E=mc² + AI, anyone?

Wolfgang Pauli is known to have famously dismissed a purportedly scientific paper with the remark that it was ‘not even wrong’. Indeed, at another instance, he quipped that ‘What you said was so confused that one could not tell whether it was nonsense or not.’

People like Jaggi Vasudev and Deepak Chopra are known for spouting such bullshit that fits neatly in the category. Then, there are the new-age gurus (increasingly religious preachers) who twist etymologies of words and names to such ridiculous extent (Christianity is Krishna Neeti, Vatican is Krishna Vatika, Australia is Astrayala, and other equally childish ‘explanations’) that even ‘not even wrong’ seems like too nice a thing to say.

Indeed, a politician like Modi can talk like this with his ‘freewheeling thoughts’ on wide-ranging topics such as the cloud-radar theory, gutter gas, ancient plastic surgery, climate change conspiracy, extraction of oxygen from windmills, and so on, including the (in)famous loud wondering (on multiple occasions) of where the extra 2ab comes from in the binomial (a+b) raised to the exponent 2.

These people treat objective science like a sort of metaphor for some vague, subjective life lesson in an effort to sound profound and smart, neither of which they are, in spite of their deeply held beliefs.

In my childhood, I remember we had a kid in our grandparents’ Sadashiv Peth neighbourhood who went to a Marathi medium school but was so enamoured by English and those who spoke it that he mastered a skill (which was then put on display during festivals and public functions) wherein he would get on the microphone and start rattling off cricket commentary in the same voice, accent, and mannerism of famous commentators, with but one difference: none of what sounded like English was English; it was all gibberish.

This post by some ‘Sreekanth’ who is in ‘Technology Management’ sounds exactly the same.

This is, in fact, a sign of not just ignorance and illiteracy but also of a weak mind so steeped in an inferiority complex that it has convinced itself that making such shit up is impressive and a display of one’s intelligence and wit and that no one but a genius could have thought of such pithy aphorisms as ‘AI is America and India’ or silly alliterations like ‘3Ds’ or ‘5Ts’ or ‘P2G2’.

But the problem isn’t these charlatans who think everything is up for ‘reinterpretation’ based on their weak intellects and juvenile perspectives. The problem isn’t a Vasudev or Chopra or Modi. The problem isn’t even that their imagination of objective reality does not match, well, objective reality.

The problem is that their audience believes their shit. For the exact same reasons they peddle it: an in-built inferiority complex that stems from a lack of any tangible achievement, or even research or study or reading or discussion, on their part. To summarise, our culture, social conditioning, and upbringing, and that includes our education and parenting, make us incurious by design, telling, nay convincing us that all that had to be known was known to our ancestors, who were the fount of everything good in the world not just today, but for the foreseeable future, and hence, there is little to no point in learning anything new.

What a long way we have come from when the ancient Indians, along with the Chinese, Arabs, and Egyptians, taught the modern world the fundamentals of almost everything we know today! What a regression! What a tragedy.

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark