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The Friday Fillip

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John Baez — for those of you over 60 that’s John, not Joan — is a mathematical physicist who specializes in quantum gravity and n-categories, both of which seem like thoroughly Good Things. Which should show you how much I know about physics, or any categories if it comes to that. And that carefully curried ignorance has the potential to make me a crackpot, I learn from John’s 37-item crackpot identification list. The great thing here, apart from the fact that the list is amusing, is that it might, with some small modifications, be made to apply to those of us ploughing the furrows of law.

Let me illustrate. There’s a negative five points with item 1 just for showing up. (It’s like golf: the lower score the better.) So far so good. But then come the next four items:

(2) 1 point for every statement that is widely agreed on to be false.

(3) 2 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous.

(4) 3 points for every statement that is logically inconsistent.

(5) 5 points for each such statement that is adhered to despite careful correction.

See what I mean? And it only gets scarier the deeper you get into the list. So next time you hear someone (other than me, of course) holding forth, whip out your crackpot list and tot up their score. It could be better than keener bingo.

Comments

  1. David Cheifetz
    August 25th, 2007 at 12:38 pm

    35. 40 points for comparing yourself to Galileo, suggesting that a modern-day Inquisition is hard at work on your case, and so on.

    Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

  2. David Cheifetz
    August 28th, 2007 at 10:51 am

    Some might want to map the Baez list against some of the messages that are now appearing in the comments portion of Osgoode’s The Court. For example, a recent message includes this statement:

    What happened with my case was that I realized the challenge was to decipher the language of the decisions and judgements. The main objective of that language, I eventually discovered, was not communications but its opposite – obfuscation.

    And

    Most litigants may not be as interested in the theory of legal language as I am – it is fundamental to my own peculiar case.

    It’s always possible, of course, that there’s a correlation to the extra ingredients reportedly available in better BC air, particularly if one is a Canadian snowboarder or the like.

    As to Joan Baez – she did a wonderful version of “The Night The Drove Old Dixie Down”, whose theme (in a way) the list quite nicely.

    I’ve been paying attention to whether the two Reptacha words happen to mean anything when put toghether. This time they’re “outgrowth 228”. I’m sure that’s a code for something that, if I knew, would reveal the secrets of the Illuminati. Or the Opus Dei. Or the Tri-Lateral Commission, etc.

    Or the central theme of of the next Ludlum novel, as if there could be any surprise.