Collective individuals

Has the internet made possible a new form of anti-science?

It’s been some time since we mentioned paradoxers.  They were christened and described by the nineteenth-century mathematician Augustus de Morgan in his A Budget of Paradoxes; perhaps the best description is “heterodox ignorance.”  Among the characteristics of a paradoxer is an idea that overturns current science based on an incomplete or inaccurate understanding of it, as well as a sense of grievance against the scientific establishment.  In his day they were trisecting the angle or squaring the circle, or setting pi equal to 3 1/8 exactly.  Nowadays they refute Einstein or the Big Bang.

Another characteristic noticed by de Morgan is their individualism.  Place two in a room and each would consider the other an imposter or worse.  Paradoxing was a lonely affair.

Paradoxers as de Morgan would recognize them are still busily at work.  We receive their emails from time to time, and no doubt would receive more if we had a higher scientific profile.  But there is another sort that seems to have appeared with the internet: the collective paradoxer.

There have been groups of people sharing a paradoxical idea before (a common one is the prediction of the end of the world at a certain date, leading to various forms of preparation for it).  These, however, seem to have been highly dependent upon the charisma or persuasiveness of a leader, rather than the attraction or plausibility of the idea itself.  Without some personal force not connected with the idea, a paradoxer remained isolated.

That has changed with the internet.  Individuals sharing nothing but the idea can find each other, no matter how distant or rare in the general population.  Placed in the same (virtual) room, they do not shy away from each other.  It appears that technology has facilitated the growth of a different kind of paradoxer.  These can work together, with all that implies for the process of science and society.

Note that technology did not create them.  It only made visible an existing human feature, like the desire for passive entertainment or for pictures of one’s self.  And though technology may eventually (somehow) discourage them, collective-paradoxers will remain a human feature.  It’s up to us to figure out how to deal with it.