Misinformation
I’m working on my next book, Knowledge out of Balance: A Primer on Misinformation, and ordered my misinformation principles to fit with certain categories. By way of recapping the principles here is the new order. WHAT IS MISINFORMATION? 1. Information begins with dogma. 2. Invalid misinformation has omissions. 3. Unreliable misinformation has distortions. WHY DOES [...]
I’ve been starting on my next book, Information out of Balance, featuring the ten misinformation principles. I will copy and paste what I wrote for Misinformation Principle #10: Misinformation increases our vanity, cynicism and apprehensions The abuse of our altruistic trust comes at a heavy cost, the focus of the final chapter. Vanity and apprehension [...]
If you have ever checked out my misinformation bookmark you will note the principle I present here will be worded differently. The bookmark states that “Misinformation promotes greed, authoritarianism and/or idolatry.” That will be rephrased here as “Misinformation serves paternalism.” Paternal agents inevitably want to satisfy greed, authoritarianism and/or idolatry, as those traits are necessary [...]
Misinformation Principle #8 states that misinformation benefits the few at the expense of the many. To understand this better let us look at a situation that you might think is misinformation by the many: groupthink. While groupthink, the herd mentality or party loyalty may all be examples of the many or majority imposing detrimental views, [...]
I have picked on “free market libertarian” information providers more than any others, more than “liberal” information providers and, for that matter, more than “conservative” information providers. Since people tend to lump in “conservative” and “free market libertarian” together one might assume a liberal bias on my part. Let me first concede that I do [...]
Even as I post this I am at work on a new book in which the order of these principles will be different. I’ll continue with the order I have started and then group the misinformation principles in their new order before moving on to the deconstruction of Liberty and Tyranny. Misinformation Principle #7 is [...]
The sixth misinformation principle is that misinformation requires more resources than information. Rumors can be started without much effort, but the most useful misinformation persuades people to ignore, deny or reinterpret what their own experiences would otherwise be telling them. In Systems out of Balance I report on the almost comical activities of Monsanto in [...]
On Wednesday (7/29/09) I was interviewed on an hour long radio program on WBCR, Berkshire community radio out of Great Barrington. The sound guy was listening intently in on the interview and carried on a conversation with me afterwards. He declared our government heading towards socialism, thinking that this was in agreement with everything I [...]
The recent series about how the founding fathers deplored political parties leads well into the next misinformation principle. We are misinformed through dogma or branding and nothing illustrates that better than party or think tank ideologies. Humans are an incredibly diverse species. To put this in perspective, bees are among the most social organisms in [...]
The fourth misinformation principle states that we are misinformed by secrecy and omission. In scientific jargon this affects the validity of the information. If you determined the average weight of humans by sampling only sumo wrestlers your information would not be valid because you omitted humans of varying types. If you weighed everyone in your [...]