The Problem with Statistics...

I was reading CNN's ticker, as is customary during my morning caffeine injection, and I remembered a post I always wanted to write, but I had no blog to write it in. Today, CNN noted that 9 in 10 Americans think Iran is trying to get nuclear weapons. My first thought, and I am not lying, was this: 9 in 10 of my college students do not even know where Iran is. In fact, in 2006, a study conducted by National Geographic found that 37% of Americans between the ages of 18-24 could find Iraq on a map, even after 3 years of war! If that sounds bad, check this out: 50% of those same kids couldn't find New York...and the media has the nerve to report what Americans believe we should do, or think we know!?!

I realize the internet has given new life to news programs whose appeal had been lost because it required (a) some degree of attention and (b) some degree of historical consciousness because it allows the "everyman" to participate in the reporting of news. A sort of democratization of the media, if you will. But, I have two questions: who are these people and are their opinions really worth trusting. I blame, to a certain extent, post-modernism for this shift from respected authorities who have spent their lives trying to learn a subject to wikipedia-driven, morons who are distrustful of any intellectualism and feel their opinion matters as much. I've got news for you: polling Americans and then using those polls as evidence for anything beyond the general ignorance of the people or the lack of intellectual rigor in American society is nothing but a slippery slope. People are stupid.

Nothing has changed since the first city-states formed some 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, China, and Egypt. The vast majority of people not only don't have time to learn about stuff beyond pop culture, but they clearly do not want to learn anything more because it would take too much time. Besides, as Huxley envisioned the world, it is often better to just be a Gamma or a Delta and revel in your base desires and sensationalism. Thinking, reading, and critically analyzing only hurts your brain. Now, don't get me wrong. The plebians are an important element of any society. They grow food, they clean schools, they become pornstars, and they do other manual labor. They are the backbone of society; they are to be respected and taken care of (universal health care anyone?). Giving them their opinions  equal weight to anyone else, however, is beyond their scope of contributions to society. I wouldn't hire a clown to fix a leak in the john, would you?