The Incredible Stupidity of Facts by guest blogger Danny Lemieux
Bookworm on Jul 07 2009 at 4:31 pm | Filed under: Climate change
One of the most prescient books that I ever remember reading as a teenager has to be Alvin Toffler’s 1970 classic Future Shock. To recap its theme, Toffler predicted that the pace of new information was increasing at such a rapid rate that it would overcome peoples’ capacities to absorb that information. The resulting effect on people would be like the proverbial overheated computer that begins to smoke, spark and finally explode! I think we are there.
I am a scientist. My specialty is biochemistry and nutrition. The most important thing about a (good) science education it that it teaches one to become skeptical. The scientific method is one that foregoes conclusions until they have been fully tested. Today, however, there are many, many bad scientists – people who begin with conclusions and then seek facts to fit their template. As Bookworm so aptly put it, these are Liberals that begin with conclusions and peddle them with facts.
I am on this topic because I recently had a conversation with a lovely Liberal lady who looked me straight in the eye and told me that NutraSweet (aspartame) was poison because it broke down into formaldehyde in the body. Nothing that I could say on the strength of my credentials in chemistry, foods and nutrition could dissuade this lady from her conclusions, including the fact that aspartame is simply two linked amino acids, aspartame and phenylalanine (the building blocks of proteins) that are essential to our diet and that are commonly found in all kinds of foods that we consume in large amounts. Without these two amino acids, we would die.
I eventually figured out what she meant…I think. For a small number of people who suffer from a condition called phenylketonuria, phenylalanine cannot be properly metabolized and does become poisonous. This is a metabolic anomaly, a bit like the relationship between Type I juvenile diabetes and sugar. The web, meanwhile, is full of scientifically jargoned albeit preposterous allegations about aspartame, wrapped in webs of paranoid conspiracies. Disregard the facts: for this lady, this template represented an intellectual safe zone and hate receptacle that helped her to better comprehend her too-complex world.
I believe that man-made Climate Change hysteria is another symptom of Future Shock. I have never believed in man-made climate change because its proponents never could clear my common-sense test. The test comprises a series of questions to the climate modelers, as for example:
- What is the leading greenhouse gas? Answer: water, 95% of total.
- What percentage of greenhouse gases is carbon dioxide? Answer: 2.5% of the total.
- What percentage of carbon dioxide is man-created? Answer: 2.5% of the total.
- How does water vapor affect climate change? Answer: nobody has a clue because it is way too complicated to understand, much less model on a computer.
- So how can mankind affect the climate if total man-made carbon dioxide represents only (2.5% x 2.5% = 0.0625% of total greenhouse gases)? Answer: the debate is over.
- What role does the sun play in climate change? Answer: this is way too complicated to model, therefore let’s keep it a constant value and ignore it.
- Occam’s Razor principle would say that we should consider the most obvious factors behind climate change first…isn’t that the sun? Answer: you are Nazi vermin and a traitor to Mother Gaia.
The sad thing is that we are about to find out that these pseudo-scientific hysterias have profound real-life, real-world costs. They are being very cleverly manipulated by demagogues that enrich themselves by cleverly manipulating a future shock population with just enough kernels of truth to satisfy their wildest fears and conspiracy fantasies, the facts be d***ed.
I fear that the general entertainment-obsessed culture isn’t interested in math, science, logic or critical thinking. There’s just too much information out there to absorb and, besides, it’s a lot easier to create abstract conspiracy templates upon which to unload our fears, frustrations and doubts. We as a society seem to prefer letting Hollywood do our critical thinking for us with wildly ridiculous disaster and conspiracy movies. Jaywalking finalists rule, sad to say!
As the Book of Ecclesiastes proclaims, there really isn’t anything new under the sun. We’ve been here before. During periods in the Middle Ages marked by famines, pestilence and war, people looked for convenient explanations for all their troubles. So, they found “witches” to blame and to burn as sacrifices to their fears. For all of our veneer of modern science, technology and communications, we really haven’t changed our fundamental nature. Only today, the witches are conservatives, Christians, carbon industries, capitalists and Sarah Palin.
Are any of you other Bookworm salonistas as pessimistic as I am about what things wicked this way come?
Related posts:
- Five people in a kitchen — by guest blogger Danny Lemieux
- Biden’s “facts”
- WMDs found — by guest blogger ElanaMama
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15 Responses to “The Incredible Stupidity of Facts by guest blogger Danny Lemieux”
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Witches: A piece about the witch-hunting of Sarah Palin, and witch-hunting as a general phenomenon, here.
Regarding the determination of opinion by images & entertainment rather than by actual logic, see my post metaphors, interfaces, and thought processes.
In answer to the question as posed; yes.
The template has been constructed and repeatedly re-enforced. I fear it is too late to break it.
Book, Danny’s post is a compliment to your blog. You certainly bring together an eclectic group. I am humbled.
Me! I am! I am convinced we are doomed to end in a horrid gray socialist workers paradise and I am horrified. If we are all poor, how will I feed my cats? And maybe my dog if I can find one. That really worries me more than anything else.
I have been a conservative since 6th grade when I read an article in the World Book encyclopedia which included a table explaining what certain words meant when we used them and what they meant when commies used them. I could see instantly that commies lie and I never looked back. After reading everything I could about the Soviet Union and forming a picture of it that was gray and drab and old and sad, I can’t tell you how shocked I was when I saw a program on TV that was filmed in Russia and it was beautiful. This was not in Moscow, it was outside of any city or town, and somehow I was surprised to see that the grass was a brilliant emerald. I think it would be easier to live under communism if the whole world is as gray as the opening sequence in “The Wizard of Oz.” It will be very hard to live under a fascist dictatorship having known the freedom we once knew.
But.
But.
I am now going to read this copy of “Take Back Your Government” by none other than Robert A. Heinlein that I just found on my bookshelf, introduction by Jerry Pournelle. I agree with that guy in National Review today who wrote that we need our own “Rules for Radicals” and I’m going to see what I can come up with. We need a Repeal Party. Who will help?
PS
Book, Danny: barring objection I will copy the post and email it to my address book. I would link to it, but fear it would be ignored. I will include appropriate recognition, of course.
Yup. The answer to any problem is Easy, Obvious, and Wrong. And, you are right about the witch dynamic. Once people have a ready diagnosis, the want to DO something. Burn the witch.
People also want to Belong; to agree, and to be agreed with. But, they also — in seeming contradiction — want to be among the insiders who “know the truth.” That gives them status in their own minds, and is a dangerously powerful drug in the wrong hands. Hitler, Jim Jones, et al.
Logic, and facts have nothing whatever to do with it. It is truly sad to see our great Universities, which around 1,000 years ago began the slow climb out of the Dark Ages teaching Logic, and Critical Thinking, and Philosophy — previously invented by the Greeks millennia before that — now sinking back into the ooze of the anti-intellectual swamp, and calling it higher learning, or whatever.
Where is our Ireland, our Alexandria? Where can we go to escape this onslaught of idiocy, this celebration of Dumb, and, God willing, preserve reason, and knowledge?
Why couldn’t it be Tribbles?
Good one.
Danny, really nicely done. I think your litmus test for global warming should get wide exposure.
I’ve recently been rereading “1984″ and am seeing some disquieting parallels between what Orwell had to say about the Party’s mindset and what I’m seeing among the Gramscian/Obamist/Ayersites.
While Orwell went overboard in his description of the naked malice and grayness of the society that he described, he was not too far off in describing the mindset of people like Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Franken, Emanuel and other leftist lights. It is that none of them are inspired by any real regard for the so-called underprivileged or downtrodden (especially blacks). Their main concern is power and self-aggrandizement—how do I get power, stay in power and use power to force my vision of “good” upon the world while living as insularly and high on the hog as I can?
The lever that the Party in “1984″ used to maintain power was to control the past. It made sure that there was no concept, let alone record, of anything that could have happened before that would have contradicted the Party’s chronicle of its inevitable and necessary rise to power. The equivalent in our society of the Party’s control over the past is the universities and mainstream media. Our children simply are never told that things ever happened or are happening in anything other than a Marxist context, thus the spreading of the execrable lies of a third-rate history scholar and hater like Howard Zinn among ignorant high school and college kids.
Modern media and mass “education” have produced history’s most cosseted proles, the class of ignorant, oblivious addicts to cheap entertainment—and even cheaper sentiments and explanations—whom poor, deluded Winston Smith thought might one day mount a revolution.
Good luck with that.
If we don’t kick some serious ass in the 2010 elections, I’m beginning to think that our ultimate fallback might have to be a nuclear-armed Republic of Texas.
That there is a tendency among those pushing AGW action to demonize those who disagree with them is a sad sign. Was it Paul Krugman who talked about “traitors to the earth?” I get the impression that many of the people who push AGW the most are those who are fairly ignorant of basic science. Case in point: the Goracle. I have forgotten more math, science, and engineering than he ever learned.
I recall books from Barry Weisberg in the 1970s purporting to claim that Marxism/Socialism was the key to establishing environmental sanity. That ignored the environmental depredations of the USSR, where big projects were not subject to public scrutiny the way they were in a free society.
Chavez recently harassed the owner of the only opposition “free” TV station, Globovision, for having had hunting trophies in his office. Chavez’s financial strangulation of PDVSA, the previously well-run national oil company, has resulted in much more environmental depredation by the collapse of basic maintenance than hunting trophies ever did.
Here is some science in a more apolitical vein, I hope. Some of the photos are from Marin County. There are many shots of wildlife from unmanned cameras. As an old ecofreak, I can get into these shots. You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.
http://cameratrapcodger.blogspot.com
Did someone say Goracle! Ahem….Gringo
(snip)
Mr Gore admitted that it was difficult to persuade the public that the threat from climate change was as urgent as that from Hitler.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6658672.ece
It rather redefines the word ‘chutzpah’.
Danny:
Excellent, clear as day even to a non-scientist.
The lovely Liberal lady, spoke volumes by rejecting facts.
Believe the lie, rather than admit she’s wrong.
Please pass the NutraSweet, I have a sour taste in my mouth.
You also need to multiply that by the US percentage of contribution to global CO2, and then by the percentage of reduction Cap-and-trade will produce in the US (taking into account most of the production will simply move to other countries) to get a better idea of how truly ridiculous it is to strangle our economy for this particular brand of snake oil.
Man-made global warming theories and their models have essentially failed in all their important predictions about physical phenomenon that they have made. What I think is driving the current regulatory push (while at the same time the scientific evidence is swinging the opposite way) is that politicians have figured out how to grab power with the issue, and big business has figured out how to make money off of it. Just like Freon and the hole in the ozone was essentially a dead issue until DuPont got behind it because their patent on Freon was running out, and they could maintain their dominance in the market by having the government force everyone to use their newer products.
To paraphrase something Instapundit said about tax shelters (http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/81555/) if a law doesn’t make any sense, just say “it’s probably to pay someone off” and you’ll be right nine tenths of the time.
In this case, green illogic is a useful cover for paying off the energy and agribusiness sectors and putting them into permanent debt to the Democrats.
>>if a law doesn’t make any sense, just say “it’s probably to pay someone off” and you’ll be right nine tenths of the time.>>
Heh. That’s the basic principle(sort of) we use (husband and I) as a guideline for most of the propositions on the ballot. That is…if it requires a tax or a bond, forget about it.
suek
I think it’s called the 9/10th Laws of Return (giggling)
9/10ths of the time, it is the tried and true thinking of follow the money
1/10th of the time it may return to the voter, who bankrolled it.
Makes sense to me, too.
[...] Lemieux at Bookworm’s Room on future shocks and global warming. The sad thing is that we are about to find out that these pseudo-scientific hysterias have [...]
Danny –
I just sat down and read this post. It is tremendous. Your reasoning and writing is so crystal clear in this piece.
The only thing I would add is the following: I think the reason that so many are not interested in math, science, logic or critical thinking is not so much because of the volume of information (although I agree that it is a factor) but because of what you said earlier: obsession with entertainment. I will not say that curiosity is dead – it isn’t. But I think it exists only in pockets.
That wouldn’t be so terrible except that many of the non-curious and entertainment-centered have the power to vote and make other consequential decisions, not to mention sway others with their half-baked ideas.
I also am quite pessimistic about what is coming. I have to keep my chin up, though, because my mom is a bit depressed about what is happening to our country. I’ve found her in tears a couple of times. I feel for her. But I can’t really tell her not to worry because I’m afraid she’s right.
Deana