Entry 91: Why Can't Everybody Think Like Me?

I've come to the conclusion that our country -- nay, the world -- would be a better place if everybody thought like me. I'm not saying it would be better if everybody agreed with me on all issues, or if everybody liked the things that I like, or took the same moral positions as I do. I'm saying it would be a better place if everybody tried to look at issues objectively and come to fact-based conclusions like I do. I'm starting to realize that many people, perhaps even most people, don't do this. They base their positions on other things like faith, ego, or predetermined ideology (how they wish things worked, not how they actually do work), and then they try to make the facts fit their stances instead of vice versa. Probably I've known for a long time that this is how many people make decisions, but the older I get, the more decisions I see being made, and in particular the more closely I follow politics, the more egregious it becomes.

[Galileo Galilei: great thinker and the most famous person whose first and last name differ by only one letter.]

And right now, mainstream Republicans are leading the charge on this backward way of thinking. Nearly all their positions on major issues, from climate change to healthcare to the economy aren't backed up by facts. They are always complaining that their critics have a "liberal bias", but it's not a bias, it's that most of they time they're just objectively wrong. (If it's bias, then God apparently has a liberal bias.) Take one of their latest BS talking points: the 2007-2008 financial crisis being caused by government agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. (This "theory" was recently espoused by independent NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg, as well.) This fits nicely with the simple-minded government-intervention-is-bad-markets-are-good ideology of the GOP, but of course, it's simply not true. (Fannie and Freddy certainly were involved in risky loans, but they joined the game too late, and had far too small a role in things to be anything close to a cause of the meltdown. You can read a somewhat wonkish take down of the GOP's position here or a completely un-wonkish take down here.)

[There is a legitimate chance that one of these people could be our next president. Gulp.]

The thing is, I can understand why people peddle horse crap if they benefit from peddling horse crap -- politicians spew BS to get elected, businesses spew BS to make money -- but what I can't understand is why anybody else believes it. I mean, the only reason the average citizen should care who caused the financial crisis is so that we can take the necessary steps to ensure it doesn't happen again. All we should care about is accuracy. Same thing for global warming, same thing for healthcare or any other issue -- all we should care about is getting it right.

And how do we get it right? We listen to smart people who think logically, use unbiased fact-based analyses, and who have gotten things right in the past. What we don't do, or at least what we shouldn't do, is listen to people who have a clear bias and twist facts. Do you think it's a coincidence that almost all studies cited by mainstream GOPers to back up their positions emanate from the same few "think tanks"? It's because they aren't real think tanks. They're puppet organizations, and they don't even try to hide it. Read the mission of the Heritage Foundation. How can you possibly treat as credible any study that comes from a group with such an openly biased mission? You may as well believe the doctors who were funded by the tobacco companies about the health risks of cigarettes. If the mission of a think tank isn't "to perform objective analyses and come to unbiased conclusions", then nobody need believe them, end of story. And by the way, this isn't some new crackpot way of thinking I just came up with -- it's called the scientific method. It's been around for, oh, the last 400 years. Let's use it people.

OK, I'm dismounting my high horse now.

[The statue in Thomas Circle, Washington D.C. -- a symbol of my figurative high horse.]

I've also come to the conclusion that you can be too analytic when it comes to personal relationships. My wife has probably come to this conclusion as well, since roughly 70% of our arguments start because she wants emotional support for something, and I, out of habit, offer only analytic support. For example, she recently ordered a box of checks from our main bank (we have five banks, but that's another story). Receiving them ended up being a whole ordeal, because they were sent late, and then we moved, and whatever, I don't know the story exactly. But finally, they were shipped to our new place, but we weren't home, so UPS put a note on our door. Our subsequent conversation went something like this.

S: Ugh! This is so annoying! We're never going to get these checks!
D: They'll try again tomorrow and the next day.
S: Nobody will be here to let them in?
D: Well then, they'll take them to a distribution center, and we can pick them up when we get the chance.
S: Yes, but we desperately need checks.
D: We still have a few.
S: Yeah, but if this whole house thing goes down, we'll need checks for everything, the deposit, the down payment, all that stuff. (We were considering making an offer on a house.)
D: We can write checks from one of our other banks. We have a bunch of checks for our other accounts.
S: We don't have any money in there. We need checks for our main bank.
D: Well, why don't we use one check from our main bank, make it out to ourselves and deposit it into one of our other accounts. Problem solved.
S: That's not the point! It's just annoying. Fine. You are right, we don't absolutely have to have checks from this bank.
D: Then why did you say we desperately need checks?
S: Why do you have to take everything I say so literally?! Can't you just let me be annoyed for a few minutes? You're always trying to tear a hole in my logic, instead of just letting me vent for a while. It just makes it worse.
D: Sorr-y. I was just trying to help.

But of course, I wasn't helping at all, because their wasn't really a problem, other than S being annoyed. I probably should've recognized this and just said, "yeah, you're right, that sucks" and given her a hug or something, but that's not really my way. I'm not really a hand-holdy type of guy. Plus, I'm still new to the husband thing. I'm sure I'll be properly trained catch on, soon enough.

In other news, apropos of my comments last entry about the iPhone, I read a piece by Malcolm Gladwell on Steve Jobs the other day. It was really interesting. The underlying premise is that Jobs wasn't the big-picture visionary that he's reputed to be. On the contrary, he was a "tweaker", meaning he took other people's grand ideas and tweaked them so that they were much better. All of Apple's big products under Jobs, the point-and-click based personal computer, MP3 player, smart phone, and laptop tablet, all already existed before Jobs got to them. But, they all "sucked" (Jobs is repeatedly quoted using some form of this word when talking about the competition), and Jobs made them un-suck.




The article also portrays Jobs as kind of, to put it eloquently, a whiny little bitch. Apparently, he was super petulant, he would unabashedly take credit for work his underlings did, and he would get furious whenever the competition "copied" Apple's products, even though Apple had already done the same thing to some other company. There is a famous moment, when Jobs allegedly assailed Bill Gates for stealing the Windows premise, and Gates responded, "Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."

There is a biography out about Jobs that the article frequently references. I'm considering buying it. The only thing is that I read a biography about Albert Einstein by the same author, Walter Isaacson, and it was l-o-ng. It's rough reading 800 pages on somebody, I don't care how interesting they are.

Well, that just about does it for this entry. Join me next week when I detail an encounter I had recently with a few fine, upstanding, not-at-all dickheaded policemen. I'm not going to go out looking for "fights" with asshole law enforcement officers, but when they happen, and you didn't do anything wrong, and you stand your ground, you feel pretty good about yourself.

Until next week...