Glenn Doty: As a Senior Energy Analyst, He’s No Stranger To Doing the Numbers
I’ve had the pleasure of hanging out with some enormously bright people in my day, but I’m not sure I’ve ever met someone with a stronger facility for math and science than our frequent participator here Glenn Doty (though a possible exception is Glenn’s father David). Numbers play a big role in almost every conversation that I’ve ever had with Glenn (pictured); normally we’re discussing things like gigatons of CO2 emissions, terawatts of energy generation, or stoichiometry (the part of chemistry that uses quantitative data to understand chemical reactions).
Glenn, much to my amusement, often uses numbers to explain many important elements of our lives that lie outside of physics and chemistry, e.g., the table below.
Sorry in advance to my mom, who will take this as an anti-Republican statement. I can see where she’s coming from there, but after all, they’re just numbers.
Thanks for the lauds Craig.
🙂
I can’t take credit for the numbers listed above though… I was sharing something from a friend.
I do, however, genuinely see the world through a lens of data. Nothing really has meaning unless you understand the context. I think that protects me from most of the hyperbole and nonsense coming out of the republican rhetoric. They shriek about how jobs numbers are “awful” when they are record-shattering, or how the deficit is “unbearable” when it is below the average seen in post-WWII America, or how GDP growth is “anemic” when it is by far the fastest growth in the industrialized world – and has been for the past 6 years…
Without context the rhetoricians in the republican party and Fox News can claim anything is “unacceptable”, no matter how good things might become. Having indulged in intense scrutiny of data over a lifetime, that kind of nonsense just doesn’t affect me. I KNOW that during Hillary’s stewardship the State Department saw fewer attacks and fewer casualties than any other Secretary of State in modern history. Hence… the outrage is phony, and is staged only out of a cynical belief that the average voter is uninformed and extremely gullible..
So while I didn’t write this one, it does reflect how I view politics. I’m glad you shared it.
Thanks again for the kind words.
🙂
Most amazing to me is that apparently, these voters really don’t mind being lied to. They must be constantly running into data points that are at odds with what they’re being fed, and it doesn’t seem to faze them.
Craig,
It works because the right-wing propaganda sphere (Fox News, hate radio, and the ultra-right blogsphere) operate as a cult, not a political party. The first thing they indoctrinate is exclusion: ONLY they are willing to tell the truth to their consumers… EVERYONE ELSE in the entire world – from government to think tanks to third part watchdog groups to foreign governmnents… and especially any news source outside of THIS TIGHT CIRCLE… are all just agents of some nefarious cabal trying to HARM YOU….
It’s present hundreds of times an hour in subtle ways throughout every FOX program of Brightbart article.. or whatever else. And so they innoculate their cult followers from receiving actual fact or logic, and because cognitive dissonance is irritating; the cultists tend to react by attacking anyone willing to offer up actual facts into the discussion… so they drive away anyone who is not already inculcated.
Then it’s just a matter of recruitment: Their “news anchors” are hot models that have their shirts unbuttoned, they have lots of flash and passion and post-production in every segment… and because they aren’t limited to actual fact the news segments are just going to be more interesting at large than the often humdrum day-to-day wrap-up of what has actually occurred in the world… But once someone starts tuning in – for the entertainment value – the subtle exclusion tricks start working on their subconscious… and before long they have another cult member.
Yes, it is the politics of hate and fear–and its popularity says something really terrifying about our culture. I especially like your analogy to a cult, in particular, the concept of exclusion: “we’re the only people who really get it.”