The World According to Bret

The world is really complicated. I can't figure it out anymore. That's one reason I haven't been blogging much. I find myself unable to put together any coherent arguments with sufficient context to make sense to anyone including myself.

Consider the following image:

You've probably seen this illusion before or at least one like it. The two circles are the same color (yellow). Yet they look completely different because of the context. And the context is kinda similar: a bunch of greenish and purplish stripes.

I subscribe to only one newspaper: The New York Times. It's somewhat left of center in the political spectrum of the United States. I read a number of blogs, most of them to the right of center.

What is striking to me is the difference in context between the left of center New York Times and the right of center media that I read. They can take the exact same yellow circle and make it look completely different.

A trivial example is "mostly peaceful protests." If you have 100 protestors and 95 of them are perfectly peaceful and 5 are not peaceful, it is, by definition, a mostly peaceful protest. Indeed, it's 20 times more peaceful than a protest in which all 100 people were not peaceful.

Now we can build a context around the "mostly peaceful protest." We can focus on the 95 peaceful protestors and their message and their treatment by their ideological opposition and by police and authorities. Perhaps they were tear gassed. Perhaps the were forced to stop protesting. Perhaps they have a very important message that's being stifled. And so forth.

Or our context can be what the 5 not peaceful protestors are doing. Perhaps they're attacking police. Perhaps they're burning dumpsters or even buildings. Perhaps there's other violence: arson, rape, even murder. Our context can be full of the lawlessness and chaos of the non peaceful protestors and can be quite frightening. And so forth.

Same story either way, but radically different contexts which causes radically different optics and impressions.

When I was 15 I was a communist. At 30 I was a libertarian. At 45 I was sort of a conservative. Now? I'm the devil's advocate. Whatever you tell me, I have a strong inclination to argue the opposite. Fortunately, I've also learned to mostly keep my mouth shut because, let me tell you, always taking the other side doesn't tend to make a lot of friends!!

When advocating for the other side, I often am told, "I can't fathom why you believe X, I've just provided evidence that contradicts it!!!!" But that evidence is like the circle above. I said the circle is yellow and they showed me a circle that looks orange within their context, within their perspective, the context on the left. To me the circle looks (or at least can look) yellow, because I can see the circle within the context on the right.

I often try to estimate how many (English) words it would take to fully describe an issue. For example, I estimate that to fully describe race relations in the United States with complete context would be more than a trillion words. I've perhaps read a million words on the subject and based on that extremely incomplete yet still significant knowledge I have developed a certain feel/intuition about the subject.

If you now show me a one-thousand word article that doesn't match that intuition, it's not gonna affect me all that much. Why? First, like every human I suffer from confirmation bias and I tend to discount things that don't fit within my worldview. Second, even if I get over my confirmation bias, you've shown me one-thousandth the information I've already processed, a lot of it already in conflict, so it wouldn't make sense for me to suddenly ignore everything I "know" and adopt a completely new perspective based on this small new bit of evidence you've shown me. Third, while your new information looks like an orange circle within the context you've provided, I probably don't share that context so the circle looks yellow to me.

To put it another way, I know a millionth of what there is to know about race relations, you then showed me a billionth of what there is to know, and either way we'll both continue to swim in a vast sea of ignorance regarding that particular subject with alarmingly incomplete and distorted contexts. Oh sure, I may be off by a couple of orders of magnitude with my estimates but the gist remains the same.

That's one subject. There are millions of subjects with similar complexity so that sea of ignorance becomes a universe (multiverse?) of ignorance.

Given that ignorance is bliss, I'm apparently so blissed out that I'm unaware of it!

Have a blissful day!