House of Eratosthenes

On Tuesday, it looked like we had three possible political scandals brewing. Two days later, with much more evidence available, it doesn’t look like any of them will pan out. There’ll be more hearings, and more bad press for the Obama administration, and more demands for documents. But — and this is a key qualification — absent more revelations, the scandals that could reach high don’t seem to include any real wrongdoing, whereas the ones that include real wrongdoing don’t reach high enough.

I think I’d like to nominate that “key qualification, absent more revelations” bit as perhaps the most insincere sentence fragment to appear prominently in print in this calendar year. Although the year is still young.

Klein is known to me to put up this kind of facade, persistently and often: An energetic, driven but impartial and cool-headed force of good honest old-fashioned journalism, always ready to let the information continue to stream on in, following the path wherever it may lead. But in the end, the answer is always more liberalism. Funny, that. What else would you expect from the founder of JournoList?

Later on, in his obituary for the scandals whose vital signs he perceives to have flat-lined, he begins his closing remarks:

I want to emphasize: It’s always possible that evidence could emerge that vaults one of these issues into true scandal territory. But the trend line so far is clear: The more information we get, the less these actually look like scandals.

What a wonderful job he’s doing of pretending to be the opposite of what he really is, doing the opposite of what he’s trying to do. “It’s always possible that the patient may start breathing. Excuse me, you’re standing in the way of my embalming machine.”

This brings to mind something I was writing lately about a personal matter:

Preconceived notions carry great weight in proportion to the weight of evidence that arrives after the preconceived notions have been formed. Again, thinking can be done well or poorly; if it is done well, the evidence enjoys a great likelihood of upsetting or even toppling the preconceptions. And this is what I try to do when I write about what I [think that I] know, and why it is that I think I know it. I look for opportunities to topple my preconceived notions….I think it is a healthy sign when what is learned subsequently carries great weight, and the first impressions carry little — that is a sign of responsible thinking. What I seem to be seeing here is the opposite: The preconceived notions enjoy a great likelihood of remaining standing, even undisturbed entirely. The newer evidence must yield to the older prejudices.

Seems almost “Kleinerrific” prose — we’re both going through the motions of doing the same thing. One might almost ask, who am I to critique him?

The difference is, I’m sincere; and it isn’t a matter of opinion, it’s measurable. Perhaps we’d all be a little bit more mature in our methodology of inspecting this, if we had better words for describing all this, besides racially-charged words like “prejudiced” and “open-minded.”

To do a good job defining this, we have to do a good job defining the situation. The complaint, overall, is the way I described it in this other matter: “Preconceived notions carry great weight in proportion to the weight of evidence that arrives after the preconceived notions have been formed.” The situation in which it becomes “measurable,” is one in which this lately-arriving evidence packs a real wallop. That’s when the sickness becomes testable.

Those afflicted shrug, and say “so what?” Uh, but waitaminnit…this means something.

Of course it isn’t fair to say “Alright, such-and-such happened, now you are obliged to do a hairpin-turn and start agreeing with me.” Grown-ups aren’t obliged to think anything at all; that isn’t how we decide complex issues after we’ve had a chance to mature. On the other hand, it is reasonable to expect some doubts to be raised. In the case of the IRS scandal, the talking point earlier this week was that this was the work of a “few rogue agents” or some such, and by yesterday the Treasury Secretary fired the head of the IRS. Obviously, Klein thinks that’s an empty, “throw a body to the sharks” maneuver that means next to nothing. Alright…that could be correct. It’s possible. And he’s certainly entitled to his opinion. But it’s an incongruity with the earlier talking point that the malfeasance was committed by a few low-level flunkies because, even if you’re looking for a body to throw to the sharks, why go for the head of the IRS if there was any truth at all to the “flunky” argument?

We therefore have a difference of opinion, resulting from Klein’s idea that some kind of critical summit has passed and is now in our rear-view mirror, and if a “real” scandal has not materialized by now then…well, it’s time to get out the toe tag and the embalming kit. Well, from where does he get that? It seems so odd that we should receive confirmation on Wednesday, or at least near-confirmation, that we’d been lied to on Monday or Tuesday, and by Thursday Klein is proclaiming the scandal dead.

The issue is not final opinion, but certainty. Klein seems so certain. If it isn’t a fair point that his mind should be changed, it’s certainly a fair point that he should have doubts he doesn’t have.

Ah, but he did mention that he’s still waiting for more information to come in. Twice! Yet, his march to the desired opinion of “nothing to see here…for now” hasn’t changed course. It hasn’t even slowed down. And there is the focus of my complaint: Contradictory evidence does come in, and the progress toward the desired conclusion is entirely unchanged. It isn’t modified in bearing or in vector. It doesn’t change course. It doesn’t slow down. It doesn’t even skip a beat.

I recall a bit of LAN administration training I attended, in which the time-synchronization among servers in a distributed database was described in great detail. I thought this was absolutely fascinating. And I suppose the analogy is a stretch for anyone who hasn’t worked in the field, but against my better judgment, I’ll proceed: Before the servers communicate with each other about “my information update is newer than yours, for it was made at HH:mm:ss.hh,” they first engage in this bit of dialogue about what time it is. Makes sense when you think about it, right? You have to have a unified understanding of what time it is before you can measure who has the newest update. And so the database system presumes that server times, for whatever reason, get knocked off. The servers therefore conduct negotiations. And in this, they have different “weights” because they are assigned different roles in the overall system. Some servers are “reference” servers, existing for no reason other than to keep time, and they enjoy the benefit of “infinite” weight: All other servers, with different ideas about this what-time-is-it question, must yield, while the reference server’s understanding of the correct time remains unmodified.

And that is my critique. The original, preconceived notion, first impressions formed during the “how do you do” stage of meeting people, or even before — the ideological leanings, if any are in effect. They become “reference servers,” enjoying this infinite weight. A bunch of Ezra-Klein-babbling is spewed about waiting for new & newer evidence to trickle on in, but it’s just a bunch of pablum.

Bottom-lining it: I do not care if such people tend to agree with Klein, or if they tend to agree with me. I am worried when people like this, decide important things. I would rather have imbeciles in charge. I’m dead-flat-ass serious. I would much rather have the important decisions that really matter, placed in the hands of someone with an I.Q. limited to about 85, but capable of forming an honest opinion and then changing it if new information merits — than a child prodigy with a genius-level intellect, who’s so smart that he “knows” what he wants to know before he’s gathered a shred of evidence to support it, and can write all sorts of chiseled prose to justify it later on. That second guy may be the smartest guy I’ve ever met. But he scares me.

I fear people who can fool themselves this way. And I have good reason to: They’re human. Humans are unique, in this way. We’re so smart that we can lie to ourselves. No other animal can do this. A jaguar, getting ready to pounce, can’t lie to herself about when & where she can do do the pouncing for the best effect. She starves to death if she does. All other “dumb” carnivores have this “problem.” But we humans are spoiled rotten; we pay for drinking water and we can have it delivered to our doorsteps. With that much higher standard of living, comes the option of lying to ourselves about things, if we decide that is what we want to do. And I don’t ever want to be that “smart.”

It’s like having a souped-up sports car with an engine that can tear the concrete in half — but no steering wheel. What good does it do you? How does it help you to have a better than average talent for figuring out what new information might mean about what’s going on, if you lack the mental discipline to actually use it? What good is horsepower without an adequate sense of direction? Or perhaps in this situation, we should say — with too much of a sense of direction. When you aren’t really taking the information in, or if you are, you aren’t allowing it to have any influence over the outcome, without allowing yourself to draw the benefit from it; making exactly the same decisions you’d make if you never came across it. That’s exactly the same ultimate result of never running across the information in the first place, isn’t it?

Update 5/18/13: Some trouble for the “scandals that reach high don’t include wrongdoing, the ones that include wrongdoing don’t reach high” line.

I would much rather have the important decisions that really matter, placed in the hands of someone with an I.Q. limited to about 85, but capable of forming an honest opinion and then changing it if new information merits — than a child prodigy with a genius-level intellect, who’s so smart that he “knows” what he wants to know before he’s gathered a shred of evidence to support it, and can write all sorts of chiseled prose to justify it later on.

William F. Buckley Jr. once said he’d much rather be ruled by the first 200 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard University. Academia doesn’t cause Klein-style wishcasting, but it sets up the framework for it. Journalism works the same way. Both are trained to think in terms of narrative arcs and chains of causality, and because these arcs and chains are sweeping enough, they’re necessarily going to be more right than wrong (e.g. you really can boil all war down to economic factors, since economic factors play such a huge role in foreign affairs). Control of the propaganda apparatus just seals the deal — there’s an Alger Hiss chair at Bard College, for instance, though evidence of his guilt is overwhelming (and The Nation, of course, immediately changed their line from “he’s not guilty!” to “why does it matter?”).

The irony I enjoy most, though, is the underlying motive. Though they love to preen and pose as champions of the working stiff, professors and journalists alike are doing it all for one reason: filthy, tainted, capitalist lucre. If it weren’t for the constant shoehorning of new evidence into old paradigms, the liberal arts professoriate would be out of a job, and guys like Ezra Klein would be back covering city council meetings in Akron or the Eastern Manitoba Junior Curling League playoffs. The career of Joe Conason is instructive — he got some nice guest spots on the Al Franken Show (remember that? me neither), a book, and a column at Salon.com for being Bill Clinton’s most willing attack dog, which, post-Lewinsky, he parlayed into… well, Wiki says he’s the the editor-in-chief of “The National Memo,” whatever the hell that is. What happens if JournoList goes under? If any one of these Obama scandals blows up, it’ll be obvious to even the most dumbass “low-info voter” that the entire non-Fox media sold us a bill of goods, not once, but twice. Klein and his lackeys would be lucky to get a job writing ad copy for the Pennysaver.
- Severian | 05/16/2013 @ 18:43
“…preconceived notions”
OH Please.
Ezra Klein
Jurnolist
“Progrressive”

How about pre-scribed notions of “jurnolism”, projected from
behind the curtain.
- CaptDMO | 05/17/2013 @ 14:50

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Yielding to the Older PrejudicesThursday, May 16th, 2013

Yielding to the Older Prejudices
Thursday, May 16th, 2013