Truth: Can You Handle It?

What did people learn from the physical effects of atomic bombings?

How do activities of insurance companies facilitate production?

Suddenly, iguana guy feels remorseful for his earlier taunts.

"i'm sorry. i'm drunk."

Stark sends a link, but it's too late. Iguana guy seems to have left his computer.

Stark sighs. "What they want is for you to give them the very first answer that pops up. And we can do that, but if it's wrong . . . "

Information vs. Knowledge

If it's wrong is the big If, the question that plagues librarians and teachers today. Of course, the information might be right-- in one study, published in Nature, that reviewed scientific entries side-by-side, Wikipedia was found to be only slightly less reliable than Encyclopedia Britannica (four errors to Britannica's every three). There's at least a decent chance that the wisdom of the crowds is fine wisdom indeed.

What concerns people like Stark is the fact that, without peer review, it's so easy to be wrong, and for your wrongness to become the top Google hit on a subject, and for your wrongness to be repeated by other people who think it's right, until everyone decides that it's raining in Phoenix.

Andrew Keen describes it as "the cult of the amateur" in his same-named book. Stephen Colbert called it "wikiality" -- meaning, "a reality where, if enough people agree with a notion, it must be true."

Information specialists call it the death of information literacy.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto, a Tufts University historian and author of "Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed," has recently noticed something very odd: "Information has replaced knowledge," he says, "and the truth of that information no longer seems to matter as much."

Information is about tidbits, crumbs of data. Information can be carried around on a Trivial Pursuit card. Information says, "It's currently 95 degrees in Anchorage."