They Said I Was Maaaaad !

It's the rallying cry of the pseudoscientist : "Some even call me mad.... And why ? Because I dared to dream of my own race of atomic monsters, atomic supermen! with octagonal shaped bodies that suck blood..."

But it's also one of those very well-known facts that geniuses can come up with seemingly delusional ideas that are later recognised to be revolutionary breakthroughs. It's so well-known that there's even a catchy song about it.

Oh, I wasn't a bit concerned

For from hist'ry I had learned

How many, many times the worm had turned

They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round

They all laughed when Edison recorded sound

They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly

They told Marconi wireless was a phony, it's the same old cry

To an extent, this idea is useful - we should always remember that new ideas haven't always been well-received. Skeptical inquiry, attacking an idea to see if it survives, is precisely how the scientific consensus is established. But what some would have you believe, as in the above meme, is that all great revolutionaries were derided as loonies and crackpots - that their "fringe" ideas will one day be recognised for their true greatness and the establishment will have to eat a large helping of humble pie.

But did they really say all these true geniuses were mad ? Who said it ? Why ? How long did they persist before admitting they were wrong ? As far as the, "they said I was mad, but I'll show them !" crowd are concerned, these little details could be anything but. As we've seen, revolutions triggered entirely by lone geniuses are largely - if not entirely - mythical; while there is certainly a germ of truth here, the reality is much more nuanced. Geniuses don't make all their breakthroughs by themselves, revolutions don't really go from zero to paradigm shift overnight and their impact isn't immediately understood.

The myth of the lone genius makes for inspiring stories. Work hard, stay the course, and maybe you too can be the next Einstein. You're not wrong, everyone else is wrong. They're laughing at you ? Well, they did the same to Edison/Columbus/Wegener/etc. too, so that means you're probably a misunderstood genius as well. They're all just too proud to admit that they're wrong. Which is motivational and encouraging, but often it's also damaging and misleading.

And I'm not a historian, so treat the rest of this post with great caution and do let me know if you spot any mistakes.

Of course, scientific beliefs change with time because they're evidence-based and provisional. Few people ever suspect that we've got science well and truly licked, though, inevitably, there are always some people convinced that some particular aspect is completely done and dusted which later turns out to be fundamentally wrong. The question is one of degree : to what extent does the scientific community* act with an attitude of denial rather than skepticism when a new idea comes along ? Is there any truth to this at all, or is it a pure fiction invented by pseudoscientists to justify their half-baked quackery ?

* It's one thing for the lay public to laugh at ideas, and quite another for qualified experts. As the saying goes, the more you research, the crazier your sound to ignorant people. So in this case I'm going to largely ignore public opinion and concentrate only on the mood of the experts.

This is a somewhat subtle notion which can't be readily quantified. First, there's a fine line between rational skepticism ("using what we know currently, let's try and disprove this idea") and denialism ("we already know enough to say that this is definitely not true and nothing will ever change that"). Even apparent deniers are sometimes just full of bluster and can end up changing their minds if sufficiently strong evidence is presented; true skeptics can sometimes be entirely rational but examine every minor detail to a ludicrous degree before accepting a new idea. Attitude is not something you can put a number on, so we'll have to look at - wherever possible - what it was people actually said.

Second, our brains are not Bayesian nets - we don't update our ideas immediately when new evidence is presented. It takes a while for entrenched beliefs to shift. It's one thing to yell, "you crazy loon !" at someone and then five minutes later say, "whoops, I was wrong, how about that", and quite another to engage in a systematic campaign of denial for a few decades. The thing is that even staunch denialism does make sense in some circumstances : at one point there was little or no evidence for a round Earth, so saying, "I think it's round, because the magic pixie told me so" should have been met with denial. Repeating the claim that the magic pixie said so wouldn't have made it any more likely to be correct.

So it's very important to consider what people were saying, how long they were saying it for, and whether they changed their minds for good reasons. All this already makes the notion that all good ideas were once dismissed as crazy to seem like, potentially, a gross over-simplification. All new ideas are rightly considered controversial - almost by definition - but are revolutionary ideas really dismissed as heresy ? Does the establishment really label all dissenters as cranks and crackpots, or just the genuine loonies ?

But did they even do that ? Did they really laugh at all these popular examples pseudoscientists drag up as examples of mainstream science refusing to listen to reason ? Were they treated as merely controversial - which is absolutely the proper way of doing science - or was there a more sinister form of dogmatism at work ? This is a topic I've covered many times before, but today I'll try a new approach of examining specific historical cases. I'll start with those in the first meme and move on to some suggested in a comment and add a few of my own for good measure.


1) Columbus

No, no, no, no, no ! This is a complete and total myth, which, shamefully, is still taught to schoolchildren today. No medieval scholar believed the Earth was flat - if you want to find a time when this belief was widespread among academia, you probably have to go back to a time before classical Greece. Not only that, but even Columbus' crew weren't afraid of such nonsense - indeed as sailors, they would have seen the classic proof that the Earth is round by watching ships slowly disappear below the horizon. This is one of the most pernicious of all the "medieval Christian stupidity" myths that has absolutely no basis in fact.

Well... almost none. It's of course possible that the common people had a different view from scholars and sailors, but the idea that the experts were all given a right good kicking up the intellectual backside by plucky Columbus is pure bunk.

EDIT : Interesting note in a comment - Columbus struggled to drum up funding because he was using an inaccurate value for the circumference of the Earth, which was too small. If he'd stated the correct value - which was known at the time - he'd probably never have gone, since he never could have survived such a long journey across the (apparently) open sea. So one may claim that Columbus was derided by experts but for perfectly sensible reasons - indeed, he never did reach India. No-one could possibly have known that America would get in the way and ruin the trip.


2) Bruno

We've met Bruno before and seen how his case has been twisted to fit an anti-religion agenda, whereas in fact things are much more complicated. At best, he appears to be an extremely rare case of a victim of an anti-science attitude among the Church. In all probability - there's some controversy over what he was actually burned for - it's far more likely that he was burned for a combination of a very bad attitude, plagiarising, and preaching unrelated religious heresies. In any case, he had absolutely no evidence for many of his beliefs, and though some of them did turn out to be correct, he was essentially little more than a mystic and a charlatan - hardly a martyr for science !

As I've said before, it's fine to use a magic pixie to give you ideas, but if your pixie doesn't tell you empirical ways to test those ideas, you need a better scientific advisor. More to the point, if your magic pixie tells you something that turns out to be correct, that does not necessarily vindicate your pixie's supernatural scientific techniques or even prove the existence of your supposed fairy godscientist. You can have ideas for whatever reason you like, but you have to test them in an objective, measurable, repeatable way. Bruno did nothing of the sort - right or wrong, he was still a crazy.

Obviously burning Bruno was a step that was a teensy-weensy bit too far, but if his ideas hadn't been dismissed, we'd also have to put up with people going on about planets made of shrubs and Nazi flying saucers living inside the hollow Sun... oh, God. I just made the fatal mistake of Googling that in case it was a genuine crackpot theory, and it is.


3) The Wright Brothers

This is rather outside my specialist area but it's very difficult to believe that they were "ridiculed and condemned for believing a machine could fly". In 1903 human flight had been a reality for at least 120 years since the Montgolfier brothers launched a balloon; there are reports of the Chinese using kites to lift people in the sixth century A.D. As for machines, the first steerable airships are reported from the late 18th century, while the first engine-powered airship took flight in 1852. Zepplins were already a thing by the time the Wright brothers were flying, and even the powered aeroplane didn't just come out of nowhere - experiments had been underway for many decades (and gliders for even longer). So the idea that the Wright brothers would have been ridiculed merely for proposing that a machine could fly is itself ridiculous. Yeah, I know, it's a meme, and memes are simplifications. But it's still wrong.

On the other hand, one can see why there might be rather more skepticism regarding the idea that heavier-than-air flight was the future, or that Wright's specific machine was such a wonderful revolution. Their first machines were extremely crude, it was not easy to envisage them being scaled up to anything resembling modern jet airliners. Certainly other experimenters were derided in the popular press due to catastrophic failures, yet even the then-famous Samuel Langely had managed to procure substantial government funding for his efforts. While it's true that the still-famous Lord Kelvin was very skeptical about flying machines*, a widespread opinion among experts that this was impossible looks rather unlikely.

* However I cannot find any reliable confirmation that he really said, "heavier than air flight is impossible", as is often quoted. That would have meant he denied the existence of birds, which is stupid. What he actually said was (somewhat) more moderate, albeit still strongly skeptical.

About the closest thing I can find to this is a quote from Scientific American, which is remarkably similar to a ClickHole article :

“If such sensational and tremendously important experiments are being conducted in a not very remote part of the country, on a subject in which almost everybody feels the most profound interest, is it possible to believe that the enterprising American reporter…would not have ascertained all about them and published…long ago?”

Interestingly, there appear to be strongly conflicting reports as to how much publicity the Wrights generated and wanted. Forbes has it that they were publicity-shy, yet newspaper reports don't necessarily back this up; others have it that the press were skeptical about the possibility of powered heavier-than-air flight (though this didn't last long). The general opinion seems to be that they wanted to keep things under wrap until they had a solid financial plan, which ironically meant a lack of publicity that could have generated business interest.

So although there might have been an element of media denial, it doesn't look like that was borne out in the opinion of mainstream experts. I couldn't find any evidence of the Wright brothers being ridiculed by aeronautical experts, and even if they were, that could easily be attributed to them being overly-secretive - and it was, of course, dramatically and totally overturned in the space of a few short years. And if you Google, "Wright brothers ridiculed", you find results dominated by pseudoscience and related posts : "they were ridiculed" appears to be something people say to justify their silly theories, not something that actually happened.


4) Vesalius

I know even less about this dude than the Wright brothers, so this is limited to purely internet-based fact checking. Vesalius was a 16th century anatomist who was among the first to re-check the claims of the Greek physician Galen, who, it's fair to say, was treated quite wrongly as an authority beyond question. Certainly dogmatic thinking is a very real thing, of which the near-veneration of Galen is akin to that of Aristotle or Ptolemy. But what happened when Vesalius dared challenge the thousand-year gospel of Galen ?

It seems that reactions were somewhat mixed. He did suffer attacks for some of his discoveries, but I could find only one source claiming that he was denounced as a "heretic and imposter" (an odd choice of word - who was he impersonating ?), which is a self-confessed unorthodox book claiming that there's a very simple cure for cancer. The author also denies HIV is a disease and that chemtrails are actually a thing, for god's sake. Similarly, this very clearly biased website implies that the Church was very strongly opposed to dissections and that Vesalius went on a pilgrimage to avoid the Inquisition, which is now refuted by most scholars.

More reliable sources note that while he was subject to some vicious, personal individual attacks for taking on Galen ("the insolent and ignorant slanderer who… treacherously attacked his teachers with violent mendacity and time and time again distorted the truth of nature"), unauthorised copies of his books became available extremely quickly - hardly a sign of ridicule !

So my naive verdict would be that this is again largely a myth. You can always find someone to ridicule anything, just like you always can find anyone to agree with anything. There seems to be little or no evidence that Vesalius suffered anything like widespread ridicule or accusations of heresy, though it's worth noting that dogmatic thinking was definitely occurring even so.


5) Harvey

Another web-based fact checking exercise. At last, this one appears to have a grain of truth in it. Harvey was a highly respected physician who attended to no less than two kings , but he did lose some support due to his findings on blood circulation. Exactly how much is difficult to say, but it seems something of a stretch to say he was "disgraced" as a physician. He never lost his head or even his job, and though support for his findings was mixed (being rather more popular in his native England), he seems to have gradually won more converts within his own lifetime. Even so, he was not happy with the treatment he received from some of his detractors :

"You know full well what a storm my former lucubrations raised. Much better is it oftentimes to grow wise at home and in private, than by publishing what you have amassed with infinite labour, to stir up tempests that may rob you of peace and quiet for the rest of your days."

So it seems fair to say that Harvey was discredited by some experts, but it's very hard to say if this was the majority viewpoint or not. Could it have been a vocal minority that were hounding him ? Possibly. It would take a proper historian to answer this one, but it seems to me unlikely that he was widely regarded as a crank.


6) Galileo 

Everyone's standard go-to scientist for "proof" of the dogmatic evils of the Catholic Church. We've met him before, and it seems pretty clear to most modern historians that the case is rather more complicated than science vs. religion. However there was an element of this (much more so than with Bruno), particularly due to an unusually strict Inquisitor, but equally, his evidence for some claims was just not all that good. The idea of heliocentricism was genuinely scientifically controversial at the time - even Galileo himself implicitly acknowledged this, publishing ideas as a series of fictional debates (albeit one-sided ones).

Galileo did not shy away from courting controversy on other issues besides the more famous heliocentrism (read that link for a full description of how and why it became as controversial as it did -  Galileo himself is probably partially to blame*). But was he widely dismissed as a crackpot ? There seems to be little evidence of that, though undoubtedly his ideas on heliocentrism were controversial. A perhaps appropriate modern analogy might be Fred Hoyle, who more or less everyone acknowledges as a great scientist despite being wrong about a lot of things. Galileo was right, but he didn't really have the evidence to convince everyone - though again, there certainly was an element of dogmatic religious thinking going on here.

* Galileo was a brilliant but complex man. Reportedly he liked engaging in "robust conversations" with anyone who disagreed with him, Church or no. For example although he corresponded with Kepler, he apparently mocked his (correct) idea about the Moon being responsible for tides, and just never responded when Kepler suggested that planetary orbits might be elliptical. On the other hand, this didn't stop him from recommending Kepler for a mathematics position ! This attitude, as I can attest from first-hand experience, is not so uncommon today - some professors only respect you once you start to fight back.

As far as the meme goes, Galileo was placed under house arrest, which is a bit different to being thrown in prison. Galileo didn't invent the idea of heliocentrism, nor were his predecessors even arrested for their ideas. So as to the direct implication of the meme that Galileo was arrested because heliocentrism was not tolerated - well it's just not that simple.


7) Everything That Can Be Invented...

Not exactly a case of an individual having a crazy-but-true theory, but still a classic example of scientific hubris. This popular quoteable quote does seem to be an urban legend - apparently originating not from a patent commissioner, but a joke in an 1899 issue of Punch magazine. But what of the other widely-reported idea that scientists near the end of the 19th century thought they'd basically got everything licked ?

There may be some truth to this. Wikipedia states that, in the last years of the 19th century, no-one would have believed that physics was not all it was cracked up to be :

So profound were these and other developments that it was generally accepted that all the important laws of physics had been discovered and that, henceforth, research would be concerned with clearing up minor problems and particularly with improvements of method and measurement.

But was it really generally accepted ? Harder to say. This discussion thread gives arguments for and against; certainly there were examples of deep hubris, but the general mood is something much less easy to determine. Let's assume that really was the case. It didn't last very long - the few short years at the start of the 20th century saw long-held ideas saw an undisputed scientific revolution. Despite the magnitude and outlandish nature of his claims, few seem to have regarded Einstein as a crank. Controversial, sure - but that's not the same as dismissing someone as a crackpot, and it was hardly as though the scientific establishment wasn't prepared for new ideas.


8) Invention of Lasers

While the laser resulted in a Nobel prize for its inventors within just ten years, it does seem to have been met with very strong skepticism from extremely qualified experts. But not for very long. Wikipedia cites that one of the inventors was told it was impossible by scientists no less presitigious than Neils Bohr. Yet reading the source material, it's clear that it's hardly the case that they were widely dismissed as crackpots :

I described the maser and its performance. "But that is not possible," he [Bohr] exclaimed. I assured him it was... After I told him [von Neumann] about the maser and the purity of its frequency, he declared, "that can't be right !" But it was, I replied, and I told him it was already demonstrated... A younger physicist in the department, even after the first successful operation of the device, bet me a bottle of scotch that it was not doing what we said (he paid up). 

So a bit of a grilling from some experts. But by no means all.

Engineers... never had a hard time with the precise frequency the maser produced. They accepted as a matter of course that a maser oscillator might do what it did... Rabi and Kusch, themselves in a similar field, for this reason accepted the basic physics readily. But for some others, it was startling. 

And at least some of the doubters - and let's please also bear in mind that the inventors were able to publish papers and secure funding for their experiments - changed their minds very quickly when the physics was properly explained to them :

I am not sure I ever did convince Bohr... After I persisted, he said, "Oh, well, yes, maybe you are right," but my impression was that he was simply trying to be polite to a younger physicist. Von Neumann... wandered off and had another drink. In about 15 minutes he was back. "Yes, you're right," he snapped. Clearly, he had seen the point.

So, widespread dismissal ? Hell no. Not a bit of it. It's true that they had some brief problems getting the paper published - but that seems to be only because they tried for a prestigious journal which had just published a supposedly similar paper (very prominent journals try to focus on novel ideas). Dismissed as cranks ? Laughed at ? Ridiculed ? Not in the slightest.


9) Radio Waves From Spaaaaaace !

Ummm.... no ? Plenty of scientists were expecting to find radio waves from space decades before this actually happened, though the precise apparatus required wasn't properly understood. However, it's true that the discovery of the ionosphere discouraged efforts, as it blocks long-wavelength radiation. It's also true that the eventual detection was serendipitous and didn't exactly have people dancing in the streets. Jansky himself did no further research* into radio astronomy, but the first dedicated radio telescope was built just a few years later. Even WWII didn't stop research completely, though things didn't really pick up until the 1950s.

* Jansky was working for a private company and there wasn't any obvious commercial application of his discovery. Things would almost certainly had been different if he'd been working at a university.

I can't find any evidence that anyone trying to start doing radio astronomy was ever ridiculed. I suppose it could be argued that people stopped looking for radio waves after the discovery of the ionosphere, but a) that's a bit different from calling people names and b) it could also have just been due to the technological limitations of the time (detecting emission at different wavelengths can require radically different instruments). At most, you could make a plausible argument that it took a while until the importance of radio astronomy was widely accepted.


10) Magnetic Fields in Galaxies

The magnetic field in our own Galaxy.

Given that so many of the fundamental breakthroughs in electromagnetism were made in the 19th century, it comes as no surprise to learn that efforts to detect magnetic fields in space were underway in the early 20th century. This, however, is much the most difficult of the topics to research - it's important, but nowhere near as revolutionary as the other topics. And unfortunately it's dominated by the "Electric Universe" crew. Unlike the political institution, this EU is not well-regarded in the scientific community - long story short, it's considered to be just plain wrong. EU advocates are essentially confined only to the internet, where they make all the usual, "they said I was mad ! scientists are dogmatic !" claims of any group of true believers the establishment has discredited.

I don't particularly want to go in to that. It's possibly something - eventually - for a future post, but right now we need to cut to the chase. The problem is that the discovery of a galactic-wide magnetic field was predicted by Hannes Alfvén in 1937, who is basically idolised by the EU community in much the same way that Tesla and Zwicky are sometimes worshipped by their fanboys elsewhere on the internet. This means that researching this comes up with all manner of websites bluntly stating things that just aren't true or can't be verified, e.g. that Alfvén predicted the filamentary structure of the Universe in 1963 (there's no record of this on ADS), that for some reason this "confounded" (well at least it's not "baffled"....) astrophysicists in 1991 (it was actually known by the early 1980's), that this "added to the woes of Big Bang cosmology" (it does nothing of the bloody sort !), or that mainstream astronomers think that black holes cause galaxies to spin - which we just don't, because that's stupid.

The only thing I can reliably determine here is that Alfvén was indeed a controversial figure. He won scholarships, professorships, and ultimately the Nobel prize - hardly the sign of being regarded as a crackpot - yet apparently he had difficulty publishing papers. Certainly his proposed alternative cosmology is derided as mad, because it is. Similarly, Halton Arp was both widely respected for his Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies but condemned for his bizarre ideas about redshift. But did Alfvén face ridicule specifically for proposing that galaxies have magnetic fields ? About the only thing I can find is that it was "generally disregarded" and, shamefully, when the fields were discovered his original proposal wasn't acknowledged. Alas, getting to the bottom of this requires a true science historian and a genuine expert in plasma physics.


11) You Will Not Go To Space Today

Rockets have been in use for more than 700 years, but it wasn't until the 20th century that they received any amount of serious theoretical and practical attention from scientists. American rocket pioneer Robert Goddard was, if not ridiculed by the establishment, certainly not taken entirely seriously and was indeed lambasted in the press. The problem, perhaps, was that for the bulk of their already long history, rockets had been pretty crappy - powerful and terrifying, but wildly inaccurate. Using them to travel anywhere must have seemed like trying to ride a tiger.

Goddard seems to have been able but reluctant to publish, at least in part due to trepidation about how this would be received by the scientific community. However, the media attacks were vicious and unjustified, famously (and totally erroneously) claiming that rockets can't work in space*. No scientist would ever have said such nonsense (Goddard published rebuttals in scientific journals), though there are plenty of idiots still claiming such tripe today, but dealing with a hostile media appears to have sent Goddard into hiding. Things did change in his lifetime, but slowly. It perhaps didn't help matters that one of the other great pioneers of American rocketry was an out-and-out fruitcake.

* Even worse was their assertion of Einstein and colleagues as a scientific elite authority - urrrgh !

Unfortunately, while it's trivial to find out what the ignorant press were saying, it's nigh-on impossible to find out what scientists were saying. Many articles mention criticism from other scientists, but actual quotes appear to be non-existent. Clearly the responses must have been mixed, because he was publishing papers and securing patents and funding (albeit at a modest level). Goddard appears to have been naturally shy, but dealing with criticism is fundamental to the scientific method - given the track record of rockets at that point, harsh criticism might well be expected.

Goddard produced a memorable quote to a reporter :

Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once realised, it becomes commonplace.

While true, thus far it's not seeming very likely that every good idea seems like a joke to the expert community, although Goddard would surely have approved of the Ig Nobel Prizes. But however strong the criticism in the US, elsewhere in the world Goddard and his rockets were being taken very seriously indeed.


12) Death From Above

That rocks from space occasionally collide with the Earth is now such an absolute certainty that it's almost difficult to believe that at one point, the scientific establishment was having none of it. The problem is that impacts are so rare that it's incredibly unlikely a scientist would just happen to be in the right place at just the right time to witness such an event. Terrestrial meteor craters are not always easy to spot or to distinguish from volcanic craters, similarly volcanoes were invoked to explain lunar craters (never mind the bizarre alternative pseudoscientific theory of "world ice"). Meteor showers were once explained as being the results of volcanic explosions or even an atmospheric phenomena, until eventually a meteorite impact had such a large number of witnesses that it couldn't be discounted.

It's worth remembering that at the time, the existence of the asteroid belt was utterly unknown. Theories of the formation of the Solar System were still in their infancy (perhaps they still are); no-one could reliably predict the existence of countless small rocks floating around in space. In contrast, volcanoes were definitely a known thing, as was lightning. So a terrestrial/atmospheric origin was much more likely given the evidence at the time. Thomas Jefferson even said that he'd rather believe that a professor would lie than the idea that "stones would fall from heaven".

There doesn't seem to have been a single leading figure in the early days of the extraterrestrial meteor hypothesis - it was a slow, gradual accumulation of evidence. Although there were those who ridiculed the idea, overall, it seems to have been little more than ordinary, entirely legitimate skepticism. Widespread ridicule, once again, does not seem to have been much of a thing, and in the worst case it quickly faded as the evidence mounted.


13) The Big Bang 

Oh, delicious irony. Pseudoscientists today just love to try and debunk the Big Bang, claiming (as mainstream scientists had once done) that it's nothing more than stealth Creationism. Yet it took many decades before the Big Bang was established as the mainstream viewpoint, and during that time things did indeed get ugly - with Fred Hoyle famously coining the very term, "Big Bang" as a pithy way to dismiss it*. Nowadays the Steady State theory belongs firmly in the realm of pseudoscience, though an unsteady state model might be feasible if you have an inexplicable desperation to avoid a "creation" event.

* He also said, "The reason why scientists like the "big bang" is because they are overshadowed by the Book of Genesis. It is deep within the psyche of most scientists to believe in the first page of Genesis", while simultaneously advocating something approaching the strong anthropic principle. It's fair to say that his views on science and religion were anything but simple.

So indeed the worm has decisively turned on this one. But was mainstream science being overly-dismissive of the idea ? Initially, probably not - if the only evidence was galaxy redshifts, it made sense to consider other options. But as the evidence gathered (an unavoidably slow process), the theory won more converts. There was certainly a strong element of prominent, public denial and even ridicule - but any argument that the main community had a persistent adherence to the older order doesn't stand up. Moreover, the instigator of the idea - Georges Lemaître - was on speaking terms with Einstein and Eddington, so the reception was very much "mixed", with not much hint of any one-sided derision of crackpottery.


14) Wegener

Alfred Wegener is someone I've long proposed should have a law akin to the more famous Godwin's Law - just as anyone mentioning Hitler instantly loses the argument, so should anyone comparing their theory to Wegener's ideas on continental drift. It's true that he was vindicated long after his death after being almost completely dismissed during his lifetime. It's also true that, although not a geologist, he presented a good deal of evidence in support of his theory.

Wegener appears to have been misunderstood for a variety of reasons. On the more positive side, he didn't speak good English so didn't defend his theory when aspects of it were misunderstood. He also didn't produce a satisfactory mechanism to explain it (though he did speculate along very promising lines), which for an idea this radical was a huge disadvantage. And other explanations seemed largely able to deal with the known problems without recourse to such a novel idea. The more negative aspect is that Wegener wasn't a geologist, and scientists don't always appreciate experts in other fields (i.e. non-experts) contradicting their ideas. The problem is that there's a very good reason for that : the non-experts are usually wrong !

Wegener, like Hitler, is an extreme case - it doesn't make a lot of sense to compare fringe ideas to Wegener any more than you should compare the EU to Nazi Germany. It's true that unlike Bruno, he had good evidence for his ideas - but he still had little clue about the mechanism. And while he was mocked for continental drift, it doesn't seem to have done his main career (as a polar researcher) much harm. Which is not so uncommon as you might think.



Conclusions

Scientific credibility, like most things, is a spectrum - ranging from mathematical certainties to absolute drivel. There isn't always a clear line between mainstream science, fringe ideas, and abject pseudoscience - but it's usually possible to differentiate between promising ideas and really stupid ones. By and large, ideas which have been extensively labelled by experts for prolonged periods as mad have tended to actually be mad.

Of course, science is a human endeavour subject to all the usual flaws, despite the many safeguards in place to minimise them. Yet in general, if you have to resort to saying, "I'll be vindicated one day !" then you've basically admitted you don't have enough evidence to support your claim. True, occasionally such claims are borne out - but the road of scientific progress is littered the corpses of far more such ideas that were simply wrong. Saying, "the establishment got it wrong once" in absolutely no way whatsoever implies that your terrible idea is somehow actually a good idea.

It's all very well to point out that the public and the media have unleashed scathing criticism on some ideas - that's pretty common, you're on very firm ground with that one. And not all that unexpected either, since the lay public are by definition not as qualified as experts. It's also useful to remember not to pay too much attention to the slings and arrows, because reality doesn't care what people think of it.

But if you want to claim that all the experts just aren't listening, the popular historical examples suggest that you're on very thin ice indeed. Many of these appear not to have happened at all - the experts never dismissed Columbus or the Wright brothers. Others are more complicated - some experts did react strongly, only to retract their objections later (in some cases in a matter of minutes), while often there's a strong element of the historian's fallacy at work : often the evidence just wasn't good enough, and the dismissal was nothing more than standard skeptical inquiry without which science would never get anywhere.

It's really, really hard to find any clear examples of widespread, prolonged expert dismissal that flies in the face of the evidence. Certainly individuals are wholly capable of this (Fred Hoyle being the classic example), while widespread prolonged dismissal by the press happens quite often (e.g. Robert Goddard, climate change). Wegener probably comes closest to this, but even he didn't really have a good mechanism to explain continental drift, so it's not quite the same as if the evidence was being ignored. As for Alfvén, that's a possibility - the problem is that since his sainthood by the Electric Universe lot, it's damned hard to find anything about him that isn't unequivocally biased. Possibly, like Wegener, he never made a determined effort to convince his detractors, or possibly his good ideas were drowned out by his unnecessarily radical alternative cosmology.

I hate this quote. The thing about skepticism is that you have to fight back. That's part of the point : to provoke debate, not suppress it. If, like Goddard and Wegener, you don't really try, no-one's ever going to believe you. Which is an unfortunate reality for those not prepared to fight their corner. You can have an idea as crazy as you like, but if you don't have evidence to support it and you don't try to defend it, there's no reason to expect people to believe it. If people dismiss you and you still believe it, keep trying to get new evidence. But if absolutely everyone is still against you, perhaps you're, well, just wrong ?

Pseudoscientists love to play the, "they laughed at all these guys" card. As we've seen, that's an over-simplification at best, and at worst it's just not true. It's also an admission of weak evidence, which means there's little reason to prefer their ideas to any others. Of course all new ideas are treated with skepticism and are often controversial, but that's trivial and hardly worth mentioning. But, as far as I can tell, the evidence for systematic, widespread expert denial appears to be very thin indeed. Even when dogmatic thinking was occurring, such as with the veneration of Galen and Aristotle*, once evidence began to be presented, opinions changed.

* It's very unlikely that such authority figures could dominate science again. Most genuine experts are well aware that even the leading names in their fields make mistakes, because it wouldn't be research if you knew what they were doing. Some people carry more weight than others, but no-one is beyond question. However for other ways in which freedom of thought can be stifled in modern academia, see this.

Still, I want to end on a a couple of caveats. First, a few months ago I came across an article which looked to be the Platonic ideal for the pseudoscientists : claims that mainstream academia had not only dismissed ideas of animal consciousness/intelligence for many years, but also dismissed researchers from their posts for going against the mainstream. It appeared to be well-cited and with numerous examples. Despite a great deal of searching I've been unable to find it again. If anyone out there has any idea which article I'm talking about, do get in touch.

Second though, I'm not a historian, and I found quite a lot of "absence of evidence" - people claim there was scientific criticism, but the original statements aren't available. So the truth of the matter might not be quite as one-sided as it appears. Still the point remains that it's important to understand who was doing the ridiculing, for how long, and whether they changed their mind. It's not enough to simply declare, "they said Columbus was mad !". For this to justify fringe ideas, their has to be a broad similarity, not a superficial one : a consistent, widespread dismissal of clear evidence by mainstream experts. As far as I can tell, this is a very rare thing indeed, whereas the failure of pseudoscience appears to be something close to absolute. The truth is like a lion in one important regard : it's big and fluffy and sometimes it bites you. Or something.

Even with these caveats I'm surprised at the strength of this result, the possible animal intelligence article notwithstanding. Although strongly-worded debates are part and parcel of changing the consensus, still, I expected to find at least a few cases where the bulk of the establishment had persistently ignored or condemned strong evidence - conservative thinking is an entirely natural human tendency. Yet there appears to be not a single case of someone initially seen as a crank who presented good evidence still being widely treated as a crank, even in the Middle Ages when science, faith and mysticism were intimately connected. Curiosity, open-mindedness, and a simple desire to learn are not so easy to suppress, nor, though it undoubtedly does happen, do either religious or scientific institutions inevitably act to enforce dogma. Maybe there's hope for us yet.

I Don't Own You

We've gone and got ourselves into a right pickle. Anyone holding even a single non-mainstream opinion is derided as an "anti-intellectual", while anyone who ever says "anti-intellectual" is seen as part of the "establishment" or worse, the "elite", a snob bent on telling people what to think in order to keep the plebs/old people/the great unwashed in line. This was merely annoying when this was confined to the criticism of so-called "ivory tower" scientists, but as it strays into politics we might - potentially - be witnessing the development of something very dangerous.

A little while back I wrote about the supposed historical conflict between science and religion. It's not entirely unfounded, but the extent to which it actually happened appears to have been vastly exaggerated. It is, with certainty, not necessary that such a conflict occur, provided science and religion mind their own business. I also referenced this interesting article, which has it that most people believing non-mainstream ideas actually try and use science to support their claims, which is clearly much more subtle and complicated than a simple anti-science crusade. And I also gave a personal example of two very intelligent staunchly pro-science people, who both hold some non-mainstream opinions, getting quite cross with each other.

This would all suggest that maybe things are not as bad as those proclaiming widespread anti-intellectualism would have it. The "flaw of averages" means that hardly anyone believes in all mainstream ideas; human beings being fallible and irrational creatures, it's scarcely an extrapolation to say that everyone believes at least some things which just aren't true. To take this to extremes, not all Creationists are hell-bent on taking down the entire scientific establishment - a few are actually entirely respectable radio astronomers. That certainly came as a shock to me, but it's quite true - they treat the whole thing as a sort of cute intellectual exercise.

If your basis for "anti-intellectualism" is, "anyone who disagrees with the consensus on anything", then we're all anti-intellectuals. And yet... if you're going to say things like, "we've had enough of experts", or "experts said the Titanic was unsinkable" to justify your ideological beliefs... then yes, you are being anti-intellectual - the vast majority of Six Day Creationists do seem to be willing science deniers; Flat Earthers are science deniers by definition. It is foolishness indeed to pretend this never happens. It can be very unpleasant to say it, but some people are genuinely very stupid and/or not only refuse to think rationally, but wish everyone else would refuse to as well. The truth can often be the most offensive thing of all.

The consensus does get it wrong, obviously. But it's an extreme Nirvana fallacy to say that "because you got this one thing wrong, all these other things are probably wrong too". Literally everyone in the entire world is wrong about some things - sometimes for good reasons and sometimes for bad ones - so it's completely unrealistic to expect that the "wisdom of crowds" (people arriving at independent conclusions) will always produce the right answer, even if it had all the relevant facts. You can harp on about the Titanic or continental drift as much as you like, but the fact is that the vast majority of ideas which seem like utter bollocks are indeed just utter bollocks.

The comments on the above tweet make it clear that, unsurprisingly, people don't like being told what to think, and they especially don't like having their own stupidity pointed out to them. E.g., "Rhetoric like this is why so few were swayed by your arguments. You are self defeating." And this is indeed one of the biggest problems I have with Neil deGrasse Tyson : he talks the talk (science is about getting things wrong) but he can't walk the walk (he wouldn't admit he got anything wrong if it hit him with a hammer). The attitude of some science popularisers* succeeds for precisely the same reason that demagogues like Donald Drumpf succeed : they're uncompromising men who are easy to admire, using the same old "us versus them" rhetoric which has been fabulously, destructively successful for so much of human history.

* This is a somewhat subjective opinion, however, as certainly not everyone gets the same impression as NGT as I do - a smug, supercilious, arrogant little SOB with the charisma of an erudite yet pedantic turnip.

And yet, for all that, the problem is that the "anti-intellectualism" cry seems to me to be a response to some really batshit crazy extreme positions - positions so extreme that normal rules do not apply. Like the Flat Earth. Now, I like to think I'm a patient person. Some of my art takes months, some papers take years. Yet when presented with the notion that the Earth is flat or that vaccines cause your genitals to drop off or your cat to grow sixteen extra heads, I give up. Some people don't - they maintain the pure evidence-based arguments with saintly devotion to the cause of logic, gentle persuasion, and reason. Yet even these people are not enough to convince some hardliners, who seem to earnestly believe that knowledge is no match for wilful ignorance. And then we end up in this horrible, ghastly, bias spiral in which anyone who holds some opinion is seen as irrecoverably biased, an idiot not worth arguing with.

"Not a late paleolithic era supporter are you ? Think you're better than me ? I'll have you, you scrawny twat !"

The bias spiral is one of the most successful of the bullshitting techniques of modern politics and pseudoscience alike. Can't win against the objective facts ? Then don't try - attack the nature of the arguments, which are far more subjective and therefore much harder for your opponents to debunk. If not strictly impossible to refute, debating the nature of the argument at least shifts the debate away from those pesky facts. It's good to understand popular fallacies, but as a general rule, when the argument shifts to identifying what fallacy your opponent is using, everyone has lost.

I don't want to tell you what to think. I certainly don't want to tell you what to do. I just want most people to agree, most of the time, that objectively measurable facts are indeed correct. I don't want to enforce a false consensus (in fact a consensus is stronger, not weaker, when there are dissenting voices because a consensus arises through considering alternatives), I don't even want to stop people from questioning scientific findings - but I draw the line when legitimate skepticism (the basis of science) shifts to paranoid denial. And I'm sorry, but if you're going to go off spouting gibberish about the Earth being flat they said Galileo was crazy hahahah look at my pie chart, then I for one can't help but call you an idiot.

Well... actually, in another world, perhaps I could. If we were limited to purely academic disputes with zero real-life consequences, this might all be fun and games - but being able to think rationally matters in politics as much as science. If your voting rights are going to affect me, then I want to know that you're capable of making at least half-sensible choices. Moreover, were we still limited to slowly writing letters, I might have the time to write back saying (in more polite terms) that you just have an idiotic belief - which is altogether different from saying you're an idiot, because everyone's got some idiotic beliefs. Unfortunately we've got this wonderful thing called "the internet", which is an incredibly powerful mechanism for sharing pictures of kitties.

Like almost anything of great power, the internet is capable of being used for both virtuous and nefarious purposes. Cat pictures can tell us profound truths...

... or outright lies.

The internet is a great and terrible thing. Everyone can have their say, every opinion counts, every voice can be heard. The problem is that even the true idiots get their say as loudly as people who've studied issues for decades, expert opinion is not given any extra weight, every voice must be heard no matter how utterly stupid it is. Simply by tail-end-of-the-Gaussian effects (a small fraction of any population always believe arbitrarily ridiculous things), we now have to listen to people who really aren't worth listening to, as though open-mindedness were always a virtue in any circumstance. It isn't. And depending on who you believe, we must either not allow anyone to say anything offensive at all, or we have to allow people to make death threats for any reason (woe betide any who say we should find a middle ground between the two !); perhaps most dangerously of all we can't call out people's stupidity or disrespect them because "that's offensive" - even when what they're saying is dangerous and deserves to be shot down. The democratic process is being perverted to an absurd absolute.

The sheer mass of misinformation on the interent forces quick responses. If you ever try moderating a large community, you'll quickly find that fighting the tide of pseudoscience is like Canute's (deliberately) vainglorious attempt to hold back the sea. Would I like to try and respond in detail to absolutely every non-mainstream idea ? You betcha. The problem is that if I did that I would have literally no time left at all to do anything else whatsoever, including pooping. And I need to poop. So that demands the wholly unsatisfactory, "I'm sorry we don't allow that here" response, which people naturally object to.

Small wonder that if you see me dismissing your theory out of hand you might see me as "biased" or a "true believer" - but you're not seeing the full picture. You're not seeing the dozens of other, completely different theories about the exact same topic I could also spend hours and hours refuting. Would you choose to do this in your free time voluntarily ? A few saintly individuals would, and I commend them, but it obviously isn't for everyone.

Entropy, the sea, pseudoscience... poor Canute.

But would you really see me as a member of the "elite" ? Or at least seeing myself as a member of the elite, which is just as bad ? Because that's just so neeeeeeaarrggooooooaaaaargh level of wrong that words fail me. Saying, "the opinion of a heart surgeon should count for more than the opinion of an eel catcher when it comes to doing heart surgery" is not elitist. Unless, of course, that heart surgeon also professes an intimate knowledge of eel-catching despite having caught exactly zero eels. Such intellectual snobbery does exist, but my impression is that this behaviour is now assumed (by some) to be the case for any and all academic experts.

Professional athletes don't have this problem. No-one describes an Olympian as an "elite" with the implication that they're some sort of snob. Yet anyone who's ever been seen as a nerd in school will recognise this as the more adult version of "swot" or "geek" or indeed "nerd", with "intellectual" itself having the same connotations in some quarters. "Oh, he thinks he's better than us !" they say, after repeated insults on the basis of a presumed greater intelligence*. It's nothing more than the politics of the schoolyard, writ large.

* It's actually, in my opinion, nothing of the sort - people are just good at solving different sorts of problems. I think we'd all be a lot happier if we stopped assuming that people good at astrophysics must know the slightest thing about climate change.

Fortunately, public perception of experts may not be as bad as it may appear if you spend much time on the internet / verbal diarrhoea dispensation network, where the anti-intellectuals are given an undeservedly loud voice. In at least some circumstances, experts are still more trusted than any other group. Maybe the reason that public opinion contrasts strongly with the expert consensus is because the expert voice is drowned by politicians, media commentators, and other enthusiastic but malevolent interest group. The media may over-report experts who go against the consensus in an entirely legitimate (but extreme) effort at impartiality, or, far worse than that, because of inherent media bias. Hence trust in experts may not be all that low, it's just that the experts aren't being reported accurately or completely.

Yet clearly if a government minister can say, "we've had enough of experts", we've got a real problem on our hands - even if that remark wasn't widely appreciated, the fact that he said it at all is a cause for concern. All social groups have their stigmas - models are seen as dumb bimbos, pop stars are seen as wildly hedonistic socialites, golfers are seen as boring, experts are seen as aloof or even hostile. As this very nice article from The Independent puts it (slightly edited here) :

In a study published in 2015... The authors argue that for an expert to be high on trustworthiness they need three characteristics: expertise, integrity and benevolence. For us to rate a person as a trustworthy expert they need to know their information, to be honest and to be good-hearted. This is problematic when we live in a world in which the idea persists that experts are mad geniuses with no moral compass who constantly need their egos stroked. As it turns out, most of us don’t trust people we believe to be narcissistic psychopathic geniuses. 

When experts talk, they often fill the air with complicated words and unintelligible acronyms. Experts seem to want non-experts to rise to their level of sophistication, rather than approaching non-experts with appropriate language... Using words and phrases that most people don’t understand in everyday conversation and through the media can be seen as an elitist attempt to assert intellectual dominance. In this time of crisis and expert shaming, we need to stop blaming the public for not listening to experts and give a stern talking to the experts themselves.

I hope that's true, because if it is, the problem is relatively easy to address. To re-iterate, do you really see me as an elitist snob ? I hope not. If the problem is that experts aren't seen as being nice : well, we are ! We're very nice ! Look how nice we are !

The back of the shirt reads, in large pink friendly letters, "ARECIBO : THAT'S THE PLACE THAT I'M REPPIN'"

Here I am, hard at work suppressing the plebs.

LOOK AT MY CUTE PUPPY, DAMMIT !

OK, if not me, then what about this guy ? Are you seriously going to look me in the eye and tell me Professor Ethan Siegel is any kind of a snob, and if you are, WTF is wrong with you ? Do you think the blue spandex angel costume company is a tool of oppression ?

That said, and notwithstanding the vast amount of excellent outreach material available on the internet (though it's not always easy to find), experts have long tried to main an air of cool, authoritarian detachment. There's a certain logic to this, the idea being to convey an impression of total objectivity, unhindered by the emotional passions that sway the rest of us. In some cases, that's probably still a good thing - I'm not sure I'd want a surgeon to go around dressed in a skin-tight bright blue angel costume. But then with doctors and nurses and the other healthcare professionals, benevolence is an intrinsic part of the job, everyone already knows they fundamentally care about people. Not so with astrophysics, climate science, economics or politics. Consequently, attempting to appear detached can all too easily make such experts appear completely detached : an unfeeling robot, from which the step to "monster" is all too small.

So certainly experts themselves are partially to blame when the public refuse to accept even very strong consensuses. But the media also have to accept responsibility when they give undue weight to minority viewpoints. Yes, fringe ideas do deserve to be heard - but not 50% of the time if only 3% of the experts think that's a better explanation. In the case of climate science in particular, journalists need to take a much bigger step back and let the experts speak directly to the public - too often, journalists are given far more screen time than the scientists. There are certainly experts out there who are great at public communication, but in the vast wastes of the internet their voice is not always heard. The mainstream media is still hugely important.

This "nice friendly experts" approach appears to be very successful - few people (except the vocal minority on the internet) seem to be genuinely distrustful of astronomers. Then again no-one has any reason to distrust astronomers to start with, but there's pretty good evidence that this approach could also work for economists and politicians. Oh, irony of ironies, look no further than Nigel "bigoted idiot with a pint" Farage ! He's worth about $3 million, yet rarely is he accused of the elitist snobbery that plagues wealthy Tory politicians. Boris Johnson's tactic is very different but no less successful : he doesn't hide his Classical education, but he deflects it by deliberately playing the buffoon, a sort of political version of the harmless absent-minded scientist, clearly very intelligent but with a weakness and therefore not trying to oppress anyone at all.

As David Cameron correctly put it, "If any other politician anywhere in the world was stuck on a zip-wire it would be a disaster. For Boris, it's an absolute triumph." Only someone with a very carefully cultivated image of buffoonery can get away with this.

Farage and Johnson go to extremes. But most other politicans and economists go to the exact opposite extreme, trying to appear as consummate professionals. Politicians are intensely public figures so it's understandable that they don't want to expose one whit more of their private lives than they have to. And I'm not sure I particularly want the Governor of the Bank of England to appear as a beer-drinking blue angel stuck on a zipline... but surely, a more moderate level of "I am not a robot" behaviour is possible. Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn retain immense popularity in some sectors (the latter not with me) by simply being who they are, even if who they are are middle-aged men who like gardening. That's hardly a recipe one would think would guarantee popularity. The thing is that the rest of the political establishment appear so incredibly corporate that almost anything seems like a better alternative.

Ordinary politicians don't have to go to the extremes of Boris or Nigel, but they do need to make more of an effort to appear less as corporate drones. The media have also got to stop dragging them over the coals over every minor infraction, yet hold them fully to account when they say something genuinely offensive. It's not an easy circle to square.

Trust in experts is not about keeping the plebs in line or the Establishment fat-cats in place. It's about unqualified people being able to make rational choices without the years of training needed to establish real expertise : because all experts have to do this outside their specialist area too. Expertise, in many fields, is not the same as authority - but it's a damn sight better than blind ignorance.

I believe a world run purely by experts (essentially Plato's Republic) would be an immensely poorer place, not least because self-determination is (by Plato's own extremely lengthy admission) the essence of justice, and it's important to let people make their own mistakes... but like all things, this is only true to an extent. You want to allow children to scrape their knees, you don't want them to fall off the edge of a cliff. A world based purely on evidence and rational thinking would not only be impossible (because not every decision can or should be made rationally), but it would also be monstrous because people have come up with all sorts of crazy ideas about what logic and evidence suggest.

I don't want to tell anyone what to think. I just think we should work towards a world in which expert advice counts for more than it does now, where evidence plays more of a role, where the ability to think rationally is celebrated but not worshipped. In that way, I think, we'd have a world with far fewer major mistakes and much less angry controversy over the big decisions.

I know this isn't as popular as the uncompromising ideas that we should all have three rounds of voting to decide what to eat for breakfast, or insist that that no-one be allowed within 50 ft of a can opener without a Master's degree in civil engineering. Moderate ideas seldom have the emotional appeal of simpler, but usually wrong, more extreme messages. But as Western politics feels increasingly polarised, it's moderate voices that are needed - fighting extremism with extremism only drives the wedge in further.

The notion that are experts are elitist snobs needs to be nipped in the bud, but that can't happen without a multifold effort. A few experts, it's true, need to get over themselves and realise that they're not fundamentally better people than anyone else. More generally, experts have to learn not merely to tolerate but to embrace outreach, and its needs to be done by actual "practising" experts, not "science advocates" or "economic advocates" or whoever - but people who actually understand the nitty-gritty details. This is true for both the institutions who want to promote themselves and the media who want to consult a friendly expert. Generic "advocates" (or experts in another field) look very silly and undermine confidence in all specialists when they say something later revealed to be inaccurate by a true expert. Solution ? Stop relying on advocates ! Train more experts to talk directly to the public - it's not that difficult ! Don't say, "we'll get this professional science communicator to talk about blah blah blah" - that's fine for very basic stuff, but not for the complex issues we face today. Instead, get an actual expert in blah blah blah to come and talk about it. I think you'll find that in that situation, the idea of any kind of widespread, snobbish elite will rapidly disappear.

"Vote Remain" In Terms Daily Mail Readers Could Understand

This idea comes from a nice lady on the internet by the name of Ruth McKay, who writes :

We needed a few tub thumping, fist waving, knee jerking bigots on our side, spreading fear and paranoia - people'd have listened to that. Our insistence on reason and facts (well, mostly) is the cause of this monstrous fiasco. Reason and facts?! I mean, honestly, you couldn't make it up. 

Well now there's an interesting idea. Can we redraft the Remain campaign in terms that Daily Mail readers will understand ? That is, nationalism must run rampant, a stench of xenophobia must permeate everything (occasionally flirting with abject racism) facts must be chosen selectively or not at all, ideology must always prevail, and anecdotes must always win over statistics. I find it bizarre that the Remain campaign was branded, "Project Fear" by the Leave group, even while they themselves painted foreigners as hordes of terrorist benefit cheats looking to steal our jobs. So fear of the mythical other must dominate over fear for ourselves. And there have to be occasional token gestures of moderation just so people can say, "obviously it's more complicated than simple racism", thus missing the point catastrophically.

Some ideas are just too perverse not to try, so here goes. I will focus on the three main issues of the real campaign : foreigners, sovereignty, and expense. But not necessarily in that order. Let us begin with a headline based on the excellent Daily Mail-omatic. It should go without saying, but for the love of all things holy don't bother to fact-check this. It is very deliberately a mixture of facts, bullshit, outright lies, and stuff I just plain made up of the top of my head.


As Westminster fat cats plan to hurt the decent, hard-working people of this country, we ask :

WILL LEAVING THE E.U. GIVE BRITAIN'S SWANS CANCER ?

Ministers are secretly plotting to take the U.K. OUT of Europe and plunge the economy into an "unprecedented" recession, the Mail can reveal.

Sources close to the Prime Minister confirmed that left-wing bureaucrats are determined to prevent the U.K. from receiving any of our hard-earned European cash and ending our special exemptions that give us unique power and influence on the Continent. The move is likely to cost the British economy tens of billions of pounds, take the nanny state to terrifying new levels, open the floodgates to illegal immigrants, and strike a crippling blow to British sovereignty, the Mail understands.

The political correctness of the Westminster establishment looks set to threaten our country as never before. Ministers are reported to believe that the U.K. is "stealing" billions of pounds each year from Europe, despite the fact that we are fully entitled to every penny of that hard-earned cash under clear regulations the British government imposed on Brussels. Europe willingly accepted economic integration as the price for our membership, but now Westminster cronies are using populist rhetoric to convince voters that our great country is nothing more than a European "parasite".

In yet another example of the loony left trying to have their cake and eat it, other ministers are reported to believe that the E.U. is a "luxury" that this, the world's fifth largest economy, supposedly cannot afford. While out-of-touch ministers bandy around figures for political point-scoring, the reality is that the £127.6 million per week that Britain takes from a grateful E.U. is essential for many hard-working British families - with most of those benefits going to the ordinary middle class. Indeed, even without accounting for the massive financial returns from E.U. membership, even our investment into Europe is far smaller than our expenditure on BEER. Once again, the so-called "facts" of the liberal experts are revealed to be paper-thin, while real people suffer as pawns in the statistical games of the bureaucrats.

In a demonstration of utter contempt for the British taxpayer, ministers have further argued that British sovereignty would, in defiance of all common sense, be somehow strengthened outside Europe. These Britain-hating liberals have no shame as they seek to withdraw our country from the world stage in the name of "European liberty".  They despise our political pre-eminence in Europe, with our unique relationship with the United States allowing us to act as a power broker for the world's economic superpowers. Our centuries-long ambition of governing Europe, which needs our guiding hand now more than ever, is threatened by our left-wing elites and a handful of snail-eating European desk jockeys. They are blind to the simple reality that Brexit would see us hand over control of the world's largest economic bloc to the cheese-eating surrender monkeys. Wellington would be spinning in his grave.

The worst lies of all told by the Leave camp concern immigration, which threatens the flow of willing European workers who would rightly prefer to see their taxes go to us rather than their own incompetent governments. Of course, we need a strong policy on immigration, but it's common sense that if we make immigration illegal, we will only have illegal immigrants. That sort of human swarm cannot be allowed to swamp our NHS and other proud public institutions. Instead we've got to keep encouraging the best and the brightest to come here and further strengthen our great country, leaving behind the dregs of society in the impoverished countries where they belong. After all, this time-honoured policy of divide and rule is what made Britain great.

We don't need "experts" to tell us that our country is stronger in Europe. Stronger politically, economically, and militarily. Our global reach is stronger than it has been in decades, and far from being mere puppets of Brussels, as the ostrich-like Euroskeptics would claim, if anything the situation is the other way around. This is a simple, common-sense truth the mainstream politicians would rather not talk about. Just visit an NHS hospital and see the wealth of foreign experience we've drawn to that great institution, or the huge numbers of foreign scientists at our universities - such is the sway we have over other nations.

An Independence Day, Nigel ? No sir ! That is something for lesser countries. We don't need to take our country back, because it is we who give other countries independence. It is we who govern nations that cannot govern themselves, not the other way around. No-one has taken our country from us in a thousand years, so vote Remain to keep us where we belong : a great country that others can only envy, neither ruling nor being ruled by Europe, but leading it into a bright, prosperous future where Britain wisely governs the nations of Europe. Let the French and the Germans and the rest be subject to us, not us be subject to them.

Absolutely Not

I posted this meme a few days ago. I did not expect it to be controversial. Not in the slightest.

Granted, it's an opinion, not a measurable fact. Point conceded. But, to those who think laws should be absolute, have you gone utterly barking batshit crazy ?

Now, normally I reserve the hyperbole-laden posts for sci-fi reviews, because most people are level-headed enough to understand that I don't actually think that Battlestar Galactic is going to usher in the next apocalypse or that I'd spit in the eye of anyone who enjoys Stargate Universe. Of course I don't, and I wouldn't. Under ordinary circumstances though, I generally try and make my philosophical commentaries fairly moderate, almost by definition.

These are not normal circumstances.

Let's see... not much sleep this week... worst political crisis in living memory... 22 hours of talks in 4 days that were mostly about topics I don't understand stuck in the same room without much ventilation... too much heat... yeah, moderation can go boil its frickin' head. Hence, I may say things which I do not really entirely agree with.

What is the purpose of the law ? To prevent crime by deterrent ? To punish for the sake of punishment ? To maintain order ? To enforce certain behaviours and discourage others ? To promote the values society aspires to ? To ensure justice ? Meh, who cares. It doesn't really matter, because it is self-evident that whatever the letter of the law, the spirit of the law is far more important. Interpreting the intent of the law is obviously not easy, but unless you think the law is some sort of monster that demands continual sacrifice, embracing the idea of absolute law is to embrace cruelty. And whatever the purpose of the law is, enforcing cruelty is not something I will ever, ever, ever support.

The original meme comes from a very good episode of Star Trek : The Next Generation that was executed in a really crappy way. In the episode in question, the Edo species have achieved an incredibly dull sort of utopia in which everyone is impossibly attractive and seems to spend most of their time having sex. It's an absurdly idyllic yet dull sort of existence, not dissimilar to the far more famous Eloi of H.G. Wells. Dullness aside, everyone appears to be at a Disney-esque level of happiness, only with more sex.

The reason for this gushingly Utopian existence is the Edo's incredibly simple laws, which are not only absolute but also absolutely extreme : anything deemed bad is illegal, and the penalty for any transgression is death. The episode revolves around everyone's most hated Star Trek character (Wesley Crusher) accidentally stepping on some flowers, which is of course illegal. For some reason the crew decide not to avail themselves of this excellent opportunity to rid themselves of this jumped-up little jerk but try and negotiate for his release. Unfortunately, Captain Picard's moral sermons are ultimately successful and we have to endure a full three more seasons of Wesley's extreme smugness.

In the Edo system, ignorance of the law is no defence. Even more absurdly, even accidentally breaking the law (i.e. by tripping up and stepping on flowers) doesn't make any difference. Which means that any visitors would have to fully acquaint themselves with all of the Edo's laws to avoid running the risk of death. In the episode, neither side make much effort to understand the other's laws, otherwise the crew of the Enterprise would surely have given the "planet of the very stupid people" a hell of a wide berth. It's obvious to anyone with a lick of sense that stepping on flowers isn't as bad as killing babies, so why would you expect the same punishment for both ?

One of my all-time favourite memes explains things rather well :

True, in the middle it can be hard to distinguish one colour from another. But it is not at all hard to distinguish red from blue, there are some things for which it's just damn blindingly obvious to anyone half-sane that red is different to blue, that some things are better than other things.

But in case even the absurdity of the Edo's laws isn't obvious to you, we can go one better. One could imagine a law which said nothing except that anyone who disobeyed that law should be exterminated. Would that be just ? Of course it wouldn't. Laws are not automatically just. Therefore, enforcing the laws absolutely does not automatically ensure justice or fairness. I can't make it any more obvious than that. Laws should be absolutely fair, but since we can't always agree on what fairness is, if you think they should be absolute then you have declared yourself morally omniscient. And that's very, very silly.

"Alright", you might say, "I can accept that these really extreme hypothetical cases*, the absolute law doesn't work. But I never meant that everyone who disagreed with me should be shot on sight. In reality, we just set different punishments for different crimes and we enforce that regardless."

* You didn't read the link about the UKIP candidate, did you ? You should.

Good try, but.... come on. If someone steals a loaf of bread from a rich* baker because they're starving and would otherwise die, does it really, really seem like justice to you to then make them pay a fine ? Even if their situation was forced upon them through no fault of their own ? What if they used to work in that very bakery but a new owner fired them because they wouldn't remove their tattoos or simply had a personality conflict ? Fining them would only keep them in the situation which drove them to poverty in the first place and is manifestly stupid.

* To my lasting dismay, people seem to continuously ignore the fact that the suffering of the rich is almost always far, far less than those at the bottom.

Or consider something more serious. Suppose our miscreant was routinely pickpocketing not to survive but just because they enjoyed the extra cash, occasionally straying into physical assault and burglary. This, on the face of it, is not a nice person.... but, what if they only do that because it's the only life they've ever known, if they've been brought up assuming this is correct way to live ? If such a person realises the error of their ways and shows genuine repentance, should you really treat them in exactly the same way as someone who shows no remorse and insults their victims in court ?

These are all, essentially, trolley problems. Yes, there are a few extreme cases in the real world where things are cut and dried, but the vast majority are far too complex for the law to make provision for all of them - without becoming so convoluted that no-one would be capable of understanding it. Not to mention various unintended consequences of laws being used for purposes for which they were never originally intended. Laws sometimes endure for centuries, others are fleeting.

Again, making laws absolute in any way is only sensible if you're omniscient, which, I'm sorry to say, you're not. The only reasonable question becomes not whether laws should be absolute, because that's just stupid, but how rigorously they should be enforced and what powers judges should be given over sentencing. Of course we must also guard against capricious judges making unfair decisions that favour those with power (laws have to be more than guidelines), but that is no reason for the wanton cruelty that moral absolutism would impose. What the hell gives you the right to just ignore any extenuating circumstances ? Nothing, that's what.

Which brings us, inevitably, to Brexit. I've made my case that we should try in some way to avoid actually doing this very stupid thing despite the result of the referendum. To recap, the arguments for the latter are as follows :

• The referendum was not legally binding, only advisory - so trying to apply legal absolutism in this case makes no sense anyway.
• The result will have far-reaching ramifications for decades to come, and should not be decided by a small minority (mainly of older voters who won't have to live with the consequences as long as the rest of us).
• The Leave campaign was based on lies. OK, political campaigns are often based on lies, but rarely are they of this magnitude or exposed this brazenly.
• Voting for a course of action which will objectively lead to harm makes as much sense as running a poll to decide if owls exist.
• Accordingly, an as-yet undetermined number of voters appear to have changed their minds, as well they should when presented with new evidence - the result may no longer reflect the will of the people at all, and should we really let such a major decision fall to such transient whims ?
• There are precedents for a such a move so it is not inconsistent with the established democratic process, even leaving aside that Parliament has every democratic right to ignore it. Like it or not, we don't have a direct democracy.

So far, all this has been met with by those who disagree is a scream of, "WILL OF THE PEOPLE ! WELCOME TO DEMOCRACY ! YOU DON'T GET TO CHANGE THE RESULT JUST BECAUSE YOU DON'T LIKE IT !"

Firstly, when have you ever heard me previously saying, "I don't like this result, we should ignore it ?". Answer : you haven't, because I've never said that even when things happened that I didn't like. But there are some things which are for all intents and purposes objectively bad, and it's those I have a problem with. It has nothing whatsoever to do with what I like, we're not talking about The Force Awakens here. I'm not going to argue that aspect, just watch the goddamn news already.

And anyway, in our society we damn well do get provision to change results we don't like. We are free to protest for (almost) whatever course of action we want. You may not want a second referendum or a general election or for Parliament to ignore the result, but I do. I am free to campaign for these things just as you are free to campaign against me.

When did the right to protest become undemocratic, pray tell ?

Secondly, the points I made quite specifically address the "will of the people" thing. At best, we don't know if it's the will of the people or not. Currently the opinion polls - like just about everything else right now - are conflicted. True, at some point we do have to make a decision and stick to it, but isn't it prudent that this extremely important decision be made on the basis of a substantial majority, not a potentially transient minority ?

Thirdly, I know what a democracy is, thank you so very much, and I see absolutely no reason whatsoever why this non-binding vote has to be treated as an absurd absolute. "We must jump into the volcano, we voted for it !" No you bloody mustn't - or if you must, don't you dare drag me along with you. If you really believe that a group vote to jump into a volcano must be binding even though the rules said it wasn't binding, then you are an idiot and I despise you. Natural selection clearly has its work cut out for the foreseeable future.

The only counter argument to this has been that "you can't simplify democracy like that". Really ? Oh, I think you'll find that I can. Apart from the magnitude of it, what exactly is wrong with my analogy ? And why the hell can't I (supposedly) simplify democracy, but you're apparently allowed to reduce it to a batshit crazy absolute extreme in which any non-binding vote must be considered sacrosanct no matter the absurdity of the result ? Aaaaaarrrghhhh !

The Magna Carta should be held no more sacred than any other text. It is totally absurd to define your laws as absolute and inviolable by a document written in another era with circumstances its writers could not possibly foresee. Rather than guaranteeing freedoms, it could do the exact opposite. Only constant vigilance and self-examination have any chance of keeping society healthy.

The ideal democracy is not one in which everyone gets to vote on every issue. It's one which everyone gets to vote on every issue and is also an informed expert about everything. Plato's Republic took that idea further, postulating that only the experts at ruling should be allowed to rule. All of these notions can't and don't exist in the real world. Representative democracy is a sort of hybrid. Most decisions (but not all) require a vote, which are almost always done by people we choose to vote for us. Those representatives aren't necessarily experts, but we would hope that since it's their job to understand what's being voted on, they are at least more expert than the majority for most of the time.

Occasionally though, we do make choices which are far closer to direct democracy. The problem is that most people are neither informed nor experts. They're not even responsible - they even vote on entirely different issues to the one put before them, sometimes out of protest, sometimes out of pig-headedness. No system, not even democracy, can function if enough people decide not to play by its rules.

What can be done about this ? Well, we can stop having referendums since people just don't know how to handle them. If we want them back, I suggest gradually trialling them on much more local levels for minor decisions first, so that people accept that what they decide has, well, you know, actual freakin' consequences before we let them play with the big decisions. Then, we've got to reform the education system and, equally importantly, the way the media are regulated. We could also think about requiring qualifications for ministerial positions and addressing the fundamental purpose of work, so that people actually have time to research issues properly. We will not get a perfect solution, but we might get one a damn sight better than the one we've got.

In the meantime, if you want to stop Brexit, keep exercising your democratic right to protest. Keep signing petitions. Keep writing letters to your local representatives telling them to use their democratic right to veto the non-binding referendum result. Stall for time to delay Article 50. Keep reminding people that there is nothing, nothing, nothing remotely undemocratic whatsoever about people changing their minds. Direct democracy got us into this mess, representative democracy may yet get us out of it.