The Internet Is NEVER Wrong

When I was a kid there was a subset of us humans who thought that the moon landing was faked and that there were aliens being housed in a quonset hut in the Arizona desert and that Communists had successfully asserted control in all areas of the U.S. government . . . and then there were the rest of us, the overwhelming majority of us, who lived in a world of verifiable facts.  I'm not suggesting that people who hold unpopular opinions are always wrong but rather that people seem to have gotten really lazy intellectually.  If I believe something unpopular I can pop onto the internet and find sources that confirm what I already believe.  But that doesn't mean that what I believe is actually true.  I think it's irresponsible to limit my curiosity to sites or people who believe what I already believe.  That's called Confirmation Bias and is roughly what I did when I sat in bars with other alcoholics and we all agreed that we were getting screwed and that everyone was against us and that nothing was our fault.  One of the great gifts of my recovery is having to listen to someone else explain why the results of my life were not often attributable to outside factors and were, in fact, the result of my own baleful behavior.  I didn't like to hear this stuff so Drinking Seaweed made sure that disagreeable people and their disagreable opinions were kept at arm's bay.  The fact that I couldn't hear what they were saying didn't make it any less true.  I'd use the metaphor of an ostrich sticking its head into the sand to avoid problems except that ostrich's aren't stupid and they don't stick their heads in the sand to avoid problems.  Adult ostriches weigh 300 pounds so they can kick the shit out of a lot of other animals.  Plus, there's the sharp beak and massive claws and the high-velocity running to contend with.

One  of the most important lessons I learned in my grinding high school was not to trust information that was filtered through someone else, to always go back to source materials and figure shit out on my own.  I think that's so ingrained in me that I forgot it was ingrained in me.  Another of the psychological biases that always startles me is the one where an individual who holds an opposing view against an overwhelming majority will almost always capitulate and go with the majority opinion.  I think how often I find myself swimming against the tide, especially in A.A. matters.  I am not lying when I say that I've been in the majority opinion only rarely when there are group consciences about internal matters in my regular meetings. 

 Eh, maybe I'm just stupid or willfully stubborn.  That's very possible.