unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [2]
A word of caution: if you are a strong partisan just looking to prove the other side is wrong, this book will challenge you to cast the same critical eye on your own beliefs as you do on the other side’s. Doing so will not be easy. Research we will introduce later in the book shows that partisans often become accomplices to their own deception by rejecting information, valid or not, merely because it conflicts with their existing beliefs. If you are a bitter cynic who has concluded that nobody is telling the truth, and you have given up looking for facts, we will show you why you don’t need to resign yourself to a world of spin.
Avoiding spin and finding solid information can be a challenge, perhaps more than most people realize. Not only are we surrounded by commercial and political pitchmen who are trying their best to pull the wool over our eyes, but also our own brains betray us in ways that psychologists are still struggling to understand. We’ll explain how our own biology can blind us to accurate information, and why it is important to work constantly at taking a skeptical approach to advertising and at keeping our minds open to the possibility that, just maybe, the other person has a point.
We hope you’ll emerge from this book rightly skeptical of the many dubious claims you read and hear, but willing to consider all the available evidence. We think you can tell who’s right and who’s wrong most of the time, if you are willing to keep an open mind and to put in a bit of effort. And we’ll show you how to have some fun doing it.
We take as our motto something the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York was fond of saying: “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”
Chapter 1
From Snake Oil to Emu Oil
A CENTURY AGO A SELF-PROCLAIMED COWBOY NAMED CLARK STANLEY, calling himself the Rattlesnake King, peddled a product he called Snake Oil Liniment. He claimed it was “good for man and beast” and brought immediate relief from “pain and lameness.” Stanley sold it for 50 cents a bottle—the equivalent of more than $10 today—as a remedy for rheumatism, toothache, sciatica, and “bites of animals, insects and reptiles,” among other ailments. To promote his pricey cure-all, Stanley publicly slaughtered rattlesnakes at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893.
Stanley was the most famous of the snake-oil salesmen, back before passage of the federal Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. And he was a fraud. When the federal government finally got around to seizing some of Stanley’s product in 1915, the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Chemistry (forerunner of today’s Food and Drug Administration) determined that it “consisted principally of a light mineral oil (petroleum product) mixed with about 1 per cent of fatty oil (probably beef fat), capsicum, and possibly a trace of camphor and turpentine.” And no actual snake oil. Stanley was charged with violating the federal food and drug act. He didn’t contest the charge and was fined $20.
Are today’s pitchmen and hucksters any less deceptive? We don’t think so. “Snake oil” has a bad name these days (at least in the United States; in China, it is used to relieve joint pain). But in 2006 we found another animal-oil product that—according to its marketer—is “much better than Botox! [and] Makes Wrinkles Almost Invisible to the Naked Eye!…Look as much as 20-years younger…in less than one minute.” The maker even claims that the product won’t just hide wrinkles, with repeated use it may eliminate them: “It is possible your wrinkles will no longer even exist.” The name of the product is Deception Wrinkle-Cheating Cream. How appropriate.
An undated poster, believed to be from around 1905, advertising Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment, which consisted mainly of mineral oil and contained no snake oil at all.
According to Planet Emu, the marketer, this scientific miracle contains “the only