Common Sense vs Least Common Denominator Sense

I just listened to Phil Plait and David Morrison on WHYY debunking doomsday scenarios. The radio host used the term "common sense." It struck me suddenly that it's not actually common anymore. What we mean when we say common sense is actually logic. Which a lot of people don't have apparently. How do we determine the distribution? Has the scale tipped? Is common sense now rare sense and that's why America is turning against the science, technology, and innovation that made this country a superpower in the first place? Is least common denominator sense the majority now? I suppose we could take a simple poll and see how many people know what least common denominator means. If they don't know, they are it.

"If you sound like you really believe this stuff people will buy it. And that's the problem," says Phil Plait. But HE sounds like he really DOESN'T believe it. Why don't people believe him?

David Morrison attributed the phenomenon of believing doomsday scenarios to cosmophobia. Instead of being excited about the discovery of new planets people turn it into something to be afraid of. Children become sensitized to this. They believe the universe is their enemy.

Phil made the analogy with the ghosthunters shows where they go to an old house with a video camera and spend the night. (I've never seen one but there was an episode of Castle that used a Ghosthunters show as a plot point. They explained all the ghosty stuff with logical explanations by the end of the show.) In a ghosthunter show every sound becomes a ghost instead of what it really is -- rats in the attic, wind blowing tree limbs against the siding, thermal contraction. If you're scared of some upcoming event then everything points to that.

They should have psychologists on this show to explain this bizarre human tendency to the astronomers. None of this makes any sense to me, and by extension I assume most trained scientists are confused by why people look for evidence to confirm what they already believe. Isn't the point of public education to teach people to think critically? If I have some hypochondriacal theory that I have attention deficit disorder and should be on stimulant drugs I go online and find out that I would never be able to secure that diagnosis based on the fact I already admitted on my blog that I've never lost a pair of sunglasses.

The first caller on the show was Steve from Georgia. He said he remembered Duck and Cover. He said he's been through hurricanes so he knows what it's like to be without electricity. OK. So what? I was surprised that Phil didn't point out that Duck and Cover was really stupid. It wouldn't do a thing to protect you from nuclear fallout. Instead Phil said it's important to be prepared for disasters. It's a smart thing to do. Keep an emergency kit. But you should be prepared for what might realistically happen. Yes, in Georgia we lose power a lot. We have a lot of trees and elevated power lines and lightning. I am prepared by having uninterruptible power supplies for all my computers and my network equipment. My power went on and off three times last night, then stayed off for an hour. For no apparent reason. It was cold and windy is all. But I shut down my computers and network in a controlled fashion, turned on my flashlight, heated my supper on my butane hotplate instead of in the microwave and used my phone to keep talking to my friend on instant messenger.

There's a difference in being prepared and being paranoid. I guess the difference is instead of just making adjustments to changing conditions, the paranoid person freaks out. Instead of trusting that the power will come back on when the crew resets a blown breaker or reconnects a broken line the paranoid person assumes it's personal? Something is out to get them? David says he doesn't know how pervasive this attitude is. Is it 1% or 5% of the population? Either way that's a lot of people.

The next caller said her brother bought into this bunk, joined a cult and killed himself. Way to really bum out the scientists. As a person that leans towards engineer even more than scientist I want to think of a solution to this problem. I can't think of anything though. Educate everybody? That seems increasingly impractical. Reassure them? Discourage people from scaring them in the first place? Why can't you say fuck on TV but you can spread patently false information designed to make people paranoid? David said he gets email from children who are so terrified of the end of the world they are contemplating suicide. That is shocking! Ask an Astrobiologist is now a suicide hotline? That is really not fair. The whole reason you go into a field like astrobiology is because you prefer to think about extraterrestrial bacteria instead of the disturbed minds of other humans. This made sad for him.

David said that he is a still a working astrobiologist. He works on interesting projects on Mars and other planets. He took on this small side task to answer question on the Ask an Astrobiologist website and now 80% of the questions he gets are about 2012 doomsday nonsense. The radio host said, "I sense the frustration in your voice." David said, "Yep."

Before I listened to this I didn't know people thought this planet Nibiru was coming to crash into the earth. I didn't know they were attributing normal geological, weather and climate events to Nibiru. And apparently any random inconvenience. It explains an experience I had the other day at the gas station. I pulled up to get gas for my lawn mower and the attendant said over the loudspeaker, "No cards, only cash!" So I checked that I had paper money in my wallet and started to pump my gas. The attendant came out to talk to me. He said the network connection for the credit and debit card transaction processing equipment was down. "I heard it was because of a planet," he said. I did a double take and asked him to repeat it. "You think your phone is out because of a PLANET?" I assured him that was not the case. "First of all, a PLANET? Not even a star? A planet doesn't emit electromagnetic energy. Second of all, all our telecommunications are on fiber optic cables now, which is very resistant to radio frequency interference, even if there was something to generate this interference in the first place. And third, I have Windstream internet service the same as you and it just goes out all the time. Their server is in Arkansas. It's not exactly Silicon Valley. They do what they can. It will come back on as soon as they get the possum out of the plenum."

2012 Doomsday Scenarios and the people that believe them: Yet another reason I am delighted with my decision to be a hermit.

Update: From @astroengine, a good article where the author seems to have listened to this same radio show. Shepherd: Can the Doomsday scenarios -- at least for 2012

Like Father Christmas, apocalypses and other "last things", Armageddon and the afterlife heaven and hell, death and judgment, serve as a rudimentary behaviour control. Do what we say and you'll get brightly wrapped angels, virgins, and bliss on a stick, in heaven or paradise. Disobey and it's burning for eternity, or reincarnation as a cane toad.

"Bliss on a stick" is my new catch phrase.

Men, please don't proposition women in elevators

How can somebody contradict a statement like "I felt scared"? I don't understand. If somebody says they felt scared and they have no reason to lie about it then I believe them. This is what baffles me about the recent kerfuffle that came from Rebecca Watson telling a story about being uncomfortable when a man propositioned her in a hotel elevator. Her point was "Men, please don't proposition women in elevators." I think that's pretty straightforward. There's certainly no reason to discuss it. But man, is it being discussed!

This issue really went all to pieces when Richard Dawkins weighed in on it. He basically dismissed the whole idea of privileged women being creeped out by men on elevators. He made some argument about genital mutilation and other really horrible atrocities against women. You can read all about it on Phil Plait's blog. It's a blog about a blog about a blog, so here's another blog about it just in case some of you don't read the other ones. Phil gets it. Thanks, Phil. He defends Rebecca Watson and maybe jumps to some extreme conclusions that I don't really think are necessary. To me it's not relevant what MIGHT happen in that scenario or WHY a woman should be on edge. The point to me is that it's totally involuntary. I never think of any of the stuff Phil mentions that might happen.

This Richard Dawkins thing blows my mind because I'm pretty sure women's instinct to feel afraid the minute a man steps on the elevator alone with them is evolution. Women are afraid of men like everybody is afraid of snakes, or big barking jumping dogs. It's perfectly natural. We can't help it. All men live in fear that women will humiliate them and all women live in fear that men will kill them. This is just how we evolved. It is unavoidable that a woman would have a stress reaction to being put in a position to humiliate a man when she is trapped in an enclosed space with him. He might kill her. We don't REALLY think that EVERY man is going to kill us, but it doesn't matter what we THINK. Our body evolved to react with fear. All Rebecca Watson did was point this out because clearly all men didn't get the memo. She was trying to do you all a favor and fill you in on what women want.

I posed this situation to my friend who travels a lot and rides a lot of hotel elevators. He said he HATES getting on an elevator with a woman. He is petrified that he will scare her. "Please don't think I'm a creep!" He hugs the wall and keeps his eyes on the floor so he doesn't make eye contact in the shiny door. He said it enrages him that it has to be that way. Yeah, it does suck. But that's where we are. Somehow our evolution got us to where women are afraid of men and some men are empathetic and don't want to make us feel worse. But judging by the comments on these other blogs some men have not evolved to this point. They insist women are wrong to feel this way and they can ask us for sex whenever and wherever they want. These men will prevent women from evolving beyond this fear because it is still preventing some of us from putting ourselves in harm's way. Our fear makes us alert. Actually, it kind of makes me a hermit. It's why I like the Sunday matinee at the theater downtown because I can walk back to my car in the daylight. Actually I feel bad calling it "fear" because it's just a mild stress reaction. But it goes from mild to overwhelming when somebody actually talks to you and asks you to go to their hotel room. For my delicate constitution I expect it would be enough of a brain chemistry change to trigger a migraine, no kidding.

Now another friend popped up on chat and made me realize that more about this topic that is argumentative. I want to be really clear.

• This discussion is not about what actions the woman on the elevator could/should take
• The stress reaction is automatic. The brain releases the chemicals without conscious effort

I had to explain this to my friend with a lot of caps lock. Especially when he said this.

Women need to work on that innate fear/stereotyping, because there is a huge variety of men of all different stripes on a broad spectrum of sexuality

We cannot "work on" an innate fear. It's innate. You might as well tell me to work on growing red hair. That's the whole point of this discussion. How do you not get it?! MEN ARE SCARY! I tried to equate it to snakes. He said he doesn't agree all men are snakes. What? No, all men are men. All snakes are snakes. Some snakes are harmless. But people have an innate fear of ALL snakes. Women have an innate fear of all men.

OK, great. Another man friend of mine has popped up taking the elevator man's side. Saying he didn't do anything wrong.

Well, I don't think the guy in the elevator did a damn thing wrong... Except, perhaps, not be attractive to Rebecca.
If he was someone she was interested in, this would have been a Good Thing.

No. Listen. This is the reason she brought it up. He did do something wrong. No man should ask a woman back to his room on an elevator. Period. That's it.

I'm still having the argument with this guy on IM. I can't believe it. He's proposing scenarios of what she could do or say. See bullet point one above.

Sorry, I'm not going to put limits on men speaking, politely, to women.

OK, what aren't you getting? It's NOT POLITE TO PROPOSITION A WOMAN ON AN ELEVATOR! EVER! There is no leeway on this.

So of the four men I talked to today about this two instantly got it. The first one had already heard about the events over the weekend but not the Richard Dawkins part. He immediately said that arguing something worse exists doesn't make a minor wrong go away and that was the end of that discussion. The second one is already well aware of this problem of women being scared. The third I convinced quickly, and the other is stubbornly arguing stuff that's not cogent to the point, which is very specifically, creepy behavior in hotel elevators. He finally came around after watching Rebecca Watson's video from the link in Phil Plait's post.



The part where she talks about the elevator incident is at 4:30. My friend says now:

I still maintain there are scenarios in which this might not be creepy, but it is clear that this was not one of them...

So he came around. I asked him why he automatically defended the man instead of just taking the woman's word for it that she felt creeped out. He said he automatically defends people who are put upon.

Ooooohhhh, I think I get it. Men are jumping to defend the other man because they think he's being attacked. I really didn't see it that way at all. She was just using that experience as an example for other men of what not to do. She never said that man who made her uncomfortable should be sanctioned in any way. That's why I didn't understand why he would need defending. She wasn't even talking about him really. It was meant as a broad lesson.

Apparently the details are important to men. My friend explains:

One thing that is a give-away was the guy said "don't take this the wrong way." That's a huge red flag...
It says "I know this seems creepy but I'm doing it anyway."
"you're interesting, wanna get a coffee sometime" may not be creepy... May not...
"Don't take this the wrong way, but you're interesting and would you like to come to my hotel room now for coffee" at 4am is fucking creepy.
Why did I jump to the conclusion that she was over-reacting? Because I assume the first situation, because I would never do the second - it's truly hard for me to imagine doing that to someone...

I think this is the same situation my second friend was in. He couldn't imagine anybody would really be genuinely creepy. This is why I'm writing this. This is why Rebecca Watson started the discussion about it in the first place. It doesn't happen to me a lot because I'm a complete freaking hermit. But it has happened to me enough to make me want to be a hermit. There are a lot of men out there who are seriously socially stunted. They are ruining it for the rest of you.

I'm really sorry for my friends who get it and who have to worry about making women uncomfortable in elevators and on the street at night. I don't know what to do about it. All I can say is if we are tough enough to deal with our physical effects of this stress you can just suck it up and deal with it too.

Of course I'm not happy with this argument as I'm an engineer and all problems have technical solutions. I think I will pay more attention to which hotels have glass elevators looking out on giant public atriums if I ever go to a conference.

*Update already. I have to put in a link to this letter to Richard Dawkins from victims of sexual assault. It is very well written and succinct. I wonder if Richard Dawkins is like my friends and he just can't conceive of somebody being that creepy? Too bad he doesn't have a friend like me on IM to 'splain it to him. In all caps. With curse words.

Bio vs Physics...to the death!

I took a few sniffs of this bait today. I think I'll just go ahead and swallow the hook.

The bait: This exchange between PZ Myers, and Tim Minchin on Twitter
(glossary: DBAD is Don't Be a Dick, aka Wheaton's Law, origin 2007. Phil Plait applied it to skeptics in 2010. TAM is The Amazing Meeting, a science, skeptical, and critical thinking conference coming up in Las Vegas in July.)

PZ Myers: Oh, christ. Waffling apologetics. RT @Daniel_Loxton I look back at scientific skepticism's history of DBAD-like appeals: skepticblog.org/2011/06/21/a-p…


PZ Myers: A history of skeptic whining & hesitation isn't even interesting.


Tim Minchin: @pzmyers Oh God, I can't believe I'm going to do this, but: I think the final paragraph - the 1838 quote - is interesting & concise.


PZ Myers: Yes, it shows skeptics have been crying uncle for 173 years. RT @timminchin: I think final para - the 1838 quote - is interesting & concise.


Tim Minchin: @pzmyers Surely the observation that faith / erroneous belief is often bolstered - even defined by - appeals to persecution is a truism.


Tim Minchin: @pzmyers Which isn't to say that you (or I) shouldn't continue with confrontation. Just that it needn't be the only mode.


PZ Myers: waht i've said all along. RT @timminchin: Which isn't 2 say that U (or I) shouldn't cont w/ confrontation. Just it needn't B the only mode.


PZ Myers: If this turns into a battle at TAM, it won't look pretty when they show up with cookies & tea, & we have brass knucks and knives.


PZ Myers: I won't be talking about dicks at TAM -- I plan to antagonize the astronomers instead. Bio vs Physics...to the death!

I'm assuming "the astronomers" PZ refers to would be Phil Plait, the beginning point of the very long article in the original tweet, and perhaps astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson who will also be at TAM 2011 and some others who are astronomers. So basically PZ is taking a swing at my friend, Phil, and people I admire enough to drive a long way to see them, and at me as a physicist? That is some crappie nibbles right there. Power Bait. It does tend to make me want to bite down on that hook and pull that spinning reel right out of PZ Myers pudgy hands. (Atheists are all fat is another topic.)

I've noticed PZ Myers's petulance towards physicists for a long time. It's pathological. I feel sort of bad for him. It's like he had some early childhood experience where he was rejected by a physicist and he took it really personally, as evidenced in this opposition to physicists on greeting cards.

So when I saw all this going down I wanted to express congratulations and support to Phil Plait -- Tim Minchin is taking his side! And there appears to be some kind of upcoming showdown. So I sent him an email.

Just so you know, I'm rooting for you. I met a biologist like PZ Myers at FSU. They can't stand that physics is a solid, hard science and they are just making shit up and rounding it off to try to make it mathematical. You think physicists have some questionable boundary conditions, you should hear some of the shit community ecologists make up -- assume the deer population increases until they consume all the grass in the area of the study. What? They BROWSE! They don't EAT EVERYTHING. They aren't locusts?! They eat a little of this and wander off. To say otherwise is idiotic. Anyway, they get REALLY mad when you point this out to them :) It reminds me of how PZ Myers flies off the handle at physicists for the dumbest things, like holiday greeting cards. Do you remember that? He said physicists had no business being on Valentine cards because they don't know about love.

I became aware of potential for inanity in biology one day in 2006 in Oceanography grad school when I was doing my biology homework and there was a formula for calculating something called the Shannon-Weiner Diversity Index. In the paper we were assigned the formula used the natural log. But in another paper it was log base 10. I looked online and found it with log base 2. I did a spreadsheet using all three choices and went to the professor to see which was right. He said it didn't matter, they use whatever they want. Say WHAT?!

The breaking point for me was when a biologist tried to use hysteresis curves to explain populations of animals and plants. OK, that works for electrons, man. Nobody said you can use that for rabbits and foxes. Step away from the white board!

I don't know why they try so hard to make it numerical. You use math for astrophysics because you don't have any other choice. You can't touch it and smell it and taste it. You have to do transforms on it before you can even hear it and see it. But plants and animals they can tell with their five senses that the system is more complicated than the few items they are quantifying. I can see why they're frustrated to try to describe it using the same language of math. Still, that's no reason for them to be such assholes about it. Some people are just gonna be assholes no matter what. PZ Meyers apparently has some buttons you can push to engage turbo-asshole. That's kind of scary.

So that's my pep-talk for you as you go up against a biologist. He is raging against physics like a frustrated child who isn't allowed to use his dad's power tools. I have no idea how you argue with somebody who is essentially jealous of you. I clearly don't know how -- I got a C in that class. A year later another professor at FSU published a book about fire ants with new data and a paradigm shift that essentially said I was absolutely correct and my professor had been wrong. I kind of enjoyed that :) But I guess you don't have that kind of time.

Good luck!

Barbara

As I do a bit more research into my jealousy theory I find more and more I'm totally right on the money with this one. I searched PZ Myers's blog for "physicist" and found a lot of rants. Here's damning evidence in a blog complaining that biologists aren't consulted on Sci-Fi movies.

But of course it's all because biology is easy, it isn't a hard science, it doesn't have any math … all ideas that are completely false, but perpetrated on science-fiction convention panels as willfully and as routinely as you'll find in creationist tent revivals.

Aww! That's not right! It's exactly what I said, but it doesn't HAVE to be! I have immense respect for biology and ecology and their respective ists when they have a proper grasp of what they're doing. Biology is NOT easy. If some biologists went into it because they weren't smart enough for physics then they are just doomed. I think biologists do themselves a disservice to try to copy physics teaching methods. They should come up with their own way of explaining things. My friend Dr. Means doesn't get all worked up trying to make up equations to describe what he observes. He goes out and does his field research and observes the big picture and sets up experiments to find out answers to specific questions. Will water moccasins chase you? People say they will. So he went out and got some to chase him. But they only came towards him when he was between them and the place they wanted to go -- the water. They would go right between his legs to get to the water. If he had run in that direction it would appear they were chasing him. But if he was on the landward side they would go away from him. He had his wife film it. I trust that he did this enough times to really convince himself in an objective fashion. Because he is, after all, an objective scientist. I don't really have to see a spreadsheet with distances and number of occurrences and a chart to prove it. I'm sure he took field notes describing each incident. That's good for me.

Another friend of mine, Joe Hutto, wrote a wonderful book about ecology in the context of raising a flock of wild turkeys. His book had hand-drawn illustrations in it, not charts, but it taught me more about the woods where I lived than anything we did in that stupid community ecology class. I thought a lot about my own observations while I was editing Dr. Means book about rattlesnakes. Since I moved back to Beachton in 2004 I had only seen one rattlesnake. When I was a kid we saw them all the time. I had proof in Dr. Means data -- back in the 1970s when we saw a rattlesnake we'd kill it and take it to him to dissect. Dr. Means did a recent paper showing the decline of rattlesnakes due to rattlesnake round-ups. Did ours go away too? We don't let people hunt them on our place though. And there are so many more gophers than when I was little. There should be more rattlesnakes too. But after reading Joe's book about the turkeys I realized the big difference was that when I was a kid I had a dog. I didn't find rattlesnakes, the dog did. Joe was astonished by how many rattlesnakes those turkeys found. My casual observation is no way to judge the population of snakes on my place when they evolved to hide very effectively. When it comes to natural things you can't just do dimensional analysis and get the answer. If I want to know something about biology I have to work a lot harder.

I used to take biology for granted because of the way I grew up. I assumed everybody who grew up in the woods understood how vastly complicated and interconnected everything is. One day I went to a lecture Dr. Means gave in Tallahassee about discovering a new kind of frog in the cloud forests of Guyana. The native people there seem to be destroying their own environment. I asked him why they don't realize they are upsetting the balance. He looked at me with this "oh you poor thing" expression and explained. "Barbara, you don't even realize how educated you are. Not everybody has your grandmother. She had to make a deliberate study of science to learn the things she taught you. Science is not obvious to people, they have to be taught to think the way you do."

Well however my grandmother managed to teach me about biology without me realizing it, she did a good job of making it clear that there is always more to be learned especially since nature is constantly changing. She never once implied there was anything easy about the squishy sciences. I think I probably steered clear of it in college because I did find it so endless. How would you know when you were finished? With physics you design a circuit, you solder it together, and it works. You're done. That seemed like something I could do in four years. I feel sorry for PZ Myers and my biology teacher at FSU who feel like they are held in lower esteem than people in the hard sciences. It kind of makes sense why PZ Myers has so much fun attacking other people that he holds in low esteem, like Deepak Chopra. I'm not sure if he really wants to attack Phil Plait like he does Deepak Chopra, but if he does then I assume it's for a different reason. Of course I could be totally wrong and it could be the exact same reason, but my own self-esteem keeps me from wrapping my head around that.

Phil assures me that PZ said "Bio vs Physics...to the death!" in jest. Well sure, I think he's going for laughs all the time, he says so.

PZ Myers: They're funny. You're not, gloomy gus. RT @Sk1mble: I can't help but notice you give more RT to woo-meisters than to rationalists. Sadface.

I realize he thinks he's being funny. That's why I cut him slack and keep reading his stuff from time to time to stay aware of his activities. I also realize Michio Kaku doesn't mean to sound like a total douchebag on Twitter so I keep following him too. As a person with terrible social skills I'm prepared to be liberal with people who have evidence of intelligence. I wouldn't get far in engineering without being friends with assholes.

That kind of makes me wonder, how do the people mentioned in this blog stack up based on Twitter popularity? A physicist, a biologist, an astronomer,  an astrophysicist, and a comic musician?

I think the Don't Be a Dick and genuinely funny contingent is well represented. That's comforting.

Update: After I posted this I realized I left off the originator of Don't Be a Dick. It's good contrast to see the two charts together to grasp the order of magnitude situation. Yeah, I think Phil Plait picked the right team in this contest.

If I included another person nagged by the religious nuts for being a fat atheist I could really make this look bad. Stephen Fry has 2,749,955 followers on Twitter.  

Skeptic Tales of Nerd Culture

Patton Oswalt and Phil Plait topped my despair with whipped cream and put a cherry on top. Here I am on vacation in my little house in the woods, remembering how unpopular I feel here, trying to get back in my hermit vibe with the internets and my chores. And all over Twitter is commentary after commentary about Patton Oswalt's Wired story about Geek Culture.

I’m not a nerd. I used to be one, back 30 years ago when nerd meant something.... I can’t say that I ever abided nerd stereotypes: I was never alone or felt outcast.

Well 30 years ago I sure as hell was alone and felt outcast. I took a test online recently and it said I am 100% pure nerd. No dork, no geek, pure nerd. Right now. And finally I am starting to feel less alone and outcast. Well, I mean I did back in Austin, but not so much today.

Phil Plait is having a contest where he's invited people to sum up the story of how they got to be a skeptic in a single tweet with the hashtag #SkepticTale. Here's his.

Telepathy. Clairvoyance. I believed them all… until my life got a little Randi. #SkepticTale

Well fabulous. Like I didn't feel like a loser already. I don't have a TALE. I never did believe any of that woo-woo crap. I was raised out here in the freaking woods by an engineer and an English major and a naturalist grandmother and similar aunts and uncles who identified every plant and animal I ever saw and taught me how things work. Sure they took me to the Episcopal church, but I didn't ever take it seriously. I thought it was like Santa Claus. Just a story they tell so they have an excuse to go hang around in the fellowship hall after church and visit with their friends and make business contacts. I would look at the portrait on the wall of my great- grandfather, an Episcopalian missionary, and remember stories my mother told of what a great asshole he was, always trying to gain the admiration of his congregation by giving them his own children's food and clothes. When I was in high school and became adept at analyzing English literature it became more and more annoying to sit through church because I disagreed with the sermon based on simple matters of language interpretation. I started paying attention more and it dawned on me that some of the people really BELIEVED whatever the man up front said, even if he was obviously wrong. That kind of gave me the creeps and I didn't really want to participate anymore. I didn't make a big deal out of it. It was just sort of like Office Space. "I'm not going to quit, I'm just not going anymore." I had a couple of cousins and aunts and uncles that seemed to feel like I did, but we didn't talk about it. It wasn't like we had a non-believer support group, but there was at least an example that made me think I could get away with it. As for the UFOs and telepathy, really? No, I never fell for any of that. It just didn't seem logical given what I knew about nature.

My home town is too small to allow for any kind of culture other than the one standard American Dream conservative one. I was always an outcast in school, but I wasn't part of any nerd or a geek culture. Oswalt describes himself as otaku, which as far as I can tell is basically addictive personality disorder. I just don't have that kind of attention span. Unlike Patton Oswalt my '80s were a wasteland of being isolated and alone with nature and writing, science and English. The only example of otaku in my world were ornithologists and herpetologists. There was a shy man obsessed with red-cockaded woodpecker man who would lurk around our woods with his binoculars and a charismatic rattlesnake expert who would dissect the specimens we saved for him in our freezer. There were no people my own age interested in anything in particular that I could tell. I knew a few guys who were good at video games and knew one kid who could do a Rubik's cube in 3 minutes. But that was middle school. By high school nobody did anything but go fishing and chew tobacco, get drunk and listen to country music. My best friend in high school got a Holy Grail script book and we studied the lines, but we didn't really obsess over it. She was addicted to starlight mints and Diet Coke and had otaku potential but I think it was squandered in our town.

I was the only kid in my school who had a computer. I used it to write the copy for the year book. I had to figure out how to get the carbon typewriter forms to go through a dot matrix printer. That's pretty damn nerdy, but with nobody else doing the same thing it was devoid of any kind of culture or coolness. It was just what I did. My dad was an early adopter and would hand down technology. My mom's side of the family was writers, so writing seemed like a normal thing to do -- using a computer to do it was the logical combination. I didn't know what else it could do. It was an IBM PC with Wordstar and two floppy disks. My dad had Zork on his Radio Shack computer when I was in middle school but by the time I got to high school it was of no interest. I was the only kid in high school with a reverse polish notation calculator, and the only one with straight As. I was unpopular and summarily abused, but it was all just inconvenient and not that big a deal. Bath oil slipped into my purse or a feminine napkin in the pages of my Calculus book were clearly a sign that somebody was trying to embarrass me, but I didn't really even care who did it. I suppose after 12 years in school with those same people I knew they weren't going to get any more interesting. Some that were interesting early on actually STOPPED being interesting on purpose to be more popular. This baffled me entirely.

While Patton Oswalt and his friends were consuming media I was actually entertaining myself with creating. I learned to knit when I was just an infant. I did cross-stitch and got a sewing machine for Christmas when I was 11. I would stay home alone in the summer and make horrible, ill-fitting, clothes. I became a photographer in the 7th grade after I took a shop class that included darkroom techniques. I learned to read sheet music in middle school band and played French horn. When I got to college I immediately joined the newspaper staff and kept writing and doing photography while struggling to become a bona fide engineer. That didn't pan out so I settled for scientist. Even at Georgia Tech, a place that should have been full of nerds and geeks I guess I fell in with the ones that weren't otaku. They were kinda well rounded people. We worked out at the gym, went to band parties and football games, played intramural sports and studied like crazy. It was 1990 before I met anybody that played Dungeons and Dragons and I was pretty apprehensive about it. The whole thing seemed quite silly to me. I was busy with my creative pursuits and it seemed kind of dumb to me to spend that much time and energy on anything that didn't MAKE anything. Plus I was uncomfortable with any kind of ceremony. The whole thing just smacked of pomp and circumstance and I was a little embarrassed for those people. Of course that role playing guy now gives talks at video game development conferences and has made a better career than me off his geek culture teenage years.

So I am exactly who Patton Oswalt is complaining about in his article. I am a fraud. I am not a geek. I am some kind of pathetic geek groupie. I follow Oswalt on Twitter but I've never read one of his books. I enjoyed Neil Gaiman at w00tstock but I had to look up who he was before I went. I follow Felicia Day on Twitter, too, and I enjoy The Guild, but I've never played World of Warcraft. I love Firefly and Dr. Horrible and even have a trompe l'oeil lab coat t-shirt. But the only line I can quote is, "Home is where your heart is, so your real home's in your chest."

I'm not a real good skeptic either. I'll watch Phil Plait's TAM talk on YouTube, but I would be nervous about buying a ticket to go hang out with all those people in person. I'm just too much of an introvert to think I'd enjoy meeting them when I can just read what they say online so much easier. But I like knowing they exist. I'm experimenting with the idea of fitting in. Being able to skip ahead and get the Cliff's Notes for geek culture online opens up doors I never had before. Some of these geeks and skeptics might be friends with me even if I'm not a gamer or a comic book reader and have not stood up to any anti-vaxxers. There is some real science and technology crossover with some of this geekiness and skepticalness. I know my Monty Python enough to be puzzled by the cheese launched by SpaceX, the bizarre crossover of technology news and geek culture where Elon Musk amused himself by putting a secret cargo on the first commercial craft to go into orbit and come back. There was no cheese in the cheese shop. Why would you use ACTUAL CHEESE as a tribute to a sketch about not having any cheese? What were they trying to say? They envision being added to the sketch? Something like this:

After John Cleese waiting for his Camembert says, "I don't care how excrementally runny it is, hand it over with all speed!"

Michael Palin replies, "Yes, sir. Ohhhh."

"What?"

"The cat's eaten it."

"Has he."

"She, sir."

 Then Elon Musk imagines, "Le Brouere?"

"Sorry, sir. We've shot that into orbit."

Really? That's not adding anything.

But I digress. Oswalt's idea for A-pop-alypse that obliterates otaku is fine with me. I support the elimination of this kind of obsession. I never did trust it. I am wary of people who go to intense effort to copy stuff. Like the cosplay people who recreate costumes from video games and TV shows. I am not scoffing at it. I spent about 40 hours helping a friend make a very excellent Bender.



I found the engineering challenges rewarding. But it niggled me a bit that we put that much effort into something that was utterly derivative. But because my friend understands geek culture better than me he knew Bender would make him beloved. So I'm still just a groupie, or maybe a roadie, or even a consultant to geek culture. I wonder how many other people are like me? Not committed to the obsession, just amused by it obliquely? Are we worse or better than the truly obsessive ones?

All the other reactions I read today were otaku types who seemed to take personal offense to some characterization of them in Oswalt's article. I think they're missing that Oswalt's JOB is to say stuff like that. If he gets you riled up, better press for him. He's doing a show in Austin in a couple of weeks. I bought a ticket a while back. I have to go by myself, though, because all of my friends think $40 is too much to pay for entertainment. Well, huh. Let's see. If we make it sound uncool to get all your geek cred online then maybe some people will decide they'll get better cred by shelling out for the actual show and ticket sales increase? I say brilliant, Patton Oswalt. That may be what I did -- buy a ticket to a show for better geek cred -- I'm not sure exactly. I am just on a mission to try to get out more and that seemed like fun. I really like the Paramount.

I am not the least offended by his article though, even though I'm the one he's talking bad about. And I do not think he'll begrudge me coming to his show. Those people who are misinterpreting it as a personal attack on their culture are no better than the minister who was twisting the gospel to suit his theme. Oswalt may have just put me down by implying I'm inferior to him because I didn't read Watchmen in the '80s. But I don't care. We were clearly in different situations then and we have to both make the best of what we ended up with. I choose not to take offense. I like him enough to pay $40 to see him just because I like the word usements that he structures. (That's a Steve Martin line from LA Story, which isn't listed as one of the geek qualifiers, but it's a quote I use a lot. I'm such a wanna-be half-assed geek.)

Smart-blind

My brother is color-blind. But smart-blind is by far the greater disability. Ever since I read this article about the Dunning-Kruger effect a few months ago I've been paying attention to this. I recently availed myself of the opportunity to do some first hand investigating into the matter. There was a guy on my favorite online dating website that answered the question, "What do you think about healing crystals?" with the answer, "I think they work." But he claimed to be an intellectual and he only wanted to meet women "if their smart." He was online, so I started a chat with him. I opened with a remark that he'd attract more smart women if he knew the difference in "their" and "they're." Yet he kept talking to me. Turns out he believes in astrology, thinks the government has a secret 20 year plan to try to take away all rural land ownership to force people to live in cities, and he thinks global warming is a hoax to increase taxes. He honestly believes he is smarter than everybody else and wants to meet a smart woman.

Dunning-Kruger effect! I never realized how that applies to people who believe mis-information. This guy is SO STUPID he thinks he's brilliant, therefore also believes that everybody else in the world is a lot smarter than they really are. The government is perpetrating a plot to take away my land? Impossible. I have met people that work for the government. Again I say, impossible. They are not competent to pull that off. I need no further argument. I stated as much to this fellow, that government employees at their most brilliant can still only do something that can be completed in a single fiscal budget cycle. A 20 year plot is untenable from a budget standpoint.

He logged off suddenly when I stated plainly that 2 years of studying oceanography with the people that actually collected the data makes me qualified to say definitively that anthropogenic global warming is real (I may have used all caps. I was trying so hard not to be a dick, too.) Anyway, the next day I got two long emails from him. All I can say is that I'm glad I was able to waste so much of his time. I didn't actually click any of his links. I knew it would just make me mad. At the end he informed me that I have a lot to unlearn.

When I was trying to find the link to the original article about anosognosics I found this one about ignorant people contradicting scientists over their methods for predicting climate change. I identify with this article a lot. I didn't struggle through three classes with Dr. Philip Froelich without a healthy appreciation for what we know, what we don't know, and what we might figure out soon. Having some smart-blind git telling me I have a lot to unlearn makes me a little bit angry. It's so hard for scientists to explain climate change to ignorant people because it's REALLY FUCKING COMPLICATED. I mean, damn, anybody remember the phase diagram for ice from high school? Try to tell Sarah Palin that water expands when it freezes AND when it gets hot and she probably won't believe you. Not even if you were Lord Fucking Kelvin.

So first the smart-blind thing made me angry, and then later it made me sad. There are SO many people in the world like him. A colleague at work showed me the dancing parrot video on YouTube because she thinks it's funnier than the ninja cat. Well the parrot has twice as many views as my rocket video, so I guess that says a lot. Ninja cat, on the other hand, has FOURTEEN TIMES as many views. As much as the Japanese like the sonic boom sky ripple, they like a stealthy cat more.

And then it made me mad again when I read this tweet from Phil Plait:

The comments on my UFO posts are always amusing, but people accusing me of not knowing Jupiter are awesome.http://is.gd/g41eT

And sure enough there was a comment where somebody contradicts Phil Plait.

There are NO reports of balloons and Jupiter was not actually visible in the NYC night sky according to the National Weather Service. ALSO, the daylight sightings would not be Jupiter either? I suggest some calming tea and maybe read Richard Dolan’s UFO & the National Security State 1973-1992. ‘We have never been alone.’ -Major Robert Dean

Oh shut up.

There's another one that was suspicious because he questioned if you could see Jupiter from New York, but that guy was just being innocent, not ignorant. Somebody gave him a nice response.

@20 NAW: “But can you really zoom a news camera in to get that nice of an image of Jupiter in the middle of New York city?”

Yes, a TV camera can show Jupiter very well, since it has a nice zoom and keeps steady. The city lights don’t bother the planets nearly as much as other nighttime objects. You only need 8x zoom or so to see the moons. Most binoculars will do, if you can hold the darn things steady.

I remember watching an outdoor sporting event on TV (I think it was the Winter Olympics), and coming out of commercial, there was this beautiful shot of Saturn. You could clearly see its rings and color bands. Then, the camera zoomed out to show just the dot and then the bright landscape that’s normally shown. That was wonderful.

And then the original commenter replied

@24. AliCali: thanks, never really being to a large city and/or working with a camera like that, I didn’t know.

See? Isn't that civil? Everybody is learning? Accepting each other's expertise?

You need to go watch the video. It made me go "Nuh UH! That reporter can't be that STUPID! And the cameraman TOO?!" I looked at Jupiter with binoculars the other night. I could only make out three moons, but that's exactly what it looks like, what they show in the video. I think the part that struck me as smart-blind was not that the reporter didn't know it was a planet and moons, but that she didn't know anybody to ask! And she didn't CARE! She just went on and on about it without feeling self-concious that she couldn't find out what she was talking about. There is almost no strange phenomenon I encounter where I don't know an expert I can ask about it. Be it biology, electromagnetism, geology, astronomy, computers, psychology, construction, weather, sewage, skydiving, cars, food....

But other people just don't care that they don't know, like the Fox News person, or they think they are so smart they contradict and criticize people that are probably smarter than them. Like this other comment on Phil's blog.

....your post in no way proves that the observed phenomena was a combination of balloons and Jupiter. Therefore I respectfully respond with some reasonable steps someone could take to actually prove the point that you falsely claim to have demonstrated. You know, the sort of things a science journalist should be expected to do.

First, you need to compare the location of Jupiter that night to the time and location of the video. Shouldn’t be too hard.

Second, you need to establish that the Fox News video camera has a powerful enough zoom to see the moons of Jupiter in Chelsea. I am actually a bit skeptical of this because of light pollution, but I have no real idea how powerful their zoom is.

Finally, any account has to also deal with the other objects that we seen after dark (ie, the earth cam footage) and the photos that have found their way to flickr. There is also the footage of the pyramid shaped object from the 13th, but that footage looks a bit hokey to me. Still, a thorough scientific analysis would not simply ignore it.

I am not claiming that there isn’t a conventional explanation for this event. Rather I hope that I have shown that you have not proved your assertions. 

OK, that guy is just a dick. Sounds kind of like the same sort of jackass that graded my GREs and gave me a 30th percentile on the written section. Phil Plait says it's Jupiter, it's Jupiter. He's not on the stand in a capital murder case, he's just refuting an patently idiotic Fox News bit. Now shut the fuck up.

As for the pyramid shaped object, you must have missed this Tree Lobsters post.

See, now I'm angry again. Smart-blind blow-hards need to be dealt with. I don't have any idea how to do this. The best I can figure is that children should be exposed to smart people, namely scientists, as role models from an early age. Give Phil Plait a TV show, good idea. Neil DeGrasse Tyson on a sit-com, excellent. (Twitter says Bill Prady asked him to be on Big Bang Theory) Hopefully these smart people will have an influence on people who don't have any cultural exposure to brilliance.

I have developed a new litmus test for guys on the online dating site. I ask them, "Who is the smartest person you know?" If they can't think of anybody, that's bad. If they say, "Hmm, I'd have to say I am the smartest person I know." Epic fail. If you don't know somebody smarter than yourself, and you have a masters degree, then you either went to the worst college in the country or you are just smart-blind. Why would you take instruction from somebody you didn't think was smarter than you?! I mean, outside of high school where you don't have any choice. I did have one or two high school teachers that I thought were smart. But before college I pretty much relied on my family for smarter-than-me role models. I'm trying to think of a smart TV character from my formative years.... There was that nice white-haired guy on Wild Kingdom. He knew a lot about animals. I thought he was cool. And Dr. Who. Oh, and Dr. Mr. Spock! Fascinating.

From the Autumnal Equinox. Jupiter is the speck. I don't have a TV camera.

Update Feb 4, 2015

Jack Klaff, @jackshebang on twitter, posted this John Cleese video about this topic on January 28th. John Cleese is friends with David Dunning!