Stupidity Re-examined

I said, yesterday, that Birthers were stupid. I have to correct myself.

The idea that Obama is not an American citizen has been thoroughly disproved. Clinging to it is stupid. But the people who cling to it are not, by and large, stupid. It's this dichotomy that's interesting.

Larry Niven said, in Protector, that intelligence is a tool to be used to reach a goal. However, the goal is not necessarily chosen intelligently.

In the case of the Birthers, the model is that there is no way that Obama can possibly a legitimate president. The solution to the model, using intelligence, is to delegitamize his presidency. Since the goal is of supreme importance, intelligence is used in its most limited, goal directed function: to find evidence to shore up a shakey model. Religion is like this. Religion-based science is not science in any sense because evidence is placed within a scaffold by reasoning that does not arise from the evidence.

This, interestingly enough, is also why creation "science" (in the same way as Fox "News") fails. The model predicts a behavior that is not supported by facts but supporting the model is more important than determining fact so the facts are bent, the reasoning strained, in support of the broken model.

On the other side, it's similar to the supporters of Gore crying conspiracy in the election of 2000. The problem with the election was that the noise level of the election process had overwhelmed the signal of the votes. There's an analogous situation in electronics known as signal to noise ration. The signal has to be sufficiently stronger than the noise to be discerned. If the signal strength is too close to the noise it can't be determined as different from the noise. The 2000 election had the same problem. The difference in votes between the two candidates was less than the inherent voting errors and irregularities of the election process. When the S/N got too low the signal was no longer distinguishible. Personally, I think the Supreme Court should not have made a decision but had a revote in Florida. Or declared it a hung election and caused it to be thrown into the House or Representitives. Either decision would have legitimized the election rather than having it hang over Bush's first term.

(Please note: I think Bush was the worst president we've had in living memory. But it serves no one to delegitmize his presidency. Nor does it serve us to do the same to Obama.)

But to return to the topic for a moment, the problem with model trumping fact is how pervasive it's become. Another way to phrase it is symbol trumping substance. The symbol represents a common cultural model subscribed to by some population subset. The substance represents actual and meaningful dialogue or action. Which do we see? Symbol. Substance, all too often, is the whisp of a memory.

We have learned to accept the symbolic gesture as a substitute for the substantive action so much that we have become unable to actually make things happen. Consider the heated rhetoric over health care for example. Nowhere has there been so many lies and labels thrown around as in that debate-- but how much actual facts have been discussed? Neither side is particularly fond of facts and meaningful statistics. Instead, they throw around little vignettes, symbolic victims and sound bites. Consider the election of 2000.

Consider the Birthers.
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