gregormendelblog.com

Riiiiiight…

Honestly, you’d have to be a blithering idiot to believe that. And you’d have to be an insufferable hack to print it.

And when hackery intersects with personal bias, well, you have the lamestream media!

The pervasive media bias is not some organized conspiracy where “big bosses” give commands from the top. No, it is that the vast majority of “journalists” have very strong personal biases and no moral problem with lying and doing what they have to in order to make the facts fit their worldview. Many times it is quite transparent to the culprits, and in fact I think that most often it is.

It’s like science. If I believe that X will happen (it is an unstated assumption of fact), I’m both more likely to interpret anything as X and to be completely unsurprised by it. I mean, when I go to sit in a chair I don’t wonder if it will hold my (ever-increasing) weight–it is an assumption and I just presume that it is true. In science, there are many requirement meant to overcome just such a bias, from randomization to intrumentation procedures to peer review to making the data available to others.

In fact, one way that you KNOW that the “global warming” supposed scientists were lying is because they refused to release their data and even tried to hide it! Real scientists don’t do that kind of crap. If they were on the level they would have said, “Here’s the raw data, YOU tell me what you think it means.” If someone else has a different interpretation of the data, then it is incumbent upon me to argue as to why I think my explanation is better. No, the “global warming” ‘scientists’ just said, “Shut up and take yer medicine–we are the experts and you are too stupid to understand.”

Uh, THAT’s not science. Not even close.

See, science is about finding truth. All the procedures are meant to further that end. Is it perfect? Not by a long shot, and I can easily make a persuasive argument that all science is fatally flawed as a path to absolute truth. But it is a good way of knowing. My iPod works, and sometimes that’s all I care about. I can wrestle with the epistemological issues when this Judas Priest song is over.

And this is exactly where the journalists of our day have failed us. They have claimed to have “the truth” and yet they are known to engage in deception. They have no methods (like scientists) to mitigate their biases, and they are left entirely to their own good behavior. They assume that because their intent is good, they must be telling the truth. I’m sorry, but the road to Hell …

This is perhaps the poorest sort of epistemology the world has ever known. It is half-baked, and doesn’t even really deserve the description of “epistemology.” It frequently leads to error, and there is no corrective. Hence, the unmitigated disaster the media is today. There is ONLY opinion, and there are no facts. That means that the kookiest conspiracy theory has just as much relevant backing as anything else. Welcome to post-modernism.