How my Brain works written 4 years ago

I hate politics. Can’t stand the bloody stuff. Not because all the politicians are liers, but because they’re all telling a version of the truth, that happens to be contrary with what every other guy is saying. So how can two people that are both speaking the truth, and up with arguments that are contradictory?

The problem is their language.

Yes, English is a useless tool for precisely communicating facts, and information to other people. Even in legal fields where professional people are employed to create documents which are concise and have one meaning can be misinterpreted. The problem is that it’s easy to make an argument look correct, even if it’s based on false assumptions. A clever person can rationalise anything, given even a tiny amount of supporting evidence.

What politics needs is a new language, based on the language of mathematics. Where assertions must be proved from an established set of axioms.

This is how my brain works, it takes a statement “Crime has increased under the Labour government”[1], and tries to turn it into maths. Realising that there’s no evidence in the statement, my brain looks for further proof. On finding something which is presented as a proof, brain will usually find an error, or a false statement, or, another statement without evidence, and try to look for proof of that. The process continues until, inevitably something which can’t be proven is found. Thus, the entire statement [1] must be false.

What’s more they expect me to vote using only this information as my guide! Ludicrous.

Anyway the above preamble has been a rather over long introduction into this comic from XKCD:

Certainty

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