My point is not that al-Qaeda has suddenly become unusually stupid. It has always been unusually stupid, and only once unusually lucky. My point is that the United States of America has become unusually stupid. Rambo, brandishing his howitzer in all directions and bellowing his war cry, is menaced by a mouse. The mouse knew a lion, once, but the lion’s dead now. Kicking in doors indiscriminately all around the world to find the mouse, and trashing the finest Constitution and Bill of Rights on earth to punish him, is as profoundly stupid as, say, announcing to the world with childlike candor that henceforth you plan to lie to it any time you think advisable. And what could possibly be stupider than that, eh?
How about an example from right here in Canada? I’ve been chided in the past for citing monumental stupidities by Palestines, Israelis and Americans…but only trivial, local stupidities by Canadians. Why, I’ve been asked, can’t Canada get a fair shake in the idiocy Olympics? My critics will be glad to hear we have a shot at the gold, having produced what some judges believe is the most appallingly stupid case of journalistic irresponsibility in recent memory. In response to one US government agency’s recently announced intention to spread disinformation—admittedly a piece of world class stupidity in itself—one of our large metropolitan newspapers ran a lengthy article that assembled slanted factoids, scurrilous Internet rumors, illogical innuendo and obvious outright nonsense to “prove” that President Bush himself bombed the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and pinned it on al-Qaeda to give himself an excuse to kill all the Arabs and steal all the oil. The piece is presented with an absolutely straight face, and only in the last paragraphs are you told the punchline: if America says it can lie, hey, maybe we’re lying too. Tee hee.
My heart sank as I read it: it was perfectly obvious to the meanest intelligence that many readers were going to miss the satirical intent. The majority of them, it would appear: a week later, responses were printed…and sure as hell, three out of five readers believe the piece was serious. One says he faxed it to all his friends, another calls it “brilliant and complete” and the third says it restored her faith in the possibility of freedom of speech in this country.
I have to agree with her: even composing enemy propaganda is now apparently acceptable, if you smirk as you do it. Or is that word too harsh? Publishing lies that blame Bush for 9/11 will, inarguably, give aid and comfort to our enemy, in time of war (albeit undeclared); the only question then is whether aspirations to humor constitute adequate excuse for putting Canadians at increased risk. I certainly won’t collaborate: I’ve pointedly not named the writer or newspaper and won’t while it’s still possible to download the article with a few mouse clicks. But I’ve given plenty of clues; anyone who really wants it, and is bright enough to be trusted with it, can find it.
For my next magical trick, I’ve actually got something even more shamefully stupid than crafting propaganda for terrorists as a joke—and again, Canada gets the discredit. You probably think I mean that doctor who refuses to treat smokers, but he’s already been adequately savaged by my distinguishable colleague Rex Murphy. I’ve got something worse: a pack of doctors who’ve sunk a knife into the broken hearts of some grief-stricken parents and twisted it, claiming the noblest of motives.
They’re highly respected, accomplished doctors from the Hospital for Sick Children with the University of Toronto and the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Their goal happens to be the same as that other doctor: they yearn to become heroes who helped save the planet from wicked tobacco. But not by doing anything so strenuous as, say, learning how to prevent or cure nicotine addiction. Demonizing the addicts is so much easier. And how better to demonize addicts than to make everyone think they’re baby killers?
All it takes is bogus science. So these heroes inspected the lungs of fewer than four dozen infants who died of SIDS, formerly called “crib death,” looking for nicotine (only). Sure enough, sometimes they found some. There, they announced triumphantly to the press: We’ve proved smoking parents cause SIDS. Ma’am, you killed your child.
Of course, they’d proved nothing of the sort. No one knows the cause(s) of SIDS. Even if one accepts the ridiculous proposition that anything a zealot finds in a corpse’s lungs must be what killed it, there was another small problem with the logic: very often, the parents of the dead infants with nicotine in their lungs were both nonsmokers. Oops.
Easily fixed: The doctors simply told the press, on zero evidence, that those parents are liars. No point checking with their insurance company, which usually tests for nicotine: just brand them as lying junkies. Make the data fit the theory.
These disgraces to science didn’t stop with simply blaming the bereaved, shaming the shattered: some are actively urging other well-intentioned nimrods to kidnap smokers’ children! “If Children’s Aid Societies step in to protect children who are undernourished, maybe we have to step in when babies do not breathe clean air,” the lead “investigator” blithely told this newspaper. A spokesperson for the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies agreed they’re seriously considering doing just that. To between one fifth and one quarter of all parents. On the basis of a single unreplicated study of forty-four infants that proves nothing.
Doctors, if I can manage to find any molecules of alcohol, caffeine, cannabis, chocolate, sugar or any other enjoyable substance that some yahoo wants banned as a health menace in the lungs of any of your children, may I come to your houses with armed backup and apprehend the kids for their own safety?
The competition in international imbecility is heavy. How about those al-Qaeda geniuses who paid a fortune for weapons-grade plutonium that turned out to be medical waste, barely radioactive enough to make a Geiger counter snicker? Or all the Hindu and Muslim extremists pissing on Gandhiji’s memory in India, each desperate to prove their religion is the most barbaric? Or Prince Philip’s boffo Australian debut as a comedian, making spear-chucker jokes to aboriginals? Or the Pope’s controversial debut as a Russian televangelist? But by God, Canada can hold its head as low as anybody. We’ve all entered the stupidity zone together.
Says Who?
FIRST PRINTED OCTOBER 1996
What are the facts? Again and again and again—what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history”—what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your only clue.
—ROBERT HEINLEIN, TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE
THE FIRST AND MOST OBVIOUS problem is that it’s getting harder to tell a fact from a factoid—let alone a factoid from pure mahooha.
Witness the public humiliation of poor old Pierre Salinger, who was unwary enough to trust data he’d gotten from the Internet and publicly proclaim that Flight 800 had been shot down by the US Navy. (A theory which, at a minimum, requires one to believe not one sailor on the hypothetical offending vessel harbors the slightest desire to be rich and famous, and the captain has no enemies.) It has always surprised me to meet people who believed, “It must be true: I read it somewhere,” and in my lifetime I have been equally surprised to find people who believed, “It must be true: it was on TV.” I find myself astonished again now that I’m meeting people who tell me, “It must be true: I downloaded it.”
The Internet, as presently constituted, is anarchy. Information ka-ka. Garbage in, garbage out. There are no fact-checkers. There is no peer review. Any fool who fancies him or herself an information guerilla can publish any gibberish he or she likes. Therefore all Internet “facts” not supported by checkable references have the same value: zero.
Our culture appears to be packed with people desperately eager to lay down a kilobuck or two, fill their desktops with large cranky gear and devote hundreds of hours of skullsweat—to gain access to an endless cornucopia of suspect data. And, since it arrives via the highest of high tech, treat all of it as revealed truth. We’re pilot
ing on the basis of the most up-to-the-minute rumors. This strikes me as a recipe for the first global riot.
But the Internet is not the problem; only its latest avatar. No matter how information comes to us, it takes hard work and careful analysis to decide how much it’s worth. Okay, we can automatically discount anything on government stationery or paid for by any political party or interest group. Sure, we can be suspicious of any announcement from anything calling itself an institute. Sooner or later Time or Newsweek will report on something of which we have personal experience, and we’ll get a sense of how much faith can be placed in them. And when I receive (and I swear I did) a junkmail from some psychic advisors that begins, “We hope this did not reach you too late,” I can tell at once that it has reached me about forty-five years too late.
But what are we to do when, for example, we read the flat assertion that, “Children born to women who smoked dope while pregnant cannot make decisions. They cannot learn,” in a November 20 Vancouver Sun Op-Ed column by one Connie Kuhns? Let’s even suppose for argument that some shred of documentation had been offered, some study cited, some scientist named—suppose we’d been given facts, rather than a claim they exist. How are we to check the facts? Required: at least an hour in a good library (or navigating cyberspace) just to find the cited study and read it. (And even after reading the whole thing, how many of us possess the necessary intellectual training to tell a good study from a statistical massage?) Another half hour to assess the professional competence of the author(s). An hour, minimum, wading through fat indexes of technical journals to learn whether the claimed result is reproducible or unique to the claimant. More work will be required to trace who funded the study and where they got their money. Then, for context, you have to step back and derive for yourself the ratio of anti- to pro-marijuana studies that receive funding—and a dozen other threads. It was kind of Ms. Kuhns to spare us all that tedious work—but in consequence only those of us who chance to actually know any children of mothers who smoked pot while pregnant can tell she is speaking pernicious nonsense.
Bad data are dangerous, whether cybernetic or semantic. We all know that some downloaded programs contain viruses, bits of bad programming that instruct the host computer to do self-destructive things, and that the wise hacker practices safe surfing. But Richard Dawkins pointed out that ideas are very like viruses. If I think up a good idea and tell it to you, it takes over a little of your brain’s processing power, forces it to make a copy of itself and encourages you to pass it on to others. The stronger the idea, the faster and farther it replicates itself, until—if it be vigorous enough—it saturates the whole infoculture. An early hacker named K’ung Fu-Tse, for instance, wrote some viruses that have survived for millennia. Such proto-nerds as Muhammad, Buddha and Jesus programmed infobots so powerful that they continue to crash operating systems and reformat whole hard drives to this day. A really good idea can spread like chicken pox through a daycare center.
So can a really bad one. As Heinlein said, “The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with its credibility—and vice versa.”
We need some real-life equivalent of Disinfectant, the clever little program written by John Norstad of Northwestern University which constantly guards my Mac against infection by corrupting ideas. Information hygiene requires a cultural Crap-Detector that will allow us to practice safe sentience.
And so we come at last to the second, less obvious and more serious problem, which I will have to leave for another day:
Nobody wants one. Not enough to pay for it. Deep down, we don’t really care if the stories we download from the Net are true, as long as they’re good stories and support our preconceived prejudices. These are, after all, the Crazy Years.
The Mahooha Filter
FIRST PRINTED FEBRUARY 1997
EDGAR PANGBORN, one of the most lyrical writers science fiction (or fiction) has yet produced, worked in a time when one could not use, in print, the common euphemism which literally refers to male bovine excrement. (A term which subsequently became acceptable for a time, but is now once again politically incorrect in that it ignores the valuable contributions of female ruminants.) One can scarcely discuss the human condition in any thoughtful way without mentioning the substance in question rather frequently. So Mr. Pangborn was forced to invent a euphemism for a euphemism, and he selected the splendid word “mahooha.” I recommend its resurrection.
One of the more invigoratingly difficult challenges of life in the Crazy Years is learning how to strike a balance between keeping an open mind and being a sucker. One should not dismiss new ideas out of hand…but neither should one accept old ideas out of hand. One ought to be deeply suspicious of anything that Everybody Knows—and just as suspicious of Secret Truths known only to Pierre Salinger.
Indeed, there seems little to choose between them. Mr. Salinger is prepared to believe in an airtight conspiracy made up on the spot by a shipful of randomly selected sailors. The rest of the media, to a person, seem equally prepared to believe that in Colorado it takes six months to get back the results of a simple DNA match. Whether it comes vouched for by the New York Times or from some anonymous text-only Web site, mahooha is still mahooha.
We navigate an uncharted sea of suspect data gathered by unreliable sensors. Riches and reefs alike await us in the dark—and in the end we really have only intuition to guide us. There is no shortage of lookouts. There are too many, all shouting at once, all warning of contradictory dangers. What is needed is a Mahooha Filter.
One may not wish to discriminate—but one must become discriminating, or drown in mahooha. There just isn’t enough time to run down every bit of information offered and rate its reliability. A way must be found to safely reject whole sheaves of data, by their smell alone.
So one adopts certain rules of thumb. Here are some I have found useful:
I routinely ignore:
Anyone who uses the word “Jehovah.” This one is actually not a value-judgment; it’s simply beyond my control. Speak to me of Jehovah, and with the best will in the world, my eyes glaze over. If this be the reflex that will send me to Hell, blame He who hardwired it into me.
Any newscaster who pronounces “nuclear” as “nucular.”
Any newscaster.
Any Pro-Life advocate who has not adopted and raised at least one unwanted child, to adulthood and through college. No excuses for economic hardship; no excuses, period. Put up or shut up.
Any antismoking zealot who cannot, at a minimum, identify and explain the principal logical fallacy in the famous Wertheimer study of sidestream smoke.1
Any antinuclear zealot who is not familiar with the comparative health records of the U.S. Navy nuclear submarine service (which permits smoking in enclosed airspace) and the general public.
Any critic (as distinct from reviewer) who is not a credentialed practitioner of the art in question—e.g., any book critic who has never been published in that genre, or any film critic who has never been professionally engaged in film-making.
Any reviewer (a distinctly different trade from critic), regardless of credentials, who gives away the ending or the big plot twist. This is, indeed, the only sin a reviewer can commit.
Any conspiracy theory involving more than three living principals or more than a hundred dollars.
Any work of art with an exclamation point in the title.
Any press release from a political party or candidate.
Any press release, including—especially!—my own.
Anything purporting to be science fact that is broadcast on the Arts and Entertainment Network, especially if narrated by Leonard Nimoy.
Any and all psychic friends who have a question.
Any claim that something pleasurable is unhealthy. Tell me broccoli causes cancer, I’ll listen. (This one is finally moot, since every conceivable pleasurable human activity has now been claimed to be bad for you.)
Finally, I would like to propose an international telephone number—a
sort of People’s Mahooha Filter. Remember the old TV game shows with applause-meters, measuring audience reaction by decibels? Let’s set up a North American Mahooha Foundation with broad police powers. Each day the foundation will select from the news whatever event, action, verdict or pronouncement is, in the opinion of the trustees, the day’s most profoundly stupid. Then the rest of us get to phone in—at our own expense, to keep us honest—and literally give it the Laugh Test.
If enough of us are moved to pay long distance rates to howl with laughter at, say, the woman in Philadelphia who is presently suing the pharmacy that sold her a popular contraceptive jelly, because she ate it on toast but got pregnant anyway (I swear, this is true), she has to shut up and go away. If we all roar at the sight of Pepsi and Coke wasting billions on a perfectly useless advertising-battle, they have to spend the money lowering prices instead. See how it could work?
I realize this system would require at least a couple of constitutional amendments—but wouldn’t it be worth it?
1 The Wertheimer study of sidestream smoke is in fact nonexistent—I made it up to prove to myself that anti-smoking zealots never actually look at any data they didn’t make up themselves. In nearly ten years, not one has ever caught me at it. Instead, to a man, they mumble something about flaws in Wertheimer’s critics’ methodology. They bullshit, in other words.
A Tale of Two Charlies
FIRST PRINTED APRIL 2001
ON THE FRONT PAGE OF THE Toronto Globe and Mail’s April 18, 2001, newspaper, a twenty-two-year-old Chinese student said, “[Americans] have attacked our plane and killed our heroic pilot. All the world has seen this act—it is proof that the USA is an aggressive power.” China’s official website overflowed with similar loud clucking. Reading it, I couldn’t help but think of my colleague Dean Ing’s splendid story “Very Proper Charlies”…and of Charlie’s chickens, the first ones I ever met socially.
The Crazy Years Page 2
