What’s the Harm?

There is a great new website – What’s the Harm? – which has been setup to highlight the physical damage that is produced from a lack of critical thinking. There is a lot of misinformation, pseudoscience, disinformation and quackery inundating the public on a daily basis through the news media, commercials, the Internet, and word of mouth. Many of the advocates for this misinformation discount their actions by claiming that what they are doing isn’t going to harm anybody. However, in many cases, as cataloged on this website, real harm is suffered by real people as a result of the propagation of mis- and dis-information and an inability to thinking critically. As noted on 06Jan09, these repercussions are estimated to total: “3,284 people killed, 306,068 injured and over $2,815,114,000 in economic damages”.

From the What’s the Harm? Website:

We are all confronted with new information daily. It comes to us via newspapers, radio, television, websites, conversation, advertising and so on. Sometimes it seems like a deluge.

Not all information is created equal. Some of it is correct. Some of it is incorrect. Some of it is carefully balanced. Some of it is heavily biased. Some of it is just plain crazy.

It is vital in the midst of this deluge that each of us be able to sort through all of this, keeping the useful information and discarding the rest. This requires the skill of critical thinking. Unfortunately, this is a skill that is often neglected in schools.

This site is designed to make a point about the danger of not thinking critically. Namely that you can easily be injured or killed by neglecting this important skill. We have collected the stories of over 225,000 people who have been injured or killed as a result of someone not thinking critically.

We do this not to make light of their plight. Quite the opposite. We want to honor their memory and learn from their stories.

We also wish to call attention to the types of misinformation which have caused this sort of harm. On the topics page you will see a number of popular topics that that are being promoted via misinformation. Many of them have no basis in truth at all. A few are based in reality, but veer off into troublesome areas. We all need to think more critically about these topics, and take great care when we encounter them.

Many proponents of these things will claim they are harmless. We aim to show that they are decidedly not.

Please check out the list of topics and read what interests you.