3

The Barnum Effect

P.T. Barnum famously said there's a sucker born every minute; then he exploited some little people and elephants to make money and probably went home and drank gasoline with sprinkles melted in it. There's a psychological phenomenon that got named after the sideshow jockey, which basically boils down to a person being more willing to accept vague, generalized information as being true about themselves, as they think it was specifically derived for them. This is precisely what a psychic does when they cold read you. A psychic looks out over a room and says "I'm getting a T or a D. Is there a D name?" If you can assemble a room of 100 people and not one of them has a dead relative whose first or last name started with a T or a D, you're probably some kind of cosmic wizard in your own right. But it works. A hand shoots up. The psychic closes in. "I'm feeling a male energy. Is it ... David? Daniel?" they struggle for a moment and the mark says, "My father's name was Dumbledore!" The psychic nods as though this were obvious.

KatarzynaBialasiewicz/iStock
"Was he killed by a friend pretending to be evil? Thought so. I see it all the time."

2

The Boring Document Effect

It's 100 percent accepted by rational beings now that Russia tried to influence the 2016 U.S. election. Don't worry about if they succeeded in any significant way, just know that they did it both here and the 2017 French election. In both cases, massive document leaks were made public. Info from one political party was just dumped like a turd on the freeway (you shit out the car window on road trips, right?)

Now, in some way, just releasing potentially incriminating info could be damaging. But what if you managed to get a hold of 1,000 pages of mundane emails from someone you didn't like. Emails about shopping, weekend plans, pictures of the cat, someone shitting out the window on a road trip, that sort of thing. And because you hate this person and want to ruin them, you skip to page 675 and find an eight-paragraph email, then go to the third paragraph and toss in "So we're still on for this weekend? I hope we can get some of the brotherhood together and kidnap all the elderly people the next town over before beating them with sacks of oranges until they beg for mercy which is music to the ears of our Dark Lord Shagga-Mothgore, He Who Rends Flesh and Feasts on Hope."

fotokostic/iStock
"He throws the best keggers."

1

Media Bias

If there's one thing American media is good at, it's giving us stories about what celebrities choose to wear as though anyone whose soul isn't made of pube-encrusted bubble gum could care a fraction of a shit about such things. The other thing they excel at is bullshit. Media bias is so prevalent the idea of news is basically laughable at this point and the 24-hour networks should just be called "Pumping Smoke Up Your Ass with Chappy McFuckYouSay." And that goes for both sides of the fence, since both left- and right-leaning news sites are left- and right-handed hand jobs.

GeorgeRudy/iStock
"Now if you could try both pockets at the same time."

The big problem with media bias is not that it exists so much as people want it to exist. Twitter is the best place in the world to watch this play out. Thanks to the 140-character limit, you can watch people shut down in three sentences or less when confronted with challenging news.

"We can confirm someone is doing something, just not who or what."

If a story supports an opposing ideology or public figure, people will shit on it immediately. No time for nuance or well-thought-out argument and consideration. No room for the possibility that a thing might exist in the world we don't like but still must accept. Instead, fuck it. Lies. Fake news. Not real. Replace it with the news that gently places its plump, rosy lips on our glistening, puckered assholes and proceeds to rim the pain of reality away with stories that tell us what we already think.

Now the extension of media bias on a long enough timeline is that, when you're used to only hearing things you're already inclined to believe, whether these are good things about your political party, for instance, or bad things about the other guys, you become conditioned to believe everything you hear because you're refusing to listen to anything that challenges you. And that's just how a Russian hacker, or an unscrupulous cop, or some shitheel from an airline, can come in and fuck you. You primed yourself without even realizing it. You're now conditioned to swallow heaping spoonfuls of BS with a big, ol' grin and a side of house salad with that shitty dressing that has too much oil in it.

Mindspace/iStock
Or on the side of the road with that canned cheese. Sorry for the disgusting food metaphors; I am really hungry.

Now more than ever you need to be skeptical about anything you hear online, on the news, or from a politician, especially if it makes you feel uncomfortable or even too comfortable. Everyone with something to gain is trying to pull a fast one on you. Don't let them. But just to be safe, you should send me all your money so I can keep it safe for you. You can trust me.

For more check out 5 Reasons The Future Will Be Ruled By BS and 5 Types Of 'Scientific' Evidence You Won't Believe Are BS

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