Snozzberry Nation- when cherry picking goes too far

The snozzberries taste like snozzberries

"Although to be fair, cherry picking isn't quite what we do. Cherries are sweet and delicious. What we do is more turd mining. And I'll thank you to give our work the respect it deserves!" John Stewart

"In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there." President Donald Trump.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant said that the world is unknowable. It's just too vast and complicated for ordinary humans to grasp its totality with our limited experiences. Instead, we create imperfect models of the world inside of our head. Sometimes we update those models when new information presents itself, but the older we get, the more we defend them and discount any information that doesn't fit. This produces confirmation bias, an inescapable cognitive bias that causes us to only let in information that confirms what we already believe. Confounding data gets ignored completely.

This leads to the great art of cherry picking- the action or practice of choosing and taking only the most beneficial or profitable items, opportunities, etc., from what's available.

Cherry picking is at the heart of most of our society- including religion, the law, politics, business, and advertising. The two big exceptions are science and education. Science tries to take a wide variety of data into consideration to come up with theories that will work most of the time, and education helps younger people build the models that they will need to get by in the world they will grow into. Older people can become so rigid that they stop most learning, and deny science when it becomes inconvenient.

While cherry picking is inevitable, too much cherry picking is dishonest and hurtful. Only looking at a small subset of facts robs people of deeper understanding. It makes disasters more likely because sooner or later even the best models break down and require ways to deal with new challenges. The main challenge of cherry picking is to realize that one is doing it in the first place. The very awareness that someone is filtering out large parts of reality should create a sense of humility and curiosity as to what they've been missing. Models that become cemented in ego are hard to move, because new information becomes an existential threat, not an invitation to grow.

Extreme forms of cherry picking are called nut picking. The nut picking fallacy is when people choose the most extreme examples of something to make a point, albeit a dishonest one. Extreme examples don't represent the norm, and are mostly put out there to get attention and stir emotions. One of the most famous examples of this is Linda Taylor, a welfare fraudster from Chicago that Ronald Reagan brought up in many, many speeches to give people the idea that most people on public assistance were crooks and cheats. While Taylor did indeed defraud the government under many aliases, she was an extreme example that Reagan flouted to inflame his base. Most welfare recipients did NOT do this.

Nut picking has become popular in the world of politics, especially in the world of cable television and online political discussion. It's much easier to discuss extreme examples to get attention than to bring up boring statistics or complex, difficult problems.

Here in the 2020's we seem to have evolved to a world beyond cherry picking or nut picking. I call it Snozzberry picking, after the famous fictional fruit popularized by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Snozzberry picking is the use of completely made up examples to make a point. Political discourse has become so polarized that partisans think nothing of making stuff up even though they know it's fake. It feels like it could happen, and makes a point in an argument, so Snozzberries away!

Politifact and Snopes are busy sites where fact checkers go over the latest Snozzberries and rate their truthfulness. It's bad enough that our brains have trouble making sense of a complex and changing world. Now we have to sort out lies from half-truths from actual truths. It's exhausting. Always consider the source when evaluating new information. Do they have an agenda? Do they have a record of one-sidedness? Harry Truman famously read five newspapers every day to get a balanced view of what was going on in the world.

One famous example of a Snozzberry is the Donald Trump at the top of this post about Haitian immigrants eating dogs. This claim turned out to not be true, but it accomplished its goal- it got attention and made voters suspicious that immigrants could actually be doing that. (They weren't, by the way.) Trump was ridiculed by some for his false claim, but he won the election anyway because few punished him and many believed him.

Mark Twain famously said "a lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." We are all fools if we let the lies that feel like they might be true cloud our judgement. The universe is so much more complicated and beautiful than that. Unless we update our models regularly with good, reliable information, we are doomed to be chasing Snozzberries. (By the way, author Roald Dahl later wrote that Snozzberries was a euphemism for penises, which changes the famous Willy Wonka scene disturbingly)

Here is a great clip of Gene Wilder and the power of lying that he utilized for the Willy Wonka movie to keep people guessing.

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