What You Think You See, Might Not be Real, or the Whole Story at Least.

I will try not to name names.  But I want to make a point about viewpoint bias.  And that is greatly a function of observation/information limitation.  Consider the following quote from Frank Herbert's  "Chapterhouse Dune."  I won't try to explain the series of books for those of you who don't know it.  But I will say as a formatting matter, each chapter of these books starts off with a "quote." Some are short.  Some are longer. And some set up the chapter.  And some are more universal in possible application.

Anyway:

“There was a man who sat each day looking out through a narrow vertical opening where a single board had been removed from a tall wooden fence. Each day a wild ass of the desert passed outside the fence and across the narrow opening—first the nose, then the head, the forelegs, the long brown back, the hindlegs, and lastly the tail. One day, the man leaped to his feet with the light of discovery in his eyes and he shouted for all who could hear him: “It is obvious! The nose causes the tail!”

Here is at least one of the rational conclusions.  If you have a narrow view of the thing, you likely are not really going to understand the truth of the thing.  My way of explaining that phenomena in a shorter way is to say, if you don't plug in all the necessary data, you are not going to come to the right conclusion.  And as opposed to our near the desert dweller in the quote, lots of people have access to all the necessary data.  But they deliberately toss out the parts that do not fit their desired conclusion.  And then with the same (relatively) delusional sense of certainty of our near the desert dweller, publish their erroneous conclusion as if their subjective beliefs are facts.

I might be just some ordinary, low rent lawyer.  But I have been making my money for years and years, sorting through piles of data, with one major priority;  separate the needles of possible real evidence from the piles of shit.  Greatly because of that, I  am really good at judging what is a useful fact, instead of mere argument.  Mere argument is fucking useless shit.  No matter how strongly  people may believe in their own or other's arguments?  As an objective matter, arguments are objectively fucking useless shit. 

Granted, our near the desert dweller skips the argument and jumps right to the conclusion.  But ya know?  It doesn't really matter how many words one uses to support an objectively baseless conclusion.  With out sound evidence, all you have got is an objectively baseless conclusion.  Let us never pretend otherwise.  And let us call out bitches who publish such useless, baseless bullshit, even if they get published by legitimate publishing houses, and get interviewed on real TV.