We are living during the so called "age of information" and thus we enjoy easy, fast communication. This is pretty much taken for granted nowadays; since we've all grown acostumed to it by now. But it is amazing. This ease of communication has been the aim of nations and empires for as long as there have been nations and empires. Wars were won and lost due to communication and in several cases proved that the pen is mightier than the sword, or marks with a big red "x" where the sword is suppose to strike.
While looking for a topic to write about for this post I clicked on one of those shady advertisments (the type you know you shouldn't really click on because there is the chance they'll infest your computer with a virus) and it said something like "cause of ww3". Right next to it was a picture of a bodybuilder that promised to tell his secret of how he gained all that muscle mass in just one month.
The link took me to a financial news website i never heard of and I started to watch an interview. It all seemed normal enough, they were in a normal looking news set, just like something you would see on Fox or bloomberg. He then preceded to make some pretty wild claims, like that he worked for the c.i.a and that he was part of a project that had predicited the crisis of 2008. Pretty extraordinary stuff. He then began to talk about how the world was being plunged into a 25 year crisis that would be the worst in history. He never really talked about another war, the news site kind of made that up.
At this point I opened a new tab and started to do some research. The website quickly turned out to be notorious for being unreliable and sensational, that fed its audience with out of date statisics and wild theories, and many people that bought what they were selling lost a lot of money. The guest was in fact a best selling author (former C.I.a operative not so much) and had, like any other author, people that agreed and disagreed with his views, even other experts seemed to respect some of his views, even though none fully agreed with him.
The interview ended with the advertizing of his newly released book, which detailed how one could prepare for this emminent economic apocalypse by investing in the right areas...
Surprise, surprise. Right?
I don't plan to adress his ideas, What he is saying is not really the point.
The point is we have this horrible tendency to accept whatever we hear way too easily. we get too hung up on what the message makes us feel rather than what it actually means. And during an age where anyone anywhere can say whatever they want and pass the idea of being credible questioning is needed more than ever. I bet that those people that lost their money got excited they had come across some good and feasible investing opportunities and didn't do their research.
It is amazing that questioning and finding things out for oneself before taking them in isn't adressed and punctuated more often.
even the media misinformes more often than it should. i remember a year or so ago that a group of italian scientists discovered that the neutrino was able to travel faster than the speed of light, and it was talked about a lot because such a discovery was going to shake the very foundations of the world of physics. well, it really would were it real. A week or so later i found out that the italians had used some uncalibrated tools. but this piece of news, probably because it wasn't nearly as sensational or exciting and wasn't really going to shake much of anything, wasn't covered nearly as much. And even when it was big news, i never really saw anyone go into why it was such a huge deal and what would change. i know i didn't really care to find that out at the time, and i believe that many people didn't care for it either. maybe because it would only really shake the world of physics, not the world most of us live in.
And i think there are more than a handful of people in the world that are walking around thinking the neutrino moves faster than light. Does that really mattter? Well, that there are people around that think won't do any harm, but to think that more than a handful of people think less of the theory of relativity, one of those human achievements that take humanity a step further soley on a intelectual bases, kind of hurts me a little. And it is kind of sad that it happened, and happens all the time, i believe, to a bunch of other things.
While looking for a topic to write about for this post I clicked on one of those shady advertisments (the type you know you shouldn't really click on because there is the chance they'll infest your computer with a virus) and it said something like "cause of ww3". Right next to it was a picture of a bodybuilder that promised to tell his secret of how he gained all that muscle mass in just one month.
The link took me to a financial news website i never heard of and I started to watch an interview. It all seemed normal enough, they were in a normal looking news set, just like something you would see on Fox or bloomberg. He then preceded to make some pretty wild claims, like that he worked for the c.i.a and that he was part of a project that had predicited the crisis of 2008. Pretty extraordinary stuff. He then began to talk about how the world was being plunged into a 25 year crisis that would be the worst in history. He never really talked about another war, the news site kind of made that up.
At this point I opened a new tab and started to do some research. The website quickly turned out to be notorious for being unreliable and sensational, that fed its audience with out of date statisics and wild theories, and many people that bought what they were selling lost a lot of money. The guest was in fact a best selling author (former C.I.a operative not so much) and had, like any other author, people that agreed and disagreed with his views, even other experts seemed to respect some of his views, even though none fully agreed with him.
The interview ended with the advertizing of his newly released book, which detailed how one could prepare for this emminent economic apocalypse by investing in the right areas...
Surprise, surprise. Right?
I don't plan to adress his ideas, What he is saying is not really the point.
The point is we have this horrible tendency to accept whatever we hear way too easily. we get too hung up on what the message makes us feel rather than what it actually means. And during an age where anyone anywhere can say whatever they want and pass the idea of being credible questioning is needed more than ever. I bet that those people that lost their money got excited they had come across some good and feasible investing opportunities and didn't do their research.
It is amazing that questioning and finding things out for oneself before taking them in isn't adressed and punctuated more often.
even the media misinformes more often than it should. i remember a year or so ago that a group of italian scientists discovered that the neutrino was able to travel faster than the speed of light, and it was talked about a lot because such a discovery was going to shake the very foundations of the world of physics. well, it really would were it real. A week or so later i found out that the italians had used some uncalibrated tools. but this piece of news, probably because it wasn't nearly as sensational or exciting and wasn't really going to shake much of anything, wasn't covered nearly as much. And even when it was big news, i never really saw anyone go into why it was such a huge deal and what would change. i know i didn't really care to find that out at the time, and i believe that many people didn't care for it either. maybe because it would only really shake the world of physics, not the world most of us live in.
And i think there are more than a handful of people in the world that are walking around thinking the neutrino moves faster than light. Does that really mattter? Well, that there are people around that think won't do any harm, but to think that more than a handful of people think less of the theory of relativity, one of those human achievements that take humanity a step further soley on a intelectual bases, kind of hurts me a little. And it is kind of sad that it happened, and happens all the time, i believe, to a bunch of other things.