Extraordinary Proof for Sensational Claims (21 Dec. 2013)

"An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof."— 

Carl Sagan, quoting Marcello Truzzi, 

following Douglas Hume 

in the tradition of P-S Laplace

                    After a moment of thought, most of us will accept the truism that claims for the truly extraordinary need to be backed up by very strong evidence. For one thing, the actual existence of some varieties of truly weird phenomena would require a major paradigm shift and reconsideration of whole world-views; and, frankly, that's hard work, and unpleasant — and probably unnecessary because most claims for the truly, weirdly, sensational extraordinary don't pan out.

            So early scientists were right to demand strong evidence for cosmologies denying that the Earth was the center of the universe, and Darwin was right to collect considerable data before publishing a theory that species evolved over huge stretches of time; and there were good commonsensical reasons to doubt that unseen and for a long time unseeable particles cause diseases, or continents can move; and there remains good reason to require extraordinary evidence for claims of ESP or levitation or telekinesis or alien abduction or alternative-medicine miracle cures.

            There are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamt of in any philosophy, and, indeed, as J.B.S. Haldane said, with no reference to sexual preferences, "the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." Very weird shit happens, yes, but not often; the everyday world is mostly pretty banal, and well, everyday, and we should be suspicious of any specific claim for the truly unusual. A few seemingly wild claims hold up; most don't.

            That much is easy, as a general principle, at least for those of us not convinced that a correct premonition or two proves something significant or that the Silicon Creatures from the Tau Ceti System abducted them. We may come down one way or another on whether some case has been proved, but we can agree to demand strict scrutiny of the evidence.

            Or we can agree if we allow no "special pleading" and decline to, for a relevant example, condemn out of hand testing purported scientific claims in Genesis against scientifically-collected data, or (for a balancing variety of special pleading) if we assert that scientific claims should never be challenged for their implications, if true, for ethics, human happiness, or the law.

            A claim teased out of Hebrew Scriptures on the age of the Earth is testable, and if the geologic evidence indicates a world billions of years older than the Scriptural claim, that Scriptural dating has been, as a scientific claim, falsified.

            An attack on the notion of free will could begin with noting free will as a strongly strange idea to start with — some hypothetical force beyond the usual laws of nature — and moving on to demonstrate that free will is an increasingly unnecessary hypothesis in explaining human behavior. Denial of free will, however, is a problem pragmatically: in terms of getting on in the world, we need to act as if we are free, and take responsibility for our actions.

            Denials of free will aren't extraordinary in the sense of implausible, but they are extraordinarily mischievous in practical, pragmatic terms; so they require very strong evidence: "extraordinary proof."
            Anyway, as a general rule, the closer we get to human affairs the greater should be our skepticism about claims extraordinary enough to make it into the newspapers, and I want to suggest a couple of human-sphere modifications to the good advice from Carl Sagan and his predecessors.

         The more sensational or even just newsworthy the claim, the more we should demand strong proof; the more an extraordinary claim reinforces completely ordinary stereotypes about people or repeats exciting folklore, the stronger should be our demand for strong proof.

            As I write, one of the SHOCKING NEW TRENDS (THE MAIN-STREAM MEDIA IS [sic] IGNORING)!!! is "the knockout game,"  especially a version where Black male teens run up and slug some random White person on an urban street.

            Yes, Virginia, we do have assaults in America, more than our share, especially in failing cities; and some of it is random and felonious assault and serious battery and some is Black on White. But a trend, an increase in occurrences — some new problem to Fear and View With Alarm!? Not really.

            So let's break this claim down and examine it.

            Adults have been complaining about wild, violent, over-sexed, ill-mannered, irresponsible kids since at least the time of Satire 14 of the Roman satirist Juvenal (who thought, by the way, the complaining parental generation way worse than their kids). In English, the classic statement is from early in the 17^th century, by an old Shepherd in Shakespeare's Winter's Tale: "I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting" — and then the Shepherd moves on to more specific complains about "these boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty" out hunting in a storm and scaring off a couple of his sheep (3.2).

            Indeed, too large a cohort of unmarried, "masterless men" in their twenties or "youth" are a problem, or a set of problems, for societies, especially in cases where young men have just been released from official military service and have time on their hands, and weapons in them — and no better opportunities for advancement than banding together and raiding the countryside: a major problem in Europe of the late Middle Ages and Early Modern periods, with analogies today.

            On the other hand, there's that long history of societies' alternating between sentimental celebration of "youth" and a mean-spirited denigration of the young. Add to this the banal fact of anti-Black racism in American history and to that unholy combination add that stories of dangerous young Black men can serve high-stakes political agendas.

            If the young and Black and male are sufficiently malicious and vicious to attack total strangers for entertainment, the soundest and most reasonable investment in them is in the criminal justice system for keeping them under control. So we old folks can feel just fine spending on prisons and prison-like schools for them and not much on their health care, nutrition, actual education and/or job training, and well, "general welfare." Which leave more money for old folks and our increasing needs.

            Be very suspicious of such claims.

            Out in the various media-spheres there are conscious propagandists and political operatives and semi-conscious reporters and gullible bloggers and e-mailers and tweeters and posters. And such people innocently or highly guiltily can take kernels of truth and wrap them in thick layers of bullshit, and we get urban legends like an epidemic of random muggings — or stories of snuff films or pink-cheeked country girls kidnapped into White Slavery or legions of spat-upon troops returning from Vietnam.

            Extraordinary and politically useful claims require strict scrutiny and a lot of proof.

            Politically useful claims that reinforce well-established negative stereotypes may indeed by true — but they require even stricter scrutiny and proof.

            So if you're told that slavery and sex trafficking have never been worse than they are today, that schools have never been more violent or that college campuses have developed cultures of rape — step back and ask to see the numbers and the definitions. It is an extraordinary claim that slavery today is remotely on the scale of slavery in the ancient world or in the time of the perfectly legal and totally horrendous Atlantic slave trade of the 16^th into the 19^th centuries. And the Atlantic trade was just one of the slave trades; slavery in the American colonies and later United States was just one of the systems of slavery: slavery enforced by law, with terror and rape built into the system.

            Moving down the scale from the horrific, it's an extraordinary claim that schools today are more violent than in the past: the days when schoolboys were routinely paddled, tawsed, caned, birched, and/or just occasionally slapped around. We still have too much violence in schools and too many school shootings — but we need to scrutinize carefully scary claims and remember that state-sanctioned violence (and relatively mild and occasionally useful violence) is still violence.

            Finally, for me to court some trouble, consider two extraordinary and newsworthy claims in reports on the high incidence of college rape found in at least one study, that of the New York State Coalition Against Sexual Assault, and the assertion that "48.8% of college women who were victims of attacks that met the study’s definition of rape did not consider what happened to them rape" (Bureau of Justice Stats. “Sexual Victimization of Collegiate Women” 2000, US DOJ).


            If the claims are for events sufficiently out of the ordinary to get heavy coverage in the media, if the claims are politically useful to one cause or another, if they fit neatly into your political views and those of a number of other people, if they reinforce negative stereotypes and get you scared or angry and/or upset — for one thing, switch the channel from Fox News, but as a larger operating principle: demand strong evidence. 

Grammatically Said ≠ Worthily Said, or Well Said (11 Aug. 2014)

           One day early in my career as an English teacher, a student at a tutorial on his essay said to me, "You know, for a guy so far Left in politics, you're a real conservative when it comes to grammar." I asserted in mostly mock indignation, "We are talking here, Sir, of a matter of style and rhetoric, and in cases of style and rhetoric, Sir, I am not a conservative; in such matters, I, Sir, am a reactionary!"

            I think he had ended not only a sentence but his opening paragraph with a preposition, and my complaint wasn't about grammar — a preposition is a perfectly grammatical thing to end a sentence with — but the stylistic point that he'd wasted a strongly-stressed climax position on a not-particularly-exciting function-word.

            Like most college-level English teachers, I had some training in linguistics and scientific grammar and had been perhaps especially fortunate to not have had writing rules shoved down my throat K-12, so I started teaching writing blissfully unaware that there was, e.g., some absolute prohibition against splitting infinitives (e.g., as I split "to have" above). I also didn't know that writers were forbidden to use "I" and got sincerely confused when my students wrote "It could be said that" when the normal construction is "I think."

            I ended up doing a little spiel on "It could be said that 'The moon is made of green cheese' — obviously, since I just said it." I noted that "I think" is pretty much an unarguable assertion — it'd be stupidly arrogant to tell you that you didn't think something — but "I think" is a handy locution and fine to use to hedge a bit (now and then) or, if stated emphatically, to give your take on some issue.

            My students taught me that "schoolmarm grammar" was alive and doing ill in 20^th-century high schools, often enforced by instructors of both sexes who were younger, cooler, hipper, and otherwise less schoolmarmish than I. So I added a section to my initial class handout listing "Writing Superstitions (Corrected)" and once got a small group of my colleagues to take out an ad in the school newspaper offering cash prizes to anyone who could find a current academic style sheet that supported such rules.

            No one collected, although Stanley Milgram once indicated that an industrious researcher could have dug up an old Psych style manual that forbade "I" and "we" — and that was why his initial report on his once-famous experiments on obedience had many passive-voice/deleted agent locutions — but more on that below.

            For now I will just pronounce the formula that I am not now nor (to the best of my knowledge) ever been a grammar Nazi, if, for no other reason, I was and remain too much of an intellectual snob to show off such ignorance.

            Still.

            However.

            But — but however much I'm willing to mess around with odd paragraphing and sentence fragments and starting even paragraphs with conjunctions, I do get persnickety about the ethics and politics and lesser but still important implications of writing: rhetoric is the art of ethical persuasion, and far from everything grammatically said or written is worthily said or written. Or, more commonly, far from everything grammatical is sensible and well-advised.

            So this much in favor of one kind of language conservatism.

            Most basically and least grandly, language needs schoolmarms and grammar Nazis for a kind of inertia that new locutions have to overcome. It also needs satirists, who can be even more reactionary than the schoolmarms. Words like "mob" and "debunk" started out as neologisms, and they stuck with the language despite the purists because they are useful. Slang from the 1920's like "23 skidoo" and "the cat's pajamas" — whatever the hell those meant — are no longer with us and unmourned. Ditto for "hep" and, I suspect, its hardier ancestor and descendent "hip," and numerable-but-why-bother expressions that entered the gantlet of pedantry and satire, had a run, and then got cut down and buried.

            A bit more important — if still vocabulary, not yet real grammar — there was merit when my third grade, or so, teacher rhetorically asked a classmate who'd asserted love for ice cream, "Would you die defending ice cream?" As the Usual Gang of (Wise) Idiots at MAD Magazine pointed out, "'Love' is overrated," "'Like' is underrated," in a couple of senses. Using "love" when "like" is quite sufficient devalues the meaning of "love" and reinforces the tendency in modern American communication TO FREAKING OVER-HYPE AND OVERSTATE EVERYTHING!!! (And I'll throw in for younger readers: The people who communicate with you only on Facebook are barely your acquaintances, not your friends, not unless you can call them up and have them take you to the airport or emergency room.)

            Similarly with some distinctions both pedantic and significant.

            It sounds weird to my ear when people say that something "begs the question" when they mean "invites" or "raises the question." To me, "begging the question" is a logical fallacy I never really understood, and I don't know why normal people would use the expression. Still, the new usage is no big deal, and if "that begs the question" comes to mean "raises the question" and removes old-style "begging the question" from colloquial conversation, that's fine with me.

            It's a significant issue, though, if "disinterested" comes to mean just "uninterested" and eliminates "disinterested" as an quick way to say "not influenced by considerations of personal advantage." We need the concept of "disinterest" if we're to talk easily about, say, journalism: journalists can't and shouldn't be objective in dealing with human stories — viewing human beings as objects to be observed is a step on the road to horrors — but journalists can try to be fair and accurate and, well, disinterested. And demanding objectivity is another instance of FREAKING OVER-STATING EVERYTHING: if Fox News really were fair and balanced that would be quite sufficient; they needn't try for godlike, or demonic, distance and detachment.

            Similarly, if with fewer dangers, is forgetting the flippant reminder, "Media [and data as well] are a plural noun." It's not ungrammatical to lump together all the various media into one vast singular "The Media"; it is, however, misleading and unfair. There is no vast singular Media out there, and Fox News isn't The Daily Show or The Nation or The Atlantic or PBS or NPR or graffiti. And if you have ever dealt seriously with data, you know that they are often messy and sometimes contradictory.

            The examples about, though, are just words: vocabulary, not grammar — a general principle John McWhorter stresses in his provocative Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English. McWhorter raises a grammatical example I want to look at: using "they" as a gender-neutral, 3^rd-person singular pronoun, as in "Each student should bring their book." This is my example and a somewhat loaded one; McWhorter gives examples from literary English that will sound unexceptional to almost any speaker of English. I give this one because I served on a committee of two assigned to make rule-writing by Miami University's Student Affairs Council more gender inclusive, starting with rules that had "The student … he (his)." On this issue, we declined to use "The student … they/their" or "he and she" or "his and her" or "s/he" or any such locution on the grounds that gender shouldn't be an issue at all since our rules shouldn't be talking about "The student" to start with. "The Student" is an abstraction, a type, and The Student never shows up in nature. Even with the homogeneous undergraduate student body of Miami U at Oxford — dismissed by Playboy, MUO folklore saith, as "male models and cheerleaders with straight teeth" — the people who showed up in class and on campus were individual students.

            Thinking in categories is inevitable if we're to think at all, and careful typological analysis can be useful; it's done in two of my favorite books: Eric Hoffer's The True Believer (obviously dealing with a type), and Konrad Lorenz's On Aggression, which deals with ideal models of behavior abstracted from nature and specifically identified as abstractions. Still, most of us are rarely very analytical and many of us get sloppy in our thinking and speech and writing; types easily slip into stereotypes, and stereotypical thinking is usually not useful and often much worse.

            (Imagine a transition here.)

            I'll end by returning to Stanley Milgram and "I" and "we" and the passive voice; for, verily, as much as any schoolmarm grammarian bashed knuckles for using "I," my MS-Word Grammar Check comes down with less violence but equal dogmatism on the passive voice. And here I'll somewhat go along with Word Grammar Check, however often I disobey its commands.

            Milgram should have avoided the passive voice in his initial article on "Behavioral Study of Obedience" (1963), as he was to come to avoid it in his brilliant book-length study Obedience to Authority (1974). The passive voice is grammatical in English by definition: there are rules in actual English grammar — the grammar we use to generate sentences — that transform active voice statements into the passive. Passive-voice sentences, however, are longer and come across as weaker than active-voice, so there are stylistic reasons to prefer the active voice, but the issue I want to look at is ethical.

            Somewhere in, I think, her monumental The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Hannah Arendt describes bureaucratic tyranny as government "in the passive voice, deleted agent." In modern tyrannies, people talk as if things just happen; "an edict comes down." During US military adventures in Vietnam, we were told — "The village was destroyed." The passive voice, deleted agent denies agency, denies responsibility.

            Milgram's experiments very much had to do with destructive obedience and with denial of responsibility. The ultimate occasion of his study was the obedience of German soldiers and others during World War II — many others — in slaughtering men, women, and children upon command.
            Milgram's experiments themselves raised ethical questions about deceiving subjects and pushing them to do, as far as they knew, awful things to a helpless man: inflict (they thought) increasingly high-voltage shocks, shocks that, if actually inflicted, could have killed the man.

            Milgram's presentation of these experiments may not be the last place in the world for the passive voice, deleted agent, but they are in that ballpark. And when I asked Milgram — in very bad taste on my part, at a party — why he'd used such locutions, the answer was that "That was how it was done."

            That was how it was done back in 1963, in a journal in psychology, whose editors, one would think, would have some command of the commonsense psychology that recognizes that human beings with human psyches do stuff. By 1974, the rules had relaxed enough that Milgram could write a book using "I" and "we" — and by the time MS-Word developed its spelling and grammar checker, the passive voice was to be eschewed.
                   (Although the Checker let me get away with "eschewed" where "avoided" would do the job — and still retain the little grammatical joke.)

            What the grammar Nazis are often complaining about is people not using the prestige form of the language and more often complaining about other people's not using the rules they worked hard to learn to obey. That's okay, so long as the grammar police aren't teaching English or copy-editing my writing or making children feel bad about their use of language. The word cops are, however, often misdirecting their efforts.

            There are still literal Nazis out there and other fanatics to be opposed, and if one's medium of opposition is language, they (sic) should be writing letters for Amnesty International and attacking instances of serious mischief in communication: the sort of significant offenses George Orwell attacked in an essay I'll recommend once again, "Politics and the English Language" (1946).

            And every now and then we language conservatives can attack a silly new expression or two and see if we can laugh it into oblivion.