In our daily lives, we filter huge amounts of data. One sieve we run it through is the “is it true?” filter. Suprizingly, we usually get it right.
Today, I told a coworker that the sky was falling. They, of course, disreguarded it is a non-answer to the non-question they had asked (”How is it going?”). A little earlier, people twice my age listened with confidence as I described to them a problem, and gave specifics about what a drawing said. Even though I am not a reliable source of information, people are able to filter the useful from the non-useful.
Sometimes I pull reliable information from patently unreliable sources. For example, I don’t watch the news because it’s too biased, so I get most of my news from webcomics. I am pretty sure that EMI is moving toward DRM-free music, based on a comic a couple weeks back. However, I don’t think that the conversation from whence I gleamed this info actually occured between picketers and a CEO.
Sometimes my reality filter fails me, however. I was reading an article today about science, and I had skimmed through a couple paragraphs and thought it gave useful information….and then I saw it was published in The Onion (a parody newspaper). That little bit of information showed that what I was reading was probably unfounded, and likely wrong. Yet, I had thought it gave some good points.
So, calibrate your bunk-o-meter well, because you are going to have to filter a lot of different information, and catagorize the true from the not-as-true
