Adventures in credulity
I didn’t know there was a myth that Oliver North told the Iran-Contra investigation and in particular Al Gore (!) that the reason he had such a pricey security system was because he was afraid of “the most evil man in the world” and that that man was Osama bin Laden.
(Actually maybe I did know it, once upon a time. It sounds very faintly familiar now – I may have caught a whiff or a glimpse of it at some point. But if so, the knowledge didn’t stick.)
I was told it yesterday. I was driving an acquaintance back from the airport, and he told me it. He told me it as something he saw – he saw Al Gore questioning Oliver North, and he saw Oliver North tell Al Gore that.
Wait, what? I said. Are you sure? That can’t be right. That was in the 80s – bin Laden was a mujahid then. He was an anti-CommOnist, just Olly North’s kind of guy. (I forebore to point out that Al Gore wasn’t on the Iran-Contra committee, because I’m a kind and loving person.)
My acquaintance all but laughed. He knew absolutely that it was right; he remembered very clearly watching it. There was no possibility of error whatsoever.
You know…I’m not used to people like that. I don’t get out much, so I don’t meet them. I’m not used to people who are so stupid that they think their memories are infallible. That level of certainty combined with cluelessness kind of startles me. (It also profoundly bores me, but that’s another story.)
I wasn’t having it though. He’d been talking non-stop since the instant he got in the car, lecturing on this and then on that, not even paying attention to whether I was interested or not, so I wasn’t having it. I kept pointing out that it was in the 80s, bin Laden was on Reagan’s side, what he was saying made no sense. Once I mentioned the dates for about the sixth time, his certainty wobbled a little, so then he started to lecture about something else.
My friend Claire looked it up on Snopes for me, so now I know it’s not just some fantasy my acquaintance made up from scratch, it’s an existing myth, that went flying around the internet in 2001. He’s a sucker for things that go flying around the internet, and emails them to everyone in his address book, which unfortunately includes me. He got it from some stupid mailing or other, swallowed it whole, and now thinks he saw it happen, and thinks he remembers seeing it. Not even that: he’s certain he remembers seeing it, and he treats skepticism with amused contempt.
Stupidity in action. It’s not a pretty sight.
(He embellished the story with a bit about Gore trying to scare North, saying North had looked down the barrel of a blah blah blah and wasn’t about to be scared by blah blah blah – I became less kind and loving for long enough to interject that Gore had been in the military too. I wanted also to point out that most military people despise Oliver North; they think he’s a traitor and a disgrace to the service…but I didn’t. Too many flies to swat.)
Not a pretty sight.
Just to be slightly nice, is this acquaintance aware of the research demonstrating the fallibility of human memory? I’m not sure how many people are aware of that.
No I’m sure he’s not. And you’re right that it’s not stupid to be unaware of it. But it is at least a little stupid to think you can have that kind of memory of seeing something on tv in 1987. I watched the Iran-Contra hearings myself, totally agog, and I wouldn’t claim to remember anything specific from them, for the simple reason that I don’t. Wait, yes I do – I remember North quoting his wife calling him “you buffoon.” It is at least a little stupid not to have noticed that one’s memory for exact detail decays with time, and so that an exact memory like that from 24 years ago is unlikely.
And that’s all the more true when you’re a layer down of the law like this guy. Well – no need to go on – Dunning-Kruger. Classic Dunning-Kruger.
Nothing makes me angrier more quickly than seeing or hearing ignorance, arrogance, and certitude working within the same human brain and human vocal tract. In this 21st century, the Internet seems to be the best enabler of phony certitude, of allowing people to maintain certainty of belief and to confuse it with knowledge, with justifiable belief. There is some deep structural or operational similarity between “I read it on the Internet, so it must be true” and “It’s in the Bible [or the Quran], so it must be true.”
I see. So since Al Gore ignored bin Laden, it was okay for Bush to also ignore the memos telling him that bin Laden was planning an attack on the US?
Lovely, how would your acquaintance take it if told that Bush took his marching orders from Gore?
[Canned, nasal voice over the PA system. . think Lilly Tomlin’s Ernestine]”
“Paging Dr. Loftus, paging Dr. ‘E’ for Elizabeth Loftus – clean-up in Ms. Benson’s passenger seat.”
Heehee, yes, if only I could have brought Elizabeth Loftus out from behind the curtain.
That’s something I do have a rather old memory of, ironically…I actually remember (or think I do) reading Loftus and getting it. I remember pausing to think about it, and comparing a memory with an imagined event, and realizing there was no difference between them, no way to tell them apart – and it instantly became crystal clear how fallible memory must be.
And yet Christians still claim that the stories about Jesus — in particular the resurrection — are reliable, when they weren’t even written down till 50 years after the supposed events they describe. It’s uncanny how people have this imagination about the reliability about memory. Things shift around so quickly in memory it’s very difficult to be very very sure. I have a sister who remembers seeing things at times and places when she was actually over 10,000 miles away!
Hahahahaha “Clean up on Ms Benson’s passenger seat” Hahahaha I was thinking about E Loftus also.
I took a folklore course in graduate school and now I simply go to Snopes anytime someone tells me anything with phony certitude. I think many of us can sniff out potential urban tales and legends given the thousands of samples that fly around the internet and the millions of suckers who swallow them.
But that image of the Virgencita of Guadalupe on a tortilla? That one is TOTALLY TRUE!!
I was baking chocolate cookies yesterday for a family get together in the evening. My wife is the baker but she was busy and so I volunteered. How hard could it be? Just point me to the recipe and I’ve got it from there.
I read carefully and followed the directions with an amazing degree of precision, I thought.
While baking, the cookies weren’t browning properly and, as it turned out, I had to bake them for almost twice the recommended time.
I didn’t understand, I prepare pancakes for the kids most weekends and it really reminded me of that process, almost exactly, except for the baking.
My wife asked in detail what I had done, and I recited, what I thought, was an exact ingredients list and summarized instructions. She said, ‘no, not baking powder, baking soda.’ I said, no way, I read the recipe carefully and even paid attention to that part’. I could remember ‘seeing’ baking powder (which is what I use in the pancakes.) I could literally see it in my minds eye. I was not convinced that I was wrong until we returned home and I looked back to the cookbook, it said ‘baking soda’ plain as day.
That he claims to remember seeing it happen makes we wonder if he’s mentally ill.
But but. . . Dean, the more important question is which supernatural being appeared on the cookies?
OT
Dean – baking powder and baking soda are very similar in composition. Baking powder is baking soda plus some cream of tartar. Probably not the reason why baking time was doubled.
Many people in the US remember watching Carlton Fisk of the Boston Red Sox “waving his home run fair” in the bottom of the 12th inning in Game Six of the 1975 World Series again the Cincinnati Reds. As a lifelong Reds fan, that awful memory was burned into my brain. I can vividly recall how terrible I felt at the time as I watched him waving his arms at the ball. The problem is that it is a false memory! A few years ago my wife game me a set of DVDs of the original television broadcasts of all seven games, and to my amazement I discovered that the live broadcast did not show Fisk waving. He really did wave his arms, but the camera which caught that scene wasn’t used in the live broadcast. The scene was only shown in replays after the fact, and has been shown many times over the years because it is considered one of the most dramatic moments in baseball history. As a result I and probably millions of other people created a false memory of what we saw at the end of the game as we watched it live.
I have some friends (5 of them) who swear they were driving together one day and drove through a rainbow. As in, they saw it ahead on the road, then they went into it, then everything changed red, then yellow, and so on. I’ve explained to them, multiple times, that this is impossible. Rainbows aren’t located at a point in space which you can move around with respect to. I’ve explained the physics of it, that the way light travels through the water drops means the rainbows are only visible ~42 degrees form the antisolar point, so it’s always located in the same direction, no matter where you move – it’s apparent motion exactly mirrors your own, you can’t outmaneuver it. And besides, even if you could reach it, it’s not raining inside your car…
Doesn’t matter. They remember it, they have other people who corroborate the memory. They trust that shared memory over the laws of physics. It’s aggravating, but fascinating at the same time. You can see the parallels with e.g. a group of pilgrims seeing the Virgin Mary in the sun.
Personally, I don’t trust the accuracy of any of my memories more than a week old. I have a memory of my parents wedding. I wasn’t even born yet, for goddess’ sake.
Jason A, this brings to mind an aphorism I’ve seen attributed to Olin Miller: “Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory.” Of course, I could be mis-remembering the source.
In this case, it wasn’t what was on the magic cookies, but what happened upon their consumption that was interesting. Nazi’s + Glen Beck + Lewis Black + Jon Stewart was the desert topic of conversation. Very strange.
Mystery of mysteries! Maybe I should have looked more carefully at the possibly mystical images on them. (see above) Another theory is the inaccuracy of our oven temp….Naaahh, it couldn’t be…
No it’s quite common really – confabulation. You think it happened, so you construct the memory to match. Loftus showed this happening. See Jason’s example.
Hence the need to be cautious about one’s own memories, especially vexed ones. If you think about them, you’re likely to change them, and you don’t know you’ve done so.
@8 — Yes. One of my favorite apologist arguments is the one that says “But why would the apostles and the early Christians lie when it was against their interest?!” I love that argument because of the way people seem to find it totally convincing. They say it with that case closed tone of voice. I always think, Um, I don’t know—maybe they were mistaken? More to the point, extending the logic, why would the early Muslims lie about Muhammad’s relationship with Allah? Why would the early Mormons lie about Joseph Smith’s perspicacity with respect to ancient gold plates? At some point you just have to say, well maybe they were just liars. Or stupid. Or mistaken. Or—and this would be especially delicious if true—maybe they just thought, “Oh who cares—it’s not like anyone in the future is going to take this stuff literally or anything. We think this is just a delightful metaphor!”
heh. I’m always wary of pointing and laughing to hard at some of this stuff. I always feel like I’m still in a glass house.
Certainly, I can remember, for instance, watching the doco loose change (good ol 9/11 truthers) and being convinced. I should probably thank the maker, because it was the feeling of being duped by the tricks in that doco that set me on a path to actually trying to think long and hard and critically, rather than just a default “any contrary view must be more true” kind of thinking.
The one-two punch was provided by watching a doco about crop circles, of all things. I’d never looked into them before, they were quite pretty and interesting and all, but this doco also “got” me. Well, got me enough to have my mind whirling for an evening, but not enough for me to google the next day and discover the dudes who have done them and the massive olympic and coke ads they’d done. And how they’d done them.
The thing is, I can’t defend myself because I was young (mid 20s at the time, not teens), but it does make me realise how easy it is to just not think about things and be duped on first glance by the first seemingly “in depth” thing you see on a subject. (It has made me forever wary of documentaries, to be honest.)
Oh sure. I just pointed out some of my own stupidities a week or so ago – like thinking bin Laden was just another scarecrow for US presidents to get people worked up about. After the embassy bombings, at least, that was seriously stupid. (I thought he’d demonstrated how pathetic and inept he was, trying to punish the US by killing a lot of Africans. I didn’t get that he’d simply demonstrated how ruthless and death-loving he was. Stupid, stupid, stupid.)
Memory is just weird. There are some very practical things that I am constantly looking up because I just can’t remember them. Then some truly awful movie I’ve seen once, twenty years ago, comes on TV and I can recite the dialog of random scenes ahead of the actors. I’ve decided the chances of me remembering something is inversely proportional to its usefulness.
I make it a point to come down hard on bullshit email forwards, no matter how innocuous, and then strongly suggest that my corrections (invariably found on Snopes) be mailed to the same list that received the initial forward. I used to laugh them off, like most people do, until I realized how much they’re poisoning people’s knowledge about the world. Facts are important.
There is a great Radiolab podcast called “Memory and Forgetting” that covers exactly this subject.
http://www.radiolab.org/2007/jun/07/
They talk about the science involved in that every time you remember something, you take it out and store it back, usually modified. It is not like a backup tape. Dr. Loftus shows up in the podcast, as you might expect.
The only solid memory is a memory that you store once and never remember again. This episode really made me leery of things I was sure I remember.
Tedd
Sweet. Only 5 posts before Loftus popped up.
Oops, wait – she’s actually referenced in the first post (though not by name). Even better.
How is it everybody here knows this stuff, and nobody out there does?
Because we are Quality People, Yahzi. Ophelia is a Quality writer who attracts Quality commenters. :))
I didn’t reference her by name because I wasn’t aware of the name, only the general nature of the research and conclusions. I’ve looked her up now. Fascinating. :)
I don’t get any of these bullshit emails any more. I think I probably scared the idiots away. The real life nuts, too. They’ll get away with it the first time, then I do a little homework and wait until they trot the same nonsense out again–which they nearly always do. There isn’t a third time.
Yeah – my neighbour was present when Barack Obama swore his senatorial oath on the Koran. Fact. Not making it up. It happened and he was there. Remembers it like it was yesterday. He knew then that Obama is a muslim. He also knows that Obama was born in Kenya. I asked him if he was there at the birth…….he told me to “get ****ed”.
Do I need to add that this guy has Tea Party stickers on his car?
I have a friend that is generally pretty intelligent but lately has fallen for one messed up conspiracy theories and psuedo- science/ history after another. He’ll find some 5 minute video on YouTube about 9/11 being an insurance scam or how He-man and the Masters of the Universe are Nazi propaganda and swallow it whole without even thinking about it. I’ve wondered if he is messing with me but I’ve heard from others that he does the same to them.
I remember having a “REAGAN KNEW” bumper sticker. Good times.
I remember, vaguely, “A Perfect Candidate”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KweT34C5i-k