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.
Hang on, what about spin? I mean, even if statements have wrongness 1/2, you can fit 2n lots of wrongness into n statements, and we haven’t even considered the possibility of larger half-integers.
if only this event horizon meant that instapundit would disappear already!
Would it be safe to say that the mere density of wrongness indicated, as it is concentrated in the echo chamber of like-“minded” readers/truebelievers of the reynoldspap, would of necessity reach the Chancresore Limit, thereby spewing irradiation into webspace, i.e., “bloviation”?
Answering to comment #36 – true, in propositional logic. In the real world of policies, the proposal is to attempt A and B, which attempt would then lead to the rest. The point being made by others is that we currently don’t have the power to successfully attempt A and B.
Here’s are some statements about Reynolds. You folks tell me if they are “wrong” or not:
He is chronically intellectually dishonest.
Assuming he believes his own bullshit, that would make him delusional.
Assuming he doesn’t, it merely makes him a liar.
I actually feel for the purfessor. He has a scientific/analytical inclination, but he’s blogged himself into a corner. His market is shrinking, his competitors have invoked the “Now with 40% more shrillness and wingnuttery’ strategy. If he becomes more crass he loses the few moderates he has left, but if he shows any sign of koolaid immunity, he loses the extremist kooks. Either way, it’s money right out of his pocket. And money is after all, the conservative God, meanwhile his market share is steadily waning. So he did the brave thing: Sent out his wife to take the risk. Classy Glenn, classy indeed.
Although not a physicist, I do have a Master’s Dregree (in Science!), and believe I may be able to shed some light on this notion that Glen has discovered a new state of wrongness.
Glen Reynolds doesn’t have many sharp tools in his toolkit, and unfortunately the one he chooses to use most often when analyzing a situation also happens to be one of the dullest: Occam’s Butterknife. This states that when concidering all possible boneheaded theories for explaining what is happening around you, the one that falls most completely outside the reality-based universe is the one you should promote on your blog. Outside the reality-based universe, there is no wrong, and also no Left. There is only Right.
Hope this helps!
But how does this account for the current administration being unaffected by the gravity of the situation? Is it because of its density?
Pingback: John Moltz » Blog Archive » Hilarious
Remember Glenn Reynolds is a lawyer. That should explain everything.
I’m really only familiar with Euclidean Wrongness, but I have an observation:
According to Heisenberg if we attempt to directly measure the wrongness of the hypotheses we would obliterate the state. By invading Iran we could measure the effect on the pumping of the oilfields but then could never measure the same effect for NOT invading Iran.
And this brings me to Schroedinger’s Wildcat…
Pingback: Deltoid
Pingback: tonyhaile.com
Yeah. Glenn is really good at being wrong.
World oil production is already near full capacity, so we could not feasibly increase production rates with all the world’s oil fields, let alone those of one country. Even Saudi Arabia is near full capacity.
What state of wrongness is that?
And this brings me to Schroedinger’s Wildcat
Whoa! Schroedinger does live/dead catblogging? Cool.
The need for an alternate perspective on the problem is indicated by the repeated failure to successfully parse and decode this sequence of utterings from Glenn Reynolds as a serious, “reality-based” propoisition. (Predictions that correspond to only physically realizable levels of stupidity are of course preferred.)
One alternative meta-hypothesis is that the blog-borne emission under scrutiny here is not, after all, a logical proposition, but instead a stream of symbols representing a sort of “preening” behavior selected for by the conditions of the right-wing blogosphere.
While “Reynolds number” is admittedly quite clever, “Reynolds’ rap” may be a more appropriate phrase.
Ah, the Schrodinger wildcat, that less frequently discussed (yet more realistic) variant in which the experimenter, after trying to trap a cat in a box, ends up in a superposition of being dead/alive…
I’m going with the black whole hypothesis.
It’s Insty… anything with “hole” in it is probably right.
“black hole” I mean. Jeez.
I’m reminded of the linguist’s observation that the sentence “Them’s them!” (affirming the identity of a plural subject) contains three grammatical errors in only two words.
You left out another one. He said that all the leaders of the 14 top oil exporting countries are dictators. In this he included Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela. However, Chavez won the presidency in an election, recently reaffirmed by the failure (certified by the OAS and Jimmy Carter’s group) of a recall vote.
In the world of the instapundit, whenever a country elects someone the US government doesn’t like it becomes a dictatorship.
Shit man, are you telling me that neutrinos escaape a black hole?! I didn’t know that, and I don’t want to believe it either, because it would be wrong.
Torbjööörn Larsson: (I done that’ cause I love oooomlauts) …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?
It seems to me that Wrongness may not be fermionic, because one might be able to combine any two or more declarations to compose a syllogism, which itself can also be wrong in its own special way. So n declarations should generate at least n! possible errors.
Moron geeks discussing economics… funny.