Spider Star
The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
Read More.Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
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How to Deal with the Irrational: The Wisdom of Sitcoms
November 5th, 2010
I was relaxing last night after my talk, after a dinner party at the University President’s house, and was catching 30 Rock, one of the more clever sitcoms out there in an age of the declining sitcom.
One of the characters (Liz Lemon played by Tina Fey) had a problem with her father, and her efforts to reason with him were proving fruitless. She went to her boss (played by Alec Baldwin) who immediately told her something like, “He’s irrational. You don’t use reason with irrational people. You use fear.”
I had something akin to an epiphany. I’ve been beating myself over the head for years trying to reason with people who believe in irrational things, who don’t trust science, who think that the Earth is 6000 years old or that carbon dioxide isn’t a greenhouse gas. I’ve typed out thousands of words of carefully reasoned arguments supported by citations, and been rebuffed with nary a cogent response. I’ve lost sleep infuriated about how some people could be so obtuse, and clueless about how to educate them.
Is it really this simple?
Is it really this hopeless for reason?
I don’t like to think so, but the last decade of elections and political commericals sure have used fear more than reason, and fear has consistently won with a few rare exceptions.
Am I selling out if I switch from reason to fear when dealing with people who don’t respond to reason? Will I feel dirty? Will it even work?
What do you think?
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It’s a two step thing: make them scared so they stop thinking rationally, then offer them a dumb solution. Advertising science has a lot of research on this stuff.
Think Catholic Church – “you are worthless and evil, but if you do exactly what we say you might be happier after you die”… I *told* you it doesn’t have to make sense. In fact, making sense might be a problem because you risk tipping people back into rational thought.
In that sense your problem is that you can’t effectively scare people into thinking rationally, but fear is a very effective motivator. Much more effective than greed or any positive emotion. Except perhaps lust. Hmm. OK, the obvious solution is to become wickly sexy and win by “I toss my hair, back and forth”
I would say the tactics of fearmongering can evidently sometimes be useful in the short term, but it’s very much a penny-wise pound-foolish sort of technique.
I’m not sure you can scare people out of their religious convictions with science. I mean, a lot of these irrational convictions seem to be in response to being scared by science–‘The Earth is 100 million years old? I can’t believe that! That number’s too big and makes me too insignificant!’
People like to believe the Earth is 6,000 years old and that immigrants are going to take their jobs because it makes them feel important. I always like the ‘hand of cards’ argument. What are the chances of someone dealing a specific hand of cards? Pretty small. And what are the chances of, after that, dealing another specific hand of cards? Even smaller. And then, another specific hand of cards. Well, almost impossible. And yet, despite those odds, here you are!
I do note, incredulously, that the right wing reacted very badly to global warming worst case scenarios. I can point to Venus and make a case that the worst case scenario is plausible…maybe it needs to be a personal fear, in a human lifetime, not something in some indefinite future for their children or their children’s children to live with.
I want people to believe the right things for the right reasons. That seems next-to-impossible. Frustrating, no?
You’re up against the lizard part of the brain. The monkeys that sat there going “ooh, I wonder what species of tiger that is” reproduced less successfully than the ones who went “Tiger! Run!”. Arguing rationally in this situation is agreeing to lose. It’s “bring a knife to a gunfight” territory – you’re using a tool you know won’t work very well. The fearmongers can spit out 20 bits of gibberish while you’re still explaining how their first one is nonsense, and if you look as though you’re convincing on that they can counter-argue more gibberish. Gibberish is cheap to produce.
What you need is a charismatic authority figure, to short-cut the whole “make a solid argument” process into single sentences. Someone widely respected and well known, like Einstein or Galileo.
Are you saying that Al Gore isn’t enough?! 😉
Yeah, I hear what you’re saying. It’s very much like what Randy Olson says in “Don’t Be Such a Scientist” that I’ve read and blogged about in the past. Most people don’t respond to reason. The farther you move from your head, and the closer to the genitalia, the bigger and more engaged your audience will be.
Sigh.
Where do I go to trade species?