When I was little, I thought my dad knew everything. He’s one of those people that can make you feel instantly idiotic. A real tear-down-the-foundations-of-your-belief-system kinda guy. One logical fallacy, generalization, or incorrect factoid and you’d be shut down faster than an independent coffee house next to a Tim Hortons. Nothing competes with a litigator or reasonably priced coffee.
A couple of years ago, I was talking with him about how stereoisomers can have completely different properties even though they are made of exactly the same elements. What? Is that not what everyone talks to their parents about? My father the irrefutable lawyer said “No I don’t believe that”. Not “oh really?” or “Are you sure?” Simply “no”.
It is precisely because my father is not an idiot that he looked at his then eighteen year old daughter’s second-year-university face and said to himself “nothing she says can be thought to have any factual accuracy”. It sounds harsh, but quite frankly, if I had been looking at me, I wouldn’t have taken anything I said to be of consequence either.
Just the other day, I was watching bad daytime television (it happens sometimes) when a talk show came on. The show had some kind of resident GP to consult on all things “health” related. He was being interviewed about a new study that had just come out about the effects of cellphones on developing brain cancer. I already told you, it was bad television. Cancer research itself is complicated. Hypothetical cancer research on the long term effects of cellphone usage when there is no good data set or correlates is, well, absurd at best. Yet, the show’s GP made some staggering conclusions about radiation and the sterility your phone is BBMing to your testicles in your pocket.
For the record, the most likely way your blackberry will kill you is if you twitter while driving, or if you keep answering it while you’re at dinner with me and I ordered a steak that came with a big knife.
What amazed me (okay it wasn’t amazing, it was expected and a little unfortunate), was how much everybody hung off of the doctor’s words. I’m not putting down GPs, they are great at getting you the phone numbers of specialists who will actually help you. I’m only being a little facetious, that’s precisely what they’re supposed to do! If a GP knew as much about an ailment as the specialist, they’d be the specialist. Just like I wouldn’t ask a 300 pound person (even if they were a doctor) about weight loss or my genetics professor about Greek philosophy.
If it had been someone with a PhD in chemistry who told my father about stereoisomers, he probably wouldn’t have said “no”. To him, I was about as reliable as Wikipedia; a vessel of mindless regurgitation of popular dogma.
So check your sources. Follow the funding, motivations, and platforms of the people you’re relying on for information. Information goes down better with a few grains of salt. Just because it’s in print, in a journal (there are “academic” journals about clairvoyance), or narrated by Morgan Freeman doesn’t make it infallible, no matter how soothing the baritone may be.
Two comments:
I would assume your Father said “No” not because “nothing she says can be thought to have any factual accuracy”. It was because, rightly or wrongly, what you said did not make intuitive sense to him.
I don’t agree that asking a 300 pound person about weight loss can be absolutely assumed to be a bad thing. There very well might be a medical condition involved, either physical or mental, that leads to the obesity (assuming it is obesity and the person in question is not seven feet tall). None of this precludes the individual of having a perfect understanding of the complexities of weight loss. An excess of poundage does not correlate with a shortage of intelligence.
Keep up the writing. I very much enjoy reading what you write even if I often disagree with various things.
Hello! I work next to (our desks touch) your uncle Dave Scott, and via him I made my way to your blog.
I read articles (mostly science, but a touch of everything) for probably 3 or 4 hours a day, and have been doing so for more than a decade. So I speak with some authority when I say that your writing style is clear, well-structured, and quite enjoyable, enough for you to be at least nationally recognized. Well done!
I only found your blog today, so if you already write for the CBC, excuse my unresearched ignorance.
As an aside, if you want any dirt on your Uncle Dave, I’m your guy.
Terry