Bozosity

Hold onto that thought

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts."--Sherlock Holmes, A Scandal in Bohemia, by Arthur Conan Doyle

Let us think about a scientific discovery that will be made next year. What will it be? What field of science will it be in? Physics, organic chemistry, astronomy? Who knows? I don't. I can't say what discoveries will be made next year. I assume that there will be some, but that's about it. We're not getting anywhere with this, but at least we can talk about the likelihood that there will be discoveries. Those doing the research have a pretty good idea what questions they are asking, and experience shows that some of them get answers within the next year.

Now let us think about a scientific discovery that was made last year. In this case I might well have a specific one in mind, although I haven't told you yet. Well, OK, I'm thinking of the measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation that, among other things, finally pinned down the value of the Hubble Constart, about midway between the competing values that various scientists had been arguing for.

Two years ago, the value of the Hubble Constant was next year's news. Astronomers know the value now, but didn't then. So we can hold those two thoughts in our minds, and discuss what they didn't know in the light of what we do know. Most people who try this exercise, however, find it impossible to recapture the ignorance of the earlier time, and assume that whoever guessed right was somehow brighter or better than those who got it wrong. Hindsight is 20/20, as the saying goes.

In this case, however, both sides were wrong, and it is clear that Holmes was right. Both sides in the debate were wrong, and by about the same amount. They had data, indeed, but not data of the quality to support their judgments, and now that we have good data, we have the answer with it.

Whether in a scientific inquiry, or a criminal case, or in the affairs of everyday life, almost everybody tries to decide the outcome without collecting adequate data. Simply by not doing that, but by keeping an open mind and seeking data, one can appear as a genius.

Keeping an open mind means being able to hold more than one idea about a particular subject in your mind at the same time, without pressuring yourself to choose one.

We don't teach this in our schools, which attempt to deal only in right answers. This is the fundamental flaw of trying to run a school system on the basis of standardized tests.

If you would like a simple demonstration of the difficulty of this enterprise, turn on a TV and find a sporting event where you know nothing of the participants, and as little as possible about the sport. Watch yourself, not just the show, and take note how you are drawn to root for one side or another, one contestant or another. If you find this simple experiment interesting, try it in other situations. If you keep at it, you will notice that you start to get better at it. I hope you find that experience rewarding, so that you keep on doing it, since it is one of the most important things you can do in your life. What's more, if you keep at it, you will eventually find out some of the others.

Here is a particularly odd set of ideas for you to practice on. See if you can fit them into your mind together. Those who believe that they know the absolute, final truth are those who are least likely to recognize the truth when they meet it. Those who are aware of their ignorance and the natural tendency to prejudgment are more likely to know something.

For an advanced exercise, try a story on the news about which there is some controversy but where you have no reason to take sides. Observe the reported facts and the competing opinions. Say to yourself, "They don't have time to give us all the facts, and they probably don't have them all. So the situation may be quite different from what they are telling us. Let us see what this story turns into next, and what others say about it."

How do I bogot? Let me count the ways

George Burns used to say, "The most important thing in show business is sincerity [pause] and if you can fake that you can do anything." This is the heart of the bogosity problem.

The essence of bogosity itself is the Us vs. Them idea, where for one reason or another, it doesn't matter to Us what They think, as long as we can get Them to do what We want, or otherwise get Our way.

Lying for profit is the most obvious form of bogosity. We would hardly need to discuss it, except that it takes so many forms, and its practitioners have found so many ways to fake sincerity. Con men, politicians, and seducers are prominent varieties of practitioner. If they are really good at it, their victims may never figure out that they were told any lies. The movie The Sting shows one way of doing this.

Then there is fiction, clearly labeled as such. That by itself is not bogus. However, the writer of fiction can easily slant the story to make a point. Much fiction is politically motivated in one way or another, as in the cases of the comedies of Aristophanes, and the novels of Jonathan Swift, Voltaire, or Ayn Rand. Whether you think that any one of these is bogus depends mainly on whether you agree with them, and whether you are bogus enough to think that that is the deciding factor. In movies and TV the effect can be multiplied by the actors and directors, and by the use of music, costumes, sets, spectial effects and much more. Politics as carried out on TV is just the most obvious example.

More problematic are the bogus who believe in their bogosity. They may really be sincere, in which case they don't have to fake it. They aren't trying to lie to you, no matter how much of what they say is not actually the case. We get this from people suffering from life-threatening disease who are going through the denial stage. The people who deny the link between the HIV virus and AIIDS, or who deny the existence of HIV, are often in this state. More commonly, people have no idea how to evaluate the truth of what they hear, and they tend then to latch on to theories that match their preconceived opinions and their emotional reactions. Believers in most isms are like this, as are believers in crackpot pseudo-scientific theories. We also get this in the form of religious, political, and social hypocrisy. John the Baptist, for example, is recorded to have said to a group of Pharisees and Sadducees, "Ye generation of vipers, who told you to flee from the wrath to come?" and he wouldn't baptize them.

The really toughest are nearly invisible to us. This includes the case just above when it is a matter of our own opinions, but even more than that the cases where the whole society, or at least the whole of some segment, believes in some form of nonsense. It can get so bad that those who don't believe feel impelled to go along and to keep their moths shut. The US saw that in the time of slavery, and the following time of Jim Crow, which are now almost universally held to be bogus. Current issues are harder. There may be two or more factions on some issue, such as taxes, regulation of businesses, Gay Rights, Affirmative Action, civil rights, fighting terrorism, abortion, global warming, Big Government and so on. In each case, two or more factions may be mostly holding bogus opinions, or holding opinions in a bogus, uninformed manner that makes them useless even if they are accidentally correct on some point or other.

Let me give one example of this phenomenon. It is generally agreed that election systems using pre-punched cards are no longer acceptable because of the hanging chad problem. Most people have therefore concluded, on no further evidence, that all punched-card systems are bad. This is not the case. The Hollerith punched card company, founded in the 1880s, and its successor, IBM, brought punched-card technology to a high state of perfection, with an error rate of less than one on a billion cards. The cards are not prepunched. The punch mechanism cuts all four sides of a rectangular hole cleanly and completely, and the punch then fills the space under the hole, pushing the cut chad completely away from the card.

At the same time, there has been a mad rush to all-electronic voting systems, as though nobody had ever heard of computer error or software bugs. The big problem with an all-electronic system is the lack of an audit trail. If something goes wrong, there is no way to discover the problem and to diagnose it. Furthermore, the current electronic systems use proprietary software which is not open for inspection to validate its correct application of election and counting rules, its security, and any auditability it may provide.

Not that any of these bogosities are going unopposed. People with experience in election systems and an understanding of the issues are promoting solutions that actually address those issues, including security, auditability, and ways to validate election software, or even to write Open Source election software that anybody could examine. But you will notice that you don't hear about this in the media.

The political Right and the political Left agree that the media are bogus (for the same reasons, but of course not based on the same selection of evidence), and so does everybody else I know. That may be, but if it is so, isn't that because we, the audience, demand that the media give us bogosity of one persuasion or another?

Bogosity Revealed

Animals, we are given to understand, are not bogus. They act according to instinct, emotion, and desire, and what you see is what you get. We humans are definitely bogus. Where in our ancestry did bogosity arise? How did it evolve? What is the missing link of bogosity, ad more generally, of bozosity? Nobody knows. The origins of bogosity and bozosity are lost in the mists of prehistory. We can conjecture that they took hold somewhere in the period where language and clothing were invented, but we don't even know where or when either of those events or processes happened, or which came first.

I mention language because it is such an effective instrument of bogosity, and clothing because so much bogosity focuses on it. Fashion, in particular, but actually the whole concept of dressing modestly, or dressing at all. This is of course a big deal among many religions, but consider what Judaism, and by inference Christianity and Islam say about it. Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The immediate consequence of this error was that they noticed that they were naked, and were ashamed, and set about making clothing out of fig leaves, which God told them they shouldn'ta oughta done. The second consequence was that they were barred from access to the Tree of Life. So that sounds like we would have to not be ashamed of nakedness in order to get to the Tree of Life. In fact, we were all born naked, and there is no shame in that.

But this is a myth, and myths are notoriously hard to interpret. Centainly if the people who care about this particular myth notice what I have said about it, a lot of them will complain. So forget it.

Where bozosity really becomes visible in ancient times is in Bronze Age Greek culture. The Kings and Princes in the Iliad, especially Agamemnon and Achilles, were bozos of the highest order. The Iliad starts with Achilles sulking in his tent like a small boy because that big bully Agamemnon took away his toy--no, sorry, his captured slave girl Briseis--no, actually his sex toy. The whole business started when three goddesses tried to bribe this guy Paris who was judging them in a beauty contest. As if beauty contests weren't bogus enough without cheating. Anyway, the goddesses of Power, Wisdom, and Love offered bribes of, well, Power, Wisdom, and Sex with the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, and Paris being a guy we know how that turned out. With the aggrieved husband chasing the pair across land and sea, and a whole big war, and as I said Achilles sulking in his tent and holding up the whole show, which is where we came in.

In the Greek Classical period, bozosity really took off. The Sophists were inventing logic, the use of logical fallacies to win cases in court, and lawyer jokes. Philosophers were coming out with a hundred crackpot theories about anything and everything, some of the most bizarre of which turned out much later to be true. Greek drama evolved out of little interludes in long religious ceremonies, taking as their central theme the variety of bogosity that they called hubris. People and demigods are constantly playing God in Greek tragedies, and shooting themselves in other people's feet. Greek comedy makes the case even clearer. Cloud Cuckoo Land, from the Aristophanes comedy The Birds, is still a byword for bozosity in politics.

The whole development of bozosity in theory and practice takes a new turn with Socrates. In his last public speech, given at his trial on a capital charge of impiety, he explained (at least according to his disciple Plato, who was there and wrote it down with some degree of playwright's license) how he had come up against the problem of bozosity, and what he decided he should do about it. A lot of people know a fair amount about a lot of subjects, but Socrates observed that people who knew a lot tended to assume that they knew more than they did, and that the people who knew the most often claimed to know, in effect, everything. Socrates declared that he was unwilling to fall into this form of bozosity. He would rather know nothing, and to know that he knew nothing, than to know a great deal but make the mistake of thinking he knew far more.

Socrates got killed, in large part, for telling the rest of the Athenians that they were all bozos and he wasn't, so they all decided that he was bogus and worse. The crimes he was charged with at his trial didn't matter. Actually if he had just stated his opinion and his choice they wouldn't have bothered about him. No, he had to go and prove to everybody who was anybody in Athens that they were personally bozos. It is actually hilarious to observe Socrates, in the early Platonic dialogues, getting his victims to tie themselves up in knots, but of course they didn't see it that way at all.

It is actually very difficult to be properly aware of the extent of your ignorance, since it concerns things you don't know about. It takes work, and discipline, and a lot of help. Of course, people who know about something that you don't know about can easily see your ignorance, but if they tell you about it they risk the fate of Socrates. Not death necessarily, but certainly disapproval and active hostility. There are a few groups who work on this awaresess of ignorance as a professional matter. They include many scientists, some members of some religious traditions, and a very few philosophers. There is, of course, bozo science, like Fleischman and Pons announcing Cold Fusion, but it is solidly established in the practice of science that we don't know more than we have tested, and in fact not all of that, and most scientists stay within that boundary most of the time.

Humility is often promoted as a religious virtue, but one does not see it as much practiced. Quite a few bogus religious teachers will tell you that they are in possession of complete, total, and absolute truth, and that they have the answers to every question. Since they all give the same reason for their separate assertions of infallibility (revelation, or the equivalent, divine inspiration), but differ wildly in their doctrines and practices, I conclude that they are all wrong. At least, they are all as wrong as the blind men describing the elephant. Maybe they have a little bit right, but you can't tell what it is in the midst of their insistence that they know everything.

Philosophers are notorious for claiming that they have worked out everything in their own minds, in a manner that cannot be disputed, and then sticking their feet squarely in their mouths. Most of them claimed that they had achieved proofs of something that everybody already knew, and were praised greatly for their achievements until it turned out that what everybody knew wasn't so. Kant, for example, claimed that he had proved that Euclidean geometry was true a priori, as the form of our perceptions, not very long before the conclusive discovery of non-Euclidean geometry. The most notable excepttion since Socrates was David Hume, who noted that we only know what comes to us through our senses, and resolutely rejected every form of received opinion about the certainty of anything beyond that. Descartes was one of the worst offenders. You could say that his doctrine was, "I thought it up, therefore it is."

Then there are politicians.

I think we're all bozos on this planet

Bozosity is defined by those who make a study of it as the ailment that makes people think they know something when they don't. It is a prerequisite for bogosity, which is the ailment that makes people think they are better than other people when they aren't.

The biggest issue in fighting bozosity and bogosity is recognizing either one in yourself. It is therefore difficult to be an authority on these matters, since having credentials on thiese topics through experience is essentially self-contradictory. The self-assurance required of a self-proclaimed authority on almost anything is, after all, the essential hallmark of bozosity. Well, I'm bozotic enough for the present purpose, and self-assured enough to take it on. So here we go.

Bogosity is the usual consequence of bozosity. Bogosity inevitably results in the practice of dividing people into two groups, the presumed un-bozotic ("Us") and those who are by definition utter bozos ("Them"). We all do it. There are those who Get It, whether "It" is Republicanism, Democratism, Libertarianism, Greenism, Socialism, Communism, Fascism, or rooting either for or against the New York Yankees, and those who don't. To those who Get It, it is basically inconceivable that any sane human can actually hold any of the contrary utterly bozotic opinions, and the next step in this chain of illogic is the conclusion that Bozos are actually non-human, or at least sub-human, especially if it also happens that they can be regarded as inhumane, like the Nazis in the extreme case, or the way Pro-Lifers and Pro-Choicers go on about each other killing babies or mothers.

Now, if you are paying attention, and especially if you Get It, it should be occuring to you about now that a division between those who divide humanity into two groups and those who don't is itself necessarily bogus. "How," you should be asking yourself, "can he [That's me.] set himself up as the Arbiter Bogotiarum [Ooh, a Latin title. How bogus!] over all of us [That's you lot, again]. Well, you're right. I can't. I said I was bogus enough for this discussion, but I'm not that bogus. No, the answer is that there is no such division. "Them" is us, and there is nobody else. We're all bogus. (If you ever do run into somebody who doesn't do the whole Us and Them business, let me know. I would like to have a word with any such person, and so should you.)

You need to be careful here. Some people do try to divide the world into the bogus and bozotic ("Them") and the good guys ("Us", of course). This is bogus and bozotic, and as I was just saying, self-contradictory. Don't let them get away with it, and especially don't let them convince you that you are one of Them but they aren't.

This leads us to the other big problem, Autobogotiphobia or Autobogotophobia, the fear of being, seeming, or being discovered to be bogus or bozotic, or of being made bogus. Instead of the puffed-up bozosity of the truly bogus, the Autobogotophobe is convinced, bozotically, of being one of Them. This can take the form of the inferiority complex, especially of not meeting the standards of parents, teachers, or peers, or of feeling required to behave in a bogus manner by bozos in authority, especially bosses (corporate, party, or religious). Some people will bogusly try to convince you that you are bogusly putting others down even when you are not. Forget it. Don't let them tell you that you have to be their kind of bozo to be acceptable or successful. You are the best example of you in the world. A genuine you is far better for you and the rest of us than any bogus construction you could try to create to hide your supposed shortcomings.

What really gets to me is the extent to which we are all supposed to be bozos in order to impress other bozos, and how we are all copying each other's bozosity. By the way, what is supposed to be so great about being somebody to a bunch of nobodies, anyway? Tthat means you want a whole lot of other people not to be as much somebody as you are, so they will pay attention to you being somebody. I'm myself already, and I don't feel a need to look like more than that by putting somebody else down to make me a bigger somebody. I prefer being somebody to a lot of other somebodies.

Care to join me?