Correction

There is, I am told, a saying in French to the effect of: "Prêcher le faux pour savoir le vrai," or "preach the falsehood to know the truth." Here in the United States, it's known as Cunningham's Law: "The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer." And it's something that I've wondered about: Why are people more likely to ignore requests for information, but rush to correct things they consider wrong. One explanation is that people prefer feeling superior to being helpful. And I wouldn't be surprised to find that it is, at least in part, true.

But I think there is another piece to this particular puzzle. And that is the fact that ignorance lacks the perceived contagion that error carries. When a person who knows a fact encounters someone who doesn't know it, the knower's knowledge is safe; they're highly unlikely to forget what they knew simply from encountering someone who does not know it. Likewise, if a person who doesn't know something encounters someone else who lacks knowledge of the same thing, the status quo reigns. But someone who is wrong (or simply out of step with the mainstream) can convince other people that they are, in fact, correct; and this allows falsehood to displace not only ignorance, but knowledge. And I think that this is part of what motivates people to action when they encounter someone who is "wrong on the Internet;" the perceived threat that the person poses to truth, and perhaps thus to themselves.

Still Going

So I went over to Lake Forest Park this morning, to check in on the protestors. They showed up promptly at 11am and started waving their signs and placards.

The small group of regulars who hang out on this corner every Saturday, rain or shine, for an hour have become something of a fixture, to the point that they're a reliable way of knowing if noon has arrived or not.

One of them told me that last week, with all of the anti-Trump protests, that there were about one hundred people present. Which I'd actually heard about. The whole reason I'd come by today was to see how many of them were going to stick around.

Because your typical lefty protest/drum circle can always drum up a good number of people. Occupy Seattle was proof of that. But what makes this bunch interesting is that they always show up. There's a core of the group who is always there. And it's not the young people who come to the marches and chants. It's the older people who understand what they're actually doing: sharing a message, rather than saving the world.

Mosaic

I was listening to the EconTalk podcast, and host Russ Roberts was interviewing Jonathan Rauch about the ideas in his book, Cross Purposes. Late in the conversation, Mr. Rauch says something interesting. I'm going to quote him at length, to get all of the context, so bear with me:

What changed over time is that, as I got to know people of faith--Jews and Christians, especially Christians--I came to see that it's not that I'm the smart one who doesn't need the crutch of religion to go about my life and be virtuous. It's that I'm the one whose missing out. That they have a dimensionality, a depth to their life. Call it spirituality, call it faith, or call it what to them it is, which is the belief in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior and all that flows from that. But, that gives them access to a side of human life and a way of being, and something very deep in ourselves that I don't have access to. I just don't.

So, I feel that I'm in the position of someone who is maybe colorblind. I function perfectly fine. I'm happy being who I am. Please, Christians, don't line up trying to convert me. It won't work. And yet, I am aware that I'm missing out on something. It's like I'm not a parent, same thing. I have a full, and rich, and happy life, and yet I am aware there's a fundamental part of human existence that I don't share.

As someone else who is both not religious and not a parent, I get where Mr. Rauch is coming from, but I don't have the same sense of having missed out on something. Mainly because I understand that being religious, or being a parent, carries opportunity costs, just like anything else, and I spent the time I wasn't worshipping a deity or raising a child to do other things that were important to me.

The thing about passing on activities that a lot of people engage in, like religion, or parenting, is that one can see this really large group of people who are all doing the same thing, and all getting the same thing, and clearly understand what one isn't getting. And I think that this is what leads Mr. Rauch to compare his atheism to colorblindness; he sees it as an uncompensated loss. And I think that a lot of religious people, especially American Christians, feel that this framing is to their direct advantage, and so would make the analogy themselves.

But for me, it's closer to trading the ability to see color for the ability to echolocate. Okay, maybe I can't tell the difference between a blue plate and a green one, but I can locate the couch in pitch darkness, and that's pretty useful in its own way.

Part of the problem may be the Anna Karenina Principle, namely that, as Mr. Tolstoy put it: "Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Applied to religion, it creates large swaths of people who have specific experiences and worldview in common, but a number of people for whom these things are much more unique. To go back to my earlier analogy, if my atheism has given me the ability to echolocate, another person's lack of faith has left them with the ability to see x-rays. And perhaps a third has an unmatched sense of touch. It's more difficult to look at such a diverse group of people and pick out one thing that they all share that can be held up as something that other people lack.

In the end, I don't see myself as having missed out on anything. The potential for human experience is vast; there's no way that any one person can take all of it in within the span of a single lifetime, which is all any of us have. Like Mr. Rauch, I am perfectly happy with the choices I've made and the paths that I've walked. I simply don't feel myself to be somehow less than for not having done as others have.

Un Populi

The latest "unpopular opinion" trend seems to be jumping on the bandwagon of criticizing Blue Origin flight 31 for Likes and other social media attention. Because of course it is. Genuinely unpopular opinions, when expressed on social media, earn crickets at best, and commonly attract reams of negative commentary of their own.

I, for my part, don't really have much of an opinion on space tourism. If Jeff Bezos wants to launch his fiancée and a bevy of celebrity women into sub-orbital space, it's his money. I think that attempting to cast it as a sort of "one giant leap for womankind" was a bad idea; but the online bickering over whether any or all of the women count as "astronauts," if the flight was "inspiring" or the degree to which misogyny is playing a role in the teapot tempest this has stirred up has faded into so much dueling virtue signalling.

And I think that this is where the "unpopular opinion" trend has gone. As noted, in a venue where the goal is to gain social credit, genuinely unpopular opinions have no place; being the odd person out on a topic that people sincerely care about tends to be a one-way ticket to vitriol, if not death threats. Even on a platform like LinkedIn, where most users are commenting under their real names and their profiles include enough information to uniquely identify them, they'll unload, without a second thought, on others who say things they don't appreciate.

Being just another among many to say what others are thinking doesn't carry the same sense of courage and free-thinking that pushing back against an imagined consensus does. But maybe it should. People cast their circles' conventional wisdom as unpopular opinions because jumping on the bandwagon has a negative connotation. But if people clearly appreciate the 50th, or 5,000th, person posting the same thought online, why maintain the pretense that there's something bold and iconoclastic there? Why create the idea that there's a legion of wrong-thinking sheeple that one is rising above, when instead there's an entire audience whose egos are clearly being stroked?

The list of virtues and vices people may have should be allowed to keep up with the times. If conformity to ideological viewpoints is seen as virtuous, then let people be open about the fact that they're publicly conforming, and that they're rewarding people for that conformity. It's the only way for honesty to also be a public virtue.

All The Same

As part of making the case that Kilmar Ábrego García should not be brought back to the United States, the White House held a press briefing with one Patty Morin, who made the case that "We need to protect our families, our borders, our children." Mrs. Morin's daughter was murdered, and a Salvadoran immigrant named Victor Martinez-Hernandez was convicted of the crime.

But what do Messrs. Ábrego García and Martinez-Hernandez have do with one another, other than have come to the United States from El Salvador without authorization? Why should the crimes that Victor Martinez-Hernandez was convicted of have any bearing on whether Kilmar Ábrego García should receive due process prior to being deported?

While critics of President Trump are quick to point to things like this when they call him a racist, whether Donald Trump actually harbors racial animosities is beside the point. When Donald Trump, his father and their management company was sued for racial discrimination in 1973 for refusing to rent to Black people, one of the rationales given was the White tenants that lived in Trump buildings didn't want Black neighbors. And it's much the same today; President Trump doesn't need to be a racist; as long as he understands his primary constituency to be racists, he'll be willing to cater to that.

It's an important distinction, because the Trump Administration's current actions aren't being driven solely by the President; like most performers, he caters to his audience. And to the degree that he understands that people who hold, in this case, anti-Hispanic views are part of the voting electorate and more likely to be Republicans than Democrats, he's willing to take actions that show he's on their side. And it's unlikely that Donald Trump is the only person who is willing to behave in this way.

The United States has never been a genuinely unified nation, and clever politicians have always been able to find ways to capitalize on the fault lines. Blaming them for those fault lines simply obscures the underlying problem, which allows it to persist.