Statistical Hypocrisy

When I went to my best friend’s house to drag him outside for a bit of fresh air, ice cream and gossip about pretty girls, little did I know that I was moments away from having my life turned upside down.

There was no answer when I hammered on the door with a subtle fist, but I was used to that. I walked in through the unlocked entrance, calling out my friend’s name and shouting juicy promises as I made my way to his bedroom.

“Come on out. You know who is doing you know what, and you have to see because you would be absolutely shook!”

The house was deathly silent. I shut up when I saw the glow of a computer screen reflected in my friend’s face eerily, as he sat statue still, engrossed in reading what looked like comments on Facebook.

I sighed loudly knowing that if my hollering at the top of my voice had no effect, my sighing wouldn’t. It was more for me than for him, because I knew what was happening here.

“Are you arguing with people on Facebook again?” I reached the statue in two long strides and smacked it on its back, and out burst a human being that turned to look at me. His eyes were aflame with naked passion.

“Do you see? Do you see?” He whispered urgently, waving a confused hand in the direction of his computer screen.

“What new crusade are you on, my friend? Whatever it is, I don’t care. I just wanted to drag you out to get ice cream and talk about girls. Because that’s what normal people do.”

My friend completely ignored most of what I said, but not everything.

“Crusade is exactly right, “ he said with terrifying enthusiasm. “Go on. See.”

“Am I supposed to be looking at a comment thread on a New York Times article about a pancake recipe?”

“Yes.”

“And…?”

“Take a look at that comment. John Smith. The same people…”

I saw it.

The same people who complained that New York Times only does salads and other dreadful tasting non-food recipes are now complaining that pancakes are unhealthy and should not be promoted. 

My friend’s eyes glinted menacingly. “You see it, don’t you? I see this argument everywhere. Literally EVERYWHERE! And it’s broken. How does John Smith - pff John Smith - know that the very same people who complained about salads are now complaining about pancakes? He doesn’t!”

“He’s wrong. WRONG. WRONG!” He screamed at the flickering screen, and it seemed to flicker more rapidly for a second as if in terror.

I responded with a wordy, “Er…”

My friend, the crusader, turned, gripped my shoulders painfully hard, and stared unblinking into my eyes for so long that I began to squirm, and melt.

“You see, “ he said. “I call this The Statistical Hypocrisy Fallacy. Just because some group of people somewhere on the Internet said they don’t like X does not mean that when some other group of people say they like X, that there is some kind of hypocrisy at play.”

I nodded because that seemed to be what was expected. He released his death grip, and beckoned me over to see another window on his screen.

The same people who complained that it was fat shaming to use fat people in exercise bike ads are now complaining that using a thin woman is not targeting the right audience.

The same players who complained that the tennis season was too long are now playing a million exhibitions.

“But how do they know that it’s the same..” I started off, before I stopped myself. The conversion was already happening, it was too late. My friend smiled at me, validated.

“I tried reasoning with one of them, you know, “ pointing at a four screens long Twitter thread. “I asked, in the most polite way I could, if this man had actually gone door to door, to people’s homes, with printed screenshots of their utterings on the Internet - time and date affixed of course - and verified that yes, these very people had changed their tunes now? But he didn't engage. Clearly, this man was a buffoon and a simpleton.”

I saw the final response from the buffoon. “TROLL!! GO AWAY!!!!111” with miscellaneous colourful phraseology inserted that I am skipping without loss of semantic content.

The same people who said DC was too dark are now complaining that Marvel has too many  quips.

Something in me snapped. That made no sense at all! How does he know it’s the same people? It was such a vacuous statement that was all the more dangerous because it had a vague ring of truth to it. But it was wrong. WRONG! Comment threads and colours whizzed by as I opened window after window - it was the same everywhere, as my friend had said. From travel to relationships to music to economics to porn, there was a John Smith in every comment thread.

A heavy weight settled in the pit of my stomach as the scale of the problem we were faced with struck me with stark clarity. 

“We need more people, “ I muttered under my breath. But my friend had gone back to fixing the world one comment thread at a time. He typed: 

The Internet, despite appearances, is not made of just one person.

Truth! I pulled a chair for myself, pulled up the comic book thread, and sat down to do God’s work.

Guns

This anecdote is a political allegory. To be a little more precise, this story is political and it’s an allegory. To be even more perfectly precise, an allegory is a representation of abstract principles by characters or figures. And the political bit is.. Well, you’ll see.

Anyway, this little tale is set in a parallel world where there are many, many people - way too many people - like in our world, but we’re only interested in four. (Why not seven billion, you ask? Because I’m the author and I like these four guys.)

The first is a man that is a fox. This manfoxthing is, at the commencement of this tale, engaged. He is in what appears to be a kitchen, and he is busy looking for something. His fox-sly face twists in a brief moment of befuddlement before it clears up in delight. A-ha! He pulls out a gun and proceeds to light the stove by shooting a bullet into it. This fox thing has a name: Mr. Metaphor.

In a different place, in a different time, but still in a kitchen, there’s another man. This two-legs is a non-descript looking workhand. He’s presumably hassled at the moment as an enormous frown creases his face. A naked side of toast is perched on one outstretched palm, while the owner of the palm is occupied looking for something. Like his sly friend from one scene past, he too finds what’s he’s looking for, and what he’s looking for is a gun, more specifically a Colt. He proceeds to use the muzzle of the Colt to scoop out a healthy chunk of butter from an open glass jar, and slowly and carefully apply it to the side of toast. This man is of Greek extraction presumably, because his name is Synecdoche.

I guess you’d say that this anecdote has a running motif - that of a kitchen - and you’d be right, because the third protagonist in this political allegory (never forget!) is also standing around in a kitchen. This person though is a woman, and before the traditionalists among you exult seeing a woman in a kitchen making a sandwich, this woman is somewhat incongruous as she’s a suit, and she’s most certainly not making a sandwich. What she seems to be trying to do is reduce a perfectly whole fruit into juice. She smiles and whips out a gun from a drawer. Placing a luscious red tomato in the sink, the suit takes careful aim at it and bullets it into healthy, if somewhat gunpowdery ,juice. This woman has a name too and her name is the seductive sounding Miss. Metonymy.

That about wraps up the tale. I say just about because it’s only the fourth protagonist that hasn’t been introduced yet, and he’s a smug bastard that only smarm-talks, but he’s a crucial piece of the puzzle here. The puzzle being of course that I haven’t made a lick of sense with the three kitchen scenes so far. Right, so the fourth man is called Mr. Irony and he’s actually a woman in a man’s clothing but that’s somewhat irrelevant to a surface reading.

Mr. Irony is a visitor from an alternate universe, where many things differ from the one that Mr. Metaphor et. al. live in, but only one that is of importance to this tale. In Mr. Irony’s strange little world, guns are apparently only used as weapons. There doesn’t exist a doppelganger for Mr. Metaphor in this incredibly perverse world that would use a gun to light a stove; nor is there an alter ego for Mr. Synecdoche that’d Colt his daily bread and butter. Needless to say, there isn’t a Miss. Metonymy-like that explosive-projectiles their morning smoothies.

Mr. Irony ponders the absurdity of using guns to do what our heroes do. Aren’t they designed to be weapons to kill? You have knives that chop vegetables and blenders that squish tomatoes into mushy pulp. Who would even compare guns to knives? Every time you see a gun you’re seeing a finely tuned life-taker. Every time you see a knife, you’re seeing something that’s an everyday kitchen tool. He smirks to himself and smugly makes a mental note to chalk off this universe as yet another universe that’s immeasurably more foolish than this own.

Now back home, Mr. Irony settles down in his couch after a long day of travel and proceeds to write a long and verbose letter to the Editor calling out the absurdity of banning guns in homes without also banning knives and blenders, that are, in his considered opinion, just as lethal.

Software In Time

“I write software.”

“Soft wear? Is this some new fangled form of clothing that does not itch like the devil in the summer heat? May I have some?”

It was at this point that the enormity of the task that I was facing struck me. Or I thought it did, but the enormity of my miscalculation would only be revealed much later of course.

“But how can you write clothes? Do you mean you draw patterns that tailors stitch?” he made a sharp flicking gesture with his hand, which I took to refer to the current fashion in stitch dancing.

“ ‘Tis a strange profession though, isn’t it? I have known a fair few artists in my time. All of them were rascals and layabouts, and all the women loved them, but they couldn’t draw the little wild tree in their backyard, let alone the beautiful pictures of God and his children that you see plastered over all those holy places. Well, couldn’t don’t mean shouldn’t, so they usually did end up drawing – perhaps that’s too strong a word, eh? – sketching smudgy impressions of the holy deity. Not the peach tree in the frontyard, and certainly not clothes. Mighty odd, you saying you draw clothes for a living. New fangled ones that don’t itch in the summer at that. Hmm”

At the end of that thorough but thoroughly inaccurate rant, the man looked directly and deep into my eyes, all but demanding an explanation for my unsatisfactory choice of profession.

A bead of sweat made its stately way down my finely sculpted temple.

“Right. Do you know what er.. come you tosser?”

“Tosser? Just because I’m showing an entirely innocent interest in your vocation doesn’t mean I want to take it away, sirree. There’s no need to run away with your tongue, I’m not going to pilfer your soft wares. Tosser?! I’m only – “

“I didn’t call you a tosser. I said cump-you-terse. Do you know what they are?”

The man looked perplexed for a moment, trying to work out if I’d only gone and repeated the insult in spite of the apology.

“No, sir.”

“They are er.. Boxes.”

“Boxes? You mean you’ve got boxes full of soft wear?”

In spite of myself, I brightened immediately. This conversation was looking up. Right? Maybe all those years of hard graft would be worth something. There’d be fame of course. But.. fame is always a function of other people’s desires. It’s something that’s given to you – a gift, alms to the needy if you will. I wanted more: something for myself, something that couldn’t be taken away on a whim. Maybe that’d still come, but that cliff yonder was starting to look remarkably attractive for an impromptu dive into the unknown beyond. Well, at least sorta unknown. I knew there’d be barrelsful of jagged rocks at the bottom to tear me into little pieces of carrion-to-be, but at least I didn’t know how many barrelsful there would be. Wait, didn’t I set off to brighten up a moment earlier? Yes. No jumping yet.

“Exactly!” said I in apparently spontaneous excitement, totally undermined of course by the heavily pregnant pause that’d preceded that exclamation.

Meanwhile, remember that brightening thing I had banged on about for a bit earlier? It quickly disappeared as I took stock of the rain-dark clouds that were rapidly scudding across my companion’s face. He looked, as you’d say, thunderous.

“I didn’t know you had boxes, sir. Not only do you appear to be an uncommonly stupid simpleton, but a liar and rogue to boot. If you had boxes and boxes of your magic fabric stowed away, why did you profess such unwarranted hesitation at my request to see one? I only wanted to see, I had no intention of –“

“Please. These boxes er.. only have the blueprints.”

“You mean the drawings? Why do you need boxes then? Are you such a bad artist that you fill up boxes and boxes with tripe before you come up with something good?” A genteel titter accompanied that rhetorical question.

I was fighting a losing battle with my ego at that point. Here I was, a brave pioneer trudging paths never before seen, bandying words with a crude peasant.

“Could you not talk for a minute? Or two? Or thirty? OK. So, a computer is a box which can add numbers. It can – “

“Did I tell you about my great grandmum? Fine old lady she was. Lost both her legs to the 'pox. Most of her mind followed until she could only remember her name when it snowed fifty kilometres away. But a fine old lady she was. She could add numbers too.”

I blanched graciously.

“Right. Hold on to your tongue for a minute, will you? Here’s a steel clamp to help you out. I’ve seen it used to tether elephants.”
“A computer is a box that can add numbers in magical ways. For example, I can use that box which adds numbers …“ I rooted around for the best metaphor to tie into the utterly useless conversation we’d had so far. “… to er.. model new kinds of fabric.”

“You mean the soft stuff.”

“Yeah, the ‘soft’ stuff.” Even my supremely unflappable demeanour was feeling the strain a little, and a touch of sarcasm crept into my otherwise perfectly considerate tone. “That day, when you’d missed reading the newspaper because you were off talking to yourself since you were so bored of talking to yourself, that was the day it was reported that scientists had figured out that manipulating numbers was all there was to the world.”

“Pardon me, sir, but if you’re referring to the day my dead grandmum appeared before me and told me in no uncertain terms that it was my destiny to not become a great man, to not become very wealthy, to not have a beautiful wife and to not be the happiest man in the world, your allusion is callous and .. and blatantly in disregard of – “

“No, not that day. The other one. Anyway, the point is that computers are boxes that add numbers, subtract numbers, and juggle them like, really, really fast. Take the fastest wagon you’ve ever seen. Now imagine it were about a thousand thousand thousand thousand times faster, that’s how long my pretty little box would take to multiply your age with your height with your weight with the temperature, and round off to the nearest hundred. But computers, computers aren’t smart. We need to get them to do what we want – and that is where I come in. I tell these boxes that they can only juggle numbers in certain ways, and I ensure they remember my instructions by occasionally rapping an object shaped like a bar of soap.”

The man, I’m glad to report, finally looked a shade weary of this exchange. His eyes scoured every nook of my visage, perhaps in search of mockery. I’m glad to report, again, that I passed the test.

“So, what you're saying is, you have a box that can add numbers, and you not only use this box to add numbers in magical ways to make blueprints of soft fabric that doesn’t itch in the summertime, but also to store blueprints of soft fabric that doesn’t itch in the summertime. What you do is tell the box to only make blueprints and none of those greenprints, and to get the point across, you use a bar of soap. And you don't have any of that fine fabric to share right now.” I nodded helpfully at every syllable.

With that, he gathered one very heavily muscled arm and cuffed me gently on the chin before going on his way. When I woke up a couple of days later, I wondered if I was wrong about passing the test after all. Right then I made a vow: I’d never travel in my time machine again.