Truthiness

It's true, I do love The Colbert Report, as well as his discovery of the word "truthiness", but that's not quite what I'm talking about today. Be prepared, I'm gonna start rambling into some kind of philosophical hodgepodge, as best as a computer science major with no such background can do.

Take a look at this article about Shane Fitzgerald, a Dublin University student who fooled the press using one of my absolute favorite inventions, Wikipedia. To paraphrase, he fabricated a "poetic but phony quote" by recently deceased French composer Maurice Jarre and placed it on Jarre's Wikipedia page. Apparently, media outlets all over the world found the false quote and used it in blogs and newspapers' websites.

After a whole month, nobody came forward to declare the quote a fraud, so Fitzgerald stepped forward and informed the media that they had "swallowed his baloney whole." Said Fitzgerald on the fiasco, "I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn't come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up. It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact."

Scary, no? I have to wonder if something like that has happened before.

I'm reminded of the presidential campaign last year (which I wrote about), when ardent followers of both candidates began to believe outrageous claims degrading their opponent, just because those things were said over and over again and they wanted those unforgivable things to be true, until they became "facts" in their minds.

A corollary: Napoleon once said, "History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon." No doubt the actual truth of certain historical events gets lost in the textbooks on the rare occasion, because (1) the actual truth was lost in translation, or (2) it isn't aligned with the ideological standards of the society in which the textbook was printed (although that thought makes me resemble a conspiracy theorist more than I would like). Instead, stories that approximate the truth as best we can get published, and over time, that's what's learned. Just as a story passed on vocally over the generations changes like a game of telephone (you know that game you played as a kid where you whispered phrases, one after the other, and at the end the phrase was totally different), history evolves.

I was watching House the other day -- which always seems to bring up interesting topics of discussion, psychology, and philosophy -- and he touched on a related subject. Roughly speaking, I believe truth to be well-defined (that's the mathematician in me talking), but generally it seems to me that morality is far more nebulous. That's one of the reasons why we fight wars; we have different interpretations of morality (among other things). It's difficult to define boundaries to moral issues. In the aforementioned episode of House, he is treating a rape victim, and in his infinite wisdom (after all, he's on TV), makes the following statement:

"The problem with exceptions to rules is the line-drawing. It might make sense to kill the ass that did this to you, but where do we draw the line? Which asses do we get to kill, and which asses get to keep on being asses?"

It seems to me that this axiom applies to many, many moral issues, which I will not discuss here, because that's a different problem. Morality is not hard and fast like truth, but it's more like Mr. Colbert's notion of "truthiness". I will draw the line on a controversial issue in one place (or maybe even argue that no line should be drawn at all), and 99.999% of the people in this world will draw the line somewhere else.

I guess everyone's ability to get along is directly related to the ability of people to respect one another's opinion. But there are certainly some issues where you can't just passively take this position (e.g., the Holocaust, which obviously required swift action to stop it). So where do you draw THAT line? I feel like I'm defining the word "is" by using the word "is".

All intended only to provoke thought. Because somebody has to take on Hulu, whose advertising campaign unabashedly admits its plot to take over the world by speeding up the brain-to-tapioca process by giving us free on-demand TV. Fight the power!