No Fooling

 "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool." - Richard Feynman 

It's humbling to admit how easy we are to fool. Give a hypnotist ten minutes and he can have a crowd of people clucking like chickens. 

The ubiquitous marketing we encounter is always trying to fool us, to get us to buy things we may or may not need and believe things that are or aren't true. It's smoke and mirrors, bullshit and manipulation, the lipstick on the pig.

Part of the problem is that basic human knowledge depends on a narrative, language, or vocabulary to perceive the world. The visual cortex in our brains gets only ten percent of its nerves from data (the optic nerve). The rest is connected to language and memory. Even sight requires a vocabulary, and is susceptible to optical illusions.

Another source of deception is supernormal stimulus--something like buggy biological software. Here's a concise introduction to the concept in a comic by Stuart McMillan. 

Our bodies navigate the world with many algorithms. For example, if you stand up after lying down, your heart will (automatically) start pumping harder to make sure your blood pressure to your brain doesn't decline enough to make you faint. This kind of "software" manages everything from respiration to reproduction, and like all software, is prone to defects--bugs.

Refined sugar takes advantage of one such bug. You can drink one of those gigantic sugary drinks all day long and the usual mechanisms that tell you that you've had enough calories for now simply don't work. McMillan notes such bugs are not exclusive to humans--animals have them too--and they make them act in counter-productive ways. In humans, the seven deadly sins--Pride, Wrath, Greed, Gluttony, Envy, Sloth and Lust--are likely such bugs. 

We can also add the appetite for infinite fairness frequently on display in young children, and creditors often take advantage of interest compounding--which goes to infinity--and the feeling of obligation even though the source of repayment is finite.

The effect of bugs on computer programs is to weaken the computer's computational power, and possibly even crash the machine. People angry about politics may vote for an opponent simply because that opponent is the only available alternative. 

"I don't care who people vote for as long as I can pick the candidates" said Boss Tweed (the corrupt manager of Tammany Hall). Political parties count on their marketing to make their candidates the only alternative.

As one Australian said "You Yanks don't consult the wisdom of democracy; you enable mobs." 

 Despite Abe Lincoln's old saying that you can't fool all the people all the time, Bridget Read's Little Bosses Everywhere, an exposee of multi-level marketing reminds us that fooling can persist for decades. Here's an excerpt:

"If the story of multilevel marketing sounds too good to be true, that's because it is. The parable of homespun Yankee ingenuity and the power of free enterprise that MLM has been telling for the better part of acentury contains inventions and elisions that have gone largely unchecked through fourteen U.S. presidential administrations and may constitute one of the most devastating, long-running scams in modern history."