Juggalo Science Fair Brainstorming
I've been thinking about which "miracle" to explain for the Juggalo Science Fair. Clearly the paper about how fucking magnets work will be a lot of people's #1 choice, but I was thinking about explaining the evolution of the long-necked giraffe with emphasis on the recurrent laryngeal nerve. All mammals share a common ancestor, and perhaps as an accident or coincidence that ancestor's laryngeal nerve descended into the chest and around the heart's aortic loop (connecting to nothing) before coming back up to the larynx. The giraffe's nerve *could* be a few inches long from brain to larynx, but because the unintelligently designed mammalian blueprint says the nerve has to go through the aortic loop the nerve is over 15 feet long. That adaptation, plus a number of others, would make for a good giraffe poster I think.
But on the way to work I started thinking about what is perhaps the most objectionable line in the song, "I don't wanna talk to a scientist / Y'all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed". I think this might be an opportunity to explain cognitive dissonance, the uncomfortable sensation which occurs when someone discovers that a closely held belief is in conflict with reality. For example when a scientist tells a juggalo that a magnet is not actually a miracle, the juggalo experiences this dissonance as sensations like guilt, anger, frustration, or embarrassment which "gets him pissed". The juggalo then has the choice to relieve this discomfort by either changing their belief about magnets or rationalizing the conflicting evidence away as "motherfuckers" who "be lyin". At its resolution, the juggalo's perception of the conflict is that the motherfucker scientist's lie caused him to get pissed, which is really putting the horse before the cart. The cognitive dissonance caused the juggalo to get pissed, which caused the scientist to be unfairly mischaracterized as a motherfucking liar.
I'm quite partial to the second poster, and I think I could make some good temporal causality diagrams to illustrate the point, but I'm still considering other ideas.
But on the way to work I started thinking about what is perhaps the most objectionable line in the song, "I don't wanna talk to a scientist / Y'all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed". I think this might be an opportunity to explain cognitive dissonance, the uncomfortable sensation which occurs when someone discovers that a closely held belief is in conflict with reality. For example when a scientist tells a juggalo that a magnet is not actually a miracle, the juggalo experiences this dissonance as sensations like guilt, anger, frustration, or embarrassment which "gets him pissed". The juggalo then has the choice to relieve this discomfort by either changing their belief about magnets or rationalizing the conflicting evidence away as "motherfuckers" who "be lyin". At its resolution, the juggalo's perception of the conflict is that the motherfucker scientist's lie caused him to get pissed, which is really putting the horse before the cart. The cognitive dissonance caused the juggalo to get pissed, which caused the scientist to be unfairly mischaracterized as a motherfucking liar.
I'm quite partial to the second poster, and I think I could make some good temporal causality diagrams to illustrate the point, but I'm still considering other ideas.