Einstein, the Dalai Lama, and the Forgotten Art of Fact Checking

Einstein, a genius frequently misquoted online.

I'm sure you've been put off, as I have, by the sight of gadget-obsessed teens fidgeting with their iPhones, seemingly oblivious to their surroundings. Clutching their devices, they invade crowded trains and WiFi-enabled cafes. Staring at glowing screens for hours on end, they look more dead than alive. They resemble a zombie horde, disengaged from humanity, animated solely by Facebook updates and Twitter feed.

So it must be pretty gratifying when you stumbled on a quote from Einstein calling these anti-social kids "idiots." The quote has been circulating online for quite some time now. It's usually accompanied by a photo (or photos) of young people ignoring one another, all preoccupied with smartphones and tablets. It reads:

I fear the day technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.

The trouble is, there's no compelling evidence to show Einstein said that. Most likely, it's something people wish he'd said.

Then there's this bit of wisdom, supposedly from His Holiness the Dalai Lama, seeping into the collective consciousness of social media through repeated sharing. When asked what surprised him most about humanity, His Holiness reportedly replied:

Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.

Profound and compact, the lines remind us about our misplaced priorities. It's the kind of sentiment you'd expect from an enlightened Buddhist. I have in fact seen this quote enshrined on the walls of at least two friends. But did it really come from the Dalai Lama? Some simple fact-checking exercises would have raised questions about the origin of the quote.

I'm not talking about the kind of old-fashioned fact-checking that fedora-wearing newspaper reporters used to do. You don't have to peep through keyholes and eavesdrop on private conversations. You don't need to write to Einstein's lawyers and request permission to examine his personal correspondence and papers. Nor do you need to contact the Dalai Lama's press office to verify the quote. I'm suggesting something much simpler: Doing Google searches on the suspected text strings.

If a quote attributed to a public figure is authentic, search results would invariably yield the name of a book, a paper, or a speech where it came from, along with the date and circumstances under which the statement was made. You should be suspicious if your searches produce a string of websites pointing back at one another, going round and round (sort of like a bunch of defendants giving one another alibi, without ever producing an independent witness to verify their whereabouts).

The Einstein quote set off my alarm bells because it just didn't make sense. How can technology "surpass"--or become superior to--human interaction? Did he mean to warn us about the danger of relying on remote communication devices for social interaction? If so, that's a very awkward way of phrasing it. Did he somehow foresee the rise of social media (perhaps during one of his time-traveling romps into the future)?

Quote Investigator, a site devoted to debunking fake quotes, checked out this saying and concluded it was most likely a made-up quote. It tracked the quote back to one possible origin: a fictional dialog in the movie Powder (1995, Hollywood Pictures), where one character said, "It’s become appallingly clear that our technology has surpassed our humanity," and another ascribed it to Einstein.

If you've ever heard the Dalai Lama speak (or seen YouTube clips of him speaking), you'd know that his English is not perfect (that's part of his charm, in my view). So a quote attributed to him with perfectly balanced sentences, with every preposition in its right place, deserves at least a closer look.

In Wikiquote's entry for Tenzin Gyatso (the Dalai Lama's Tibetan monastic tittle), the article lists the much-recited "Man. Because he sacrifices ..." quote under "Misattributed." It writes, "This appears to be a loose adaptation of the work of Reata Strickland, who has published it as An Interview with God." (Those interested in tracing the origin of the quote further may also consult the following correction notice published at The Global Ripple.)

Never mind that ordinary web surfers have been too quick to accept a quote without demanding proper citation. Forbes magazine published an entire column based on this erroneous quote. "The Dalai Lama is Wrong," declared the magazine's contributor Erik Kain in the title of his piece. Then he proceeded to criticize His Holiness for "speaking from a place of enormous privilege about a world that, for all his spiritual wisdom, he simply cannot fathom." Despite some comments pointing out that the quote--the core of the article--was a misattribution, the article still stands today, with no postscript addressing the error.

When the questionable nature of the quote was exposed, some, to my surprise, seemed unfazed by the intellectual fraud committed against them. On Facebook, when the Dalai Lama's quote was revealed as a misattribution, one commenter replied, "Hoax or not, it's a good point, false attribution notwithstanding." Another echoed, "It is a valid lesson of life never the less (sic)." 

Similarly, when The Damien Zone published an article revealing the quote as fake, one commenter wrote, "I shared the quote, but that doesn’t mean I necessarily believe the Dalai Lama said it, nor do I care if he did, didn’t, or if someone else did."

How widespread is this attitude to lower the threshold for factual accuracy, I wonder? Is it acceptable to put words in famous people's mouth, as long as the made-up quote is adequately inspiring? Has the reading public become so cavalier about journalistic integrity? 

Don't get me wrong. I share the concern for technology's influence on society expressed in the so-called Einstein quote. I also find nuggets of wisdom in the alleged Dalai Lama saying. I believe they deserve to be shared and repeated for their content. But it's not right to give them unwarranted credibility by pretending they're from a scientific genius and a spiritual leader.

Where's the harm in circulating a few feel-good sound bites misattributed to certain cultural icons, you might ask. The danger is, we'll be inviting bigger lies, with far greater consequences. The tendency to share first and question later produces the kind of fiasco where, after the Boston Marathon bombing, Reddit's online forum fueled amateur sleuthing activities that led to wrongly identifying innocent people as suspected terrorists. (Reddit has apologized for the incident.) 

In Burma, growing up under military rule, I was limited to two government-run newspapers as my news sources: The Guardian and The Working People's Daily. They were both propaganda machines for the totalitarian regime. I learned to read between the lines, to question the printed words, to always find corroborating sources before accepting something as fact. In that political climate, truth inevitably became a rare commodity, often a casualty of the government's PR campaigns.

With free blog-hosting sites, camera-equipped devices, and omnipresent web connectivity, everyone is turning into a citizen journalist today. We all have the power to broadcast, for better or worse. That's why I think everyone should also become a diligent fact checker. If we voluntarily forgo our responsibility to differentiate fact from fraud, if we take truth for granted, we will indeed become a generation of idiots. You don't have to be Einstein to figure that out.