Do You Believe Everything You Read?

Do you believe everything that you hear? It’s in the paper (or on the internet) so it must be true! One of the things that you hear about this time of year is that the day after Thanksgiving is the biggest shopping day of the year. According to statistics from the International Council of Shopping Centers, the busiest day varies from year to year and ranges from December 18th to December 23rd, with the day after Thanksgiving being anywhere from the 4th to the 8th busiest day. This is easily accessible information, and you’d think that in this age of instant fact checking more people would know this, yet you still hear, year after year, that “Black Friday” is the busiest shopping day of the year. In my opinion, most people just don’t want to think, it’s a lot easier to simply spout what they heard around the water cooler, on their favorite radio talk show, in church, or in that “This Is Real!!!!” forwarded email. This tendency to credulousness is widespread during political races, where potential voters hear all kinds of dirt about candidates and make their decisions based upon information of dubious veracity.
So what do you do? I just assume that everything that I hear is a big basket of horse crap and look for evidence to back it up, rather than just assuming everything is true and waiting for it to be debunked. This is why I am no longer in anyone’s email address book; I kept replying with evidence that the “true stories” were made up.
Choose to think! You might not have many friends, but the ones you have won’t be as stupid.