Research, Truth, and the Recipe for Paranoia

June 11, 2012

The wave of cannibalism might just be that… a wave. Waves go away. I’m here to let everyone know… we need to calm the frak down with this zombie apocalypse thing. In fact, the whole, “zombies are rising up” thing is blown way out of proportion. Cannibalism is not as rare as we think. Violent psychopaths aren’t that rare, either. At any one point, there are between 35 and 50 active serial killers in the United States.

Actually, these stats make me more afraid!

It’s the bane of a society that has access to so much information. We can see so much, see the patterns, something which is really the goal of Randomology, but at the same time we can become infatuated with TOO MUCH information. It’s easy to try and see all of this information and think we have a solid grasp of the subject at hand. The truth, however, is that no one person can really look at everything. It can often take done, maybe hundreds of man hours to comb through the information on the net, in news updates, whatever, and get a good idea of what’s really going on out there.

Paranoid?? by ~MyBlackSheep on deviantART

Yes, there are maybe fifty serial killers out there, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to be targeted, and that’s based on the sheer population numbers.

This is really is the danger is doing research. While, yes, you can get a handle on the situation from looking at various sources and reports, like I usually do for this site, there’s always more information out there.

Knowing how to use said information is the important part, though.

Every one of these articles could easily take up three or four hours of research. They don’t. Much like writing, you have to just stop and say, “I’ve done as much as I can” and hope that it’s enough. This, however, is where paranoid freaks like the high-ups at Fox and MANY radical websites, and paranoids in general, get their fuel. Seeing a pattern is not the same as the pattern existing. Seeing a country that is still in financial trouble after we elected an African American president is not the same as said president being the cause of those problems. Homosexual rights being an issue is not the same as gays suddenly demanding their rights and the president turning people gay.

paranoid by ~JohnnyMarbelo on deviantART

There is a difference between “facts” and “truth.” A fact is a verifiable statistic, a number, something that anyone can check. The “truth” is the reality built around this fact. For example, going back to the zombie apocalypse stories, one could easily make the claim that cannibalism is on the rise. Then again, cannibalism, as shown above, is much more prevalent than previously shown and we’ve just noticed it for the first time, much like the teen in the last link who apparently thinks homosexuality and liberalism are linked because we have a liberal president and gay rights issues are a prominent now.

Truth is what you make out of facts, but those facts have to stand up to scrutiny. That’s what a lot of people, namely Fox and people like Fox, seem to forget. Truth is malleable. Facts are not.

And now, let us bask in the geeky glory of Wreck-It Ralph.