Today I was going to discuss what has been going on in Israel lately and examine the various responsible parties. But quite honestly I have nothing positive to say about any of the organizations determining the fate of that region and it makes me both blindingly angry and very very sad. So fuck that, lets talk about the dilution of information.
To be clear I'm not talking about the dissemination of information to the populace, that is at its core a beautiful, hopeful thing to me. No, my concern lies with the tradition, especially in news media, of giving the loudest voices equal time and respect to the well informed. Not only that but the habit of assuming that someone who claims expertise in a field has any fucking clue about anything at all. Now, the second bit I understand; most people are pretty trusting and there isn't really anything wrong with that. It does however deserve to be pointed out that avarice and time are both very disruptive to accuracy.
There is a phenomenon called the "half-life of knowledge" and it refers to the fact that over a period of time advances in science and understanding will render around half of accepted information inaccurate. This is most pronounced in fields such as medicine which by their nature continually engage new information, (both through rigorous study and incidental discovery in the form of individual patient care). There is even a habit in medicine to inform students that by the time they graduate everything they learned will be obsolete. Its a great example of people being completely fucking wrong of no fault of their own. Add to that the unfortunate tenacity of ideas beyond their accuracy and the propensity of people to over-hype new and unsubstantiated information and its pretty unsurprising that most people have no clue what they're talking about.
Another side of this nasty habit is corporate interference. What I mean is that corporate, academic, and sometimes governmental, forces are prone to extorting desirable results out of scientists and stonewalling undesirable results. This is largely done by the manipulation of grants and intimidation, and its a way, way worse problem than you'd want to believe. And then, of course, there's the problem of providing equal representation to overwhelming expert consensus and fringe fuck-stickery.
Unfortunately, the problem isn't just with the accidentally ill-informed and the pressured experts. Not only are many of the people involved in relaying information to the populace, (news media) either sad and kind of stupid or blatant fucking idiots with an axe to grind, (and believe me its not easy to get around the bias of either side to prove this) but these sputtering bobble-heads tend to look to opinionated plebs for just about everything, often in the form of polls. Now, naturally the worst issue on this front is that everyone is biased, it can't be helped. You can typically try to mitigate this by engaging people with varying opinions and positions, but that typically doesn't happen because people tend to disregard opposing views and seek supporting ones.
These issues taken together coagulate into a sort of perfect storm of misinformation and poorly obfuscated motives. Unfortunately, I'm a jaded, cynical cunt; so I don't have any solutions, even if I did you wouldn't want them. I have to say after... Jesus, three hours of trying to hunt down info on various news personas and organizations that isn't frantic masturbation by any number of social factions I might as well have just done the fucking Israel thing.
Good luck out there.
~Eshi
No comments:
Post a Comment