Work911 Ezine - How Do You Know What You Know Is Really True?

October 27, 2010 - How Do You Know What You Know Is Really True? (Part
1/2 of our newsletter)

Our feature article is brand new and it's a first in a series about
information, fact, opinion, social media, and how we all take in
information and make decisions. Not to worry. It's a bit abstract
sounding but nothing could be more useful in our real world than
understanding facts and information, and the psychology we all use to
make sense of the world when we are bombarded by information and
suffer from information overload. We also have some special offers to
help you save some money. But before we get to those, we need to go
back to the issue of donations/website survival.

Donations Still Needed, and Deployment of Intrusive Ads

First thank you to the very few people who donated to allow us to keep
our sites free, open and devoid of intrusive ads and clutter.

As I mentioned last time, each of our sites must "pay its own way" in
terms of absolute costs, but also there must be a way to justify the
time spent maintaining and updating the sites. Just as an example, our
workhelp.org site (which we have turned into a management oriented
site) had 1600 articles handpicked in the library. Unfortunately, over
half of those were auto identified as being bad links or possibly
being bad, and EACH ONE had to be manually checked. Yikes.

If we don't do that, you'll just get error pages rather than what you
want to read. There simply is no point in running sites that are more
annoying than helpful, and the only way we can do that level of
maintenance is if our sites generate additional income. Time spent on
sites that generate no revenue is time taken away from our business.

That said, I can't criticize those that haven't yet donated. I get it.
So, we have started to deploy popunders and more banner ads on one or
two of our sites that are not earning their keep. We don't want to,
but the reality is that most major companies are doing this, including
major business publishing companies. Yuck.

In addition, we will be putting some of our domains (and possibly
websites) up for sale. We are considering selling

workhelp.org
bozocentral.com
buyingadvice411.com
reprintability.com
relationships911.org
free2thee.com
researchprofessional.org
conflict911.com
consumerprotectionzone.com

Any domains we sell will be auctioned off or sold via godaddy, but you
have first shot at these. Our willingness to sell our domains depends
on the specific domain. For example conflict911.com actually makes
some money for us, and is popular so any pre-emptive bid would have be
be in multiple 4 figures, and possible in 5 figures. If you are
interested in a pre-emptive purchase, email us at ceo@work911.com with
an offer. The domain reprintability.com is one we had plans for but
never used, so it can be had at a lower price.

Now, if we receive additional donations, we can limit or remove those
ads and keep/maintain sites at risk.. If you can kick in a few dollars
to support our free sites, please do so. Donations will also ensure
that this newsletter is also relatively free of intrusive ads.

I won't harangue you. Go to: http://work911.com/donate.htm where we
explain the situation in more detail, and PLEASE help us keep sites
open, free of charge, free from popups and other intrusive ads. We are
not a large company, and we are simply stretched too far timewise and
moneywise to continue as we have.

Another Way To Help

One way we can deal with the issues above is to increase website
traffic. Our sites are niche sites. For example, conflict911.com deals
with conflict, and one reason why it doesn't make much money is
because the traffic levels, while good for a site of its type, is too
low. articles911.com is similar. Good traffic, but now quite enough to
be profitable. So, if you promote any of our sites that you like to
those in your social networks (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn),
that's a huge help and it doesn't cost you but a few seconds.

To make it easier, we are installing buttons on all our pages so all
you need to do is click on one to send the link or site address to
your network. We've completed that on articles911.com and started
similar updates on our Leadership resource center at
http://work911.com/leadership-development . I'm not asking you to fake
vote. If you like something, click and let others know, and help us
keep our sites fresh.

Reminder on Free Whitepapers We Endorse

We have an arrangement with Tradepubs to make available free offers to
trade magazines and whitepapers on a huge array of topics. Not only is
some of the stuff really excellent (we request copies ourselves), but
when you grab offers, we make a small fee. There must be almost 500
titles available, on topics ranging from computers and IT, through to
how to use Twitter. Here's the link to the catalog: http://l743.tradepub.com/

Feature Article: Fact, Opinion, Truth in An Era of Information
Overload, or.....we are the most ignorant population in the history of
the Earth

This new article is also available at:http://socialmediabust.com/
bunklieshype/7-misinterpretationsofdata/169-fact-opinion-truth-in-an-
era-of-information-overload-or.html

It's lucky we don't think about this stuff too much. You might want to
stop reading here. If I was you, that's what I would do. Imagine if
you will, that almost everything you know and have learned in the last
ten years might be wrong. Or that while you take for granted that what
you know is "true", much of it isn't or is such a small bit of a
picture that it's useless or misleading. And it's getting worse. In
this first of a series of articles, we'll take a look at why these
circumstances occur, and how they may affect you and me, the plain
folks and businesses and even our political systems.

The Conditions of Ignorance In Modern Days

In the past ignorance has come from a lack of easily available
information/facts on which to base conclusions. For example, lacking
in observable and verifiable facts, the wise old ones told us the
world was flat. Thus, a conclusion based on this "If you sail too far,
you will fall off the edge" is faulty, and in fact discouraged the
factual testing of what turns out was wrong. This is interesting
because "wrong" is not benign. It wasn't then and it isn't now. A
wrong fact results in wrong conclusions which results in wasted or
damaging actions with real world negative outcomes.

As relevant data could be collected, of course, humans changed their
conclusions, so today we know the Earth is flat. We were able to
progress because at some points we had "just enough information/facts
data" to be able to pick out what was relevant and not relevant.

Today, we end up ignorant, but for the opposite reasons. We never
reach a point where we have just enough information to make informed
decisions. We have way too much information that sounds relevant, no
mechanisms in place to provide checks and balances on what information
gets distributed, no way to confirm most of what we hear. On top of
that we've removed our dependence and trust of authority and systems
to help us out. No longer do we get our news and information from
sources that have systems to check facts and sources, as with news
media in the past. Most of us get information from unedited,
uncontrolled and even anonymous sources. Blogs, Facebook, other social
media platforms and in general most of the Internet provides
alternative voices to appear, but those voices are of unknown
reputation, and without oversight.

The result is we draw conclusions, not on a balanced examination of
evidence, facts and data. We draw conclusions on the basis of what we
want to hear, and based on what we want to believe. So, research no
longer comprises looking for pros and cons of things, for example. We
look for other people to confirm our already existing beliefs. For
example, you like social media and twitter? You will look for and
remember "data" that proves it's wonderful. You like Comcast? You will
likely come across positive comments about Comcast? If you see
negative ones you will diminish them in your mind. Likewise the
reverse.

The conditions of modern day ignorance apply to ALL of us. That's
because our limitations with selecting information out of huge streams
of information are primarily biologically based because our brains are
information reduction machines with a limited capacity. Hence they
gate out more data/information going into the system than is accepted.
Of course, with the huge increase in information that inundates us we
select more and more, and the selections end up based, again, more and
more on what we want to hear.

More

There are now billions of voices you can "hear" through the Internet,
voices that would never have been available to you ten years ago. So
who gets heard? Who gets believed? Who do you believe and why? In a
perfect world people would gain credibility based on their track
records, and to the degree that what they have said has been used and
been proven beneficial to those that used that person's thoughts and
opinions. That basically describes how science works although somewhat
oversimplified. But you don't have access to that information. You
only know what that person says, and what anonymous other people say
about that person. If he or she is popular, there will be lots of good
things said, but popularity doesn't mean truth (lets not forget the
flat earth thing), or that what might have worked for that person or
even someone else would work for you.

Unfortunately, in a quest to sift through information, we put our
faith in the idea that popularity means rightness. We accept something
said by a popular person, and then we act on it.

We really have no idea, beyond faith, whether the information we chose
is true or even useful. We live on faith. We believe while applying
inadequate criteria. And we don't know whether what we believe is the
truth or not. In many cases, neither do we care, because we MUST
operate on faith in the knowledge we adopt, otherwise we'd could never
act, or worse, we go insane.

Some Summary Points

Most of the knowledge (what we believe is true) is based on faith and
not fact, and in our modern age, it's a necessity to operate this way.

In modern times, we have too much information so we become selective,
both by intention and through how the brain is wired to reduce
information in the system.

When we select it's normal and most common to select the information,
and seek out the information that we want to be true.

The Internet, and in particular social media has opened the door for
billions of voices to speak, so the task is to determine who one will
listen to, who one will believe and trust. This task applies to you
and I as individuals, but in fact, the fate of our very political
systems (and democracy) may be determined by how each of us manages
this issue.

Since we lack enough real facts and information to "test" someone to
determine whether their words are credible, we (both individually and
as a system) use popularity to determine who we listen to, and hear.
Popular people are heard, quite honestly because the are popular.
Popularity does not imply wisdom, accuracy or anything else. I means
that something about a person (e.g. a haircut, facial beauty, firm
jawline, charismatic way of speaking) attracts people. This things
have nothing to do with wisdom or truth, yet we need to choose
somehow.

As individuals it's to our benefit to understand that almost all the
information we use is now unverified. That is a major change from 15
years ago, where the sources of information -- media of different
sorts, had checks and balances and ethical considerations, not to
mention long traditions or professionalism. Today there is very little
of that. Anyone can write a blog, email messages, comment on sites,
write on Facebook, and they can do so with complete impunity and
responsibility. Nothing is verified, and while there is a notion that
"crowds" will balance bad information with alternate information, that
really doesn't come into play in real life due to psychological
factors.

Should you care about any of this? While the words and language are a
bit abstract, the real world consequences EVERY DAY are huge for
everyone consuming information. Your behavior, what you eat, buy,
wear, is influenced by information you glean from media, and more and
more from the Internet. And the kicker is; you don't know beyond faith
who is right. You make do, because you have to, but the truth is that
understanding "information", and how to critically evaluate is now an
essential life skill.

More soon. Comments?

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That's it for now. Due to the length of the article, and some time
constraints, this is only part 1 of our two part newsletter. Look for
part 2, which will contain discount codes for some of our nifty cool
learning stuff, within a day or two. Now in case you need to know,
here's some information about our free websites and libraries.

Our Sites:

Just a quick summary of our sites that have information on the
following topics:

World's Best Search Engines: http://researchprofessional.org

Training and Development Resource Center:http://thetrainingworld.com

Free Learning Stuff: http://free2thee.com

Small Business Resource Center: http://smallbusiness411.org

Small Business Blog (new material): http://smallbusiness411.org/wp/

Leadership Resource Center: http://work911.com/leadership-development/index.html

Communication Resource Center: http://www.work911.com/communication/index.htm

Conflict (both workplace and family) http://conflict911.com

Business, Strategic and Personal Planning: http://www.work911.com/planningmaster/index.html

Performance Management & Appraisal: http://performance-appraisals.org

Customer Service: http://customerservicezone.com

Our Main Site: http://www.work911.com

Multi-Purpose Articles Database: http://www.articles911.com

To new subscribers: The work911 newsletter is published no more than
once a week and contains articles on all things work related, and
contains other work related resources, and updates about our sites,
and their contents. Past history indicates we publish about every ten
days. Subscribe at http://work911.com/newsletter.htm

Don't forget that you can access free, useable previews of over twenty
of our books and helpcards at:

http://busylearners.com

and that we continue to offer special freebie offers and discounts to
our newsletter subscribers!

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