Bozosity

Columbozos

The essence of bozosity is holding fast to the unsupported opinion that you know something when you don't. There is a lot of it about, and we all do it. In fact, it is unavoidable

For example, almost everybody knows that Columbus's crews on the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria in 1492 were afraid of falling off the edge of the Earth, which they all bozoticallly believed was flat.

Actually, they believed no such thing. Sailors knew better than anyone else that the Earth is round. On a flat Earth, ships would not disappear over the horizon, and you wouldn't be able to see further from the crow's nest on the top of the mast. The Greeks not only knew that the Earth was round, but had measured its size with about 10% accuracy from the differences in the lengths of shadows in Alexandria in the north of Egypt and Syene in the south.

Columbus's men had a much more serious concern. They were beyond the point of no return, where they would not have enough food to sail back to Spain, when they finally sighted land.

The real bozosity in this story belongs to Columbus. He calculated the distance from Span to China going westward from the smallest estimate available of the size of the Earth, and the largest estimate of how far away China was to the east. His calculations were off by the width of the Americas plus the whole Pacific Ocean, nearly half the distance around the Earth.

Columbus also got into trouble when he went back to Spain, because it was obvious that he hadn't reached China. On the other hand, he did find a land that nobody in Europe had known about, with lots of gold and silver and jewels, as it turned out, and other even more valuable things such as corn, tomatoes, squash, chilis, vanilla, and chocolate.

There is a lot more to the story of Columbus's adventures in bozosity, but I don't have time for it today. And I don't have time for his patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, those paragons of bogosity (We are so much better than You) who expelled the Jews and the Muslims from Spain and let the Spanish Inquisition loose on those who wouldn't go quietly, also in 1492.

PS Columbus discovered the New World, but he did not discover either North or South America. He only landed on some of the Caribbean islands.

Liar, Liar

Much is being made these days about whether President Bush lied about the reasons for invading Iraq. Whatever one may think about this matter, it is worth noting that he is not the only one to do so. Abraham Lincoln claimed that the reasons that James Polk gave for the war between the U.S. and Mexico were completely bogus, and that it had more to do with the elections than the facts. The war with Spain was certainly bogus. More recently, President Lyndon Johnson got into an undeclared war in Vietnam over a trumped-up claim that the North Vietnamese attacked a U.S. warship. President Nixon followed up with the secret war in Cambodia and Laos. He followed that up with a completely bogus peace treaty, resulting in Henry Kissinger getting a bogus Nobel Peace Prize for leaving South Vietnam to be overrun by the North.

Lying to start or stop a war is not particularly a Democratic or Republican failing. It is one of those all-too-human failings where some bunch of bozos has what seems like a good idea, and furthermore think that it is such a good idea that lying to make it happen is an act of patriotism or at least a good political career move.

My point of view on this should be clear: Lying is bogosity. It means you think you know so much better than everybody else that it doesn't matter what you tell them, and your bright idea is so much better than theirs that their opinion isn't worth considering.

Now if you want your country to be bogus, and to be known to be bogus (because your important lies will be found out sooner or later), you have every reason to lie. If not, you are better off acting on the assumption that your lies will be found out, and that the adverse consequences of being untrustworthy will outweigh any tactical, strategic, or financial advantage you may temporarily gain.

Bear in mind that advantage comes and goes, but you have to live in the same world with the same people for the rest of your life and theirs.

Now you may think that my opinion is utterly bogus, since I am saying that my opinion is better than those of the liars. All I can say is, I'll take honest bogosity over lying bogosity any day.

It's the Milk, Stupid

A Sufi tale tells of a poor man who needed a length of rope, and decided to ask his rich neighbor to lend him some.

"Nothing would please me more than to help my neighbor in his need," said the rich man, "but unfortunately just at this moment I need all of my rope to keep my milk tied up."

"What!?" exclaimed the poor man. "That's the stupidest thing I ever heard. You can't tie up milk!"

"Ah," said the rich man. "I see that there is something important that you do not understand. You see, when you definitely don't want to do something, any reason is good."

---

Whenever you hear political rhetoric about why we should or should not do something, remember this story. Politicians don't want to tell you why they really favor or oppose a piece of legislation as long as there is some other reason that appeals to the voters in their districts. Whatever reason they give, remember that it may have as much to do with the case as keeping the milk tied up.

Why should we lower taxes? To stimulate the economy? No, that's keeping the milk tied up.

Why should we raise taxes? To pay for services? No, that's keeping the milk tied up.

Why invade Iraq? Forget WMD. Forget oil. Forget delusions of empire. That's just keeping the milk tied up.

Why re-elect President Bush? To keep the milk tied up.

Why not re-elect President Bush? To keep the milk tied up.

"What milk?" you might ask. Well now, that would be telling. But I can give you a hint.

Why do people want to do anything? The usual motives are power, sex, and money, or in some cases life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Truth and the public interest are usually way down the list in the political realm, although there are exceptions. When you hear a politician talking about the Public Interest, assume that he means keeping the public interested in voting for him.

Good Advice

One of the major anti-bogotical teachings of Jesus is the advice to the hypocrites to take the log out of their own eyes before trying to help someone else remove a speck. This is good advice, to be sure, except for one thing. How do you go about it?

I mean, do you have to be perfect before you can give any advice on anything at all? I admit that getting everybody to stop giving advice, even when asked, would probably be an improvement. It would certainly have an interesting and very likely beneficial effect on government if the politicians had to shut up at all times and listen.

OK, so according to Christians, Jesus is perfect and he can give us all advice. But how do we get any more advice? Don't tell me we don't need it. We have these logs in our eyes. Maybe Jesus told us what to do, but if we haven't gotten it yet, can anybody else try to explain it to us? There are plenty willing to do so, but the bogosity rate in such advice is extremely high. For any given public advice-giver, a minority hang on his (usually) every word, and most of the rest of us think that his advice is perfectly idiotic.

And note, Jesus got himself killed. I have expressed my admiration for Socrates not presuming to greater knowledge than he actually had, but he also went and got himself killed. There were a number of prophets in the Jewish scriptures who worked on becoming perfect, and gave their advice, and got themselves killed. Gandhi got himself murdered. Martin Luther King (who was by no means perfect, but let that pass) got himself killed.

Now, I exaggerate. Not everybody who tries to be non-bogus and be helpful gets killed. Some just get locked up, or exiled, or have their careers ruined, or are just laughed at. Some take advantage of this last fact and pretend to be clowns. Why do they do it, then?

Because they are constitutionally incapable of deliberate, conscious bogosity. Simple as that. It's rough on them, but the rest of us desperately need these people.

Heinlein Got It Right

Americans are considered crazy anywhere in the world.

They will usually concede a basis for the accusation, but point to California as the focus of the infection. Californians stoutly maintain that their bad reputation is derived solely firom the acts of the inhabitants of Los Angeles County. Angelenos will, when pressed, admit the charge but explain hastily, "It's Hollywood. It's not our fault—we didn't ask for it. Hollywood just grew."

The people in Hollywood don't care; they glory in it.

—And He Built a Crooked House, Robert A. Heinlein

The Bogotomaths

One of the nice things about mathematics is that a theorem, once proved, stays proved, with very few exceptions (Remind me to tell you about non-standard arithmetic and analysis sometime). Math is thus the least bogus of the realms of human endeavor.

Now that doesn't mean that mathematicians are immune to bogosity. When they aren't proving theorems, they are as bad off as the rest of us. That includes any time when they are talking about their opinions of what math should be, rather than about what we can prove. The most egregious example was the Nazi campaign, led by Ludwig Bieberbach, against "Jewish mathematics", specifically against George Cantor's theory of infinite numbers. Today Cantor's work is fundamental to every branch of mathematics, but the controversy continues. In Cantor's own time, and for decades afterward, it was denounced by mathematicians, who at least had some idea what the issues were, and by anti-Semitic German nationalists who didn't know and didn't care about the substance of the mathematical questions.

The earlist historical example of utter bogosity in mathematics is attributed to Pythagoras. One of his disciples, says the story, proved that the side and diagonal of a square cannot be measured as integral multiples of the same length, or equivalently, that the square root of 2 is not a ratio of whole numbers. Legend has it that this discovery took place on a ship, and that the Pythagorians in horror threw the discoverer overboard.

In both of these cases, and in a few others that have occured over the millenia, the difference between what mathematicians can prove and what they believe they should be able to prove spilled over into religious and political controversy. The Pythagoreans were a religious brotherhood (although some women were admitted), and of course we know about the 19th century German nationalists and the Nazis.

Pythagoras was certain--absolutely, totally, positively certain--that everything in nature could be represented by the counting numbers, or as we would say today, positive integers (no zero, which hadn't been invented). If the side of a square is taken as the unit length, then the length of the diagonal is the square root of 2. So the Pythagorean who proved that the square root of 2 is irrational prompted a murderous rage, if the story is true.

Later, Greek mathematicians thought that everything in geometry could be constructed by ruler and compass, and were flummoxed when the oracle of Apollo called on them to construct the cube root of two (actually, to construct a cube twice the volume of another cube, but it comes to the same thing). This time they took it better, and only killed a hundred bulls (as a sacrifice to the god, of course). Much later, non-Euclidean geometry and "imaginary" numbers struggled for acceptance for centuries, but nobody got killed over them. Then there was Georg Cantor.

Cantor's ancestry was Jewish, but he wasn't a religious Jew (which made no difference to racist anti-Semites, of course). The name Cantor refers to the singer who is a vital part of Jewish religious services, as you can see in Eddy Cantor's movie The Jazz Singer.

Anyway, our Cantor proved that there are more points on a line than there are counting numbers, and that there were more functions than numbers, and then kept right on going, proving that no matter how many infinite numbers we find, even more remain. This contradicted an old idea of Aristotle's, who held that there was no actual infinity in mathematics. At most there was the "potential" infinity of the length of a line that can be extended past any possible limit, or of the counting numbers, where we can always count higher. A real infinity, and an even bigger infinity, and then a never-ending infinitiy of infinities, was too much for some people. In a similar way, quantum mechanics was rejected as "Jewish physics" when it appeared somewhat later. Einstein is the best-known Jewish physicist to contribute to quantum theory, of course, but it was hardly a Jewish subject.

Anyway, the Nazis and their allies the Italian Fascists drove out or killed all of their Jewish mathematicians and scientists, and anybody who objected. And as a result of that, the US got the bomb first, due to the efforts of the emigré scientists, including Fermi, Einstein, and Szilard.

Can we draw a moral from all of this? Well, one clear conclusion is that if you manage not to be bogus, that certainly doesn't mean that you will be safe. But we knew that. More significantly, if you want not to be bogus, you have to be prepared to go where the truth takes you, even if it makes your head explode. Religious and political prejudices, and even mathematical prejudices (prejudice of course being a sufficient condition for bogosity) can result in murderous rage against the messenger under some circumstances. You can't avoid having opinions. You can, however, remember that opinion is what you think you know, and you have to be ready to give it up if it turns out that it just ain't so.

Credits

Here are some of the inspirations for this blog.

The Buddhist Malunkyaputta Sutta, in which the Buddha denounces Malunkyaputta's bogus questions. Also, the parable of The Blind Men and the Elephant, which was told by Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu teachers, and was later taken up within Islam.

Secrates's preference to be ignorant and know it, rather than know something and be unaware of his remaining ignorance

John the Baptist denouncing the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism as a "generation of vipers" (Mathew 3:7), and Jesus denouncing hypocrites as "Whited Sepulchres" (Mathew 23)

Jesus's parable of The Good Samaritan

Voltaire's Candide

Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Puddnhead Wilson, and On the Damned Human Race (not available on the Internet)

Walk Kelly's Pogo

The Firesign Theater, I Think We're all Bozos on This Bus

The career of "Landslide" Lyndon Johnson, Master of the Senate

Car Talk hosts Tom and Ray Magliozzi, aka Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, for the term Bo-o-o-gus!

Guy Kawasaki's Rules for Revolutionaries number 10, "Don't let the bozos grind you down," and his definitions of "bozosity" as Standardizing on Windows and as an affliction that makes you think you know something when you don't.

The alt.religion.kibology newsgroup, for continuing discussions of bozosity

Carnegie-Mellon University for Quantum Bogodynamics