My eyes are perhaps worse than yesterday. I’m wearing my glasses while I type this. I called the ophthalmologist yesterday and he was supposed to get back to me today. He didn’t so I called again and was promised he would return my call. They did apologize. I seem to see in the distance just as well as on Tuesday but I can no longer see my computer. It might just be a matter that I’ll need some sort of reading glasses for that. I hope the same one will let me read books which are much closer. I’m not going to speculate more, what’s the point? I don’t know.
I would like to go out shopping today but I’m not going to leave until I hear from my doctor. Phone tag has been a theme of late. It took me forever to connect with LORi, I’m still going back and forth with Jane.
I just took off my glasses, it seems like that’s better for Word though glasses on is better for Web Browsing. Things are much higher contrast without glasses. I’ve spent the last few days working on system to take my eyedrops on schedule. I think I finally got it right. I have an alarm set every two hours coded by which combination of drops I need to take. I don’t need the printed sheet I was given. I take one drop every day hours, one every four, and the last every six. Next week it gets easier as every two-hour drop goes to every four hours.
Now to get to the part I’ve been putting off; it’s going to get many people upset with me but it’s important. It is my pet cause of pet causes, rationality. There are three terms that can mean the same thing but people judge very differently, intuition/gut feeling and prejudice. People think of intuition as a good thing, and it is in some respects and prejudice is a bad thing, but they both come down to believing the path the truth is not through reason but as something that you just know.
I so often hear people say, “I’m very intuitive.” What I always want to ask is, how do you know? What are you judging by? The answer of course is that their intuition says that they are intuitive. I’d like to think of myself as intuitive but if you ask me why I can give objective evidence. Back in my academic career I could find solutions in math and science must faster and more often than my classmates. This kind of intuition is not mysterious, and it’s not just innate, it’s learned. The more math I learned, the more I could figure out. I learned how to think. I learned by experience which paths to pursue. Even with that my intuition, like everyone’s was often wrong. That’s what makes math and science different than other fields, you might find a solution through intuition but you then have to prove it with reason. Intuition can fool you. Everyone that pursues math and science learns that.
When I hear people say they are intuitive what they usually mean is that they can tell who to trust? They can judge the truth of situation based on little information. In other words they are judging before they get the facts, pre-judging, the definition of prejudice. They gain confidence their intuition is good by confirmation bias. They remember when they are right. Even worse they think they are right when they aren’t. If some source agrees with their intuition that’s the source they will be believe, not the preponderance of the sources that disagree. People judge sources by how much they confirm their prejudices rather than by objective measures of reliability.
This drives me to distraction. Conservatives’ intuition tells them that climate change is a hoax. What is really telling them that is their tribal affinity. It’s what a good conservative thinks. Progressives do the same thing. When Obama was president few progressives thought of climate change as a priority. Now that Trump so loudly decries it, it becomes important. The evidence is not as important a factor as the prejudices. As a progressive I can feel the social pressure to be against GMOs. This is where I know I’ll make people mad. I was disappointed when Bill Nye made an anti-GMO video. His arguments were specious, every argument he made could be made to be against bringing in crops not native to an area, which is most crops. I was relieved when he saw the light. His reasoning won out over his prejudice.
The battle between reason and prejudice is behind so much of what’s wrong in the world. People voted for Trump because they ignore the facts and just know that immigrants are dangerous. They just know the only reason we lost manufacturing and mining jobs is because there’s some nefarious cabal of globalists. They just knew that Hillary could not be trusted. They just knew that whites have it harder than minorities and men have it harder than women.
I get upset when progressives do the same things because it gives intellectual and moral force to “following your gut.” Once that is an acceptable argument than there is no room for rational discussion. The winner is the side that shouts the loudest or wins people over emotionally.
Con men say that the easiest mark is the one that thinks they know it all. At least con men in movies and TV say that. Those are the people that can be conned into thinking that global warming and vaccines are conspiracies. They care more about punishing those they see as the bad guys than achieving positive results. I’ve had discussions where I say that we have to change the economic incentives so that people and corporations do what’s best for society and got backlash because “it’s letting them off the hook.” The question of whether it would work or not was beside the point. They “know” that there are bad people that have to be punished.
One of the things that has delighted me as that sports has finally adopted an empirical approach. Once a few teams made changes everyone else had to because otherwise they couldn’t compete. Basketball learned the value of the three pointer which was obvious from the get-go but went against conventional wisdom. Baseball learned the value of walks and power. Then then they learned the value of pulling the ball and hitting it in the air. What baseball learned was to follow Ted Williams’ hitting philosophy. His success wasn’t enough to convince anyone for 60 years. Football has learned the value of passing. Hockey players now concentrate on getting better shots, not just more.
Maybe we can do the same on policy. The American health care system fares poorly compared to other wealthy and any not so wealthy countries. It should be obvious that we need to change. But even now people resist. You might have read how “single payer” does well in polling. It doesn’t when the fact that people will lose their current insurance is included in the question. They fear the unknown. Others have become enamored with single payer without understanding that there are other options for universal coverage that do just as well if not better. Switzerland is not single payer and might have the best health care system in the world. What they have is akin to Obamacare done right. It’s truly universal. It doesn’t have all the holes for people to fall into. I remember telling someone this and their response was, “but I still prefer single-payer.” They knew no details. They had never even heard of Switzerland’s system. They just “knew” was what better.
I do this rant to myself every single day. I can’t read a newspaper or go on Facebook without encountering people who “know” things that aren’t true. We all do it. I do it. People need to acknowledge that and learn to distinguish objective facts from their gut feelings. You can follow your gut as a guide to investigate, but not to determine the truth.
I hope I think of something fun to write about tomorrow. I hate to complain so much. Maybe my doctor will get back to me early enough that I can write about that. I’m still waiting for him to return my call from yesterday. That’s an entirely different kind of complaint.
Wise Madness 