tigertoy

I have some big problems in my life. What they are isn't the point of this post; I'm looking at how I deal with problems. The least functional way I have of dealing with a problem is to metaphorically hide under the bed. The problem is too big to have any solution I can see. Thinking about it is distressing. So I just ignore it and pay attention to other things.

In a slightly more functional mode, I see that the whole problem is too big, but there is one part of it that I can address, and then I focus on that part. That part is something I can work on. The problem is that I focus on that part, however trivial it is, and continue to ignore the rest of the problem. If the thought of the larger problem comes up, I tell myself I'm doing the small thing so I'm taking care of it.

This is only slightly more functional than completely ignoring the problem if the part I've chosen is trivial. To take an example from my own past, my house is perpetually horribly cluttered. When I was actively playing Magic: the Gathering, my magic cards were a significant part of the clutter. I would direct the energy for dealing with the clutter into obsessively sorting cards while the rest of the clutter continued to build up.

The reason I bring this up, the real point of this post, is that I had an insight that as a society we are caught up in the same trap. For an example, consider the cold war. The problem that the world could be blown up in a nuclear war was too big to deal with, so there was a lot of hiding under the bed. However, there was also a lot of energy put into trivial gestures. School children were taught duck and cover drills and shelters were designated and stocked with emergency food rations. Doing these things helped people to feel that they were doing something, but if one considers an actual nuclear war, one realizes that these things wouldn't really make any difference.

More relevant to our situation today is the problem of how we're destroying our environment. We realize, when we bring ourselves to think of it, the extent of damage we're constantly doing to our planet, but we don't see how we can really fix it. But we've hit on recycling. "I'm recycling my plastic bottles," we say, "so I'm helping. I'm doing my bit." I can't argue that recycling in itself has no value at all, but it has much less value than we give it credit for. Many of those plastic bottles we virtuously put in the recycling bin end up in the landfill anyway, very few of them become more plastic bottles, and even when they do the process uses a lot of resources along the way. It would be better to not buy a one use bottle at all. It would be better than that to get our municipal water systems to the point where nobody felt they needed single use water bottles.

It sickens me how much airtime the media spends on "this is so and so who just lost their home and/or their loved ones in the latest disaster, can you please tell us how you feel while can barely keep yourself from crying uncontrollably" garbage. This isn't journalism it's sleazy tabloid garbage exploiting the victims for the sake of emotionally titillating the audience. Disasters are a worthy subject, but what should be covered is explaining what really happened, and more importantly how likely it is to happen again, what we should do to mitigate the risk, and what the economic and political barriers are to doing it.

I knew days ahead of time that Harvey was going to be an epic disaster not because of hurricane winds but because of flooding, based on things that I caught because I know stuff and I was paying attention when they quickly glossed over it. Then after the storm hit, they're incessantly harping on how this was totally unexpected, why didn't we know this was going to happen. We did know it was going to happen, but the media didn't think it was important enough to stress and the country didn't notice.

I knew months ago that we were going to have terrible fires in California, the whole state is tinder dry. I want to hear details on what the local terrain is like to support such an intense fire, and what could be done to make the towns less vulnerable when the countryside goes up in smoke. I don't want to hear how much it sucks to have your house burn down and how terrible it is to come back from the evacuation and see it over and over and over again.

I'm going to post something here that may get me yelled it, but it's something I believe.

This was inspired by a story I just heard on the radio about how some kids in Hannibal, MO got lost in a cave and were never found. It described how they went off on their own and no one was concerned until they didn't come home for dinner, and how that would never happen today. It would be considered child neglect.

( long and somewhat incendiary comment inside )

I was listening to the radio this morning and there was some discussion about the connection between facts and truth. The person on the radio contended that while facts can be checked and verified and reasonably be shown to be correct, but truth is more subjective and hard to pin down. This inspired a train of thought.

I believe in science as a way of understanding the world. Science approaches a problem by forming a hypothesis and collecting facts to see how well it fits. If most of the facts align, the hypothesis is strenthened. If there are facts that don't fit and there's a pattern to those facts, it points to a way to refine the hypothsis, or possibly even throw it out and start over. But in most sets of data, there are a few outliers -- measurements that are way outside the range of most of the data. If the data can be graphed on a scatter plot, there's a very heavy concentration of points along the expected line, but there are just a few apparently randomly around the graph. If there are few enough outliers, we consider the hypothesis valid despite these outliers.

In politics, on the other hand, we focus much more on the outliers rather than going with the general trend. If a debater can present a single fact that disagrees with an opponent's point of view, and that fact is verified, it's considered a valid argument (at least to one side of the question). There is little attempt to see the general pattern and ignore the outliers.

This problem is very much driven by the way the media work. Ordinary events -- those in the main blob of data points on the scatter plot -- aren't newsworthy because they're common. Outliers, because they are novel, receive far more attention than they generally deserve; and this tends to reinforce extreme viewpoints by reinforcing them with outlier examples. For example, consider how many people worry about how dangerous air travel is but never pay attention to how dangerous car travel is. This happens because plane crashes are so rare that every one is going to get media attention, while car crashes are so common that they're hardly ever mentioned.

Truth is somewhat subjective and squishy, but a reasonable view of the truth should be formed by considering the ordinary majority of the facts rather than concentrating on the outliers.

I do not normally read The Oatmeal, but a friend pointed me to this strip. I find it thought provoking and worth reading. Be warned that it is very long, despite being called a comic, and (as the first part imprecates) you need to read the whole thing.