A friend is visiting this weekend and told us about an Internet meme that’s gone somewhat viral: that the the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor never happened. It strikes me that blaming this phenomenon (and there are many exemplars) on social media software is inadequate. To me there is something more subtle at work: the slow erosion of the dichotomy between facts and strongly held opinions. And I blame a lot of this on K-20 education, where outside the realm of STEM, there is no longer a canon, but rather something entirely more squishy. Historical fact (like Pearl Harbor) then becomes something post-modernized. If this happened in STEM, the facts of say quantum mechanics, the Periodic Chart and germ theory would quickly enforce inconvenient truth on political opinion.
How do we fix this? I’m not sure. It may simply be that our education system has become somewhat of a lousy product for its student customers. And that’s a product of perverse incentives that are a result of an outdated business model. But in any case, the outcome is Pearl Harbor as hoax.
Discoverers and Discoveries 