The Loneliness Of The Unrepentant Fact Checker

 

   There are people who get very upset when other people fact check statements they make or information they share.

   I know this because I am a compulsive fact checker.

   This fact-checking compulsion came about years ago. As a youngster I was entranced by UFO's (now referred to as UAP's), and became an ardent believer that planet earth had been visited by extraterrestrials and that the big, bad government was covering it up.

   It did not help that my Mother was a reader of supermarket check-out stand newspapers such as The National Enquirer, The Weekly World News, and other rags of that ilk that sensationalized reports of UFO abductions, cow mutilations, and crop circles, and that I got to read them when she finished scouring over the celebrity trashing stories.

   Couple that with my avid interest in Science Fiction (the more fantastic the better), and it isn't hard to understand how I naïvely jumped into the cesspool of ufology, parapsychology, pseudoscience, and of course conspiracy theories.

   Conspiracy theories abounded, and believing that the weird & wacky stuff I was becoming enmeshed in was being covered up by a sinister, secret government organization (or two, or a hundred) intent on keeping the proof under wraps was fairly easy.

   That all changed though, when I discovered a digest-sized magazine titled the Skeptical Inquirer. 

    To make a long story short, that little magazine opened my mind like none of the other magazines or books I'd been reading ever had or could.

   S.I. introduced me to the world of science and reason...and fact checking.

   It was where I first read Sagan's dictum that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", and read the even more self-evident, "ordinary claims require ordinary proof."

   Yeah, I know, I know, those statements seem overwhelmingly obvious.

   But they are not, which is proven to me everyday by the large number of people I meet who believe fervently, blindly, in things that not one iota of incontrovertible proof for has ever been found.

   So, to the point of this diatribe, whenever I do encounter someone who shares with me information that seems to be even the slightest bit incredulous, I habitually do some fact-checking, which is fairly easy to do with the good ol' internet at one's fingertips.

   Further, I usually fact check the fact checking, just to be sure.

   Which leads to the people who shared with me the information I was dubious of getting a little irritated when I present information that counters the information they shared, and the frequent label of "No-it-all" being slapped on me.

   Which I don't really mind, even though it's wrong, for I do not know it all, which is why I research it all.

   So, yeah, "research-it-all" would be a far better epithet.