Witches in the Laundromat

I spent some time this morning in the laundromat, reading about witch hunts in fifteenth century Europe. The hunts originated when Pope Innocent VIII commissioned the writing of the Malleus Maleficarum - a how-to manual for identification of witches with horrific details on how to exact confessions via torture. This book, along with plentiful funding for witch-hunters, led to a massacre of countless innocents; not to be confused with the Pope who started it all.

One particular village slaughtered around 150 people - mostly women, many of them children, amazingly well documented - for the crime of witchcraft in a single year. Disturbingly, such was the norm for villages all across Europe. Multiply 150 witches per year by all the villages in Europe for a few years and you get (as a rough order of magnitude) ... hundreds of thousands? Millions?

Pope Innocent VIII died in 1492, the allegedly illegitimate father of 16 children. As his death neared physicians attempted 3 "transfusions" to save the ailing pontiff, resulting in the death of three young boys who "donated" blood. (See here, last paragraph).

And that was the same year Columbus discovered the Americas.

When my wash came to a stop I put my book down and loaded my wet things into the dryers. An older woman came pretty much out of nowhere to advise me that dryer number 5 ran hot and would dry my clothes off faster, thus saving me a few quarters. I had my doubts - because I always have doubts - but loaded my clothes into machines 5, 6, and 7, just to see what would happen.

Human beings, in general, believe what they're told far too easily. On the one hand, there is some benefit. When someone is told "don't eat the red fruit because they're poison," it's beneficial to believe the source without checking. Even if the source is wrong, no real harm comes from believing the bad information. On the other hand, failing to check facts for oneself leads to an abundance of bad information floating about, like "the earth is flat", "witches cause rain storms", or "Barack Obama is a Muslim."

Or for that matter, dryer 5 runs hot.

After 8 minutes dryers 6 and 7 stop spinning, but dryer 5 is still going strong. In fact, I have time to paw through my laundry from the other two dryers, extract the dry pieces, and combine what's left into a single dryer before dryer 5 completes.

The woman's advice wasn't bad, but her facts were wrong. Yes, it's advantageous to use dryer 5, but not because it runs hot. It runs long, giving one a few extra minutes of drying.

It was not long enough to save me any quarters, however. I still needed to run the vaunted dryer five a second time.

Nevertheless, the issue remains - people fail to check the facts. When presented with a supposed truth people are more likely to simply accept it, rather than verify it first. Failing to test the validity of supposed truths can result in horrible consequences, like the slaughter of a hundred thousand witches.