Introduction to the Insanity that is this Substack
Maybe I should explain myself, if that’s even possible.
Why do I write posts the way I do, heavily laden with quotes from scientific papers but also with chicken solar plant engineers, inebriated gnomes, and non-existent conversations with Elon Musk?
There’s actually a reason, but it takes a bit to explain. It’s primarily about the reliability of information.
Information in the olden times
Back in 1970s and 1980s America, if we wanted to learn about a subject we had to go to the library and start reading. This system had its downsides (musty old books, no talking, the Dewey Decimal System) but it also had some upsides that we may not have appreciated enough at the time.
To get a book published an author had to write something worth publishing, which took considerable time. Then a publisher had to be willing to print the darn thing, and bookstores and librarians had to buy it and stock it.
All along this process there were built-in quality checks. Printing books costs money, so the publishing houses needed to ensure those books were sold. If a publishing house gained a reputation for publishing garbage, librarians wouldn’t buy their books and bookstores wouldn’t stock them. So publishers vetted the books they published, employing teams of editors and fact-checkers. And of course they wouldn’t waste their time on sloppy authors, so the authors had to put at least some care into their work.
This meant that not a lot of books were published (compared to today) but there was at least someone looking out for accuracy – the entire process from the author’s advance, up to the checkout counter at the local bookstore or library, created a bit of quality control.
That’s not to say that no garbage was published – far from it – but most of the books on the shelf would be mostly accurate, at least up to the state of knowledge at the time. And it was fairly easy to recognize the fringe stuff – books about how Elvis was a trans-dimensional alien kind of stood out.
Information in the “information age”
The advent of widespread use of the internet beginning in the 1990s was a great boon to all students and researchers. Huge archives of books were put online, and texts that were previously difficult to access simply due to geographical location were suddenly becoming available for everyone to study.
And for those first few years it was great. The bulk of the information being put online had been developed in the older, print system, with its quality checks. So most of it was still reasonably reliable.
But there was a huge problem inherent in the new system. When it costs next to nothing to publish online, everything gets published – including garbage. A lot of garbage. And as the garbage purveyors gained skill in their presentation, it quickly became very difficult to tell reliable information from garbage.
So the internet of today isn’t really the great library of information we anticipated. Instead it’s an enormous garbage heap with some good resources hidden in it, buried under mountains of trash. We haven’t yet come up with a new method of reliably vetting information, and information itself has become a weapon, making the problem even worse. Somewhere in this giant fire hose of raw sewage there are some real gems, but good luck finding them.
For example, Wikipedia sucks
For those looking for good information, think of the typical Wikipedia article. An author will write a long paragraph containing several pertinent facts, then add a reference that’s a link to a 400 page textbook. There’s no way to know where in that huge tome the Wikipedia author found those facts, so the reader must either read the whole thing or trust the Wikipedia author. Some of the articles are equivalent to a few pages in length but have over a hundred references – and many of those references are links to websites that no longer exist.
I can do the same thing, and write what I think the scientific literature says, but how do you know I’m not just making it all up? How do you know the references say what I claim, without reading them all yourself? I can put twenty references in every article, but who is going to read all those references?
Traditional journalism has also fallen flat on its proverbial face. Instead of finding solutions to the issue of the reliability of information, online versions of traditional news sources have multiplied on the modern internet like amphetamine addled rabbits. There are many times more of them, and you can find multiple sources to back up any claim you want to make.
So what to do about it? Here’s my attempt:
The structure of the posts contained here represent my approach to this problem. Each has a narrative, leading to one or more final points. But the path is constructed of quotes directly from the sources, many of them published research that was conducted by people who work in that field. And I often provide quotes from multiple references on the same subject, demonstrating that the ideas represent the conclusions of multiple scientists in multiple papers. It’s redundant at times but at least you know I didn’t cherry pick the references.
And the original references are all there so you can check them if you wish. Since I have used direct quotes from the sources you can search for those quotes in each referenced document, and decide for yourself if I have taken them out of context. In other words, if you disagree with my conclusions you can reconstruct my path for yourself – and decide for yourself.
Reading the scientific literature on any subject, unless it’s your own specialty, is mind-numbingly boring. And lots of public health “experts” and “authorities”rely on the fact that the overwhelming majority of us aren’t going to read the research.
So I provide quotes directly from the authors (although I also try to provide some plain-English clarification) and if you think I’m misrepresenting the paper then please, read it yourself. Nearly everything I quote is available online, for free.
As I mentioned in one of my posts, the internet is basically 99.9999999% useless garbage and there’s no point adding more. Maybe my approach will provide something more useful than all of that garbage – something you can quote and know where the numbers came from. Something you can read, then use the references yourself when you are debating a subject with a recalcitrant acquaintance.
But why all the insanity?
Reading these papers is quite a chore, and simply arranging the narrative and quotes in a logical order will generate something as thick and dull as the papers themselves (sorry to all the scientists, but you know this is true).
So I have some fun, make up characters, interrupt the narrative with quotes from movies and television, and generally display the random malfunctions of my fractured little brain. This is like getting up and stretching in the middle of a long, difficult task. It relaxes the mind for a few moments, and hopefully makes the content easier to digest. It certainly makes it easier to write.
So come along and meet the employees of The Chicken House Solar Generating Plant in Marathon, Texas. Hear the ramblings of Todd the CDC Intern, Nate the Pneumonia Gnome, and the part of Elon Musk’s brain that takes control when he tokes and tweets.
Listen to me rant about rancid movies and reminisce about 90s romantic comedies, and marvel at how anyone with my Spotify playlist can claim to be mentally sound.
And hopefully, just maybe, learn something and know that it’s true.