SEPTEMBER 2022 IN
RICK ASTER’S WORLD
People who are quick to conclude that things are what they say they are are being exploited mercilessly by the scammers of the Internet era. This pattern of exploit has become so common that people are starting to become alert to the hazard in the philosophical error that the scammers are taking advantage of.
There is a colorful story in the news of a major retailer that had to take all its new rooftop solar arrays offline because so many of them had caught fire or concentrated heat in a way that presented a danger. There were dozens of these solar arrays, manufactured and installed by many different suppliers. Solar arrays worked without incident everywhere else, so how had this one company been so unlucky?
The answer appeared to be a matter of making assumptions. The company had paid to purchase the solar equipment and had hired a contractor to install it. In its corporate mind, that was everything it needed to do. The result of writing those two checks would be a working solar array. It had made the mistake of confusing the purchase orders with the product it wanted to buy.
This error can be seen a form of literalism. It is the error of taking things at face value based on the most superficial information. The purchase orders said that a solar array would be brought online. The purchase orders had been approved and paid, and that was that. When a pattern of problems emerged, the company was confused and took months to respond.
After the company realized that it would have to take steps to check and verify the functioning of the systems, it found that about 1 percent of the equipment and work was incorrect and would have to be redone. Other building owners had planned on this kind of testing and verification from the outset, and that is why the same problems are so rare elsewhere.
What makes this story so colorful is that this same retailer is regularly guilty of shipping out the wrong products to its customers. This happens when the factory bar code has been stickered over with a different bar code, identifying one product as another. The retailer does not appear to be doing this with malicious intent, but it has no controls in place to prevent it from happening because, in this company’s view of the world and in its automated systems, the bar code is the product. And so the problem of misidentified products happens over and over.
To make this connection more specific, this retailer faced (and publicly denied) a scandal over its store-brand power strips, which had almost the same tendency to overheat and catch fire that the rooftop solar arrays had.
The cause of the problem, again, is a kind of literalism, an excessive tendency to expect things to be exactly what they are said to be. Literalism can be seen as a hazard. The potential harm applies to many more things than electrical connections, and it can hit any of us, not just retailers. The following list provides examples of forms of literalism that can result in the same class of error. Literalism can be the assumption:
All of these things are true enough sometimes or in some contexts, but not often enough that they can be relied on in general or in a systematic way.
One reason literalism is so prominent is that 20th century movements in American philosophy and psychology held that thoughts and logical propositions were not different from the words used to express them. This led to a long list of errors, but also gave credibility to the idea, already known to be incorrect at the time, that words were infallible when it came to identifying things.
Spam email was the first widespread effect on the Internet that made most of us start to question literalism. If you believe that every message in your email inbox was written by a person and sent specifically to you, then you have been living on another planet for the last 20 years. Now, it seems, we are not waiting for the next crisis to be nearly so obvious to start to question whether we can trust things to be what they say.
One current example can be seen in the job market. Scams targeting job seekers have been around for centuries, but have started to become more common as criminal enterprises automate spam and other scams to specifically target people applying for jobs. Solutions are not yet complete or obvious, but it helps that most job seekers now know that the job mentioned in a job listing might or might not exist. The job listing is not the job.
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