The two most dangerous words

I was talking to a good friend of mine the other day who had attended some sort of conference in Omaha the week before where one of the talking points was the population differences between Georgia and Nebraska. He then went on to say that he had no idea that Atlanta, Georgia has a population of over 25 million people.

I know my mouth dropped open when he said it and I quickly asked him why he thought that and he replied he heard it from the speaker he went to listen to. I told him he had to have misunderstood the speaker but he stuck by his guns. I then tried a second line of reasoning with him; that being if that population number make any sense to him at all and he said it did because the speaker wouldn’t have said it if it wasn’t true.

In fact, the 2016 Census put the population of Atlanta, Georgia at 472,522 people and the population of the state of Georgia at 10.31 million people. But my friend believed a number that was two and a half times the size of Georgia because he believed the speaker wouldn’t have said it if it wasn’t true.

The three largest cities in the U.S., by the way, and have been for some time are New York City, 8.5 million people, Los Angeles, 3.9 million and Chicago, 2.7 million.

But back to believing whatever people say because they say it. In other words, we repeat stories and statistics because ‘we heard’ them from what we consider to be a reliable source.

Our President is fond of using those words too. It’s not unusual at all for him to hold a rally or a press conference and talk about the things that ‘he heard’ recently. I guess followers of Trump believe that if it’s okay for him, it’s okay for them too. Except that just because someone says it doesn’t make it true.

Now this is an amazing occurrence in our society because thanks to technological development, it’s easier than ever before to find out the truth. We used to need a dictionary, an encyclopedia, a really smart friend or a college professor to discover the right answer and today all we have to do is hit a few keys on our computer. I say this with some caution because, as most of us know, a lot of information on the Internet isn’t true either. So we have to make sure we go to objective, well-regarded sites rather than subjective, issue dominated sites. The point is the right answer is easy to find if we just take the time and make the effort.

But too many of us are like my friend. He didn’t look up the population of Atlanta, Georgia. He thought he heard the speaker give a true statement so he internalized it as the truth and started repeating it as the truth. And probably more conversations are started with the two most dangerous words, ‘I heard’ than any other beginning. It happens a thousand times every day in every location and we can either believe what we’ve just been told or we can verify it for ourselves. Far too many people do the former and don’t do the latter and that’s how we come up with ‘fake news’. It’s fake news if it’s untrue and a world of untruths are being spoken every day now. So I tend to challenge people who say things that don’t sound right to me by either telling them I don’t believe what they just said or that I’m going to have to look that up to verify its accuracy. Some people are offended because I tell them that. But I want them to know I don’t necessarily internalize and believe anything someone else tells me, even when they’re telling it as the absolute truth or they’re my very best friends.

By the way, I was telling another friend about my conversation with the first friend I mentioned and when I told him what my friend thought the population of Atlanta was, the second friend burst out laughing and said, “Heck, there’s not 25 million people in the whole country!”

You may be thinking by now that I have some really dumb friends but it’s not that at all. All of us are experts on some things and totally ignorant on others because nobody can know everything. But everybody can verify everything if they’ll just make the effort.

We have nobody to blame but ourselves if we don’t take discovering the truth as one of our most important civic obligations.