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A Theory of the Flourishing of Ignorance

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“When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one!”            –Alice in Wonderland

Any thoughtful person looking at our peculiar times can’t help but wonder why the willful acceptance of misinformation is so pervasive. In an era when the ease of researching anything is easy, and credible news sources are just a click away, it is a puzzle to understand why so many are flying blind with their own preferred fantasies.  Most of us know the common markers of self deception heard all around us: covid vaccines are very dangerous; “the government” is using them to take away our freedoms; progressives are Nazis or “communists;” there is a concerted “war on Christmas;” voter fraud is widespread; university teachers indoctrinate their students; and that was just a “party” in the Capitol on January 6, not an insurrection.  These kinds of fictions keep surfacing. Nearly all of these claims are provably false, using accepted means for verifying facts and applying common tests of source credibility.  How do people stay in their own bubble?

It’s Now Easy to Live in an Information Desert 

An admittedly oversimplified but compelling explanation hints at part of the cause.  In a nutshell, we no longer give sufficient time to comprehensive news sources that were common even fifteen years ago. Instead, we cherry-pick news about just a few stories, choosing sources more for conformation than information.  A result is that we are poorly informed or unaware of what the best evidence shows in a given instance.

The reason this is so easily was made clear to me on a recent trip where, for days, my only source of news was television. None of the three hotels where I stayed had a newspaper available.  And their WI-FI access was predictably spotty. Typically, even good television news shows cover only a few stories.  Frequently, as with the collapse of the condominium on Collins Avenue in South Florida, one story dominates. Cable news especially has a hard time juggling a complex news agenda, even though they have capable reporters that are ready for calls from producers that often never come. A single story formula tagged as “breaking news” seems to be a ratings winner.

A good newspaper forces closed minds to open, at least a little.

This matters, because cable and internet news has largely replaced much more diverse city newspapers that still existed until a few years ago. Newspapers carried various stories from the AP, perhaps Reuters or and AFP, as well as the paper’s local reporters and other specialized news services.  Even a middling city paper offered a daily window on the world.  And a very good one, like the New York Times, forces closed minds to open.  For example, on the day I started writing this, just the first page of the Times featured 18 different news items, including a photo story of an ICU staff trying out a new treatment to save a dying covid patient. The image of medical staff hovering over a patient suggested a valiant effort to find a medical off-ramp just short of death. True, readers still chose what they wanted to read. But its hard to miss conclusive and myth-busing headlines.  What would that front-page picture say to an anti-vaxxer?

In addition, news consumers are not tied to the linear and and narrower stories of cable and broadcast news outlets. Video edits for the viewer, one story doled out at a time at the pathetic oral rate of about 200 words a minute. By contrast, print lets the reader decide from a much broader palette of stories. In addition, Americans were once better informed partly because news services and many newspapers had a financial interest in doing straight news.  Commentary may work for the increasing tribal cable networks, but not for a news service like the Associated Press, which needs neutrality to satisfy its very different subscribers.

Misinformation by the Truckload

It’s now an old and sad story that news readership is on life support.  Some papers have survived, but with far fewer reporters.  Whether it is the Allentown Daily Call or the New York Daily News, staffs that remain now sit in a sea of empty desks.  The rationale of the earnings-driven owners is that younger Americans aren’t newspaper readers, which is sadly true. But it is a mistake to assume that younger Americans have thrown in the towel on credible news stories.  And yet the major internet giants like Google aren’t much help. They aren’t journalists, and they aren’t very good at aggregating stories for the collective good. Their selections are mostly governed by algorithms rather than solid reporting.  In truth, neither CNN’s Jeff Zucker or Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg would cut it in the journalistic worlds once occupied by Fred Friendly, David Halberstam, Janet Malcolm, David Carr or Ben Bradlee.  These latter-day giants would have seen through the charade of one-note news, as well as the price it exacts from an increasingly distracted public.

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Sound is a Product of Where it is Heard

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The makers of some of the marvelous devices that we purchase in order to hear great sound want us to believe that all the magic is because of their equipment.  But its not that simple. 

We usually think our audio gear is the primary sources of the sound environment we cherish.  Many of us can’t resist joining the never-ending chase for better amplifiers, speakers, virgin vinyl, digital-to-analogue converters and the like. And there is no shortage of companies and marketing experts who are happy to feed our search for audio perfection.  But the ostensible requirement for “good” or “high end” equipment ignores the huge effects that spaces have on the sounds that reach our ears.

For Dennis Foley, the wise and sometimes frustrated acoustical expert who offers short videos on YouTube, room size is the single most important variable in determining how well or badly something sounds. The folks that come to him for help in producing great sound usually want to talk about their $3000 turntables, $6000 amplifiers, or their rare English speakers–the same kinds used as monitors in recording studios. But he wants to talk about the usually inadequate amount of space where they will be used.  Roughly the ideal room for music should be at least 20 feet wide and 21 feet long, with a ceiling height of 11 feet.  And things only get better if there is even more volume.

Why does a room’s characteristics trump the relatively small qualitative differences between inexpensive and expensive audio equipment?  It gets complicated, but most rooms are simply too small to accurately reproduce a full range of auditory content. For starters, virtually every modest-sized space has a resonant frequency, meaning a particular sound pitch it “likes” to amplify. For example, I know a pleasant local restaurant with a great menu and only lit by candles.  All of its small rooms have a soft romantic glow: a perfect visual representation of what is meant by “fine dining.”  Yet this old inn actually sounds like a Chuck E Cheese on a Saturday afternoon. The problem with the restaurant is that its “intimate” small spaces contain a lot of hard surfaces or old-fashioned glass windows. They can’t help but reflect and amplify sounds at certain frequencies. In one especially regrettable room, the spaces love the lower frequencies of male voices—especially baritones. Give a male patron several glasses of wine and a seat in one of the few tables, and he can become the acoustic equivalent of a fire alarm.  Deafening. In slightly more technical terms, the room’s “mode” peaks at around 400 Hz. It loves sound in this range and is helped by very reflective glass. Your rooms have different modes.  You can hear them if you run a “sweep” of a tone-generating oscillator in them. The mode appears when a given frequency on the oscillator gets noticeably louder.

Many times the first mode in a room is in the bass range, where too much energy and long sound wavelengths have no place to go, so they just build into a mass of indistinct sound. A low note can produce a wave that is 20 feet long. The problem of this too-big-for-the-room energy is that it spills out of its path and makes a sonic mess.  A frequent result is the head-rattling boom of “one note” bass.  Our ears have been trained to accept these non-musical artifacts if dead thuds as the real deal.  But “muddy” base is not very musical.

In these situations, great equipment won’t help.  Something that will may seem to be counterintuitive.  Your music in a modest sized room will probably sound better if you listen at a more modest volume level.  As Foley would say, if you listen, a room will tell you what it can handle.