[MD] Who can you trust?

[Platt Holden]

Hi All, 

Much of the debate on this site is not only about how to interpret the 
writings of Mr. Pirsig, but the trustworthiness of sources used to support  
a point of view. An example of the problem comes from today's NY Times in 
an article about the effect of art instruction on learning  An excerpt:

"Obama cites sober social-science research on the poor city neighborhoods 
he knows best. “Studies in Chicago have demonstrated,” his arts statement 
reads, “that test scores improved faster for students enrolled in low-
income schools that link arts across the curriculum than scores for 
students in schools lacking such programs.”

"There’s just one problem with this ostensibly hardheaded defense of arts 
education. The studies invoked as proof that involvement in band — or dance 
or sculpture — spurs higher academic performance actually show nothing of 
the sort. To the consternation of arts proponents wedded to this way of 
arguing, the instrumental logic has been challenged by a team of 
investigators affiliated with Harvard’s Project Zero, an education research 
group with a focus on the arts. An emphasis on the arts’ utility in the 
quest to reach math and reading benchmarks may seem politically smart, but 
the science it rests on turns out to be shaky."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/magazine/27wwln-lede-t.html?ref=magazine

I guess most of us tend to discount claims made by politicians. But, 
"scientific studies" have also been known to be suspect. Some of us rely on 
Wikipedia to provide "facts" to support an argument. Perhaps more reliable 
than other sources, I've seen criticisms of it, too.  There's also a human 
tendency to discount a source when it doesn't "fit" one's political
beliefs. 

No doubt there's been an "information explosion" since the advent of the 
internet. But as we all known, advances in technology do not necessarily 
assure better quality. So what to do?

For me, the criteria laid down by Pirsig is the best I know of. "The tests 
of truth are logical consistency, agreement with experience, and economy of 
explanation." (Lila, 8) The weakness in this is "experience," as Pirsig 
acknowledges in SODV: "The reason there is a difference between individual 
evaluations of quality is that although Dynamic Quality is a constant, 
these static patterns are different for everyone because each person has a 
different static pattern of life history. Both the Dynamic Quality and the 
static patterns influence his final judgment. That is why there is some 
uniformity among individual value judgments but not complete uniformity." 

So try as we might, there's no escape from our biases based on our life
history. I guess all we can do in ascertaining the reliability of sources 
is to try to limit those biases as best we can.

Which ain't easy I admit. 

Best,
Platt