http://www.amazon.com/Believing-Brain-Conspiracies-How-Const...
may be the most important new book published in the last year. I had just finished reading the book when the "bird man" story broke, and what did I see on Hacker News threads but many people saying that they believed the story because they wanted to believe it, and they would believe a single, otherwise unevidenced claim in a self-produced video rather than the whole body of tested theory from currrent physical science. This is the usual observation of human behavior: people form beliefs first, for largely self-reassuring reasons, and then strive mightily to hunt up rationales for maintaining those beliefs, despite contrary evidence. Really, to raise the quality of discussion here on Hacker News, we all ought to read The Believing Brain at our earliest opportunity and think about all the threads we have seen here where participants conclude first and ask questions later.
As I reminded Hacker News participants just a day ago,
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3716043
Malcolm Gladwell is on record
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122671211614230261.html
saying in an interview,
"Q: Do you worry that you extrapolate too much from too little?
"A: No. It's better to err on the side of over-extrapolation. These books are playful in the sense that they regard ideas as things to experiment with. I'm happy if somebody reads my books and reaches a conclusion that is different from mine, as long as the ideas in the book cause them to think. You have to be willing to put pressure on theories, to push the envelope. That's the fun part, the exciting part. If you are writing an intellectual adventure story, why play it safe? I'm not out to convert people. I want to inspire and provoke them."
So if the statement here is that any reader of any published article, and any listener to any public speech or performance, should check the facts, sure, let's all check the facts. Fact-checking takes time and effort, and for sure we all have to rely on more than Wikipedia (which any member of the general public like me can edit) to know what the facts are. It's always going to be necessary to hold factual statements tentatively. The more interesting and bold conclusions we might be tempted to draw from some striking factual statement, the more we should check it out to see if the statement can be verified.
See Michael Shermer's new book The Believing Brain,
http://www.amazon.com/Believing-Brain-Conspiracies-How-Const...
which I am reading right now, for much more on how easy it is to believe a statement without checking it for accuracy first, and how hard it is to be sure we are even doing even checking of the most important things we believe.
This should be ROUTINE practice in police investigations, to guard against corruption of witness testimony, but, alas, we all know counterexamples. Moreover, it is a professional ethics violation for prosecutors to make excessively detailed statements to the press (who are always willing to ask for as many details as they can get) about the course of an investigation in progress and about possible motives for a crime when the accused has not yet been put on trial. The principle of "innocent until proven guilty" is STILL important, despite many cases we can observe where it appears to be violated.
The human mind leaps to supposing explanations and forming a narrative around new, disturbing events. The mind is a "belief engine"
http://www.amazon.com/The-Believing-Brain-Conspiracies-How-C...
and all of us would like to get an answer, even a quick and dirty answer that may be flat wrong, rather than have unanswered questions about a shocking news story. I remember well the speculation that swirled around the Columbine High School shootings some years ago. I was active in a different online community then, and a bunch of programmers were unembarrassed about going beyond the limits of their occupational knowledge to endorse various hypotheses about why the shooters killed their classmates. Right now we don't know why James Eagan Holmes shot movie-goers, evidently planning well in advance to kill many strangers. I'm not going to speculate about it.
The public-health perspective on violence reduction is interesting, because it doesn't depend on knowing much about the motives of individuals. The theory is that certain risk-reduction measures work in general, minimizing the chance that some individual will engage in any kind of incident like the one in Aurora, Colorado. Gun control is such a sensitive issue in the United States that it is barely being discussed yet by politicians in connection with the incident this weekend, but differing national patterns of gun control have been mentioned by commentators who point to the example of Australia's response to the 1996 Port Arthur, Tasmania shooting
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/07/20/opinion/donohue-gun-contro...
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/8502957/smaller-risk-of-...
as the right way to reduce risk of further mass shooting incidents. That's food for thought. So far I am not aware of any reason for young people in residential neighborhoods in the United States to have what are called "assault rifles" for legitimate purposes, and I certainly would be glad to know that none are in my (crime-free) neighborhood.
First edit: I see other Hacker News commenters are picking up on the submitted article's author's remarks on depression. This may be overgeneralizing too much from one example, even though the author also refers to a Secret Service study of the small number of examples of school shooters studied to that time. I think the author's most accurate point on that issue is "A vast majority of depressives are a danger only to themselves."