Originally circulated on 22 May 2020
Hi fellow Ruminants & Groupies in Lock Down Level 4
Greetings from day 56 of lock down. Over the past week I have received no worthy submissions for Ruminant Pink Friday’s ™.
As I try to digest the flood of ludicrously wrong information we all see on Covid-19 and, I have to confess some issues at work, it becomes apparent that just calling something wrong is not nearly sufficient to do justice to some of the stuff we are seeing. In this respect I would like to introduce the concept of not even wrong and wronger than wrong. In an earlier submission I referred to the fascinating book “On Bullshit” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit. The concept of not even wrong and wronger than wrong assists you to grade the bullshit.
The phrase not even wrong is generally attributed to the theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli who was known for his colourful objections to incorrect or careless thinking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
There is now even a website dedicated to the concept of being not even wrong. https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/. This however appears to be a place where physicists and mathematicians get to argue with each other over obscure issues like the Szpiro conjecture (don’t ask). So don’t go there.
Amazingly one can go beyond not even wrong to being wronger than wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wronger_than_wrong.
Something that is not even wrong is associated with something that is unfalsifiable.
When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were also wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
Asimov explained that science is both progressive and cumulative. Even though scientific theories are later proven wrong, the degree of their wrongness attenuates with time as they are modified in response to the mistakes of the past.
Micheal Shermer stated that being wronger than wrong is actually worse than being not even wrong (that is, being unfalsifiable).
Thus the purest form of bullshit is wronger than wrong.
I will provide two recent events where one could say they are wronger than wrong:
- The president of the United States actually saying that you should ingest sanitisers to sanitise the inside of the body. ( He may have a point if you use pure ethanol)
- The South African government issuing a lengthy set of regulations on what clothes you may buy during lockdown. I got no further than you may buy short sleeve T shirts but only for the purposes of keeping warm. No point in reading any further.
Please keep the submission ideas flowing.
Regards
Bruce
Ruminant Pink Friday 