I Read it on the Internet

I don’t want to turn this into a 4 Yorkshiremen sketch, but when I was growing up we had very few of the accoutrements that are, today, considered central to life. Our phone was ‘chained’ to the wall. If you wanted to call someone, or someone called you, you had to talk in a specific location. We were lucky - we had two phones - although you did have to worry whether someone was on the upstairs extension listening in.

There were 3 TV channels and the words “video tape” were still a few years away. We wrote, and read, things called ‘letters’ (you may have read about them in history books). If I wanted to find out about some new thing, I had to head to the library and read some books.

Back then, you see, I never once imagined my older self being able to type the following into Google

what is the Korean penis haircut called?

It isn’t the most important question I’ve ever asked, but it might be one of the strangest. I watch a lot of Korean shows (known as kdramas). I like them because they remind me of what TV used to be like - entertaining and fun without any preachy crap¹ containing, as author and critic The Critical Drinker puts it, “THE MESSAGE™”.

I’ve noticed this kind of haircut on kids in a few of the shows

Which prompts the question “did you really want to make your son look like a dickhead?”

If you can ignore the occasional character who looks like a mini walking dildo, then I can thoroughly recommend kdrama. Some of the shows are really very good. In my opinion, overall, they’re producing the best TV entertainment right now and have been for a few years.

But what really struck me was the miracle of the Internet. There are some cultural elements in these kdramas that I wasn’t sure about. In the past I’d have to head to the library and try to find information on Korea and its culture.²

These days I can find the answers in seconds. From food to religious beliefs to history to dating traditions to legal practices and everything else in between, the ‘answers’ are in front of me in next to no time at all.

That’s bloody amazing.

I’ve put the word answers in quotes there because, just as you would with any source of information, you still have to critically assess it and compare it to any other information you’d found. Depending on the question you will find a range of ‘answers’ on the internet and then you have to use some judgment to figure out what subset, or mix, may be closer to the truth.

That’s all as it should be.

To paraphrase the world’s first true scientist³, Ibn Al Haytham, “don’t just believe shit even if it’s written in a book. Test everything”.

This process, these days, might be called DYOR (doing your own research) and it is, according to some of the credentialed class, a very bad thing. You need that itsy bitsy slip of paper, that credential, that authorizes you to DYOR, you see.

Without it you’ll (allegedly) fall prey to one of the three ravening Information Monsters, known as dis, mis and mal. Without that itsy bitsy piece of protective paper you’ll be infected with bad stuff. It works just like a mask during an outbreak of a respiratory disease (which is to say, not at all).

We did use to, by and large, trust the experts. People who espoused ‘alternative views’ were (seemingly) few and far between and easily dismissed as cranks. We trusted (more or less) what we read in the papers or watched on TV.

Then along came the big, bad internet.

All of a sudden, Wally McKnuckleHead, who used to write 400 letters to his local newspaper every week, had access to a platform where his views could be propagated without the pesky interference of some jumped-up Nazi local newspaper editor.

In simple terms they, whoever we may conceive of as ‘they’, lost control.

And what a fuppin glorious thing that was!

Yes, there were a lot of Wally’s, but that’s a good thing.

However daft you may think an opinion or viewpoint is, the act of reading it (if you actually read it) forces you to assess what’s written. However briefly, your brain is analysing stuff and constructing counter arguments.

No longer are you restricted to seeing the ‘facts’ and opinions the editors want you to see. You are seeing a much, much wider range of things and you have to engage whatever level of critical faculty you have in order to assess what you’re reading or watching.

And not every Wally is a wally.

And even Wally isn’t a wally all the time.

It’s important that we see alternative viewpoints, however ‘crazy’ we may think they are. Some of them turn out to be not so crazy after all.

I used to emphasize to my students that being wrong is often much more valuable than being right. The provisos here are that (a) you recognize when you’re wrong (b) you work really hard to figure out why you’re wrong and (c) you keep working until you get it right.

This process works in a field like physics where there are very definitely right and wrong answers. You learn so much more by this process (DYOR?) than you would if you simply ‘copied’ the answer, or looked it up.

But it’s what we should be doing all the time when it comes to assessing ‘information’. Of course, there are time limitations which mean you have to sometimes ‘trust’ things you read. You can’t know everything (and neither does the Internet).

Seeing any of the 3 Information Monsters is not a bad thing. It is, in my view, a necessary thing.

If all physics students do is to study ‘worked examples’ they’ll be woefully ill-prepared to answer questions outside of what they’ve seen⁴.

The year 2020 might be viewed in the future as a turning point; a seismic shift in the attitudes of the population. Not because so many got a bit befuddled and brain-fogged by the fear of a super-duper all-singing and all-dancing virus, but because so many now realize that the Experts™ were talking utter shite.

All of a sudden those itsy bitsy paper credentials look about as effective as masks. They’re useless bits of paper.

It’s the internet wot dun it. If we were back in the ‘old days’ we could be much more easily manipulated. We’d have a few newspapers and TV news shows to rely on and very little else.

Instead, what we got was a whole range of free-thinking people (many of whom possess serious credentials themselves) presenting very different understandings and analyses from the ‘official’ narrative that we were supposed to believe.

They wiped the floor with the approved experts and, in the right vs wrong game, they massively outperformed the ‘official’ Experts™.

Despite some serious censorship by the various Tech companies (the lap dogs of government, or the other way around?) the truth about covid could not be fully suppressed. Whilst many still believe in all the illogical batshit insane useless crap we did to ‘combat’ covid, the proportion of people who now know almost all of it was a tissue of lies is really encouraging.

The governments around the world are desperately trying to get us back to the ‘old model’, where the sources of information are tightly controlled and few. It’s a very regressive step and we must do everything in our power to resist. It is probably the most important battle right now.

If you’ve read my stuff for any length of time you’ll know that I think the whole “viruses don’t exist and/or cause disease” faction is utterly wrong and misguided.

BUT

I am encouraged by the numbers who think this. I think it’s a good thing. Why? Because it indicates that more and more people are no longer as prepared as before to swallow the official kool-aid. That’s a great thing.

2020 might have warped some people’s minds beyond repair, it trashed our economies and our governments did other dangerous and damaging things, but it awoke the beast of DYOR.

It generated a whole load of people who no longer take what’s read as gospel, who are prepared to apply the scientific method and critically examine what they read.

What a wonderful, wonderful, thing that is.

The response of governments around the world? They’re attempting to dial the clock back and to regain control. This is something we cannot afford to let them do.

1. Some shows do tackle ‘progressive’ issues. One of my favourite shows, Itaewon Class, features a black character and a transgender character and the issues of racism and ‘transphobia’ do play a part. They’re handled really well, though, without any overt preaching - and even those characters who would have the typical ‘western’ woketard going purple in the face with rage are treated sympathetically.

2. I can thoroughly recommend the book “The World’s Daftest Haircuts” written by Snipper McLoon.

3. He was the first, to my knowledge, to state the Scientific Method. He also did some great science and was known in Europe (centuries later) as The Father of Optics.

4. We had one student who complained to the university Dean that one question she’d had on the exam was not one she’d seen before and so that question should be excluded from the grading. I used to do a mix of problem exercises for the students. Some were straight ‘worked example’ questions from the textbook with different numbers, or minor variations thereof. Some were different questions for which I provided detailed worked solutions a couple of weeks later. Others I never provided the full solution for (although I would go through any student answers for these on a one-to-one basis). I had many students who simply refused to even attempt this latter set of questions, despite me explaining that, amongst other things, I was trying to get them to the ‘next stage’ where they could develop their own techniques for assessing whether they’d got something right.