This is a frightening commentary, not just on Internet literacy specifically, but the complete failure of our educational system to teach critical thinking. Because thinking is hard.
30 thoughts on “The Tree Octopus”
Comments are closed.
This is a frightening commentary, not just on Internet literacy specifically, but the complete failure of our educational system to teach critical thinking. Because thinking is hard.
Comments are closed.
Oh….
It is important to look at the site itself,
http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/
to understand this creature’s dire plight.
The FAQ page is particularly enlightening, especially the money donation method (To give your money directly to the octopi) at the bottom.
Clearly, the survival of these creatures is in grave peril!
Sasquatch predation is apparently a major factor, as well. One shudders when one imagines just how many tree octopuses a Sasquatch can eat in a day…..
I want to know WHO is telling kids NOT to believe everything they read…internet be damned for incorrect intel. I know adults who think PRINT means TRUTH. Unfortunately, they usually read NYT or CNN, NPR online which only compound their silliness.
When my older son was in grade school we had a problem after his teacher told him, and I quote, ”…if it’s in a book, it’s true.”
He was smart enough even then (about 8, 9, 10) to question that statement. He made the jump to racism as his example of things that had been taught, in the past, that were wrong, by modern thought, when he told us about the teacher.
She was a prime example of why some people should be fired from teaching.
Rand, I am disturbed by your tree-octupus denialism. I mean, this stuff has been Peer-reviewed! I mean, don’t you care? I think you should put a tentacle ribbon on your site.
They should have tried to get Al Gore’s endorsement. They probably could have.
The science is settled on this. Although they are more threatened by the clear cutting of the spaghetti trees they prefer to inhabit.
The “tree octopus” website is priceless!
It would be a good scam to sell “tree octopus” T-shirts and the like. I wonder if this would result in prosecution for fraud.
It is actually easy to convince people of the existence of tree octopii. Most people in the rest of the country have the image of the Pacific Northwest being some kind of remote, isolated biomeme where we all live in log cabins and avoid being eaten by “big foot”.
This is as priceless as the campaign to ban “dihydrogen oxide”.
So… Does this mean the “genuine tree octopus leather” gloves I just bought, aren’t genuine?
Wait…how do we know this story about people falling for internet hoaxes isn’t just an internet hoax?
*spins top*
Eh…I’m underwhelmed. Someone goes to a lot of effort to put up a website describing a superficially plausible hoax, and many kids fall for it. So what? All we’ve proved is that a good effort at fooling someone is likely to succeed. What else is new? The key element of a real scam that’s missing here is where you’re asked for big piles of your money, your secret passwords, and so on. I suspect even a teenager might twig when confronted with that.
Furthermore, if the suggested “solution” is to “trust authorized sources,” i.e. those vetted by the mass voting of those around you, I’m not sure this is any improvement. Replace low-risk credulity with high-risk credulity? If you believe the tree octopus site, you might embarass yourself by writing a stiff letter to the editor. If you believe MSNBC, you might vote for a lying incompetent pretty-boy socialist to be your President, a much more dangerous scam for which to fall.
I think that the study is ongoing. They’re seeing how many bloggers say that it is a hoax just because an “expert” says so. Just stop and think about it for a moment. They even have a picture of the thing! How can you be so stupid and believe an expert while ignoring what your eyes can plainly see?
I showed the site to my 15 year old. After 10 seconds and two paragraphs he looked at me like I had lost my marbles.
Y’all can make jokes all you want but I have to hit the sack. Getting up early tomorrow to go monkeyfishing.
“Superficially plausible” is generous for a site that lists sasquatch as a predator. If a reader thinks that a scientifically plausible site would discuss sasquatch in such a matter-of-fact fashion, they have a pretty loose grip on reality.
What’s interesting is the fact that the site uses environmentalist rhetoric as validation. It gets accepted because it looks like every other species-preservation, anti-development website out there.
kurt9: you mean the Pacific Northwest isn’t full of snooty hipsters drinking Starbucks and throwing fish at each other while listening to Nirvana?
Jim, you’re equating a loose grip on reality to unfamiliarity with a peculiar pop mythology vocabulary word? So anyone who doesn’t know a “jackalope” is a standard Southwestern practical joke term has a loose grip on reality?
I think it’s important to distinguish between ignorance and stupidity. Being fooled by this site is certainly evidence of ignorance — of not knowing, for example, that sasquatch is made up and all octopuses breath by gills (and so cannot live out of water). But for it to be evidence of stupidity it would have to be the case that you could figure out it’s bogus without knowing any important relevant facts at all, just by discovering internal contradictions and offenses to common sense.
I refer you to the Australian Museum site on Drop Bears:
http://australianmuseum.net.au/Drop-Bear
I’m with Carl Pham. You try to get multiple sources, of course, but what do you do when you get a contradiction?
Wikipedia for example, notoriously unreliable, says Drop Bears are fictitious. But the Australian Museum has a page on them, along with hundreds of animals that are quite real.
Reliance on common sex doesn’t always help. For example, the story at
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/12/17/gaza.gender.id/
, apparently by CNN, and apparently genuine.
Real or not? It certainly goes against common sense, and common experience.
(BTW – it’s real – some people do naturally change sex from either 5ARD or 17BHDD syndrome, and a few other, rarer ones)
As an nearly-native northwesterner, I heart that website.
Believe it or not, a great deal of time has been spent within the past several years by environmental researchers hunting for the Giant Palouse Earthworm. One or two overgrown nightcrawler types have been unearthed, but the legendary burrower remains elusive.
Heh.
“kurt9: you mean the Pacific Northwest isn’t full of snooty hipsters drinking Starbucks and throwing fish at each other while listening to Nirvana?”
Oh yeah. We have boatloads of stupid SWPL hipsters as well. Fortunately, most of them are in downtown Portland and Beaverton (west side) as well as the Seattle area. I live across the river in Vancouver, Washington state, which is actually politically conservative (tea party sentiment is strong here).
I see where this is going. Next, somebody will try to tell me that people from Chicago don’t all carry violin cases with machine guns in them.
Actually, Carl, I think that it crosses the border between ignorance and stupidity once a person looks at the “photographic evidence” on that website. The pictures of blue and multi-colored plush octopi, thrown haphazardly into a tree, should be enough to satisfy your condition that one “could figure out it’s bogus … just by discovering internal contradictions and offenses to common sense.”
That’s not the only internal contradiction or offense to common sense on that website, either. Sasquatch is a red herring in this case.
“I see where this is going. Next, somebody will try to tell me that people from Chicago don’t all carry violin cases with machine guns in them.”
Noooo—-!
Andrea H,
the Northwestern natives don’t THROW the fish, they just SLAP each other with the fish.
While dancing. of course.
Red herring John B? They’re THE only serious choice of knowledgeable fish slappers!
Andrea,
Be fair. Some of them listen to Pearl Jam.
What this also shows is the fallacy of the “wisdom of crowds” argument many in the net community make.
Don’t forget the centaur archaeology exhibit in the library at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville!
Only if you exclude you, me and everyone else on the net who instantly recognizes this as a hoax, and I’m not sure you want to do that save for confirmation bias…
Superficially plausible, because a type of creature that would seem equally ridiculous actually exists. (Tree crabs, of which IIRC there are more than one species.) However, the rest of the page undermines that. I particularly like the fur-bearing salmon. There is some precedent for that, too; according to the RC there are fur-bearing fish. (Beavers and capybara.)