More thoughts on Ebert’s Poe

Martin wrote:

Ebert comes clean

And gives those of us who get a little smug about our critical thinking a refresher on the importance of critical thinking. Go read.

And he thanked me by name! You now get to ridicule me mercilessly for going into fanboy squee mode.

To be fair, PZ does have some valid criticisms.

Yeah, more than valid; it’s an excellent point that PZ is making. I like and respect Ebert, and many times I’ve relied on his well-written opinions to decide what movies to see. Having said that, I’ve seen this “point” made too many times to find it in any way novel or clever. The point appears to be: “I said stupid things in a public forum to show how people would react, and sure enough people called me stupid.”

I mean, yes, ho ho Roger, very droll. The problem is that if I went around assuming that everyone was kidding when they recited a bunch of ignorant tripe that sounds exactly like what real creationists say, I’d be wrong in 95% of all cases, instead of (as some people were) wrong in this one. I am a fan of Ebert too, and like Martin, I’m familiar enough with his history that I didn’t think he would really turned into a creationist. But most people, having at most a passing familiarity with his non-movie writing, would have no reason to assume it wasn’t real. The only way to be sure is to read through the creationist nonsense carefully enough to detect the subtle sarcasm. And who the hell wants to do that, when all the creationist “I told you so” lists are so very uninteresting and similar to each other?

Lots of people pull the “I acted stupid and people called me stupid” trick and call it a study of human nature. Many of them even use this tactic to cover up the fact that they really do believe something genuinely stupid, like Scott Adams. Another guy who very clumsily pulled the same thing was our good buddy Patrick, who, after receiving well over 100 emails that universally panned his weird lawsuit crusade, wrote to tell us that the whole thing was an “experiment.” Right.

I’m not saying that Roger Ebert is lying, of course, I’m just saying that it’s strange to criticize people for being convinced by your plausible imitation of real idiots. Ebert does make a very fine point at the end of his recent post:

These days, there is no room for ambiguity, and few rewards for critical thinking. Now every word of a politician is pumped dry by his opponent, looking for sinister meanings. Many political ads are an insult to the intelligence. Here I am not discussing politics. I am discussing credulity. If you were to see a TV ad charging that a politician supported “comprehensive sex education” for kindergarten children, would you (1) believe it, or (2) very much doubt it? The authors of the ad spent big money in a bet on the credulity and unquestioning thinking of the viewership. Ask yourself what such an ad believes about us. No politics, please.

Yeah, he’s absolutely right, somebody would have to be a moron for believing that Obama wants comprehensive sex education for kindergarteners. However, somebody would not have to be a moron to believe that somebody would earnestly claim that he said that. They already did, and do. Hundreds or thousands of blog posts have been written which take the claim seriously.

So suppose that instead of writing about creationism, Ebert had written a “Jonathan Swift” style post saying, “Hey did you hear about Barack Obama? He wants to teach six year olds about condoms.” And then further suppose that a lot of people had written to him with all kinds of verbal abuse, and then Ebert had said “Ha ha! You see how gullible these people are? To their credit, no Republicans wrote to me at all.” That’s really not all that clever.

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