It's a big number anyway

When T. Boone Pickens ran a national advertising campaign for his plan to reduce foreign oil consumption, he cited the total costs to the USA at $700 billion a year. Both Barrack Obama and John McCain cite $700 billion as the amount transferred from the US to other nations for oil. However, the figure is overstated by hundreds of billions; Pickens calculated using the maximum price for a barrel of crude oil and then rounded up to the nearest hundred billion. So in this day and age, regarding one of the largest national issues, in full view, someone with a vested interest can inflate a number and it can spread as if it were a fact not subject to scrutiny.

Another example is the myth we need to drink 8 glasses of water every day; there is no scientific basis for this number, it amounts to folklore. Similarly, we use much more than 10% of our brains and men don't think about sex every 7 seconds. And for what it's worth, there are not enough nuclear weapons to kill everyone on the planet.

Pickens and his $700 billion figure are not too cumbersome - there are a lot of dollars spent on foreign oil and a large number helps advertise it is an important issue - but the lesson is that this misinformation can happen. Those with much to gain have an incentive to make numbers in line with their own interests. Pickens and his claims are advertised on television and repeated by Presidential candidates/pundits, so the problem is how can we use the Internet as an antidote for misinformation instead of a source of misinformation. I was taught in grade school three written sources confirmed a fact as common knowledge (no need to cite); I found examples of evaluation criteria for Internet sites, but nothing as jumps out as a reliable rule of thumb.