The Standardization of Error

In my readings this past week I was recently introduced to the name Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879-1962), an Arctic explorer and ethnologist from Manitoba, Canada. He was also a writer of many books about the Arctic, the peoples of the arctic and even one on Greenland which made me wonder what he'd think about the attention it is getting from our current administration. The title which caught my eye, however, was this one from 1927, The Standardization of Error.  

In The Standardization of Error, Vilhjalmur Stefansson examines how mistaken ideas and practices can become widely accepted and perpetuated through tradition and authority. Drawing on his experiences as an explorer and anthropologist, Stefansson illustrates how errors can persist in science, diet, and cultural understanding when people prioritize established conventions over evidence or logic.

Stefansson critiques the reluctance of societies and experts to challenge outdated beliefs, emphasizing that such resistance can hinder progress and innovation. He uses examples from exploration, human health, and survival techniques, particularly in extreme environments, to show how "standardized errors" can lead to misconceptions with significant consequences.

The book is a reflection on the human tendency to cling to familiar but flawed ideas. The author urges readers to adopt a more critical and open-minded approach to knowledge and problem-solving. Stefansson’s insights remain relevant as they challenge readers to question accepted truths and seek out facts that align with reality, even when they contradict established norms.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s idea of the “standardization of error” is both simple and unsettling: a mistake, repeated often enough by respected voices, becomes accepted truth. Once institutionalized—through textbooks, professional training, and cultural habit—the error gains authority. Questioning it begins to feel like heresy. 

What makes standardized error so durable? Institutions reward conformity. Experts build careers on prevailing models. Textbooks lag behind new evidence. Social pressure discourages dissent. Over time, the error becomes invisible because it is woven into normal practice.

This is what is most disturbing about today's polarized culture war. We've lost the notion that truth is meant to be discovered, not created. Once you decide Truth is anything you want it to be, then it becomes shaped by the one who wields the most power.

For centuries it was believed that the earth was the center of the universe. Confidence in modern engineering lead the Titanic's owners to believe the great ship was unsinkable. For a while eggs were bad for us, till they weren't. Same with peanuts, and other foods that have gone in and out of favor. For my entire adult life we've been told we'll be out of oil in ten years. Seems to me we have more oil than ever. More disconcerting is when the media spins stories by omitting facts, or deliberately burying uncomfortable truths, or facts that don't fit a preconceived narrative. Or when politicians pander for votes by....

Maybe we're veering a tad here. Maybe not. What do you think?

Related 
Against the Idols of the Age: A Contrarian's Critique of the Twentieth Century

Against the Idols of the Age: A Contrarian's Critique of the Twentieth Century

There is something appealing about contrarians. People who see things from a different perspective may often be on to something. Hence my attraction to David Stove's Against the Idols of the Age, a provocative collection of essays that challenges dominant intellectual trends of the 20th century. 

The book gathers Stove’s critiques of scientific irrationalism, modern philosophy, and cultural orthodoxies, arguing that many influential ideas—especially in the philosophy of science and evolutionary theory—rest on faulty reasoning and misplaced reverence for fashion-able thinkers. Stove targets figures like Popper, Kuhn, and Darwinist interpretations of human behavior, while defending common sense, empirical realism, and logical clarity.

I've read a few books over the years by authors dissecting and debunking contemporary "experts" by pointing out the king had no close on. One of these examined papers in physics that were called brilliant when, in fact, they were primarily gobbledygook. When Camille Paglia tears into Michel Foucaut, and Norman Finkelstein slaughters contemporary golden calves (e.g. I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It), I applaud.

You don't have to agree with everything, but there's a lot of meat on them bones. Our capacity to think more deeply may be challenged. So be it. Exercise that brain muscle. Make it sweat. It feels good.

Here's the table of contents for Stove's book:

Against the Idols of the Age

Introduction: Who Was David Stove?

Acknowledgments and a Note on the Text

The Cult of Irrationalism in Science

Cole Porter and Karl Popper:

The Jazz Age in the Philosophy of Science

Sabotaging Logical Expressions

Paralytic Epistemology, or The Soundless Scream

Idols Contemporary and Perennial

D'Holbach's Dream:

The Central Claim of the Enlightenment

"Always apologize, always explain":

Robert Nozick's War Wounds

The Intellectual Capacity Of Women Racial and Other Antagonisms

Idealism: A Victorian Horror-story (Part Two)

Darwinian Fairytales

Darwinism's Dilemma

Where Darwin First Went Wrong about Man
Genetic Calvinism, or Demons and Dawkins

"He Ain't Heavy, He's my Brother," or Altruism and Shared Genes

For an introduction to this author, read Roger Kimball's Who was David Stove? in The New Criterion. It may give you just the courage you need to swim upstream against the current in your own battles.

His beef with Darwin is elaborated on in his 1995 book Darwinian Fairytales, which critiques sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. He argues that Darwinism fails to explain human behaviors like altruism, which he sees as contradictory to the "selfish gene" theory. Though a non-creationist, Stove argues that while natural selection is a successful biological theory, its application to human behavior is overblown and often relies on "fairytales" to explain away inconsistencies, such as why humans engage in self-sacrificing or non-reproductive behaviors. 

Stove is best known for scathing attacks on a variety of concepts, especially Popperian falsificationism, Marxism, feminism, and postmodernism. 

David Stove's comments on Cole Porter are classic. Evidently Stove repeatedly quoted Cole Porter’s lyric “Anything goes” (from the 1934 musical of the same name) as a shorthand critique of modern intellectual culture. For Stove, Porter unintentionally captured the spirit of relativism: the idea that there are no firm standards of truth, reason, or evidence.

Here are a few reviews of this book, pilfered from Amazon:

"Stove was undoubtedly the most stylish and witty writer of all philosphers of the last one hundred years, if not of all time. When it comes to attacking the absurdities of twentieth century intellectual movements no one else came close, and certainly no one else was as funny." --The Review of Metaphysics

"What separates Stove from your average angry-eyed reactionary is the startling brilliant way that he argues, combining plain horse sense with the most nimble and skillful philosophical reasoning this side of Hume, along with a breathtaking wit."
--The Parisian Review

"As most reviewers before have acknowledged, it seems impossible to be able to agree with everything Stove says. But that only adds to the enjoyment. The book may be controversial but it certainly is FUN. What's more, even when making the most preposterous claims, Stove will usually do two other things: 1) lay out his argument in an innovative, surprising and clear way, 2) make several brilliant and true observations on the side, which otherwise would probably never have crossed your mind." --MrOzik

And one more from Amazon:
Critically, Against the Idols of the Age offers sharp, lucid, and often entertaining arguments, marked by wit and rigor. Reviewers praise Stove’s analytic precision and polemical force, though not all will agree with his conclusions; his style is combative and opinionated, which makes the book both stimulating and controversial. It serves as an engaging introduction to Stove’s thought and a trigger for readers to question prevailing assumptions in science and culture.

The Red Scorpion Version 2.0

Aztec Calendar (click to enlarge)

My first novel, The Red Scorpion, weaves ancient Aztec legend into a modern cautionary tale about pride, curiosity, and unintended consequences. The story went like this:

In the late 1930s, University of Minnesota anthropologist Dr. Harold Comstock encounters a disaffected youth from a secretive indigenous clan while conducting research in the hills near Tepoztlán, Mexico. The youth reveals a guarded secret connected to Quetzalcoatl and the red scorpions believed to protect the legendary man-god’s final resting place.

Comstock brings one of the scorpions back to Minnesota, confident he has secured a rare scientific treasure. Instead, his arrogance sets in motion a quiet but deadly chain of events. Years later, the abandoned Eagle’s Nest bed-and-breakfast—its dark history reduced to rumor—draws the attention of a curious teenager. Dusty Greene soon learns that some myths endure for a reason, and that not all relics are meant to be disturbed.

So begins the tale of The Red Scorpion, rooted in Aztec legend, transported into a modern world where the conflict between good and evil is but a coffee table discussion with no serious aim other than to entertain.

Boys will be boys and when Dusty discovers the abandoned house, now labeled a haunted house in the Internet age, he's thrilled by the idea of exploring it. Dusty Greene hasn’t learned yet that there are some things we really should be afraid of.

When I was young, I myself was fascinated by the notion that abandoned houses might be haunted houses. My aim in writing the YA (Young Adult) novel was to create a story that would be interesting for teenage boys because it seemed that more girls were readers than the boys, and to covey a message that there really is evil in the world.

A few of the details in my story came from personal experience. One feature of the "haunted house" was that the house was built over a sprig with running water. The idea for this came from my own personal history. I'm a descendent of Daniel Boone, whose father Squire Boone built a home over a spring in Pennsylvania, southwest of what is now Allentown. Visiting that site where the house still stands gave me a concept for the final battle between my hero, Dusty, and the Red Scorpion.

Several years after self-publishing this first book I was contacted by a Hollywood producer regarding another project. When I pitched The Red Scorpion as a film concept, he made a couple suggestions, which led to the development and writing of a treatment for a much larger film concept which we called Beyond the Smoking Mirror. You can check it out Here.

Printed copies of The Red Scorpion are no longer available. A digital version of this book is available here at Amazon.com.

Beyond the Smoking Mirror
https://ennyman3.substack.com/p/beyond-the-smoking-mirror-dfb

Almost Wordless Wednesday: Take Me Out to the Ball Game

 Thanks for the memories!

Six years ago yesterday I wrote this blog post about the 

Negro Leagues, Satchel Paige and the Indians.

Here's a link to a Humor page that includes 

"wisdom" from Satchel Paige and Yogi Berra.

 Robert Lookup's Unusual List of
Important Dates In Major League Baseball

For Major League Baseball Fans Who Love Statistics

Retrosheet

Finding Balance with Regards to Crime

Last week, while reading a chapter from economist and social thinker Thomas Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions, this statement jumped off the page: “While the concept of an ‘optimal’ quantity of crime may be uncomfortable, it is also clear that no one is prepared to devote half the Gross National Product to stamping out every residual trace of gambling.”

It is a bracing statement. Steven Spielberg's Minority Report immediately came to mind. In the film crime is nearly eliminated through pre-crime technology that arrests individuals before they act. The result is remarkable safety—but at the cost of due process and moral agency. The film underscores this same tension Sowell sites: in trying to eradicate crime completely, a society may sacrifice the very freedom it seeks to protect.

No one likes the idea that some level of crime may be inevitable. We instinctively want safety to be absolute. Yet Sowell’s point, and Spielberg's, is not that crime is acceptable, but that trade-offs are unavoidable.

Every society must balance liberty, cost, and security. Eliminating every infraction would require a surveillance state, vast expenditures, and a level of intrusion most citizens would reject. Cameras on every corner, or as in Orwell's 1984, every home. Police in every transaction. Bureaucracy in every exchange. The cure would likely become more oppressive than the disease.

The American experiment has always wrestled with this tension. We prize freedom—freedom of movement, enterprise, speech, and association. But freedom carries risk. A society that leaves room for initiative also leaves room for misconduct. The question is not whether crime can be reduced; it can and should be. The question is how far we are willing to go, and at what cost to other goods and values we cherish.

There's also a moral dimension. A mature society must distinguish between different kinds of wrongdoing. Violent crime threatens life and order and demands serious response. Other offenses—regulatory violations, minor vice crimes, youthful mistakes—raise different considerations. Treating all infractions as equally intolerable can produce overcriminalization, overcrowded prisons, and strained public budgets without meaningfully improving safety.

Finding balance requires clarity about priorities. Government’s primary duty is protection, but protection must be proportionate. Resources are finite. Tax dollars spent on marginal enforcement are dollars not spent on schools, infrastructure, or public health. Excessive time spent policing low-level infractions may be time not spent addressing serious threats.

Another out of balance feature is that because of efforts to hold police under the spotlight lest they misbehave, they now spend four hours out of a twelve-hour shift filling out paperwork. This distrust of police ties up more of an officer's time so that they have less time for responding to real crime. (EdNote: These numbers from our Duluth police department may vary from other police districts.)

George Orwell warned, “In a society in which there is no law, and no police, and no one willing to enforce order, there is no freedom.” Freedom is not the absence of authority; it is the presence of reliable order. Businesses large and small depend on contracts being enforced, property being protected, and disputes being settled peacefully. When theft, vandalism, and intimidation go unchecked, commerce shrinks and ordinary people retreat. When businesses close it also reduces the number of jobs available. And as statistics show, fewer jobs has a direct correlation to higher crime.

Movements to “defund the police,” whatever their intentions, risk weakening the very conditions that allow neighborhoods and businesses to flourish. Police accountability matters, but dismantling enforcement erodes trust and investment. Law and order are not enemies of liberty—they are its scaffolding.

In the end, the search for balance reflects a deeper truth: human beings are imperfect, and any free society must manage that imperfection without surrendering the very freedoms it seeks to defend. No question that finding balance is an ongoing challenge, but wisdom isn't found in extremes. Finding the "Golden Mean" is an imperative.

What Was It Like to Work on the ENIAC?

In the tech realm, everyone knows about the ENIAC. My mother's brothers were each more than acquainted with it. They worked with it.

Vacuum tube. I remember when
television sets had them.

The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the world's first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer. It was developed during World War II (1943–1945) at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering by John Mauchly, J. Presper Eckert, and their team, under U.S. Army contract for the Ballistics Research Laboratory.

The ENIAC was built to calculate artillery firing tables quickly—complex ballistic trajectories that took humans days but ENIAC handled in seconds (e.g., 5,000 additions per second, vastly faster than mechanical predecessors). 
Here are some key specs to wrap your head around:

• Used approximately 17,468 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors.
• Weighed 30 tons, occupied a 50x30-foot room (a little larger than my wife's 40x30-foot garage) and consumed 150 kW of power.
• Programmed by rewiring plugboards and switches, not stored programs. It took days to change tasks.
• Unveiled publicly in February 1946 (post-war), it influenced later computers like EDVAC and UNIVAC.

It would be fair to say that the ENIAC marked the dawn of modern electronic computing.  
According to The Evolution of Computers Wordpress site:
The first generation of computers occurred from 1946 to 1958, it was called The Vacuum Tube Years. The vacuum tube was an essential step in the progress of early computers. A vacuum tube was a sealed glass or metal-ceramic enclosure used in electronic circuit which controlled the flow of electrons inside. The air inside the sealed tubes was removed by a vacuum The purpose of the vacuum tubes in the first generation of computers was to be an amplifier and a switch at the same time. The vacuum tubes had no moving parts which enabled it to take weak signals and make them stronger. In other words, the vacuum tube could amplify weak signals. The second purpose for the vacuum tubes was for the easy management of stopping and starting the flow of electricity instantly. This was referred to as the switch. It was these two components, amplifier and switch, that made the ENIAC computer likely. 
Reading about the ENIAC brought to mind a comment my uncle Ferrell Sandy made around 15 years ago before he passed. When my mother and I would visit, we'd often go to an Italian restaurant at the bottom of the hill where he always ordered Chicken Marsala.* When I was growing up my dad would ask--at family reunions--what he was working on. He always replied, "I can't tell you." He was a physicist who worked in a consulting firm that had two clients, the CIA and the NSC. 
In 2010 or 11, fifty years had passed and things were very changed and he could share a few stories, including his experience working on the ENIAC. As noted above, the ENIAC had over 17,000 vacuum tubes. So when I asked about his experience, Uncle Ferrell said, "It would run for five minutes, and then stop, and you'd walk around and try to find which vacuum tube burned out." Once you found it, you could replace it and start it up again. A vacuum tube would burn out around every five minutes.
This was the beginning of the computer revolution.

* Chicken Marsala is a classic Italian-American dish of thin, pan-fried chicken cutlets served in a rich sauce made with Marsala wine, mushrooms, and aromatics like garlic and shallots, often thickened and finished with butter or cream.