On the Soapbox

The title of this post may seem a little odd, but there is a connection... I had just finished reading an article by the New York Times titled "Lactic Acid Is Not Muscles' Foe, It's Fuel". It was an article that appeared in the NYT's list of most e-mailed articles a few days ago. It was added to my to-read queue, and I finally got around to it today. It's an article about biology, athletics, and exercise--all of which are topics in which I have no interest, which made the process of reading the article not all that enjoyable. So when I reached the end and found that the article's title pretty much said all that needed to be said, I found myself asking, "Why did I bother reading this article?"

The article proposed an interesting idea. In this case, since I had no interest in the topic itself, what made the article's proposed idea "interesting" was that it challenged what is for many people common knowledge. And before I felt comfortable kicking the old teachings out of my mind in favor of this, I felt the need to validate it. In this case, it meant reading about the methodologies described in the article, reading about the exact findings and various caveats--if any--as described in the article, reading about dissenting opinions from the scientific community--if any--and the basis of any dissent, and then running all that through and seeing if the conclusion that I come to given this information matches that of the article.

And after thinking about my behavior some more, I guess this is also why I dread opening up my RSS reader because I know that it would drain a lot of time away. There have been many instances where, upon reading a says-it-all title (like that for the lactic acid article), I tried to force myself to move onto the next item in my RSS reader. Despite that, I am almost always unable to force myself to skip articles that propose "interesting ideas", even if the title and opening blurb provide a good summary and even if, as it was in this case, the topic itself isn't even interesting to me.

Perhaps I am being a bit anal-retentive about all this, but as I think about it, there have been times when the titles and conclusions of various news items are distorting, misleading, or simply wrong. This is especially true with Slashdot (and for the Digg fans out there, Digg is about ten times worse). And I suppose it's also true on occassion with news sources that are not as reputable as the Times (and even they aren't perfect). I often look at the people on Slashdot who post knee-jerk article reactions that miss the point after just reading the title and quick summary without actually reading the article in depth, and I wonder, how many people out there in the mainstream fall prey to this problem with other news sources? With Slashdot, it's just a few geeks who get misinformed about mostly techie stuff. With other forms of media, it's the general public and issues that are sometimes more important. Remember the hysteria over the Dubai ports deal?