House of Eratosthenes

It made a big impression on me last night as I participated in two simultaneous dialogues over on the Hello Kitty of Blogging and I realized I was seeing two simultaneous demonstrations of the same class of event. Demonstration one: A conversation ensued underneath a link to the latest poll results at Unskewed Polls which currently have Romney/Ryan at 55% and Obama/Biden at 42%. And the conversation was: Stop linking to unskewed polls!

I don’t mean to imply that the complainant did not know what he was talking about. I for one am perfectly willing to listen to reason to a math-based argument that says Mitt Romney is not, when all’s said and done, ahead by thirteen points. And the argument was based on math, in the sense that the complainant did mention the word “math.” But I found his syllogism overly simplistic:

1. The more orthodox polls say something different,
2. Blah blah blah blah blah,
3. Therefore, they’re right and unskewed polls is wrong.

Moreover, I found the arguing style to be deceptive. When I said something to the effect of, I do believe there is an effort to misrepresent Obama’s prospects for re-election in order to depress Republican turnout, he came back with “So all the major polls are push polls, all designed to hurt Republicans, all working together to make Republicans lose?” This doesn’t do much to convince me. If the other person’s position is an all-or-nothing and mine is a sometimes-maybe, and the opposition has to rephrase my position into a hardline stance in order to attack it, it just shows they can’t present a compelling case by continuing to define the disagreement as it actually exists.

So I replied this morning, in a way I think nicely summarizes what took place last night…

I think the country is so polarized right now, and this election is so close, and the history of polling is sufficiently filled with debacles in which a democrat victory or a tie was a sure thing but it ended up with a decisive Republican victory — [the polling is] pretty much a waste of time unless steps are taken to ensure the Republican/democrat/independent sampling is aligned with the expected turnout. Also, the profession of polling is partially flawed the same way other professions are flawed, in the sense that when the professionals turn out to be wrong they don’t pay any kind of meaningful price.

They’ve somehow hit on the idea that they can sample a bunch of…whatever, it don’t matta. And if anybody criticizes this practice then the critics must not know what they’re talking about.

No matter how you cut it, it doesn’t make sense to oversample democrats by some number of points when they’re expected, for logical, scientific and history-based reasons, to be under- sampled in the actual turnout. I don’t even see why we’re having an argument about this.

Demonstration two: A commenter here who I’ll allow to name himself only at his own option, replayed a conversation he was having with a more senior gentleman, father of an acquaintance of his, who surprised him with a great big bushel of left-wing propaganda nonsense about Joe Biden having won the debate on Thursday, the only reason he was laughing and snickering like that was because of Paul Ryan’s lies, George Bush invaded Iraq as a revenge move against an assassination attempt on his daddy, all that stuff. This economy was so busted in ’08 that no president could’ve fixed it, we went into Iraq because Bush cherry-picked the intel, stimulus didn’t work because it wasn’t big enough, blah blah blah. Where examples would have been expected, they weren’t offered. Just a bunch of high-level reverberated talking points. But this was a highly, highly intelligent man which made it such a surprise that he’d be jabbering away with such foolishness.

My reply:

I wonder how it is you think he was intelligent.

I have this theory that, starting in school, we measure “intelligence” in our society by means of: Repeating information the listener is likely to have heard in lots of other places, nevermind whether it’s correct or not, and doing so with great verbal confidence. In this way, I think our schools tend to declare “copying from your neighbor” to be against the rules, and then encourage the heck out of it. To such an extent that our cultural definition of high intelligence amounts to…copying stuff.

Later…

I’ve noticed this in a lot of smart, smart people: They don’t seem to have a learning curve anywhere. They become acquainted with a new field of study, and bam, two days later they know just as much as anybody else. Except there’s no originality in any of it. It’s like their “learning curve” is replaced with a “Everything I know I know from somebody else” curve.

Which ties in with that other conversation. The smart, smart guy’s argument essentially boiled down to this: I’m believing the more orthodox polling exercises uncritically, and you should too. He talked a lot about “math” but he really didn’t have anything to say besides just that. I directly attacked the sampling methods, and directly stated what exactly my problems with those methods were; anybody even casually acquainted with statistics should immediately recognize how this is a real problem. But my opposition in that conversation can’t, or won’t, even directly address the counterpoint to provide a rebuttal with some meat to it.

These are not isolated examples.

Over and over again we see people who can, and do, provide some good solid evidence that they aren’t dummies, but only by way of generalities like: use of extended vocabulary, maybe even using Latin phrases, personal reputation, business accomplishments, academic achievements, et al. But when it comes to the subject actually under discussion they can’t bring anything.

Of course, this fits in with my years-in-the-making sense of dread that we’re headed toward an early Idiocracy, a dystopian future in which everything worth using “was built by some really smart guy who lived a long time ago” and nobody knows, or cares, how the damn thing works. Just give it a good kick when it acts up, that usually gets things working again. “Intelligence” seems to have been re-defined to be — the ability to convincingly mimic others. It might have taken place quite awhile back. I remember some four decades ago my first-grade or second-grade teacher paired me up with one of these social-butterfly kids, at the top of the social structure as well as the grade curve, to balance out my various shortcomings. In fact this wasn’t any one particular experience, it happened a few times: Social-butterfly kid would oh so eloquently repeat the lecture of which I was apparently ignorant, and I’d present the difficulty I’d had in applying that to some specific situation…and social-butterfly-kid would simply repeat what he or she already said. It completely blew my mind first time it happened, and the second time as well. Now that I’m a grown-up and it’s still happening, I must confess it still discombobulates me to this very day. Perhaps I’m not alone.

…use of extended vocabulary, maybe even using Latin phrases

Always a challange, when unintended consequences constantly change definitions by fiat.
“we”, and “is”, come to mind.
Personally, I prefer disembodied French phrases when I want to appear intellectually philisophical. More folk of the students at the baracades ilk actually ~~think~~ believe they’re the-science-is-settledish.

…I’ve noticed this in a lot of smart, smart people: They don’t seem to have a learning curve anywhere. They become acquainted with a new field of study, and bam, two days later they know just as much as anybody else….

I’ve noticed that reinventing the wheel seems EASY if one only notices smart, smart people.
- CaptDMO | 10/15/2012 @ 11:03
“Intelligence” these days is defined as: verbal dexterity, plus the ability to cite things. They don’t have to be relevant things, mind you, so long as they sound sufficiently long and complicated and have some kind of academic pedigree….

It’s so bad that I’ve found most leftists, like nearly all teenagers, simply cannot distinguish fact from opinion. This starts in grade school, as you noted — simply regurgitate what the textbook says — and extends all the way through graduate school, where 95% of the whole enterprise is finding someone to quote saying whatever it is you intend to say in your “orignial” research. And thus opinions are turned into “facts” that “everyone knows” — questions are begged with citations which, if you follow them out, lead back not to archival documents or bench work, but to endlessly recursive citations of other journals. It says something that the most cited names in the humanities are Marx, Foucault, and Chomsky, three gentlemen who wouldn’t know a fact if it bit them on the ass.

At this point, I’m starting to think that even Idiocracy wouldn’t be so bad. They’re dumb, but at least they’re not preeningly self-righteous about it. Our modern liberals are not only silly and ignorant, but narcissistic, too, endlessly staring at their own reflections in a puddle of free-range organic tofu.
- Severian | 10/15/2012 @ 13:14
They’re dumb, but at least they’re not preeningly self-righteous about it.

Word. Like Morgan, I’ve had my “discussions” with lefties on FB, with said discussions consisting of me laying out facts, figures and statistics and the lefty responding that a) what about the nasty GOP? or b) your facts and figures are irrelevant because [insert bullshit here]. The other lefty commenters approve of the initial response and say “Well, he/she has you there.” Excuse me? Changing the subject, or failing to answer my question (or both) are not ways to win arguments. They are dishonest tactics used when you don’t have a valid response. And it gets on my nerves.

I used to avoid politics on Facebook. I figured it was a way to reconnect with old friends, or people who’ve moved away, that sort of thing. But all (well, almost all) of my lefty friends started posting liberal boilerplate ad nauseum and they seemed somewhat disturbed when I questioned them on some of their “facts”. Now, I rarely post anything fun. It gives me great pleasure to post more and more of Barry’s failures, lies and overall incompetence. The impotent fury and sputtering just makes my day…better.
- Physics Geek | 10/15/2012 @ 14:02
My boyfriend is in the middle of a Facebook battle with one of our friends. The friend is a small business owner and you’d think that he would know better. But he keeps putting it out there and my boyfriend keeps pushing back. My boyfriend was a strong Obama supporter last time but has turned around and is ready to vote Republican for the first time in his life.

I keep pushing back too, although there are some posts I just ignore. It’s Facebook after all and we are dealing with people that are not interested in hearing logical discussions with an open mind.
- teripittman | 10/15/2012 @ 14:48
It’s Facebook after all and we are dealing with people that are not interested in hearing logical discussions with an open mind.

What you said.

The real reason I don’t post political crap on Facebook is that if you’re really my friend, you already know my political opinions…. and that I have the facts and logic to back them up, so it’s best not to test this unless you’re prepared for a long argument. If you’re not my friend, though — we’re just work acquaintances or old high school classmates or something — then I don’t feel as if I have the right to involve you in what will become a thoroughgoing discussion uninvited.

I shouldn’t be surprised that lefties post political crap on Facebook — they’re all virtue junkies; they’re fixing — but it still annoys the hell out of me, all these smarmy little self-righteous missives from the hive mind. Thank goodness I never used FB all that much anyway….
- Severian | 10/15/2012 @ 15:29

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MimicryMonday, October 15th, 2012

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Monday, October 15th, 2012