So many words, so little substance

Well, I've been duped. I enjoyed reading the first half of 1421, a book about Chinese voyages of discovery that carried them around the world. But, as it likely turns out, the whole thing is a fabrication.

The key to my being taken in was that the conclusions, for the most part, were reasonable presuming the facts upon which they were based were actually true. I regret to say, they are often not true.

But, how was I to know? Here I'm reading a book written by a Royal Navy commander, a master of cartography, ocean currents, and navigating by the stars. He's sailed these very seas (he said), he has special insights due to his vocation that allows him to see things that other "normal" researchers could not (he said), he has provided a framework that neatly fits many pieces of unexplained (he said) history into a cogent whole. He has solved the riddle! (he said)

Must I Wikipedia everything?? I lamented a few months ago to anyone who would listen that one impact of having so much information at our fingertips is the mortifying realization that we really know almost nothing. The things we can be absolutely certain of based on our own experiences are so few that we rely on hearing about the vast majority of things we believe second hand.

Isn't it interesting that what we "know" is a function of what we hear and experience, and that our capability for hearing things second hand has traditionally been limited on the supply side? Now we are completely saturated with information. Yet our capacity to personally experience things hasn't expanded as quickly.

Ergo (how often do we get to use that word?), the percentage of our "knowledge" which is personally verified is lower than it has ever been. We've never been more vulnerable to snake-oil salesman, and it's precisely because we have so much information with which to defend ourselves! (A step further and we might conclude that only communities have the experiential context to validate the vast quantities of information we have access to, and that is why Wikipedia is perfect for the information age.)

Obviously time for bed...