Fire indeed hot

This blog covers quite a bit about human biases and stupidity, but the "fire indeed hot" problem is one I still haven't got a soddin' clue how to solve.

Many problems are very complicated. Sometimes, statistics are difficult to interpret. Often it can be hard to see if data supports one theory or another, and dealing with uncertainty and measurement errors is tricky stuff. There are a whole bunch of ways way people act irrationally in the face of confusion and complexity, and a whole bunch of ways psychologists and sociologists have proposed for tackling this.

But then there are "fire indeed hot" problems, when the issue is staring you in the face and/or burning your legs off. I don't know how to persuade anyone that fire is hot if they won't believe it when their own hair is actually on fire. I'm not sure anyone does. All psychological theories seem to assume that there's at least an element of rationality at work, that when a certain sensory threshold is exceeded the brain will, unless under truly exceptional circumstances, concede that maybe stabbing oneself in the eye or trying to swallow a whole fire extinguisher wasn't such a good idea. Those kind of errors are supposed to be dealt with by the Darwin Awards, not persuasion.

An alternative and probably more common version of this is the "everyday Flat Earther" problem. This is the only slightly milder version where you can't actually see the answer directly, but the weight of evidence is so staggeringly large that the only ways of discounting it are a) to be so distrustful of everyone that you literally wouldn't believe them if they said that oxygen was safe to breathe; or b) you are very, very stupid. Again, it beggars belief that such people are able to wipe their own arse, but apparently most of them manage it.

My sneaking suspicion is that pretty much everyone is an everyday Flat Earther on one or two minor issues. The problem is that democracy depends on the assumption that hardly anyone has such baseless opinions on issues of any real import, so the chance of such things gaining traction is negligible.

Britain has elected Boris Johnson and his Tory acolytes by a landslide. This, to me, is definitely something close to a "fire indeed hot" problem. The country - the whole blasted country, not some tiny subset of lunatics this time - has actively chosen a man with a well-documented history of lying and duplicity; from unlawfully proroguing Parliament, to hiding in a fridge and declaring that he'd be happy to be interviewed by anyone named Andrew, even while saying that the BBC were liars. Let's not even mention the vitriolic "Turkey should join the EU documentary", the Brexit bus, the model buses, the two prepared Brexit speeches, or that time he felt Michael Gove (Michael Frogface GOVE !) was a stronger contender for Tory leader. Let's simply say : this makes no sense. None of it. This is just stupid. We've elected a man determined to "get Brexit done" without an effin' clue what that really means, even while the country is still split 50-50 as to whether it wants Brexit at all, who has a history of being hated by the Scottish whilst determined to prevent them from having a second referendum.

This is nuts. Nobody has a clue what the next few years will bring, because it's damn hard to predict the actions of someone so scared of interviews that they prefer to hide in a fridge. We've chosen the way of cowardice and petulance, of a goofy-haired man-child buffoon who literally steals people's phones in full view of them and the media. Wonderful. Let's all strap ourselves in for a fun-filled next few decades of post-truthism, where we don't need any actual hospitals because we can pretend we've got eight billion; where we don't need to worry about Donald Trump because we can pretend he's a sort of ugly orange Tooth Fairy that only little children believe in; where we can ride BoJo's handmade cardboard buses to work because there's no money for any real ones. We can have our cake and eat it and then some, telling ourselves we shamed the EU into giving us a fantastic deal and stopped all those pesky immigrants from coming over here and tending to our sick and injured, laughing with delight as there are no more damn brown people stealing our jobs and benefits, and just occasionally wondering why we ever let "reality" ever bother us when it's so much easier to simply pretend it doesn't exist.

This is definitely going to end well, isn't it ?