Stupidity and Ignorance

[stoutfellow]

While I was in California, my sister E. gave me one of those little desk calendars - you know the kind, "Word of the Day" or "Thought of the Day" or the like. This one is entitled "Well, Duh! Our Stupid World and Welcome to It". Now, quite a few of the entries are very funny, but there's one that just bugs me.

Here's the text:

Government by the Idiots
In 1977, the Smithsonian Institution bankrolled development of a dictionary of Tzotzil, a language spoken by only 120,000 poor farmers in southern Mexico, nearly none of whom could read or write - and, therefore, didn't have much use for a dictionary. If the government had simply given the farmers the $89,000 it spent on the dictionary they didn't need, they wouldn't have been so poor.

The authors appear to have a little difficulty with arithmetic. $89,000 divided among 120,000 poor farmers would give each of them the munificent amount of $.74. Yeah, that's a wonderful step towards relieving their poverty.

But there's a larger error involved here. The dictionary in question was never intended for use by the Tzotzil; like all dictionaries of this sort, it was written for the benefit of linguists and anthropologists wishing to study the Tzotzil culture before it degrades further under the pressures of poverty and encroachment by the surrounding Mexican-Spanish culture. There are literally thousands of languages in imminent or long-term danger of extinction, and linguists are racing to gather what information they can before they go under. (There are also efforts to preserve or revive some of those languages, but that's an uphill road.) This is a perfectly appropriate use of Smithsonian funds, in keeping with its mandate from the government.

I have read of an incident at a Congressional hearing on funding of the National Science Foundation. A Congressman (or perhaps a Senator, I don't recall) pointed to an item which had been budgeted for research into "complex analysis", and drawled that perhaps it would have been cheaper if they had settled for simple analysis. Eyeroll. "Analysis" is a cover term for those branches of mathematics which are descended from calculus; complex analysis is simply the application of the techniques of calculus to the complex numbers, as contrasted with, for example, real analysis. (In point of fact, complex analysis is in some respects simpler than real analysis.) Of course, the costs of studying these subjects are about the same...

Again, back in the late '70s or early '80s I saw a newspaper column by the then-famous muckraker Jack Anderson. He was complaining about government waste, and pointed to a paper which had been written with government support. The paper, he said, came to a certain remarkable conclusion, which he quoted. The statement quoted was, indeed, trivial-seeming. However, it happens that the paper was on the mathematical subject known as knot theory, which I know a little bit about - and I recognized the "conclusion" as being one of the fundamental definitions in that subject. It took me a while to realize what error Anderson had made, but it's a natural one. Anderson was a journalist, trained in the rhetorical conventions of that field - and every journalist knows that you put your main point in the first paragraph; the rest of the article or column is devoted to details and elaborations. But the rhetorical conventions of mathematics are different: you begin with such things as a statement of the problem and the fundamental definitions you're going to work with. The meat of the work - the real conclusion - appears later. No wonder Anderson missed the point!

This sort of thing galls me. It is so easy to mock legitimate scientific inquiry, especially if you have no comprehension of what is actually being done and why. Those are the real DUH! moments, as far as I'm concerned.

Comments

Journalists and Politicians

[p-o-u-n-c-e-r.livejournal.com]

I suspect Senator Proxmire of Wisconsin is the NSF critic you recall. He had a monthly press release called the "Golden Fleece Award" to call attention to items of egregiously wasteful government spending. Of course having to find one such example every month, he and his staff often times "found" a bad example. More often than not, some would say.

Of journalists -- I'm more and more of the opinion they deliberately attempt to maintain ignorance as a means of obtaining objectivity. Some Harvard professor suggests that many "Alien Abduction" stories have some sort of objective common cause -- perhaps not actually attributable to little green men from outer space -- while many and most other professors of the field dismiss the idea as a cultural copycat meme like break dancing or streaking. So the journalist plays up the UFO, gives the lone-wolf researcher first and last word on the topic, and quotes only one contrary pundit for "balance". This is news...

The thing that really gripes me is that they bring this same technique to questions of much more vital importance. Are these documents genuine? Was the CEO so heavily sentenced for insider-trading or for obstructing the investigation? Were the pardons processed by the Justice Department? One whistle-blower; one spokesman for the agency; and on we go to the next celebrity wardrobe malfunction ...

Re: Journalists and Politicians

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

It could have been Proxmire, but I have a faint impression that it was a Representative. (Proxmire's very prominence argues against its being him; I would certainly have recognized, and probably remembered, his name.)

[oilhistorian.livejournal.com]

My dissertation co-chair experienced a similar situation. He received a rather hefty (for a historian) grant from the NSF for researching the history of the fax machine. His grant was prominently featured in Reader's Digest's column on government waste since his history started in 1843 and the telephone wasn't invented until 1876. Of course, unlike Reader's Digest, Jonathan understood that 19th-century telecommunications were primarily telgraphic, not telephonic ....

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

I should have said "academic inquiry"; the humanities and social sciences (and linguistics is, after all, one of the latter) are even more vulnerable to this sort of nonsense than are the sciences. Thanks for reminding me.

[hornedhopper.livejournal.com]

Wow. That *is* pretty pathetic. I can't imagine *anyone* in a position to research silly laws, etc., not knowing what linguistics is or understanding the need for documentation of unwritten languages or languagues on the verge of extinction...