3 Million Homeless Crows Using Cars to Crack Nuts

This latest chapter of unSpun has introduced some of the most startling information yet. After beginning with an introduction that told the story of the great crow fallacy and how it continued to spread long after suspicions had arisen and even after it had been debunked, the authors summarize the entire debacle quite well when they say that “It’s easy to see how spotting a few crows getting lucky can encourage even serious scientists to think the behavior might be deliberate” (105), and simply “It’s fun to think that crows might be clever enough to learn such a neat trick” (105). Again, the book shows us that we as people like things that are easy (because thinking is work) and because information is always more engaging when it’s actually entertaining.

What really surprised me, however, was how many people are willingly to believe information that is obviously fabricated, and, what’s more, is openly admitted to be so! The story about the ex-con Snyder blatantly faking the statistics about the numbers of homeless people within the country, and then (only when caught in a lie, of course) admitting it, only to have journalists and others continue to cite his information, was completely mind boggling! I know that many of us can be mislead either due to our own lack of effort in researching the facts or by or the genuine skills of propaganda creators, but this was beyond ridiculous. That a man could come right out and tell the WORLD that his information was completely baseless and still hold some rapport is utterly absurd, especially because (unlike with the cutesy little crow story) no one would actually want to believe that Snyder’s estimates, which were in fact tremendously overblown, were actually true.

Sometimes it is hard to be able to find the truth in any story, especially in cases like those of news reports during the Gulf War, when the media would often only portray the stories they wanted to be seen (which, in that case, were those of a clean war with supposedly little civilian casualty). But when it comes to believing something simply because it’s an entertaining or amazing piece of information, people should think twice about whether or not it may be valid.

Factual Healin'

I am about to say something that someone (somewhere) will no doubt take offense to, but nonetheless, here it is: people are, as a matter of being, pretty damn lazy. This laziness results in decision making that is (to put it gently) on par with a slightly decomposing tree stump. Living in a country that has organizations to regulate and report back to us on everything (the FDA, FCC, ADA, ACLU, NASA, SPCA… yeah, I’m getting carried away, but you see the point) we have come to the point where we believe that we no longer have to think about the value or legitimacy of the products we buy or the services we choose, because someone else in some big fancy administration somewhere has already done it for us.

To a degree, this can sometimes be forgivable, if the action or choice being undertaken is small. If someone has not stopped to consider that the newest loaf of bread, listed as being ‘On Sale’, is still more expensive than the generic brand after already buying it, the result is forgivable, if not mildly unfortunate. However, in the case of such people as Daniel Bullock, the hardworking, community-service-performing “all around good guy” California physician who was thrown in jail for buying into a scam that he thought would exempt him from having to pay taxes, the repercussions for his stupidity were much more dire. At first, I felt a small pang of sympathy for the doctor, because he had not intentionally harmed anyone and might not have thought he was committing a crime. However, the more I mulled over the situation, I realized he had gotten exactly what was coming to him: after he purposely chose to avoid doing the research necessary that would have obviously informed him that such an act was illegal, he then chose to bask in willful ignorance, believing that this would keep him from suffering the consequences, if there were any. But think about it: If you were to go to a different country, would you not be subject to those laws, even if you did not know about them? We each have a personal responsibility to know the rules and laws of the society we live in, and, if we don’t want to deal with the consequences or get gypped out of our cash, we should also know the background stories of what we buy and what we do.

It’s hard not to be lazy. We have already learned in previous chapters that it is part of our brain’s natural chemistry to fall into the trap. But that doesn’t mean we have to, and if we consciously choose not to seek out the facts, the only people we have to blame for what happens to us is ourselves— not the companies or ad industries. They’re just doing their jobs.