Questioning the Unknown

The bottom shelf of the bookcase in my living room is an interesting one. Above it, on the top shelf, I have my Song of Ice and Fire books, among others, and below that, Dune. As we make our way further down the shelf we see more sci-fi and fantasy novels, a complete collection of Calvin and Hobbes comics, and, to my eternal shame, an overlarge number of Garfield books. Below them all, though, is the shelf that tells to any intrepid explorer the story of my youth as a paranormal afficionado.

Bear in mind I have never in my life put any credence whatsoever in alternative medicine, psychic powers, or the more generally harmful of the fraudulent pseudosciences. As a kid, though, my flights of fancy seriously entertained ideas of Bigfeets, aliens, ghosties, Jersey Devils, and world-spanning conspiracies of silence.

The bottom shelf of my living room bookcase is accordingly full of titles like The Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unsolved, Mysteries of the Unknown, and The X-Files Guide to the Unexplained volumes one and two. Looking at them today in a brief moment of reminiscence I questioned for the first time the constant use of words like "mystery," "enigma," and various words prefixed with "un" to refer to paranormal nonsense.

I mean, none of these things are exactly "unknown." The fact that you're filling 200 pages of an oversized book with "information" about a sasquatch or a poltergeist would seem to belie the very title on the cover. Moreover, the subjects of these books are only "enigmatic" insofar as there are no real, hard facts about them. That does not, however, imply that they are mysteries to be solved. Sometimes when there's no evidence for something, that's because it isn't there.

So, then, whence come the "unsolved," "unexplained," and "unknown?"

Maybe it's a marketing ploy, but I can hardly believe that it is just a marketing ploy. There has to be some reason the publishers think that framing bullshit as mysterious and unexplained will move units. After ruminating on it for a while, I believe that these titles speak to the general level of scientific illiteracy in our culture.

Certainly the subject matter of books like these is both a result of and a contributor to scientific illiteracy. The people who "research" and write the books are ignorant of proper scientific methodology and so have ridiculously low standards when evaluating evidence for their pet claims. They often assume what they wish to prove and will simply never be convinced that their stance is incorrect. Like the best of pseudoscientists, though, they can mix it up with enough scientific-sounding parlance that the casual reader, himself ignorant of real science, becomes even more ignorant. Books like Mysteries of the Unexplained stand in the center of a really nasty setup involving people who don't know about science and people who spread their ignorance of it like plague rats.

I think that the titling of books like these, though, also has a lot to do with it. If the subject matter contributes to scientific illiteracy, then the big, bold words on the front, the sales pitch to the hapless moron in the "New Age" section of Borders, exploit it.

It's fairly obvious that many people regard science as this closed-off, ivory tower enterprise filled with poindexters and know-it-alls obsessed with their rightness. The "Science Doesn't Know Everything" bit of doggerel speaks to both people's ignorance of science as a self-correcting enterprise that doesn't claim to know nearly everything and to their strange assumption that science does indeed think it knows everything. Consequently, a certain type of person becomes angry at science for the presumption he assumes it makes and searches for things that science might not "know" about.

This type of person seems to love wonder, imagination, and mysteries, but, in a cursory (and perhaps pre-biased) look at science, has decided that it can't possibly contain these things, and even if it did, it's probably over his head and full of itself anyway. Instead, this person looks for his wonder elsewhere. He sees a book titled The Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unsolved and the rest is history.

Titles such as that seem to be a shameless attempt to exploit scientific illiteracy, and indeed a basic lack of reasoning skills. Most people, owing perhaps to Sherlock Holmes and/or CSI, think that anytime there is a claim that lacks evidence for its veracity, a mystery is afoot. Combine this with a complete ignorance of the many magestic enigmas that comprise most every field of modern science and you have a mind ready to purchase a book on giant ape-men who don't hunt, die, defecate, or otherwise have any noticeable effect on their ecosystem. Marketing empty, unsupported nonsense as "mysterious" is a shrewd move in a culture filled with folks who have never even heard the phrases "null hypothesis" or "burden of proof."

"Lack of evidence" is not the same as "unknown." In fact, in some cases, a lack of evidence can be demonstrated to mean "known lack of a causal phenomenon." To recap what's in that link: if someone tells you a nuclear bomb went off at location X, but there is a complete lack of devastation and radiation at location X and thus a complete lack of evidence for the explosion of a nuke, you can conclude pretty damn solidly that there was no nuke.

There's nothing mysterious or unexplained about cryptozoology. There's just a bunch of amateurs tromping about the woods looking for a creature that they assume exists based on some of the worst proof imaginable. The same basic claim covers ghost hunters, conspiracy theorists, and the rest of them. They see mysteries where there are none and sell that ignorance to others at fifteen bucks a pop.

Just because Bill says something and lacks evidence for it doesn't mean that Bill's claim is mysterious. Most of the time, I think you'll find that it just means that Bill is full of shit.