A fact is information minus emotion. An opinion is information plus experience. Ignorance is an opinion lacking information. And, stupidity is an opinion that ignores a fact.
A fact is information minus emotion. An opinion is information plus experience. Ignorance is an opinion lacking information. And, stupidity is an opinion that ignores a fact.
I watch these words bandied about in our global media and wonder whether the average person is really aware of how critically important the semantics of these words truly are.
The opportunity for the massive onslaught of media stimuli to influence opinion is becoming ever more omnipresent and equally dangerous.
When someone makes a statement saying that something is a fact, that should mean that it is verifiable, immutable and provable. End of story. It does not matter what the person’s opinion is, what their belief system has taught them or what their political perspective is. A fact is a fact… Until it is disproven in a methodical, verifiable approach. Leonardo da Vinci created the Scientific Method. His approach to doing experiments repeatedly, trying to see if alternate outcomes were possible, laid the foundation for the world to use his process to distill fact from fiction.
But sometimes, something that can be a fact, can also be a partial fact. In da Vinci’s enthusiasm to define the world around him, he discarded the Vatican’s concept that everything in the heavens revolves around Earth and instead reasoned that the sun does not move. Da Vinci instead postulated that the planets must orbit the Sun. And while he was partially accurate in the new assessment, he was still wrong in his fact because the Sun does actually move, but the planets continue to orbit around a sun that is moving in space. He had yet to learn what Einstein would postulate centuries later… which is the Theory of General Relativity. Meaning that things can move in relation to one another. The sun does appear to be stationary from our perspective, until we calculate its position in the universe in relation to other heavenly bodies, and in that perspective we see the Sun is part of the expanding Universe at large.
So da Vinci’s perspective that the Sun does not move was not a fact. It was an opinion. (Even if he thought it was a fact at the time that he wrote it secretly in his notebook, for fear that if he spoke that blasphemy he would be burned to death). Those who would opt to burn him, tied to a stake in the town’s square for stating such an opinion were ignorant and were leveraging their opinions to suppress the concepts of new knowledge coming forth for others to learn and postulate from.
Whereas those on our planet Earth at this point, who still believe that the world is flat, are just outright stupid, because they are ignoring the evidence of film and video from outer space that clearly prove, beyond any shadow of doubt, that it is a fact that the Earth is spherical in shape.
All of this may seem rudimentary to you. But it is most wise to recognize the percentage of the global population who may not be anywhere near as intelligent as you are and who are most susceptible to the opinions of others and who are willingly eager to absorb those opinions as being facts, when in (fact), they are not factual at all.
Happy Friday!
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