If you think it's hard to mock something that's reasonable, go take a look at some creationist books. (The old breed, not the earnest new "Intelligent Design" subspecies.) Creationists make quite a point of mocking evolution as an absurdity: did a mouse hatch from a lizard egg one day? Is there somewhere a half-fish, half-ferret? This is scarcely new; it goes back to Bishop Wilberforce asking Huxley if he was descended from an ape on his mother's or on his father's side.
All sorts of reasonable ideas are mocked among those who deride them. Women's political equality was a matter for mockery once: surely they'll just vote for the most handsome man! Other social-political views, ranging from support of same-sex marriage to support of gun ownership, are roundly mocked by those who disapprove of them.
On women's sufferage, it's fairly well established that physical appearance weighs more heavily for a candidate than his declared platform, voting history, etc.
Unfortunately, this applies to male voters too.
Proof by contradiction: suppose this method is true. Then anything which can be mocked is false. Consider the following mockery:
"Right, so political scientists and philosophers have debated these issues for thousands of years, and all of a sudden a humorist can figure out how to obtain a quick truth-value merely by using the average person's laughter as library, laboratory, and debate floor?
If this works, I envision elections run solely on attempts to mock the candidates involved. As Barack Obama makes a speech, a solemnly convened panel of Jay Leno, David Letterman, and Conan O'Brien will feverishly interrupt with the best one-liners they can craft. Recording devices will be in place all around the room to measure laughter volume to the decibel.
Then Obama's opponent gets up. As Letterman makes fun of his tax policies, the crowd goes wild. Fifty decibels, sixty...seventy decibels of laughter. As the chortling dies down, Chief Justice Roberts announces what everyone already knows - Obama will have four more years in power.
Gone are the economists and statisticians and bureaucrats, as forgotten as alchemists and astrologers. In there place rises the New De-mock-racy, in which comedy is recognized as the key to good policy. Laughter really is the best medicine - as is tangibly proven when doctors switch to making diagnoses solely by mocking how stupid all the other possibilities are. 'Dr. Johnson thinks you have Alzheimers'? He must have Alzheimers' himself to forget to account for your thyroid test results! HAHAHAHAHA!'
The world is transformed into utopia - until it's wiped out by a paper-clip-maximizing robot created after someone got the Singularity Institute closed by calling it 'rapture of the nerds' and got a good chuckle out of a few people who enjoyed sticking it to the eggheads."
Since the method can be mocked, it must be false. But then we have arrived at a contradiction: the method is both true and false. Therefore, the method is false.
Heavier than air flight? Yeah like that will work. Let me just get in my lead balloon.
I don't see much merit to this idea.
This has been discussed a lot here, under the name The Absurdity Heuristic. My favorite post on it is Yvain's.
I'm not sure Adams actually believes what he's saying. He's so very good at mocking things that I would have thought he realized he can do it to anything. He may just be promoting a 'test' that grants him special powers.
On the other hand, he is a skeptic on pretty much everything.
'It's nearly impossible to humorously mock something that is reasonable.
Nonsense. Humor is lots of fun, but it's far, far from the measure of reason. I'm under the impression that, in every country, a reliable source of mockability is alien-seeming accents. I'm told that, in mainland China, at least 50 percent of TV humor consists of Chinese people mocking each other's regional dialects. I could give any number of examples in English, but is it really necessary?
Other sources of humor would include: people falling down, big noses, and -- at least in English -- words with a difficult 'K' sound.
None of these examples involves an actual proposition that can be 'reasonable' or true or false. I don't think this is the kind of mockery that Adams is talking about.
Neat idea, but I don't think it works. Just about anything can be mocked simply by adopting a dumb sounding voice and adding sufficient "huurrr hurrs."
"Hurr..... I couldn't POSSIBLY balance the budget without raising taxes!!! That'd be reee-DIC-ulous!! Hurrr!!!!"
Or, conversely...
"Hurrr.... I'm just gonna give up on balancing the budget without raising taxes 'cuz I'm too lazy.... hurrr!!!"
"Well, sure it sounds bad when you say it like THAT!"
Whether that is skilled mocking is up for debate. But if you're going to take the time to evaluate whether a particular mocking is skilled or funny in an objective sense, you might as well figure out whether the idea was reasonable in the first place.
Just about anything can be mocked simply by adopting a dumb sounding voice and adding sufficient "huurrr hurrs."
"Hurr..... I couldn't POSSIBLY balance the budget without raising taxes!!! That'd be reee-DIC-ulous!! Hurrr!!!!"
Or, conversely...
"Hurrr.... I'm just gonna give up on balancing the budget without raising taxes 'cuz I'm too lazy.... hurrr!!!"
Scott Adams was talking about humorously mocking, which does imply "funny".
As I said, the quality of the mocking is up for debate. But given a suitably skilled live delivery and proper setup, a comedian could get at least SOME people to laugh at that.
This is so obviously wrong that Scott Adams can't actually believe it. What he's doing is signaling "I'm rich and I don't want to pay more taxes. Woe is me. Let me signal my intelligence by opposing big government, but signal more strongly that I'm willing to make the sacrifice of more taxes because I love my country."
It was a failure on many levels.
Thanks for all the replies. As I said in the post, I also don't think Adams is completely serious. Here is the weaker version of his argument that I find interesting: if someone can make you (or maybe other rational/informed people) laugh at your beliefs, should that cause you to reassess your level of certainty in those beliefs?
In other words, I don't think Adams really believes that someone "successfully" mocking your opinions automatically makes them false -- but he's asserting at least some connection between this kind of humor and truth. Which feels right to me, though I can't really articulate it any better than he did.
Or maybe it's more of a connection to self-deception -- the easier it is to laugh at your own beliefs, the more likely they are to be somehow insincere, regardless of their truth or falsehood.
Most of the time when I see someone (myself included) mock their own beliefs, it translates to "yes, I'm not an idiot - I understand that these are low-status. That said,"
As other commenters have said, mockery is mainly a status game and the funny thing is to lower the status of the mocked person ("only an idiot can believe such silly nonsense"). The success of mockery relies upon speaker's rhetorical qualities and opinions (often read: prejudices) of the audience. I almost think that these are the only things it relies upon while truth of the belief doesn't matter.
As for the weaker version, it is damned difficult to laugh at one's own beliefs, no matter how false they are. I even suspect that the correlation is opposite: if one's beliefs are well founded, one may feel more comfortable making fun of them, because one is certain that the humor doesn't threaten the beliefs which are part of one's perceived identity.
If it's a belief you've previously thought of as obvious and left unexamined, then this is probably a useful heuristic. Otherwise, no.
No, it's the opposite. We always laughed the hardest when we recognize the joke as having some truth to it.
I'm not sure what the protocol is for linking to or quoting another site on LW, but I thought this would fit here for two reasons: first, because I'm curious what people here think about his 'mockability' test, which seems to be half in jest but (I think) has a serious point at its core -- and second, because I think there might be people here who want to take him up on his challenge.
(Obviously I am not Scott Adams, and I have no connection to him nor any reason to promote his blog.)
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/mockability_test/
'It's nearly impossible to humorously mock something that is reasonable. Take, for example, the idea that hard work is often necessary for success. There's nothing funny about that topic because it's unambiguously true. Humor only comes easily when the topic itself has a bit of dishonesty baked into it. That's why humor about politics, business, and relationships is so easy. There's a whole lot of lying in those environments.
I have a theory that some sort of mockability test would work like a lie detector in situations where confirmation bias is obscuring an underlying truth. In other words, if you believed that hard work often leads to success, and yet I could easily make jokes about it, that would be a contradiction, or a failure of the mockability test. And it would tell you that confirmation bias was clouding your perceptions. To put it in simpler terms, if a humorist can easily mock a given proposition, then the proposition is probably false, even if your own confirmation bias tells you otherwise.
I'd like to test this theory. I'm wrestling with my own confirmation bias on the topic of whether we could, in some practical sense, balance the U.S. budget without raising my taxes. I certainly want that to be a solution. But everything I see confirms my belief that it's literally impossible to do without causing more problems than it solves. And by that I mean more problems to everyone, not just the poor.
Obviously the math of budget cutting works. If you cut federal spending by 50%, just as an example, and keep collecting taxes, you balance the budget. And the philosophy of small government is legitimate. No one wants a government that grows larger without end. But I wonder if there is any way to cut government spending enough so that, along with economic growth, we can balance the budget without raising my taxes. I sure hope so.
So I issue a challenge to anyone who holds the view that the budget can be balanced without raising taxes. Allow me to interview you, by email, with the transcript published in this blog in a week or so.
I will pick one person to interview on this topic. If you'd like that person to be you, describe in the comment section your qualifications, political leanings, and a brief bio of yourself. The rest of you can vote on which champion of the cause you would like to see me interview. I'll ask the chosen one to email me.
Just so you know what you're getting into, I plan to mercilessly mock anything you say that lends itself to humor. If I fail to find humor in your reasoning, you win. It's that simple. And remember, I want you to win because it means there's hope I won't have to pay more taxes.
Who wants to take a run at this?'