When Someone Tells You They're Lying, Believe Them
When Someone Tells You They're Lying, Believe Them
Some people refuse to admit they're wrong, but there's other clues
Paul Ehrlich became well-known for his 1968 book The Population Bomb, where he made many confidently-stated but spectacularly-wrong predictions about imminent overpopulation causing apocalyptical resource scarcity. As illustration for how far off the mark Ehrlich was, he predicted widespread famines in India at a time when its population was around 500 million people, and he wrote “I don't see how India could possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980.” He happened to have made this claim right before India’s Green Revolution in agriculture. Not only is India able to feed a population that tripled to 1.4 billion people, it has long been one of the world’s largest agricultural exporter.
Ehrlich is also known for notoriously losing a bet in 1990 to one of my favorite humans ever, the perennial optimist (and business professor) Julian Simon. Bryan Caplan brings up some details to the follow-up that never was:
We’ve all heard about the Ehrlich-Simon bet. Simon the cornucopian bet that resources would get cheaper, Ehrlich the doomsayer bet that they would get pricier, and Simon crushed him. There’s a whole book on it. What you probably don’t know, however, is that in 1995, Paul Ehrlich and Steve Schneider proposed a long list of new bets for Simon - and that Simon refused them all.
The first bet was fairly straight-forward: Ehrlich picked 5 commodities (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, & tungsten) and predicted that their price would be higher in 1990 compared to 1980 as the materials become scarcer. Instead of rising, the combined price went down. Ehrlich’s decade-spanning obstinance and unparalleled ability to step on rakes make him an irresistible punching bag but despite his perennial wrongness, his responses have ranged from evasion to outright denials:
Anne and I have always followed U.N. population projections as modified by the Population Reference Bureau — so we never made “predictions,” even though idiots think we have. When I wrote The Population Bomb in 1968, there were 3.5 billion people. Since then we’ve added another 2.8 billion — many more than the total population (2 billion) when I was born in 1932. If that’s not a population explosion, what is? My basic claims (and those of the many scientific colleagues who reviewed my work) were that population growth was a major problem. Fifty-eight academies of science said that same thing in 1994, as did the world scientists’ warning to humanity in the same year. My view has become depressingly mainline!
Some humans possess the unfortunate egotistical and dishonorable habit of refusing to admit error. It’s a reflex I personally find utterly baffling, because nothing engenders someone’s credibility to me more than their ability to admit error. So if we can’t always rely on people to admit a mistake, what else do we have?
What I find so interesting about the second bet in 1995 is how peculiar the proposed conditions were:
I kept thinking “…so?” as I read these. Why would someone care about the availability of firewood versus the heating and cooking costs in general? Why would someone care about per capita cropland statistics versus the availability of food in general? Many of these are also blatant statistical fuckery, such as monitoring increases in absolute worldwide AIDS deaths during a period of persistent population growth.
Ehrlich is playing a seemingly uncomfortable game of Twister here, but his behavior makes perfect sense if you read intelligence and agency behind his decisions. The only explanation for the indirect, tangential, and collateral measurements is that Ehrlich knows that a direct measurement will not be favorable to his pet theory. He does not believe in truth, but rather believes in belief as the kids say, and he’s not willing to jeopardize it.
The acrobatics are the tell here. When Meghan Murphy debates the sex industry, she has to keep the wheels on her goalposts perpetually greased up. Meghan wants to say that everyone who works in the industry has a negative view of it, but the preemptive goalpost shifting she employs is proof she knows that’s a lie. The guy claiming there’s a dragon in his garage can only preemptively dismiss [thermal imaging/flour/whatever] as a legitimate investigatory tool only because he knows there is no dragon.
It’s not perfect but it’s often the best we have. Ideally we get people who act honorably and admit mistakes and are willing to falsify their own theories but barring that, just look for the acrobatics. They’re the product of intelligent design, not random chance.
Ehrlich means honest in German and this makes it even funnier.
Yassine: "Some humans possess the unfortunate egotistical and dishonorable habit of refusing to admit error."
Amen to that. Reminds me of running across the tale of the fellow who championed lobotomies -- and until his dying day:
OS: "When physician Walter Freeman died in 1972, he still believed that lobotomies were the best treatment for mental illness. A pioneer in the method, he was a deeply confident and charismatic man who eagerly spread the technique in America, long after the rise of alternative treatments that were less destructive. Listen as journalist Megan McArdle and EconTalk's Russ Roberts discuss what McArdle calls the 'Oedipus Trap': mistakes that no one can live with, even if they were innocently made, and how admitting such mistakes to ourselves is nearly impossible. They also discuss the complexity of the credo, 'follow the science.' "
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4k2nzooJVkSer0sbNqtir6
But thanks for an interesting tale there of how "we" have a tendency to believe the most untenable claptrap. And thanks for the link to your essay on Murphy and to Yudkowsky's sites therein -- enough in the latter to keep me going for several months, at least. But what's notable about Murphy, what both Ehrlich & Freeman apparently share, is their articles of faith, Murphy's that it's "unethical to pay for sex". And nothing that anyone can say is likely to disabuse her of that belief. Apropos of which, ran across a quote that was apparently originated by Jonathan Swift some three hundred years ago:
JS: "Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired."
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/07/10/reason-out/
https://bestfriendsandworstenemies.substack.com/p/its-not-about-the-science-the-evidence/comment/18444625
Problem there is that virtually all of us have these "unexamined assumptions" that we take as gospel truth, and damned be those who try to disabuse us of those notions, who try to "reason" us out of them. Interesting elaboration on that theme -- or maybe more an illustration of it -- is afforded by a recent essay by Lorenzo Warby on the Substack of lawyer Helen Dale [HD]:
HD: "This article can be adumbrated thusly: Marxism isn’t a religion, despite sailing close to the definitional wind. Post-enlightenment progressivism ('Wokery'), however, is definitely a religion."
https://helendale.substack.com/p/a-crusading-clerisy
There may well be some significant similarities between "Wokery" and conventional religions, but the article, from a quick skim, seems to be playing the "four legs good, two legs bad" card. There seems to be a studious unwillingness to even consider how so many in the "Anti-Wokery" camp are just as narrow-minded and dogmatic, just as "religious", just as committed to various articles of faith.
Something of a case in point of that -- and one close to my heart, so to speak ... -- being the rather dogmatic insistence that "sex is immutable!!11!!" -- even among humans, that every one of us has to have a sex. And damned be anyone who gainsays it -- as Kathleen Stock once put it:
KS: "No. Because IMO 'female' is a cluster concept. Dictionaries aren't set up to accommodate cluster concepts. If you don't like that answer, here is a different view .... Neither view implies menopausal females aren't females, as you seem to think. That's mad."
https://medium.com/@steersmann/reality-and-illusion-being-vs-identifying-as-77f9618b17c7
Just the facts ma'am, just the facts.
Interesting, and quite relevant dichotomy between faith and reason, particularly these days when so many "pots", on both sides, are saying the "kettles" on the other side are blacker than the ace of spades. Moot exactly what the salient difference there is, but kinda think that Norbert Wiener -- one of the progenitors of cybernetics -- got to the heart of it with this passage from his "Human Use of Human Beings":
Wiener: "I have said that science is impossible without faith. By this I do not mean that the faith on which science depends is religious in nature or involves the acceptance of any of the dogmas of the ordinary religious creeds, yet without faith that nature is subject to law there can be no science. No amount of demonstration can ever prove that nature is subject to law." [pg. 193]
http://asounder.org/resources/weiner_humanuse.pdf
"faith" is sort of an essential element of even science. But it at least recognizes that its "articles of faith" are contingent, are provisional, are subject to review and continual testing. A world of difference from "Wokery", "Anti-Wokery", and much of conventional religion.