Hopelessly Wrong vs. Hopelessly Touchy
Please do not attempt to persuade me of positions that are hopelessly wrong. It's unkind. It's inconsiderate. It backs me into a corner where my only choices are to dismiss the topic with polite smiles and nods, or to offend you.
I recognize that being hopelessly wrong is normal and healthy. I'm not calling you out. I myself maintain many incorrect opinions, and any correct opinions I maintain are more likely than not defended by flawed suppositions. That is to say that I'm usually wrong, and when I'm not it's probably for the wrong reasons.
However, some wrongs are wronger than others. Some opinions are built on a bed of reasoning that is internally consistent, with an architecture that connects the various elements of the opinion and organizes them in a sequence designed to minimize or quantify bias; other opinions might be more like random collages of catchy memes from a hodgepodge of sources, shuffled according to whim. While it may not be inarguably clear which conclusion is correct, it is often obvious which method of argument is more vulnerable to self-deception.
Since it is patently impolite to imply that a person's reasoning may be faulty, I argue that it ought to be considered rude to raise in mixed company opinions whose adherence is more likely than not to be predicated on a foundation of being hopelessly wrong. Is that excessively Canadian of me?
I don't want to work to keep my expression diplomatic while you try to convince me by parroting somebody else's arguments. I'd rather talk about the weather. Why would you want me to expose the paucity of logical connective tissue between your clumps of words? It's a terrible position to be put in.
It's not especially better when you espouse an opinion I share but your rationale is a wreck. I can wince through it as long as I'm not asked for a lot of feedback. But you always want feedback. Affirmation, really. I'm righter than right, aren't I? People who disagree with us are fools, aren't they?
"Well...sort of."
This is at least partly true, because we are all fools. Our greatest propensity is for fooling ourselves. Any opinion whose structure does not take this into account is automatically suspect.
Strictly speaking it may not be perfectly accurate to claim that everybody is always wrong about everything, but it is a reasonable enough approximation of the reality for valid application to the vast majority of situations -- like Newtonian Mechanics: a fudge, but a fudge capable of inserting small objects into orbit around distant gas giants. Close enough.
If that's unappealing, we might simply say that nearly everyone is largely wrong about almost everything most of the time. The key difference between my wrongness and yours is a matter of confidence: you're overdrawn on certainty. You think you know, and I think we think.
Can anything be sure in this world? Yes. While all conclusions are provisional, the correspondence between certain clusters of conclusions can provide clues. Like sand filings arranged by a magnetic field, the bigger picture softens the small-scale noise into a macroscopic pattern. It becomes apparent that not all models bear the same level of fidelity with respect to reality; some have predictive power, some do not.
To paraphrase the great Dr. Asimov: it may be imprecise to claim that the Earth is a sphere but it is significantly less imprecise than the claim that it is flat.
So you want to discuss global warming by flinging around borrowed opinions? All you will prove is that you're vulnerable to the blather of ideologues. So you want to demonstrate how the answer to an eternal question is both clear and obvious? All you will advertise is that your perspective is bereft of nuance. So you want to put yourself in opposition to what you perceive to be the mainstream of Western thought? All you will expose are your own personal insecurities made manifest in strawmen.
"So what you're really saying is I'm stupid."
No. Just that you're wrong. I didn't volunteer the information: you asked. I wouldn't feel too badly about it if I were you -- everybody is always wrong about everything, after all. You don't have to be stupid to be wrong. Nobel laureates are wrong...sometimes wildly so. Rocket scientists and brain surgeons and top-experts-in-the-field may defend incorrect opinions. Cardinals can misunderstand theology, too.
Intellectual humility isn't about never claiming to be right -- it's about appreciating how seductively easy it is to be wrong.
The fact is that one out of one people at least somewhat misunderstands statistics, nineteen times out of twenty. Without a basic sense of proportion, everything that follows is blatherskite. This is why paying attention in math class is important. Roughly speaking, being innumerate quintuples your chances of being hopelessly wrong about any subject -- even simple ones.
Intuition is useful for interpreting micro-expressions, body posture and tone of voice; it can be harnessed for back-of-envelope scenario spinning and visualization; it can come in handy in hunting, in aircraft piloting, in poker.
But for grokking complex phenomena with non-linear relationships between sub-phenomena operating according to non-obvious constraints, intuition is bunk. Reality is indifferent to whether it is palatable to human cognition. Facts are facts regardless of your discomfort.
The fact is that transitional fossils are abundant. Vaccines are not a cause or catalyst of autism. Non-ionizing radiation does not ionize biological tissue. There are no deposits of accumulated toxins in your intestines, and no amount of coffee blown up your ass will change this. Jews and Illuminati are not laying a foundation for the New World Order. Scientists are not colluding globally to falsify climate data in order to secure government funding. There are no giant apertures leading to the Earth's cavernous interior at the poles. This planet's magnetic field has never, and will never, spontaneously shift in a matter of days or months. Your hair and nails will not continue to grow after you die. Women are not inherently less skilled in mathematics than men. Homeopathy is water. People actually did land on the Moon in 1969. HIV was not manufactured in a laboratory. The Coriolis effect is orders of magnitude too weak to influence the direction of a sink's drainage.
The fact is that they were not controlled demolitions disguised as attacks. Elvis is dead. Cold reading is an ancient but simple trick. There is no rogue planet. Mayan eschatology is silly. Coincidences are a product of Type I errors in your brain's pattern detection system.
L. Ron Hubbard was not a war hero. Nostradamus couldn't predict a bus.
Peanuts are beans.
"You're closed-minded."
No, the reification of mammal prejudices is closed-minded. Shutting ones eyes against the world-as-it-is in favour of the world-as-it-is-felt is closed-minded, reducing the scale of all Creation to the metric of a flailing ego. Can't you appreciate that the world is so much grander than any one man's myopia can admit?
Death terrifies you more than it does me. That doesn't make you the more spiritual person. You've conflated my peace for apathy, because you're up to your tits in skandhas and can't see out. You're so stung by the truth that you cannot understand how one might live calmly in its face. Om, motherfucker. Om!
But none of this can you tolerate knowing. It makes you angry. You feel insulted. You've made careful if selective study, and you feel in your guts that what you've chosen to absorb rings true. Those who might disagree could only do so because they are corrupt or sick, worshipping at a false altar, willingly led down by the garden path by feckless wits and unrepentant naïveté.
People who say things you can't follow are tricksters. Eggheads with no agenda but to keep the common man down. Ivory tower sadists who pretend to have insights for no better purpose than to humiliate you. They think they're better than you because you didn't go to college, and now they're out for revenge. They're nothing but intellectuals and socialists and sheep.
"You agree, naturally?"
I back out of the room slowly, nodding and smiling and commenting on the temperature outside. I won't consent to be drawn into an inquisition about how you're hopelessly wrong because you lack the tools to parse my critique. I know you'll read my retreat as victory for your position, but that's okay. Your opinions -- like animal kinds in the Bible -- are immutable. It is an argument between you and yourself, united against the world.
I fear you will lose. Like milkweed seeds, enlightenment defies those who would grab it with a tight fist.
So feel free to believe any marlakey that suits you but please, please, please don't attempt to persuade me to your position if you're too delicate to handle my objections. Being hopelessly wrong simply makes you human; being hopelessly touchy about it makes you an ass.
I recognize that being hopelessly wrong is normal and healthy. I'm not calling you out. I myself maintain many incorrect opinions, and any correct opinions I maintain are more likely than not defended by flawed suppositions. That is to say that I'm usually wrong, and when I'm not it's probably for the wrong reasons.
However, some wrongs are wronger than others. Some opinions are built on a bed of reasoning that is internally consistent, with an architecture that connects the various elements of the opinion and organizes them in a sequence designed to minimize or quantify bias; other opinions might be more like random collages of catchy memes from a hodgepodge of sources, shuffled according to whim. While it may not be inarguably clear which conclusion is correct, it is often obvious which method of argument is more vulnerable to self-deception.
Since it is patently impolite to imply that a person's reasoning may be faulty, I argue that it ought to be considered rude to raise in mixed company opinions whose adherence is more likely than not to be predicated on a foundation of being hopelessly wrong. Is that excessively Canadian of me?
I don't want to work to keep my expression diplomatic while you try to convince me by parroting somebody else's arguments. I'd rather talk about the weather. Why would you want me to expose the paucity of logical connective tissue between your clumps of words? It's a terrible position to be put in.
It's not especially better when you espouse an opinion I share but your rationale is a wreck. I can wince through it as long as I'm not asked for a lot of feedback. But you always want feedback. Affirmation, really. I'm righter than right, aren't I? People who disagree with us are fools, aren't they?
"Well...sort of."
This is at least partly true, because we are all fools. Our greatest propensity is for fooling ourselves. Any opinion whose structure does not take this into account is automatically suspect.
Strictly speaking it may not be perfectly accurate to claim that everybody is always wrong about everything, but it is a reasonable enough approximation of the reality for valid application to the vast majority of situations -- like Newtonian Mechanics: a fudge, but a fudge capable of inserting small objects into orbit around distant gas giants. Close enough.
If that's unappealing, we might simply say that nearly everyone is largely wrong about almost everything most of the time. The key difference between my wrongness and yours is a matter of confidence: you're overdrawn on certainty. You think you know, and I think we think.
Can anything be sure in this world? Yes. While all conclusions are provisional, the correspondence between certain clusters of conclusions can provide clues. Like sand filings arranged by a magnetic field, the bigger picture softens the small-scale noise into a macroscopic pattern. It becomes apparent that not all models bear the same level of fidelity with respect to reality; some have predictive power, some do not.
To paraphrase the great Dr. Asimov: it may be imprecise to claim that the Earth is a sphere but it is significantly less imprecise than the claim that it is flat.
So you want to discuss global warming by flinging around borrowed opinions? All you will prove is that you're vulnerable to the blather of ideologues. So you want to demonstrate how the answer to an eternal question is both clear and obvious? All you will advertise is that your perspective is bereft of nuance. So you want to put yourself in opposition to what you perceive to be the mainstream of Western thought? All you will expose are your own personal insecurities made manifest in strawmen.
"So what you're really saying is I'm stupid."
No. Just that you're wrong. I didn't volunteer the information: you asked. I wouldn't feel too badly about it if I were you -- everybody is always wrong about everything, after all. You don't have to be stupid to be wrong. Nobel laureates are wrong...sometimes wildly so. Rocket scientists and brain surgeons and top-experts-in-the-field may defend incorrect opinions. Cardinals can misunderstand theology, too.
Intellectual humility isn't about never claiming to be right -- it's about appreciating how seductively easy it is to be wrong.
The fact is that one out of one people at least somewhat misunderstands statistics, nineteen times out of twenty. Without a basic sense of proportion, everything that follows is blatherskite. This is why paying attention in math class is important. Roughly speaking, being innumerate quintuples your chances of being hopelessly wrong about any subject -- even simple ones.
Intuition is useful for interpreting micro-expressions, body posture and tone of voice; it can be harnessed for back-of-envelope scenario spinning and visualization; it can come in handy in hunting, in aircraft piloting, in poker.
But for grokking complex phenomena with non-linear relationships between sub-phenomena operating according to non-obvious constraints, intuition is bunk. Reality is indifferent to whether it is palatable to human cognition. Facts are facts regardless of your discomfort.
The fact is that transitional fossils are abundant. Vaccines are not a cause or catalyst of autism. Non-ionizing radiation does not ionize biological tissue. There are no deposits of accumulated toxins in your intestines, and no amount of coffee blown up your ass will change this. Jews and Illuminati are not laying a foundation for the New World Order. Scientists are not colluding globally to falsify climate data in order to secure government funding. There are no giant apertures leading to the Earth's cavernous interior at the poles. This planet's magnetic field has never, and will never, spontaneously shift in a matter of days or months. Your hair and nails will not continue to grow after you die. Women are not inherently less skilled in mathematics than men. Homeopathy is water. People actually did land on the Moon in 1969. HIV was not manufactured in a laboratory. The Coriolis effect is orders of magnitude too weak to influence the direction of a sink's drainage.
The fact is that they were not controlled demolitions disguised as attacks. Elvis is dead. Cold reading is an ancient but simple trick. There is no rogue planet. Mayan eschatology is silly. Coincidences are a product of Type I errors in your brain's pattern detection system.
L. Ron Hubbard was not a war hero. Nostradamus couldn't predict a bus.
Peanuts are beans.
"You're closed-minded."
No, the reification of mammal prejudices is closed-minded. Shutting ones eyes against the world-as-it-is in favour of the world-as-it-is-felt is closed-minded, reducing the scale of all Creation to the metric of a flailing ego. Can't you appreciate that the world is so much grander than any one man's myopia can admit?
Death terrifies you more than it does me. That doesn't make you the more spiritual person. You've conflated my peace for apathy, because you're up to your tits in skandhas and can't see out. You're so stung by the truth that you cannot understand how one might live calmly in its face. Om, motherfucker. Om!
But none of this can you tolerate knowing. It makes you angry. You feel insulted. You've made careful if selective study, and you feel in your guts that what you've chosen to absorb rings true. Those who might disagree could only do so because they are corrupt or sick, worshipping at a false altar, willingly led down by the garden path by feckless wits and unrepentant naïveté.
People who say things you can't follow are tricksters. Eggheads with no agenda but to keep the common man down. Ivory tower sadists who pretend to have insights for no better purpose than to humiliate you. They think they're better than you because you didn't go to college, and now they're out for revenge. They're nothing but intellectuals and socialists and sheep.
"You agree, naturally?"
I back out of the room slowly, nodding and smiling and commenting on the temperature outside. I won't consent to be drawn into an inquisition about how you're hopelessly wrong because you lack the tools to parse my critique. I know you'll read my retreat as victory for your position, but that's okay. Your opinions -- like animal kinds in the Bible -- are immutable. It is an argument between you and yourself, united against the world.
I fear you will lose. Like milkweed seeds, enlightenment defies those who would grab it with a tight fist.
So feel free to believe any marlakey that suits you but please, please, please don't attempt to persuade me to your position if you're too delicate to handle my objections. Being hopelessly wrong simply makes you human; being hopelessly touchy about it makes you an ass.
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