most readerss analyze this as ridding soiety of leaches who prey on ouur misfortunes There are however those who have a radically differnt interpretion: In order for the character to overtrurnand take ovet command of the ccountry th he would have to abolish the current laws and the lawyers with them.
In our current situation where disinformation seems to rule the line would have to be updateed to : “First we kill all the compter folks” and that would eventually bring down the internet and ,as a result much disinformatioin will not be spreae.==d. Unfortuantely, much useful info would all be lost --- like throwing the baby out with the bathwat3r
So, what to do, what to do? Well, a drastic remedy would be to follow a modified version of what Shakespeare wrote a couple of centuries ago:
“Whatever you do, don’t shoot me --- I’m just the messenger.”
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