Do you find it strange that in an age of information overload, so many people favor generalities and ignore details? This is especially true in the politically charged environment of the present. Thus, the Right generalizes the Left and visa versa. The process exudes mental laziness while affirming a sense of security and dismissive superiority. “MAGA fanatic,” “Commie subversive”…Basically, many revert to name-calling when a reasoned argument requires a detailed analysis.
But how detailed?
Ignorance Breeds Haughtiness
Ignorance runs in the human family. The irony is that in our ignorance we pretend genius or at least savvy. We are nothing if not sure in our perspectives.Yet, as Kurt Friedrich Gödel (b. 1906, d. 1978) demonstrated with mathematics, no knowledge system is complete in itself. Logic ultimately rests on axioms and assumptions; math can’t prove itself. Incompleteness is the rule, but you would never know that today if you engage someone in a political argument. When it comes to debating the other side, everyone is sure, positions are certain, and only selected details apply—often manipulated details, many of which were selected by algorithms devised by “those in the know,” that is, by single-minded people either consciously or unconsciously supporting an agenda through words or algorithms that enhance or censor, depending on the views of those who write the algorithms: Thus, the recent shutdown of debate over the causes and cures of COVID led by haughty sycophants in the media [Shoot! Did I just revert to name-calling?] who were little different from those who made Galileo disavow his claim that Earth revolved around the Sun.
The pretense to savvy among haughty people “in the know” runs as deep as the subconscious and derives from an unfathomable realm of manipulators hidden from ordinary mortals like me—and maybe you. As Cathie O’Neill argues in her book Weapons of Math Destruction about software systems that manage our finances and our lives, “These mathematical models [are like gods] opaque, they're workings invisible to all but the highest priests in the domain: mathematicians and computer scientists. Their verdicts, even when wrong or harmful, are beyond dispute or appeal.” (3).*
Look at the ostracism or cancellation of people who chose not to get the mRNA vaccine or who argued against vaccinating little kids and also against closing schools. Look also, at those who extolled the vaccines as unquestionably protective, some of who still contracted and then spread the disease, including multiple-dosed President Biden and the apotheosized Dr. Fauci. And look, too, at the unprovable claim that “Well, the vaccine kept the reinfected from getting sicker.” How does one prove that? Read O’Neill it again: “Their verdicts, even when wrong or harmful, are beyond dispute or appeal.”
The aim of social media algorithms is a change in both belief and behavior. The public is reduced to generalities and compliance backed by the threat of ostracism—solitary confinement on a grand scale to use an oxymoron. Detailed explanations and arguments are anathema. Selected details inductively supporting predetermined generalities remain, and no counterarguments are entertained. Speaking of oxymorons…
An Unknown Eminent Scientist
The enlightenment of the 18th century gave rise to the science of the 19th century and some very important discoveries that propelled a number of researchers into a shrine of eminent scientists still visited by 21st century physicists. Among those enshrined is Albert A. Michelson of the Michelson-Morley experiment that disproved the concept of an enveloping Ether (aether) through which lightwaves were thought to travel like water waves. Debunking the ether came on the heels of James Clerk Maxwell’s formulas that tied electricity to magnetism and that explained fields so essential to today’s understanding of matter and energy, atoms and radio waves, subatomic particles, and the strange world of quantum mechanics with its wave-particle duality. For physicists the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th were exciting times. It seemed as though humans had finally broken from mythical explanations of the universe to enter an age of reasoned understanding. Those heady times ballooned the optimism of the previous century of Enlightenment: Humans were on the threshold of knowing all there is to know. Think Encyclopedia Britannica. It’s in the foregoing context of 19th-century science that Michelson wrote,
“While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. It is here that the science of measurement shows its importance—where quantitative work is more to be desired than qualitative work. An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals. For Michelson and his contemporary “eminent scientist,” mankind had entered an Age of Refinement.
If those 19th-century experimenters were alive today, they would rejoice that their intellectual descendants at CERN keep adding details like the Higgs boson and the lifespan of an accelerated muon. What’s next? Or rather, what’s the next level of refinement in physics? The nature of Dark Matter and Dark Energy? A LIGO refinement of gravitational waves?
The rise of modern physical science and the proliferation of social scientists has yielded another set of details—and a new kind of details, those that can be manipulated to control belief and behavior. The details of The Russian Collusion, now thoroughly debunked and the Hunter Biden laptop, now thoroughly proven, stand as models of blatant manipulation of details in favor of a generalized agenda of quashing political opponents’ thoughts and policies. Social “scientists,” like network pundits with an agenda to push, choose the details that make their case. “Crime is down” is a recent example that is taken out of the context of a shift in how the FBI now categorizes and counts crimes.
Refinement Is All about Details
Democritus and Leucippus gave us the concept of atoms. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, physicists like Bohr, another enshrined scientist, refined the concept of a world made of atoms. Over the past hundred years others used increasingly more sophisticated experiments to further refine the refinements of Bohr and his contemporaries. In short, we live in a time of increasing decimal places: Atoms to protons, neutrons, and electrons, to quarks and muons, and neutrinos, and—in the distant future possibly—to strings. Smaller and smaller and smaller, unimaginably more detailed, so detailed that it takes considerable intellectual effort to keep up with the refinements. Who has time to examine all of them? Who can check their veracity? You? I venture to guess that you did not awaken today to ask, “What’s the morning’s news out of CERN?” “What’s the source of details on this new story about food safety, drugs, and political intrigue?”
As in solving problems in Euclidean geometry, refining rests on axiomatic thinking and assumptions. All the proving we seek rests on acceptance of general understandings. We can’t see quarks, but we can detail their appearance in protons and neutrons. Two up quarks and one down quark make a proton; just the opposite makes a neutron. And those seeking further refinements stand apart from humanity in general, those many humans who really don’t care about atomic composition. We don’t all have research jobs at CERN do we? “Just give me the basics, man. I have people to see and places to go. Besides, I pretty much know all I have to know. Stuff is made of atoms. That I’ll grant.” And the axiomatic thinking extends into the realm of everyday politics as exemplified by networks like MSNBC and NPR, both of which seem to wear their bias like a heavy pendant on an even heavier chain around their necks.
We run with familiar systems and perspectives because they provide the bare minimum that is sufficient enough for us “to get by.” Once we have accepted the general, we find details—even peripheral details—to support it.
Publishers’ Clearing House Day
Even the least “scientific” among us has access to an indefinite number of details if we choose to look. But who has the time or the inclination? The details are like the mail in the words of Seinfeld’s Newman who, when asked by George why postal workers “go postal,” says, “Because the mail never stops. It just keeps coming and coming and coming; there's never a let-up. It's relentless. Every day it piles up more and more and more! And you gotta get it out but the more you get it out the more it keeps coming in. And then the bar code reader breaks and it's Publishers’ Clearing House day.” **
Thus, we choose generalities as protection against the onslaught of details. So, we yield to O’Neill ’s “weapons of math destruction.” Refinement has become both boon and bane: Boon because it provides an avenue for better understanding, bane because it overwhelms us and prevents our discovering truth.
* 2006. New York. Random House. Crown Publishing.
**Find the scene on YouTube
But how detailed?
Ignorance Breeds Haughtiness
Ignorance runs in the human family. The irony is that in our ignorance we pretend genius or at least savvy. We are nothing if not sure in our perspectives.Yet, as Kurt Friedrich Gödel (b. 1906, d. 1978) demonstrated with mathematics, no knowledge system is complete in itself. Logic ultimately rests on axioms and assumptions; math can’t prove itself. Incompleteness is the rule, but you would never know that today if you engage someone in a political argument. When it comes to debating the other side, everyone is sure, positions are certain, and only selected details apply—often manipulated details, many of which were selected by algorithms devised by “those in the know,” that is, by single-minded people either consciously or unconsciously supporting an agenda through words or algorithms that enhance or censor, depending on the views of those who write the algorithms: Thus, the recent shutdown of debate over the causes and cures of COVID led by haughty sycophants in the media [Shoot! Did I just revert to name-calling?] who were little different from those who made Galileo disavow his claim that Earth revolved around the Sun.
The pretense to savvy among haughty people “in the know” runs as deep as the subconscious and derives from an unfathomable realm of manipulators hidden from ordinary mortals like me—and maybe you. As Cathie O’Neill argues in her book Weapons of Math Destruction about software systems that manage our finances and our lives, “These mathematical models [are like gods] opaque, they're workings invisible to all but the highest priests in the domain: mathematicians and computer scientists. Their verdicts, even when wrong or harmful, are beyond dispute or appeal.” (3).*
Look at the ostracism or cancellation of people who chose not to get the mRNA vaccine or who argued against vaccinating little kids and also against closing schools. Look also, at those who extolled the vaccines as unquestionably protective, some of who still contracted and then spread the disease, including multiple-dosed President Biden and the apotheosized Dr. Fauci. And look, too, at the unprovable claim that “Well, the vaccine kept the reinfected from getting sicker.” How does one prove that? Read O’Neill it again: “Their verdicts, even when wrong or harmful, are beyond dispute or appeal.”
The aim of social media algorithms is a change in both belief and behavior. The public is reduced to generalities and compliance backed by the threat of ostracism—solitary confinement on a grand scale to use an oxymoron. Detailed explanations and arguments are anathema. Selected details inductively supporting predetermined generalities remain, and no counterarguments are entertained. Speaking of oxymorons…
An Unknown Eminent Scientist
The enlightenment of the 18th century gave rise to the science of the 19th century and some very important discoveries that propelled a number of researchers into a shrine of eminent scientists still visited by 21st century physicists. Among those enshrined is Albert A. Michelson of the Michelson-Morley experiment that disproved the concept of an enveloping Ether (aether) through which lightwaves were thought to travel like water waves. Debunking the ether came on the heels of James Clerk Maxwell’s formulas that tied electricity to magnetism and that explained fields so essential to today’s understanding of matter and energy, atoms and radio waves, subatomic particles, and the strange world of quantum mechanics with its wave-particle duality. For physicists the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th were exciting times. It seemed as though humans had finally broken from mythical explanations of the universe to enter an age of reasoned understanding. Those heady times ballooned the optimism of the previous century of Enlightenment: Humans were on the threshold of knowing all there is to know. Think Encyclopedia Britannica. It’s in the foregoing context of 19th-century science that Michelson wrote,
“While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. It is here that the science of measurement shows its importance—where quantitative work is more to be desired than qualitative work. An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals. For Michelson and his contemporary “eminent scientist,” mankind had entered an Age of Refinement.
If those 19th-century experimenters were alive today, they would rejoice that their intellectual descendants at CERN keep adding details like the Higgs boson and the lifespan of an accelerated muon. What’s next? Or rather, what’s the next level of refinement in physics? The nature of Dark Matter and Dark Energy? A LIGO refinement of gravitational waves?
The rise of modern physical science and the proliferation of social scientists has yielded another set of details—and a new kind of details, those that can be manipulated to control belief and behavior. The details of The Russian Collusion, now thoroughly debunked and the Hunter Biden laptop, now thoroughly proven, stand as models of blatant manipulation of details in favor of a generalized agenda of quashing political opponents’ thoughts and policies. Social “scientists,” like network pundits with an agenda to push, choose the details that make their case. “Crime is down” is a recent example that is taken out of the context of a shift in how the FBI now categorizes and counts crimes.
Refinement Is All about Details
Democritus and Leucippus gave us the concept of atoms. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, physicists like Bohr, another enshrined scientist, refined the concept of a world made of atoms. Over the past hundred years others used increasingly more sophisticated experiments to further refine the refinements of Bohr and his contemporaries. In short, we live in a time of increasing decimal places: Atoms to protons, neutrons, and electrons, to quarks and muons, and neutrinos, and—in the distant future possibly—to strings. Smaller and smaller and smaller, unimaginably more detailed, so detailed that it takes considerable intellectual effort to keep up with the refinements. Who has time to examine all of them? Who can check their veracity? You? I venture to guess that you did not awaken today to ask, “What’s the morning’s news out of CERN?” “What’s the source of details on this new story about food safety, drugs, and political intrigue?”
As in solving problems in Euclidean geometry, refining rests on axiomatic thinking and assumptions. All the proving we seek rests on acceptance of general understandings. We can’t see quarks, but we can detail their appearance in protons and neutrons. Two up quarks and one down quark make a proton; just the opposite makes a neutron. And those seeking further refinements stand apart from humanity in general, those many humans who really don’t care about atomic composition. We don’t all have research jobs at CERN do we? “Just give me the basics, man. I have people to see and places to go. Besides, I pretty much know all I have to know. Stuff is made of atoms. That I’ll grant.” And the axiomatic thinking extends into the realm of everyday politics as exemplified by networks like MSNBC and NPR, both of which seem to wear their bias like a heavy pendant on an even heavier chain around their necks.
We run with familiar systems and perspectives because they provide the bare minimum that is sufficient enough for us “to get by.” Once we have accepted the general, we find details—even peripheral details—to support it.
Publishers’ Clearing House Day
Even the least “scientific” among us has access to an indefinite number of details if we choose to look. But who has the time or the inclination? The details are like the mail in the words of Seinfeld’s Newman who, when asked by George why postal workers “go postal,” says, “Because the mail never stops. It just keeps coming and coming and coming; there's never a let-up. It's relentless. Every day it piles up more and more and more! And you gotta get it out but the more you get it out the more it keeps coming in. And then the bar code reader breaks and it's Publishers’ Clearing House day.” **
Thus, we choose generalities as protection against the onslaught of details. So, we yield to O’Neill ’s “weapons of math destruction.” Refinement has become both boon and bane: Boon because it provides an avenue for better understanding, bane because it overwhelms us and prevents our discovering truth.
* 2006. New York. Random House. Crown Publishing.
**Find the scene on YouTube
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