The sweet spot

Years ago I played in a local league table tennis team with two colleagues from work. Our team captain was understandably keen to improve his game so he bought an expensive super duper carbon fibre bat. According to the marketing hype of this wonder bat the entire blade was a single sweet spot. In a normal wooden bat of those days the sweet spot was supposed to be the centre of the blade from which the ball would go straight and true at enormous speed with almost no effort.

Of course none of us was actually good enough to gain anything from such a bat so it was no surprise when our optimistic captain sent even more balls than usual whizzing over the end of the table.

It’s an interesting idea though – the sweet spot. One could use it as an analogy to describe standpoints adopted to clarify political situations. For example, it is possible to analyse Brexit in enormous detail, particularly in relation to the tangle of EU regulations. It is also possible to stand back from the detail without losing sight of its implications.

The question then arises – where is the Brexit sweet spot? The sweet spot would be some standpoint where the issue is as clear as it can be without standing so far back that the whole thing becomes too simplified because none of the issues has been given sufficient focus. To my mind the Brexit sweet spot is to be found where the primary focus is on democracy. There is nothing wrong with doing mountains of analysis but that doesn’t alter the sweet spot standpoint. This doesn’t mean a sweet spot standpoint is all we need. What it does, if we find it, is clarify everything else.

Taking the analogy further, it is possible to be too close to complex social and political issues such that the sweet spot becomes obscured. This can occur when experts try assemble enough evidence to clarify an issue when the issue cannot be clarified by evidence alone. There is too much of it, human judgement is involved and as a result cherry picking the evidence has become too prevalent.

Climate change obviously has a severe case of the cherry picking problem. Yet one might suggest that it also has a sweet spot where such complexities come into some kind of focus. Such a clarifying standpoint might claim that the climate change story is unscientific because it is not falsifiable. In that case it violates Karl Popper’s dictum that scientific theories must in principle be falsifiable.

Popper’s dictum is about as close as we get to defining good science. Move away from it and we encounter the killer question - if even in principle a theory cannot be falsified then what practical difference does it make whether it is valid or invalid?

The key words here are in principle. In principle it is possible to imagine how the climate change story could be falsified but falsification is not part of the official narrative and this is where we spot the unscientific nature of it. Hostility towards falsification is easily observed within the ranks of the climate faithful so maybe this gives us the sweet spot – the narrative is unscientific.

This is not to claim that analysis and factual investigation are not worthwhile. Of course they are enormously worthwhile. But in spite of the complexities in human affairs there appear to be sweet spots where the value of any analysis becomes clearer and misleading analysis becomes more obviously misleading. 

The sweet spot is merely an analogy though. It is still possible to send the conceptual ball whizzing over the end of the table.