How Bad Information Creeps Into Your Head

I am widely regarded as a pessimistic cynic.

I am without a doubt a pessimistic cynic.

The good thing about being a pessimistic cynic is that we are always happy when we are wrong, but we are prepared for the worst when we are right. The worst thing about being a pessimistic cynic is that you worry – a lot.

I am usually right.

(That sentence will make steam shoot out through Gil Friend’s ears. Mike Muskal will simply smile.)

I am also widely regarded as a liar. (Yes. I know that.)

I never lie.

Okay, that’s ridiculous. Everyone lies. As a matter of fact, we all live in a mental environment composed of a mélange of facts and fictions about the events of our lives that we have accumulated during the course of living our lives. One might almost say that we are living our lies.

Even that’s not true. I know one person who I do not believe has ever told a lie. He happens to be my son.

I asked him once why he never lies, and he replied that he never lies because he doesn’t care enough about anyone else to lie to them.

(Okay. He could be a sociopath but, if so, he’s a very sympathetic sociopath.)

Revision:  I never consciously lie about any fact relative to my personal and professional history. (Maybe I’ve embellished a thing or two, but there was always a kernel of truth beneath the embellishments.)

Some of you are now going through your mental file cabinets reviewing things I have written or said, trying to find examples of the lies you are sure I have told. Good luck with that. It’s going to be very hard for you to accept that I have actually done everything I have said I have done. Sorry about that.

Like everyone else, however, I am occasionally wrong in my facts because I absorbed some bad information, didn’t understand what I learned, or simply made a mistake in my calculations.

Shit happens.

There is however a critical difference between lying and being wrong in your facts, but everyone always regards being wrong with your facts as being the same thing as lying.

Big mistake.

This happens to Donald Trump all the time. The Donald is a veritable information sponge but, like the sponge in your kitchen sink, he dries out rapidly and has to replenish himself with fresh facts. He probably has short duration long term memory, which means that he only remembers what he wants to remember and he only remembers it the way he wants to remember it. Donald is really lying. He really believes everything he says while he is in the process of saying it but, once it has been said, he no longer has any interest in remembering what he said or what it means.

We are now living in a post-fact world because it is literally impossible for any single human being to determine what the truth is about almost anything, except in the fields of mathematics, engineering, and chemistry where there are such things as observable factual evidence.

(In mathematics – until you reach advanced calculus, which I never did – mathematical formulas always behave the same way. There is no way to fudge engineering. If the bridge collapses, that’s prima fascia evidence that the design was flawed. In chemistry, you have this thing called replicability. If you put the same amounts of the same reagents into a flask under the same conditions, you will always get the same result. Believe it or not, most scientists in most other fields would readily agree that many of their “facts” are really speculations. Nuclear physicists might argue that, but nuclear engineers are really highly paid engineers. Astrophysicists on the other hand, can’t agree on the time of day on Mars.)

Otherwise, everything we think of as facts is actually the majority opinion about a datum.

However, there are many, many people out there who propose fallacious solutions to intractable human problems, polluting the process of solving those problems by injecting false or misleading information into the public conversation.

It has, in fact, become an unpaid part-time job for me trying to track down and correct these obvious lies even though I know that the source materials I am referring to are unreliable and often corrupted.

Here, let me tell you a story against myself about that.

I got into a conversation recently about the Second Amendment. Someone  made the point that when the Second Amendment was written and voted into the Constitution, the United States had no armed forces and was therefore forced to rely upon citizen militias.

This struck me as wrong. I knew, however, that George Washington had to requisition 13,000 militia men borrowed from Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania in order to put down the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794.

I checked Wikipedia.

Wikipedia clearly and unambiguously told me that the United States Army was founded on June 14, 1775.  The United States Navy was founded on October 13, 1775.  The Marine Corps was founded on November 10, 1775.  (The Coast Guard, originally known as the United States Revenue Cutter Service, was founded on August 4, 1790.)

This is how the Google Chrome listing for the search term “United States Army Founded”  looked  at the beginning of the search results

And THIS is how Wikipedia presented the article itself:

Okay. So, the other guy was wrong, right?

Wait. Not so fast.

Google was wrong. Wikipedia was wrong.  I was wrong but so was the other guy.

Oh, these are indeed the dates that the Army, the Navy and the Marine Corps claim they were founded on…but there’s a problem: The United States of America did not exist in 1775. In fact, the original 13 colonies had not yet declared their independence from Great Britain in 1775.

The armed forces that eventually became the United States Army, the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps were actually the Continental Army, the Continental Navy and the Continental Marines…and all three services were disbanded after the successful conclusion of the War for Independence.

The other guy was right. Wikipedia was (and is) wrong, and so was I because I depended upon an unreliable resource.

I then resorted to the Encyclopedia Britannica. You can’t get any better  than that, right?

Wrong.

Encyclopedia Britannica reports that the United States Army was indeed founded by the Second Continental Congress on June 14, 1775, making the same mistake that Wikipedia made by conflating the Continental Army with the United States Army.

However, the Britannica article went on to explain that even though the Continental Army was disbanded on November 2, 1783…except for 25 privates who were assigned to guard Fort Pitt and West Point, which were both military depots at the time.  Note that the Army was disbanded by the Second Continental Congress because the United States of America did not come into existence until 1787 with the adoption of the new Constitution.  Nevertheless, when Washington was inaugurated in 1789, the United States had 595 men under arms.

So, I was right, after all, and the other guy was wrong. There was never a day from 1775 until today when the United States didn’t have an army.

What about the Navy?

Unlike the Army, there is a break in the heritage of the United States Navy, because the Second Continental Congress disbanded its naval forces soon after the Revolutionary war ended. The Navy was resurrected in 1794, when Congress authorized the construction of six frigates to protect American shipping from the pirates who were doing business off the coast of North Africa. (Note: in point of fact, the reason that American ships were plying the waters off North Africa was to pick up slaves for transportation to the United States.)

Just to add some zest to the confusion, the Department of the Navy wasn’t actually established until 1798. Before that, the Army and Navy were both under the control of the Department of War.

To give Wikipedia its due, if you plod through their article on the United States Army, you would eventually find statements indicating that there was never a time when the United States didn’t have an army.

So, I was wrong again. Wikipedia is right, except for the part about it being the Continental Army before it became the United States Army.

No one is going to lose any sleep over whether or not the United States had an army between 1783 and 1787.

This is just an illustration of how difficult it is today to determine the validity of even very simple facts, and how often presumably reputable sources – to the extent that Wikipedia is reputable – are wrong about things. Wikipedia is crowd-sourced and therefore unreliable because anyone can change anything in all but a very few Wikipedia articles, and there are work-arounds that allow you to corrupt the data in almost all of those “protected” articles.

Wikipedia is now doing its semi-annual fundraising campaign (or is it quarterly now?) looking to raise money to keep itself afloat. I’ve given money to Wikipedia in the past because I use it so much that it would be ungrateful not to support them, even though Jimmy Wales is a libertarian.

This year, however, Wikipedia will have to get along without my support because I just bought a subscription to Encyclopedia Britannica. This feels like a step up from Wikipedia because it can’t be edited by anyone who wants to change reality by adding or subtracting some data here and there, but I can’t justify gifting Wikipedia while I am also paying for Britannica. (The same rationale explains why I don’t subscribe to The Washington Post: I have a subscription to the New York Times. I actually think the Post is now head and shoulders above the Times, but I’m already naming Jeff Bezos as a dependent on my tax returns and I just don’t want to give him any more of my money.)

So the moral of this story (and thanks for reading the whole thing, by the way) is that we can’t trust anything that comes out of anyone’s mouth these days. We can’t even trust the things that come out of our own mouths.

Postscript:  I just realized that, while Encyclopedia Britannica is more reliable in terms of the stability of the data, the problem with using the encyclopedia as a reference tool is that, even though it is now online (for $2 a month by the way) it can’t keep up with the pace of current events. Unlike Wikipedia, the Encyclopedia Britannica isn’t crowd-edited. Article go through an updating, editorial review and revision process that doesn’t exist on Wikipedia. On the other hand, there is no discernible political bias on Britannica and you really can’t say that about Wikipedia, although those political biases are likely to change from day to day, too.