This story illustrates the "blind you with science" tendency in telling technology:
How Gullible Are We?
A student at Eagle Rock Junior High won first prize at the Greater Idaho Falls Science Fair. He was attempting to show how conditioned we have become to alarmists practicing junk science and spreading fear of everything in our environment. In his project he urged people to sign a petition demanding strict control or total elimination of the chemical "dihydrogen monoxide."
And for plenty of good reasons, since:
- it can cause excessive sweating and vomiting
- it is a major component in acid rain
- it can cause severe burns in its gaseous state
- accidental inhalation can kill you
- it contributes to erosion
- it decreases effectiveness of automobile brakes
- it has been found in tumors of terminal cancer patients
He asked 50 people if they supported a ban of the chemical.
- Forty-three (43) said yes,
- Six (6) were undecided,
- Only one (1) knew that the chemical was water.
The title of his prize winning project was, "How Gullible Are We?"
He feels the conclusion is obvious.
--http://www.theburningbiscuit.com/HowGullibleAreWe.html
"It was apparently created by Eric Lechner, Lars Norpchen and Matthew Kaufman, housemates while attending UC Santa Cruz in 1989, revised by Craig Jackson in 1994, and brought to widespread public attention in 1997 when Nathan Zohner, a 14-year-old student, gathered petitions to ban "DHMO" as the basis of his science project, titled "How Gullible Are We?"[1]" --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihydrogen_monoxide_hoax
Also see Snopes.com, below, which verified the story as true: http://www.snopes.com/science/dhmo.asp
"In 1997, Nathan Zohner, a 14-year-old student at Eagle Rock Junior High School in Idaho Falls, based his science fair project on a report similar to the one reproduced above. Zohner's project, titled "How Gullible Are We?", involved presenting this report about "the dangers of dihyrogen monoxide" to fifty ninth-grade students and asking them what (if anything) should be done about the chemical. Forty-three students favored banning it, six were undecided, and only one correctly recognized that 'dihydrogen monoxide' is actually H2O-- plain old water. Zohner's analysis of the results he obtained won him first prize in the Greater Idaho Falls Science Fair; garnered him scads of attention from newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations, universities, and congress people; and prompted the usual round of outcries about how our ignorant citizenry doesn't read critically and can be easily misled. In other words, a tempest in a teapot.
Zohner's project wasn't original: spoof petitions about dihydrogen monoxide and other innocuous "dangers" have been circulating for years, and Zohner based his project on a bogus report that was already making the rounds of the Internet. Moreover, Zohner's target audience was ninth-graders, a group highly susceptible to allowing peer pressure to overwhelm critical thinking. Thrust any piece of paper at the average high school student with a suggestion about what the "correct" response to it should be, and peer pressure pretty much assures you'll get the answer you're looking for. Someone that age isn't very likely to read a friend's petition calling for the banning of whale hunting and critically evaluate the socio-economic and environmental impact of such a regulation. Instead, he's probably going to say to himself, "This issue is obviously important to my friend, and he must have some good reasons for circulating the petition, so I'll sign it."
That said, this example does aptly demonstrate the kind of fallacious reasoning that's thrust at us every day under the guise of "important information": how with a little effort, even the most innocuous of substances can be made to sound like a dangerous threat to human life. The next time you receive an ominous message such as the one warning you that sodium lauryl sulfate (a common foaming ingredient used in shampoos) causes cancer, with the "proof" being that this caustic chemical is also used to scrub garage floors, keep in mind that the very same thing could be said of another ubiquitous cleaning agent ...dihydrogen monoxide.
In March 2004 the California municipality of Aliso Viejo (a suburb in Orange County) came within a cat's whisker of falling for this hoax after a paralegal there convinced city officials of the danger posed by this chemical. The leg-pull got so far as a vote's having been scheduled for the City Council on a proposed law that would have banned the use of foam containers at city-sponsored events because (among other things) they were made with DHMO, a substance that could "threaten human health and safety."
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