House of Eratosthenes

There’s a genre of expository writing where the author explains in detail how he got something completely wrong. The name for this form is “nonexistent” because no one ever does it. Similarly, you will never hear a lecture from an economist explaining how he got some prediction totally wrong. For instance, Obama’s economic team swore that the stimulus bill would set off an economic boom through the magic The Multiplier. They were wrong and it was a flop, but no one talks about it because it is simply not done.

This is something you see in all fields, not just public policy. You never read about scientists discussing how they screwed up an experiment or fell for some nutty idea that sounded good at the moment. What we expect and what we get is equivocation, denial and when that does not work, an attempt to flush the incident down the memory hole. It usually works too. Paul Ehrlich was hilariously wrong about human populations, but he has paid no price.

Well, I can explain it, I think. Opinion-makers and opinion-distributors like Ehrlich pay no price for being wrong, because very few people care; and people don’t care because they, in turn, also pay no price. “Turned out to be right/wrong” has little practical meaning anymore. Our system of forming and governing societies, our style of discussing weighty issues, come from times in centuries past when being right or wrong meant the difference between living or starving. Now, it means the difference between strutting like a peacock on Facebook, or…fuming away on Facebook.

It has almost as insignificant a bearing on our station in life, families, fortunes, careers, all the things that matter, as…the outcome of an organized sports event? Well no. Nothing has less impact than that. But it’s pretty close. Been that way for awhile, and our dedication to the dialectic has suffered as a consequence.

[…] Freeberg: […]
- DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Being Wrong | 11/04/2015 @ 07:55
In engineering, this process is called a “post mortem” – introspection into how a project went, even when the project gets canceled.

People are still prideful human beings in this process, though.
- fwh | 11/04/2015 @ 09:09
It sounds like something that CS Lewis pegged very early on – one of his earliest works, in fact, “The Pilgrim’s Recess” – when he wrote of a place where the residents have to fill a certain quota of opinions each week or their master cuts off their food. Whether right or wrong doesn’t matter; it’s the volume that counts.
- nightfly | 11/04/2015 @ 11:27
Trying to explain the inevitable failure of central planning to some college kids, I used the analogy of the movies. Consider: In Hollywood, everyone is the very best in the world at what they do. Not just the directors and/or the actors. The key grips, the best boys, and all the other weird titles you see when the credits roll; they’re all seasoned professionals, highly trained, working at the apex of a huge, ruthlessly competitive business. And yet…. even though everyone involved is the absolute best at what they do, we still get nothing but Ant Man, Origins: The Formicating. Ant Man was a joke back in the Sixties; did anyone, I asked them, even the most dorked-out Marvel fanboi, really want a full-length, live-action movie about Ant Man? Or the A-Team, or the Dukes of Hazzard, or shot-for-shot remakes of National Lampoon’s Vacation or what have you? The target demo — teenagers — have never heard of any of these properties, but they all get made into huge-budget movies.

That’s because the feedback is all screwed up, I told them. Everyone involved is awesome at making great movies, but “making great movies” isn’t the goal. Actor X only wants to work with Director Y. Director Y will only work for Studio Z. The accountants won’t greenlight anything below a certain anticipated opening-day box office, and those figures come from marketing. The marketing guys, meanwhile, have to get to work before the filming even starts. The technical people work in a bubble, and, instead of taking directions from the scriptwriters to make the writers’ vision appear onscreen, they tell the writers to rewrite based on their effects. And so you get the Star Wars prequels, where every single aspect of the production is amazing… but the movie itself sucks.

When there’s no way to get meaningful feedback, I told them, that’s what happens. Bureaucrats report the smooth operation of their departments to other bureaucrats, but nobody bothers to ask what those departments are actually supposed to be producing. Everyone over-fulfilled the production target in the Five Year Plan, yet the workers don’t have shoes.
- Severian | 11/04/2015 @ 12:23
Hey, if it ain’t dialectic, it’s PATHETIC!
But “feel goods” (or anti-organized feel bads) ARE the basis of rhetorical propaganda based …um….paid protestors.
Oddly, U-turns from consequences aside, “othering” rhetoric ALWAYS seems to involve “free” transfer of wealth, and/or “new rules” concerning jurisprudence.
- CaptDMO | 11/04/2015 @ 14:48

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“Being Wrong”Wednesday, November 4th, 2015

“Being Wrong”
Wednesday, November 4th, 2015