Should We Stay or Should We Go?

While Patriot missiles and Iranian ballistics with sonorous Farsi names collide in the skies above me, this post by Jason Burris, Laugh Dealer, got me thinking.

Every day someone unknowingly does the biggest poo in the world for that day.

True or false?

At first reading, it feels true. Obviously true. A distribution of the effluent size of eight billion digestive systems operating around the clock across the planet must produce an extreme right tail. Statistical probability practically demands it. Somewhere, some anonymous person flushes, likely with some difficulty, the day’s winner without realizing what he has done (it has to be he/him).

If yours is the sort of mind that cannot let well enough alone, you begin dissecting the proposition.

Biggest how? By Length? Mass? Volume? A slender serpent of prodigious length might defeat a stout and formidable chode if we settle on length as the metric. But that choice is unlikely to satisfy most judges. Perhaps we mean heaviest. Wet weight? Dry weight?

The questions continue. And soon we shall have to confirm what counts as a contender. One segment? One sitting? A day’s work?

And what about the day itself? Which day? The planet does not share a single day. Midnight arrives in Doha hours before it reaches Los Angeles. A bowel movement that belongs to March 6 in one place may belong to March 5 measured somewhere else. Our “daily champion” turns out to be an event stitched together from overlapping slices of time that never existed simultaneously.

By the time you finish asking the relevant questions, the proposition has dissolved into indeterminacy. The thing that felt obviously true a moment ago has ceased to have a clear referent.

Yet we felt that we had understood it immediately.

The largest poo is not like the smartest unicorn. The unicorn fails because the creature does not exist. The largest poo fails because we have not yet agreed on the rules of the contest.

Human language functions largely by tolerance of vagueness. In the normal course of our daily business, we do not parse every sentence into its hidden ambiguities. We glide across them. Shared intuition patches the holes and fills in the gaps. Communication works not because language is precise but because our minds are skilled at pretending it is.

If we wished to rescue the sentence, we could force it into mathematical clothing:

For every civil date label D, let S(D) be the non-empty set of all bowel movements initiated during that date in the producer’s local time zone. Assign to each element of S(D) its measured wet mass. Then at least one element of S(D) possesses maximal mass within that set.

That statement is true. Trivially true. Every finite set has a maximum.

It is also completely different from the sentence we read on Instagram. From real life.

Between those two sentences lies the distance between how language works and how the world must actually be specified before truth can be evaluated.

Most of the time this gap causes no trouble. Sometimes it does.

Tonight, in Doha, explosions echo across the region. Airspace remains closed. Videos of intercepts circulate on phones. Further south, Dubai continues to exist as the world’s temple of maximalism: tallest tower, largest mall, most extravagant skyline. If there were ever a city designed to host the global champion of turds, every day, it would be Dubai.

And between the missile videos and skyline photographs appears a philosophical riddle about the largest poo and its unknowing host.

We scroll past, understanding everything instantly.

Or thinking we do.

Because the same mechanism that made the Instagram sentence feel obviously true is the mechanism by which we digest headlines, warnings, predictions, assurances. We read a sentence. Our minds supply the missing structure based on a personal world assembled over a lifetime. The statement feels coherent because our interpretation makes it so.

Until you stop and ask the simple question: what exactly does that mean?

Which brings us to the question circulating in our house tonight.

Should we stay or should we go?

Friends ask it. Messages arrive entreating us to make haste and escape. Cost-benefit ratios begin to accumulate. How far will Iran go? Will this escalate? Will there be nuclear fallout? How long will airspace remain closed? Can we take the dogs? What about the people and the life we leave behind?

The calculations pile up, but they do not converge.

Eventually you notice something unsettling. We cannot even determine, without debate and arbitrary conventions, who holds the title for the biggest stool on Earth. Yet here we are attempting to determine the optimal response to a regional conflict using the same linguistic machinery.

The world runs on approximations.

Somewhere tonight, perhaps in Dubai, someone will unknowingly produce the largest bowel movement of the day. The claim remains both intuitively obvious and logically slippery at the same time.

Like the question of whether we should stay or go.

Language points toward reality.

But it rarely lands exactly on it. May that rarity persist through these troubles.