Human Beings are No Longer Listening Carefully

One of the moments that sticks in my memory from graduate school is putting the SETI @ Home screen saver on a bunch of computers that weren’t mine.

The small room at the end of the hallway in the speech communication (now Rhetorical Studies) department in Sims Hall at Syracuse University had a few old computers in it for the use of graduate students. At the time I was obsessed with the SETI @ Home program, and wanted to crunch even more data than my little Mac laptop could handle. After about an hour, I saw all the screens in there lighting up with the distinctive red and yellow bars of potential alien signals.

Alien communication. Seemed like a pretty reasonable thing to have the computers research while nobody else was using them. I spent a long time looking at the screen as it did it’s work. On nearly every page the source of the potential alien chatter was listed: Arecibo Radio Observatory.

The loss of Arecibo Radio Observatory is nothing short of acute ear trauma for the human race. We have been listening carefully to deep space for decades. Now, the ability to listen has been destroyed. We are now alone again, surrounded by potential noise but unable to know it.

The communication breakdown is a symbolic marker of the global communication breakdown we’ve all experienced over these past few years as we all decided to ignore our capacity to hear, and instead try to broadcast our signals over the signals of others. Sabotage, not accident, has been the watchword when it comes to political communication, everyone forgetting that at some point they did not believe what they think now; someone had to persuade them that their view is right.

Arecibo was a powerful symbol for those of us who believe communication to be the most vital part of the human experience. Our ability to craft meaning for one another, and do it with a particular purpose in mind, makes us part of a large family of creatures on Earth. What separates our ability to do this is we can craft symbols that are unrelated to any material thing or extant property around us: We can send signals that only refer to other signals, those signals sent so long ago we don’t remember making them.

The symbolic power of the observatory was simple: We are listening. We want to hear you. We want to get what you are saying. The intensity of our concentrated listening to the heavens produced so much data that SETI created the screensaver software to take advantage of the resting CPU power that sat idle across the planet. We had listened so intensely that the information collected would take the best computers on Earth a generation to carefully consider what we had heard. Space that around a bunch of PCs and laptops idling away across the world, and you exponentially cut that time.

SETI @ Home and Arecibo combined in a way to symbolically present us at our best to ourselves. We are eager to hear whatever you might be saying out there. We are trying our best to hear you, and we are trying to understand it as best we can. We’re even questioning the silences as meaning something. It doesn’t get more generous than this in terms of communicative responsibility.

And yet, millions of us are capable of spending the time and money on such a project, and equally capable of mourning the loss of such a project. At the same time though, we are incredibly incapable of listening – really listening – to the variety of viewpoints that fellow human beings may hold.

The contradiction would be staggering if we weren’t familiar with human beings. Even when we are certain we learned a ton from listening carefully, we find it to be impossible to do with one another. Even more ironic: We all think we are doing it extremely well when what we are most likely doing is tuning one another out.

The collapse of Arecibo is a tragedy and horrible loss for human scientific knowledge, but perhaps we can take a moment to reflect on the symbolic collapse of our ability to listen to the most foreign, most alien creatures. They are, after all, moments to practice this all around us.

Annoyed

I absolutely hate the transition from spring to summer. My conversion into the enemy of my childhood self is complete. When I was younger this was my favorite moment of the year. Now it just means I don’t get to do any of the things I like to do for three months. And it’s a really bad time for me to encounter pet peeves, such as when journalists go to scientists to explain things that rhetoricians should be explaining.
I ran across this post the other day which I thought was really interesting. I find logical fallacies quite interesting, and this post seemed to promise that it would investigate not only the fallacy, but the origin of the phrase that we use for it.
The fallacy discussed is the Begging the Question fallacy, the only one that I’ve experienced, next to Argument from Ignorance, that students don’t really ever understand. It’s simply when you make your argument in a manner that assumes the more controversial and less agreed upon assumption within your claim has already been answered in your favor. Therefore, the opponents might “beg your pardon” on the way you dealt with that question.
I have no idea if this is historically accurate or what, but it’s just how I rationalized it in my head when teaching it. At least I’m better off than the New Yorker, who thinks it means “to raise a question.” So what do they do to solve their problem? They turn to a Computer and Information Science Professor to answer it.
This is my greatest pet peeve – how the media ignores rhetoricians, and how hard scientists are consulted to explain everything. Rhetoricians are notoriously bad about attracting the attention of the media as well, so the fault is on both sides. But if you are a rhetorician and you haven’t talked to your media relations department at your University about what you study and what you can comment upon, shame on you.
So they ask the computer scientist (who has this blog, which is amusing until you realize that the sediment of working with computer languages informs his perspective on what “good” natural human language should look like) what he thinks and he responds by first claiming that begging the question is the same as the circular argument (Sorry professor, easy trap to fall in to but more studying on your part would spot the difference). Then he responds this way, which I simply must quote at length because it’s too jaw-droopingly annoying to avoid:

In my opinion, those are both bad choices. If you use the phrase to mean “raise the question”, some pedants will silently dismiss you as a dunce, while others will complain loudly, thus distracting everyone else from whatever you wanted to say. If you complain about others’ “misuse”, you come across as an annoying pedant. And if you use the phrase to mean “assume the conclusion”, almost no one will understand you.

My recommendation: Never use the phrase yourself — use “assume the conclusion” or “raise the question”, depending on what you mean — and cultivate an attitude of serene detachment in the face of its use by others.

As we can plainly see, this is why a rhetorician should be called in to answer such a question. For the Computer Scientist, the audience is unteachable, unchangeable, static, and with unproblematic and impossible to break ties to their understanding of the term. His solution is to “zen out” somehow about the words when they are misused. A quick check of the rest of his blog indicates just how easy that is to do – most every entry is about an annoying practice of language that is either worth our scorn or our laughter. This representative anecdote, in Burkean terms, shows us the limits of using any science – be it computer science, psychology, or any other go-to science for explaining “correct” use of language. The rhetorical moment of being able to trump your opponent, or broaden the audience’s understanding is lost because “nobody will understand you.”
That might work for computer languages, but identifying question begging, explaining it succinctly, and then using it as an argument itself as to why the opposition shouldn’t be accepted is a powerful rhetorical move that just might work in a situation or two. Cultivating the ability to explain difficult, old, and complex ideas related to how we use language can boost one’s ethos and improve the audience’s appetite for looking a bit deeper into fallacies.
Of course, I agree with our noble computer scientist that adaptation to audience is vital. But at what point does it become pandering? At what point is the ethical duty to try to push that audience to richer understanding lost? I suppose for a computer scientist it makes sense to “re-code” the language to get rid of the annoying, meaningless “memory call” command (wow I really don’t know enough about programming to write that last sentence). But for humans, language writes us. We didn’t invent language, we were born with it. We came into “being,” as humans, because of language. And that understanding is why scientific explanations of proper use of language will always be lacking.
We mold ourselves and each other with our words. This is what we lose when we crumble to the idea that “they just won’t get it.” It is good advice for getting a computer to do something though.

LOL Scientists

Someone wrote a book on the paranormal! Sadly though, the author of this article feels that it’s shocking to know that in the book these phenomena (ooooh? What? what??) are real.

It’s so funny and annoying at the same time when smart people approach a complex phenomenon – let’s say the paranormal and the realm of the psychic – and then conclude something totally beside the point. Well, beside any sort of interesting point that we humans could do something with.

Please answer me this question: Why do all of our supposedly most insightful investigations feel that announcing that something is “real” or “really works” is a conclusion?
What about its implication, meaning, role in the social, cultural, political? What about it as a phenomenon and what it says about identity, humanity, the other, the economic? Wasn’t your investigation started because the phenomenon, as such, existed? Isn’t that “real?”
I just don’t understand how anyone can be satisfied with the claim “it’s really real” being synonymous with insight.
But then again, I don’t understand why the tools of scientific investigation (objectivity, experimentation) have been globalized to the point where one has difficulty imagining an alternative way of “finding out” that would be considered legitimate.