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The Moving Goalpost

The Moving Goalpost fallacy seemed a fitting topic for the new year, when people's personal goalposts are sliding about like ice skaters. People are lacing up, some sailing around, triple-axeling; some colliding with things, toppling, getting up again, or just inching along with a white knuckle grip on the rink edge of aspiration.

Most personal goals are born ambitiously (I will no longer drink mimosas during bubble baths), then wobble a little, moving closer, allowing us to drink two mimosas, which is not as wicked as our usual five, but better than no mimosas at all (unreasonable!). The moving goalpost fallacy usually deals with the opposite: cases in which the rules tighten, goal post moves farther away, for the standard is reset by someone else who doesn't want that goal to be achieved. 

The Moving Goalpost is not about building arguments, but about testing theories. It deals more with venturing into real-world testing of claims. How many times must a statement be tested before you'll believe? How large is a decent survey sample size? Do you require double blinds? Litmus tests? Fingerprints? Where is your goalpost?
Everybody's brain has a nightclub bouncer; if an idea doesn't meet his standards, he sends it out with the riffraff, or in with the riffraff, depending on the club/brain. Most bouncers have a standard ID check and once-over. That's one goalpost. But every bouncer has a blacklist, and every mind has ideas that it refuses to accept. No matter how much glitter eyeshadow the scientists wear while they're proving it ten times, your epistemological bouncer shakes his head.

In a classic example, opponents of evolutionary theory point to gaps in the fossil record, claiming that evolutionary lines don't really connect because the record is incomplete. "Show us one fossil of a part-fish, part frog, and we'll be satisfied," they cry. If that evolutionary gap is filled with a new fossil (see Tiktaalik the fishapod), deniers now point to the two new gaps on either side of the new specimen. This prospect of these endless, shrinking targets helped to inspire my snail shell dartboard. Standards of acceptance shrink so that sacred ideas don't have to.

In a classical example, Greek gods were masters of moving the goalpost in order to keep mortals from overstepping their bounds. The mortal Psyche discovered this the hard way while trying to please her divine mother-in-law, Aphrodite. First she had to prove her worthiness to by separating a giant stack of mixed rice into two colors. When that was over, however, she had to steal the wool of belligerent golden sheep. The next thing Psyche knew, she was running impossible errands to the underworld, and that seldom ends well. These tasks were not really truth-seeking measures of character, but obstacles and punishment borne of jealousy. At the bottom of an endless demand for testing is an emotional distaste for the claim itself, an ancient form of procrastinating acceptance of the truth.

To be fair, I think Aphrodite probably never planned to drag Psyche through all those tasks. Moving the goalpost is seldom comfortable for standard-makers or the standard-meeters because no one likes to look wishy-washy. Instead, I think Aphrodite meant to commit the Nirvana Fallacy, in which real world activities (of mere mortals) are from the start held against idealized, godly standards. This way, impossibility is built into the standard from stage one. Maybe the rice separation task was supposed to be elegantly hopeless. Aphrodite didn't count on Psyche getting help from talking ants, and later, from more divine sources. I think that shortly after Psyche was reunited with Cupid, she invented contracts to prevent that sort of mess. 

Regarding my illustration: I stumbled upon the target idea while reading about The Moving Goalpost's more optimistic counterpart, the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, which also involves fiddling with standards after the fact. As the story goes, a man (from Texas?) shot a round of bullets at a barn wall, then drew a target around the bullets. The target image stuck. I settled on the dartboard idea because it allows me to illustrate a series of targets/shell sections that spiral into impossibility. The reward always remains the same, though. Why 4 points? I like the shape of the number 4. 

My goal for the new year is to make my artwork a bit more fluid, my drawings more gestural. Digital artwork can become surgical at times, a little like separating a pile of mixed rice. At pixel level, it's easy to lose a sense of line motion that makes for strong illustration. Line motion . . . a moving goal, embedded in a post. Hopefully I can keep this Moving Goal Post somewhere in my memory for the next year.

Comments

  1. I meant to add that the shell is pink in color because it was beginning to look too much like a football jersey.

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