Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole (20 page)

We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously. A machinic assemblage, through its diverse components, extracts its consistency by crossing ontological thresholds, non-linear thresholds of irreversibility, ontological and phylogenetic thresholds, creative thresholds of heterogenesis and autopoiesis.
⁴

In 1997, Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University (eminently qualified to comment on the use of scientific terminology), annoyed with the way in which some postmodern writers were borrowing terms and theories from physics and applying them in a nonsensical way, published, along with his colleague Jean Bricmont, the book
Intellectual Impostures. Impostures
carefully and often hilariously exposes the scientific jargon–fueled nonsense of various intellectuals writing in this vein. About the longer passage from which the Guattari quotation is taken, Sokal and Bricmont say that it is the “most brilliant mélange of scientific, pseudo-scientific and philosophical jargon that we have ever encountered; only a genius could have written it.”
⁵

Intellectual Impostures
followed the “Sokal Hoax” in 1996. Sokal submitted to the fashionable US postmodern journal
Social Text
an essay packed full of pretentious-sounding, pseudoscientific claptrap. The editors of
Social Text
, unable to distinguish claptrap from profundity, published it. After all, Sokal's “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” seemed to make as much sense as other papers they published. The publication of “Transgressing the Boundaries” became an “Emperor's New Clothes” moment for the style of philosophy published by the journal.
Social Text
became a laughingstock.

About Jean Baudrillard's work, which is full of references to chaos theory, quantum mechanics, non-Euclidean geometries, and so on, Sokal and Bricmont write:

In summary, one finds in Baudrillard's works a profusion of scientific terms, used with total disregard for their meaning and, above all, in a context where they are manifestly irrelevant. Whether or not one interprets them as metaphors, it is hard to see what role they could play, except to give an appearance of profundity to trite observations about sociology or history. Moreover, the scientific terminology is mixed up with a nonscientific vocabulary that is employed with equal sloppiness.
When all is said and done, one wonders what would be left of Baudrillard's thought if the verbal veneer covering it were stripped away.
⁶

I include this quotation from Sokal and Bricmont because it nicely summarizes what might be said about
Pseudoprofundity
more generally—
Pseudoprofundity
consists of a thin mixture of the trite, the nonsensical, and/or the obviously false, whipped up into an impressive-looking linguistic soufflé. Prick it with a fork, let out the hot air, and you'll find there's little left. Certainly nothing worth eating.

In defense of Guattari, Baudrillard, and others, some might say that Sokal and Bricmont have misunderstood what these writers are trying to do. Such postmodern thinkers are themselves engaging in game playing and spoofery. So the joke is really on Sokal and Bricmont. This won't wash. As Richard Dawkins points out in his review of
Intellectual Imposteurs
, if Sokal and Bricmont's targets

are only joking around, why do they react with such shrieks of dismay when somebody plays a joke at their expense. The genesis of
Intellectual Impostures
was a brilliant hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, and the stunning success of his
coup
was not greeted with the chuckles of delight that one might have hoped for after such a feat of deconstructive game playing. Apparently, when you've become the establishment, it ceases to be funny when somebody punctures the established bag of wind.
⁷

DEALING WITH PSEUDOPROFUNDITY

Hopefully, this brief sketch of some of the ways
Pseudoprofundity
can be generated will help you spot it more effectively. If you find yourself on the receiving end of such blather, how should you respond? How can we best reveal
Pseudoprofundity
for what it is?

Pseudoprofundity's
greatest enemy is clarity. One of the most effective methods of disarming it is to translate what is said into plain English. Say, “Right, so you are saying …” and proceed to jot down in clear, unambiguous prose on back of an envelope precisely what they do mean. Such a translation will typically reveal that what was said is one of three things: (1) an obvious falsehood, (2) nonsense, or (3) a truism.

However, combating
Pseudoprofundity
is rarely quite as easy as that. Those who spout it are often aware, at some level, that clarity is likely to unmask them, and they will probably resist your attempts to rephrase what they mean in clear and unambiguous terms. They will almost certainly accuse you of a crude misunderstanding (see chapter on “
Moving the Semantic Goalposts
”). Of course, they still won't explain clearly what they
do
mean. They'll just keep giving you the runaround by changing the subject, erecting smokescreens, accusing you of further misunderstandings, and so on. For this reason, the unmasking of
Pseudoprofundity
typically requires both time and patience.

Mockery and satire can have a role to play, as Allan Bennett's “The Sermon” and the Postmodern Essay Generator illustrate. The Hans Christian Andersen story “The Emperor's New Clothes” ends with much hilarity when the small boy points out that the emperor is wearing no clothes at all. The public's laughter at the emperor parading around naked finally breaks the spell that the charlatan weavers had, in effect, cast over them all. Laughter can similarly help break the spell that
Pseudoprofundity
casts over us. A little satire may help us recognize that we have been taken in by someone spouting little more than truisms, falsehoods, or nonsense
dressed up as
profundity. That is why those who spout pseudoprofundity often strongly discourage satire and mockery—taking enormous, exaggerated offense at it.

There is an important caveat when it comes to the use of humor, however. Obviously, any belief—even a genuinely profound belief—can be mocked. I'm not suggesting mockery should
replace
clear, rigorous criticism of the sort I have attempted to
provide here. No one should be encouraged to abandon a belief just because people laugh at it. But, because of its ability to help break the spell that pseudoprofundity casts over its victims, allowing us to entertain for a moment or two the thought that perhaps we have been somewhat gullible or foolish, a little mockery can form an appropriate part of a response. Mockery may be both useful and legitimate if we can show that it is deserved.

A

I know I'm psychic. For example, last week I was thinking about Aunt Sue, whom I hadn't talked to for ages, when the phone rang. And it was her.

Prayer clearly works. I prayed for Mark, John, Karen, and Rita and they all got better.

I have no doubt that ghosts are real. My mother saw one just last week. And she's a trustworthy woman not prone to making things up.

Anecdotal evidence is also a staple of snake-oil salesmen everywhere, who can usually produce a handful of supporting testimonials to the efficacy of their remedies:

John ate three of my patented magic beans, and his cancer disappeared. Here's his sworn testimony!

People are attracted to anecdotes. We especially love hearing tales of the extraordinary and supernatural. Many of us are easily swayed by anecdotal evidence for the existence of psychic powers, ghosts, or the efficacy of prayer or of some alternative medicine. Yet, as supporting evidence, such anecdotes are almost entirely worthless. Why? For a range of reasons. Here are a few examples.

AMAZING COINCIDENCE

First of all, note that amazing coincidences are inevitable. There are billions of people living on this planet, each experiencing thousands of events each day. Inevitably, some of them are going to experience some really remarkable coincidences.

Such coincidences will be thrown up by chance. The odds of flipping a coin and getting a run of ten heads by chance is very low if you flip the coin only ten times. But if billions of people do the same thing, it becomes very likely indeed that a run of ten heads will occur.

Such coincidences can easily generate the appearance of supernatural activity. For example, such coincidences can suggest that prayer can cure people of terminal diseases. Among people diagnosed with terminal cancer, a small percentage will spontaneously get better. Such rare occurrences are just a natural fact about cancer. Huge numbers of people are diagnosed with terminal cancer each year. And a significant proportion of them are prayed for. It's likely, then, that a few of those diagnosed with terminal cancer and prayed for will recover. Is the existence of such people evidence that prayer works? Clearly not. These are people who would have gotten better anyway, prayed for or not. A handful of reports of such amazing recoveries is not good evidence of the efficacy of petitionary prayer.

What would be more impressive is if, say, after being prayed for, someone's amputated leg grew back. That's something that would really run contrary to everything we know about how our bodies function. If, in response to prayer, God really did heal people by supernatural means, and if his powers are unlimited, then he could just as easily grow someone a new leg as cure them of terminal cancer. However, well-documented cases of people growing legs back after being prayed for do not, so far as I am aware, exist. Interestingly, reports of “miraculous” medical recoveries tend to be largely restricted to the kinds of cases in which such spontaneous remission is known to occur.

What about the phone-ringing episode? Just the other day, I was booked to play at a wedding in some fairly remote countryside about fifty miles from where I live. When I arrived, my brother walked out of the building to meet me. He was as amazed to see me as I was to see him. The venue was miles away from where either of us lived. But, by sheer chance, we ended up at the same place at the same time. A month or two ago, my wife took a train journey to a station in the north of England. When she stepped onto the platform, her father was standing there. Again, both were amazed. Again, this was a coincidence. The fact is, coincidences happen. Every now and again, people will run into each other in unexpected locations. Every now and then, the phone will ring, and at the end of the line will be someone you were just thinking about.

Coincidence also accounts for at least some sightings of monsters. Consider the many thousands of people who look out over Loch Ness each year. All sorts of shapes are created in the water by floating logs, otters, wind patterns, the wakes of boats, and so on. Just by chance, a few will look a little monster-like. So, if a monster is what people are looking for, we should expect a few such reports of a monster, whether or not there's a monster in the loch.

Those finding hidden codes in ancient texts also tend to rely heavily on coincidence. In the book
The Bible Code
, journalist Michael Drosnin claims to have discovered within the Bible a
code revealing events that happened thousands of years after the text was written, events such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas. Drosnin also claims no mere human could have encoded these hidden messages, and that he has therefore discovered mathematical proof that “we are not alone.”
¹

Has Drosnin really discovered such deliberately hidden predictive messages within the pages of the Bible? Critics note that Drosnin's method of revealing his messages looks suspiciously as if it would throw them up by chance. Drosnin denies this. He claimed in
Newsweek
, “When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in
Moby Dick
, I'll believe them.”
²

One critic then proceeded to do just that. Mathematician Brendan MacKay subsequently used Drosnin's method to find encrypted in
Moby Dick
“predictions” of the assassinations of Leon Trotsky, Indira Gandhi, Martin Luther King, René Moawad, and Robert F. Kennedy. In fact it turns out that by using Drosnin's method you can find such “messages” hidden in any large text. They're thrown up by chance among the vast number of letter sequences that Drosnin's method generates.

The important thing to remember about coincidences is this—what would be
really
odd is if they
didn't
happen. If no one ever unexpectedly ran into a friend or relative, or if we never received phone calls from people we just happened to be thinking about—well, that really would be pretty peculiar. The fact that amazing coincidences happen is, or should be, entirely unsurprising and requires no supernatural explanation.

THE POST HOC FALLACY

People often assume that because one thing happens after another, that one is the
cause
of the other. But there needn't be any causal link. To assume that because B followed A, A
caused
B is to commit the fallacy known as
post hoc ergo propter hoc
(which means “After this, therefore because of this”). Suppose my kettle boils immediately after a comet crashes into Mars. Did the comet cause my kettle to boil? No. That's just a coincidence.

Similarly, the fact that someone diagnosed with terminal cancer recovers after prayer does not establish that prayer caused the recovery. To suppose otherwise is also to commit the post hoc fallacy.

Recovery after diagnosis of terminal cancer might be an amazing one-off coincidence. But what if we spot a
pattern?
What if,
whenever
A happens, B always, or very often, follows? Would
that
establish that A causes B?

Suppose, for example, that there is a New Age medical treatment advertised like so:

Ninety percent of those suffering from unexplained lower back pain who took magic beans as treatment reported a significant improvement after just a few weeks!

Wow, that sounds impressive—
90 percent
! Surely we have here evidence that magic beans really do effectively treat lower back pain, right?

No, we don't. Ninety percent of cases of unexplained lower back pain will have improved significantly after six weeks, even with
no treatment at all.
So the fact that 90 percent of those with unexplained lower back pain improve significantly after receiving magic beans, crystal healing, homeopathy, or a rubdown with pink blancmange is no evidence at all that any of these treatments have any sort of beneficial effect.

What we tend to overlook is the extent to which the supposed “effect” happens
anyway
, whether or not the alleged “cause” is present. One hundred percent of those people who drink water eventually die. That doesn't establish that drinking water is the cause of their death.

COUNTING THE HITS AND IGNORING THE MISSES

Francis Bacon, a pivotal figure in the development of the scientific method, once said, “The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other.” Anecdotes can appear to provide compelling evidence of psychic abilities and supernatural events, particularly when many are collected together in a book or article. Page upon page of anecdotes about the amazing insights of psychics can leave people thinking, “Well, there's got to be
something
to it, surely!” But how is this evidence accumulated? Typically, as Bacon notes, people
look for cases that seem to support the theory they believe in, and ignore those that don't.
This is called
confirmation bias.

For example, someone who believes they are psychic will usually focus on the few “hits,” for instance, those times when they received a phone call from someone they just thought about. They forget about the many “misses”: all those times when they thought about someone but the person didn't immediately call. By collecting together several such “hits” and ignoring the innumerable “misses,” it's not difficult to convince yourself that you have psychic powers, even if you don't.

Similarly, someone who believes in the efficacy of prayer will typically ignore all those cases in which people diagnosed with terminal cancer were prayed for and didn't recover—the overwhelming majority—and will focus exclusively on the handful of cases in which there was a full recovery. By ignoring the “misses”—all those occasions on which sick people were prayed for but they experienced no recovery, and collect together only on the “hits”—the small proportion of occasions the person recovered, we can, again, easily convince ourselves that we have amassed powerful evidence of the miraculous efficacy of prayer.

We can now see more clearly one of the main reasons why anecdotal evidence is such poor evidence. When we are simply presented with a large collection of anecdotes, we have no idea
how
idiosyncratic
the cases are. If I casually take a sawn-off shotgun and pepper the side of a barn on which a small target is hanging, and a couple of shotgun pellets happen to fall inside the target, that's not evidence of my great marksmanship. Someone who initially looks only at the two holes in the target might be impressed, but once they take a step back and see all the misses, it becomes obvious that there's no evidence of marksmanship after all. The “hits” were highly atypical.

Not only do we tend to count the “hits” and forget about the “misses,” we also tend, when recounting anecdotes, to focus on those features that make the story sound dramatic and downplay details that make it less so. There's often also an incentive to “sex up” anecdotes—sometimes even a financial incentive. Tabloid newspapers and TV production companies know that, as a rule, their audiences tend to be more interested in dramatic and extraordinary tales than in articles or programs that shed doubts on such stories. As a result, even while pretending to be “balanced,” TV programs on the paranormal are often little more than puffs for self-styled psychics. Doubts, if voiced at all, tend to be in the background. As a result of all this anecdote generating and peddling by the media, many people have become convinced there is abundant evidence that ghosts exist, that some people really are blessed with psychic powers, that some people have been abducted by aliens, and so on.

THE POWER OF SUGGESTION AND OUR TENDENCY TO “SEE” WHAT IS NOT THERE

Human beings are remarkably prone to “see” things that are not, in truth, there. Take, for example, the
power of suggestion
, nicely illustrated by Kenneth Arnold's famous sighting of the very first flying saucer back in 1963. Arnold was flying his light plane near Mount Rainier in Washington when he saw a series of mysterious shapes in the distance. On landing, he reported these unidentified
flying objects. The news media picked up the story of Arnold's flying saucers, and, soon after, many other people were reporting the saucer-shaped objects in the sky. They have been reporting them ever since. The saucer-shaped spacecraft has become a staple of science fiction. But here's the thing—
Arnold did not report seeing flying saucers.
What Arnold said he saw were boomerang-shaped craft that bobbed up and down, somewhat like a saucer would do if skimmed across a lake. The reporter misheard, the story of “flying saucers” entered the public sphere, and other people started reporting saucers too. Why? Assuming most of them were sincere, and assuming it's unlikely our alien visitors just happened to switch from using boomerang-shaped craft to saucer-shaped craft in 1963, it seems the saucer reports that followed were, and are, largely a product of the power of suggestion. People see something in the sky, and, because they expect it to be saucer shaped, that's how it looks to them. Expectation strongly shapes perception.