It’s kind of starting to weird me out how difficult it is to tell how much paranoia is justified vis-à-vis the government and businesses these days. It occurred to me when listening to the Latest in Paleo podcast that, while people that refer to “Big Pharma” are probably insane, some of the things that they’re complaining about do seem valid. I suppose that in some ways it’s a false dilemma — they could be crazy but still right about some things — but it makes me think. At what point can you dismiss someone’s ravings as the delusions of a paranoid mind and when do you still need to consider them? From a Bayesian perspective, I suppose the proper approach is to just assign lower prior probabilities to statements made by people who tend to be crazy.
A Few Days Later, I Come Back to Writing This
After talking with a friend about how many things get “ruined” not because they themselves are inherently bad — they may in fact be pretty cool! — but because of their rabid fanbase, I realized that one could consider that phenomenon a more general instance of what I was writing about here. The more I thought about it, the more I saw how many things this applies to: Bands, games, sports, clothing, movies, etc. all become unpopular not on their own merits, but because of the people that surround them. This makes sense, if you think about: Given that there tend to be more stupid people with bad taste than genius connoisseurs in the world, it’s more than likely that you’ll be introduced to something by an idiot than someone that can really explain the intricacies and depths. For example, your first encounter with mixed martial arts is probably not going to be listening to Georges St. Pierre expound on his training philosophy or learning about the history of the ancient Greek pankration, but more likely a crowd of baying frat boys in Ed Hardy cheering as someone gets their face pounded in.
After recognizing this phenomenon, I started noticing it everywhere. One can understand why we do this so much — we hardly have the time to independently evaluate every single thing we encounter on its own merits — but I think it behooves us to remain cognizant of what we are doing: While biases can be useful to quickly filter phenomena, one should be aware that one is operating on a bias, and should be prepared to re-evaluate the evidence on its own merits.
The real issue problem though, as always, is other people. Obviously you’re
an intelligent individual, ready to reassess your priors whenever it becomes
clear that your biases may be invalid, but what about when you happen to enjoy
something that, perhaps unfairly, others disdain? As with so many things, the
answer can be found in the bible: Kill them all, sparing neither woman nor child
nor animal, burn down their dwellings, and salt the ground on which it stood.
Alternately, if you’re some sort of godless heathen or sissy moderate, try not
giving a shit about what they think and simply be a living counterexample to
their theory that only stupid people like $thing and maybe they too will learn
to rethink their biases.
