The blogosphere has been having its fun with this little bit of instant punditry from Glenn Reynolds:
Of course, if we seized the Saudi and Iranian oil fields and ran the pumps full speed, oil prices would plummet, dictators would be broke, and poor nations would benefit from cheap energy. But we’d be called imperialist oppressors, then.
Far be it from me to add anything to the trenchant political analysis already available. But as a Physics Blog, we feel it’s our duty here to point out the exciting scientific consequences that our more humanistical friends have thus far missed: the possibility that Prof. Reynolds has discovered a new state of wrongness.
You see, wrongness is a fermionic property. That is to say, a statement is either wrong or it is not wrong; you can’t pile on the wrongness to make a condensate of wrong. By the conventional rules, n declarative statements can be wrong at most n times. By the Pauli exclusion principle, you just can’t be more wrong than that!
I count four declarative statements in Instapundit’s two sentences. (“… prices would plummet,” “dictators would be broke,” “poor nations would benefit,” “we’d be called imperialist oppressors.”) Now let’s count how many time he is wrong.
- prices would plummet — No, they wouldn’t. As it turns out, the Saudi and Iranian oil fields are running at very close to full capacity; any increase would be at most a perturbation.
- dictators would be broke — Not sure which dictators we’re talking about here — the ones we just deposed? In fact, dictators have shown a remarkable ability to not be broke even in countries without vast stores of oil wealth.
- poor nations would benefit — Because it’s really the poor countries that guzzle oil? This one baffles me.
- we’d be called imperialist oppressors — Now, in a strict sense this is not wrong. We would be called that. Because invading sovereign countries in order to take over their natural resources is more or less the definition of imperialist oppression. However, Reynolds’ implication is clearly that we should not be called imperialist oppressors, that it would somehow be unfair. Which is crazy. So can we count that as wrong? Yes!
So indeed we count four instances of wrongness in only four declarative statements — Fermi degeneracy! No more wrongness should be possible.
But as Tim Lambert points out, Instapundit managed to be wrong yet another time, by begging a question and then getting the wrong answer!
- The subjunctive clause opening the first sentence cleverly slides from invading Saudi Arabia and Iran to running pumps at full speed. Actually not something that would happen in the reality-based world! As Tim says, “Yeah, because that’s pretty much the way it worked out in Iraq.”
So in fact, Reynolds has managed to fit five units of wrongness into only four declarative statements! This is the hackular equivalent of crossing the Chandrasekhar Limit, at which point your blog cannot help but collapse in on itself. It is unknown at this point whether the resulting end state will be an intermediate neutron-blog phase, or whether the collapse will proceed all the way to a singularity surrounded by a black hole event horizon. We may have to wait for the neutrino signal to be sure.
Comments
107 responses to “The wrongness singularity”
[…] and a little fun with Instapundit. […]
mitch is correct. Instadude says: Of the top 14 oil exporters, only one is a well-established liberal democracy — Norway.
Unless PM Harper has made some major power grabs over the weekend, I don’t think that Canada, a major oil exporter, is a dictatorship.
If you extend your range outside of that one paragraph, you’ll notice that the wrongness increases drastically.
On the femionic nature of wrongness: One feature not mentioned by any of the commentors is that fermions can exist in a combination of states, i.e., can simultaneosly be both wrong and right. Paradoxes display such features.
Now that you’ve got front page billing on daily kos, expect to see the posts from right-wing knuckle draggers who will inevitably label your hilarious and oh-so-correct post as unfunny. They’ll give you the Colbert treatment.
another quanta of wrongness would be “If we seized the oil fields…” I’m am 100% certain Glen Reynolds wouldn’t be anywhere near that, based on his bed-wetting level involvement in the “War on Terror”.
Glenn Reynolds has 11 dimensions of wrongness…
But is wrongness theory renormalizable or are there infinities that will continue to arise giving meaningless answers?
Perhaps we need QWD Quantum-Wrongo-Dynamics.
Almost 30 years ago, I heard sports commentator Brent Musburger exhibit four dimensions of wrongness in one seven-word sentence. This is highly compact wrongness, neutron star territory here.
The sentence (a question actually) was repeatedly incessantly in commercials advertising the upcoming NBA championship between the Lakers and the Celtics:
“Can The Bird stop Tthe Magic Man?”
Larry Bird wasn’t called “The Bird”; Magic Johnson wasn’t called “The Magic Man”; it wasn’t Bird’s job to stop Magic; and if it had been, everyone knew the answer would have been No.
We found the Brown Dwarf!
Funniest physics/politcs hybrid column EVER.
In all fairness, it’s a short list.
AC
brilliant post. The more tightly Insty clutches the Conservative welfare straw, the more he slips, in fits and starts, but inexorably, into Wingnuttia Swamp.
The best we can say of Herr Reynolds’ comic intellectual pratfalls is: His paradigm is full of shift.
Compared to the lie ratios of Republicans in office, Reynolds bombs… heh (pardon the expression).
Has everyone forgotten this The Daily Show classic?
Republican Representative Joe Barton of Texas:
“This bill is based on the premise that we believe in private, free-market capitalism to develop the resources of this land in a cost-efficient manner.”
Jon Stewart:
“Oh my God we have a winner! Congratulations, Rep. Joe Barton, you have achieved a lie-to-word ratio of one-to-one!”
Joe Barton – dKosopedia:
http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/Joe_Barton
How soon we forget…
The discipline of which this thread is implicitly a part, quantum bogodynamics, originates in software engineering.
As is well known, “[B]ogons [the elementary particles of bogosity] also have tremendous inertia, and therefore a bogon beam is deflected only with great difficulty.” And, unfortunately, we in the reality based community are serving as a bogon sink, and the VRWC is still in a position to serve as a bogon source.
Can the forces of science be brought to bear to reverse our situation, and somehow deflect the bogon beams back onto their creators?
The future lies ahead. However, the notion of calculating degrees of wrongness is a brilliant contribution to the field of quantum bogodynamics, similar to the discovery/invention of “charm,” “spin”, and “strangeness” in the field of quantum dynamics proper.
God that is good. Too bad the InstaTesticle’s readership are too busy parroting him to see stuff like this.
Groan. Brings new meaning to the word “pun-ditry” I guess.
no, but three rights make a left
[…] Before quoting at length let me do two things. First, thank you Sean from Cosmic Variance for the wonderful post I am about to paste. Second, Paul, please never read my blog lest I, like Instapundit, am caught entering a new state of wrongness. […]
[…] Ok this is funny… Instapundit open-the-spigot related… […]
[…] This analysis of a right-wing blogger’s claim is entertaining. So in fact, Reynolds has managed to fit five units of wrongness into only four declarative statements! This is the hackular equivalent of crossing the Chandrasekhar Limit, at which point your blog cannot help but collapse in on itself. It is unknown at this point whether the resulting end state will be an intermediate neutron-blog phase, or whether the collapse will proceed all the way to a singularity surrounded by a black hole event horizon. We may have to wait for the neutrino signal to be sure. […]
I see that the five/four ratio is only 1.25 instead of the 1.44 needed to form a black hole. But could we not invoke the presence of the Instacracker version of “dark matter” — simply put, the idea that he is wrong simply on general principles, thus making a sixth wrong?
I estimate that since Reynolds not only is wrong gazillions of times a day, but is either a) uncaring as to his wrongness or rightness, or b) actively promoting wrongness as rightness, that would suffice to declare him wrong on general principles, in addition to whatever specific wrongness he may be emitting at a given point in time.
Is it possible that Cohen has put us inside the blackhole of non-reason?
Could we be in a world different from the one we grew up in and not notice?
Could the possible ways of being wrong be different now then they were before? Everything changes when you get nearer the singularity…
Are we trapped in a world where wrongness cannot be factored out, corrected, or escaped?
Oh God! Oh God! We’re all going to die in here!!!
Seriously though, the rule is that you can’t be wrong and right at the same time in the same way.
The rule is not that you can’t be wrong in many ways all at once.
In this particular case, we counted wrong. There is an implied positive assertion that invading = oil flowing.
And this assertion is wrong in many ways. It relies on oil extractablity. It relies on our successful invasion. It relies on our sucessful occupation. It relies on the house of Saud not destroying it’s oil fields when we invade. It relies on a competent execution of a well thought out strategy. It relies to some extent on luck.
So let us revise our assertion to match the facts: Cohen can be wrong in more ways about a single assertion than anyone else in the world. He’s like a constant to which everything else is relative.
Think speed of light – but, you know, less bright…
A reply to #36 I believe. There are material conditionals (the truth conditions of which you stated) and there are counterfactuals. Counterfactuals are what we mostly use in English, and they are what are used in predictions. The standard semantics for them says that they are false iff at the nearest possible world where the antecedent is true the consequent false. You don’t actually have to believe in different actual universes for this to work, but it can help in ways. It is odd to use simple propositional logic to come up with weird claims about the state of a prediction, since predictions, and all other counterfactuals were taken for awhile to be proof that the material conditional of propositional logic did not describe the ‘if…then’ of natural English, and so did not apply to much of any discourse. See David Lewis and Robert Stalnaker for books and articles which are way above my head but set out the semantics for these conditionals.
Read correctly, as a counterfactual and not a material conditional, what Reynolds says is false, because the world would have to be very different than it is for his prediction to be borne out. The less like our world some possible world is, the farther away it is, so at the nearest possible world where the antecedent is true, the consequent is almost certainly false.
This reminds me, years ago I thought of a formula for the speed of thought, basically, that the speed of thought was equal to the speed of light divided by the density of the brain in question. As we can see from the Perfesser’s density, he is rapidly approaching the big ZERO.
Moshe:
Very funny! One must remember to let go of the tail of the tiger at times.
W:
“Torbjööörn”
This is double wrongness. The ö sound (which english speakers don’t have) is also a tentative marker, akin to u in “Uuuuhhhh… Duuuhhh…” ie we say “Ööööhhh… Döööhhh…”, so this spelling is both insulting and wrongly spelled. It is an example of a bozon.
“”I think that if the cost of a commodity lowers all benefits.”
Wha? I’m missing something here; how does a drop in the price of a commodity, e.g. cotton, benefit all, e.g. everybody, including the cotton farmers?”
I don’t cotton much to economics, but I believe this would be the effect if the cost of the raw resource dropped. (Ie not the farmers gain.)