Facts Are Stubborn Things

If you do an Internet search on the phrase "Facts are stubborn things" you will find that the cyberworld is full of conflicting information. You get about 60,000 hits. Within the first dozen citations, the quote is attributed to John Adams, Mark Twain, Ronald Regan, Lawrence Peters, and several unknown French guys. So much for stubborn facts, eh?

This, in a nutshell, is the problem for seekers of Truth ever since Al Gore invented the Internets. There is too much conflicting data, misinformation and outright malicious fabrication. As Lincoln observed, "It is easy to fool most of the people most of the time. "

Guys like Rush Limbaugh and John Stewart make their living maliciously distorting the words and deeds of anyone of the other side of their political ideology. They may think they are doing it for entertainment, but too many of their fans miss the humor and believe anything they hear from the lips of their guru.

We do not know who we can trust to tell the truth. The stubborn facts are buried deep in the mine and we do not have time to go in and dig them out ourselves. Google and other search engines are constantly gamed by special interests and clever marketers to make their interest-friendly results appear near the top of the list of returned hits.

Like me, most seekers-of-truth are in a hurry for enlightenment. So, we usually abandon our online research after viewing a few pages of search results. We click on the one or two that seem to agree with our preconceived notions. If the writing is intelligible, and it supports our point-of-view, we hyper-link it to verify our source. We shamelessly ignore contradictory data.

The problem remains:

“Facts are ventriloquists dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.” Aldous Huxley. At least, I think he was the one who said it.