George Clooney Is Dead?

May You Rest In Peace, George

Generations of Americans heard their parents insist, "Don't believe everything you read."

Parents also urged children, when confronted with a proclaimed fact, to "consider the source." Was that source of information unbiased and well-informed?

Well, compared to today's sources, our old sources seem impeccable. Our 1970's newspapers featured editors who required reporters to have three credible sources for a story. Newspapers were known as "The Fourth Estate," a vocal check against the powers of government. New York Times writers like Scotty Reston and William Safire scored the Harvard and Stanford commencement speeches, while Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein parlayed his Watergate reporting into a nighttime gig dating famous hotties like Bianca Jagger and Elizabeth Taylor. Reporters became celebrities.

Our sources then were good. And still we were urged to mistrust them.

Today, the internet--which is to rigorous journalism what needlepoint is to art--is our biggest source. Its information is unedited, unfiltered, and unvetted. No writer feels either the need to print next-day retractions or the breath of a lawyer peeking over her shoulder. As a result, our world now overflows with misinformation. Millions of us, for example, were going to be raptured.

To make this misinformation problem worst, we repeat what we read. With each repetition, many crack pot views turn into accepted dogma; repetition has that effect, as many studies have proven. As one example, the actor George Clooney died recently on the web. In real life, however, George was sipping an iced latte in a chaise lounge on Capri.

We tend to believe others. So the web--a huge herd of "others"--becomes our guru.

Jan Lorenz and Heiko Rahut recently exposed this susceptibility of ours to other people's opinions. These two men asked 144 Swiss students, each one in an isolated cubicle, to answer several questions, including "What is the length of Switzerland's border with Italy?"

The student's average guesses came very close the actual numbers. They estimated that Zurich had 1000 new immigrants, for example. The actual total was 1067.

But what happened if these students heard the other student's estimates? They became swayed by them, and became less accurate--yet more confident in their bad new estimates than they had been in their better ones! To magnify the influence even more, people tend to trust the most confident people, which turns the cocky dunderheads into information leaders.

Today, the wise remain silent while the easily swayed speak, and their voices meld into a loud chorus. They assure us that George Clooney is dead.

All of this seems particularly strange to me, a former trial attorney. Trial attorneys learn that the mere opinion of another person--even of the world's best-regarded expert--is not even admissable as evidence of anything. But outside the courts, most people seem to accept the idea of Proof By Anecdote, and just one anecdote can be enough.

We hear today about Evidence Based Medicine and Evidence Based Management. What we badly need is Evidence Based Life.

A crowd of independent thinkers--those Swiss students in their isolated cubicles--acts wisely, as a famous book title once said. A crowd of people listening to others, however, easily becomes a Mob.

And so we may be living in an irony. Are we becoming more informed yet more wrong--and more confident that we are right--every day?

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