However, I think the article sabotages itself by trying to lump too many different new uses of “so” together, as if these are all related just because they involve (mis)use of the same word. Trying to dissuade journalists from grasping for grand unifying theories is a vain task, of course. But still I don’t know quite what to make of claims like the one in the following quote, or maybe it’s just that I can’t quite picture what it sounds like when someone is going after this particular effect:

“But in the algorithmic times that have come, ‘so’ conveys an algorithmic certitude. It suggests that there is a right answer, which the evidence dictates and which must not be contradicted. Among its synonyms, after all, are ‘consequently,’ ‘thus’ and ‘therefore.’”

If you say so. But considering that we’re talking about new uses of “so,” I’m not sure if making recourse to words that are only its synonyms when it is being used correctly really helps get us anywhere useful.

The particular use of “so” that began catching my ear at least a few years back usually occurs in a specific context. A person with a lot of technical knowledge, such as a scientist, is speaking to a lay person when it becomes clear that the lay person will need some backgrounding before they can understand the answer to a question or some other point that the first person wants to make. (I’m not surprised to read in the article that “Microsoft employees have long argued that the ‘so’ boom began with them,” although, if I may express a peeve about newspaper web sites, this would be a perfect place for a link to some examples.)

Here’s the kind of usage I’m talking about, from an interview for one of the technology case studies I write.

Me: “A lot of industries are affected by fluctuating supply costs and things like that. Why is it so important in your industry in particular that you be able to respond so quickly to those kinds of changes?”

Interviewee: “So we’re really a data company. We sell food, but our products are commodities, so all we can compete on is price. Anything that helps us analyze price and supply data better than or just sooner than our competitor helps us stay on top.”

The knowledge being imparted need not be technical, of course; the same usage could arise when one person is telling another person a story from a context the second person isn’t familiar with.

Person 1: “There I was, in my graduation gown, covered in mud—”

Person 2: “Wait, what?”

Person 1: “So, in my town there was this old disused quarry, and the tradition was, every graduating class of seniors would….” Etc.

There is, for me, a suggestion that the “knowledgeable” person is sort of having to pause the incredible rush of facts and ideas through his head and pick out the pieces that the “ignorant” person needs. (This is most pronounced with usages in more technical conversations.) “So” functions here as a sort of verbal finger hovering over the page, looking for the best place back up to so you can start over and get everyone up to speed.

To my ear, the usage also implies the existence of—or at least the “knowledgeable” person’s belief in the existence of—a power gradient favoring the speaker, if only because it seems clear to the speaker that the other person “needs” the information that will follow. “I know things you don’t know,” it seems to say. “But wait, don’t worry, I’ll share some of them with you.”

Maybe I’m wrong, though, because the idea of using “so” to emphasize or at least point out a power gradient seems kind of the opposite of what Galina Bolden argues that it is used for:

To begin a sentence with “oh,” she said in an e-mail message, is to focus on what you have just remembered and your own concerns. To begin with “so,” she said, is to signal that one’s coming words are chosen for their relevance to the listener.

The ascendancy of “so,” Dr. Bolden said, “suggests that we are concerned with displaying interest for others and downplaying our interest in our own affairs.”

Maybe so, maybe so. Dr. Bolden is a linguist who has apparently written several academic papers about the use of the word in question, so she should know.

Still, for my money, the best description of the usage I’ve been observing comes in the letter to the editor from which I learned about the original article in the first place. Though I don’t quite agree with the writer, a Mr. Ernest Priestley of Seattle, Washington, that the usage is “annoying,” I do agree that:

“Beginning an answer with “so” implies that the answerer is drawing a conclusion from a body of knowledge to which she is privy and the listener is not. She is not just answering; she is explaining. The tone is professorial and slightly condescending.

‘So’ implies expertise and special knowledge, enhancing the weight of the answer and the status of the answerer. Hence, I suppose, the quick spread of this usage into venues other than the college lecture hall and the high-tech community.”

Sounds about right to me.

Perhaps you are wondering which blog isn’t, but of course this one is actually devoted to exploring and explaining the reasons for self delusion and irrational thinking, which puts it in rather more rarefied company.

For example, this post on the Dunning-Kruger effect helps explain why it is such a headache-inducing waste of time to argue about global warming with people who’ve gotten their entire education on the subject from insecure weathermen and furious right-wing screeds about the University of East Anglia’s email leak.

“The more skilled you are, the more practice you’ve put in, the more experience you have, the better you can compare yourself to others. As you strive to improve, you begin to better understand where you need work. You start to see the complexity and nuance; you discover masters of your craft and compare yourself to them and see where you are lacking.

On the other hand, the less skilled you are, the less practice you’ve put in and the fewer experiences you have, the worse you are at comparing yourself to others on certain tasks. Your peers don’t call you out because they know as much as you do, or they don’t want to hurt your feelings. Your narrow advantage over novices leads you to think you are the shit.”

The above quote comes from a line of reasoning about why, say, so many obvious incompetents seem so surprised to be told that’s what they are when auditioning for American Idol, but it also seems to neatly sum up the mindset of someone who has spent about five minutes actually considering the body of knowledge known as climate science (as opposed to the time they’ve spent considering the body of “knowledge” informing the industry that has been created to defeat the findings of climate scientists).

And a quote from Charles Darwin thrown in by the post’s author seems to neatly encapsulate the desperate feeling of frustration that so often comes over me in discussions with opponents of the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), or opponents of vaccines, or opponents of Keynesian economic interventions, and on and on.

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

At any rate, I am reminded of the form response I recently prepared in the course of the last on-line argument I’ll ever have about global warming. As it happened, I got the last word in that argument without having to deploy this, but I offer it here for your own reuse and modification in similar circumstances. You don’t have to credit me:

[Name redacted], I would really encourage you to check out a book, like the one I linked or any other similar one you like, that drinks the Kool-Aid and talks about (1) what the AGW conspiracists would at least like you to believe, and (2) the evidence they claim to have that supports that belief. You might also want to double-check critics’ claims about whether the IPCC “ignores” something, which you can easily do here.

Then you will have a better idea of the types of objections and arguments that would be necessary to really confront the theory as a whole. The ones you offer are simply insufficient. You can quickly prove this to yourself on line, if you’re really interested—if you’re arguing in good faith. Let me know if you want some help devising search terms, but I’m not going to get into a link battle. I’ve had lots of these discussions, and I decided recently that—even if I could convince every self-styled “skeptic” (most of them not skeptical enough by half) of what I think are the error of their ways—it’s too big a job to do for free.

This is because, in my experience, the skeptic tends to set an impossibly high standard for pro-AGW evidence but has virtually no lower limit on the quality of the anti-AGW evidence they will accept.

More specifically, before they will be convinced, they demand to see it proved that—unlike any other scientific discipline (or, indeed, any other complex human enterprise in general)—the field of climate science does not include at least some charlatans or incompetents, or that there is not a single weakness (if only intuitively apparent to non-specialists) in any component of the theories proposed or data used. I can’t prove these things, of course, but even if I could, I’d still have to respond to criticisms like “but Al Gore lives in a big house” or “but Obama burns fossil fuels when he flies around in Air Force One” or “but bankers have figured out a way to get rich from global warming just like they have from everything else.”

In fact, I have often looked into objections raised by skeptics, and have never needed more than a few minutes of searching to understand what they have overlooked, or how little effect their claims would have on the validity of the overarching theory even if true. This is because the edifice that is the theory of AGW is very large and complex, and it is built on a broad, deep foundation consisting of hundreds of years of data from dozens of fields. The building will not fall down, in other words, just because someone pulls out a few bricks.

I know my saying that won’t necessarily be enough to convince you—it’s not meant to be—but I hope you’re enough of a critical thinker to avoid concluding that my unwillingness to rehearse the entire theory of AGW before your eyes means that I’m not credible, and that you will continue to ask challenging questions of any sources you consult on this topic. Good luck in your ongoing studies!

By the way, in case you were wondering if I would like to debate you on any of the non-AGW topics I mentioned, I’ll have to beg off there, too. But thanks for reading!

Did you know you can subscribe to Margin Notes by email? No more than one email per day (and then only if there is anything new to report). What’s not to like?

It’s amusing, somehow, that—among the dozen or so tabs I have open in Safari right now—one contains the lyrics to the Dire Straits song “Money for Nothing” and another a New York Times article about fighting back against the illegal tactics of debt collectors. It’s just a coincidence, of course, but one that might seem telling to the many people who unquestioningly assume that people with debts in collection are simply deadbeats who deserve what they get.

I wonder if there is much overlap between such people and those who think that health care reform is about giving “insurance for nothing” to deadbeats, as opposed to giving everyone an equal right to give their money to a private corporation in exchange for moderate protection from financial disaster resulting from chance and accidents of birth—but I digress.

Just like no one can safely assume that they’ll never be homeless (even the one percent or so of us who have enough in the bank to outlast some months of unemployment, although by using “us” there I don’t mean to imply that I do), having a debt in collection is a circumstance we are all probably much more likely to experience than we might think.

Come to think of it, I experienced it, once—or, at least, a collection agency thought I did. Turns out the real debtor was someone else with a vaguely similar name who had an unpaid bill at some hospital in a state I’d never visited, and it was relatively easy to clear up.

Still, what with the state of the economy and the rampancy of identity theft, even people who make good-faith efforts to discharge their debts could still end up on the receiving end of the kind of threatening, obscenity-laced phone calls that plagued my family when I was in elementary school.

Now, let me hasten to point out that I have no problem with companies seeking out the money that is legally owed them, and boy did my family legally owe some companies some money back then. Nonetheless, there are laws enumerating what debt collectors can and can’t do, and threatening prison and/or levying shocking insults against the family members of people who have fallen on hard times and are struggling to pull their heads back above water aren’t among the former. At various low points of my own, there have been a lot of unpleasant jobs I’ve been willing to work, but debt collection—in which job openings are advertised frequently enough to suggest that it’s both a booming field and one that has difficulty retaining people, and gee, I wonder why—ain’t one of them.

So, partly to aid my own memory when the hammer falls, and partly for your own enjoyment, here’s the article lede, describing a man who seems to take personal pleasure in helping people make debt collectors follow the law, a personality that honestly feels pretty similar to my own.

Among debt collectors, Steven Katz is known as a “credit terrorist.” For years, he has run what he calls the Steven Katz School of Bill Collector Education, otherwise known as the “credit terrorist training camp.”

Mr. Katz, a 58-year-old accountant in suburban Tucson, spends his free time schooling debtors on the finer points of consumer protection law to help them turn the tables on debt collectors. On occasion, he thumbs his own nose at them too.

“How many times can I sue you? Let me count the ways…”

The article offers some practical hints about resisting collection efforts (prime among them: demand proof of the debt, because apparently a lot of times there isn’t any, just a notation that you owe money in a spreadsheet somewhere). But for the real deal, you probably need to visit Katz’s website (“website” as opposed to “Web site” AP-approved, by the way).

For comic relief, I enjoyed reading about this guy, even if this particular bit of color doesn’t exactly help improve the image of the category of people who might also find themselves resisting a collection attempt. Still, you have to draw the line somewhere:

“Mr. Scroggin, who provides price estimates at a body shop, said he was the type of person who refused to be taken advantage of, even for petty offenses. For instance, years ago, he said he joined in the class-action suit against the pop group Milli Vanilli, accused of lip synching, and collected a $1.25 check.”

“In her slowly rising head were two black holes. Prospero saw in his mind a doll that had terrified him when he was a child. The eyes had rattled in the china skull. Now the woman’s voice, mechanical and heavy: “Why don’t you sleep? Go to sleep.” Her mouth opened wide, impossibly wide, and then the whole face stretched and writhed and yawned in the faint light.”

I’m reminded of nothing so much as the distorted, creepily out-of-proportion mouths so popular in modern horror movies. Click here to view an example from The Ring, but only if you want to see something creepy. There must be some others: I feel like I’ve seen a lot of horror movies recently where significant scare or at least startle value arises from the way someone’s mouth just… keeps… opening. The Ring example isn’t quite what I was picturing. Maybe someone can suggest some more titles.

Perhaps needless to say, I will be waiting to suggest this book to Coen until at least fifth grade.

From an interview with Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias, a thinker I really admire one of my favorite bloggers (even if I find him just a tad smug self-satisfied at times):

“When our pride isn’t on the line or we’re working together on a project and we need to achieve something — maybe our job is at stake — we’re much more likely to be reasonable. But when we talk about politics or religion or whatever we talk about on these radio shows, that’s when we’re much more likely to not be reasonable and to find it more enjoyable to speak than to listen.”

Damn! Zing!

I liked this, too:

“It’s a common point in almost every person’s life when they see people around them who have beliefs they don’t quite understand and they decide for themselves that, “Well, I must just be more honest than those other people. I must be trying harder.” That’s the easiest way to explain your disagreement with other people. We do disagree, and it does bother us; we know, at some level, that something’s not right about that, and we’re eager to find explanations. The easiest explanation that usually comes to mind is just our own superior sincerity or honesty. It’s just quick and easy. We’re not very honest about considering that explanation.”

I definitely agree that people who disagree with me need to be more honest with themselves about how wrong they are.

Read the rest.

Did you know you can subscribe to Margin Notes by email? No more than one email per day (and then only if there is anything new to report). What’s not to like?

Anyway, while in the midst of ruminating on my family’s near-term future and how best to raise my son, I liked reading Ross quoting Salinger quoting Emerson (” a touchstone” for Salinger, who “often quoted him in letters”):

“A man must have aunts and cousins, must buy carrots and turnips, must have barn and woodshed, must go to the market and to the blacksmith’s shop, must saunter and sleep and be inferior and silly.”

Sounds like a philosophy I could live with.

Also:

“After he bought a Maytag washer and dryer, he was tickled that the salesman quoted Ruskin to him—something about where quality counts, price doesn’t. He was sure that the line wasn’t part of the man’s spiel. “God, how I still love private readers,” he wrote. “It’s what we all used to be.”

“L.B. Namier once said that “the crowning attainment of historical study” is to achieve “an intuitive sense of how things do not happen.” It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him.

We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only in the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.”

Hey, I found the essay on-line, supposedly the version that was originally published in Harper’s in 1964. (I suppose it’s possible that there might be differences between that version and the version published in the reissued book I’m reading, so my apologies for any discrepancies.)

“They asked us years ago if we wanted to carry guns, and I turned it down. It’d just be too tempting.”

The alleged perpetrator could be charged with “felony aggravated animal cruelty,” which I assume could result in jail time. I hope it does, if only to provide the appropriate venue for a conversation between him and some kitten-loving biker^[1] that starts like this:

“So, what are you in for?”

_____
1. If you follow only one hyperlink today, make it this one!

“We’ve repeatedly highlighted Kaiser’s health care polling, which revealed that only about half of the public knows about many of the key provisions that are in the Democrats’ bill, such as coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. Meanwhile, a Pew poll this week found that only 26 percent of Americans know that it takes 60 votes to overcome a Senate filibuster — and only 32 percent know that Senate GOPers voted unanimously against the Democrats’ health care plan. And a Rasmussen poll of likely voters found that only 21 percent of them believe that the Democrats have cut taxes for “95% of working families”, a fact which is probably true.

I don’t particularly blame the public for this. The number of politics “fans” probably numbers somewhere on the order of 10 or 20 million out of a country of 250 million adults. Most people have lives and have better things to do than to follow politics all the time. They pay quite a bit of attention during Presidential elections and, I would argue, make reasonably sophisticated decisions. But outside of that, most people aren’t watching MSNBC or Fox News every evening or logging onto the Washington Post or FiveThirtyEight. They’re developing impressions based on limited information, often gleaned from partisan news sources and politicians who have an incentive to tell them anything but the truth.”

One possible reaction to this is self-righteous anger about the willful ignorance of the electorate, blah, blah, blah. Another one is to find hope in the fact that many of these people don’t actually disagree with what’s on the table and so they can be reached.

My latest column over at Went West reports on a list of demands that 175 residents of the next county over from Missoula have forwarded to their sheriff and county commissioners. Here’s my favorite:

Implement a requirement that the sheriff press county residents 18 and over into a militia, for which he will organize training three weeks out of every year. The Missoulian quotes some amplifying detail from the questionnaire: “Women must serve, but not in a combat capacity unless the men are in danger of being overrun.”

You’ll want to read the rest, especially if you’ve never heard of the “constitutional sheriff” movement.

Did you know you can subscribe to Margin Notes by email? No more than one email per day (and then only if there is anything new to report). What’s not to like?