Knots in the Neurons

This is an update on my reading. In my ignorance, I raised a question: "There are so many ways of getting it wrong, there must be lots of ways  of getting it right. Or is that an improper premise?" 

Watch as I untie the knots in my neurons. Now that I have done some reading, I understand that this idea is a combination of non-sequitur fallacy and equivocation fallacy.

Non sequitur: "there must be lots of ways of getting it right" does not follow from " there are many ways of getting it wrong". Perhaps the only way of getting it right is to not get it wrong. Or there may be more than one practical solution to a problem. Or it could be that there is no way of getting it right, as in apophatic theology. 

Equivocation: The adjective right is used in different contexts. Conflating factual rightness with ethical rightness or logical rightness or pragmatic rightness is an equivocation fallacy. Being right in one sense does not imply being right in another. 

So whether there is one way of getting it right or many or none depends on what you are talking about. One more knot in the neurons.

Nice to be Ignorant

Following my confession of ignorance and the assertion that a writer should offer something more, I am amazed to discover that I still want to write even though I am mostly ignorant and have no idea what more I can say. I first went through this five years ago when I collided with the word semiotics and was curious what it meant. Since then I have discovered that semiotics is what I am doing here writing this blog. Now you are reading it. Nice to have company. Don't worry. It's not contagious. You won't have to write your own blog. Promise.

What's next? Not sure. I go to the Wikipedia list of academic disciplines and scroll the mouse wheel seven times. (Seven is a magic number. Three is pretty good too, and eleven.) Then I close my eyes, draw circles with the mouse eleven times, and click left. That takes me to reasoning errors, a subheading of epistemology. When I click on reasoning errors, I wind up in a list of fallacies (ways of getting it wrong), including formal fallacies, propositional fallacies, quantification fallacies, formal syllogistic fallacies, informal fallacies, improper premise, faulty generalizations, questionable cause, statistical fallacies, relevance fallacies, and red herrings. Each of those categories lists subcategories and sub-subcategories. 

Woah! If I'm not careful, I'm going to learn something. A politician would have filled his shopping cart by now and be ready to check out. I'm kidding. That's one of those fallacies. It's free. You just grab and run.

This is going to take a while. I'll be back when I'm finished reading. Have some ice cream. 

Wait, that must be a quantification fallacy. It's going to take longer than ice cream. Plant wheat and come back when you've finished your sandwich.

Isn't this fun? So nice to be ignorant! I feel like a kid in a candy store. I wonder. There are so many ways of getting it wrong, there must be lots of ways  of getting it right. Or is that an improper premise?

Trust Me, I'm Ignorant

Understanding things gives us confidence in solving problems. Wouldn't it be nice if we knew it all and could solve all the problems. In 1996, John Horgan published a book entitled The End of Science  in which he proposed that all the major discoveries in science had already been made. Now 28 years later, thinking that there might be something more, I asked Bing: "What major advances have been made in science since 1996?"

Bing answered:
"Since 1996, there have been several significant scientific breakthroughs and discoveries that have shaped our understanding of the world. Here are some notable ones:

Cloning of Dolly the Sheep (1996)
Top Quark Discovery (1997): 
Dark Energy and Accelerated Expansion of the Universe (1998) 
Tau Neutrino Discovery (2000)
Human Genome Project (2000)
CRISPR Gene Editing Technology (2012)
Detection of Gravitational Waves (2015)
Exoplanet Discoveries (2000s)
Gene Therapy Successes (2000s)
Advancements in Artificial Intelligence (2010s)s.

Thank you, Bing. John Horgan's opinion that we pretty well knew it all back in 1996 looks like an extrapolation of optimism bias into absurdity. Worse, the thought that "we" know is delusional. "We" consists of individuals each of whom understands a little piece of what there is to know. The more "we" know, the more unlikely it is that anyone can be a comprehensive generalist, knowing much about most things. Trust those who confess their profound ignorance. They are telling the truth.

I wasn't sure I was right about that, so I Googled it. I found a paper entitled "the evolutionary improbability of generalism in nature", with 144 citations to studies about everything from aphids to primates to some things I can't pronounce like Medyodachtylus kotschyi geckos. Why would homo sapiens be any different? 

To be quite sure, I read this article about the Muon Mystery. Now I'm quite sure that I don't know much about anything. 

Trust me. I'm ignorant.

Something More

We've just finished listening to "The Door-to-Door Bookstore" by Carsten Henn, as an audiobook from the public library. It was delightful. You couldn't tell how delightful from the odd title or the cover art. Although the reviews were good, it was something more than expected.

Now I have the task of selecting our next book. I scan a list of best-sellers, passing some by because the titles put me off. I waste an hour reading synopses, and discard them all because we've been there too many times: love in wartime, family sagas, serial killer thrillers, sci-fi fantasy, apocalypse, time travelers, people behaving badly, courtroom dramas. I hunt for a mystery author we have enjoyed before only to find that she's trying too hard to get our attention and her voice has gone dark and ugly. Enough of that. Novels should provide novelty, not PTSD. 

On occasion, I search the library for random key words to see what comes up. Books will speak for themselves if we let them. Now and then we stumble into delight and stay awhile.

A billion years of serendipity
equipped us with ideas, voice and lore
to tell the meaning of what soon might be,
a dark and ugly end.
Or something more.

Axe the Tax

In the previous note, I could have chosen to parse some phrase other than The True North Strong and Free, but I wanted to avoid offending readers by challenging their beliefs. Canadians tend to be mildly nationalistic and are unlikely to walk away from an eccentric rant about the national anthem. The metamessage, that ideas are fallible and incomplete, had nothing to do with patriotism. Anyway, I guess you weren't put off because here you are looking for another dose of pithy prose.

This time, be warned, I'm going to dip into the evidence and the politics around carbon pricing in Canada, "axe the tax" and the "carbon tax rebate", two potent ideas begging attention and votes. I hope your party looks good in the spotlight.

Reader discretion is advised.

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There, the others are gone. Now it's just us and we aren't worried. We know that political ideas aren't real, don't we. Or do we? I have a few things to say about that.

An idea is a real emergent phenomenon arising from communication between minds, information riding along on various material media: from brain to voice to brain to print to brain to newscast to brain, and so on. Without the need to communicate, ideas would not exist. We would be hermits living alone, hunting dinner with a stick because there would be no one to show us a better way, no SUV to get us to the grocery store, no climate change, no looming end to the anthropocene, no government with no plan to fix things, no voters to convince, and no taxes. Sounds delightful. Where's my stick? 

Yes, but it's nice here in our house whatever the temperature outside, and I'm hungry, and I have to communicate or depart to the wilderness. So I have ideas and a blog instead of a stick.

Besides being real itself, an idea is an imperfect representation (in words or other symbols) of something else real like the events behind what we call climate change. To be clear, the idea Climate Change is about something real that cannot be accurately or completely captured in words or models. Awareness of the discrepancy between reality and idea causes some debate. We know lots about climate change, but we don't know it all and we've never fixed this problem before so we don't really know what we're doing. Putting a price on carbon is one way some governments are trying to fix things. Let's see if it works. But first there is an election (October 20, 2025 at the latest in Canada) and whether a party promises to axe the tax or continue a carbon tax rebate could help decide the next government.

Knowing the intention behind an idea helps in decoding the meaning. If the intention is to reduce the disastrous effects of climate change, the government might put a price on carbon to redirect energy consumption to low carbon sources. On the other hand, if the intention is to win votes, the government might axe the tax or give a carbon tax rebate because reducing the cost of living or providing some income support will make voters happy...until their town burns in a wildfire or the drought drives up the cost of corn or a flood drowns cattle and there's not enough hamburg to go around.

To be pragmatic, an idea might have unintended effects. In the sophistry of parliamentary debate, the government gets the blame for everything wrong in the world, including wildfires and droughts and floods and the cost of living. That isn't the intention of those who want to win an election. They want power and glory, not blame. When you win an election and wake up in question period not knowing what you are doing, that's a politician's nightmare. Quite unintended. Before we make promises, invent slogans, spread conspiracy theories, and call people nasty names, we should pay attention to the evidence and save everybody some grief. Opinions, rhetoric and clever names are not evidence. Evaluate the evidence.

Finally, both the idea and reality change. Noticing the results of actions nudges ideas closer to reality and actions based on ideas may alter reality for better or worse. Evidence can help. Here is some evidence about carbon pricing in a 2020 WEF report. 

Look at the evidence,
vote for the carbon tax rebate,
go electric and hope for the best.

Or ignore the evidence,
axe the tax, 
and cruise to the crash on cheap fuel.

We have a say in what happens next.

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The Most Important Facts: Aaron Wherry, April 2023

How Carbon Pricing Works: Government of Canada

Climate Change Data: Statistics Canada

Social Cost of Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Government of Canada

What's Behind the Carbon Tax and Does It Work : Benjamin Shingler, CBC News

The Carbon tax Debate: Aaron Wherry, CBC News

The True North Strong and Free, Eh

What's that supposed to mean? 

Perhaps true means that the words are an exact representation of reality. Good luck with that.

North could refer to direction. But is that magnetic north or geographic north (about 800 km apart), and does it ignore the Chandler Wobble and the drift of the magnetic north pole (55 km per year)? North maybe, but true north?

Here in Guelph, Victoria Road North means Victoria Road Northwest. Since the city is laid out on the bias (45° counterclockwise), north in Guelph is a convenient fiction on which locals agree to keep directions simple. We get away with it because the GPS lady isn't worried and nobody looks at maps anymore.

Or maybe north refers to latitude. Let's see. Compare 43.0° N for London Ontario Airport and 51.5° N for London Heathrow. Well, Canada is a big country, so not all parts of it deserve the True North designation. We just ignore that the true north is where most Canadians don't live and never visit. 

Anyway we're strong, aren't we? So we can keep the Russians out if they decide they want our north for its mineral resources. We have strong defenses, unless we blow our budget on pipelines and oil subsidies and can't afford jets and helicopters and radar stations. Nevertheless, we are quite strong economically except for homeless people sleeping in tents in the town square. Whatever, we certainly smell strong from wildfires, pulp mills, nickel smelting, tailings ponds and diesel exhaust. 

Anyway, we are free, for sure, since Canada is a big place, and if we choose to, we can make a home on the tundra where there's nothing around but mosquitoes to bother us, until the permafrost melts and the tent disappears into a sinkhole. Otherwise, free means we are crowded into cities paying more rent than we can afford, putting up with neighbours who have foreign accents and odd cooking odours and strange holidays, neighbours who won't show skin at the beach like regular Canadians do. But I suppose free means we must tolerate differences, obey the rules and pay taxes in return for the shared benefits of living in community, like a tidy income stealing cars. Also free means reciprocity, meaning we give some to get some, except for the CEO who gets a year's average wage in a single paid holiday Monday plus half an hour at the office on Tuesday. That's what we're singing about.

Or are we? It seems we are sort-of north-ish, sort-of strong-ish, and sort-of free-ish. Not so singable, but closer to true.

****************

By now you have figured out that I'm piling this stuff up to spread it again later fertilizing an argument. You are so smart!

Every utterance, even this one, comes with some mix of intentions such as the following: to convey information or question information, to inspire or inhibit imagination, to support or discount explanation, to motivate or discourage action, to entertain or annoy, to prove who is smarter and who's not, and anything else I can't think of right now. Intention will be some blend of these proto-intentions. If we don't have the time or patience or capability to sort out the intentions behind the words, we may depend on the pronouncements of experts or tradition or just take a guess, which makes it unlikely we will comprehend exactly what was meant. But we do our best and live with the consequences.

*****************

No surprise then that the true north strong and free could mean something different than I suggested in the preamble. That phrase from our national anthem was not intended, I imagine, as a definitive description of the Canadian experience but rather as an aspirational ideal yet to be defined. 

Let me have a go. North perhaps includes a hint of adventure, braving the unknown wilderness. Strong could refer to hardship endured with courage. Maybe free implies that we have a choice of possible futures to pursue. And singing about it together will help us get there even if we are not sure where we are going. 

As I see it, the true north strong and free is poetry, the author's intention being that we live meaning into the words. 

As for my words in this note, you may well question my intentions. Why am I writing about the National Anthem when Canada Day is four months away? That's too involved to answer just now. Maybe the next note will enlighten. I am interested to see what I have to say for myself.

Don't Bother Us With Facts

unless you're going to tell us what we already know. That's confirmation bias. Or you may tell us what we want to hear; that's permitted since it feeds our optimism bias. Also, if you're one of those others (whatever name we use for our demons), then you aren't one of us and we don't trust you, so we aren't listening (that's groupthink). Therefore, according to psychologists, when we converse, we should look for common motives because facts don't win fights.

This conclusion discounts rationality. We are intelligent for a reason, to seek the truth, because intuition is fallible and needs a reliable, vigilant and honest companion.  What begins with shared motives may end in action informed by facts. We aspire to understand the way things really are even if we have to admit our errors, even if the facts are distressing, even if our friends have other opinions.

Therefore, let us pay attention to the evidence, speak truth with compassion, and not despair. We have a say in what happens next.

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Let's take back the planet: David Suzuki and Ian Hannington

Just have a think videos by Dave Borlace:

Energy Efficiency

Carbon Capture and Storage

How to Fix the Climate by 2030

Mother Earth: Neil Young

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In reply to Marion's comment, here are links to
the archive of my blog, newest first, over 200 posts combined:
The Basket Overflow
Still Missing the Basket
More Notes that Missed
Notes That Missed The Basket
Not sure why you are messing around in my trash when there is so much good stuff to read. We have been listening to "A New Season" by Terry Fallis.