The face in the mirror

Like many people, I've at times been in the position of having to interact with narcissists.

I'll not name names, but two, in particular, stand out.  One of them frequently said things like, "Of course, I know I'm wrong all the time," while in point of fact never admitting to being specifically wrong about anything.  Ever.  This individual never budged so much as an inch off any claim, up to and including ones that were demonstrably false and complete matters of opinion like tastes in music and even food.  (If you differed in those opinions, you were "entitled to your opinion even though it's wrong.")  Everything became about being perceived as the most smart, cultured, savvy, and astute person in the room, so every conversation turned into a battle for dominance, unless you refused to play (which, eventually, is what I did).

The second had a different strategy, albeit one that still resulted in the role of Center of the Entire Universe.  For this person, negative attention caused a complete emotional breakdown, which resulted in everyone having to circle the wagons simply to restore order.  Worse still was when something this individual said made me upset; because then, the focus shifted to someone else's needs, which was unacceptable.  My expression of annoyance, anger, or frustration was turned around into my having unreasonable expectations, which precipitated another emotional breakdown, returning me to the role of caregiver and he-who-pours-oil-on-the-waters.

It's a relief that neither of these two are part of my life any more, because being around narcissists is, among other things, absolutely exhausting.  The incessant focus on self means that no one else's needs, and often no one else's opinions, ever get heard.  Worst of all, neither one had any apparent sense of being narcissistic; I heard both expressing, at one time or another, how unfair it was that they didn't have many friends.

Funny how that happens when you don't consider anyone but yourself.

This lack of self-awareness makes narcissism difficult to study, because it's hard to analyze a condition that the patient doesn't know (s)he's got.  But now a team at the University of Graz (Austria), led by psychologist Emanuel Jauk, has not only looked at what it means to be narcissistic -- they've done neuroimaging studies to see what's going on in a narcissist's brain.  The result was a paper that appeared last week in Nature.

"Narcissism is a topic of increasing interest to science and the public, probably because cultural changes in the past decades favor narcissistic behavior," Jauk says.  "Our study was aimed at taking a closer look at the self-image of narcissistic individuals using neuroscience, which might help to unveil its less conscious aspects."

The results were fascinating.  In the authors' words:

Subclinical narcissism is a personality trait with two faces: According to social-cognitive theories it is associated with grandiosity and feelings of superiority, whereas psychodynamic theories emphasize vulnerable aspects like fluctuating self-esteem and emotional conflicts...  While social-cognitive theory would predict that self-relevant processing should be accompanied by brain activity in reward-related areas in narcissistic individuals, psychodynamic theory would suggest that it should be accompanied by activation in regions pointing to negative affect or emotional conflict.  In this study, extreme groups of high and low narcissistic individuals performed a visual self-recognition paradigm during fMRI.  Viewing one’s own face (as compared to faces of friends and strangers) was accompanied by greater activation of the dorsal and ventral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in highly narcissistic men.  These results suggest that highly narcissistic men experience greater negative affect or emotional conflict during self-relevant processing and point to vulnerable aspects of subclinical narcissism that might not be apparent in self-report research.

The upshot is that this study suggests narcissism doesn't result in feelings of pleasure when you think of or view yourself; it increases your anxiety.  "Narcissism," Jauk explains, "in terms of an inflated self-view, goes along with negative affect towards the self on an involuntary level."

Which certainly makes sense given my interactions with narcissists.  Above all, neither of the individuals I mentioned seemed all that happy.  It appeared that the returning focus on self came out of insecurity, fear, and anxiety rather than conceit -- that it was more about reassurance than it was about praise.

So the condition itself is a little misnamed, isn't it?  The word "narcissism" comes from the Greek myth of Narcissus, who was a young man whose appearance was so beautiful that he fell in love with a reflection of himself, and couldn't tear his eyes away -- he eventually pined away and died, and the gods took pity on him and turned him into the flower that now bears his name.

Narcissus by Caravaggio (1598) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The reality is sadder.  Narcissists, apparently, think of themselves not out of self-love, but out of a constant uneasy sense that they aren't actually beautiful, intelligent, competent, or desirable.

Which is kind of a miserable way to live.  Knowing this defuses a lot of the anger I harbor from my experiences with the narcissists I described earlier.  For all of their desperation for attention, at their core they were deeply fearful people.

The authors make reference to an alternate version of the Narcissus myth that is more in line with what true narcissists experience.  They write:

In another prominent version by Pausanias, the myth has a different ending: Narcissus is gazing at himself, when suddenly a leaf falls into the water and distorts the image.  Narcissus is shocked by the ugliness of his mirror image, which ultimately leads him to death.

This more tragic ending is much closer to what the study found:

Considering the two versions of the ancient myth of Narcissus, our results are in favor of the less prominent version, in which Narcissus is shocked to death by the ugliness of his mirror image when a leaf drops into the water.  This myth can be seen to metaphorically reflect the ongoing critical self-monitoring that narcissists display when confronted with self-relevant material, presumably due to a lowered intrinsic coupling between self-representation and self-reward/liking.

Which makes me feel like narcissists are more to be pitied than scorned. 

The haunted pub

Last week my wife and I did some hiking along beautiful Skaneateles Lake, and decided to stop for a pint and some chow at Wayside Irish Pub in the village of Elbridge.  The food, beer, and atmosphere were all great, and we also got a chance to check out a place that has a well-established reputation for being haunted.

While enjoying our drinks and pub grub, we struck up a conversation with a woman down the bar who was apparently an off-duty bartender (we never quite established what her connection to the pub was except that she works there, but that's what I think she was).  And it turned out that she is quite certain she has had more than one encounter with the pub's spectral residents.

The story is a curious one, if you compare it to other alleged hauntings, for its lack of information.  Most haunted places have a definite story they claim is behind it all; murders and suicides are the most commonly-cited causes of ghostly presences, and any information about the identity of the spirit and how (s)he ended up there is quickly forthcoming, often along with considerable embellishment.

Here, though, the story is that there are two spirits at Wayside, a man and a woman, and nothing more is known about them.  Many people have had spooky experiences there, including some folks that beforehand were staunch disbelievers.  The woman we were chatting with said she's seen wine glasses fly off the rack over the bar, and once on the second floor kept having someone touch her neck when no one was there.  She told me I was welcome to wander around, and recommended checking out the staircase between the first and second floors, which is apparently is one of the most common places for people to have creepy experiences:

But I didn't see anything or anyone.  I was hoping that when I got home there'd be a translucent figure in the middle of my photo of the staircase, but no such luck.

I was encouraged to go up to the second floor, which was currently not being used, so I did.  It was quite atmospheric.  There's a room done up completely in red:

A hallway that certainly seems like it needs a ghost:

And a banquet room that looks like it should be at the Overlook Hotel:

But despite wandering around there by myself for some time (my wife preferred to stay downstairs and continue the conversation with the off-duty bartender), I saw nothing untoward.

What I find most interesting about this is how completely matter-of-fact the woman was in telling us about her experiences.  She told us about the flying glasses as if it was just something that happens sometimes, although she admitted that the touch on the neck "scared her pretty good."  And what struck me was that she had no particular reason to make stuff up; it wasn't (frankly) that good a story, just a couple of strange things with no explanation and no follow-up.  I know eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable even when they're trying to recall things accurately, but all I can say is that this woman spoke with the ring of truth.

Still, I can't say I was turned into a believer, or anything even close.  I was hoping I'd given the ghosts plenty of opportunity to blow in my ear or untie my shoelaces or whatever, but nothing happened.  Maybe they were napping or something, I dunno, but I sure wish that if there is some odd presence at Wayside Irish Pub, it'd have shown itself.  After all, I really do want to believe, even if so far I haven't been given any particular reason to.

Anyhow, it was worth going.  After a long day's hiking the cold pint was wonderful, and I can definitely recommend the nachos.  If you're ever near Skaneateles and don't mind a twenty minute drive farther north, give it a visit.  Bring along your camera.  Maybe you'll have better luck photographing the pub's ghostly residents than I did.

The Satanic Symphony Orchestra

Here at Skeptophilia, I try not to focus day after day on people who believe crazy stuff.  After all, loony ideas are kind of a dime a dozen, and loony people just as common, so at some point this kind of thing starts seeming like low-hanging fruit.

But every once in a while, I run into an idea so loony that it almost seems kind of... inspired.  Which is why today we're going to discuss: how the Freemasons are altering your DNA using a musical pitch to make you hate Donald Trump.

This may sound like a ham-handed attempt at satire, but sadly, it appears to be real.  According to a link sent to me by a long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia, this is the claim of one Mark Taylor, self-styled "firefighter prophet," who has this to say about his own credentials:

I am no longer simply Mark Taylor, but also Shakina Kami, a name that translates from a combination of the African and Indian languages into “Beautiful One Whose Desires Are Fulfilled, and in Whose Life the Lord Dwells with the Divine Wind of Providence.”

So I think we can all agree that sounds pretty authoritative, even though I have to admit that I speak neither "African" nor "Indian."  Be that as it may, Taylor/Kami used his Divine Winds of Providence to write a book with the somewhat cumbersome title The Trump Prophecies: The Astonishing True Story Of The Man Who Saw Tomorrow… And What He Says Is Coming Next, wherein we find out that not only is Trump the Anointed One of God, Taylor himself had a vision in which he saw how Trump would win, and how this would be a tremendous defeat to the Forces of Darkness.  It's filled with passages such as the following:

The Spirit of God says, ‘America, get ready, for I AM choosing from the top of the cream, for I AM putting together America’s dream team, from the president and his administration, to judges and congress to ease America’s frustrations!’  The Spirit of God says, ‘Rise up, My Army, and get in the fight…  Rise up! stomp the enemy’s head with bliss; send the enemy back to Hell and into the abyss.’

All I can say is that even if we're being ruled by the Dream Team Cream, lately the news has made me want to Scream.  Overall, I can't say my frustrations have been eased much.  In fact, most of the time I feel like I need to double my anti-anxiety meds just to make it through the day.

Anyhow, I guess Taylor et al. didn't stomp the enemy's head blissfully enough, because the Bad Guys are now fighting back.  According to an interview he gave on right wing activist Sheila Zilinsky's radio program, Pass the Salt Live, last week, we are now being bombarded by "frequencies" designed to alter our DNA:

I believe what happened on November 8th is that the enemy has sent out a frequency, if you will -- and if you'll remember, when we did your show on "frequency" we literally got shut down and had to start over again... those who are tapped into this frequency, and it agitated and took control of those who had their DNA that was turned over to the enemy.  And that's what's happening.  The Illuminati, the Freemasons, their main goal is to change the DNA of man, and they're doing it through these frequencies, whether it's the bombardment of the news media, whether it's rock and roll music, I mean we could go on and on with these frequencies as we've talked about before.  So you need to surround yourself with the good news, not the apocalyptic messages right now.  Not to say that things aren't going to happen, because we're always going to have fires and earthquakes and hurricanes.  It's not the apocalyptic message that everyone's talking about.   

I'm being bombarded by emails from Christians right now, saying, "Look, I support Trump.  But everybody in my family has isolated me.  Everybody in my church is not talking to me."  It's because their DNA is being controlled by the enemy.  By broadcasting the news media, the audio part of it, at 440.  That's why when you watch the news media you get agitated.  It creates fear, it creates panic.  And this is what is going on in the church.  The body of Christ has got to stop being vulnerable to this stuff.  You've got to stop listening to the mainstream news media.  Look, if I want to know what's happening, I'll go to Fox's website to catch the headlines...  That's not being broadcast, where I'm hearing it in a frequency or anything like that.  See, the thing about that 440 hertz is that it will damage your body organs.  That's another reason why people are so sick.  It changes your DNA.  That's the goal of the Freemasons, the Illuminati.  They want you to be part of that Illuminati bloodline.

Okay, I have only one question about all of this, which is:

What?

A news broadcast sent out solely at a frequency of 440 hertz wouldn't be damaging so much as it would be annoying, because it would be a single continuous musical tone at A above middle C, which would make it a little hard to glean information from, good or bad.  Also, if 440 hertz caused DNA to change, orchestra members would undergo horrifying mutations every time the oboe plays an A so the rest of the musicians can tune their instruments.

Which could be kind of entertaining, even if it wouldn't really be conducive to a good performance afterwards.

Also, you really get the impression here that, besides the fact that Mark Taylor is nuttier than squirrel shit, he also has no concept of how DNA works.

Or maybe I've just listened to too many symphonies in my life, and I'm now part of the "Illuminati bloodline."  Which, now that I come to think of it, would be kind of cool, especially if it came with evil superpowers.

But I'm guessing that's not really all that likely, because here I sit, drinking coffee and trying to reboot my brain with only marginal success thus far, instead of cackling maniacally while shooting lightning from my fingertips, which would be a lot more fun.

The real problem, of course, is that once you start looking into this stuff, you very quickly go down the Bottomless Rabbit Hole of Lunacy, and start watching videos with names like "432hz vs 440hz pt 2 Nazi Fluoride How Illuminati 440hz Music Poison Pineal Gland," which not only has to do with Nazis, fluoride, the pineal gland, and "frequencies," also involves astrology, the All-Seeing Eye, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, John Lennon, Elvis Presley, the year 1776, and pacts with the devil.  It ends by asking, "Did they deceive the mass and Themselves while they didn't knew IT?", which I think is a pretty good question.  After watching all of this stuff, I'm not sure what I knew anymore, myself.

So many thanks to the loyal reader who sent me the link, which has left me feeling like I need a double scotch even though it's only eight in the morning.  I suppose I should buck up, as I have a big day ahead, retuning all of my musical instruments to 432 hertz so that my pineal gland doesn't freeze up and turn me into a Trump-hating Nazi Freemason.  I hate it when that happens.

Political backfires

The good news from yesterday's post, wherein we learned some ways of fighting the backfire effect and convincing people to change their minds, was immediately counterbalanced by a new (and discouraging) study out of Denmark that showed that for politicians, the more data they have access to, the worse backfire effect becomes.

A team at Aarhus University led by Martin Baekgaard was studying motivated reasoning, which is the thought process we engage in when we are presented with information either supporting or refuting our prior beliefs.  In the first part of the experiment, test subjects were given test score data from two schools, A and B, and asked to evaluate which was more successful.  A different set of test subjects was given the same data, but one of the two schools was labeled "Public School A" and the other "Private School B" -- like in the United States, the relative merits of public vs. private schools is a topic of heated debate.

This first bit of research generated results that were unsurprising.  When the two schools were given anonymous tags, the data was evaluated fairly by both people who supported public schools and those who supported private schools.  When they were labeled, however, the backfire effect kicked in, and the test subjects' prior opinions skewed their analysis of the results.

So far, nothing we didn't already know.  But the second part of the experiment not only looked at the quantity of data provided, and compared the results of 1,000 test subjects from a variety of professions as compared to 954 career politicians.  And this gave some results that were, to put it mildly, interesting.  Let me give it to you in the authors' own words:

Does evidence help politicians make informed decisions even if it is at odds with their prior beliefs?  And does providing more evidence increase the likelihood that politicians will be enlightened by the information?  Based on the literature on motivated political reasoning and the theory about affective tipping points, this article hypothesizes that politicians tend to reject evidence that contradicts their prior attitudes, but that increasing the amount of evidence will reduce the impact of prior attitudes and strengthen their ability to interpret the information correctly.  These hypotheses are examined using randomized survey experiments with responses from 954 Danish politicians, and results from this sample are compared to responses from similar survey experiments with Danish citizens.  The experimental findings strongly support the hypothesis that politicians are biased by prior attitudes when interpreting information.  However, in contrast to expectations, the findings show that the impact of prior attitudes increases when more evidence is provided.

Yes, you read that right.  Politicians, like other people, are prone to falling into the backfire effect.  But unlike the rest of us, the more data they're given, the worse the backfire effect becomes.  Show a politician additional evidence, and all you're doing is making sure that (s)he stays planted even more firmly.

Baekgaard et al. propose a reason for this result, and I suspect they're correct; most politicians are, by their very nature, partisan, and have been elected because of strongly supporting a particular political agenda.  Since the backfire effect occurs when people double down on their beliefs because of feeling threatened, it stands to reason that politicians -- whose jobs depend on their beliefs being right -- would experience a greater sense of threat when they find they're wrong than the rest of us do.

But that leaves us with the rather alarming result that the people who are directing policy and making decisions for an entire electorate are going to be the ones whose response to the data is worst.

"The Great Presidential Puzzle" by James Albert Wales (1880) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And, of course, this result is borne out by what we see around us.  Here in the United States, it seems like every time new studies are performed and new data generated, the determination of politicians to shout "damn the facts, full speed ahead!" only gets stronger.  Which can explain why any of a number of crazy policies have been implemented, ones that fly in the face of every rational argument there is.

But in the words of Charlie Brown, "Now that I know that, what do I do?"  And my answer is: beats the hell out of me.  As I said in a previous post, I think nothing's going to change until the voters wise up, and that won't happen until we have a more educated citizenry.

And heaven only knows what it'll take for that to come about.

Argue with me

In recent months, I've done several posts that reference the backfire effect -- the tendency of people to double down on their previous beliefs when challenged, even when shown hard evidence that their views are incorrect.  But of course, this brings up the question, if people tend to plant their feet when you offer counterarguments, how do you change someone's mind?

A quartet of researchers at Cornell University, Chenhao Tan, Vlad Niculae, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and Lillian Lee, have studied this very question, and presented their findings in a paper called, "Winning Arguments: Interaction Dynamics and Persuasion Strategies in Good-faith Online Discussions."  My wife stumbled onto this study a couple of days ago, and knowing this was right down my alley, forwarded it to me.

What the researchers did was to study patterns on r/ChangeMyView, a subreddit where people post opinions and invite argument.  If someone does succeed in changing the original poster's view, the successful arguer is awarded a ∆ (the Greek letter delta, which in science is used to represent change).  By seeing who was awarded deltas, and analyzing their statements, the researchers were able to determine the characteristics of statements that were the most successful, and the ones that were generally unsuccessful.

Argument Irresistible, by Robert Macaire (from the magazine Le Charivari, May 1841) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And the results are a fascinating window into how we form, and hold on to, our opinions.  The authors write:

Changing someone's opinion is arguably one of the most important challenges of social interaction.  The underlying process proves difficult to study: it is hard to know how someone's opinions are formed and whether and how someone's views shift. Fortunately, ChangeMyView, an active community on Reddit, provides a platform where users present their own opinions and reasoning, invite others to contest them, and acknowledge when the ensuing discussions change their original views.  In this work, we study these interactions to understand the mechanisms behind persuasion. 

We find that persuasive arguments are characterized by interesting patterns of interaction dynamics, such as participant entry-order and degree of back-and-forth exchange.  Furthermore, by comparing similar counterarguments to the same opinion, we show that language factors play an essential role.  In particular, the interplay between the language of the opinion holder and that of the counterargument provides highly predictive cues of persuasiveness. Finally, since even in this favorable setting people may not be persuaded, we investigate the problem of determining whether someone's opinion is susceptible to being changed at all.  For this more difficult task, we show that stylistic choices in how the opinion is expressed carry predictive power.

More simply put, Tan et al. found that it wasn't the content of the argument that determined its success, it was how it was worded.  In particular, they found that the use of calmer words, statements that were serious (i.e. not joking or sarcasm), and arguments that were worded differently from the original statement (i.e. were not simply direct responses to what was said) were the most effective.  Quotes from sources were relatively ineffective, but if you can post a link to a corroborating site, it strengthens your argument.

Another thing that was more likely to increase your success at convincing others was appearing flexible yourself.  Starting out with "You're an idiot if you don't see that..." is a poor opening salvo.  Wording such as "It could be that..." or "It looks like the data might support that..." sounds as if it would be a signal of a weak argument, but in fact, such softer phrasing was much more likely to be persuasive than a full frontal attack.

Even more interesting were the characteristics of the original posts that signaled that the person was persuadable.  The people who were most likely to change their minds, the researchers found, wrote longer posts, included more information and data in the form of lists, included sources, and were more likely to use first-person singular pronouns (I, my) rather than first-person plural (we, our) or third-person impersonal (they, their).

Unsurprising, really; if a person is basing his/her opinion on evidence, I'd expect (s)he would be easier to convince using different evidence.  And the "I" vs. "we" vs. "they" thing also makes some sense; as I posted a couple of weeks ago, despite our technological advances, we remain tribal creatures.  If you engage that in-group-identity module in the brain, it's no wonder that we are more likely to hang on to whatever views allow us to keep our sense of belonging to the tribe.

The Tan et al. research, however, does give us some ideas about how to frame arguments in order to give us the greatest likelihood of success.  Stay calm, don't rant or ridicule.  Give your reasoning, and expand on your own views rather than simply responding to what the other person said.  If you have links or sources, post them.  Especially, show your own willingness to be persuaded.  If the person you're arguing with sees you as reasonable yourself, you're much more likely to be listened to.

Most importantly, don't give up debate as a completely fruitless and frustrating endeavor.  Vlad Niculae, who co-authored the study, found their results to be encouraging.  "If you’ve never visited [ChangeMyView]," Nicolae writes, "the concept that people can debate hot topics without getting into flame wars on the internet might be hard to believe.  Or, if you read a lot of Youtube comments, you might be inclined to believe the backfire effect, and doubt that graceful concession is even possible online.  But a quick trip to this great subreddit will undoubtedly make you a believer."

Out of line

The latest conspiracy theory, as if we needed another one, is that the Chinese are up to something out in the Kumtag Desert.

An article by Jesus Diaz over at Gizmodo called "Why is China Building These Gigantic Structures in the Middle of Nowhere?" shows a screen capture of a Google Earth view, with the arid expanses of eastern China overlaid with a strange pattern of white lines.  The photograph is captioned, "What the hell, China?", presumably because asking China "What the hell?" has resulted in their immediate cooperation in the past.

The author of the article, and some of the people who posted comments afterwards, speculate that the lines might be:

• top secret military bases;
• an evil new weather-control station along the lines of HAARP;
• landing sites for aliens;
• patterns meant to resemble constellations as seen from the aforementioned aliens' home world;
• a mock-up of the streets in a major US city, to be used as target practice; or
• magical patterns involving pentagrams and Masonic symbols.

Or maybe all of the above. They conveniently leave out my own personal favorite explanation, which is that it is:

• Photoshopped.

But of course, I have no proof of that, and even mentioning it would probably make the conspiracy theorists decide that I am part of the conspiracy, and maybe even that I am secretly Chinese despite the fact that I am a blue-eyed blond.  (Maybe I was genetically altered, who knows?)

In any case, I find the whole thing screamingly funny, especially the part about pentagrams and Masons, because we all know how many Satan-worshiping Chinese Masons there are.  The part about the city street maps is also kind of funny, especially given the map that was posted, overlaying the Chinese line pattern with a map of Washington, DC:

The map is followed by the comment that the grid pattern "does sort of resemble the configuration of streets near 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue." *one eyebrow raised in a significant fashion*

Well, okay, not so much.  You'd think that if the Chinese were trying to create a mock-up of the streets of D. C. in order to "calibrate their optical targeting systems," it would conform perfectly, not just "sort of."  On the one hand, the writer seems to think that the Chinese are up to something super-technological and amazingly top secret, and in the same breath that they can't draw a straight line.  C'mon, you can't have it both ways.  If they were trying to target D. C., it'd be kind of important to get the map correct, don't you think?  It'd also be pretty easy, given that accurate street maps of major US cities have been available online for years.

And after all, if they're trying to take out President Trump, wouldn't it be easier just to program their optical targeting systems to home in on the radioactive orange glow of his skin than to build inaccurate mockups of Washington D. C. out in some godforsaken stretch of Chinese desert?

Of course, the problem with this conspiracy theory is the usual one; if you're allowed to rotate, shrink, or enlarge a random pattern of lines, you can always make it align to another such random pattern -- as long as you're content with a "sort of" fit.  I'd bet that I could take the Chinese line pattern and make it align to the streets of Ithaca, New York, if I wanted to, and also if I had technological skills higher than that of a typical kindergartner, which I don't.  It's like the post I did a while back about ley lines; if you can manipulate the data, and you're okay with an approximate match, you can always find a pattern.

So, what are the Chinese really doing out there?  Assuming, of course, that the pattern wasn't Photoshopped in by some hoaxer?  The answer: I have no idea.  But I'm going to go out on a limb, here, and state for the record that I'll bet it has nothing to do with alien landing sites, optical targeting systems, evil weather-control apparatus, or the Masons.  On the other hand, if today an alien spacecraft adorned with Masonic symbols lands in the middle of downtown D. C. during a freak tornado, I will consider myself as standing corrected.

Blinding me with science

Call me naïve, but on some level I still can't quite believe we've gotten to the point in the United States where our elected officials pride themselves on ignoring science.

The latest example of this kind of idiocy is the chief administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, who in my opinion was appointed to this position in order to give him the leverage to dismantle the EPA entirely.  That he hasn't done so yet -- although steps have been taken, in the form of cutting part of the staff and muzzling the remaining ones -- is more a testimony to the complete inability of this administration to accomplish anything, good or bad, than it is to a lack of will.

But Pruitt has made it mighty clear what his attitude is.  If there was any doubt of that, consider his statement last Thursday, given during an interview on a Texas radio program: "Science should not be something that’s just thrown about to try to dictate policy in Washington, D.C."

In other words: those damned ivory-tower scientists should keep their noses where they belong, in their electron microscopes and particle accelerators and reaction flasks, and stop trying to use what they know to accomplish anything practical.

I find this stance to be nothing short of baffling.  If we don't use science -- i.e., facts and evidence -- to drive policy, what the hell are we supposed to use?  Party affiliation?  Guesses?  The Farmer's Almanac?  Our daily horoscopes?

How have we gotten here, to the point that science is considered somehow disconnected from the real world?  Where people say, "If the scientists messing around in their labs say one thing, but the folksy musings of non-scientists say something else, I'm gonna believe the non-scientists?"  Part of it, I think, is the fault of us science teachers.  The fact that a governmental leader -- of the Environmental Protection Agency, for fuck's sake -- can say something like this and not be immediately laughed into an embarrassed silence is more of an indictment of our public school system than anything I can think of.  We've for years largely taught science as a list of disconnected facts and vocabulary words; no wonder that our students grow up to think of science as something weird, hard to pronounce, and not quite real.

But it's worse than that.  Our leaders, and pundits on television and talk radio, have trained us to disbelieve the facts themselves.  Never mind such incontrovertible hard evidence as the melting of the polar ice caps (just last week, a ship made it for the first time across the northern sea route from Norway to South Korea, without an icebreaker).  Never mind the thousands of pages of worldwide temperature data, the shifting of migration times for birds, the changes to the timing of flowering and leaf-out in northern deciduous forests, and even a recent study that in the northeastern United States, snowshoe hares are no longer growing in a white coat in the winter -- they're staying brown all year, because now that there's no reliable snow cover, being white in January is poor camouflage.

But none of those facts matter when compared to the ranting of people like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, not to mention Donald Trump and his proxy at the EPA, Scott Pruitt.  Ironically, Pruitt's statement, delivered last week in Texas, came as a category-4 hurricane was bearing down on the Texas coast, and has so far delivered an estimated 15 trillion gallons of water -- and it's not done yet.  It's being called a "500-year storm."

I'm trying to figure out how many storms in the past ten years have been labeled that way.  I've lost count.

And yet Ann Coulter is still discounting any possibility that this storm could be the result of anthropogenic climate change.  "I don't believe Hurricane Harvey is God's punishment for Houston electing a lesbian mayor," Coulter tweeted yesterday.  "But that is more credible than 'climate change.'"

Thanks for weighing in, Ms. Coulter.  I'll give your opinion serious consideration once I see your degree in climatology.

Or, for that matter, in any scientific field.

But that kind of har-de-har-har statement from a layperson is somehow given more weight than all of the academic papers, solid research, projections, and predictions -- than all of the actual facts -- generated by the smartest and best-trained people in the world.

Hurricane Harvey prior to landfall [image courtesy of NASA]

As far as Scott Pruitt, he couldn't resist the opportunity to follow up his statement about how we shouldn't "throw science around" to generate policy with a dig at President Obama, who at least listened to scientists, even if he didn't always give them the attention they deserved.  "[Climate change] serves political ends," Pruitt said.  "The past administration used it as a wedge issue."

So in this topsy-turvy bizarro world we're in, to use facts, evidence, and science is creating a politicized "wedge issue," and to ignore them is the way to create sound policy.

The whole thing leaves me wanting to scream obscenities at my computer, which I actually did more than once while writing this.

Honestly, I think the only way this will change is if the American people wise up to the extent that all of these ignorant clowns get voted out of office, or if we're struck by an ecological catastrophe so immense that it becomes impossible to deny what's happening.  I'm not secretly hoping for the latter, by the way; but our track record of waking up to reality before serious damage is done is hardly encouraging.

For now, all we can do is watch and wait, and hope that the chickens come home to roost in the 2018 election.  But I'm not particularly optimistic about that, either.