Another real-life skeptical experiment...

[onager]

Hmmm. This sounds like a phenomenon I often see in our beloved R/T forum.

Especially from people who like to drop a reference to, say, F. Josephus into a thread...when it's clear they haven't bothered to read his books, except for certain cherry-picked references.

Ditto for references to Dawkins et. al. Everybody knows what they said. The problem is, often they didn't say any such thing.

Over at my favorite gearhead site, Jalopnik, Ralph Nader is usually considered the Debbil Incarnate. He single-handedly brought Big Nanny Gubmint into the car industry!!!

One of the site editors finally put up a poll. He asked directly how many commenters had read Nader's book Unsafe At Any Speed. And he asked that they "be honest."

Ninety per cent of the respondents had never read the book.

Amazing. From the vitriol hurled at Nader on this site, you'd think he had personnally confiscated the '78 Trans-Maro in their driveway and hauled it to the crusher.

Yet less than 10% of the vitriolistas had even bothered to read the book.

Here's the poll/thread. Some of the comments are interesting, considering that these are hard-core car nuts. (I'm a soft-core car nut, I think...):

For those who think "th'gubmint" has too much influence in our lives, please at least be thankful that the milk you put in your kids' cereal this morning didn't kill them, and was, in fact, milk, because, once upon a time, there were no rules as to what constituted milk, or how it should be collected, stored, or sold.

http://jalopnik.com/5482235/have-you-read-unsafe-at-any-speed

[trotsky]

1. Ha!

And of the 10% who answered in the affirmative, I'm willing to bet at least half of them were lying. :)

[ChadwickHenryWard]

3. I've always been skeptical of polls generally.

There isn't any way of knowing how honestly people are answering the questions. Then of course there are people that are too stupid to know what the poll is asking....

[realisticphish]

4. that's why psych research is a pain

I had an advanced research class in my undergrad where everything was questionnaire-based. YOu would spend HOURS carefully constructing every question, and when you got them back, what would you find? 7, 7, 7, 7. Or 10, 10, 10, 10, or 1, 1, 1, 1.

I didn't totally blame them; it was a ridiculously boring form, being as it concerned a rather boring aspect of social psychology. But it's a giant pain in the ass.

[ChadwickHenryWard]

2. This society owes Nader a huge debt.

He's not thought of all that positively over here either. He is, though, like Eugene Debs, one of our nation's great unsung heroes. People fail to realize just how unsafe cars were back then. Just watch the brutal thrashing the Bel Air dummy receives compared to the relatively more gentle voyage of the Malibu dummy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g

Nader related, years ago, the story of a gruesome sight he witnessed while hitchhiking across the country; a car had crashed on the highway, and there were then no laws about children in the front seat or inclusion of seatbelts as standard. A 4yo girl had been seated in the passenger seat as the car swerved off the road. The glovebox popped open and completely severed the little girl's head as she flew forward into the dashboard. Hear head was recovered by police in the back seat of the car. The free market did not deem seatbelts to be necessary, so Johnson's government had to take matters into their own hands.

It should be noted that Nader did not single out the Corvair. Only one chapter in the book was about it. It became the target only after GM attempted to intimidate Ralph with late-night phone calls and not-so-well-hidden tails. Unfortunately, when you very conspicuously attempt to follow somebody into the Capitol Building, you tend to get arrested by Federal Marshalls. They even hired two prostitutes to seduce him. He rebuffed both of them, so GM's CEO called him a fag, which Bobby Kennedy objected to when he got his turn to ask questions. So the CEO accused RFK of impropriety during his time as AG, which was the end of it. The bad press continued, as Nader won a defamation of character lawsuit against them the next year. He turned around his and used his damages to fund another lawsuit against GM on behalf of consumers.

If you're interested in Nader, you might want to watch this excellent documentary on his life:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ycR36N68R8

[onager]

5. Thanks for the info.

Especially the Insurance Institute video. That got a lot of play on the gearhead sites.

Generally when someone would post about how much safer old cars were, because they were made out of "solid metal" etc. etc.

The video pretty much answers that argument!

I read Unsafe At Any Speed many years ago. One of Nader's anecdotes always stuck in my mind, for some bizarre reason.

Typical American suburb, a kid is out riding his bike. And the neighbors are backing their new 1959 Cadillac out of the driveway:



The kid was IMPALED on one of those tail fins. IIRC, he survived, but just barely.

[ChadwickHenryWard]

6. When I saw that video I showed everybody I know.

Nobody believed me when I used to say how much safer cars are now. But they used to be made out of steel! And they were HUGH! They were great steel behemoth great big huge steel things! This is all prior to seatbelts, air bags, head restraints, crumple zones (which I've heard denounced an an unsafe design flaw,) collapsible steering columns, those windshields that pop out in one piece instead of breaking into a thousand razor-sharp shards, and laws governing the hardness and sharpness of dashboard controls and radio knobs. I asked them to just look at the very controlled way in which the Malibu dummy moves, and the very measured area of safety that encompasses the body of the driver, versus the Bel Air driver basically just getting hit by a car going 60.

I also really like that point about the milk actually being milk. People just identify Nader with car safety, but in the late sixties he and a 90+yo Upton Sinclair worked towards greater control over advertising and food content in federal regulations. Most people don't realize the huge benefit we receive from even a mild measure of control of what we are sold to put into out bodies. Just imagine if we had some measure of control over the huge financial institutions that control our entire economy.