Frater 219's Journal: How to Make Yourself Look Stupid

This is not a list of ways to be stupid. It is not about foolish or immature people trolling, flaming mindlessly, or pandering to one another's prejudices. It is a list of ways that moderately informed people frequently make themselves look as if they just stepped off the clue boat with an empty cart. Its format is to present the general form of a kind of stupidity, and to illustrate it with examples from matters both online and offline. And for the first:

Mistake negative experience for bias. This is a great way to look like a Rondroid: when someone disagrees with you, or criticizes something you participate in, presume that they are motivated solely by prejudice. When someone says they've had bad experiences with a product, a company, or a group of people, with which you are affiliated, dismiss what they have to say as "biased."

The term "Rondroid" comes from the name of L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology. In the late '90s, a group of online Scientologists took to defending their church's criminal practices by accusing its critics (largely ex-members) of "bigotry". (When that failed, the Scientologists started using denial-of-service attacks and barratrous lawsuits.)

When a person has had consistently unpleasant experiences with a piece of software (one you use and admire!) and calls it "buggy" or "historically insecure", you do neither yourself nor the truth any favor to call him prejudiced. He is not -- he is the very opposite: "postjudiced", as it were; having made up his mind on the basis of experience. If you cannot accept the fact of another's experience, then you should examine your own biases.

Underestimate the importance of individual free choice. By doing this, you look like a Soviet planner. You presume that you, in your wisdom, know exactly how many people should produce toilet paper and how many should grow turnips. By sending all your people to produce toilet paper, you doom them to starvation; by sending them all to grow turnips, you doom them to wiping their asses with dried turnip leaves. Only when people are able to choose in the market which of these necessary trades to follow (by following the money -- when one resource is short, its price goes up) can a dynamic balance be achieved. Excessive planning produces cyclical shortages.

Truth be told, like many economic truths this applies outside the formal (money-driven) marketplace as much as within it. For instance, some have criticized the open-source populace for producing multiple programs to fill a niche -- or for failing to sign on en masse to a single favorite project. "If only everyone would quit making random weird stuff and work on Mozilla, since it is more important!" It is a glad fact that the people who whine thus have no power to make it so, for it is out of today's random weird stuff than the next success comes.

Assume that a perfect consensus exists, then criticize its "members" for inconsistency. This is how to look like a creationist. The method of stupidity here is to create a false stereotype of a diverse group -- making it out to be of one mind and belief -- and then to attack it as "hypocritical" for its internal disagreements, or for failing to live up to your stereotype of it. "How can you Slashdot people buy Lord of the Rings DVDs? I thought you all said DVDs were evil!" This particularly asinine form of strawman argument involves attacking person A for disagreeing with person B -- but only because you assumed that they would agree.

Creationists -- those who deny biological evolution for religious reasons -- often point to minor disagreements among biologists as evidence that evolution is "in dispute" or "under fire" within the scientific community. They claim, for instance, that since gradualists (such as Dawkins) and punctuated-equilibrists (such as Gould) cannot agree on the details of evolution, that the whole science must be impossibly flawed. No such thing is the case. Evolutionary biologists do not study whether evolution happens (a settled matter) but rather the particulars of how it happens (a matter still being discovered). To presume that a perfect consensus should exist, then sounding the alarm at "inconsistency", is to attack a straw man.