Wednesday, August 08, 2007

What evidence?

Am I the only one who has noticed the proliferation of supposed "experts" in their fields who rely purely on anecdotal evidence to support their theories? In particular, I'm pretty tired of the people who run blogs or websites espousing the incredible amount of "evidence" they get from others who give them feedback via whatever electronic vehicle they choose to use as a platform.

Come on people!

Don't these people realize the vehicle they use to procure all this information is in itself slanted and biased towards whatever message they are sending? From now on, they should refer to themselves as advocates of whatever material or viewpoint or subject they represent. The choice of words is critical here and, as is the case in the media and society in general, the words are not chosen as carefully as they should be.

Please tell me the population at large isn't fooled by this?

1 comment:

Skudge said...

The population at large believes what it wants to believe, and selects their individual experts accordingly. It doesn't matter your qualifications, if you sound authoritative, and you say what I want to hear, DING you're my expert.

When I've written, I've always tried to be clear that it's one man's opinion. I'm a believer that there are few real facts.

You can tell me the sky is blue. It is. But it's also not. It's clear. It just happens to appear blue from our perspective.

But while the Internet brings information to the people, it also brings a much higher percentage of disinformation - some of which I believe is intentional.

Consumers of information need to understand that there are very, very few experts in any given field, and that every morsel of information needs to be subjected to a filter of intelligent thought.