#416 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Friday July 29)
Good morning,
“A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both.”
--James Madison
STUPIDITY OR SIMPLY MISINFORMATION…
I’ve written several times about the spread of stupidity in America (citing Jonathan Haidt’s article in The Atlantic and the ridiculous uninformed answers to Bill Maher’s inquiries of “the man on the street”). Here’s another example of how the distribution of tweets of falsehoods in tweets is making us “stupider,” provided by Dana Gordon:
“Think about Trump and the tweeting. You would watch the news, they would share a story, Trump would tweet, they would then read his tweet, discuss his tweet, and all of a sudden a fact became a two-sided issue. He used tweets to affect Mueller report, impeachments, Covid....
Even now, if he says something they rush to tell his ‘view,’ which muddies the water with lies.
It isn't just the stupidity. It is the rush to be ‘objective’ that gives truth and lies equal time. It makes little sense giving a specialist the same amount of time as a Covid denier. Or a scientist and a climate denier. Or someone under oath versus a tweet in the middle of the night.”
For those who have been reading the Musings for a while know that I think the basic rules of engagement from Middle School Debate should govern critical thinking skills among adults. One of these skills is weighing information on the basis of its source.
My erstwhile partner in crime in teaching students and training parents as judges, Chris Keyser, and I try to explain a hierarchy of reliability and fact-checking. One needs to discount the speaker and his/her politics and the frequency of the information’s publication. Here is our rough ranking of sources:
Double-blind study published by Stanford University and peer reviewed in Nature or the Lancet
Government study, Pew study or other statistically defensible and carefully constructed study
Investigative reporting by The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, edited and cross-checked by professional journalists
Op/ed from a reputable publication that is subject to fact-checking and editing
Editorial of a publication with a known editorial/philosophical/political bias
Blog from a known reputable source
Random blog
Aunt Mildred
Just because something is published in a newspaper doesn’t mean it’s true. And just because it’s been republished zillions of times on the Internet doesn’t mean it’s true (and may even suggest the absence of truth!). Plus, just because someone in a position of authority says something (e.g., the President, the Chief Justice, or Gwyneth Paltrow) doesn’t make it true. This is the fallacy of authority. We can’t rely on the opinion of a single individual simply because of the position they hold.
Bradley Tabach-Bank notes that the people I highlight for their stupidity “may not be ‘stupid,’ but they are most certainly ‘ignorant.’” That’s fair enough. But the media, the social media platforms, and the lack of an educational system that provides the necessary critical thinking skills make ignorance more common than perhaps it once was.
These are maddening times…
MOVIES ASSOCIATED WITH STATES—PART I
I’ve been toying with the notion that there are movies that are situated in a state, capture the feeling of the state, or are connected events that occurred in a state. The following is Part I (of three parts) of my imperfect list. As is the case in all of my lists and recommendations, they are informed by my own taste and quirkiness. Some immediately scream out their location (Goodfellas, Leaving Las Vegas, The Untouchables, Chinatown). Others are reflective of a region as much as a particular state (e.g., To Kill a Mockingbird, which evokes the South, and Jeremiah Johnson, which evokes the West). Some reflect where a historic event occurred (e.g., A Beautiful Mind could have been any research university, 127 Hours could have been any high-risk hiking accident). Here is the first part of the alphabet. I’m curious what movies are particularly evocative of a place for you:
Alabama: My Cousin Vinny, Selma, Big Fish, To Kill a Mockingbird
Alaska: Insomnia, Into the Wild
Arizona: Psycho, Raising Arizona
Arkansas: True Grit
California: LA Confidential, LA Story, Chinatown, Clueless
Colorado: The Shining, Jeremiah Johnson, The Prestige, Misery
Connecticut: Mystic Pizza, Beetlejuice
Florida: Moonlight, Scarface
Georgia: Gone With the Wind, Deliverance
Hawaii: Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Descendants
Illinois: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Untouchables, Eight Men Out, The Blues Brothers
Indiana: Close Encounters of a Third Kind (although an iconic scene is in Wyoming)
Iowa: The Music Man, Field of Dreams
We’ll get to the rest of the states in a couple of weeks…
WHEN TELEVISION WENT COLOR
People talk about how certain inventions materially changed the course of our way of life—the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, computers, cellphones. But some changes are less significant but take on greater meaning for kids who live through it. For me, it was the color television.
I was always amazed at television (frankly, I still am). How do all those radio waves bounce around and show up, separate from each other on separate stations? When I was a kid, we had a black and white television that was set within a large piece of furniture. When something went wrong, we called the “TV repairman,” who arrived with a large toolbox in which were myriad tubes to be plugged in where a tube had gone awry. And getting better reception was not problematic cable but might involve climbing on the roof to redirect the antenna.
But this is not the purpose of the story. It is the advent of color TV. I remember watching “Walt Disney Presents” when it became “The Wonderful World of Color” in the early 1960s. To my chagrin, the picture on the television didn’t magically change from black and white to color (apparently, I learned, an additional purchase was required!). My sister and I pressured our parents about this and eventually (though later than we would have liked), a color television appeared in the space within the console where the old “TV as furniture” previously resided. Of course, it didn’t fit into the furniture quite the same as the black and white, but it was much more entertaining.
Peter Bain has a memory of color television: “I enjoyed very much your “I Dream of Jeannie” tribute. [It prompted] me to share with you a conversation some friends and I had at dinner last week. We were discussing our childhoods and the technology advancements we shared together. A very fun subgroup discussion was identifying sitcoms that began in black and white and advanced into color during their runs. “Jeannie” was one. We added “Beverly Hillbillies,” “Bewitched,” and “Gilligan’s Island.” I welcome your additions to this cohort!”
Have a great weekend,
Glenn
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