Birds Aren't Real

Facts, fictions, fibs and fables - MET - Chapter 62

Apr 12, 2024

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them.

Hypatia

Hypatia, born c. 360 CE, was a Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, then part of the Eastern Roman Empire. She was murdered by a mob of Christians in 415 AD for questioning both the plausibility and the historical authenticity of their creed.

1,609 years later, as the pain and tragedies continue, nothing appears to have changed in the nature of human insensibility.

Here, then, to fables.

Every advance in every field of human understanding started off as a notion, an intuition, a compulsion, an idea, a hypothesis or a theory. This is as true of the advances in the softer domains of art, literature, music, religion, morality and social governance as it is of the empirical domains of mathematics, astronomy, technology, medicine, physics, chemistry, engineering and so on.

The difference is that the former are deemed to be true when despite — or just as often because of — evidence to the contrary they are felt to be true. From there it’s a hop and a skip to believing them to be true.

This is the essence of fideism, the belief that reason has no place in discovering theological truths. It was summed up most notably by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason: “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”

Theories in the harder domains are deemed to be true only when those inklings of incipient ideas, gut-feelings, suspicions or formal hypotheses are proven to be true by the scientific method. Then they qualify as knowledge.

Wikipedia describes it thus:

The scientific method involves careful observation coupled with rigorous scepticism, because cognitive assumptions can distort the interpretation of the observation. Scientific inquiry includes creating a hypothesis through inductive reasoning, testing it through experiments and statistical analysis, and adjusting or discarding the hypothesis based on the results.

Given that only the tiniest fraction of the global population is actively engaged in the pursuit of mathematical, biological and scientific certainties, we are left with over eight billion people who make up their minds the way the Asaro people do.

Knowledge is only a rumour until it lives in the muscle.

Saying of the Asaro tribe of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea

That would probably include you and me.

My interest in this isn’t motivated by a whimsical fancy that the fanatical fideists and the nationalist, supremacist and racist zealots among them who are responsible for all the hurt and horrors of the world will read this and see reason. It’s inspired by Karl Popper and a niggling feeling that conspiracy theories are no less valuable in their intent and purpose than the theories that led to the harnessing of electricity, the development of monoclonal antibodies, and the invention of the toothbrush.

Sir Karl Raimund Popper (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian–British philosopher, academic and social commentator who turned the academic world on its head by rejecting the classical inductivist views on the scientific method in favour of what he called “empirical falsification”. It went like this:

Logically, no number of positive outcomes at the level of experimental testing can confirm a scientific theory, but a single counterexample is logically decisive; it shows the theory, from which the implication is derived, to be false. Popper's account of the logical asymmetry between verification and falsifiability lies at the heart of his philosophy of science. It also inspired him to take falsifiability as his criterion of demarcation between what is, and is not, genuinely scientific: a theory should be considered scientific if, and only if, it is falsifiable.

Wikipedia

So the statement “All swans are white” cannot be proved. It can only be disproved by finding a black swan. Or a swan of any colour other than white.

Where it gets interesting, in the case of swans, is that if it turned out to be practically and logistically impossible to identify the colour of every swan on the planet or in the known universe, the statement “All swans are white” could not be considered scientifically accurate.

In Popper’s terms, a theory that cannot be falsified can’t be true, scientifically speaking. This is a high bar. And its implications lead down all manner of epistemic and philosophical rabbit-holes from which there’s no coming back with your common sense still intact.

Especially in the case of conspiracy theories.

The scientific community adjusted to Popper with characteristic equanimity. While total verifiability remains the Holy Grail of the scientific method, the emphasis of research shifted in most cases to assessing the mathematical probability of something being true, which, for instance, is the measure by which the efficacy of a new drug is assessed in clinical trials. Any result higher than a fifty percent likelihood of it working in actual human patients is often regarded as quite enough to roll out a barrel of breakthrough blockbusters. Oxycontin comes to mind.

It’s the money, honey.

For conspiracy theorists and those of us who pay any attention to them at all, the implications of Popper’s paradigm are as profound as they are disturbing.

A conspiracy theory, like a scientific hypothesis, is credible only if it is inherently falsifiable. To be true, in other words, it must be capable of being tested and proven wrong. This is precisely how and why conspiracy theories differ from religions and other beliefs founded on faith and faith alone. Religious beliefs and all other quasi-mystical theories are inherently incredible in these terms. Which isn’t to say that all non-mystical, real-world conspiracy theories are true, but only — from a scientific perspective — that they could proven to be true because most of them are so readily falsifiable.

Even more worryingly, if any given news report (together with the interpretation and significance given to it by its broadcaster or publisher) cannot be falsified, it cannot be accepted uncritically as true.

Right now, caught up as we all are in the epistemic bun-fight that makes it daily more difficult to discern the incredible from the unbelievable, Popper’s shift in perspective from the verifiable to the falsifiable is decisive.

It is no longer the responsibility of the conspiracy theorists to verify their claims. They can make up the weirdest shit in the world. They always have done and they always will. And we’ve always had the right to suck it and see.

The onus is now on the traditional media, with all their reach and their resources, to prove that their version of history, past and present, isn’t only verifiable but, much more importantly, that it’s inherently falsifiable.

This isn't as abstruse or trivial as it sounds. The BBC recently spent a lot of money to come up with a thing called Verify to reassure us that they aren’t just making it up as they go along. It’s a cool tool, but it entirely misses the Popperian point.

Claiming that something is verifiably true is the precise opposite of proving that it can be falsified. Indeed, the more desperately it attempts to reassure us of the verifiability of this or that claim, the more likely we are to suspect that an ulterior interpretation is lurking behind the surface of the screen.

Birds Aren’t Real is a running joke. It was invented one whimsical moment in 2017 by Peter McIndoe, a psychology student at the University of Arkansas. His point was to take the piss out of the kind of conspiracy theories that feed the anger and angst of the Alt-Right. He tells the nutters who sign up to the madness of it that the movement has been around for fifty years since the “deep state” had destroyed all the birds in the USA and replaced them with little, feathered surveillance drones that keep track of the moves of every US citizen.

They believe him. Which is how and why it went viral.

I mention this only to underline the increasingly hazy distinction between faith and reason at the deep end of humanity’s very deep pool of stupidity. Falsifying the idea that birds aren’t real would be as simple as scraping the splattered blood, bones and brains of a mossie or a dark-eyed junco off the windscreen of your F-350 and observing the absence of tiny wires, wheels and widgets among them.

Just as in every other aspect of epistemological uncertainty, it’s faith and faith alone that prevents the hard-core believers from looking into the mess they’ve made.

This was Time Magazine’s Top Ten Conspiracy Theories before COVID added several interesting hallucinogens:

The JFK Assassination
9/11 Cover-Up
Area 51 and the Aliens
Paul Is Dead
Secret Societies Control the World
The Moon Landings Were Faked
Jesus and Mary Magdalene
Holocaust Revisionism
The CIA and AIDS
The Reptilian Elite

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