House of Eratosthenes

I lay claim to the concept, but my friend James Bostwick of Newsblog Central gets credit for the name. Fungi Fallacies, a modern plague, threatening to infest and smother and starve us as surely as anything from the Book of Exodus, consisting of nothing but so much intellectual nonsense.

I’ll explain.

We live in an age of a troubling paradox, and I believe it is unprecedented. In all of recorded human history, we’ve managed to rely on an unwavering truth about the information we can gather: Quantity will invariably lead to quality. Put another way, in times past, it was easy for us to take some of our more glaring mistakes, whether the mistakes involved intentional fraud or not, and tie them to some nugget of good information we didn’t have. Had we known just a little bit more, things would have been better. Our parents could do this, as could our grandparents, our ancestors from a century or two ago — it has been, as they say, ever thus. Bad information has a correlation to inadequate information.

And so it has been part of the human condition to, like a dog chasing a car, wish for more information. And like the dog catching up to the car, here we are. We have the “innernets,” which by themselves/itself, put us into an entirely different world. What we want to know, we can find out. Instantly. Usually, free of charge or any obligation whatsoever. And what we call the “web” promises to be merely the first ray of sunshine in a whole new dawn.

And like the dog chasing the car and finally catching it, we find we’ve answered nothing and just raised new questions. We barely comprehend what it is we’ve achieved, and as for the new situation this achievement has placed us in, we’re entirely clueless.

We find ourselves submerged not in useful information, but in crap. It’s up to our armpits. And most distressing of all, before we had all this information, the crap wasn’t here. “Back in the day,” crap was something you found on the bottom of your shoe once in awhile. Now we’re swimming in it. If the crap was only ten percent of everything we heard, like it used to be — or twenty or even fifty percent — we’d be on easy street. But we have all this information, and now ninety-nine percent of it, or more — not ten percent — is nothing more than pure feces. What happened? We were supposed to be enlightened, and instead we’re being smothered.

Why is that? Well, to answer that question, consider what a “fungus” is. The mushrooms you buy in the store to put on your salad, are a fungus. The growths, and the fuzz, and the slime you find on the north sides of trees and rocks deep in the forest, each of these is a fungus. What grows in your crotch when you don’t change your underwear or take a bath is a fungus. The plural is “fungi,” and what amazing things fungi are!

They have it in common with each other that they are fragile. Incredibly fragile. Depending on what kind of fungus we’re discussing, the band of acceptable temperatures is relatively narrow, and they always need moisture. In addition to water, they require a lot of food, preferrably nitrogen-rich food. They can’t digest things very well on their own. So a constant supply of somebody else’s “used food” is ideal. And they don’t like light.

What’s remarkable about a fungus, is that for something so picky and fragile, they are extraordinarily low-maintenance. It’s really a miracle of nature. You get the right conditions in a house, on a tree, on your foot…and there you go. Fungus. Fungi are so low-maintenance, that you don’t even have to work to get fungus — you have to work to not get fungus.

That brings us to the fungi fallacy.

Just as an interested person can now use the “innernets” to learn whatever he wants, we tend to forget that a charlatan can use the same device to sell whatever he wants to sell. That has been the case since before the web, of course. Vaudeville-era chronicles are replete with stories of “snake oil” salesmen and the like. But with the planet covered with a virtual network, today’s snake-oil salesman can be connected instantly with whatever environment he wants to transform into a market. They get to select the enviornment in which their wares are peddled. Just as the student can be connected instantly with whoever might have the information he wants. It’s not a one-way street.

And because the charlatans choose the environment much the same way as the fungus chooses the north side of a rock, we have this “information fungus.” Lots and lots of it. We get to hear ideas that have no intrinsic structural integrity of their own, and are just as intellectually strong as a fungus is hardy. That is to say, not at all. But like the fungi, those ideas get to thrive wherever their advocates feel the ideas have the best shot. Wherever there is moisture, fecal matter, and an absence of light.

In generations past, we had a “fungus” like this. People said Ronald Reagan was trying to advance a nuclear arms race, when America already had the power to “blow up the world seven hundred thousand times.” This started out as “blow up the world five times,” if memory serves, and then the number kept getting bigger and bigger. But there was no “web,” so to propagate, the canard had to tumble through several different enviornments involving several different cultures.

Now look what happened. The myth survived, because we all have it in common that we don’t want to see the world blow up. But for its own continued survival, it had to mutate into something called the Nuclear Winter. Evidently, someone got embarrassed because someone else was asking probing questions. Like…”Whaddya mean, blow up? You mean South America will be flying in one direction and Asia will be flying in the other direction? How did you conclude we have the power to do that even once?” Someone was asking questions like that. You can’t tell me nobody was asking it. I was asking it.

Nowadays, when you get silly mythologies like that going, you can choose where and how they propagate. Our information-oriented society has made it possible to keep such a chestnut a virtual secret from undesirable audiences, while spreading like wildfire only among the desirable ones. Consequently, it takes much longer for common sense to seep in.

And so we get to hear “all the scientists agree there is global warming and it’s dangerous.” This is simply not true. But it seems to be so, because whoever wants to promote that fallacy, can use a modern infrastructure to plant the message where it is expected to grow.

You can’t go just anywhere and say “we need to raise the minimum wage to bring the unemployment rate down.” There are too many places where someone might say “how does it bring the unemployment rate down, when you make it more expensive to hire people?” …or, “raise it to what, ten dollars an hour? Why not twenty? Why not fifty? If a little of something is a good idea, isn’t a lot of it better? Why not?” — and there you are. Fallacy ruined.

Like a fungus, such silly ideas are fragile. They can only grow in certain environments.

But where the environment exists, the fungus will take root.

So we get to hear about “the war in Iraq is all about oil.” We’re a victim of our own success. A generation ago, this idea would have found its way to us through exposure to a diverse audience, and somewhere in there someone would have asked a question bothersome enough to pop the whole theory like a balloon. Like…”if we’re in Iraq to get free oil, why are we letting them keep it?” Like that. Well nowadays, the message can be communicated and ultimately transplanted to a hospitable environment, without surviving such scrutinizing questions. Ergo, we have nonsensical ideas. We’re buried in them. Fungi fallacies.

Here’s an even better example, courtesy of “Karol” at Alarming News. The author is describing a personal experience at a politically-themed rock concert:

We have this contingency of people, who actually believe they are the majority. It was mentioned several times last night that most Americans have come around to their view, that the troops need to come home now. How do they know? Well, polls say so! Which, fine, you want to believe polls, that’s ok with me. But how come their elected officials don’t believe those same polls? Why aren’t their Senators and Congressmen calling for withdrawal en masse? If the majority agrees that immediate withdrawal is necessary, why is it a touchy political issue? It should be so simple. In fact, I highly recommend that Democrats follow the polls and run in ’06 on the idea of immediate withdrawal. I want to see how that would go down, exactly.

And there you have another example. Suppose I want the troops back home, now, no matter what. I think everybody agrees with me. The polls say so. But like Karol points out…I don’t pressure my representatives in Congress to pay attention to those polls. That is not the right environment for my message, just as a salt bed isn’t the right environment for a mushroom. No, this is something for a rock concert.

And the author makes a great point. A truly populist sentiment is ripe for a lot of other places besides rock concerts…but we’re buried in moose feces types of ideas that don’t seem to be sufficiently durable, to be offered just anywhere. They have to grow only in places where they feel at home. But once those environments exist, they grow by themselves.

Moral of the story is, more information is not better. We’ve had to contend with this before in recorded human history…just not quite as often as we do now.

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Fungi FallaciesFriday, March 24th, 2006

Fungi Fallacies
Friday, March 24th, 2006