Critical thinking

Today on social media some people took as true the story published by the site ElDeforma.com: Samsung pays Apple $1 billion fine in nickels.

Publimetro in Colombia published it and then had to apologize; other outlets edited their content so that the mistake wouldn’t show so much.

The copy-pasting of this story is impressive. You only have to look on Google to see how the media don’t bother to verify anything and publish this “news” without the slightest shame.

A look at the site’s name already gives us a clue: “El Deforma, un NO-Ticiero de Verdad” (a real NON-newscast), and sure enough, if you read the motto at the foot of the page, it says: “We are willing to make things up as long as you laugh, and at the same time we are very honest… Honestly, it’s all a lie.” :)

It happens everywhere. Stories from The Onion have been taken as true too.

But how can we avoid falling into this kind of trap? Very simple: with critical thinking, something that is lacking, and badly. Just one exercise to give you a sense of how outrageous the story is, and which should have made you doubt: the text claims it took some 30 trucks to carry those coins. Work out how many tons a billion dollars in five-cent coins comes to (a nickel weighs 5 grams; the biggest trucks in the world, like the ones used at Chuquicamata, carry between 300 and 450 tons).

I remember that in 2005 I told you about the case of a story taken as true by EMOL about the development of technology that allowed men to get pregnant.

Not long ago Radio Bio Bio fell for the crack in the sun :), and there are several more cases like that; if we set out to list them there would be enough to fill several blogs.

This will always happen, because it is a problem of lack of critical thinking. Critical thinking is the process by which, using our knowledge and intelligence, we arrive at a reasonable and justified explanation of some matter. Although it is related to skepticism, it is not the same thing, because skepticism doubts the truth, or that it can be reached, and flat out distrusts everything, or almost everything.

From an epistemological point of view, critical thinking seeks to identify fallacies and biases in order to get an objective approximation to the facts. Critical thinking starts from a neutral perspective, analyzing and weighing the evidence. It is not about starting from a negative attitude, or one closed to knowledge; doing that means falling into several of the biases we have talked about at length on this blog.

Curiously, my last post turned into an example of this: I struck a nerve with several skeptical people who insist that man has not been to the moon. On Twitter I even got a comment that said:

“I don’t understand how @lnds can be so skeptical about some things and find ‘ridiculous’ those who are skeptical about the man on the moon thing”

Which worries me, because it means I’m not being effective at getting across the idea of critical thinking. I won’t go on at length explaining how critical thinking lets you reason and discard as wrong the idea that there is a conspiracy to make us believe that man reached the moon and that it was all staged in a movie studio. There are people who have explained it much better and at great length, like Eugenio Fernández Aguilar, author of the excellent blog Ciencia en el XXI, with his book La conspiración lunar ¡vaya timo! (The moon conspiracy: what a scam!).

With the moon conspiracy something similar happens as with Samsung’s coins for Apple: we are dealing with rumors, or ideas born in some feverish mind, that start to take flight and that don’t hold up once you apply critical thinking, but that persist, like parasitic memes, like astrology, homeopathy and stories of alien abductions. No matter how much we do, it’s not worth trying to eradicate them, because confirmation bias and motivated reasoning will be stronger, and the people who want to believe in these ideas cannot be convinced.

And to make this moon conspiracy business clear, I’m going to leave you a video, and allow myself to paraphrase Samuel Clemens by telling you that lying costs nothing; the expensive part would be keeping up the lie, and the truth is that going to the moon is cheaper than maintaining the deception for 43 years.