Scott Adams: 'Mockability Test'

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.

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.

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.

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.

Low status things are mockable but not necessarily bad in any other way.

No, it's the opposite. We always laughed the hardest when we recognize the joke as having some truth to it.