We’re All a Dumbass to Someone

Reclaim the Liberating Concept of People Just Being Wrong, Mistaken, or Incorrect

ChatGPT’s interpretation of a “Wicker Iron Battery.”

Think on all those clips you’ve seen online where two people are having a debate. Words like “heated” or “owned” or maybe even “destroyed” are used in the title. It’s a title right off the bat to put you into a mood of triumph or despair depending on how well your side is represented. You’ve got some cleaning to do so you click on it because for some reason your soul prefers argument to music. Inevitably, one person makes a good point that the other person wasn’t quite expecting. What happens next?

Naturally, the clouds open up, sunlight streams down on the face of the person with the great point. The evil one, the deliberate deceiver, shirks back further into the shadows. This is true, even if both people are in a dark podcast studio. The liar falls to the ground, writhing in agony, screaming “How could I have been such a piece of shit! I was blinded by my own wickedness, but now I see! Forgive me, teacher!”

This is, of course, ridiculous.

In fact, I have never really seen anyone instantly change their mind about a deeply held political, personal, or religious belief almost ever at all. This is because people have to walk around with their beliefs all day every day, they figure out ways to pattern match those beliefs to the world around them, and the odds of you saying something so giant that it disrupts that pattern is very small. Even if someone can’t do a very good job at expressing it, they usually have very good reasons to believe whatever it is they believe. The closest I have ever observed to someone changing their mind on the spot in the real world follows only two patterns:

1. Something is said that causes the other person to involuntarily laugh. Laughter is a confession that what has been said was truly surprising, novel, and changed the way that someone saw something, if only for a moment. They still won’t change their mind on the whole but do that enough times over a long enough period and their views tend to shift a little bit. Laughter also can only happen in a place where the person feels safe giving up some ground. This is probably one of the deep reasons I try to be funny all the time, although I never consciously think of it that way.

2. Someone says the equivalent of, “Oh. Huh.” Again, surprise, is the root here. Some piece of information is shown, some mechanic to make something work in a different manner than what the other person was expecting or believed possible. So, they are surprised. At root there, they are surprised because their worldview didn’t previously accommodate for such information and they are confronted with a small piece of impossibility. They have to move around their beliefs to make it work. This is only possible when someone is actively engaged with trying to make something make sense in their own head. “Oh. Huh” happens when the last piece falls into place and the mental machine suddenly moves. If the person is not engaged in such a manner, this is not possible.

Whenever I am surprised, I do my best to kick my ego out the door and figure out how the new information fits into the tree of my knowledge. The universe hangs together all of one piece, without seam or joint, so it follows that if I understand something it should fit into what I knew before or else that what I knew before needs to be amended. I also call this my “Head Universe.” I tend to think about most things mechanically, even religious things. Forgive me, this is the impoverishment of my soul, that I think about the divine and diesel engines with the same neurons and likewise for compassion and chemistry. Probably because when I was little my dad used to sneak me into the mill under his jacket and then he’d explain the whole layout of the production floor. It’s all steps, one things after the other, and if you understand each step you don’t have to see the end with your eyes to know what the end will be.

So, now, onto the embarrassing parts so I don’t accidentally start a cult:

The Ladder and the Fire Suppression System

My first summer in the sawmill my dad gave me one commandment. I was not, under any circumstances, to do something stupid and embarrass him. Don’t go try and find a board stretcher. Don’t let someone talk me into mixing two different colors of paint together to produce a primary color. None of that. We had a family reputation for horse-sense to maintain. I think I asked something flippant at the time like if horses like to get divorced a lot. I also took this to mean, “Never ask for help and just figure it out if you need to do something hard.” Thusly, I took a large section of pipe meant to replace part of the fire suppression system and headed out from the machine shop into the mill.

It quickly became evident that there was no way for me to simultaneously hold onto this very long section of pipe, which would have involved holding it in the middle, and screw it into the rather small and recessed place it needed to go, which would have involved me holding it at the farthest end. Yes, I tried all the obvious things you’re thinking about. No, they didn’t work. It was too recessed and you couldn’t realistically fit one into the other well enough from far away to get the threads to match up. So, I got creative.

I got two ladders, some blocks, some shims, and I centered the pipe on one ladder and lifted it with blocks and shims until it was centered on the receiving pipe. Then I got onto the second ladder and carefully screwed it in. Worked like a charm. Brownie points for me, right?

Wrong.

Smugly satisfied with my creative solution, because I understood I had been sent out to fail as a sort of prank —on reflection, summer hires like myself tended to slow down productivity a lot because all of the guys spent most of their time trying to find tasks to make us look like fools— I assembled the rest of the fire suppression system. Which was an L-joint and then another length of pipe and then finally a sprinkler head.

The only problem is that I forgot to move the first ladder before doing that last part. So at the end of an hour I had built the fire suppression system through a ladder and could not remove it. Which is exactly when the mill plumber entered the scene and I was deeply embarrassed because I hadn’t even realized I’d done it yet.

He got on the radio and asked/broadcast to the whole mill: “Anyone want to see something funny?”

So I took an hour to disassemble the end pieces I had put on, removed the ladder, and spent another hour putting them back on. Which is all to say, don’t feel satisfaction until you’re all the way done, and always remember to stop and think through the whole thing step by step before you take the first step and again after each step. Or at least as many steps back as you can.

The Transfer Deck Chain Incident

My dad also told me it was really important that I demonstrate the physical superiority of our bloodline. So I was not to shy away from hard work. When it became necessary to replace all the several hundred feet of chain on a transfer deck I was to pick up each sixty pound length of chain and race up the stairs with gusto. Preferably with one under each arm. After all, there were a few hundred lengths of chain that had to be brought up. This took several hours and I was completely covered with sweat by the end. We could only drive the chain so far into the mill and then it was up to me to carry them up the stairs and around several large pieces of equipment and along the narrow catwalks. My arms and back hurt for days afterward.

Upon completion, I awaited applause at my demonstration of incredible strength.

Instead, the kindly old lead millwright asked me “Do you think anyone has ever had to do that before?”

“Yeah, probably. Why?” Inside, I rolled my eyes a little bit. So this was how it was going to be. This old man was going to be so jealous of my strength he couldn’t even be impressed for a moment.

“Do you think if someone was here for a really long time that they would find a better way to get that work done?”

I felt suddenly chilled, aware that I had almost certainly fallen for one of their many pranks but failed to see how.

“Uh… yeah.”

“So if you think about where you took all that chain… I know it takes a long while to walk there… but where is it physically in relation to where we dropped the chain off?”

This was easy. I pointed directly up.

“Right over our heads.”

“Look up,” he said.

Which was when I noticed a large trap door and also immediately understood the purpose of the hydraulic winch nearby where I’d placed all the chain. If I’d bothered to look for it, the whole endeavor would have taken about half an hour and minimal work on my part.

Sure, someone could have told me. But I also could have thought to look.

The Wicker Iron Battery

After the mill shut down, I spent a summer working on a gas drilling rig in New Mexico. This is by far the worst job I’ve ever had and it’s why I don’t get too stressed out by email job stuff. After spending a week or so in something called the “Tool Yard” where I mostly did very low-level maintenance work, a guy named Alan drove me out to meet my drilling crew. I promised myself I’d never forget the rig number, but I can’t recall it now.

On the way there, Alan asked me about myself. I told him I was going to school for engineering. He asked me if I’d done well in high school and I told him I’d gotten a scholarship from NASA and a Nobel Laureate, but that last one wasn’t as big a deal as it seemed because the Nobel Laureate had also gone to my high school and it was only a few hundred kids. And basically, by not being a father upon graduation I’d basically already been in the top ten percent of academic performers. He was very impressed and looking back I definitely wanted him to be and if I had to do it all over again I would definitely, definitely not have mentioned any of that. This was the summer that finally put the smug little shit in my heart that thought he was smarter than everyone else in the ICU.

Alan saw his chance to pitch a concept company to what he viewed as a technical co-founder.

Alan asked if I was aware of how much lightning came out of the sky during desert thunderstorms. I said that I didn’t. He said that it was a fucking lot. Like Thor’s hammer swinging all over the place, and this was before the Marvel movies had come out.

Was I aware that lightning is made of electricity? I confirmed that I was.

Was I aware that electricity liked metal and specifically iron? This took me back and I tried to explain the concept of resistivity and electron shells but Alan brushed this aside.

Was I aware of what didn’t conduct electricity? Lots of things, I said and again tried to talk about how electricity actually flows through some materials but not others. Alan gave a dismissive laugh and looked at me before shouting what was to him the only obvious answer “Wicker!”

He then spent the better part of ten minutes laying out his plan to build the world’s first “Wicker Iron Battery” to solve the world’s energy problems. Lighting would “just blast the ever-loving shit” out of a “chunk of fucking iron” but the chunk of iron would be in a giant wicker basket so the electricity would have nowhere to go. He wasn’t sure exactly how much energy would be stored this way but was confident it was “fucking a lot.” He needed me to calculate this for him so we could both be billionaires.

I explained, with what I thought was kindness, exactly why this wouldn’t work. I explained the concepts of voltage, amperage, and capacitance. I explained why when lightning struck a chunk of iron in a wicker basket the electricity wouldn’t just stay there and even if it did how there would be no meaningfully way to extract it for productive work.

Alan and I didn’t talk for the remainder of the two hour long drive out to the drilling rig. When we got there he handed me a pressure washer and told me that I was to clean the rig. I asked him where I should start and he responded.

“You fucking figure it out, Einstein.”

And this is how I started to learn about team work, and maybe you have to coordinate with other people’s feelings to be productive and live a happy life.

We’re all a dumbass to someone about something at some point in our lives. My biggest problem in my youth was arrogance. If I could do better than someone on a math test, I took it to mean that I was in some general way smarter than them across a whole array of tasks no matter how long they’d been doing them or how long their work history happened to be. To be fair, I am generally able to pick things up a bit quicker than most people. But there are large swaths of life where that doesn’t really matter because some tasks require you to have brains in your feet or hands in ways that are very difficult to just pick up on the fly. Or to just know things that aren’t intuitive by having been around something for a long time. The real test, the wisest test, isn’t if you are “smarter” than someone else. The real test is if you are smart enough to figure out how to do something in the real world. And by that measuring stick, we’re all pretty dumb. It takes a lot of us to do almost anything.

Think back on your own life. Do you have the same basic set of beliefs that you did when you were a kid? Be honest. The answer is no. You’ve changed and evolved. Good. That means you are connected to the world and can learn.

So now take that experience and wrap it around other people. When someone says something you vehemently disagree with is it more likely that they’re some whole kind of different creature than you are? Or that maybe they’ve just lived a different life, seen different things, and reached different conclusions? Maybe you know something they don’t. Maybe even, gasp, they know something that you don’t.

If you don’t think this might be true, if it causes you to push away in revulsion ask yourself to assess another likelihood: Is it more likely that you know everything, that your worldview is perfect and pristine, and it’s everyone else who needs to update the way they see the universe or maybe you also have some ideas that need to be tested and might be a bit arrogant about it just like everybody else?

There’s more to this, of course. It’s not that easy. The world is too complicated for any of us to figure all of this out in a single human lifetime. The implications are too numerous for any of us to hold it all within a single mind. But maybe if we approach the tapestry of reality, that is so large you can’t even see it all at once, as a team with people we trust and each of us looks at some tiny part and checks the work of our nearest neighbors, we can communicate honestly and figure out the whole picture.

The things that helps us to do that, like community and shared culture and traditions tie us together and move us closer to that place of truth and beauty.

The things that push us away from it, our anger at each other, our pride, aspects of culture and tradition that no longer serve our seeking, move us further into the darkness.

If you can accept that someone is just wrong, or mistaken, even if you have to do something quite drastic to stop them from acting upon those beliefs, it completely liberates you from hating them. In fact, it forces you to have hope that you can change their mind. That you might be able to make them laugh at something. Or say “Oh. Huh” at some part of their stated beliefs. I’m not saying people are never pig-headed or deliberately cruel, just that they’re not for the most part.

Once you know this, you can begin to think through step-by-step what would need to be in place to make you trust your neighbor a little bit more than you fear him. What would you need to cooperate with the other people in your culture and build something that both of you can be happy with? How could you make something that you could be confident in?

As I said, the purpose of this substack is primarily to encourage the construction of something I call a “Trust Index” although recent conversations lead me to want me to rename it a “Trust Assembly.” A systemized, digitally native experience, for cooperating within and across groups to discover the truth. Something like Community Notes on twitter —check the date of my articles on this, you’ll see they predate Community Notes, just as a signal of my credibility on this topic— A way we can all look at the tapestry of what is and do a little bit more to figure out how it all fits together.

The future worth showing up for starts with all of us accepting our limitations and figuring out how to help one another despite them.