What is the truth?

[ClearWater]

I am interested in getting at the truth, but I’ve noticed, on occasion, I have been gullible, like Little Red Riding Hood, believed the Big Bad Wolf’s lies. Sometimes, I’ve even seen signs of the truth and said, “Oh grandma, what big eyes you have!” I’ve heard the wolf, his other lies, and believes these other lies to cover up the first!

Come to think of it, we have all been gullible from the beginning. Just look at Adam and Eve. Eve BELIEVED the serpent!

Often, I have actually been guillible to the point that a few months ago, I was actually a victim of fraud! I’ve been taken in a lot by liars, scammers, husslers. Well, I have tried to give people the benefit of the doubt, and so often, especially in Mexico, that’s NOT a good policy.

In our time we have an additional challenge. I’ve had some occasions where I would read something online, accept it at face value, not only believe it but go off at a run to share it with the rest of the world only to find it was something like a spam. I’m also not the only one.

For example, once, someone forwarded an e-mail to me from Jay Leno. I got upset about it to a point I got out a pen and paper and wrote him a letter asking why he’d say such a thing. I got a response that he had NOT even said that!

Another time, I was online, there were NUMEROUS sites saying certain things attributed to Padre Pio. I’m a big fan of his. Anyway, I was even to a point of printing all this out and sharing it with friends only to learn from a priest that apparently, he never even said any of that! Then, a priest helped me. He said that people have a way of creating rumors. He said Padre Pio was asked about this and responded that he had NEVER commented on world events (like these e-mails were all saying!).

In our times, perhaps more than ever, we have to be so careful about truth.

I don’t want to make that mistake ever again, but probably will. However, perhaps someone has some advice. That time with Padre Pio where I was so gullible, I had seen it on a BUNCH of sites! So, I figured it HAD to be true.

How can one ever get at the truth, particularly if one’s using the internet for one’s information and not get taken in by gossip, scams and all the rest?

 

[Elizium23]

Firstly, when receiving information from the Internet, always consider the source. If you have received email from someone you don’t know, or someone you know who forwards lots of emails unchecked, then take it with a grain of salt. The Internet is a terrible place to get your information when you don’t know where it’s coming from. I receive mine from reliable, reputable news sites, and anything I hear on Twitter or Facebook, I cross-check.

Now you need to know how to cross-check facts. snopes.com should be a site in your frequently visited list. If you ever hear something that is “too good to be true” or totally unbelievable or you are about to forward some kind of earthshaking facts, please check them on snopes.com first. It is often the case on Facebook when someone will reshare something extraordinary and one friend will comment with a snopes link which totally disproves it all. Reliable news sites are also your friends, some have a “Fact or Fiction?” section where they debunk rumors and falsehoods circulating on the Internet.

I hope this helps a little bit.

 

[JRKH]

Very true…It’s amazing the amount of misinformation going around. Especially in e-mails and on facebook.

Well - one thing I can offer is that many things can be checked on “Snopes” …
Assuming of course that Snopes can be trusted…

Another thing that bugs me in this regards is on facebook when people share "missing persons’ reports that have no date on them…
They will say something like “Jim has been missing since Saturday”…OK - but which Saturday. How long has this thing been circulating? Seems some can go for a long time because nobody follows up.
I will take the person’s name and do a search and nearly every time I find that the request is no longer current.

I know that this doesn’t help a lot…but thought I’d share.

Anyone else have some good resources to check these things?

Peace
James

 

[ThinkingSapien]

Well, I have tried to give people the benefit of the doubt, and so often, especially in Mexico, that’s NOT a good policy.

You’ll have to throttle that according to what’s at risk. I might give different scrutiny to some one making a recommendation for an inexpensive product than some one making a recommendation for an expensive financial investment, for example.

In our times, perhaps more than ever, we have to be so careful about truth.

I don’t want to make that mistake ever again, but probably will. However, perhaps someone has some advice.

At some point or another you are going to be at the mercy of information coming from others. Whether it’s the news, your doctor, financial adviser, or even a close friend. It’s going to be impossible to not find yourself in the position of being unable to verify something yourself as long as you are a part of society. Unfortunately, some times it just boils down to a gamble.

How can one ever get at the truth, particularly if one’s using the internet for one’s information and not get taken in by gossip, scams and all the rest?

I don’t think there’s a guaranteed way. The information is a conduit for information, but that information is still coming from people that at times will choose to misrepresent, mistakenly misrepresent and misinterpret, or not have all of the information behind some event. This is part of the motivation of a skeptic who promote the strategy of being slow to believe without a lot of corroborating evidence (not to be confused with a the more extreme “radical skeptics” who think knowledge is most likely impossible).

 

[ClearWater]

Now you need to know how to cross-check facts. snopes.com should be a site in your frequently visited list. If you ever hear something that is “too good to be true” or totally unbelievable or you are about to forward some kind of earthshaking facts, please check them on snopes.com first. It is often the case on Facebook when someone will reshare something extraordinary and one friend will comment with a snopes link which totally disproves it all. Reliable news sites are also your friends, some have a “Fact or Fiction?” section where they debunk rumors and falsehoods circulating on the Internet.

I hope this helps a little bit.

It does! In fact, I just saved that Snopes site onto “favorites” so that I can try this out and hopefully not be as much into helping to contribute to the problem!

I have always found discernment of truth challenging.

I once had a math teacher, one of my all time favorite teachers, even though I actually hated math! He was very organized, had us put up the homework up on the board. You do number one, so and so, #2, etc. We would see, from watching the others not only our mistakes but everyone else’s, which were often similar to our own! We would learn from our, and their, mistakes. He’d explain, and we’d go through everything so quickly, because at the end of class, he’d tell us a story.

He would teach us about life. He would tell us stories and stories, and one day we found out that some of them weren’t true! We confronted him, and he told us that’s because, in life, not everyone would tell us the truth. He said we needed to begin to tell the difference!

With our class, he insituted a “truth day” at the end, that he would need to tell us the truth, finally, to any question. What I learned that he was lying much of the time, and I almost always believed him!

He said the best lies were the ones mixed with truth, because, if the person tried to check, they’d see there was an element in truth, think the whole thing was true!

He said his favorite class would check it out for themselves. One, he told them he had an experimental car! He said, in the inside, it said, “experimental”. He said they actually opened the hood, looked inside, and they caught the students doing this…trying to fact check!!! He even had them going even further! They said it was NOT true that he had an experimental car.

He said…that it was…that it must have said it even further down inside! So, he tried to lie, again!!!

Oh, and another thing…we finished our book in record time. So, he went to the school, explained we had finished and asked permission to get us a book on logic. We only partly finished it, but it’s the only exposure I’ve had on logic, but I’ve found logic helpful and regret not having studied more of it. It helps, in life, and I didn’t realize just how much.

When one goes after truth, I find one comes into all kinds of issues…how to discern true e-mails or information, from false. Also, how not to get into things, against logic…generalizing…say…

I have a car…my car is blue…Therefore, ALL cars are blue" kind of thing…false.

It’s been a very educational journey, and it still goes on!

 

[ThinkingSapien]

Anyone else have some good resources to check these things?

Rumors get constructed and distributed faster than sites that dispute them get a chance to respond.

One policy is requesting a source for a story. I’ve sometimes found that for those stories that have sources the story may have evolved as it traveled from it’s source to you. Some rumors are derived from authentic stories. Line-by-line fact checking may be necessary to sort that out. There was a story about gas stations fixing prices that stands out in my mind. When I first encountered it a coworker sent it to me (over a decade ago). There’s an immediate contradiction in that of the two classifications of gas stations (those fixing prices and those not fixing prices) some of the names were just other brands for a name that was in the opposing column (making it self contradicting before further research was done).

And some times it’s enough to ask some one how they know something. Sometimes you’ll find out it’s the conjecture of the person delivering the story.

 

[ClearWater]

I’ve been having difficulty in communication with even my students here. We don’t always communicate directly due to all the unusual circumstances. It can sometimes be where one person says something, says something to someone else, who says something to someone else. Have you ever played the game, “Chinese telephone”? It’s been a little like that.

We are not trying to distort the messages, but they’ve often been oral and get more distorted the more they go.

I am also seeing if I can do things more directly, even less through text or e-mail with my supervisors due to the problems with miscommunications and misinterpretations.

I am trying harder and harder to work closer to the source.

 

[ClearWater]

Just tried Snopes out for the very first time. Very cool!

 

[John_Lazarus]

Yogi Berra supposedly said, “I never said half the things I did.”

The saying used to go, “Believe nothing you hear, and only 50% of what you read.” I’d say with the advent of teh Intertubez, that percentage is dropping like Congress’ approval rating – because any idiot with a wifi connection* can post any claptrap online.

Wikipedia is actually not a bad resource, if used properly. Use the citations provided to find the primary sources.

Also, whenever I read anything, I consider the source. Back when I lived in Toronto, I used to read the *Star *(for the general liberal view), the *National Post *(for the white-collar conservative view) and the *Sun *(for the blue-collar conservative view). I used to find that between the three, filtering for their political prejudices, I could get a fairly objective view of the news.

As for sayings and quotations, just look for primary sources. Lives of the Saints-style hagiographies are often more concerned with highlighting their subject’s saintliness rather than providing an accurate biography. And that’s not confined to Catholicism: Remember Parson Weems, who promoted all those myths about George Washington?

It reminds me of a show I saw on TV, it was called I. It was about a teacher who was teaching English as a second language to (stereotyped) immigrants. One woman was the stereotype Chinese student: serious and very Party-loyal. She would consistently be making quotes out of the Little Red Book. One time, when someone in the class insulted her, she said, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me. Chairman Mao.” The teacher asked, “Chairman Mao said that?” She shrugged, “As a boy…”

*Like me. :whacky:

 

[Elizium23]

Wikipedia is actually not a bad resource, if used properly. Use the citations provided to find the primary sources.

Wikipedia is a tertiary source. It compiles results mostly from secondary sources, so those are what will be in the citations in most articles. Sometimes primary sources are used, sparingly and with caution.

Don’t assume just because something has a little blue number next to it, it must be true. You need to click through and read the book/news article/whatever source was provided.

One of the most prevalent types of vandalism on Wikipedia is people introducing factual errors. They will subtly change a date or a year or insert the word “not” or mutate a complicated chemical formula. People like me search for these edits and revert them day after day, but some slip through. So, always, use caution there.

 

[ffg]

The truth is that the internet is man-made, and thus ripe for constant error.

But it’s fun.