Bozosity

"The Federal Emergency Management Agency's online aid request form works best with newer versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. It can cause problems for people using Apple or older Windows PCs."

Now that's bogus. Even Republicans have been complaining about the incompetence at FEMA.

You might have heard the Congressional Black Caucus railing about racism in rescue efforts after Hurricane Katrina. I don't know. As far as I can tell, the standard rule for cockups applies: think incompetence before malice. Apart from the current Administration's well-established malice toward Democrats.

There is, unquestionably, deep racism among some people in New Orleans, in the South generally, and in parts of the Federal Government, going back to the aftermath of the Civil War and beyond. That's why a disproportionate number of blacks are poor, and of course it is the poor who lived in the lowest parts of the city, the furthest below sea level. But the poor in New Orleans are not only black. There are Latinos, and Vietnamese, and many others there.

The current problem is that rescue efforts started from high ground, and rescuers turned back whenever their boats or helicopters were full. So help was provided for the shallow end of New Orleans first and most, with much less happening in the deep end for at least the first four days.

One could argue that this scheme rescued the greatest possible number of flood victims in the first few days, but it is clear that it rescued the least possible number of those at greatest risk for as long as possible. Why didn't FEMA think about those at greatest risk more? Well, FEMA management is certainly incompetent enough to account for this, but the Bush administration's well-known contempt for the poor certainly played a major part. It just isn't clear that racism was the problem. They seem to despise the poor equally, not on the basis of ethnicity or national origin but just on the basis of money. And their contempt isn't based only on money. FEMA paying no attention to Mac and Linux users isn't based on poverty, but those are definitely two very liberal minorities, on average). Users of older PCs, OK, that could be money, but never mind.

But I certainly can't claim to know, on the available evidence, that anybody in the current Administration isn't racist.

If you want to do something about bozosity in the world, you have to do something about your own bozosity first. That means coming to grips with your own ignorance. Now there is a fundamental program about ignorance. It's about something you don't know about. One line of attack is to try not to be ignorant about something, that is, to know all about it. This is, of course, not possible. Your ignorance on any subject is and will remain infinitely greater than your knowledge, and besides that, some of what you know with great confidence will turn out to be wrong.

Anyway, studying isn't coming to grips with ignorance, it's trying to deny that the problem is a problem. So here is what we really want to do. We want to be aware of being ignorant of something, without knowing what that is. Some people apparently find this exercise too painful to even think about in the cases that are most important. But let us start with easy versions, and work our way up to the full problem by stages, and hope thereby not to scare ourselves silly.

It is traditional, at least since the myth of Prometheus bringing fire from the Gods to humans, or any Sun-god of wisdom like Apollo, to regard light as a metaphor of understanding. Imagine, then, standing just inside the entrance to a cavern. Where you stand there is still some light, but over there in the back it's pitch black. So you know that you don't know what is in there, and you can see where your knowledge ends and your ignorance begins. In the case of a cave, you can, of course, carry a light in with you. There is a whole technique worked out by spelunkers (cavers) for exploring unknown caves with a minimum risk of death or serious injury, and a wide choice of equipment to take. Spelunkers sum up the essence of the techniques by saying, "There are old cavers and there are bold cavers, but there are no old, bold cavers."

You can get a similar effect by picking up a book on any subject you know nothing about. A history or geography book is, to begin with, a shallow cave where you don't know the facts yet, but you know you are capable of understanding them. There are much darker recesses in the caves of history and geography, once you look at the original source documents, which may conflict, or be based on myths and travellers' tales. A book in a foreign language is quite a bit darker, but if you learn the language, you open up a wonderland of brilliant passages. For most people an advanced math or physics book is the darkest of all. You don't understand what you are looking at, and you may have no idea how to begin. And as Niels Bohr said, "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't."

A useful intermediate case is a novel or short story, particularly in genre fiction (mystery, adventure, science fiction, fantasy, even romance) where you can try to work out in advance what is really going on or how the protagonists will cope. Or not. You don't have to try to solve the puzzle, in fact. You can just read on and see how it comes out.

Puzzles are also useful. You know there is a solution, and that you can find out what it is just by looking, but you can confront your ignorance for an extended period. Maybe you will get the answer, and maybe not, but you have a chance to see how your mind works in a controlled state of ignorance. Are you calm, or pleasurably excited, or in a tizzy? Does your brain race uselessly, or does it start making connections, or are you simply baffled?

A really hard case is facing another human being, and realizing that you don't know how that person thinks. Many of the problems that the world faces come down to an inability to believe that people really think as they do. The supposition arises that these other people must be deluded or lying. Or insane, or evil, or something that means we don't have to look into their beliefs any further.

However, there is more to the problem than that. It may be that they don't think the thoughts you find impossible to imagine. You may have been misinformed, or you may have been informed correctly but you misunderstood.

The hardest case of all is to look into your own mind. It is natural for me to assume that I have good reasons for my beliefs. I am by definition unaware of any persuasive evidence against them. Does that mean that there is no such evidence, or that it exists but I haven't heard about it (perhaps it hasn't even been discovered yet), or that I have heard it but don't believe it, or don't understand how it applies to me? But it is unquestionable, based on the history of physics, that something I firmly believe about the material world is wrong, and, based on other history, that some of what I believe about politics and religion is wrong. You too, and all your friends and relations.

You cannot directly dig beneath the surface of your own mind. There are a number of indirect methods, of which the most intense include psychoanalysis and Zen meditation, in both cases over a period of years.

It is reported that coming to grips with your own ignorance can make you much more tolerant of other people, although this by no means follows automatically. Socrates, for one, get himself killed by insisting on helping other people with their ignorance rather than leaving them be unless they asked for assistance. Which is reported to be the reason why so many Zen meditation centers are on distant mountains, where only the fairly dedicated can be expected to show up.

Who Says Seeing is Believing?

Everybody knows that what you see is not simply what is there. When you get closer to something, you can see more detail. If you turn off all the lights, you don't see anything. We can't see around trees, or buildings, or the earth. The same applies to all of our other senses, and to everything that we hear from others or see on TV, and everything we make up in our own minds. (What I call Neo-Cartesianism: “I thought of it, therefore it is”). But we don't act like we know this. Much of the time, many of us act as if we know everything of any significance. This was the main complaint that Socrates made (or anyway, that's what Plato had Socrates say), and as we know, he got killed mainly for demonstrating that everybody in Athens who was anybody didn't actually know what they were talking about. To their faces.

The Buddhist Surangama Sutra also makes this point, in quite a different way. It gives the example of someone with a defect in the lens of the eye, resulting in the appearance of rainbow light around a lamp flame, and says that when one knows the source of the rainbow light, one is not deceived by it. Would it were so simple. In reality, it takes a lifetime of devotion and constant practice to make a good start on it.

Anyway, the most important result is that we don't know what is good for people, including us. This is the basic reason for the proverb, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” Most of public life is made up of people loudly proclaiming that they have all the answers, and that they know in particular what is good for me, even if I don't. Even so, I am certain that they don’t, mainly because they all vehemently contradict each other, and accuse each other of seeking to destroy the Republic, or Western Civilization, or The One True Religion (whichever) or even the world as a whole.

It is a proverb on the Internet that one should suppose incompetence before malice when things go wrong. Now, although politicians lie [Gasp! No!!! Say it isn’t so!!!!], there is no evidence that any great number of them actually want to destroy the Republic or the world, although some of them want to destroy the Myriad False Religions, even if somebody else's One True Religion is among them. My observation is that there is sufficient incompetence in government to explain everything I’ve seen so far, apart from some of the religious loonies. Of course, I could be wrong about them. Not being able to tell whether you really know anything is the principal form of incompetence, after all.

Let the Unique Gather

"In summary, this…position requires a unique individual with strong…skills and…experience."

The word “unique” is greatly overused and indeed misused in job reqs and in advertising copy. While we are all unique in various ways, there is nobody uniquely qualified for any particular job. True uniqueness of human achievement is not defined by job descriptions, but rather by individual abilities applied to achieving what nobody else would have thought of doing in that way. Like Einstein, or Gandhi, or Henry Kaiser.

Confuse me with the facts

The most common way to be bozotic is not wanting to know something, which seems to afflict everybody in some form. You have some comforting belief, and you won't listen to anything that goes against it. We see this in politics, religion, and to some extent in science and even mathematics. In politics, it is those who cling to ideology of the right, the left, or wherever. In religion, the dogmatists. In science there are of course adherents of lunatic theories of all sorts, including inventors of perpetual motion machines. But even the top scientists get stuck sometimes. The difference there is that top scientists, however much they may dislike an idea, still pay attention to the experimental results that support it.

Einstein, for example, famously hated Quantum Mechanics, which he had a hand in creating. In 1905, his miracle year (annus mirabilis), in addition to his papers on Special Relativity and Brownian motion (conclusively establishing the atomic theory of matter), he wrote a paper on the photoelectric effect, conclusively establishing that light is absorbed in the discrete chunks that we have called quanta ever since. This rounded out Max Planck's 1899 theory that light was emitted in quanta, and set the stage for the development of quantum theory, one of the most successful physical theories ever, and by far the most troubling. Niels Bohr, the acknowledged leader of the process that led to Quantum Mechanics, frequently said things like, "If you are not troubled by Quantum Mechanics, you don't understand it." By that standard and several others, Einstein really understood what Quantum Mechanics was about.

The problem, from Einstein's point of view, was that Quantum Mechanics deals with probabilities, not inherent properties. The difficulty became clear in 1925 with Max Born's probabilistic interpretation of Schrödinger's application of the wave equation to quantum mechanics. It became intolerable to Einstein in 1927 with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.

The wave equation applies to any kind of wave. For water waves, sound waves, the motion of a vibrating string, and many other phenomena, the wave is an observable physical state of matter in an obvious way, like the shape of a water wave, where the essential physical property is height. Sound moves in pressure waves, and there are temperature waves, bending and twisting waves, and other kinds.

But in quantum mechanics, the waves don't represent observable properties. The wave form determines the probability of observing any value of a property of the object such as position, energy, and so on. In general there is a high-probability value, with the probability dropping off very rapidly away from that value. These states do not present much of a problem, because the high-value states behave themselves pretty well. An atom observed in some location is likely to be found near there in the future. An object moving in some direction will be found continuing in that direction if it is not disturbed. In some cases there may be two or even more values of relatively high probability, meaning that there is no such thing as the actual value. In the extreme case, we get Schrödinger's cat, which is alive and dead at the same time, with a mixture of probabilities depending on the decay of one radioactive atom.

The Uncertainty Principle made things much worse. It is a principle of mathematics that a wave form does not have a definite frequency unless it is infinite in extent. More generally a finite wave form has a spread of possible frequencies that depends on its size in space, and the product of the spread in space and the spread in frequency must be greater than a certain constant amount. Since the size of the waveform determines the area in which the object can be found, and the frequency relates to the speed of the motion, determining the object's position means that we don't know its speed of motion, and determining how fast it is moving means that we don't know where it is.

The wave equation and the Uncertainty Principle make it clear that we cannot predict the future with complete precision, and in some cases we can't predict it at all. This is entirely different from Newtonian physics, which was entirely determinate. Of course, in certain areas, Newtonian physics doesn't work, so although we could make precise predictions with it, they would turn out to be completely wrong.

A further problem is that even God cannot predict the future if Quantum Mechanics is correct. This puts it in conflict with all religions that teach the omniscience of God not only concerning the present, but the eternal future. How can God give prophets a look at the future if there isn't only one? How can God have a plan for everything in the universe? This is a problem for many versions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, but not for other religions in general. Anyway, it was a problem for Einstein.

Einstein fought against probabilistic Quantum Mechanics with every resource he could muster. He analyzed the consequences of the theory in considerable detail, and whenever he found a seeming contradiction, he challenged physicists to resolve it. They always did, and they always resolved the seeming contraditions by experiment, that is by showing that the world actually does things that no reasonable person would expect, and that hardly anybody would believe without the evidence of the experiment.

Poor Einstein. It was hard on him, having his most cherished beliefs shattered. Still, he did pay attention to the experiments, and was therefore not a bozo on this point. In fact, he made major contributions to statistical Quantum Mechanics, in particular the Bose-Einstein statistics of indistinguishable particles that can be in the same quantum state, since amply verified.

Now, Quantum Mechanics is known to be wrong on some points, because it is inconsistent with Einstein's General Relativity, which has survived every experimental and observational test. There are some theories designed to replace Quantum Mechanics in a way compatible with General Relativity, although it is too soon to tell which of them may work out. So, in a way, Einstein will have a real victory over Quantum Mechanics. Still, the replacement theory is not going to reestablish determinacy and predictability, not even for God.

Unless, of course, God is just making it all up, and so doesn't need to predict anything. If you really don't want to listen to the facts, you can always find a way to claim that they don't matter.

Thinking, Thinking, Thinking…

I have been having a problem with this blog, which is why I haven't posted in a while. If I take on the current biggest global bozos, I will get bozos thinking that I am doing it purely for political reasons, and that I am therefore utterly bogus. Well, I'll take the risk, because I have to do it. Hard-line Republicrats are bozos, and that's all there is to it. So are hard-line Greens, Libertarians, and Independents. They are all bogus, as well, because they think that everybody else is bozotic or worse. So forget it. I'm going to call them as I see them.

Now let us get clear about this political thing. Gandhi pointed out that you don't convert enemies by attacking them, but by befriending them. An even earlier example is Shakyamuni Buddha converting the murderer Angulimala, who was astonished that anybody would not be afraid of him, and would wish to be his friend.

So let me remind you that when I discuss politics, I do not mean to imply that everybody in a particular party is a bozo. A lot of people are trying hard to understand and to do the right thing, in every party. I may disagree with them, but I don't claim that they are mentally inferior, or simply lying about what they want, which I hear others do.


I'll have to explain all this further, I know. But now, let's get started.

One of the fundamental design principles of the U.S. Constitution is to try to get good, or at least adequate, government from an assortment of self-promoting rascals by setting their interests against each other. We call this the Separation of Powers between the Legislature, the Executive, and the Judiciary. That's the main reason not to mind the rascals too much, but we do have to make sure that none of them get too far ahead of the others. Of course, any political party you listen to will tell you that the rascals have gotten out of hand, and presumably there is something in that idea.

So I approve of the Supreme Court telling the Bush Administration that U.S. law applies in Guantanamo, so they have to give the prisoners Due Process, in the same way that I approve of the Supreme Court batting down some of Abraham Lincoln's and FDR's excesses. I don't like a President having the power to put people away, no matter how nasty any of them might be, without charge. In fact, it seems to me that we fought a great big war over things like Imprisonment During the King's Pleasure in the days of King George III, and our George III, Jr. may profit by his example.

I also approve of the President appointing members of the Supreme Court, so that over time all parties get a say in interpreting the Supreme Law of the Land. I also like government gridlock, when one party has a majority in the House of Representatives, and the other in the Senate. It's like Aesop's Fable of the Frogs who Wanted a King. They complained about King Log, which never did anything, but they complained a lot more about King Stork, who went around eating some of them up.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

Today is a holiday in much of the US, in honor of a man once simultaneously hailed as a prophet and reviled as a public enemy, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and hounded by the FBI with charges of Communism.

John Kennedy said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable." He meant the Communist countries, of course. It turned out to apply to the Civil Rights struggle, where non-violence mostly won out, and even more to Vietnam, where repression escalated to ever more violence. It also threatened to undo many of the gains of the Civil Rights movement by siphoning off money, attention, and will from social programs, among other ills that fell disproportionately on the poor in general and Blacks in particular. Kennedy's statement remains applicable today.

Who were the people making peaceful revolution impossible in Kennedy's time?

The segregationist South was keeping Blacks down, of course, but so were a lot of people up North. Dick Gregory summed it up, saying, "In the South they don't care how close you get, 'long as you don't get too big, and in the North they don't care how big you get, 'long as you don't get too close."

Then of course, the US, the Soviet Union, and their allies fighting the Cold War, made sure that almost every country in the world was under either a Communist or anti-Communist dictatorship. More particularly, the US and its allies vs. North Vietnam and its allies, messed up Vietnam, and then Cambodia, Laos, and other neighboring territories.

This was nothing new, of course. Slavery created violent revolution in many countries, notable Haiti early in the 19th century. France put the new nation under embargo, and so did the United States. The President, George Washington, and the Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, were both slave owners, with a far greater horror of slave uprisings than sympathy for fellow revolutionaries and fighters for human rights. The US is still at it, blocking development loans to Haiti from the International Development Bank.

There are many other such remnants of repression of peaceful revolution. Hungary and Czechoslovakia tried to reform their respective varieties of Communism, resulting in counter-revolutionary Soviet invasions.

Fighting continues against remnants of repression of social change and human rights, and outright murder, all over the world, and people still live with the damage done in previous centuries. Here are just a few examples.

• Japan took over Korea in 1905, and outlawed the Korean language in 1935. The Japanese have not apologized, and the Koreans have not forgiven.


• England took over Ireland starting in 1170. The violence has not entirely subsided.


• Kurds are not allowed to use their own language in Turkey and Syria.


• Albanians were not allowed to use their own language in Yugoslavia as a whole, or in several of the Yugoslav republics, including Serbia and Macedonia, after Yugoslavia broke up.


• King Leopold of Belgium, once the most hated man in the world, ruled the Belgian Congo as his personal property, under the general rule that Belgian forces could kill anybody who got out of line on the spot. In the 1960s those who had not paid any attention around the world were astonished by the resulting savagery of the Congolese rebellion, which continues in the form of frequent civil war to this day.


• Catholics and Protestants have not gotten over the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, which resulted in the Thirty Years War and innumerable further persecutions, wars, and rebellions.


• Some Muslims are still fighting the Crusaders who taught them an utterly barbaric and lawless mode of warfare.


• Repressive Arab regimes try to blame everything on the US, but the terrorists try to bomb their Arab rulers as much as they try to bomb the US.


• Numerous factions in Israel and Palestine are keeping the pressure on everybody (not just the "other" side) to keep up the violence.


• British colonial rule and its aftermath gave us revolution and civil war in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Iraq, and many other places.


• French colonial rule gave us the Algerian rebellion, the war in Vietnam, and other issues.


• The Soviet Union taught its allies and puppets to rule with savage brutality. North Korea is still at it, and Chechnya is still trying to escape it.


• The United States taught its allies and puppets in Latin America and some other places to rule with savage brutality. Guatemala, among others, has not yet recovered.


• The Iranian revolution and the current theocracy are direct results of the CIA overthrow of an elected government in Iran and the restoration of the Shah.

Violent revolution continues in varying degrees (sometimes moderated by truces) in the Congo, the Sudan, Peru, Nepal, Turkey, Northern Ireland, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Liberia, Israel, Russia, China, and other countries.

Why do people make peaceful revolution impossible? Fear, I suppose, is the immediate motive. Somehow, people seem to assume that peaceful revolution is inherently impossible, and will always turn violent. Then they repress it, and then they get violent revolution, and then they say, "See? We told you so!"

So bogosity, Us vs. Them, seems to be the real problem. It is after all obvious that We are more important or more worthy, and They don't count, and of course can't be trusted. They aren't even really human, the way We are, and They are inherently violent, unlike Us inherently peace-loving people.

Oddly enough, when the European Union demanded that Turkey stop oppressing the Kurds in Turkey if they wanted to have any chance of entering the EU, and the Turks did lighten up, the Kurds stopped bombing Turks.

I could cite other examples, but I rest my case, and President Kennedy's and Dr. King's, and Gandhi's.