Top video in youtube ?

Amazingly this is a goofy comedian video that has a staggering 79 million views (and growing). Full article is here.

Conspiracies, Lies and misdirections

I've had many arguments with my friends about certain conspiracy theories that pop up once in a while. This stuff varies from "Did man ever land on the moon?" to the age old question of "Are there aliens here on earth?" and to controversial topics such as 9/11 . Power of the Web brings us the opinion of a large number of people within a few clicks and it is easy to mislead or come up with plausible explanations to the unexplained and make others believe. Here is my take on it.

Public media does not always tell the truth. period. There is no guarantee what you hear in your favorite news channel is true. But there is no choice! Even when we have thousands of bloggers, it is still the giant public media organization that becomes the credible source. So if the public media says 'a plane crashed at pentagon' then a plane must have crashed at pentagon!. A relatively unknown blogger saying that the 'debris are unlikely to be from a plane crash' is not taken seriously and will soon die down as noise.

There is a different side to this story as well. Say that someone wants to deliberately make a situation look different than what the public media has reported, even when the reported facts are true to a great extent. The current environment of alternate media gives anyone the freedom to do so. I've seen this happen with many terrorist groups where they portray a completely different picture, typically in a manner that is advantageous to them, on their respective web spaces. The bottom line is we cannot be sure who is telling the truth, or to be more accurate, whose story has a greater truth in it.

So as laymen what should we do ? Are we to question everything that comes up in public media ? Are we to condemn everything that others say or vice versa ?
If it is to be so how do we asses the state of the world ? The answer is not so straightforward since the absolute truth (if it ever exists) is really hard to get at. However I think the key here is to understand that everything that you hear and see are mutations of the truth to different degrees. Once you know that then it would be possible to form some opinion (if you need to) of what concerns you by considering a number of sources. Your opinion may well be biased based on your background but that is fine since each of us are entitled to form our own opinion (as long as we don't go about intruding into other peoples lives to force our opinion on them). If you are a policy maker, then you have to be careful in forming your opinion since it may have a greater impact on the world (for example my opinion of aliens only matters to me where as the American Presidents opinion of aliens may well be important to a much larger group of people)

Since the above statement may be a bit cryptic, here is an example. Do I believe that there are aliens on earth ? Given the information I have access to, I see an overwhelming number of unproved reports of alien encounters and an equal (or greater) number of scientific explanations (psychological effects, physical phenomena etc) that explains these alien encounters. Being a man of science I tend to bias towards the scientific explanations and form my opinion to say 'no, I don't believe there are aliens on earth'. As always opinions are not carved in stone so it may not stand forever.