show your #$%&ing work
2007-03-26 | 7:11 p.m.

If I have one pet peeve in all the world, it's this:

Intellectual laziness.

I hate, hate, hate it when people don't bother to check their facts.

Okay, obviously, we can't go to the source material for every single thing we're told. We have to decide what sources of information we're going to trust. And that's fine. But that's why it's important to think critically, keep an open mind and a bit of healthy skepticism, and always be willing to accept the possibility that someone, somewhere, someday, will show us evidence that we're wrong.

And that's okay.

My real problem is this--

I hate it when people pass on a bit of information that is easily verifiable, without actually bothering to verify it.

I had a (somewhat casual, admittedly) friend once who stopped talking to me over this kind of thing. She was always sending me those stupid creduloid email forwards. Any and all she got. Long after everyone else I knew had gotten wise to them and started hitting "delete" every time one hit their inboxes.

Bill Gates will give you gazillions of dollars for every person you forward this email to. Tampon makers are loading up their products with glass dust and asbestos to make you bleed more. A sick child will get 12 cents toward her medical treatment for every person who reads this email. Some crazy guy is sending poisoned sponges through the mail to random people.

Hell, she fell for the frickin' sulfnbk.exe forward.

And no matter how many times I replied to her and directed her attention to various sites where the facts could be checked, she just kept forwarding them, until one day, I sent her an uber-snarky reply.

She was not pleased. In fact, she was furious with me.

She really thought that she was helping people by sending these things out en masse, without "wasting" any time clicking over to Snopes (a process that takes about 30 seconds). How could I explain to her, without sounding like a condescending bitch, that I no longer even read a single email she sent me that began with FWD:? That she'd cried wolf so many times that no matter what she sent me from that point on, I would assume it was a hoax simply because it came from her?

I was a bit more delicate than that. But she got the gist of what I was saying regardless. She wasn't stupid.

Flash forward to today. Someone sends me a doom-and-horror message on Facebook about them misusing my information in a very specific way. So I click over to the privacy page. I see, RIGHT THERE, a statement that says they do not do what it was they were accused of. I message said person back, asking where he got his information.

I swear to any gods that might exist, I wasn't trying to condescend, or snark, or pick a fight. I respect this person. I assumed he wouldn't have pulled something like that out of his ass. I wanted to get at the truth.

But instead of answering the question, he sends me a mini-lecture about why it would be bad for them to do what he claimed they were doing.

Well, duh.

But when I called him on the fact that he hadn't answered the question I asked, he got all offended. And still didn't answer the question.

I think I need to be more tactful about this kind of thing. I want people to think critically, yes. But more than that, I want the truth.

Truth matters.

****ends self-righteous diatribe and steps off soapbox****

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