I was scanning my phone when I should have been doing something like spending quality time watching The Bachelorette with The Lovely Mrs. Smith the other day (because the family that watches The Bachelorette together obviously can't get Netflix to load) when I came across something interesting.
Ok, it was more interesting than The Bachelorette. But that cuts a pretty wide swath that includes professional bowling, foreign language films without subtitles and those drug ads for really scary-sounding but completely unfamiliar diseases that include about five minutes of possible side effects which can't possibly not be worse than what they supposedly cure.
But I digress...
Anyway, the allegedly interesting thing I came across was that some smarty-pants know-it-alls at Cornell have conducted a study that indicates people who consider themselves experts on a particular topic are more prone to claim knowledge of "made-up" facts about that topic than people who aren't.
So, the research department of a school that is easily as prestigious as its Ivy League brethren Harvard, Yale, Penn, Colgate, Brown, Dartmouth, Princeton and Columbia spent a lot of time and money to tell us that, well, we're blowhards.
They even have a name for it. It's called "overclaiming." Ok, it's called "overclaiming" at Cornell. Down here it's called "being a smart a....well, you know." However, that probably wouldn't look so good on the grant application. As in: "the purpose of our study is to determine who the Smart A...es are. Please give us some money to do that."
Now the researchers came to their conclusion by doing things like having people who claimed to be personal finance experts identify which of a list of words were actual financial terms. The so-called experts apparently were more likely to identify completely fake phrases like "pre-rated stocks" and "fixed-rate deduction" as genuine jargon.
I probably wouldn't have claimed knowledge of any of those terms. However, I am familiar with the financial phrases "overdraft protection" and "lost debit card, again." But then, I have children.
Why people do this the researchers didn't actually say, but tone would seem to indicate the motives they ascribed were somewhat less than pure. And we'll have to presume the motives for their study didn't consist of wanting to snicker at a bunch of pompous rubes and get paid for it.
I, of course, have another explanation. Because, I do, and because, if I didn't, the editors of this paper might be calling to see where the rest of my column is. But that's a little "behind the curtain" and more than you probably needed to know.
However, I do actually have an explanation, and as someone who, like my youngest daughter is seldom right but always certain, I'm qualified to give it to you.
I know a lot of stuff. A very small percentage of that stuff is useful. The rest of it was gold back when "Trivial Pursuit" was all the rage. Since then, well, not so much.
The problem with that is that I collect useless but semi-interesting information the way truckers collect shot glasses. The fact that those shot glasses may actually be more practical than anything I know is not lost on me. Or, The Lovely Mrs. Smith.
If you're not so inclined (and most sane people aren't), lot of things just bounce in and out of your head without leaving much of a mark and taking up space that would be better used for things like remembering when to renew your car tags (hint: probably before you see those flashing lights in your rear view mirror. Just saying.).
So while it may be somewhat interesting to know both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs dropped out of college (Harvard and Stanford, respectively), that Michigan's state capital isn't Detroit (it's Ann Arbor) and that mayonnaise was named after a general who lost a battle after taking time to finish a meal that include the condiment, you could probably survive if you didn't.
However, if you're a weapons-grade collector of useless stuff, you've got so much of it committed to memory that, after a time, it becomes difficult to tell fact from fiction or remember what you actually know and what is a ghost memory. You know, like that memory of the time you were interesting at parties.
When you know and spray useless information like shotgun pellets, you can't really be surprised if at least some of it misses the target. Like "pre-rated stocks" or "fixed-rate deduction." Sounds right. Sounds like something you've read. Must be true.
So if pontificators like me can draw anything from this study, it's that we might want to pause before blasting away with the trivia. Or at least check with Google first. Which still beats watching The Bachelorette.
And if we can't do that, at least we can remember that it was Lord Gladstone who said, "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
By the way, in the 1930's, Colgate's swim team used to go to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to train, which started the collegiate tradition of Spring Break in Florida. However, Colgate isn't in the Ivy League. Jobs gave his famous "Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish" speech at Stanford, but he actually attended and dropped out of Reed College. Ann Arbor is home of the largest college-only football stadium in the U.S., but the state's capital is in Lansing. Gladstone served as British Prime Minister for longer than anyone else, but Oliver Cromwell actually did the beseeching. The mayonnaise thing, however, is apparently true.
Who knew?
Gary Smith is a recovering journalist living in Rogers.
Commentary on 07/24/2015