So I just saw a commenter complaining about how there’s a national epidemic of our boys having their penises stolen by Ritalin. I see people saying this all the time, so I figured I might as well look and see if it’s true.

According to the CDC, about 4% of boys aged 4-17 are medicated for ADHD. This is a big country, so that’s a lot of boys; it’s still a pretty trifling rate, though, and that’s what matters. Assuming a bell curve for displays of rowdiness, and assuming that only the most rowdy are medicated, then we’re likely several standard deviations from the mean before we get into pill-popping territory. The kids getting drugged are, like, the Mensa of misbehavior.

When you see the actual numbers and ignore the cultural frenzy, it looks like there’s probably not a problem at all.[1] It works out to about one kid per classroom; can you recall ever being in a K-12 class that didn’t have at least one disruptive asshole who couldn’t control himself?[2]

So people shoot their mouths off about this all the time, but none of them put in the 15 seconds with the Google that it takes to find the actual facts. Why? For the love of zombie Jebus, why? It ain’t hard, and it doesn’t require any fancy info-retrieval skills–I typed in adhd rates in children and got exactly what I wanted; hell, Google helped me out by auto-suggesting half the query.

People could do it easily, if it ever occurred to them to do it. Is the problem that they think the knowledge they hold must be true, so it’s not worth verifying?

[1] This ignores the problem of heterogeneity, in which there could easily be some districts with abusive, over-prescriptive policies. Those would be local problems, though, and the rhetoric always suggests a national problem. Even taking that into account, it’s interesting to look at the top chart and notice that the most heavily-diagnosed, heavily-prescribed states are poor and Southern. I have a fact-free suspicion why this may be so, but I’d be interested in seeing your theories first.

[2] Disruptive assholes who can control themselves are something else entirely, and I like to think we added a lot to the classroom discourse.

There’s a great big bolus lodged in my throat.

It started growing three or so weeks ago, has been swelling since, and by today it’s threatening to rip my neck wide open.

Problem is, it’s so big that it won’t slide down the natural channels into my fingers.

(Yeah, my metaphorical throat is connected to my literal fingers. Anatomy gets weird when you lean on poor metaphors.)

The words just won’t come, because there are so many of them, and because the heart of the bolus isn’t a single idea but a whole tangled memeplex; to try to write on one little bit necessitates both some unravelling and some exposition on another strand, which leads to another, and more, and the drain gets all clogged up again before I’m even started.

It’s all mushed together: Why I’m no longer a bibliophile. Why Stanley Fish was right, and why he was even righter when he pointed out why his commenters–especially the ones sort of sympathetic toward what they thought he was getting at–were wrong. Why…OK, maybe this is the kernel at the heart of the bolus. Let’s try it.

Why people are unable to distinguish between an institution and the core around which that institution has grown. Worse: It’s not that they’re unable to distinguish, it’s that they don’t realize the institution is even really there. Ask them and they’ll say, “Yeah, of course, institution. Of course it’s there, what’re’ya, blind?” But then they’ll go on arguing and acting and demonstrating a complete lack of knowledge of what that institution is, and what it does, and why defenses of the core are completely irrelevant to their defenses of the institution. And but–here’s the sticky part–because they’re insensate concerning the actual institution, and because they know the institution exists, they don’t realize that the institution is something other than just the handmaidens of the core. So they stridently defend the institution with arguments that make no sense, because the arguments are pitched toward defending the core, which–here’s the key bit–is guaranteed to continue every bit as healthily without the institution that has grown up about it. Because the institution was successful in its promotion and protection of the core, and after its success it started finding other purposes toward which to put itself.

Yeah, see what I mean? That’s going to need some unpacking. And probably some changing of terms. And I’m going to go ahead and post this, hoping to trick myself into unraveling later. Think of “the core” as the objects of humanistic study and “the institution” as humanities departments, and maybe you’ll get a heads up on where I’m heading with this.

Looks like the Malkinites et al. are taking their opposition to the stimulus plan to the streets, sort of. That in itself isn’t an awful thing; I disagree with them, but nonviolent direct action is a valid and respectable means of expressing mass discontent. Problem is, they’re calling their loose network of streetcorner prostests the Tea Party movement. (Linking to Pandagon not just because Michelle Malkin makes me ill but also because there are several useful links in the post.)

See, here’s the thing: That famous Tea Party they’re using to lend spiritual authority and intellectual heft to their protests? That wasn’t a bunch of people standing around shouting slogans and waving signs. That wasn’t a group of guys who wrote sternly-worded pamphlets. What it was, was a bunch of people risking serious consequences in order to smash shit up. The real Tea Partiers were the Black Bloc of their day, antiauthoritarian radicals who destroyed other people’s property in order to make their point.

To put it very mildly, I suspect the stimulus protesters would not look too kindly on such activities, or on the kind of people who commit them.

(Should I bother to mention that the whole point of the original Tea Party was a protest against the British lowering taxes? Again, I think the stimulus protesters would be less than sympathetic toward the old-school Tea Partiers’ motives.)

I really, really don’t know what to make of these people.

(Simplified for comprehension.)

I’m on an intercampus subcommittee putting together a redesign proposal for the shared website. The first phase of our project was to design a new search interface and submit that to the larger committee.

Six weeks ago we finalized our proposal for a new search interface. One month ago we submitted our proposal for a new search interface. The larger committee has not yet met again, so it has not evaluated our proposal, and so we have not received feedback.

This is the subcommittee’s second meeting in two weeks. At both meetings, we have done nothing but discuss…ideas for the proposal for a new search interface. Which we have already submitted, and so can’t change. But that’s still the only thing we’ve been talking about.

Yikes, what a title.

Anyway, in a comment thread over at Slacktivist, somebody analogized the speed-of-sound barrier and the speed-of-light barrier, saying that the former was a limit that people thought we couldn’t break and that it has been replaced by the latter, but, hey, they were wrong before so who knows?

Somebody else piped in and said that very common analogy always gets his goat, because the sound barrier and the (for lack of a better term) light barrier are fundamentally unalike. The former was a concern over the human body’s ability to withstand the mechanical forces of faster-than-sound travel, and it was never universally held; the latter is a concern over the fundamental nature of being and is pretty much a dead cert. It’s like comparing apples and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

So far so good. The first poster can be forgiven making use of a cliched-but-inappropriate analogy, but then instead of accepting the (presumably) new-to-him information he tried to defend himself:

Considering that it’s just a neat sounding analogy for [the idea that Biblical proscriptions are more like suggestions], I don’t see that as a problem. The fact that we look at the speed of light right now and say that we’ll never be able to exceed it is part of the point of the corollary and arguing mechanics is focusing on the tip of the finger instead of the moon.

Didja see that last bit there, the bit about fingers and moons? That’s the dead giveaway, the bit that strongly suggests he thinks he has some philosophical standing because he read that motorcycle maintenance book and some other pop-philosophy and pop-zen stuff he picked up at Barnes & Noble’s. The finger-moon bit is the excuse they’ve learned that allows them to, say, make analogies because they sound cool rather than because the things being compared share some intrinsic quality yet can be juxtaposed in an illuminating way.

My hate-on doesn’t come from the original poster’s refusal to back away from his massive analogy fail, it comes from the very common mindset that allows such fails to happen and then celebrates them. Making and evaluating an argument’s propositions based on surface appearances is no way to go about things, because it allows for enough stretching and squishing and special-appealing that you can build a valid argument for anything and then claim that it’s sound. It’s not just an abandonment of rigor, but an outright denial of its purpose.

Look, the whole point of building arguments is to use propositions that are demonstrably true to establish the otherwise-indemonstrable truth of other propositions. To do this, you don’t just have to be logical, you also have to be honest and rigorous. You have to make sure the truths you’re claiming as established are both demonstrable and relevant. You have to be aware that homonyms exist, so you don’t use two different types of quality represented by a single word as a single quality. That’s, like, totally basic stuff, and it’s also stuff that’s a whole fucking lot more complicated and difficult than it looks like it’d be.

Once the non-rigorous pseudo-argumentation becomes popularized, the newbie likely won’t spot the difference between it and the real thing. And once that happens, hucksters like Robert Anton Wilson can pull out some syllogisms not dissimilar to the “QED: Ray Charles is God” joke to “prove” that logic itself is fundamentally flawed. If you try to point out where they’re going wrong, they’ll just lean on the finger-moon bit and claim you’re missing the point.

(If they happen to pick up a popular “explanation” of quantum physics along with their popular philosophy, then they’re truly lost to us.)

Have you tried Ben & Jerry’s Creme Brulee ice cream? If you haven’t, don’t. It’s dangerous stuff. It really doesn’t much taste like creme brulee, but it does taste like pure yummy yummy tastiness.

If unicorn tears were ice cream, this is what they’d taste like.

It feels like somebody poked every millimeter of my gumline with a sharp metal pick.

Oh, wait.

From a ~16-year-old girl to her phone: “We’re having something called stir fry for dinner. Have you ever heard of that?”

Ah, Rolla. Will you never cease to amaze me?

I’m already dreading lunch.

We’re going to be in an all-day committee work session, and we’re ordering in pizza.

Now, here’s something you don’t know: There are three common pizza toppings I can’t eat. Onions and peppers upset my stomach, sometimes violently so, and the texture of big chunks of tomato makes me gag (even worse when there’s a pool of seed-filled tomato slime underneath).

I mentioned the peppers and onions yesterday, and the ribbing began. There’s something in the midwestern mindset that finds it cruelly hilarious when someone doesn’t like something that most people do like, or when someone likes something that most people don’t like. A little teasing is fine, or at least acceptable, but one of my coworkers likes to make a big deal out of it. A big, annoying, barbed, unrelenting deal.

It was decided we’ll have two pizzas, one with meat and peppers and onions, and one either margherite or Greek. I realized then that I’d forgotten to mention the tomato thing, and people were already clearly exasperated (no, really) by my not liking peppers or onions. The level of “play along to get along” can get kind of ridiculous around here.

So there will be pizza, and I will be unable to eat any of it. And I will be mocked for not eating any of it, and the mockery will likely persist for at least a couple of days.

I’m already dreading lunch.

An altercation seems to be arising over a very trivial matter. This is not, alas, unusual.

As I left for lunch, I realized from whence this altercation might stem: Some of my colleagues appear to believe that the way to clarify a set of instructions is to add more instructions.

This, as a general principle, is just wrong. The way to clarify a set of instructions is to locate the source of inclarity, determine how the issue could be more clear, and then scrap the existing instructions and write a new set. You may be able to use the scrapped instructions as a model and maybe even a framework, but if the lack of clarity is real and serious then you almost certainly have a structural problem on your hands. The more serious the clarity problem, the closer to scratch you’ll need to start.

(Of course, one of the specific criticisms under consideration is the complaint that the reviewer got confused by all the outgoing links on a page with no outgoing links. I’m not sure how to deal with that one, but it should give you some idea of what I’m working with.)