Ignorant and proud of it

Way back in 1980, biochemist, writer, and polymath Isaac Asimov wrote something that is even more accurate today than it was back then:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been.  The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

I remember the first time I ran headlong into the bizarre American "ignorant and proud of it" attitude Asimov describes, during the presidential campaign of George W. Bush.  Even Bush's supporters admitted he wasn't an intellectual; I heard one person say he was voting for Bush because he wanted someone in the White House who was one of the "common folk," someone he would want to sit down and have a pint of beer with.  I responded, in considerable bafflement, "Don't you want the president to be smarter than you and I are?  I know I'm not smart enough to run the country."

His response was that the intellectuals are out of touch, and don't understand on a visceral level the problems ordinary people face.  This, I have to admit, contains a kernel of truth.  Politics is a money game, and most (not all; I'm sure you'll find counterexamples) elected officials come from some level of wealth and privilege.  And it's true that this privilege can create a set of blinders.  People who have never been down to pennies at the end of a pay period -- as I, and many others, have -- don't understand what it's like for financial worries never to be far from your mind, twenty-four hours a day.

The problem, of course, is that while an "ordinary person" might empathize with the plight of other ordinary people, that doesn't mean (s)he knows how to fix it.  Experiencing a problem doesn't mean you have a clue how to solve it.

But as Asimov pointed out, the "we're equal as people, so my ideas are as good as yours" nonsense is woven deeply into the American psyche, and the result has been that increasingly you run into people who seem to be not only oblivious to their own ignorance, but actively proud of it.  I was just discussing this with my athletic trainer, Kevin, this week.  One of the points I made is that I know there are a lot of areas about which I am ignorant.  The internal workings of cars, for example.  I have only the vaguest notion of how automobile engines work -- which is why when something goes wrong with my car, I go down to my mechanic and say, "Car not go, please fix."  What I don't do is start blathering on to my friends and acquaintances about carburetors and alternators and fuel pumps, and getting all defensive when one of them tells me what I'm saying is bullshit.

This, surprisingly, is often not the approach people have.  Kevin told me he was at a party a while back, and someone was pontificating about how the problem with the COVID-19 vaccination was that it was a vaccine.  On the other hand, he said, he was fine with getting a flu shot, because that wasn't a vaccine, it was a shot.

Kevin said, "The flu shot is a vaccine, too."

The guy responded, "No, it's a shot.  COVID is a vaccine, which means it does stuff to your immune system."

A little goggle-eyed, Kevin said, "But... doing stuff to your immune system is what shots are supposed to do."

Undeterred, the guy said, "No, that's vaccines.  The flu shot just stops the flu virus from making you sick, it doesn't mess with your immune system."

At that point, Kevin decided that the guy had the IQ of a peach pit and gave up.

What gets me about this is not that some person had a goofy misconception about something.  We all have goofy misconceptions about some things, and a complete lack of knowledge about others.  But -- hopefully -- most of us know better than to broadcast our ignorance in front of a large group of people.

Or on a major news network.  Just a couple of days ago, Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, who is himself no stranger to broadcasting his stupidity, had a guest who made Carlson's own beliefs look positively Ph.D.-worthy by comparison.  The guy's name is (I'm not making this up) Joe Bastardi, and you'll get a good idea of his scientific credibility when I tell you that he's the author of a book called The Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate War.  (He chose this title when it narrowly edged out his second-favorite choice, which was 99% of the Earth's Scientists Are Big Dumb Poopyheads.)  But what he said went way beyond just claiming that "the climate's just fine, keep on burnin' those fossil fuels."  Here is a direct quote, which (once again) I swear I'm not making up:

I’ve been giving [climate change policy] a lot of thought today, because I had to drive from Iowa City all the way to Pittsburgh, and when I went by South Bend, oddly enough it hit me.  There are three possibilities here, in my opinion, just looking at this, okay.

First is, they’ve all got climate vaccines.  We don’t know about them, but unlike the COVID vaccine, they actually work, so whatever they do, they’re immune from it.  So that’s a possibility.  That’s a long shot.

The second, Tucker, is, that if bad weather stops air travel, and it stops car travel, if you can cause more bad weather, right, then guess what?  Everybody can’t drive.  For instance, next week, and the week after?  Watch how much bad weather comes into the United States.  It’s going to be the coldest, snowiest period around the Christmas time since 2000.  So we’re gonna see planes, and trains, and all these other things shut down.  So if you just dump all this CO2 in the atmosphere, your assumption is, hey, CO2 causes bad weather, if I could cause more bad weather, then guess what?  Other people won’t be able to fly, and we’ll have less CO2 emissions.

Or the third possibility, exactly what you said: it’s a phony climate war, it’s fraudulent.  When we talked back in July, we talked about how it’s going to get cold earlier this year across the United States, that has nothing to do with CO2, what it has to do is the natural cycles of the weather, and what happens is these people are taking advantage of people who fall prey to this, and this is what they’re doing.  There’s no logic or reason for it except they are trying to establish a caste system that destroys the greatest experiment of freedom and individuality, which is this country.

I have a few responses to this, to wit:

1. How the fuck do you vaccinate someone against the climate?
2. Winter is frequently the coldest, snowiest part of the year in the United States.  That's because we're in the Northern Hemisphere and that's how seasons work.
3. So, what he's saying is that the environmental scientists have created the whole climate change thing in order to destroy the United States.  Even though a great many of them live here.  Because that makes total sense.
4. Does he really think that somehow, the climatologists are engineering bad weather across the entire United States?  Simultaneously?  How are they doing this, using magical laser beams from space, or something?
5. No, wait -- it's not magical laser beams from space, he says.  It's something way less plausible than that.  What we're gonna do is dump carbon dioxide into the air to make travel difficult, which will stop travel, which will cause us to emit less carbon dioxide. 

Now that's what I call a cunning plan.

And through the entire conversation, Tucker Carlson sat there, nodding sagely, as if what Bastardi was saying was nearing Stephen Hawking levels of brilliance, instead of doing what I'd have done, which is to say to him, "What is clear from this conversation is that if the government taxed brains, you'd get a refund."

Which explains why I am not a commentator on Fox News.

So.  Yeah.  For some reason, there are people who are abjectly ignorant, and yet who consider it critical that the entire world finds out about it.  It all brings back the well-known aphorism -- one of my dad's favorites --- that "it's better to keep your mouth and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and prove it."

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The cult of ignorance -- and "do-it-yourself braces"

In his wonderful essay "The Cult of Ignorance," Isaac Asimov wrote something that still resonates, 36 years after it appeared in Newsweek: "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been.  The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"

This tendency on the part of Americans to assume that democracy means that all ideas are equal, and everyone's utterances equally valid, often drives us to do ridiculous things.  We discount the conclusions of scientists, preferring instead the evidence-free declarations of politicians, actors, and athletes.  The criticism "they don't understand the common, working-class people" is frequently lobbed in the direction of the intelligent.   This sense that the well-educated are either impractical or else actively evil leads us to elect the unqualified because they "seem like regular folks," even though you'd think we'd all want our leaders to be selected from the best and smartest we have.  But somehow there's this sense that being smart, well-educated, and thoroughly trained gives the experts an ivory-tower insulation from the rest of us slobs, and probably leaves them immoral as well.

What it actually accomplishes, though, is to give your average guy the idea that he knows a great deal more than he really does.  Called the Dunning-Kruger effect, it makes the unskilled overestimate their knowledge and underestimate their ineptitude.  And just yesterday, I ran into a new phenomenon that illustrates that amazingly well: do-it-yourself orthodonture.

I'm not making this up.  Put off by the high costs of orthodontic treatment, the inconvenience of having braces (sometimes for years), and the mystery of how a few brackets and wires could straighten out crooked teeth, people have said, "Hey, I could do that."  Now that 3-D printing is easy and cheap, people print themselves out resin brackets, affix them to their teeth with glue, and start yanking.  Lured by testimony that such a course of treatment could reduce the costs to under $100 and shorten the duration of brace-wearing from three years to as little as sixteen weeks, the idea has been spreading like wildfire.

[image courtesy of photographer Jason Regan and the Wikimedia Commons]

But folks -- orthodontists have to go through extensive training for a reason.  It's not enough to peer in a friend's mouth and try to replicate the friend's orthodontic hardware on your own teeth.  One of the DIY-ers, a fellow named Amos Dudley, has posted pictures of his changed smile on the internet, an alteration that took only four months.  But orthodontist Stephen Belli says that looks can deceive:

I’d like to see an X-ray, because he’s probably caused some irreparable harm.  He moved these teeth in only 16 weeks.  You can cause a lot of problems with that.  If you move a tooth too fast, you can actually cause damage to the bone and gums.  And if you don’t put the tooth in the right position, you could throw off your bite.

And why did Dudley take on his own orthodontic work?  "Because," he said, "I wanted to stick it to the dental appliance industry."

A stance that apparently gave him the impression that he knew enough to start shoving around his own teeth.

I find this attitude impossible to understand.  I consider myself reasonably intelligent, but I know I'm not smart enough to be responsible for my own medical care.  Similarly, I know I don't have the training to understand the latest scientific findings in most fields, nor to come up with solutions to the nation's economic problems and foreign policy.  This is why we have experts.

Which is why it really pisses me off when someone comes up with the latest pseudo-clever meme about how to fix everything, such as this one:

When I first saw this one -- and it's been posted far and wide -- my first thought was, "Can't you do simple arithmetic?"  If you don't see what I mean, try this: let's raise the salaries of the soldiers and seniors to, say, $50,000 a year.  Accepting the numbers they've quoted here, this would require an extra $12,000 for each soldier and an extra $38,000 for each senior.  Multiply each of these by the number of active-duty soldiers (1,388,000) and seniors on Social Security (59,000,000) in the United States, respectively, to see how much money we'd need.

Then, using a similar calculation, figure out how much we'd save yearly by cutting the wages of retired presidents (of which there are currently four -- Carter, Bush Sr., Clinton, and Bush Jr.  You can even be generous and throw in Obama if you like), the House and Senate members (535 of them), the Speaker of the House (1), and the Majority and Minority leaders of each branch of congress (4), down to $50,000 each.  See how much you save.

Falls a little short, doesn't it?

I mean, for cryin' in the sink, people.  If it was that easy, don't you think someone would have thought of this by now?

Which may seem a long way from do-it-yourself braces, but it's all the same thing, really; the attitude that a completely untrained individual is just as good as an expert at solving complex problems.  The cult of ignorance is still thriving here in the United States.  But despite our desire to think that everyone's ideas are on equal footing, ignorance will never be as good as knowledge.

Ignorance sucks

I bet you think you know what science is for.

I bet you subscribe to such ideas as "science is a means for understanding the universe" or "science provides a method for the betterment of humankind."  And I bet that you think that, by and large, scientists are working to elucidate the actual mechanisms by which nature works, and telling us the truth about what they find.

Ha.  A lot you know.

Yesterday I found out that scientists are actually all in cahoots to pull the wool over our eyes, and are actively lying to us about what they find out.  They work to stamp out the findings of any dissenters (and, if that doesn't work, the dissenters themselves), and to buoy up a worldview that is factually incorrect.

Why would they do this, you may ask?

I... um.  Let's see.  That's a good question.

Well, because they're that evil, that's why.  And you know, that's how conspiracies work.  They just cover stuff up, sometimes for the sheer fun of doing it.  Even the scientists gotta get their jollies somehow, right?  I mean, at the end of the day, rubbing your hands together and cackling maniacally only gets you so far.

I came to this rather alarming realization due to a website I ran into called, "Is Gravity a Pulling or a Pushing Force?" wherein we find out that what we learned in high school physics, to wit, that gravity is attractive, is actually backwards.  Gravity isn't pulling us toward the center of mass of the Earth, like your physics teacher told you.  It's more that... space is pushing you down.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

It's a little like my wife's theory that light bulbs don't illuminate a room by emitting light, they do it by sucking up dark.  She has been known to say, "Gordon, when you get a chance, can you replace the Dark Sucker in the downstairs bathroom?"  Presumably when the filaments in the bulb become saturated with dark, they become incapable of doing their job any more and need to be replaced.

But unlike my wife, the people on this website are serious.  Here is one representative section from the website:

Be sure to understand that any volumetric expansion of the Pressure of electrical-mass that surrounds the earth is what then compresses back and pushes free electrons along any given conductor. This elasticity of the quantum particles of space is the very source of "all" generated electricity around the world at this very moment. The Pressure (Density x Temperature2) of that ocean of electrical-mass that surrounds the earth is also the very origin of Gravity (your compared Density).

And so now - You - know the exact answer to what Albert Einstein spent 20 years searching for while he lived at 112 Mercer Street, Princeton, New Jersey.

The very connection between Gravity and Electricity.

Gravity is absolutely "pushing" us down onto the earth. Gravity is the Pressure of electrical-mass that permeates space and surrounds the earth. And that pressure is responsible for both the pressure of the earth's atmosphere as well as the pressure of water below any ocean.

Three layers surround the earth; The ocean, The atmosphere, and Gravity. Gravity is exactly equal to the ocean of water or the ocean of atmosphere that is surrounding the earth except Gravity is the third and outermost ocean of electrical-mass that surrounds the earth and moves through all mass.

Electrical-mass is invisible to the eye and does not possess temperature. Keep in mind that molecular Velocity = Temperature.
A = Acceleration Z = Time AZ = Velocity (Temperature) AZ2 = Distance.

The combustion of all stars (Energy) produces a pressure of electrical-mass (Gravity) that surrounds all planets and this is the exact connection between Energy and Gravity that Albert Einstein was diligently searching for.

A "Pulling Force" is absolutely impossible. And it's actually quite astounding that this needs to be stated in the year 2012. Certainly no one possesses the ability to calculate "continuous" or "exhaustively" true and pure Physics until they have come to the above realization.

It bears mention that my bachelor's degree is in physics, which means that my knowledge of the topic is, while not exhaustive, certainly better than your average layperson's.  And after reading the above (and lots more like it) on this website, I had two reactions:

1. What?
2. Do you have the IQ of a wad of used bubble gum?

I think what gets me about this is the way it's written; not only does the writer seem to have no knowledge whatsoever of elementary physics, (s)he comes across (and, in fact, states outright later on in the website) that people who do have such knowledge are the dupes.  We folks who have studied science have been fooled by the evil establishment, which is trying to keep us all in abject ignorance about how the universe actually works.

This individual isn't embarrassed by a lack of knowledge; this person is proud of it.  The author of this website takes an abysmal understanding of the rudiments of physics as evidence that (s)he has not been contaminated by the wicked Status Quo.

As another quote from the website put it, "Keep getting the word out to the Physics community who's [sic] eyes have been blinded by complexity rather than enlightened by simplicity."

It's just the cult of ignorance rearing its ugly head again, isn't it?  We here in the United States -- and it may be so elsewhere as well -- tend to distrust the educated, for some reason.  Why else would the word "elite" be used as an insult -- at least in academics?  Recall what Isaac Asimov had to say on the topic: "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been.  The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"

And that, I think, is at the heart of this.  Why should we have to put in our dues, listening to the pointy-headed professor types pontificating, when we can just sit around and come up with our own theories?  Especially now that there's an internet, wherein anything goes, regardless of whether it has any connection to reality?  You can always find ignorant people, insane people, and disaffected academic-wannabees who will give you lots of positive feedback, no matter how far out your ideas are.

And given that Science Is Hard, it's all too easy to characterize the professors as wanting to make it harder.  They obfuscate, couching the science in complex terms not because it is complex, but because they're engaging in some kind of Freemason-like ritual to throw people off the scent.  You are in the dark not because you're too lazy to learn the actual science, but because the scientists want to keep you in the dark.

Or maybe you just need to replace the Dark Suckers.