Whither Ignorance?

When you investigate certain issues down to the bone, you can usually arrive at the Truth - usually.  However, the discipline and time involved is enormous.  

Emotional and psychological questions can get hairy.  However, questions of biology and physical science are easy to investigate and arrive at something akin to Absolute Truth.  Physics is complete.  After figuring out Quantum Physics, that area of science was complete.  We may discover some goofy particle here and there, but nothing changes or adds to our knowledge of the universe.  

Any question with regard to biology simply takes experiment and observation.  Any variations are between the specifics of the specimens and not the fundamentals of the science.  

Which brings us to the question - with all the advertising and BS out there that is plainly a lie, what do we do?  We do not have the time to investigate everything, even if we have the scientific and analytical skills to investigate.  There is just too much life to live to look into everything.  

Think about your area of expertise.  Now, recall the last time the mass media reported on something that you are an expert on.  How much of it was true?  Probably none of it.  

Think of an event you were a part of that the mass media reported on.  How much of it was true?  Probably 20% of it at best.  The job of news factories is to sell advertisements - not to report facts.  Never forget this.  The job of corporations is to keep the organization alive - no matter what and whatever it takes.  

Perhaps it all comes back to the Agency Problem.  There is no neutral source.  Every source of information has embedded within it the people and the organization that produced it.  Nothing is pure.  The original idea of science was pure information.  Now that science is complete, we are left with selling products that we can create using scientific knowledge.  Thus, all the smog of advertisement and news.  What did I tell you?  News is selling advertisements, and NOT reporting facts!  

Even Facebook has algorithms to select topics for your news feed.  You are not seeing everything your friends post.  You are seeing what Facebook wants you to see to optimize advertisement selling.  

So, the next time you deem someone ignorant of something you think you know - you need to pause.  Perhaps you too are a victim of advertisement misinformation if you consume a lot of media.  We all do.  Thus, we are all misinformed.  We are all ignorant.  

We live in a post-scientific age.  This means we are in the age of selling.  Every piece of information we consume tries to sell us something.  We are all caught up in the web of impure information.