degringolade

A fence in Kingston

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master——that’s all.”

Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”

There is an imagined certainty when discussing anything of merit. That language itself is so poorly suited to accurately expressing the things that the inside of our heads refer to laughingly as “reality” is to make most discussions an exercise in futility.

The italicized statement above keeps coming into my head. I also read a quick article today over at Slashdot which discusses how a simple change in how a single letter in code (ascii versus unicode) which describes the same letter in a cryptic line of programming code can muck things up . It is amazing how two different renditions of a word/symbol (if one can count the cryptic “githubusercontent” as such) can blow up at the code level.

The same kind of thing happens here on the internet when the sincerely concerned attempt to supercharge the transmission of an individual’s night sweats to another. After all, what good is a fear of something that you have no effect upon unless you can share your internal terror and transmit that fear.

“Most ‘scientists’ are bottle washers and button sorters.”

— Robert A. Heinlein

So here in the land of the internet, people spend much time and effort trolling for scraps and clues for their fears to support their night sweats. There is a lot of high quality “panic ore” out there. Mostly the information is partially distilled, with information pulled out of larger datasets and presented as universal when, in fact, it presents a conclusion that the entire study cannot support.

I am not saying that there aren’t serious problems raging around. There are some that can be addressed, there are some that are out of our control and we will simply have to adapt to. But unless folks sit down and look at the entire (nearly overwhelming?) sets of overlapping data, there can be nothing useful done.

So, before you start bandying about the “snarl words” like extinction and collapse and fascist and nazi, please remember these words are just there to stop your thinking. The more unpalatable thoughts that these words mask are things like change and adaptation and what we have to do on a societal and individual basis to make our way through the maze of not especially palatable realities that these words disguise.