Best Opinion: Boston Globe

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/

"It's one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one," says Joe Keohane in The Boston Globe. "'Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,' Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789." The firm American belief in this notion is at the heart of our democracy. We believe that "knowledge is the best remedy" to "ignorance and misinformation," and that if people have the facts they'll be "clearer thinkers and better citizens." Unfortunately, we may have been wrong all along. Here, an excerpt: