I just got done reading To Kill a Mockingbird. In case you haven't read it, it's mostly about the ugliness of overt racism all the way down to simple prejudice through innocence. At the same time, I began reading Don't Believe Everything You Think. Not a lot of it, mind you, but I got through the chapters on how we turn anecdotal evidence into proof. It's crazy how stuff in your life can suddenly tie together to help you figure stuff out.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I have issues with reddit. I stopped in today again after a long break and read through a few pages of comments on various articles. This was the comment that inspired this post. Please take the time to read it, it's very short. It's unfortunate that the author didn't link to the studies he mentioned, but I've seen them first hand doing research for my Civil War class in college.

I think we need to remember that when we hear something that supports what we already believe (or want to believe), it's worth pausing and checking to see if it's really true or just the author(s) trying to massage unreliable data into something that seems true. You either hold an opinion on something, or you know the truth about it. You might get upset that you can't always definitively back up what you believe, but holding an opinion is much less dangerous than believing you know the truth.

Think about the racism surrounding the civil war. Those who held the opinion that blacks were inferior were ugly as it were, but those that claimed to prove it were even worse. The things I think are true or that you think are true, in just a few years from now, might prove how ugly we are as well.