The Meaning of It All (9 page)

So, in short, you can't prove anything by one occurrence, or two occurrences, and so on. Everything has to
be checked out very carefully. Otherwise you become one of these people who believe all kinds of crazy stuff and don't understand the world they're in. Nobody understands the world they're in, but some people are better off at it than others.

The next kind of technique that's involved is statistical sampling. I referred to that idea when I said they tried to arrange things so that they had one in twenty odds. The whole subject of statistical sampling is somewhat mathematical, and I won't go into the details. The general idea is kind of obvious. If you want to know how many people are taller than six feet tall, then you just pick people out at random, and you see that maybe forty of them are more than six feet so you guess that maybe everybody is. Sounds stupid. Well, it is and it isn't. If you pick the hundred out by seeing which ones come through a low door, you're going to get it wrong. If you pick the hundred out by looking at your friends you'll get it wrong because they're all in one place in the country. But if you pick out a way that as far as anybody can figure out has no connection with their height at all, then if you find forty out of a hundred, then, in a hundred million there will be more or less forty million. How much more or how much less can be worked out quite accurately. In fact, it turns out that to be more or less correct to 1 percent, you have to have 10,000 samples. People don't realize how difficult it is to get the accuracy high. For only 1 or 2 percent you need 10,000 tries.

The people who judge the value of advertising in television use this method. No, they think they use this method. It's a very difficult thing to do, and the most difficult part of it is the choice of the samples. How they can arrange to have an average guy put into his house this gadget by which they remember which TV programs he's looking at, or what kind of a guy an average guy is who will agree to be paid to write in a log, and how accurately he writes in the log what he's listening to every fifteen minutes when a bell goes off, we don't know. We have no right, therefore, to judge from the thousand, or 10,000, and that's all it is, people who do this, who study what the average person is looking at, because there's no question at all that the sample is off. This business of statistics is well known, and the problem of getting a good sample is a very serious one, and everybody knows about it, and it's a scientifically OK business. Except if you don't do it. The conclusion from all the researchers is that all people in the world are as dopey as can be, and the only way to tell them anything is to perpetually insult their intelligence. This conclusion may be correct. On the other hand, it may be false. And we are making a terrible mistake if it is false. It is, therefore, a matter of considerable responsibility to get straightened out on how to test whether or not people pay attention to different kinds of advertising.

As I say, I know a lot of people. Ordinary people. And I think their intelligence is being insulted. I mean
there's all kinds of things. You turn on the radio; if you have any soul, you go crazy. People have a way—I haven't learned it yet—of not listening to it. I don't know how to do it. So in order to prepare this talk I turned on the radio for three minutes when I was at home, and I heard two things.

First, I turned it on and I heard Indian music—Indians from New Mexico, Navajos. I recognized it. I had heard them in Gallup, and I was delighted. I won't give an imitation of the war chant, although I would like to. I'm tempted. It's very interesting, and it's deep in their religion, and it's something that they respect. So I would report honestly that I was pleased to see that on the radio there was something interesting. That was cultural. So we have to be honest. If we're going to report, you listen for three minutes, that's what you hear. So I kept listening. I have to report that I cheated a little bit. I kept listening because I liked it; it was good. It stopped. And a man said, “We are on the warpath against automobile accidents.” And then he went on and said how you have to be careful in automobile accidents. That's not an insult to intelligence; it's an insult to the Navajo Indians, and to their religion and their ideas. And so I listened until I heard that there is a drink of some kind, I think it's called Pepsi-Cola, for people who think young. So I said, all right, that's enough. I'll think about that a while. First of all, the whole idea is crazy. What is a person who thinks young? I suppose it is a person who likes to do things that
young people like to do. Alright, let them think that. Then this is a drink for such people. I suppose that the people in the research department of the drink company decided how much lime to put in as follows: “Well, we used to have a drink that was just an ordinary drink, but we have to rearrange it, not for ordinary people but for special people who think young. More sugar.” The whole idea that a drink is especially for people who think young is an absolute absurdity.

So as a result of this, we get perpetually insulted, our intelligence always insulted. I have an idea of how to beat it. People have all kinds of plans, you know, and the F.T.C. is trying to straighten it out. I've got an easy plan. Suppose that you purchased the use for thirty days of twenty-six billboards in Greater Seattle, eighteen of them lighted. And you put onto the billboards a sign which says, “Has your intelligence been insulted? Don't buy the product.” And then you buy a few spots on the television or the radio. In the middle of some program a man comes up and says, “Pardon me, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but if you find that any of the advertising that you hear insults your intelligence or in any way disturbs you, we would advise you not to buy the product,” and things will be straightened out as quickly as it can be. Thank you.

Now if anybody has any money that they want to throw around, I'd advise
that
as an experiment to find out about the intelligence of the average television
looker. It's an interesting question. It's a quick shortcut to find out about their intelligence. But maybe it's a little bit expensive.

You say, “It's not very important. The advertisers have to sell their wares,” and so on and so on. On the other hand, the whole idea that the average person is unintelligent is a very dangerous idea. Even if it's true, it shouldn't be dealt with the way it's dealt with.

Newspaper reporters and commentators—there is a large number of them who assume that the public is stupider than they are, that the public cannot understand things that they [the reporters and the commentators] cannot understand. Now that is ridiculous. I'm not trying to say they're dumber than the average man, but they're dumber in some way than somebody else. If I ever have to explain something scientific to a reporter, and he says “What is the idea?” Well, I explain it in words of one syllable, as I would explain it to my neighbor. He doesn't understand it, which is possible, because he's brought up differently—he doesn't fix washing machines, he doesn't know what a motor is, or something. In other words, he has no technical experience. There are lots of engineers in the world. There are lots of mechanically minded people. There are lots of people who are smarter than the reporter, say, in science, for example. It is, therefore, his duty to report the thing, whether he understands it or not, accurately and in the way it's been given. The same goes in economics and other situations. The reporters
appreciate the fact that they don't understand the complicated business about international trade, but they report, more or less, what somebody says, pretty closely. But when it comes to science, for some reason or another, they will pat me on the head and explain to dopey me that the dopey people aren't going to understand it because he, dope, can't understand it. But I
know
that some people can understand it. Not everybody who reads the newspaper has to understand every article in the newspaper. Some people aren't interested in science. Some are. At least they could find out what it's all about instead of discovering that an atomic bullet was used that came out of a machine that weighed seven tons. I can't read the articles in the paper. I don't know what they mean. I don't know what kind of a machine it was just because it weighed seven tons. And there are now sixty-two kinds of particles, and I would like to know what atomic bullet he is referring to.

This whole business of statistical sampling and the determining of the properties of people by this manner is a very serious business altogether. It's coming into its own, but it's used very often, and we have to be very, very careful with it. It's used for choice of personnel—by giving examinations to people—marriage counseling, and things of this kind. It's used to determine whether people get into college, in a way that I am not in favor of, but I will leave my arguments on this. I will address them to the people who decide who gets into Caltech. And after
I have had my arguments, I will come back and tell you something about it. But this has one serious feature, among others, aside from the difficulties of sampling. There is a tendency, then, to use only what can be measured as a criterion. That is, the spirit of the man, the way he feels toward things, may be difficult to measure. There is some tendency to have interviews and to try to correct this. So much the better. But it's easier to have more examinations and not have to waste the time with the interviews, and the result is that only those things which can be measured, actually which they think they can measure, are what count, and a lot of good things are left out, a lot of good guys are missed. So it's a dangerous business and has to be very carefully checked. The things like marriage questions, “How are you getting along with your husband,” and so on, that appear in magazines are all nonsense. They go something like this: “This has been tested on a thousand couples.” And then you can tell how they answered and how you answered and tell if you are happily married. What you do is the following. You make up a bunch of questions, like “Do you give him breakfast in bed?” and so on and so on. And then you give this questionnaire to a thousand people. And you have an independent way of telling whether they are happily married, like asking them, or something. But never mind. It doesn't make any difference what it is, even if the test is perfect. That's not the part where the trouble is. Then you do the following. You see about all the ones
who are happy—how did they answer about the breakfast in bed, how did they answer about this, how did they answer about that? You see it's exactly the same as my rat race, with right and left. They have decided on the odds of the thing in terms of the one sample. What they ought to do to be honest is to take the same test that has now been designed, in which they know how to make the score. They've decided this gets five points, that gets ten points, in such a way that the thousand that they tried it on get marvelous scores if they are happy and lousy scores if they're not. But now is the test of the test. They cannot use the sample which determined the scoring for them. That's going backwards. They must take the test to another thousand people, independently, and run it out to see whether the happy ones are the ones that score high, or not. They do not do that, because it's too much trouble, A, and the few times that they tried it, B, it showed that the test was no good.

Now, looking at the troubles that we have with all the unscientific and peculiar things in the world, there are a number of them which cannot be associated with difficulties in how to think, I think, but are just due to some lack of information. In particular, there are believers in astrology, of which, no doubt, there are a number here. Astrologists say that there are days when it's better to go to the dentist than other days. There are days when it's better to fly in an airplane, for you, if you are born on such a day and such and such an hour. And it's all calculated
by very careful rules in terms of the position of the stars. If it were true it would be very interesting. Insurance people would be very interested to change the insurance rates on people if they follow the astrological rules, because they have a better chance when they are in the airplane. Tests to determine whether people who go on the day that they are not supposed to go are worse off or not have never been made by the astrologers. The question of whether it's a good day for business or a bad day for business has never been established. Now what of it?

Maybe it's still true, yes. On the other hand, there's an awful lot of information that indicates that it isn't true. Because we have a lot of knowledge about how things work, what people are, what the world is, what those stars are, what the planets are that you are looking at, what makes them go around more or less. Where they're going to be in the next 2000 years is completely known. They don't have to look up to find out where it is. And furthermore, if you look very carefully at the different astrologers, they don't agree with each other, so what are you going to do? Disbelieve it. There's no evidence at all for it. It's pure nonsense. The only way you can believe it is to have a general lack of information about the stars and the world and what the rest of the things look like. If such a phenomenon existed it would be most remarkable, in the face of all the other phenomena that exist, and unless someone can demonstrate it to you with a real
experiment, with a real test, took people who believe and people who didn't believe and made a test, and so on, then there's no point in listening to them. Tests of this kind, incidentally, have been made in the early days of science. It's rather interesting. I found out that in the early days, like in the time when they were discovering oxygen and so on, people made such experimental attempts to find out, for example, whether missionaries—it sounds silly; it only sounds silly because you're afraid to test it—whether good people like missionaries who pray and so on were less likely to be in a shipwreck than others. And so when missionaries were going to far countries, they checked in the shipwrecks whether the missionaries were less likely to drown than other people. And it turned out that there was no difference. So lots of people don't believe that it makes any difference.