Narnia fans will surely recall the Professor's admonishment of the poor logical reasoning of Susan, Peter, and Edmund in regard to believing Lucy's outlandish claims of another world in the Wardrobe. "What do they teach these children," he mutters. In the Last Battle, our Professor, now Lord Digory, is again found to mutter and presumably shake his head: "It's all in Plato, all in Plato." I often find Digory's attitude sympathetic, but never moreso than during an election year.
Recently this was highlighted when I referred others to snopes.com to find that attibuted statements or personal characteristics of candidates were in fact misleading. Given the climate of a presidential race, there is good reason to believe these mis-attributions were ultimately intentional, but by the time they get passed around, well-meaning people who are legitimately concerned are easily misled. In response, I learned that snopes.com was run by a couple who met in the alt.folklore.urban newsgroup, an old haunt of mine from years gone by. I suspect I read some of David Mikkelson's original "snopes" posts long ago, but I don't specifically recall them.
Having been a member of the "online" community since 1989 or so, and as a student of philosophy, science, and critical thinking, I like to think I have a rather well-developed bullshit filter. Of the few dozen or so items I have had something like good knowledge of what I have compared with information at snopes.com, it has fared reasonably well. There have been cases where mistakes were made, and occasionally rather substantial ones. In comparison to most other media sources I have had similar experience with, this is better than par. Even more interesting, is the substantial number of times I have been duped by some chain e-mail, only to find out I had been "snopesed", and I have been thankful for their consistent reasoned debunking of my own ignorance.
I have not kept a formal log of these inquiries, but overall, I would estimate the snopes couple have been reasonably accurate about 90% of the times I am very familiar with. This is comparable with reputable news media (NY Times, BBC, NPR) and wikipedia, and perhaps somewhat lower than traditional "true" research monographs and policy analysis reports (e.g. Rand Institute, most refereed scientific journals). It is also *far* above the results of the average google search ... especially in matters of politics. Anyone who advises you to "find out the truth" by "researching" with a google search is either deluding themselves or beguiling you or both. There is nothing about "accuracy of information" in google's algorithms; it is simply a matter of content linking, etc, and it is very easy to inflate a google hit likelihood irrespective of the quality of the information. For technical information, the google method is ok more than half the time; for non-technical information, forget it.
That's not to say you can't find some interesting, and maybe even accurate, information by arbitrary google searching. After all, it is reasonable to assume that most of the information in the world is not an intentional misattribution.
But I'm afraid I must differ with our good and loyal guide, Professor Digory. It's not all in Plato -- some of it is in Aristotle (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy). What do they teach in these schools, anyway?
[Added later:]
Two tangential things I found that I enjoyed reading along the meandering path for this post:
