• printer friendly
• mail this article
• iPod format
• digg

Photo

  David Burke Burke is a fourth-year political science and English student. E-mail him at dburke@media.ucla.edu.

You’ve all heard the saying, “Opinions are like assholes, everybody has one.” Well I never liked that analogy very much and I think I have a better one. Opinions are like germs. Everybody has millions, they are constantly sharing them with each other, and the opinions contaminate almost everyone they touch.

At UCLA, students form a lot of opinions based on the information they receive in their classes. Professors are not exclusively fact-spewing robots – they are biased people! In the communications studies major for example, many students who take classes about media bias think they know a lot about the subject.

But all these students really know is what a few sources, likely including a biased professor, think about the media. Most of them have never worked in the media and they never will; yet they feel comfortable disseminating their opinions to others as if they are deeply rooted in facts and first-hand knowledge.

Political science students go through a similar process. There are many liberal political science professors at this school and more often than not they put a positive spin on liberal ideology that is bound to rub off on some of their students come the next election day.

Some opinions are more harmful than others – we are not just talking about pizza topping preferences here. We are talking about opinions that are legitimately harmful because they play a role in establishing public policy and electing public officials.

I’m just going to take the gloves off and say it: an enormous number of people’s opinions are harmful because many of them are uninformed, and thus outright stupid. People think they know enough to form a valuable opinion about an issue, when in reality they don’t even know enough to make an inkling of a valuable opinion. And when people use their uninformed opinions to make decisions, we run into problems.

Let me give you some examples. Recently my friend and I were involved in a classic political argument between a liberal and a conservative. Eventually he said that “lobbyists essentially decide who becomes President.” When I asked him for his rationale he said, “Didn’t you see all those lobbyists celebrating at the Republican Convention?” He honestly believes that!

Does that sound like a well-grounded opinion to you? It sounds like he just picked up his opinion from a magazine article or from what somebody once told him. I feel fortunate to know many intelligent people with whom I can discuss things, but too many of them have very strong opinions that are not based in the realm of facts and first-hand knowledge.

Let’s take another example: George W. Bush. Our President gave us a perfect example of an uninformed opinion having a huge impact when he referred to certain states as an “axis of evil.”

Millions of people who heard the State of the Union now believe that Iran, Iraq and North Korea are all “evil” and allied against us. They don’t know this is true, but many Americans accept it anyway solely because the president said it.

That is not an informed opinion.

I’m only 20 years old but I know that no state can be “evil.” It would be more informed of me to say that Bush and his speechwriters constituted an “axis of stupid” than to believe what the President actually said.

It is scary that many well-educated people and a vast majority of the American public make important decisions like voting for elected officials based upon their uninformed opinions. One of my friends’ rationales for voting for Bush was that Al Gore does not listen to his advisors. Of course he knows that! He just watched “Saving Silverman” for the third time while winning the 2001 NHL championship on beginner level by exploiting a glitch in his computer game! The only people who know whether or not Al Gore listens to his advisors are Al Gore and his advisors. Unfortunately, lots of other people think they know things like that too, and make important decisions based on these baseless assumptions.

Be smart enough to know what things you are ignorant about and what things you actually know something about. As long as you are engaged in the process of combating your ignorance, you are a friend of mine – and not a threat to society.

So if you are voting in the upcoming primary election on Tuesday, make a distinction between things that you actually know and bits of second-hand knowledge you pick up randomly that may not even be true. If you do not make that distinction, you will be doing a great disservice to yourself and to society.

Comments

Post a comment