Thanks for the comment, jimmy! That’s a good point, and I wonder if it apples to what we’re seeing in some of the political misinformation today, where the objective isn’t so much to be believed, but to bombard a person with so many conflicting views and narratives that they lose faith in the process and institutions altogether.
I think the conflicting narratives tend to come from different sides of the conflict, and that people generally want the institutions that they’re part of (and which give them status) to remain high status. It just doesn’t always work.
What I’m talking about is more like.. okay, so Chael Sonnen makes a great example here both because he’s great at it and because it makes for a non-political example. Chael Sonnen is a professional fighter who intentionally plays the role of the “heel”. He’ll say ridiculous things with a straight face, like telling the greatest fighter in the world that he “absolutely sucks” or telling a story that a couple Brazilian fighters (the Nogueira brothers) mistook a bus for a horse and tried to feed it a carrot and sticking to it.
When people try to “fact check” Chael Sonnen, it doesn’t matter because not only does he not care that what he’s saying is true, he’s not even bound by any expectation of you believing him. The bus/carrot story was his way of explaining that he didn’t mean to offend any Brazilians, and the only reason he said that offensive stuff online is that he was unaware that they had computers in Brazil. The whole point of being a heel is to provoke a response, and in order to do that all he has to do is have the tiniest sliver of potential truth there and not break character. The bus/carrot story wouldn’t have worked if the fighters from a clearly more technologically advanced country than him, even though it’s pretty darn far from “they actually think buses are horses, and it’s plausible that Chael didn’t know they have computers”. If your attempt to call Chael out on his BS is to “fact check” whether he was even there to see a potential bus/horse confusion or to point out that if anything, they’re more likely to mistake a bus for a Llama, you’re missing the entire point of the BS in the first place. The only way to respond is the way Big Nog actually did, which is to laugh it off as the ridiculous story it is.
The problem is that while you might be able to laugh off a silly story about how you mistook a horse for a carrot, people like Chael (if they’re any good at what they do) will be able to find things you’re sensitive about. You can’t so easily “just laugh off” him saying that you absolutely suck even if you’re the best in the world, because he was a good enough fighter that he nearly won that first match. Bullshitters like Chael will find the things that are difficult for you to entertain as potentially true and make you go there. If there’s any truth there, you’ll have to admit to it or end up making yourself look like a fool.
This brings up the other type of non-truthtelling that commonly occurs which is the counterpart to this. Actually expecting to be believed means opening yourself to the possibility of being wrong and demonstrating that you’re not threatened by this. If I say it’s raining outside and expect you to actually believe me, I have to be able to say “hey, I’ll open the door and show you!”, and I have to look like I’ll be surprised if you don’t believe me once you get outside. If I start saying “How DARE you insinuate that I might be lying about the rain!” and generally take the bait that BSers like Chael leave, I show that it’s not that I want you to genuinely believe me so much as I want you to shut your mouth and not challenge my ideas. It’s a 2+2=5 situation now, and that’s a whole nother thing to expect. In these cases there still isn’t the same pressure to conform to the truth needed if you expect to be believed, and your real constraint is how much power you have to pressure the other person into silence/conformity.
The biggest threat to truth, as I see it, is that when people get threatened by ideas that they don’t want to be true, they try to 2+2=5 at it. Sometimes they’ll do the same thing even when the belief they’re trying to enforce is actually the correct one, and it causes just as much problems because can’t trust someone saying “Don’t you DARE question” even when they follow it up with “2+2=4″, and unless you can do the math yourself you can’t know what to believe. To give a recent example, I found a document written by a virologist PhD about why the COVID pandemic is very unlikely to have come from a lab and it was more thorough and covered more possibilities I hadn’t yet seen anyone cover, which was really cool. The problem is that when I actually checked his sources, they didn’t all say what he said they said. I sent him a message asking whether I was missing something in a particular reference, and his response was basically “Ah, yeah. It’s not in that one it’s in another one from China that has been deleted and doesn’t exist anymore.” and went on to cite the next part of his document as if there’s nothing wrong with making blatantly false implications that the sources one gives support the point one made, and the only reason I could even be asking about it is that I hadn’t read the following paragraph about something else. When I pointed out that conspiracy minded people are likely to latch on to any little reason to not trust him and that in order to be persuasive to his target audience he should probably correct it and note the change, he did not respond and did not correct his document. And he wonders why we have conspiracy theories.
Bullshitters like Chael can sometimes lose (or fail to form) their grip on reality and let their untruths actually start to impact things in a negative way, and that’s a problem. However, it’s important to realize that the fuel that sustains these people is the over-reaching attempts to enforce “2+2=what I want you to say it does”, and if you just do the math and laugh it off when he straight face says that 2+2=22, there’s no more oppressive bullshit for him to eat and fuel his trolling bullshit.
Thanks for the comment, jimmy! That’s a good point, and I wonder if it apples to what we’re seeing in some of the political misinformation today, where the objective isn’t so much to be believed, but to bombard a person with so many conflicting views and narratives that they lose faith in the process and institutions altogether.
I think the conflicting narratives tend to come from different sides of the conflict, and that people generally want the institutions that they’re part of (and which give them status) to remain high status. It just doesn’t always work.
What I’m talking about is more like.. okay, so Chael Sonnen makes a great example here both because he’s great at it and because it makes for a non-political example. Chael Sonnen is a professional fighter who intentionally plays the role of the “heel”. He’ll say ridiculous things with a straight face, like telling the greatest fighter in the world that he “absolutely sucks” or telling a story that a couple Brazilian fighters (the Nogueira brothers) mistook a bus for a horse and tried to feed it a carrot and sticking to it.
When people try to “fact check” Chael Sonnen, it doesn’t matter because not only does he not care that what he’s saying is true, he’s not even bound by any expectation of you believing him. The bus/carrot story was his way of explaining that he didn’t mean to offend any Brazilians, and the only reason he said that offensive stuff online is that he was unaware that they had computers in Brazil. The whole point of being a heel is to provoke a response, and in order to do that all he has to do is have the tiniest sliver of potential truth there and not break character. The bus/carrot story wouldn’t have worked if the fighters from a clearly more technologically advanced country than him, even though it’s pretty darn far from “they actually think buses are horses, and it’s plausible that Chael didn’t know they have computers”. If your attempt to call Chael out on his BS is to “fact check” whether he was even there to see a potential bus/horse confusion or to point out that if anything, they’re more likely to mistake a bus for a Llama, you’re missing the entire point of the BS in the first place. The only way to respond is the way Big Nog actually did, which is to laugh it off as the ridiculous story it is.
The problem is that while you might be able to laugh off a silly story about how you mistook a horse for a carrot, people like Chael (if they’re any good at what they do) will be able to find things you’re sensitive about. You can’t so easily “just laugh off” him saying that you absolutely suck even if you’re the best in the world, because he was a good enough fighter that he nearly won that first match. Bullshitters like Chael will find the things that are difficult for you to entertain as potentially true and make you go there. If there’s any truth there, you’ll have to admit to it or end up making yourself look like a fool.
This brings up the other type of non-truthtelling that commonly occurs which is the counterpart to this. Actually expecting to be believed means opening yourself to the possibility of being wrong and demonstrating that you’re not threatened by this. If I say it’s raining outside and expect you to actually believe me, I have to be able to say “hey, I’ll open the door and show you!”, and I have to look like I’ll be surprised if you don’t believe me once you get outside. If I start saying “How DARE you insinuate that I might be lying about the rain!” and generally take the bait that BSers like Chael leave, I show that it’s not that I want you to genuinely believe me so much as I want you to shut your mouth and not challenge my ideas. It’s a 2+2=5 situation now, and that’s a whole nother thing to expect. In these cases there still isn’t the same pressure to conform to the truth needed if you expect to be believed, and your real constraint is how much power you have to pressure the other person into silence/conformity.
The biggest threat to truth, as I see it, is that when people get threatened by ideas that they don’t want to be true, they try to 2+2=5 at it. Sometimes they’ll do the same thing even when the belief they’re trying to enforce is actually the correct one, and it causes just as much problems because can’t trust someone saying “Don’t you DARE question” even when they follow it up with “2+2=4″, and unless you can do the math yourself you can’t know what to believe. To give a recent example, I found a document written by a virologist PhD about why the COVID pandemic is very unlikely to have come from a lab and it was more thorough and covered more possibilities I hadn’t yet seen anyone cover, which was really cool. The problem is that when I actually checked his sources, they didn’t all say what he said they said. I sent him a message asking whether I was missing something in a particular reference, and his response was basically “Ah, yeah. It’s not in that one it’s in another one from China that has been deleted and doesn’t exist anymore.” and went on to cite the next part of his document as if there’s nothing wrong with making blatantly false implications that the sources one gives support the point one made, and the only reason I could even be asking about it is that I hadn’t read the following paragraph about something else. When I pointed out that conspiracy minded people are likely to latch on to any little reason to not trust him and that in order to be persuasive to his target audience he should probably correct it and note the change, he did not respond and did not correct his document. And he wonders why we have conspiracy theories.
Bullshitters like Chael can sometimes lose (or fail to form) their grip on reality and let their untruths actually start to impact things in a negative way, and that’s a problem. However, it’s important to realize that the fuel that sustains these people is the over-reaching attempts to enforce “2+2=what I want you to say it does”, and if you just do the math and laugh it off when he straight face says that 2+2=22, there’s no more oppressive bullshit for him to eat and fuel his trolling bullshit.