The game of telephone is often presented as an example of entropic loss of information. But it also shows the opposite. The players invent; they create new stories. Here's a telephone train (this example goes back to Trump's first election):
A says to B: "Paul Ryan left the House of Representatives because the Republican Party became a mess."
B to C: "Paul Ryan left the House because the Party became a mess."
C to D: "Paul and Ryan left the house after the party became a mess"
D to E: "Paul and Brian crashed the party, made a mess and left the house."
The detailed information of A is 100% lost. But D has created a new story with familiar implications that might be even richer than A. You can fill in what kind of a mess, how and why Paul and Brian acted, what kind of fratbros they are. So there's an entropic loss, clearly, but complexity is contributed by the human need to explain what's not understood clearly. It's like interpreting contrails as chem-trails orchestrated by the elites to kill you.
In a way, conspiracy theories are a tribute to human theory construction. But notice that there's something intrinsically mediocre about it. It plays to a common fear, with always the same background explanation: the rich want to harm you. There's a kind of post hoc ergo propter hoc truth to this background: the rich don't suffer as ordinary folk do, and their priority is not alleviating the suffering of the ordinary unless there's money in it for them, and they benefit from everything including catastrophes that harm ordinary folk, so, yeah, let them be the culprit.
Problem is, once you've settled on this convenient, plausible one-size-fits-all explanation, you lose interest in finding out or figuring out what's really going on with the phenomenon, on the one hand, and how the economy and the society in general benefits the wealthy on the other.
The scientific explanation for con trails is actually more surprising and explanatory: it's exhaust at high altitudes where it's so cold the condensation doesn't evaporate. And that's why only planes way high have the trails and not low flying planes. No mysterious elites or intent to kill us for some reason even more mysterious, not to mention contrary to the actual and not at all mysterious interest of the elite's in having more not fewer consumers of their productions.
If you've been reading this blog you'll recognize that it's one of the themes of the whole thing: what is understanding, why do we misunderstand so grievously, what motivates our misunderstandings, what's the role of the sciences in this human mess, and what are the implications for polarization, individual-social identity and governance.
(There's also a lot on how scientific theories are mere cognitive patterns, not realities of the world itself and contrary and even contradictory theories can be true but wrong.)
From my perspective, the false theories we invent are addressed to our human fears -- it's a fundamental of natural selection that fear motivates theory-creation in order to predict dangers -- and are unimaginative and lame compared with the wild facts science discovers. That's because science is not addressed to human fears or interests. But the reasons why we develop those false theories is a truly interesting and surprising scientific source of human understanding. The false theories (and that includes sci-fi, art, religion and the stories we tell about ourselves): lame and mediocre. That we hold them stupidly: fascinating. So false theories, unimaginative and lame as they are, tell us more about humanity than scientific theories which are wildly imaginative and fascinating in themselves. Cute paradox.
Another paradox: of two ancient texts, the one that makes more sense is likely to be an inaccurate copy. Copyists, like a player in a game of telephone, seeing a text that seems odd, unlikely or incomprehesible, will "correct" it in the direction of common sense. Incoherent weird texts are more likely to be authentic because, as Byron wrote, "Truth is strange, stranger than fiction." Fiction makes sense of the world in a mediocre and unimaginitve way, like conspiracy theories for example. Even art is a kind of bad copyist, correcting the world so that we can understand or better accept it morally or esthetically. That's why science is so unbelievably imaginative -- it's not addressed to an audience to help it to accept the world. Science doesn't care if its explanations are bizarre and hard to believe or understand. That's the big difference between science and the rest of human endeavor.
No comments:
Post a Comment