Hoodwinked!

In case you missed my update on yesterday’s entry, the story about Survivor suing Huckabee and Davis was false. ARGH! I added an update on here and on Facebook but I wanted to write a little more to make sure I didn’t continue to perpetuate the hoax.

I try to be so careful about that, especially because the proliferation of fake news sites has become ridiculous. I do my best to not share misleading things, and it irritates me to see people sharing things as if they are real. Here is a pretty good list of fake news and satire sites (try to ignore the misspellings). I apologize for sharing something from what I should have known was a fake site. I saw the NBC News tagline, but missed that the website listed was NBC dot com dot co, which is absolutely not the real NBC site.

It occurred to me that I was easily hoodwinked on this one because I really wanted it to be true. Pardon me, my bias was showing! So it was fitting that I came across this interesting Vox article today about a quiz that checks your political bias.

Almost all of us have some bias. We tend to read sites that reflect our opinion and reinforce our beliefs. That’s been well-established. I consider myself very liberal, but I really make an effort to learn the truth about things and follow the science if it’s there. This is why I haven’t jumped on the GMO or gluten bandwagons. Science doesn’t support either claim (unless you have celiac disease). But I digress.

It didn’t take long to take the quiz, and it gave a nice, detailed report about the methods behind it and about my results. It’s worth checking out if this is something that interests you. My results showed that I was 25% biased, which was less than approximately 60% of those who took the test. The average result was 40% biased.

I was okay with these results, although it made me want to be a little more diligent about researching things and continuing to learn more. It’s very easy to grow complacent in our beliefs and not challenge ourselves. But challenging ourselves is how we learn and grow.

Onward! (And I promise to be more careful about what I share!)