As long time readers know, I had a battery of VCRs that allowed me to sample a wide variety of programs in minimal time. I recently reduced the time, while increasing the quality, by upgrading my entire system to Tivo. Tivos allow me to watch a program at five different speeds. I usually know when a program will interest me in the first five minutes (no ads). If I'm mildly interested, I can take in an hour's program in about ten minutes. Some, however, I watch the full forty-two minutes. A recent MTV True Life story, I'm a Reality TV Star, was one that rated watching. Reality shows, of course, are drastically edited to tell a particular story and show people in a particular light. If a producer's got the hots for a girl, the girl's going to shine. If the director doesn't like someone, he'll become a villain. It's supposed to be entertainment. However, some of the characters have such strong personalities, elicit such strong group support or enmity, they stand out. The producers are looking for people like these because they are entertaining, and there's little that can be done to hide their persona. If someone's a drunken slut, she's a drunken slut whether on camera or off. If someone's uncontrollably crazy, totally outlandish, off the charts, he'll be the same on or off camera. Or at least, so I thought.
True Life is a little different reality show. It tries to carve out a slice of life by taking three of four people involved in the life and following them throughout their trials and tribulation. It's themes range from the mundane, I Took a Summer Beach Share, designed so the viewer can see plenty of skin shots, to I Have an Eating Disorder, a truly disconcerting show. I'm a Reality TV Star amazed me. I knew that participants in reality shows tried to milk their fifteen minutes of fame, but I had no idea how reality shows could take over a person's life. Of the three people followed in the show, I wasn't familiar with one, although his course in life was exceedingly strange. A tax accountant, he joined the Survivor cast to get out of the grind, and got knocked off pretty early in the competition. Unfazed, he went to Hollywood, took a job waiting tables and, acting as his own agent, started getting himself invited to Red Carpet affairs. He did this by calling the promoter, saying he was an agent representing so and so, himself, of course, and praising his potential to the sky. He then gets invitations, gets some beautiful lady to accompany him, easy because it's a glitzy photographed event, and then revels in the free food, beer, and advances his career as best he can. I guess it might be fun, but really, tick, tick, tick. Besides, the girls never spend time with him outside the parties.
I was pretty familiar with the other two people because they are all over the reality scene, appearing in a variety reality programs. Tonya, probably one of the most disliked figures, is a beautiful young lady who suffers from some rare physical problem that requires expensive treatments. The producers on her first show highlighted this, but somehow turned it into a mental problem (why anyone would risk being misrepresented for fifteen minutes of fame eludes me). She therefore became crazy Tonya. Jonny Fairplay, a name he made up, is probably the most famous liar on reality TV. He won a reward on Survivor by claiming he'd just got news his grandmother, who'd raised him, passed away. He ends up getting kicked off most of the reality programs he's on, and I don't mean losing by the procedures, I mean the producers kicking him off, because he's an unrepentant drunk who'll pick a fight with anyone and anything when he's under the influence, go into uncontrollable rages, the full nine yards. He even had a torrid affair with Tonya on one rather dismal reality show that involved making a horrid movie the E channel debuted.
What I found extremely interesting from watching the True Life program is that neither Jonny nor Tonya were, and in the case of Tonya, are, the persona they are constantly depicted to be. Jonny had a stable job as an art appraiser before going on Survivor. His drinking was under control. When he became a reality TV star, the drinking started, and with good reason. In addition to making money on reality stints, he's invited to bars to sign autographs. I'll tell you how much the bars pay after I describe Tonya. In addition, Jonny has a much greater advantage with the girls than the tax accountant. He's sleeping around like a movie star, with a dual girl relationship, in short, a continuous threesome, with one starlet and one of the contestants on the reality program, America's Top Model (which you'd think would be watchable, but isn't). He has no intention of abandoning the life of free drinks and sex that his fifteen minutes of fame have served him.
Opposite to Jonny, Tonya entered her first reality show with a stable relationship, which broke up with her fifteen minutes of fame. Crazy she isn't, in fact, she's quite levelheaded. She is now in another stable relationship, but, like Jonny, she makes money on reality TV, and she makes appearances at bars and other venues all around the country where she's mobbed. She has people asking to have their photograph taken with her as she waits for planes. Here's the rub for Jonny and for Tonya. These appearances, get this, cause I can't seem to grasp it, net them up to $2,500 per event, and by net I mean, all expenses paid. At two or three a week, it's easy to see the cash register go ka-ching enough times to trap the beneficiaries in the life style. Unlike the tax accountant, who has assumed no persona (unless acting as your own agent could be considered a persona), Jonny doesn't want to continue being a drunken rage filled idiot while Tonya doesn't want to continue playing the role of the crazy, promiscuous bitch. The problem is, if they want the money, they have to continue to fit in the persona reality shows have created for them. While for Tonya, it might just be tiresome acting, Jonny's lifestyle is eventually going to lead to death or worse. Both were clearly ashamed of what they were doing, but at the end of the program, all efforts at change failed and they continued on in their persona. In fact, it's just been reported that TNT Wrestling paid Jonny $300,000 for a forty minute stint at a promotional. Tonya's competing for $500,000 on another reality program.
Practicing empirical scientists go through something like the reality TV star grind. After all, contestants for reality programs have stars in their eyes. They want to get in front of the camera, be seen by the public, make something of themselves they are not. Youngsters have the same urge when it comes to science. The world is mysterious, full of hidden wonders, and finding out about it becomes a goal. Empirical science is set up like a reality program. People compete for rewards, and winners go on to become famous, garnering riches and honors. But, just like reality TV, which, with hundreds of programs chewing up contestants, produces relatively few stars (I'm not familiar with her, but I understand that one of the hosts of the women's gabfest, The View, was a reality star contestant from somewhere), the vast multitude of contestants sink back into routine lives of jobs grinding out paychecks to support themselves.
That's the end road for the multitude of practicing empirical scientists. How many practicing empirical scientists are there? I don't have any idea, I haven't been able to find out, and therefore I suspect that the number of practicing empirical scientists is unknown. I know from personal experience that a lot of people with engineering degrees of one sort of another are practicing empirical scientists. Every industry employs not only engineering graduates, but math graduates, and graduates in any number of fields. People in semi-professional jobs can take courses to upgrade their skills to become laboratory workers, in effect, practicing empirical scientists. Some who set out to be world famous theorists downgrade to simple practice, and the number of fields, and the number of people in the field collecting data, is legion. In short, there are millions and millions of people who make a living from practicing empirical science.
These people, however, do not have much say in the theoretical restrictions that control their thinking. Empirical science is basically taught in metes and bounds. For those enjoying a little more youth than me, metes and bounds are the way they measured real estate in the old days (although as late as the fifties, when I did title searches, I had deeds describing property in chains, an eightieth of a mile). Metes and bounds empirical science is simply that, prospective recruits are herded into classrooms or lecture halls, told what the dogma is, then taught certain skills in the real world that, in effect, turns them into engineers, people who fiddle with reality in an attempt to change it. Or they become project oriented, involved in any one of empirical science's gigantic engineering schemes that employ thousands, consume billions, and produce zilch. See column 22-06.
During their careers, practicing empirical scientists attend many conferences and read many journals to keep updated on the dogma, but very few have anything to do with the maintenance, preservation, or alteration of that dogma. That function is left in the hands of a relative few empirical scientists who generally fall under the heading of theorists, and can generally be found molding away in high salaried university posts, usually in conjunction with the government. These people have been educated in various fields laid out by the metes and bounds of empirical science, and they have received their positions only after long years of slavishly learning what dead men who knew nothing thought up. The only way they can keep their positions is to continue to repeat what they learned by rote, and come up with creative ideas to save the dead men's theories when reality shows them to be clearly wrong, never for a minute allowing the dead men's theories to be touched. Saving the theory is just another word for theory falsification, but being able to falsify a theory demonstrates its not a valid theory, so they make up a euphuism, saving the theory, in its place, claiming that all opposing theories are falsifiable. Then there are the drones who labor to discredit any and all who would dispute the dead men's theories with reality. These nut jobs call themselves skeptics, but real skeptics are skeptical of the status quo, not of new discoveries that challenge the status quo.
As a quick example, let me go back to our daunting reporter at the South Pole we met in column 25-06. He's really getting it out there because I found a new article by him in a different magazine. In this article, he's explaining why all the money we spend there is well spent. He's talking about one of the South Pole Stations functions, the Quiet Sector, where the Earth Science and Seismological Observatory is located. Saying the centers detectors are connected to 120 seismic detectors and centers around the world, he then goes on to say, if "your Aunt Ethel drops an egg on her kitchen floor, we hear it." I know he can be excused for repeating what he was told by some practicing empirical scientist working at the Observatory (an inflated name, by the way, for a process designed to detect Earthquakes), but you have to believe the practicing empirical science believed what he said because that's what he had been told. Practicing empirical scientists use equipment that is designed to detect things. Practicing empirical scientists don't know the theory behind the equipment. They've just been taught that this results in that. The knowledge that this results in that comes from prior experimental testing of the equipment by other practicing empirical scientists. See the discussion of the Geiger counter in column 13-06. The equipment is going to detect what it is designed to detect, but it is the theoreticians that dictate what the equipment is detecting. The whole cold fusion, now table fusion, controversy, is based on a theoretical determination of what's being detected. See column 52-05.
But the correspondent, as well as the practicing empirical scientist that fed him the line, should know, by simple common sense, how nonsensical the statement, that a piece of equipment on the South Pole can detect a dropped egg in Kansas, is. If that were the case, it could also detect the much more forceful footfalls, which means that it couldn't detect anything, because there's probably about a billion footfalls a second going on around the world, and the noise would drown out the detection of the dropped egg in the unlikely event the egg actually could be detected. But that's empirical science for you. It doesn't want, and won't tolerate, dissent. The correspondent isn't going to tell the practicing empirical scientist that what he's saying is impossible because he'll never get any more copy, and the practicing empirical scientist can't disagree unless he wants to be on the next flight out six months hence.
This structure, a minority dictating to the vast majority, using enforcers, reflects the world that existed when empirical science was invented. That world was feudal, with all authority emanating from the top, and the vast herd expected to be blind followers, else they ended up in dungeons where they were slowly mutilated to death. Newton, the founder of empirical science, is an example, if not of a feudal lord, a dictator who obtained his absolute power from a feudal lord. When Lord Montague, his niece's lover, engineered his takeover of The Royal Society, the takeover was absolute. Newton's pronouncements were not virtually law, they were law. He, and all the lawmakers that followed him, were ardent believers in a maker of the laws, a maker that modern theoreticians have rejected (what does the existence or nonexistence of a lawmaker have to do with the effectiveness of our technology) but worse, they knew less than today's average advanced placement high school graduate about anything. That's why the lawmakers (the men, not the deity, because there are no laws operating the universe) are so defensive. They are defending a bunch of made-up stuff they learned by rote and believe to their very cores, just as the Pope believes in Catholicism to his very core.
The feudal system of course, disappeared in the West as the industrial revolution and the invention of production produced widespread prosperity. The prosperous have more time on their hands, time that only the privileged few had in a feudal society. One of the things that fill a person's mind when they have time on their hands is the desire to have a hand in their destiny, which means a need to have a political say. This demand, to take part in the governance of their country, led feudal societies to gradually (or sometimes, not so gradually) evolve, with the most prosperous ones evolving democracies where the people elected their leader. The feudal model evolved into the democratic model.
The rulers of the feudal world fought change tooth and nail, but the opposition was too great. The rulers at the top of the empirical science world have effectively maintained control of the feudal model in the face of the growing number of practicing empirical scientists prosperity requires. Although practicing empirical scientists vastly outnumber the ruling elite of feudal empirical science, they do nothing. The feudal leaders were powerless in the face of a growing prosperous middle class in spite of attempting to take away their prosperity with taxes and regulations. Not so with the feudal empirical rulers. In fact, the prosperity that production produced created the class of practicing empirical scientists, and it provides them with lavish benefits. By requiring certificates of admittance for practicing empirical scientists, the feudal empirical elite can take away those benefits simply by decertifying practicing empirical scientists, then destroying their reputations.
While our tax accountant will always be able to quit his waiting job, abandon promoting himself, and go back to tax accounting where monetary benefits await, Jonny Fairplay and Tonya are stuck in their persona. They are ashamed of it, but driven by need to maintain it.
Unfortunately, practicing empirical scientists are in the same fix, with one exception. They do not realize they are living out a persona, are immersed in a delusional bubble of fantasy, made-up dogma, see column 20-06, so maybe they shouldn't be ashamed.
I disagree. The defects in the empirical model of the world are so great, so obvious, and so inconsistent, and the consequences of not getting it right, a perverted technology that doesn't reflect reality, so great, they should be ashamed.
We should be ashamed, too. It's our neck on the chopping block.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com