“APRIL FOOLS!” I WAS JUST FAKING

In many parts of the world April 1 is “April Fools” day. It’s a day to play practical jokes— to present something that’s not real, to fake someone out, and then to declare, “April’s fools!” Shouting that then exposes the hoax and, ideally, then everyone gets a good laugh. There aren’t many times or places where fooling someone, faking something that isn’t real, is funny, fun or playful, but this is one. Most of the time it misleads, deceives, and creates significant problems.

This is especially true when it comes to fake news or false information. And while there has always been fake news, we seem to be in an age of exaggerated fake news. In fact, some news companies blantonly and intentionally set out to manipulate the news for various political agendas. Long time before President Trump identified CNN as “fake news station,” we talked about the subject of dis-information and mis-information. It’s been around for a long, long time.

An innocent form that generates fake news is when people simply make mistakes about information or when people make assumptions and write them as if they were facts. That happened to me when I was twenty-one. While driving I bumped my car into another car. We exchanged insurance forms and went our way. The next day in the local news paper, it was reported that I was injured and taken to the hospital. When some friends asked me about my injuries and told me of the report in the newspaper, I said, “That’s news to me.”

Why or how someone made that report I never found out. I’m assuming that someone may have seen the accident and reported that I drove away and when someone else heard that they may have said, “maybe he had to get to the hospital,” and then another dropped the “maybe.” And by the time the “information” pass through several people, someone told a report that the driver of one car was taken to the hospital for injuries and then, without checking, that’s what he wrote.

Mis-information frequently occurs like that. It is the old child’s game of “telephone” where 10 or 20 people pass on a story and the final story is usually significantly different from the first story. Sometimes it happens like that. We humans are generally not very skilled in accurate listening so we “hear” with half an ear, hear through our filters, and contaminate facts with our perceptions without even being conscious that we are doing so. This can becomes disastrous especially when we’re passing on “gossip” about someone and have reasons to speak ill of someone.

Yet that kind of “fake news” is innocent compared to intentionally generating and inventing “news” in order to sway opinions, beliefs, and understandings. Now that the dossier against President Trump has been exposed, we have a great example of people intentionally inventing so-called “news” in order to discredit someone and apparently from what we now know use it to

start a special counsel investigation. It’s now known that it was paid for by the Clinton Campaign and the Democratic National Party. Yet since it is still in process, we won’t know the full extent of it until the special counsel’s work is done.

Now the very fact that people can, and do, invent “fake” news and information puts all of us at risk of operating —not only from inadequate information—but positively false information. And fake information occurs in every field, every discipline, and even in scientific areas.

Now there is one profession that fully capitalizes on this—that of stage magicians and illusionists. They mostly create visual illusions that trick our eyes and minds. Using the natural dispositions (biases) regarding sight and how the brain fills in information, they can trick us into thinking that something exists or operates in a way that it really does not. What we think we see or perceive is fake, and not real. You can find lots of these if you google “illusions,” or “attention tests.” Look for the invisible gorilla if you have not seen that illusion.

If we are all at risk from mis-information and fake news or information, what can we do about it? What can we do to protect ourselves as we seek to find the truth about something, the real facts?

The place to begin is with a healthy skepticism that does not naively or automatically believe whatever someone says or what you read or hear in the news. Then, with that healthy skepticism, learn to skillful ask questions, and for that, there’s no better tool than the Meta-Model. This is a set of linguistic distinctions and questions. The linguistic distinction identifies a place where language is typically and generally weak— “ill-formed” was the word that Noam Chomsky used. To this weak spot in mapping things, the Meta-Model provides a set of exploratory questions. The design is that by asking the questions, it invites the speaker to provide a fuller description and so to provide a richer map.

When you use the Meta-Model distinctions and questions in this way, you learn critical thinking skills. Now you can think things through more effectively, gain greater clarity on what someone is attempting to communicate, and test the validity of words and phrases. After all, words are not reliable indicators of truth. People can and do lie using words. So we have to test the words to see if they are accurate symbols of the territory.