Also sometimes really dumb

“We are a unique species and have various ways in which we are exceptionally different from every other creature on the planet, but we're also sometimes really dumb.”
Julia Watzek

Watzek was the lead author of a paper published in Scientific Reports illustrating how capuchin and rhesus macaque monkeys were significantly less susceptible than humans to "cognitive set" bias when presented a chance to switch to a more efficient option. The research results supported earlier studies with fellow primates, baboons and chimpanzees, who also showed a greater willingness to use optional shortcuts to earn a treat compared to humans who persisted in using a familiar learned strategy despite its relative inefficiency.

“I think we're less and less surprised when primates outsmart humans sometimes,” Watzek said.

The "Science" Channel is hurting America

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The Covid-19 pandemic is shining new light on America’s dysfunctional relationship with scientific literacy.

From Trump on down, elected officials, business and civic leaders, and regular-old-citizens are making choices about the virus that seem to reflect a less-than-stellar understanding of infectious diseases, the immune system, and public health.

Trump is generally baffled by everything having to do with Covid-19 and has stated that the virus can be defeated with the seasonal influenza vaccine.

Republican Senator Tom Cotton is fixated on conspiracy theories.

Talk show host Bill Maher went down the rabbit hole with a misleading comparison of mortality counts, get-over-it fatalism (“People die. That’s what happens in life. I’m sorry”) and statements comparing the pandemic to Y2K and the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig accident in 2010.

New York Times columnist Russ Douthat told his audience “Just go on a cruise, two weeks it’ll be over.”

And tycoon Elon Musk Tweeted on March 6 that “The coronavirus panic is dumb,” a statement that has garnered 1.7m likes even as “top officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have warned that a large-scale outbreak of the disease occurring in the U.S. is possible in the coming weeks.” (via The Hill.)

Churlishness and ignorance is nothing new among public figures in the United States, alas, but with Covid-19 now showing signs of exponential growth in the US the short-term consequences of a less-than-constructive public dialogue may be extreme.

And the public’s background knowledge and ability to make sound judgments in this arena is thin to begin with.

72% of Americans are scientifically illiterate and 70% of Americans “cannot read and understand the science section of the New York Times, according to a 2007 study reported by Science Daily

All of this has renewed a conversation in my family about the role cable TV science programming has played in making Americans dumber.

So I was interested to learn through archaeologist Sarah Parcak that a Mr. Mark Etkind, formerly the General Manager of of the Science Channel, has left his job.

Mr. Etkind, who spent 12 years at the Science Channel and Discovery (the channel’s parent company), was responsible for creating programs such as,

  • Finding Bigfoot

  • Call of the Wildman

  • Gator Boys

  • Pitbulls and Parolees

  • BBQ Pitmasters

  • Hillbilly Blood

  • Buying Alaska

  • Monsters & Mysteries in America 

  • United States of Bacon

  • Mountain Monsters

  • Buying the Bayou

  • Last Call Food Brawl

I remember being excited, long ago, at the prospect of having new cable TV channels devoted to science and history, but the dream of great programming was short lived as reality programming and low-caliber, lowest-common-denominator dreck filled the channels 24-hours a day.

And I wonder, as we confront the grim reality of a runaway pandemic in the United States and elsewhere, if an American watching the last 10 years of the Science Channel, Discovery, the Smithsonian Channel, the History Channel, and National Geographic would have picked up enough background information and critical thinking skill to be able to grasp the significance of Covid-19 and make good decisions for themselves, their families, and their communities.

Given what I’ve seen of the programming on these channels I’m guessing not. (Though I will make an exception for Mythbusters, one of the best “popular” shows about scientific method and critical thinking, ever.)

Unusable

Whereas a social movement has to persuade people to act, a government or a powerful group defending the status quo only has to create enough confusion to paralyze people into inaction. The internet's relatively chaotic nature, with too much information and weak gatekeepers, can asymmetrically empower governments by allowing them to develop new forms of censorship based not on blocking information, but on making available information unusable.
Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, 2017. Introduction.
“My fear is that homo sapiens are not just up to it. We have created such a complicated world that we’re no longer able to make sense of what is happening.”
— Israili historian and author Yavul Harari, on the difficulty of acting morally in a fast and complex world. From What’s Next for Humanity: Automation, New Morality and a ‘Global Useless Class’, by Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura, New York Times, 19 March 2018

Long-term backwards vision

Instead of formulating meaningful visions for where humankind will be in 2050, [our leaders] repackage nostalgic fantasies about the past — and there’s a kind of competition: who can look back further. Trump wants to go back to the 1950s; Putin basically wants to go back to the Czarist Empire, and you have the Islamic State that wants to go back to seventh-century Arabia. Israel — they beat everybody. They want to go back 2,500 years to the age of the Bible, so we win. We have the longest-term vision backwards.
Israili historian and author Yuval Harari, from What’s Next for Humanity: Automation, New Morality and a ‘Global Useless Class’, by Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura, New York Times, 19 March 2018

The dumbest true statement

One night in December of 2019, I was up until 3 a.m. watching TikToks in bed, and woke up with a sore shoulder from holding the phone up at a weird angle. Since “I pulled my shoulder watching TikToks in bed” is the dumbest true statement I've had to make in quite some time, I have since been good about not bringing the iPhone 6S Plus to bed. I leave it on my desk and read instead. I can't overstate what a positive effect this has had on my life.
Emanuel Maiberg, After 1,434 Days of Testing, My Review of the iPhone 6S Plus: A fine and durable phone for a hard and horrible world, Motherboard, 13 February 2020

It does not spark joy

The smartphone is a window into the world. The bigger the window, the more of the world you see, and the world is often bad. This is the screen that quivers and glows in the middle of the night with ominous texts. It's the screen I leaned up on my nightstand and watched as I fell asleep to a live video of Trump's 2016 election victory speech. It's the phone that rings when my parents need to tell me that someone has cancer or has died. For some reason I only have bad memories of the phone, though I know that it has delivered good news as well. It does not spark joy.
After 1,434 Days of Testing, My Review of the iPhone 6S Plus: A fine and durable phone for a hard and horrible world by Emanuel Maiberg, Motherboard, 13 February 2020

Election 2020

“It's disappointing that the state has this rule in place, that the voters would have to vote using the system we want to replace in order to have the system that we want to replace be replaced.”
Shelby County Tennessee Commissioner Mick Wright, on the county's inability to upgrade voting machines before the upcoming 2020 elections, Ballot Bombshell: Election Machine Issue Becomes Moot by Jackson Baker, The Memphis Flyer, 13 February 2020. Via Jennifer Cohn (@jennycohn1). As Orwellian as this sounds, Commissioner Wright, a Republican in a county known for voting rights abuses, wants to replace the current crappy system with one that uses Ballot Marking Devices — a tech @jennycohn1 has convinced me is *bad news for democracy*.

The big stuff can never get done

“Any strategy that involves crossing a valley — accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance — will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.”
Innovation Starvation by Neal Stephenson, Wired, 27 October 2011

Verification in reverse

So many of the routines of political journalism were based on behaviorist assumptions about how candidates would behave that simply do not apply. And that’s one of the epistemological crises in journalism right now.[…]

I think we’re completely losing this battle, on every level. And fighting about truth itself — there’s something inherently polarizing about that. We’re just at the beginning of understanding some of his methods for profiting in an environment where truth is exploded.

An example would be his use of verification in reverse. Verification is trying to nail down a claim with facts, evidence, data. Verification in reverse is taking something that has been nailed down and introducing doubt about it. When you do that, it releases a lot of energy, controversy, furor, reaction. And then you can power your political movement with that energy.

The truth-telling system and political journalism rested on certain assumptions about how public actors would behave. Trump shatters all those assumptions.

Jay Rosen, in Is the media making American politics worse?, 22 October 2018.

Entertainment logic

“Journalism academics have always known that newsworthiness, as the American press defines it, isn’t a system with any coherence to it. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s just a list of factors that occasionally come together to produce news. There’s no real logic to it, other than it’s a list of things that can make something news. The advantage of it is that it leaves maximum leeway for editors to say, ‘This is news,’ and, ‘That’s not news,’ and so it’s news if a journalist decides it’s news.”
Jay Rosen, from Is the media making American politics worse?, in which Rosen is interviewed by Vox's Ezra Klein, 22 October 2018

Rosen continues,

One of the things that slips in there, of course…is that entertainment logic can actually be the logic that a news company is operating under, and it doesn’t have to explain that to its users, or even to itself.

An example I would use is the way that CNN has purchased these pro-Trump talking heads. That doesn’t have any editorial logic to it. It makes sense to have conservative voices. It makes sense to have people from the middle of the country. It makes sense to have people who have certain priorities.

It doesn’t make editorial sense to have a pundit who is defending Trump, right or wrong. But it does make entertainment sense to have people like that on the air, if you are following entertainment logic.

Twitter was made for trouble

On Twitter…teens saw the street code in the workings of the site. “Whoever made Twitter,” said Tiana, in September 2010, “designed Twitter for trouble.”

She explained that she could see her friends’ confrontations with people she didn’t follow. Tiana was prepared to “jump into” these conflicts and expected her friends to do the same. In the context of the [street] code, Twitter seemed provocative. It placed users before a stream of other people’s conversations, with the prompt “What’s happening?”

Tiana, from The Digital Street by Jeffrey Lane, 2018, p. 72

Rumors of War

Photos CC-BY Michael Peter Edson, 2020

Edit: Back when I wrote this in February, 2020, three years into the Trump presidency and also a thousand years ago, I couldn’t imagine the spark that would finally cause our communities to erupt in violence. The anger and justification were there in our hearts, but what would it take to light the flame? And now, as Ezra Klein wrote, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder: We weren’t there, and then, all of a sudden, we were. –Mike, June 3, 2020

* * *

Something that fascinates me about Kehinde Wiley’s Rumors of War is the idea that Wiley’s sculpture makes an end-run around established battle lines regarding the preservation or removal of monuments to Confederate Civil War leaders.

On one hand, many argue that such statues should be removed because they celebrate and ennoble racism and slavery (many of the statues were commissioned as part of a deliberate campaign to intimidate African Americans during our Jim Crow era in the late 19th to mid 20th centuries); while others argue that removing the statues is tantamount to erasing history.

In 2017 alone, Baltimore removed its monument to Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the dead of night; New Orleans did so in public, for reasons eloquently described by mayor Mitch Landrieu (“Here is the essential truth. We are better together than we are apart…”); Charlottesville, Virginia, which saw violent protests around the issue in 2017, has still not removed its statues of Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson though the city council voted to do so over two years ago.

But Rumors of War takes the debate in another direction by changing the way we see the statues in the first place.

Wiley’s monument sits in a place of honor outside the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts: immense, powerful, relevant, and shocking.

“As a lifelong Richmonder, born and raised, I am overwhelmed with what this means. To see somebody with the shoes that look like people of Richmond, the hoodies that look like people of Richmond, to be such a contrast. I’m excited. I’m terrified,” a local radio host told journalist Kriston Capps.

As Capps reported, “Wiley seemed to endorse the approach of building new statues rather than removing old ones. ‘I say don’t tear down the house,’ he said, ‘even though it’s ridiculous, even though all this chest-beating is symptomatic of a broader illness. We can compose poetry of broken bones.’”

A few blocks away from Wiley’s sculpture, on a barren traffic island at the intersection of Arthur Ashe Boulevard (named for the trailblazing African American tennis star) and Monument Avenue (named for its many monuments to Virginia veterans of the Civil War) sits a monument to Stonewall Jackson. Jackson’s memorial was erected in 1915 at the height of Jim Crow.

After I saw Rumors of War, cast in 2019, with its young, powerful rider wearing jeans and a hoodie and straining at the stirrups in Nike high tops, Jackson and his horse looked isolated to me — skinny, tired, and defeated. Left behind as a footnote while the real work of society carries on somewhere else.

I believe in civic discourse. I believe that we need to practice the long and patient process of talking to each other and making shared decisions even when, especially when, we disagree. But I also believe in the deft and unexpected move, the ninja move, the lightning bolt, the stroke of insight that can emerge from anywhere, at any time, to break through the static and force us to see where and who and what we are — and what might be possible if we think and work in new ways.