Do I Really Believe All This Whacky Stuff?

I have gone on some whacky rants in this blog which may leave the critical reader wondering - "Does he really believe all that whacky stuff?" After all, getting rid of teachers to improve education? Come on, now. And claiming that belief in global warming is grounded in apocalyptic thinking? That is just plain weird.

 But the question is not whether or not I believe all this whacky stuff. The question is - Am I willing to explore unconventional ideas to see where they go? The answer to that is - Yes! And here are two reasons why that is important.

First, most of us walk around believing a lot of things that are simply not true. There are so many examples of this that it is hard to pick any for fear of not being representative. But, for the sake of argument, people believe general things like: their spouse is loyal, if you work hard you will reap rewards, and people are basically honest. Specific things include: sure I'll be able to pay off all those students loans, I can rely on social security for my retirement, and this new military action will be of short duration.

 Like good conspiracy theorists we tend to accept, uncritically, confirmatory evidence while ignoring evidence that challenges our views. Sometime we are just naive. Sometimes we are in complete denial. But, what ever the reason we are vulnerable. And the longer we believe a thing that is not true the more vulnerable we become and the higher the cost when we cannot deny the truth any longer.

The only way to avoid this is to allow the unallowable and consider the validity of ideas that we would prefer to reject.  The more naive one is about some things the more likely they are to be naive about other things. Similarly, the more critical they are about some things, the more likely they are to be critical about other things.

The second reason is that the solutions to our biggest problems often lie outside of the range of possibilities that we currently understand. If we knew how to solve them we would have. The problem is that we don't know how to solve them. And we don't know how to solve them because the solution lies outside of our current understanding.

So, allowing a whacky idea and seeing where it goes reduces our vulnerability from beleiving things that are not true and allows us to solve problems that might otherwise be unsolvable. Those sound like pretty good reasons to me.