“The tide goes out, the tide comes in.” God did it!

You can’t explain Bill O’Reilly
[Via Bad Astronomy]

Because Bill O’Reilly’s arrogance, willful ignorance, and egregious lack of rational thinking is such a juicy target for satire, I present to you a whole bunch of things Bill O’Reilly can’t explain. Here’s one:

That link has quite a few more, almost all of which made me laugh. Never a miscommunication.

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O’Reilly’s original comments indicated a severe lack of understanding and that is why he does it. He is a smart man, a good entertainer. He knows what sort of schtick works for his audience and he provides it. Just like Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, O’Reilly has an image to uphold and willful ignorance is part of that.

He helps design Cargo Cult Worlds, where the narrative is more important than the facts.

A common aspect of Cargo Cult worlds is that they  halt further investigation. Tide goes out. Tide comes in. God did it. End of story.

When he was called on the fact that this story actually has many more pages detailing the effect of gravity from the moon, this was his reponse:

Wow! Even more instances of how the Cargo Cult Worlds are designed to stop further investigation. ‘How’d the moon get there? How’d the Sun get there?’ Why do we have a moon and Mars doesn’t? Of course, Mars has two moons but  O’Reilly’s point does not need any connection to facts or reality.

So eventually his metaphor has to be pushed back to a point where science may not have a complete understanding – say the first 5 seconds following the Big Bang. That gap now proves God. Because we can pretty much explain what has happened since. The God of the Gaps is not a very strong thing to base your Cargo Cult World on.

For explaining to him that his original view was incorrect, people get insulted. Because trying to add pages to the story created in a Cargo Cult World almost always results in irrational anger.

Thus I am happy to see that the response to this anger is derision.  I like this one because it displays the sort of know-nothingness that O’Reilly espouses:

Politicians everywhere lie when they talk budget cuts in services

by Iwan Gabovitch

Why is evidence so hard for politicians?
[Via Bad Science]

One thing you hope for, with politicians, is that they won’t make the same mistakes over and over again.

Last week we saw that the government has overstated the problems in the NHS by using dodgy figures (to be precise, they used misleading static figures instead of time trends). We saw that Andrew Lansley’s repeated claim that his reforms are justified by evidence was untrue: the evidence doesn’t show that his price-based competition improves outcomes (if anything it makes things worse); and the evidence also doesn’t show that GP consortia improve outcomes (unless you cherry pick only the positive findings). It’s okay if your reforms aren’t supported by existing evidence: you just shouldn’t claim that they are.

Now Lansley’s junior minister Paul Burstow MP has kindly responded, repeating the exact same mistakes again, only more clumsily. I find this, in all seriousness, genuinely frightening from a minister, so I’ll explain how he does it.

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Using ‘facts’ that are not supported by evidence and misquoting  papers are hallmarks of the denialist. It is something not only seen in American politicians but can be seen in the UK also.

When the only way to get support for cutting services is to lie, one would thing that path would represent failure. Instead, many people blithely follow that path, because the wonderful music played by their favorite Pied Piper sounds so good.

The lie is better than actually facing facts.

Never mind that the real world works very differently. It is a real sign of dysfunctional world views when they rely so much on points that are demonstrably false. Too many people today hold exactly those sorts of dysfunctional views and follow leaders who propose them.

The leader says “I’m really Napoleon Bonaparte. Onto Moscow” and the followers start packing their winter clothes.

A sane person would be calling the mental health authorities. Cargo Cult Worlds could well be a sign of an inability to deal with the complexities of the modern world. Retreating to a safe fantasy is better than dealing with reality.

We are in for troubled times when the false narrative is more important  than the facts. Is anywhere safe?