Crimes Against Logic

by Jamie Whyte

  p. 60 Hitler is a great favorite, but refutation by association does not require his services. Other objectionable individuals or groups will do just as well if the association can be made to stick. Religious fundamentalists are quite good. Victorians aren’t bad either. I have heard certain strands of feminism dismissed on the ground that they are a kind of neo-Victorian puritanism, which nicely gets in both of the above associations. Whether the feminist ideas in question are correct is irrelevant, but it should do to shut up feminists, who like to think they are modern and secular.

  As usual, the mistake is more common than explicit statements of it. It is what underlies a widespread gang membership approach to belief. Many hold political or religious opinions not because they have any reason to think them true but just because they like the associations. There is, for example, a kind of package deal of beliefs for lefty students. They are anti-free trade, pro-environmental protection, in favor of more redistribution of wealth, a bit feministy (but not as much as they used to be), they think animals have rights, and, though they are not adherents of any established religion, they do have a kind of religious sentiment that inclines them to a bit of waffling on the topic. Why do they hold all these positions? Simply because that is the current lefty package—and aren’t all intelligent, concerned young people at least a bit lefty?

  Lefty students aren’t the only ones who pick their politics and religion like fashion accessories or gang insignia. Most social groups, even those that are not explicitly ideological, have membership opinions. The ideas of a Beverly Hills country club member can probably be predicted with more accuracy than those of a Democrat.

  p. 61 We live in a mobile society. There is no need to feel bound to one style of thinking forever—the ideological equivalent of those sad sixty-year-old men with their yellow teeth, wingtip shoes, and Elvis hairdos. As our lefty students age, so will the ideas that suit them. Just as they will move to the suburbs, take up golf, and don pressed khakis, their political ideology will drift rightward.

  And thank goodness! Left-wing rhetoric sounds so naïve coming from a forty year old. Do act your age (and shut up).

  6 – Empty Words

  p. 63 Academic seminars can be pretty dry. Before committing yourself to two hours of doodling and moving your weight from one buttock to the other, it is best to get some idea of what you’re in for, hence the common practice of posting brief descriptions of seminar papers before they are given. Here is an example:

  In this paper, dealing principally with The Winter’s Tale, Harald Fawkner explores phenomenological descriptions of a recognisable hiatus between affectivity and sensibility. He proposes that, in moving from the great tragedies to the so-called romances, Shakespearean drama becomes increasingly preoccupied with an understanding of emotion as quasi-aesthetically disconnected from p. 64 the apparently conditioned mundanity of cause and effect, representivity and determining contextuality.[6.1]

  Something has gone wrong with the language in this synopsis. The sentences are strictly grammatical and all the words are from the English language, or at least a small extension of it, but it is nearly incomprehensible. You can tell that Professor Fawkner is going to talk about Shakespeare’s plays, but what he has to say about them remains a mystery. What, for example, can be expected from someone who “explores phenomenological descriptions of a recognisable hiatus”? Should I wear a raincoat to the seminar? How does someone who thinks “emotion is quasi-aesthetically disconnected” from something—be it the apparently conditioned mundanity of cause and effect or anything else—differ in his opinion from someone who believes this disconnection to be genuinely aesthetic?

  Or perhaps nothing has gone wrong with the language here. Perhaps the point of such language is not to communicate your ideas to the reader but simply to give an impression of being learned while saying almost nothing at all. Perhaps all this inscrutable verbosity is meant to shroud the banality of the ideas.

  Who knows about Professor Fawkner? Perhaps his paper, unlike its synopsis, was a model of clarity, full of big ideas about the Bard. I will remain forever in the dark on the matter because I now make it a policy never to attend academic literature seminars. Most of you readers will also attend few, even if not by polp. 65icy. Yet you will not be saved from the many popular mutilations of language that serve to obscure the message or the fact that there isn’t one. Such language abounds in business, politics, and academia—wherever people have an interest in sounding as though they are cleverer and more cram-packed with insight and good ideas than really they are.

  As with the threat of terrorist atrocities, a vigilant population is required to stamp out obscurantism. This chapter is intended to assist the struggle by providing a guide to obscurantist language. The examples discussed do not cover the full range—that would require a book in itself—but they will allow you to identify the most threatening cases. Whether on the tube, at a political party conference, or in a boardroom meeting, you will know when it is time to alert friends and colleagues and evacuate the intellectual area.

  Jargon

  Jargon can aid clarity. When it does, it is usually less pejoratively called terminology. For example, the special terms of economics—net present value, price elasticity, and so forth—are indispensable to the subject. Because, unlike their everyday relatives—worth, spendthrift, and so forth—they can be measured with some precision. By stipulating precise meanings for such terms, and especially by making them measurable quantities, economic ideas can more clearly be expressed and tested.

  Economics is not special in this respect. The role of such terminology in articulating and testing theories is a hallmark of rigorous science. This may explain why those who wish to pass off p. 66 their ideas as enjoying scientific rigor are inclined to employ as much jargon as possible—management consultants, for example.

  Management consultants sell advice for large sums of money. The advice can be useful, which, hopefully, explains the fees. But, there is a certain insecurity in the young men and women who prepare the presentations of management consultancy firms. The advice, however good, often seems too simple. Your company has an over-capacity problem. Then you had better increase sales volumes or cut capacity. How might you increase sales volumes? Lower your prices, perhaps, or open new sales outlets, or something else. How likely to work are these options? New sales outlets would be too expensive because customers for your type of product are very price-sensitive. Then lowering prices is the best bet.

  That’s the sort of idea involved. It’s fine but . . . it just doesn’t sound clever enough from Ivy-League and business-school graduates charging $5,000 a day. It needs sexing up with some jargon.

  Jargon in management consulting involves the substitution of bizarre, large, and opaque words for ordinary, small, and well-understood words. The substitution is no more than that. Consultese brings with it no extra rigor, no measurement precision lacking in the ordinary language it replaces. Where terminology in the sciences aids clarity and testability, consulting jargon shrouds quite plain statements in chaotic verbiage.

  Though few of you readers will be management consultants, many will have been exposed to their language, because it now permeates the business world and, increasingly, journalism and politics. Certain words must be included wherever grammar permits, and sometimes even where it doesn’t. Fashions change, but “leverage,” “intellectual capital,” “benchmark,” and “moving p. 67 forward” are perennial favorites. Suppose, for example, that the way your company is run means that the good ideas of the staff are not heard by the managers, and that other companies do better in this respect. This becomes:

  Benchmarked against best-in-class peers, intellectual capital leverage reveals significant upward potential moving forward.

  Some readers will need help with the translation. To “benchmark against” means to compare with. If you compare your height with the three men closest to you in the crowd and find that you are tallest, you say, “benchmarked against g
reatest geographic proximity persons, I am a top quartile height performer.”

  “Best-in-class peers” are good examples of something similar to the object of analysis. For example, if you are Dutch and standing in a crowd in Barcelona, then it may be premature to declare yourself a top quartile height performer. You may stand a head above all these Spaniards but a head shorter than a top quartile Dutch height performer. That is, you may be a runt when benchmarked against best-in-class peers.

  “Intellectual capital” is stuff you know that can be useful for the business. For example, the ability to add and knowledge of tax law are part of an accountancy firm’s intellectual capital. This is a peculiar use of the word capital, because the things a company owns, which it may or may not use for its operations, are normally called its assets. Capital is what’s left after you deduct a company’s liabilities from its assets. So, “intellectual assets” would seem more apt. But there’s no accounting for pointless jargon, I suppose.

  p. 68 “Leverage” must wait until last, because it leaves the strongest taste.

  “Reveals upward potential” means “could be improved,” provided we want more of it, as we do in this case. “Reveals upward potential” is better than “could be improved” because when you get more of something, the number that measures how much you have is moving upward. “Upward potential” implies numerically precise measurement, whereas “could be improved” does not, and so is always to be preferred, even when such precise measurement is not possible, as in this case.

  The modifier “significant” here means “a lot.” Something revealing significant upward potential could be improved a lot. But “a lot” is not the kind of thing said by people who receive significant sums of money for their advice.

  “Moving forward” means “in the future.” It is gratuitous in any sentence with a future tense verb, such as, “You will receive our bill, moving forward. “ And it is also gratuitous in our example sentence, because this talks of potential, which is always realized in the future. Nevertheless, “moving forward” is a useful addition because more words are generally helpful, even when they add no information, and because it puts a positive slant on things. We are not, you will note, moving backward.

  Now, let’s return to the masterpiece of consultancy jargon: “leverage.” Nothing better embodies consulting’s parody of the proper use of terminology in the sciences. Normally, you get leverage when you use a lever to apply force to some object. The lever rests on a pivot and the degree of leverage is measured as a ratio—the length of the lever on one side of the pivot to the length on the other. This notion of leverage has a perfectly natural extension in finance, often called gearing. If you invest p. 69 $50,000 of your own money and borrow the rest to buy a $500,000 home, then your leverage (or gearing) is 9:1—your debt is nine times your equity. The extension is sensible because the financial case, like the physical case, involves a precise ratio.

  In consultese, however, “to leverage” just means “to use.” “Leverage” is leveraged in sentences that have nothing to do with ratios, like this one and like our example sentence. Management consultants even talk about leveraging each other. If I am the boss and find myself doing too much work, then the consultants in my team are not leveraging me properly. (I’m not making this up.) In short, consultants take an item of proper terminology, with a precise measurement-based meaning, and use it as a synonym for a word with a more general, everyday meaning. They make the precise vague, thereby reversing the proper use of terminology.

  Why do this? Well, “leverage” sounds impressively technical and, like “moving forward,” it puts a positive slant on the sentence. When you leverage things, you get out more than you put in. Don’t just use it, leverage it!

  It’s pathetic but nonetheless popular. And, you can sympathize. Who would feel comfortable charging $250,000 for:

  Companies like yours make better use of their employees’ knowledge.

  Spotting jargon is difficult. The first sign is that you can’t understand what is said. But, that could be because perfectly respectable terminology is being used and you don’t know what it means. It could be your ignorance not their bullshit. That is the fear, lurking at the back of most businesspeople’s minds, that keeps them nodding appreciatively as all this babble cascades out over the charts and tables of their advisers’ presentations. No one p. 70 wants to be exposed. We are all up to speed on the latest business science!

  It takes a solid command of the subject—be it business, political policy, or literary studies—to spot the difference between terminology and jargon, to tell when the unusual words add nothing to precision but are merely bamboozling synonyms for ordinary language. That is why insiders are best positioned to blow the whistle. Alas, they are also most likely to have an interest in the silence of the whistle, which may explain why it is so rarely heard.

  Weasel Words

  Making a clear claim is a dangerous business. Say something plainly and you can just as plainly be shown wrong. If Jack claims that the price of gold will rise next week, then we will all know he was wrong when it falls. If Jack wants to avoid exposure, he will couch his prediction in the language of the financial advice profession, saying something like:

  If U.S. interest rates stay below the 3 percent benchmark and market sentiment remains positive, then gold could rally to new highs in the near term.

  The conditional nature of the statement is helpful. When the price drops, who will remember exactly what the conditions were? Whatever they were, they obviously weren’t met. In this case, they are certain to have been unmet if the price falls. For they include market sentiment remaining positive, and the only test for market sentiment being positive is that the price goes up. p. 71 So Jack’s prediction is simply that if the price of gold goes up, it will go up. Which is at least true. Such conditions, though rendering them worthless tautologies, are nearly always present in the predictions of financial advisers.

  “In the near term” is good, too, because it means the time for your prediction to come true is never quite up. Even if the price falls next week, it might rise the week after next, and that is still the near term, isn’t it?

  But best of all is “could.” If you substitute “could” for “will,” or “could be” for “is,” then you can never be wrong. After all, anything is possible. When the price of gold goes down, then Jack will still be right: it could have gone up.

  “Believed to be” is also a useful substitute for “is.” Jack may declare that gold is believed to be a good investment without fear of refutation by its price falling. He didn’t say who believed it and he certainly didn’t say the belief was true.

  The cost of making statements immune from error by the inclusion of these weasel words—“could be,” “believed to be,” and the like—is that they are thereby rendered empty. Insofar as we take these words seriously, the statement no longer tells us anything informative. Of course gold could go up in price. We want to know if it will. I know some people believe gold is a good investment. Everything, no matter how stupid, is believed by someone. The question is whether or not this belief about the price of gold is true.

  Users of weasel words hope that they will be overlooked until things go wrong. They are a kind of insurance policy. If gold goes up, good: Jack said it would. If it doesn’t, well never mind: he only said it could.

  p. 72 Not only predictions are hedged with weasel words; all sorts of alleged findings are couched in this language. Here is a typical example from a Daily Telegraph article apparently reporting recent findings on the health effects of cannabis (May 2, 2003). The article is titled, “Cannabis ‘could kill 30,000 a year.’ ” In it, Professor John Henry is quoted:

  Even if the number of deaths is a fraction of the 30,000 we believe possible, cannabis-smoking would still be described as a major health hazard.

  First, note the expression “the 30,000 [deaths] we believe possible.” Professor Henry cannot strictly mean what he says here. Thirty tho
usand deaths was well-known to be possible before any research was conducted. Any number is possible. It would be newsworthy to discover that 30,000 is possible only if there had been some prior reason to suspect that it is impossible. But what could have made it impossible?

  By saying that he believes 30,000 cannabis-caused deaths to be possible, Professor Henry is probably trying to say that he believes 30,000 to be the actual number, but that he isn’t certain. His evidence, though not conclusive, makes 30,000 the best estimate of the number.

  There are standard statistical measures of how much confidence we should have in a hypothesis in the light of experimental findings. Familiarity with these statistical measures cannot be assumed in laypeople and so they are not normally reported in newspaper articles. But, throwing in the word possible to indicate that the proper degree of confidence in the hypothesis is less than one (i.e., not certainty) is worthless. No hypothesis is made p. 73 certain by experimental results. “Possible” cannot distinguish those hypotheses enjoying strong evidential support from those with only weak support.

  Worse, if the available evidence makes 30,000 the best estimate of the number of cannabis-caused deaths—a number worth publishing—then it would be more idiomatic to say that this is the “likely” or “probable” number. Then again, likely is so much riskier than possible. If, on further investigation, 5,000 turns out to be the real number, then 30,000, though still possible, won’t seem to have been very likely. Why give hostages to fortune by speaking plainly?