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4.4: Seeking a Second Opinion

  • Page ID
    21974
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    Suppose you see this headline in the Weekly World News: "Tot Falls 5,000 Feet and Lives!" Should you believe it? Well, that depends on what it means. Does it mean that the tot fell from a plane without a parachute? If so, you'd expect this stunt tot to be a flat tot, wouldn't you? But maybe the tot did have a parachute. If so, the story could well be true. When you see such a headline, you are sensitized, or should become sensitized, to wonder whether some crucial information has been left out.

    Even if you were to stop and read the story and find out that the tot did not have a parachute but still lived, you should be cautious about believing it because your common sense says this feat is highly improbable. Before you put much faith in a story like this, you should get some independent verification. That is, you should get a reliable second opinion that supports the story.

    What is a reliable second opinion? An expert’s opinion would be one. Getting the information from an independent, credible source will help with the reliability. For example, the opinion of an eyewitness interviewed by your local newspaper's reporter, and not by the supermarket tabloid's reporter, should be a good enough second opinion for you to believe the story about the tot’s fall. A videotape would also be independent verification. Remember, though, that the more improbable the belief you are considering adopting, the better the evidence has to be. Without the better evidence, then your belief should be lukewarm. A video camera file can be doctored; even three eyewitnesses sometimes can be mistaken about interpreting what they saw. There are videotapes and eyewitnesses who have seen a sea monster in Loch Ness in Scotland, but the experts still believe there is no sea monster there.

    Three testimonials of UFOs from members of the UFO Society should be given considerably less credibility than testimonials from three independent people who have no special interest in promoting UFOs.

    Time is also an important factor. Verifying the falling tot story is much easier than verifying whether St. Matthew wrote down the Gospel while visiting Mt. Ararat two thousand years ago. Verifying current events is easier than verifying most historical events, because the trail isn't so cold. There are more traces of current events, more eyewitnesses, more available data, more evidence to find, less need to rely on faith.

    Suppose the following were another headline from the Weekly World News:

    CASHIER FIRED BECAUSE OF HER BIG BUST
    WINS BACK PAY

    Is this headline inconsistent with anything you know? No, and it is not especially improbable, only mildly surprising. So you should believe the headline. It is unlikely that the newspaper is wrong about everything. Still, the tabloid is not a sufficiently reliable source for you to believe anything of importance without first checking elsewhere. If it were important to you to get the facts right about the big bust story, you should not rely solely on this paper's report. Try harder to verify it. Get more information from more reliable and independent sources. Would six more copies of the same issue of the Weekly World News make the story six times more likely to be true?

    In 2016, the Stanford University History Education Group published their study of whether American high school students could assess the strength of the evidence offered in support of a news story. Here is one of their famous examples. The students were informed that on March 11, 2011, there was a large nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan. The students were then told that four years later the following image of misshapen flowers with the accompanying comment was posted on a public photo sharing website:

    Fukushima Nuclear Flowers
    Not much more to say, this is what happens when flowers get nuclear birth defects.

    The Stanford Group asked high school students to assess whether the post is strong evidence of Fukushima Daiichi causing an environmental problem. Too many students said it was. Only 20% of the students viewing the picture thought to ask whether the picture was really from that area of Japan or even from Japan at all, how it was determined that nuclear radiation caused the unusual shape, or whether there are flowers like this at places far from nuclear power plants. In short, too many high school students were uncritical thinkers.


    This page titled 4.4: Seeking a Second Opinion is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Bradley H. Dowden.

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