Steve Packard, the proprietor of Depleted Cranium, posted an interesting story yesterday:
No Wifi allowed? You’ve got to be kidding me…
... according to this article, Lake Head University of Thunder Bay Ontario has taken the rather extreme step of banning wifi wireless networking from campus. Today many universities have wireless networks on campus which is not only great for students with laptops, but also makes setting up computers a breeze since they don’t need to worry about plugs and cables and most new computers support wireless out of the box. But apparently the powers that be at Lake Head insist that “the jury is still out” on the effects of low power microwave RF fields on humans, and therefore they can’t in good conscious allow their students to be anywhere near one of those potentially deadly devices!
A few universities have gone so far as to reject campus-wide wifi on the grounds of health concerns, which is a pretty dumb policy considering that there are plenty of these devices around and no evidence of any negative health consequences. Well, Lake Head now has made it a matter of policy to not only reject a campus Wifi network but also forbid students from running their own Wifi equipment. Jeez! Hope you weren’t thinking you could use that laptop in the lounge of your dorm! And you had better disable that wifi adapter in the hardware manager.
...
There’s no word on whether they still allow cell phones, cordless phones, bluetooth headsets, RF remote controls, microwave ovens and so on. Also no word on whether they have a campus radio station. Of course, banning that stuff would be ridiculous, nearly as ridiculous as banning Wifi on concerns about non-existent health affects that you just know there must be despite zero evidence.
I believe it is safe to say that Western Civilization and our current standard of living are the result of our rationality slightly outweighing our irrationality, with the slight increment compounding over time. I think it is also safe to say that even among the best and the brightest of us, irrationality still has a powerful hold. And, if further evidence is needed, consider this post, from Luboš Motl, which shows that even nominally brilliant thinkers can fall victim to unscientific nonsense:
After some time, I was led to web pages of the LHC alarmists again:
The most catastrophic man-made phenomena that they are afraid of - and that might be caused by the new accelerator at Franco-Swiss CERN, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - are microscopic black hole production, gigantic strangelets, and the tunneling into another vacuum in the landscape. These things may create a growing volume whose interior is incompatible with life and they may destroy our planet: the LHC is therefore irresponsible, they say.
Lubos takes apart the arguments of the alarmists with alacrity; please go over to his site for an explanation that should set your mind at ease. In essence, the only way the LHC can destroy the universe is if the laws of physics suddenly stop working; that this has not happened yet, despite many opportunities, suggests that it will not happen any time soon. (That is meant to be a touch of sardonic wit, by the way.)
What is it that causes bright, supposedly intelligent individuals, to believe nonsense?
The ancients lived in a world suffused with magic. They had only a rudimentary sense of cause and effect and random and often malevolent events were ubiquitous. Our minds evolved in a world in which such rudimentary ideas of cause and effect sufficed. If you put your hand into the fire, you got burned. Easy to understand, limited complexity. As civilization began to take root and we built increasingly sophisticated structures (including scientific, cultural, and philosophical structures) to mediate between us and chaos, the mind that had evolved to confront a simple and simplistic world needed to be jury-rigged to deal with our increasing complexity. Rational thinking was layered on top of the irrational and became the thin veneer that separates us from chaos. One of my first posts dealt with the intersection of Magic and Rationality:
We live in a world surrounded by magic. Our minds evolved in a world of magic. It is no wonder that it is such an ongoing struggle to think about the world in a rational way. No one would question that our ancient ancestors, the prototypical hunter-gatherers on the savanna, were embedded in a world where magic was an everyday phenomenon. Their lives were dependent on the sun rising in the morning (where did it go at night anyway, and how did anyone know it would come back the next day all the way over there!), on the vagaries of the weather; they grew ill and died from unseen, invisible enemies. They attempted to make sense of the world by developing myths and deities. They would have no trouble with some of the explanations being bruited about concerning the provenance of the recent tsunami: the Gods must have become angry with us. The idea that sophisticated 21st century, technologically adept people could be equally seen as surrounded by magic would, to many, be a non-starter. However, I believe it is the necessary starting point in trying to make sense of the world.
Our anxieties are now more sophisticated and our explanations for our anxieties are more (pseudo) rational yet certain things remain the same. Generally people fear what they don't understand and when the objects that are poorly understood are opaque to our senses, they behave as a nidus for irrational thoughts. As an example, the fear of WiFi is similar in structure to past fears; the fear is that invisible rays will penetrate us and cause Cancer or damage our brains. This is directly analogous to the fears of nuclear power (invisible radiation which we can't detect will kill or cause Cancer) and living close to high tension wires (invisible radiation which we can't detect will kill or cause Cancer) or various overblown fears of toxins in the environment and our food ((invisible chemicals which we can't detect will kill or cause Cancer.) It is one step removed from the paranoid fantasies endemic in the third world, in which the evil eye can cause disease or powerful Jews destroy innocent Muslims via polio vaccines. The Soviet secret police, experts at creating and disseminating frightening paranoid fantasies that worked so well because they were seeded into fertile ground, apparently propagated the myth, accepted by a very many people despite (because of?) the absence of any evidence, that American scientists created the AIDS virus to murder black people.
It is exceptionally difficult to appreciate when we have fallen victim to irrational thinking. Eternal vigilance may well be the price of freedom, but it is also the price of rationality. In a final paradox, we always have the most trouble seeing the irrational within ourselves. The "wisdom of crowds" works because in a relatively informed crowd, most of the time our irrationalities cancel each other out while the rational is reinforced. It doesn't always work, but it remains our best chance for getting it right. As may be implicit in this, the inferiority of tribal cultures is precisely because "reality" is dictated from the top down by a small group of authorities; their irrationalities do not cancel out, in fact, they are mutually reinforcing (reinfecting?).
Periodically, and most often under great stress, societies decompensate into psychosis. I believe that the stress level is unprecedented by virtue of the pace of change that we all struggle to surf and the dysfunction of large swaths of the gap, who are even less equipped to deal with rapid change. We have much irrationality yet to come.
Recent Comments