All posts by Gary C. Woodward

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Defiantly Out of Touch

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[This 2016 post seems as relevant today as when it was written. Even with a few updates, it is still true that willful ignorance has become a form of political life.]

In his sobering 1989 study, Democracy Without Citizens, Robert Entman dwelt on the irony of living in an information-rich age with huge numbers of badly informed citizens.  There is a rich paradox to a culture where most have a virtual library available on any digital device, and yet would struggle to pass a third grade civics test.  According to the Annenberg Policy Center only one in three Americans can name our three branches of government. And only the same lone third could identify the party that controls each of the two houses of Congress.  Fully a fifth of their sample thought that close decisions in the Supreme Court were sent to Congress to be settled.

Add in the dismal results of map literacy tests of high school and college students (“Where is Africa?,”  “Identify your city on this map”), and we have just a few markers of a failed information society.

Many seem comfortable living without even an elementary understanding of the world they “know.” 

As Entman notes, “computer and communication technology has enhanced the ability to obtain and transmit information rapidly and accurately,” but “the public’s knowledge of facts or reality have actually deteriorated.”  The result is “more political fantasy and myth transmitted by the very same news media.” We seem to live comfortably without even elementary understandings of the complex world we live in.

This condition is sometimes identified as a feature of the Dunning-Kruger effect, a peculiarly distressing form of functional ignorance  observed by two Cornell psychologists.  Many of us seem not to be bothered by what we don’t know, overestimating our knowledge.  Dunning and Kruger found that “incompetent” individuals (those falling into the lowest quarter of knowledge on a subject) often failed to recognize their own lack of skill, failed to recognize the extent to which they were misinformed, and did not to accurately gauge the skills of others.  If you have an Uncle Fred who is certain that the President Obama was a Muslim who was born in Kenya, you have an idea of what kind of willful ignorance this represents.

Circumferance of the unknownThink of this pattern in an inverted sense: from the perspective of individuals who truly know what they are talking about.  For even the well-informed, the more they know about a subject, the larger the circumference of the borderlands that delineate the unknown.  That’s why those who have mastered a subject area are often the most humble about their expertise: their expanded understanding of a field gives them a sense of what they still don’t know.

The key factor here is our distraction by all forms of media—everything from texting to empty-headed television programming—that leaves us with little available time to be contributing members of the community.   When the norm is checking our phones over 200 times a day, we have perhaps reached a tipping point where we have no time left to notice our own informational black holes.

With regard to the basics of membership in a society, the idea of citizenship should mean more.  In most elections cycles easily half of eligible voters will not bother to vote.  And even more will have no interest in learning about the candidates who want to represent them in Congress or their local legislatures.  Worst still, this has happened at a time when a President and many others have been captured by a reality-show logic that substitutes melodrama for more sober discussions of policy and governing best practices.  Put It altogether and too many of us don’t want notice that we have been captured by fantasies rather than truths.

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0 to 60 in Under 29 Minutes Flat

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Getting up to speed is easy; it’s the sudden deceleration that poses all the problems.

With what seems like the newspaper version of a straight face, The New York Times recently reported that a whole group of new electric cars available to the general public will be able to go from 0 to 60 miles per hour in “under 6 seconds.”

This kind of lightning speed is a standard metric in almost auto reporting. But why should we need to know?  We’d be better advised to consider whether the brakes in these cars might work to control the inevitable fish-tailing of drag-race speeds.

Five or six seconds is about the amount of time I need to even think about moving.  Short of a possible once-in-a-lifetime close call, is there any reason a motorist would want to put that metric to the test?  Perhaps in front of your house? Maybe near a school?  How about the parking lot at the supermarket? It may be different for you, but we have critters  and walkers in our neighborhood who are used to having more time to get out of the way.

The argument that freeway on ramps require G-force acceleration is often bogus. Most are designed to be long enough to allow drivers time to adjust and safely fit into the flow of traffic.  On an interstate near my house some merge lanes are a good half-mile long.

Auto writers seem to exist on another plane, where useful statistics are too routine to bother with. Useless statistics are another matter entirely.  This kind of breathless reporting is so common we hardly notice. Truth is, this kind of acceleration trivia is part of a much bigger pattern of mostly male-centered references to tired tropes of masculinity.  Muscle-car culture is getting to be pretty old-school. We should really know how efficient a car is in city traffic, where average speeds on weekdays barely reach into the thirties.

For the record, I could probably go from 0 to 60 in a few seconds.  But it would require stepping off a cliff. Getting up to speed is easy; it’s the instant deceleration that poses all the problems. That’s true of cars as well, as an any number of drag-race videos demonstrate. Surely everybody loves a responsive vehicle.  But how many have an interest in trying to turn theirs into a rocket?  (OK, how many over 40?)

I noticed that the usual guy reporting on cars for the Times seems to be gone. He did lots of videos of new models cruising sanely around his West coast neighborhood, gently corning at speeds you and I would recognize as sensible. I hope he wasn’t replaced because he was too practical.

To get real about climate change means thinking differently, and moving beyond amazement at the remarkable start-up torque of electric motors. This feature is impressive, and electrics will surely send internal combustion engines and transmissions to museums. But, all things considered, it seems useless to continue to enshrine jackrabbit starts in the rhetoric of auto reporting.

By the way, I think I could get my wheelbarrow up to 60 mph in less than 30 minutes.  But I would need the help of more wheels, and maybe Lombard Street in San Francisco.  But that would be bizarre, and completely meaningless.