Friday, October 26, 2012

A brief rant about baloney…

With the advent of blogs, such as this one, and with myriad (re)sources available for finding information, misinformation, disinformation --- thanks to the Internet and World Wide Web --- a popular pastime has emerged: finding information that fits a viewpoint (also called "confirmation bias"), and repeating it somewhere, usually on a blog, or on Twitter, or on Facebook, and forcing it to fit a preconceived notion or the already held viewpoint. This (mis/dis)information can be used to reinforce a position, to shape a position, to refute a position, to confuse/obfuscate a position, or to create a false straw-man position. Hopefully this is done ethically, with information, and not (dis)misinformation, done responsibly, done to move a discussion forward, done to at least attempt to offer something constructive. 

But all too often lately it's being done with a prior/assumed claim to protected speech, with the idea that an opinion is somehow being expressed in the very act of repeating something true or something false, and that because we're all entitled to our opinions we can pretty much say/post/repeat anything we want.

However... there's a huge gap between expressing opinion and simply repeating baloney.

As an example, just one small example, take The Donald's recent "very big" announcement about President Obama. The Interwebs were awash with speculation about what Mr. Trump might be planning to say. Ultimately what he did say (his grand offer of paying a charity upon release of information, a.k.a. extortion) was absurd on its face, but the most heinous and hateful of these speculations was perhaps that The Donald was in possession of divorce papers belonging to the Obamas, that one has filed for divorce against the other, a piece of “intel” for which there is zero evidence extant, and about which the source was an anonymous someone who is close to The Donald. This "fact" was "reported" on Tuesday, 10/23/12, by several bloggers, and, sadly, repeated either in or out of context by many others. All this did was play on and put forward another of the tired anti-Obama themes that had been flying around the blogosphere since the 2009 inauguration.

Now let’s be clear: a fact is something that has tested substance, that has been verifiably tested and proven, that can be, therefore, taken as being true.

An example of a fact follows: The Obamas are married.

An opinion, on the other hand, is a viewpoint, a theoretical take about, a speculation on, or an interpretation of some fact or some hypothesis. 

An example of an opinion follows: The Obamas are married (fact), and to me they seem happily so (opinion).

This opinion is probably based on something aside from the underlying, reported, or verified fact (e.g., a marriage license that is probably available as a part of the public record; guests who attended the wedding being interviewed; etc.). It’s probably based on a perception, an observation, a gut-feeling. The underlying fact supporting the expressed opinion is still a truth, but the interpretation is where the opinion part lives.

Baloney regardless of its quantity is still baloney; it's just a smaller or a larger pile of it.

Baloney, the repeating of something that might not be (and probably isn’t) true, offering something that is just speculative, repeating something that has no basis in fact, is just that: it's baloney. For example, repeating as fact that The Donald has said he has divorce papers in hand is baloney, and then offering that this may or may not be true is also baloney, and then defending the act of offering this disinformation as an honest expression of opinion is just more baloney heaped on the previous baloney. 

Baloney regardless of its quantity is still baloney; it's just a smaller or a larger pile of it.

Some of my students used to become frustrated during class discussions when I or a fellow student would call them on stating opinion versus stating fact versus stating baloney. One of them might have said what he or she honestly and innocently felt was his or her opinion and would then take offense to any disagreement based on this prior assumption of free speech, as stated above. To help clear up these sorts of misunderstandings, Carl Sagan developed his Baloney Detection Kit, which I heartily urge anyone to read. My nowhere near as complete measure for baloney detection is as follows:

Is the thing you said…  

  1. verifiably true, that is, did you do the work necessary to verify it as true, and are you now offering a verbatim presentation or, at least, a closely paraphrased approximation or report of this verified true fact, or
  2. just something you heard or that you read, that you did not bother to verify one way or the other, and that you are now just repeating, either paraphrased or verbatim, as if it’s a fact?
If it's 1, then it's probably a fact and you are offering your opinion on it; however, if it's 2, or something like this, then it's possibly not a fact and, until it’s verified one way or the other, is just as possibly baloney and definitely not an opinion. It's important to understand which is which. And verification is based not just on how many times something is repeated on the Interwebs, but also by whom it's being repeated: there are good sources, and there are bad sources, and it's necessary to glean one from the other. If a source has an agenda, either for or against something, then it's probably not reliable. The challenge is finding objective sources.

Yup… we do have free speech, and thank goodness for this, but I’m not sure we’re equally free to spread baloney on anything other than slices of bread. And even if we are free to do this, does the ability to spread baloney on anything make it the right thing to do?

Fact is fact and opinion is opinion, but baloney is neither of these: it's just baloney (and a lunch meat).

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