The Inconvenience of Facts

(Picture from here.) 

I don’t usually talk here about shenanigans on the public stage. But today, I’m going to make an exception.

 

I had a troubling phone conversation with a friend the other night. We’ll call her Brenda and her spouse equivalent Brian, for purposes of this discussion.

 

Brenda was telling me how Brian was ready to jump in his car and drive to help in the January 6^th insurrection. She wasn’t having any of that and kept him home.

 

Brian got all of his news from social media—specific social media sites, at that. Social media sites that have been shown to lie. But Brian’s mind was fixed. He was convinced of the truth of these sites. Other data sources that showed they were lying were merely revealing themselves to be liars, themselves.

 

There’s a diabolical beauty to this sort of thinking: a standard is set up that cannot be challenged and, therefore, anything challenging that standard must be, by definition, in error.

 

This changes the field of discussion from rational thought to religion. To be clear, I am not against religion. But here the cognitive mechanism that makes some religions work—accepting scripture as revealed truth of one sort or another—is being used for other means.

 

Once that transition is made, no further intellectual discussion is possible. The conversation has moved from the cerebral to the emotional. Emotional discussions can only be fruitful when emotions are directly engaged, not in a faux scholarly way. If people argue out of fear, then that fear must be addressed. What they are arguing about is irrelevant. It’s the fear that is important. This is true for other emotions as well.

 

To reuse what Heinlein said in Glory Road, “…facts do not sway them in the pursuit of a higher truth.”

 

This is a problem, though. Because we need to address facts. What can you do when what you want to happen is thwarted? The obvious answer—the one we teach our children—is you accept the setback and work around the problem or right the wrong. When we teach that, we always say, explicitly or implicitly, that this means working through proper paths. If you get an F on your report card, you don’t shoot your teacher in an act of vigilante justice.

 

I see this as a twofold issue.

 

The first part is determining what is fact. These days, that’s hard enough.

 

Social media is a primitive mechanism for determining fact. It’s the modern-day analog of village gossip and just as reliable. It’s primarily built to convey emotion, which it does quite well. The whole underlying desire to connect to one another is emotional. It’s not surprising, then it fails spectacularly at distributing facts.

 

In the last hundred years and fifty years or so, we’ve built an entire news industry to propagate news: facts written as story. It is an imperfect, clunky, stumbling mechanism, prone to tipping one way or another depending on the whim of the moment and without the self-correcting mechanism of scientific peer review. It’s like democracy: it’s only good when compared to all of the other mechanisms.

 

News, like anything else, has to be vetted. We all have different ways of doing so with various degrees of success. Personally, I have a set of test subjects where I think I know the correct answer. Usually, this involves aeronautics or biology or computing—something I’m professionally competent in or something I’ve invested a lot of research time in. If a news source gets those right, I figure it has a higher probability of getting things right about which I’m incompetent. I also give higher credence to those news sources that give their sources.

 

A number of years ago, I found a story on the Human Events website that seemed strange. So, I followed it from source to source only to find my way back to a set of stories that referenced each other. I never did find an original source. Possibly, the story was made up. Or the story had sources I could just never find. The fact that I couldn’t find the original source reduced my trust of the story, and the site.

 

But the second issue—the more important issue, as far as I’m concerned—is that we have to recognize our own incompetence and the incompetence of others. News stories have to be vetted against a standard. Most importantly, the news stories have to reflect actual facts. Facts, in this case, are verifiable circumstances that are independent of our point of view. If I’m inclined to view the Palestinians favorably, I cannot dump facts that count against them.

 

This is, to me, the main problem with social media and why it’s like village gossip. We pick sources that are inclined towards our point of view over our perception of fact.

 

Worse, we have the Dunning-Kruger effect to consider: people are incapable of determining their own level of competency at things they know little about. Social media denies the D-K effect. Its underlying presumption is that the selected crowd that is telling you what you want to hear is capable of telling you the truth. It might be a set of capable people but there’s no standard against which this can be judged. And it flies in the face of our own deeply held belief that we are as good at anything as anyone else.

 

Instead, we must face our own incompetency and create mechanisms to guard against it. I am not a political theorist. But, I tend to think that a political theorist that has the credentials of a Nobel Prize to be worth listening to. He has to be vetted as well. And, yes, it never ends. There will always be a level of uncertainty and one must learn to be comfortable with this.

 

Americans are particularly susceptible to this problem. Built into our psyche is the unfounded belief that anyone can do anything. “Anyone can grow up to be president,” as the saying goes. Implied in a modern interpretation of this idea is that anyone can do anything without effort. We can determine competence without research. We can determine moral truth without searching our hearts. We can determine right action merely by being present. Often, with a gun. Batman says it, so it must be true.

 

Moral nuance need not apply.

 

I don’t have a solution for this. Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, years ago: “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts."

 

That notion seems to have disappeared.

 

I wish I had a solution for this. Better education. More money to schools. Bring back the FCC Fairness Doctrine. Legislate truth in news.

 

But I think none of those will work. There’s too much money these days in disguising opinion as truth—and revealed truth, at that.

 

Possibly, the best we can do is what I once read attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr., but can now no longer find: “do good, eschew evil, and bear witness.”

 

 

Danse Mécanique Released!

 My novel, Danse Mécanique, has been released for all purchases.

The best way to get it is to go to my website, www.stevenpopkes.com, where all the links are.

Charles de Lint said this about the book:

"I love the compelling story that explores music, artificial intelligence, scientific methodology, corporate greed, mythology, religion and the breakup up of communication. But it also celebrates the joys of community and the interconnectedness of things."

Go. Enjoy.

On to the next.

Contrived vs Actual Narratives: Metafiction in Harness

(Picture from here.)

 

I’ve been reading several alternate world stories lately. Spinrad’s The Iron Dream, Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, Tidhar’s Osama. Not sure why these have shown up but that’s the way it is sometimes.

 

These are very famous works that have their followings. Tidhar won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. So, I suggest that people looking for a review of them need not seek them here. My tastes are too idiosyncratic to be useful.

 

I’ve spoken about TMITHC before. I read The Iron Dream some years ago and reread it recently. I read Osama for the first time.

 

What’s interesting is how all three authors tackled essentially the same take on the idea differently. In all three, the world of the characters is different from the world’s history and state as we know it. In TMITHC, the Japanese and Germans won World War II. The Nazis occupy the USA east of the Rockies. The Japanese occupy the USA west of the Rockies. The Rockies themselves are unclaimed territory.

 

In The Iron Dream, Hitler came to the United States and ultimately captured his life’s work in an  SF novel which pitted purebred human beings against filthy mutants. Hitler’s novel occupies most of the novel.

 

In Osama, Osama bin Laden lives only in the pages of novels by Mike Longshott. The plot revolves around a private detective who’s been commissioned to find the author.

 

In all three cases, there is a world of the characters presented against a fictional world that depicts, in some way, the world we know. These are by no means the only works with contrived vs actual narratives. John Gardner’s October Light and Freddy’s Book are two more examples.

 

For purposes of this discussion, I’m going to create two terms: the actual narrative, that refers to the narrative that includes the characters of the created world. And the contrived narrative, which is the part of the work that shows our world in opposition to the created world.

 

In TMITHC, the cares and worries of the Japanese/German occupation is the central concern of the actual narrative. The contrived narrative is depicted by the novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, where Hawthorn Abendson depicts  the USA as winning the war against both Germany and Japan. But the center of the TMITHC is the world of the characters. The contrived narrative work is important in the actual narrative but considered propaganda. Even when Grasshopper is shown, it’s close to our world but significantly off. Like seeing the world through a dark glass. I’m not saying Grasshopper is tacked onto the world as an afterthought—it’s an important piece of Dick’s novel. But it lies in opposition to the world of the characters. It’s an alternate point of view. The prose of the actual narrative is very different from the contrived narrative. The two use significantly different prose styles.

 

The Iron Dream is hard over on the contrived narrative. That is the important part. The actual narrative is limited to a frame describing the origin of the included novel, and a critical analysis.  The rest of the book is the contrived narrative as written by Adolf Hitler.

 

In Osama, the contrived narration and actual narration are given roughly equal footing. Several reviews have described significantly different prose styles between the two narrations but it was too subtle for me. I had trouble differentiating between the two.

 

The other choice Tidhar made was to keep a very low-level difference between the actual narrative and the contrived narrative. I.e., the two worlds weren’t all that different.

 

Three choices to handle the same idea in different ways.

 

I can see issues with all three approaches. In TMITHC, the actual narrative is so compelling and different that the contrived narrative can be lost. In fact, I suspect Dick introduced flaws in the contrived narrative for exactly that reason: the reader can’t discount the contrived narrative as just being something the reader already knows.

 

The Iron Dream was published in 1972 while TMITHC was published in 1962. Thus, Spinrad wrote TID knowing it would be compared to TMITHC. While the world of Hitler in the actual narrative might have been interesting, Spinrad keeps its exposure limited. Instead, Spinrad keeps the focus on the contrived narrative. This story is structured very much like a “traditional” SF, showing how close to fascism such a narrative can swing.

 

The issue with the third alternative—giving both the actual and contrived narrative equal standing—is that the two can blend in the reader’s mind. This, in part, I think was Tidhar’s intent: to show that no villain is so completely dark as to be inhuman. Osama was published in 2011 and, I think, largely insulated from Spinrad’s work but, perhaps, less so from TMITHC, given the attention given to Dick’s work in recent years.

 

That’s likely unfair to Osama: it is a vastly different work, in a vastly different time, with vastly different goals. Both Spinrad and Dick worked in the shadow of World War II. Tidhar is working with a completely different set of issues, icons, and symbols. 

 

This shows the approach still has legs.