Real Clear Truth

I had an idea yesterday for a science fiction short story. It would go something like this…

Two college kids are taking a sociology course and are given a research assignment to study how people are able to separate fact from fantasy, truth from propaganda and valid information from misleading advertisements. The premise is that society can only function well so long as these differences are distinguishable.

Given our Internet age, our two heroes propose a study where they will send out emails with various degrees of falsehoods. They will create emails that people are sure to pass around widely so that many people will be exposed to the information presented. Then they will do a poll to see how many people we’re fooled and how many correctly identified the falsehoods.

Unfortunately, as the story unwinds, our two heroes discover that nearly everyone is fooled by their misleading emails. Even when they include lines in the email that say, “We checked this out on ’snopes.com’. It is factual. Check for yourself”. Of course, the email isn’t factual at all, but then nobody ever bothers to click on the link provided and go to snopes.com to see. (If you don’t think this happens, check out this article here.)

In the end, our two heroes write a paper for their class that reports the sad facts of life as they have discovered them — only to get a failing grade for all their hard work. Why? Well that’s the twist to this story.

In giving the failing grade, the teacher writes this note:

Your research was excellent, your analysis was correctly derived from the data you acquired and your bibliography was extensive and formatted exactly as we instructed in class. Unfortunately, the paper does NOT follow the clear guidelines provided in the instructions for this assignment. We are only interested in research on intelligent species, NOT sub-cognitive primates such as humans.

Ms. Quaklemyr, Galactic University, Branch N29Q48, Sociology Dept.

Update:

It appears that fact is stranger than fiction. Scientists have discovered that, at least in some cases, chimpanzees have far better memories than humans. See news story here.

Maybe the heroes in my short story should have studied chimps instead!