Memories of the 28th Century

Fact and fiction are often presented as opposites. Fiction is made up, fabrication, lie, etc., but the real difference is in the attitude of the teller. Many things have been presented as fact that are far from being actual fact. It might actually be that the majority of things presented as fact are not factual, but it is difficult to tell the difference. It is interesting that I just watched the truly strange video “Massachusetts” by Ylvis, a Norwegian band; it is a satirical praise of Massachusetts, and, like most good satire, some people take it at face value. But this is not the kind of fiction that passes as fact that I was thinking about. Politicians are better examples of those who present fiction as fact.

Most of what comes out of Washington is quite false, but it is spun in the hope of getting people to believe it. That Obama medical insurance program is a prime example, and today it came out that the fine for failing to comply is also false. But the biggest lies about it are that it will reduce medical costs, and that is still being presented that way although no one believes it. I won’t go further into political lies presented as fact, because it’s like the proverbial “shooting fish in a barrel”, but there are major problems with academia.

The Economist Magazine had an article this week about the failure of peer-review. There are some interesting comments: “A few years ago scientists at Amgen, an American drug company, tried to replicate 53 studies that they considered landmarks in the basic science of cancer . . . they were able to reproduce the original results in just six.” And “Months earlier Florian Prinz and his colleagues at Bayer HealthCare, a German pharmaceutical giant, reported in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, a sister journal, that they had successfully reproduced the published results in just a quarter of 67 seminal studies.” It is expected that many scientific studies will be proven wrong, and that is why researchers are expected to cooperate with those who try to replicate their results, but not all cooperate. Considering this article and others that have come out over the years, it appears that scientists have no more respect for actual fact than a novelist might, and some novelists do extensive research to make sure that they don’t end up looking like idiots. http://www.economist.com/news/briefi...it-not-trouble

Specialty periodicals aren’t the only periodic literature that has trouble with actual fact.

I have known for decades that what is reported as news is not what happened; it is what the reporter to express. Sometimes such things will have some connection with what has happened, and other times there is no clear connection between event and report. I first learned that in September of 19__, when the only items that were correctly reported about Free University City were the name and a photograph; the reporter didn’t even get the name of one of the people involved that the reporter gave the impression that he had spoken with.

Another problem with differentiating fact and fiction is that opinions are often presented as straight-forward assertions of fact even when the one opining knows perfectly well that the assertions are not necessarily actual fact. We bloggers are often in that position, but those who think about such matters realize that blogs, by their nature, are not presented as facts; although there may be elements that are factual.

I have already written about marketing lies, and those are as easy a target as politicians, but there are some examples that are completely over the top in all ways. The best example is bottled water. Bottled water companies took a descriptive study of how much water people consume and turned it into a command that everyone must drink a half gallon of plain water on top of all the water from food and other liquids without regard for body mass or anything else. I have even heard that some physicians spread that lie as if it were true. I hope that I will not be treated by such a physician; he probably would use leeches and sacrifice a lemming to the Goddess of good health.

On the other side of things, there is some fiction that is written and presented as fiction that is meticulously research and is more fact than not, but the author inserted some fictional characters or episodes that are made up, usually based on the known facts. People who can tease apart fact and fiction can learn as much or more from such fiction as from pure fact. Pieces of fiction like this are good reflections of ordinary life in which people interweave fact and fiction as suits them. Much of the fiction is made of little item that make no difference, while the actual facts are the hard ones that can’t be avoided.

Most people are perfectly aware of how much fiction passes as fact and vice versa, but I wonder if anyone has ever come up with a good explanation of why people do this as a general practice. Or maybe people in general aren’t conscious that everyone lies as much as they do.

I wonder how many falsities I have in this blog post. At least I managed to avoid castigating the worshippers of anthropogenic global warming for their presentation of hopes and dreams as scientific fact.

Please let me know what you think. Are they truth, lies, or just gas?