Loren Collins - Bullspotting: Finding Facts in the Age of Misinformation

Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him.

Ernest Hemingway

In issuing this charge, Hemingway was speaking specifically about the art of writing but his advice is applicable on a far greater scale. Crap detection is not only a valuable tool; it's an essential one. We're constantly bombarded with information, much of it unreliable, from every source imaginable. Television, radio, print, news, word of mouth, and especially the Internet, are continuous founts of misinformation. Of crap. Operating in the world efficiently depends on one's ability to identify that crap, to spot bull, to know what to trust and what to be suspicious of. But how does one go about making those distinctions as automatically as Hemingway would suggest we should?

When I told a friend that I was writing a book on recognizing misinformation, his response was, You only need one thing: common sense. This was not an undereducated friend; he is a lawyer with a master's degree in business. But he's dead wrong. It's immediately tempting to agree that common sense is all that's needed to tell fact from fiction, but it's common sense that's driving that sense of agreement.

Common sense is, unfortunately, often unreliable. Indeed, it's so unreliable that humanity has developed a mechanism to try to overcome the common errors of common sensea means by which we can cut through the morass of prejudices and blind spots and unconscious assumptions, and discover the true reality underneath. And we've given that antidote for common sense a name: science. Or, to put it more broadly, the scientific method. A question is posed. Research is conducted. A hypothesis is constructed. The hypothesis is tested. Analysis is done, and a conclusion is drawn. And that conclusion can then be validated or invalidated through further iterations of the scientific method.

It's not perfectly suited to all aspects of life, but the success of the scientific method of thinking is evidenced by its own successful results. Within less than sixty years, humanity went from putting the first man in flight to putting the first man on the moon. In fewer than fifty years, we went from discovering the makeup of DNA to successfully cloning a large mammal. Common sense, by contrast, told us for most of human history that the world was flat. That the stars moved, but not the earth. That the world was composed of but four elements: earth, fire, wind, and water. That life had existed for only a few thousand years. That illness was caused by supernatural forces. That certain races of people were inferior. That women were inferior to men. That magic exists.

For millennia, these were our accepted truths. Humanity's knowledge was largely governed by common sense, and progress was slow. It was scienceand its tools for rationally examining our universe and uncovering its undiscovered truthsthat propelled the rapid change of the last few hundred years.

That's not to say that common sense is useless or that it leads only to false answers. Common sense is frequently helpful and does sometimes aid in making legitimate observations about the world. For instance, common sense might recognize that the consumption of certain natural plants tends to be followed by helpful (or harmful) aftereffects and might thus conclude that the plant is medicinal or poisonous. Identifying that pattern can help lead to the discovery of an underlying truth. Still, it's no guarantee. Hypotheses, after all, are essentially the operation of common sense. We look at existing data and patterns, and we draw a tentative conclusion. Some hypotheses turn out to be correct; many don't. Common sense is the same way.

Perhaps the biggest change that science has provided in the past century has been the introduction of the Internet. It's often said that such developments make the world smaller, but on the individual level, this has made the average person's world immensely larger. Historically, people tended to have local friends, read local newspapers, follow local events. Our lives are no longer so insular.

Our access to information has grown exponentially, and so, simultaneously, has our access to misinformation. Entire libraries of scholarship are available online, but so are innumerable amateur blogs. Legitimate and respectable news sources are ever-more convenient, but ideological and agenda-driven websites offer up factually questionable propaganda posing as news. Video archives preserve the past, but inexpensive cameras and editing software now permit even the nuttiest conspiracy theorist to produce a polished video presentation that can be visually compelling.

Unfortunately, most of us are not conditioned to distinguish between trustworthy and untrustworthy information, particularly given the avalanche of new facts we're presented with each day. So we turn to logical shortcuts. We favor information from people or sources we like. We distrust information that's inconsistent with our personal biases and beliefs. We accept information when it supports a conclusion we like, and we deny it when it supports the opposite. We fall back on common sense.

Using such shortcuts is not necessarily wrong. Indeed, it's often necessary, given the sheer volume of information we're confronted with each day. One can hardly be expected to research and validate every new piece of information encountered; life would be a perpetual series of mundane research projects on insignificant subjects.

Still, there are ways that misinformation can be spotted and singled out for further review. A properly trained skeptical eye is always on the lookout for suspect information and is possessed of the tools to evaluate it. Then, even if a firm answer cannot be easily found, the skeptic knows to keep an open mind as to the validity of the new fact and can avoid treating it as a confirmed truth or a proven falsehood. He or she can avoid being a duped participant in the further spread of misinformation.

Indeed, while the Internet has facilitated the spread of misinformation, there are simultaneously ever more resources that examine, challenge, and debunk false claims. Barbara and David Mikkelson founded the website Snopes in 1995, with the original mission of addressing urban legends that circulated the web, particularly through e-mails. Today, with a scope that is far broader than just urban legends, Snopes remains the web's go-to source for the lowdown on the latest popular rumors. And despite the site being an independent operation, the Mikkelsons are regularly attacked by cranks for their debunking. Similar websites, such as TruthOrFiction.com and About.com's Urban Legends page, are also good resources that have been challenging false claims since the late 1990s.

It wasn't until the 2000s that new websites were devoted to a field where misinformation is not only endemic but also has the potential to be far more influential than a simple chain e-mail: politics. Elected officials, political commentators, interest groupsthey all regularly spin the truth to suit their agenda, and during election years, that spin gets broadcast directly into the public's homes as part of every campaign.

Debunking even made its way onto television with the popular Discovery Channel show Mythbusters. Premiering in 2003, each episode of the show takes on a handful of rumors or myths, and the hosts conduct experiments to see if the claims stand up to scrutiny. Depending on the result, the myth is declared to be either Busted, Plausible, or Confirmed. And while the show's experiments are not scientific in the strictest sense, cohost Adam Savage has noted that the show roughly follows the scientific method: they take a claim, develop a hypothesis, make a prediction, conduct some tests, and evaluate their findings. It's condensed and formatted for broadcast purposes, but the end result is that