I think this would be a good list to compile. It should be stories which are undoubtedly true and factual, with no hint of opinion in them. People who read The New York Times, our idiotocracy, think they are well-informed, but of course it is quite the opposite, adn they’d be much better informed if they read teh New York Post. The New York Times is, to be sure, written by people with higher IQ’s who went to better colleges and are given bigger salaries and more time to write their stories, but the editors carefully cull any story that makes liberals look bad, and if they do have to include an awkward fact, it goes down in paragraph 17 so they can say they covered it but nobody reads it.
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For more than a decade, signs at Glacier National Park warned visitors that the glaciers would be gone by the year 2020 – now those signs are being changed.
They were originally added to the park to reflect climate change predictions by the U.S. Geological Survey.
Glacier National Park spokeswoman Gina Kurzmen explained that the latest research shows shrinking of some glaciers, but in ways much more complex than what was predicted. Because of this, the park must update all signs around the park which state that all glaciers will be melted by 2020.
The Glacier National Park sign story is one liberals don’t read, but it a good one to make the point that they trust experts blindly and disregard evidence they can themselves observe. Or as one might say, they lack common sense. Part of common sense is believing what your eyes tell you and being skeptical of stories people tell you who are trying to sell you something.
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Margot Cleveland,
7 Big Stories Corporate Media Is Ignoring Because The Truth Might Help Trump
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Experts. When should you trust an expert? When he (a) is smarter than you, and (b) when he is trustworthy. Item (b) is the most important. I was going to say that item (a) is obvious, but people read “media pundits” all the time, and on both right and left I am usually impressed by how mediocre they are. They seem to know no more and be no smarter than the average college grad, chosen for their lack of imagination rather than anything else, or, rather, famous for being famous. A lot of celebrities are people famous by virtue of their position and nothing else. TV anchormen and Supreme Court justices are examples. Become a TV news anchorman, and you’re famous and respected, even if you’re a chimpanzee. Same for being a Supreme Court justice.
Most people don’t rely on Reason as much as Authority. That’s good, because they are so bad at Reason that they’d fail at it if they tried, and Authority is easier. On the Web, in particular, I’m wondering if I should use my titles “Professor” and “Doctor” more because of all the idiots that give their opinions. In academia, it’s notorious that titles are only used at Podunk U., because if you’re at Harvard or MIT, then (a) all the faculty have doctorates, and they’re almost all professors instead of non-tenure track lecturers hired on the cheap whom students call “professor” but who aren’t, and we’re just trying to defraud them; (b) everybody’s smart enough to only care about the strength of your arguments, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re a professor or not; and (c) only a few mediocre people wander in, so there’s no need to use credentials to shut them up. But the Web is dominated by the stupid and the foolish. They infest the blog comment sections, choke off the intelligent ideas in Twitter threads, and pollute the chat rooms with their boring cheering and their offensive smells. Few of these pests have any credentials, so we may need to return to 19th century snobbery just for rational discourse to survive.
In some situations, credentials have a reverse effect. They indicate not reliability, but bias. Two examples of global warming and the fake media. If someone tells you he is an expert on global warming, with a PhD and an important position at a top university, that is a good sign he is a scoundrel and a cheat, and you can discount anything he says about global warming. That field is a corrupt one, as we have known since ClimateGate. I am perhaps too strong. The average person is not a scoundrel, quite– he is a coward, rather, who lets the scoundrels control his discipline and suppress unorthodox opinions, and who quietly decides to confine his publications to uncontroversial areas and to not object to the lying and injustice he knows is going on. And, of course, there are good scholars working in the field, even though it is a corrupt one— those are the ones we hear about being suppressed. It’s just that the credential should make us doubt the holder, rather than the credential enhancing his reliability.
The same is true about being a professional journalist. Immediately, we should think “fake news” and “Democratic Party stooge” and “slave of a leftwing editor who’s afraid of losing his job if he deviates from the party line.” It is not an honorable vocation, in general– though it is extraordinarily honorable for those who pursue it honestly.
And I must include myself in this too. I am a university professor. Don’t trust us. We are a cowardly, immoral, bunch, though we are, to be sure, probably hard-working and intelligent. I had to backtrack there with “probably”; we are still employees, so political considerations can still get us our titles. If someone gives you his political or religious opinions and you learn he is a professor, trust it less, not more. Be less willing to trust your daughter near him. And don’t think you can rely on him in a pinch.
As an application of this, compare the trustworthiness of “Some guy on the Internet” with a “climate scientist”, “journalist”, or “professor”. The climate scientist and the journalist should be downrated, clearly. The professor, too, should be downrated unless it’s on a politically neutral topic.
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1. Bostock was fired after an audit turned up that he had spent $12,000 in county fund unsupervised in bars and restaurants and to sponsor a gay softball team in the next county. He and his gay lover regularly socialized with his boss and boss’s wife, going out many times to nightclubs and gay venues.
2…