A Little Baseball and a Load of Crap

I'm sitting back, enjoying a beer, and watching the Red Sox/Yankees game. I would love to see the Sox go to the playoffs. What would make things better is if the Indians get the wild card. Just say no to Yankee playoffs! [grin] I have doubts about this becoming a reality. The Yankees have a great team that seems to get even better when battling for playoff rights.

Today's rant begins with a short story.

I was talking to a fellow employee at the warehouse I worked at. He informed me that one of the worlds most venomous spiders lived in our warehouse. Needless to say, I was intrigued. He pointed out that the popular spider known to many as the Daddy Long Leg was very poisonous, but its fangs were too small to penetrate a man's skin. My initial reaction was to think that this sounded like a load of crap. He was very serious though, and obviously not joking around. I had no reason to argue with him, because I knew nothing about the biology of this spider.

After work I did a little research. I found out that I was correct in thinking that it was a load of crap. They are not poisonous, but it is a very popular rumor. My co-worker was probably told this rumor by one of his friends and accepted it as true. I wonder how these rumors become so popular. My best guess is that in this case it was probably started by a kid. He was probably trying to scare a friend for fun. This friend then tells other kids, and the rumor begins to spread. How did this spread into the adult world? Why would a grown adult believe something that sounds so outrageous?

I'm sure almost everyone has heard the saying, "Don't believe everything you hear". This is good advice, but people choose not to follow it. Because of this, there are all kinds of weird and stupid things that people accept as true. Check out snopes.com for a long list of these idiocies.

The spider story is mostly harmless. I guess it doesn't help arachnophobes, but they seem to have bigger problems than Daddy Long Legs. Other rumors can be very harmful. People believe in psychic powers, although there is no proof that they exist (check out randi.org). When trust is given to a psychic, so is all the money they can scam out of you.

Whatever the degree of harm to others, the harm is greatest to you. By not thinking for yourself, and blindly trusting what others tell you, you are doing yourself a great injustice. If someone challenges your opinions, you have no leg to stand on. The best defense you can muster is, "That's what I was told".

Do yourself a favor and question your own opinions and beliefs before others challenge you on them. Become a critical thinker by questioning the information you hear. A man who thinks for himself craves knowledge, while the man who believes what he's told becomes intellectually stagnant.

If it looks like shit, and smells like shit, it's probably shit. But, you will never know that without checking it out for youself.

Edit: October 3, 2005 Part 2 - Trusting Your Sources
David brought up a good point in the first comment to this post. We cannot spend all of our time checking sources. The above rant refers to blind trust. Once you have researched the information given to you from a blind source, you know whether or not that source can be trusted. If they consistantly give you true, verifiable information, you know you can trust them for most things. I still don't think they should be trusted 100%. After all, nobody's perfect.

When researching information that I know very little about, I try to find at least 2 or 3 different sources that supply the answers I need. This is mostly because I use the internet, and you need to be very weary of information found here. One source that I have come to trust is wikipedia.org. Another is snopes.com. Time after time, they have supplied information that is not only verifiably true, but states it in a neutral way. By being neutral, they are not pushing an agenda.

I do a lot of research concerning science and religious issues. I have found one source that is NOT a good one. It is actually a series of sites. Some of them are allaboutphilosophy.com, allaboutscience.com, and allaboutgod.com. Those sites have been put together by All About God Ministries. The sites appear to provide official information, but they are written with the purpose of pushing the belief of Jesus. Unlike wikipedia.org, they do not provide a neutral viewpoint to the facts.