Mea culpa: 5 things to do when the BS detector turns on you

From the mouths of babes.

To celebrate our youngest’s 25th birthday, we gathered for a lovely meal at a local restaurant. In the course of the conversation, I cited the old saw about pens, pencils and the space race of the 1960s. You may have heard it. NASA spent millions developing a pen that would write in space. To solve the same problem, the Russians spent no money at all – they used pencils.

Max was on me in a flash, but in polite and respectful terms. (Great kid, by the way, but my opinion is biased.)

“Not true,” he said.

“Seriously?” came my reply.

“Think about it. If you write with a pencil in zero gravity, the graphite dust goes everywhere. It’s a hazard to the equipment. They used pens,” he explained.

But, holy crap. If he was right, I was going to eat some serious crow. Me? Deceived by an urban myth? About space, no less? A subject about which I consider myself an expert?

It’s not that I repeat the pen-pencil story every other day. In fact, I can’t even remember the last time I mentioned it. That’s not the issue. The issue is that I heard this a billion gazillion years ago – decades before Al Gore invented the Internet*.

I’d fallen into a perfectly placed trap: it wasn’t from the Internet. I was pretty sure I’d read it. Like, in print, on paper. And I put more credence in a print source.

Suffice to say I was wrong. It’s scary when you’re wrong because you start wondering about all the other things you believe. How much of them are crap?

Answer: I don’t know. But I do know you could drive yourself crazy with the thought of it.

This episode led me to realize there are right ways and wrong ways to respond when you find yourself in the crosshairs of a BS detector. Not suggesting mine is the be-all and end-all, but it’s the roadmap I generally follow when I realize I’ve been intellectually hoodwinked.

1 Don’t argue. Your challenger might be right

Max was 100 percent correct. And right to call BS. I didn’t know that at the time but I wasn’t about to dig in my heels. He is a famously solid source of facts. I know my kid well enough to know that he’s not much of a smoke-blower. When he makes a statement that definitive, you can take it to the bank.

2 Check it out

Here’s where it gets tricky, since BS tropes multiply like viruses online. But with come careful searching, you can usually get to the truth.

Snopes is the go-to for this kind of thing, but it’s not completely watertight. I usually start there. But I rarely end there.

Snopes fully supported Max’s challenge. A chink in the armor. But I am never satisfied with just one source, so I always look for more, like Urban Myths and ThoughtCo’s urban myths page.

3 Find another (reliable) source

Here’s where Google comes in handy. Once you narrow down some keywords based on the Snopes results, do a broad search and see what comes up. This is often all you need to find a reliable source or two – by that, I mean either a recognized, fact-based site like How Stuff Works or Popular Science – not a Liberal/Conservative/Libertarian/Fill in the blank ideology slanted source.

If that doesn’t net results – try hitting the ‘news’ button at the top of your Google results page. This can help sort out the wingnuts (but you still have to be vigilant.)

In the pen-pencil story case, Scientific American was paydirt.

4 Accept your new viewpoint on the issue

Once you’ve accepted the possibility that you had it wrong, it’s time to give yourself permission to change your mind.

One of the things I never understood about politics is how lawmakers and policymakers get skewered for changing their views – getting tarred with the classic ‘flip flop’ epithet. What reasonable, intelligent adults don’t change their minds on issues when confronted with new information?

It’s easy to stick to your errant views and stick with the flat-earth folks. It’s harder to admit you were wrong.

I believe it’s a privilege of humanity to adopt new viewpoints when we discover new information. So when you confirm the error of your old belief – accept the new one, stop repeating the old one and be grateful for the opportunity to act like a human being.

5 Thank the source that set you straight

Not always practical if it was something you heard on the radio or read in a magazine. In my case, I thanked Max for calling me out. Another way to be more human in everyday life.

Even if your revelation comes by way of an anonymous website – you should be able to pen a quick email or comment of gratitude. Every good website has editors behind it making content decisions. And they might like a positive message now again, considering how much they must get yelled at on a daily basis.

Look, we’re never going to rid the world of people who think underarm deodorant causes breast cancer or that glass is really a liquid or that Mikey the Life Cereal TV kid died after eating Pop-Rocks or that hot water freezes faster than cold water. Oops, wait a minute. That last one is actually true. Kind of.

But maybe if more of us were more willing to accept the fact that we’re not always right about every single thing, maybe we could move things forward, just a little. Food for thought.

What about the pens and pencils?!

Right, you’ve been waiting for that. Here’s the story:

Both the American and Soviet space programs started out using pencils. But the hazards were even greater than Max’s single example. True, the dust was a problem. Remember, whether it’s actual lead or graphite, pencil lead is highly conductive of electricity – not a good thing to get into sensitive electronic equipment. Worse, imagine a broken pencil point floating around a space ship. And what might happen when an astronaut inhaled it. And thin, dry wooden sticks in a total oxygen environment? That’s not kindling, it’s fuses.

That’s why they needed pens.

Like many urban myths, this one has a kernel of truth in it. Before the problem was solved, NASA put out a $3,000 contract for a non-flammable mechanical pencil. The manufacturer delivered 24, at a taxpayer cost of around $129 a pop.

That wasn’t such a great PR coup for the space agency when the story went public. And mechanical pencils only solved the flammability issue. Dust and broken leads were still a thing.

So they needed a pen. But not just any pen, a space pen. A non-flammable pen that would write in a total vacuum, in zero gravity, at any angle, at 50 below or 200 above zero degrees.

And preferably one that wouldn’t cost a fortune.

They got their pen. And they didn’t spend a dime developing it. Paul Fisher did that. The mastermind behind Fisher Pen Company, he spent a million bucks of his own money developing the pen that would eventually fly in space. It had a pressurized ink cartridge. It used special ink that would stay liquid in severe cold or heat. And it was all metal, so it wouldn’t burn, even in 100 percent oxygen.

And what did Fisher do with his million-dollar pens? He sold them to NASA at around $2.50 each. Not chump change in 1967, but not exactly Fort Knox, either.

And when the Russians found out about the Space Pen, they wanted them, too. So, with permission from the U.S. government, Fisher sold them to the Russians, for the same price the Yanks paid.

In fact, Fisher Space Pens have been on every manned mission since, from Apollo to Skylab, the Space Shuttle to the International Space Station.

Fisher knew he had a great idea. And he knew he would recoup his investment by selling them to the general public as the pen that helped put men on the moon. 50 years later, they’re still selling, so it’s probably safe to say he was right.

Now you know. Thanks, Max.

*A little urban myth humor, there. Not only did Al Gore not invent the internet, he also never actually claimed he did. 🙂

=SE

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