The first three arguments I remember having... The first in a hotel room somewhere, I think it might have been Daytona Beach, Florida, when I was 3. My mother disagreed that the past tense of "go" was "goed." She just didn't understand. It became quite a heated argument as I tried to convince her that "went" was ridiculous. A little later I was in Kindergarten and I was just insisting that 'c' always makes a sound like an 's', because it's obvious, 'c' starts like 's.' What kind of crap is a 'c' that sounds like a 'k'? It's not called "kee." (My younger brother of course was right.) Also in Kindergarten, I remember arguing with my teacher about religion. It was a religious school, but I was telling her that there were two devils. There's the one she was talking about, and there's the one in Clash of the Titans. He's called Pan. My dad told me he's the devil, so he must also be the devil. She didn't know what I was talking about and looked very worried. I'm also told that at a very young age I used to troll most of my mother's plans for walks by insisting on bringing a frying pan, but as I do not remember this, I am not convinced.
***
Also around Kindergarten, at lunch or dinner, I argued with both of my parents that I could see atoms. They told me that wasn't possible. They sounded very perfunctory and certain. They weren't even *thinking* about it! So I tried to explain the little spots I see. I demanded to know what they were, then, and got no answer better than "dust." Today I'd call them "visual qualia" or "like phosphors or film grain" or "individual photoreceptors firing." There was a finding that in certain cases photoreceptors in the retina can in fact respond to single photons, so while I was wrong, maybe I wasn't as far off as all that.
A little later in 2nd grade, I remember trying to convince my classmates at a round cafeteria table that they were "death" because they thought when you can't hear it's called "deaf." They actually kind of hated me, all of them.
Everyone in 2nd grade told me that the new Batman movie was awesome, and I told them it was stupid. They all kept asking me, and since they didn't like me anyway, I stirred their hatred by telling them I didn't want to see it. Our positions have, for the most part, reversed. As soon as I actually saw it, I loved it, and have ever since. Most people think that one is stupid, but I think I lost the argument. Not only was I "wrong," my whole approach didn't make a shred of sense. My dad angrily didn't like the look of the new movie, like most stuff we watched or wanted to watch, and I assumed every single kid there liked it so much because everyone else liked it. Yet I loved it. The power was direct and undeniable, and I knew immediately *that* was why they all loved it. That was a nice illustration of two faulty ways of thinking, both in a sense arguments from authority: argument from the opinion of an accepted authority, my dad on this occasion, and the assumption that if it's really popular, there must be something wrong with it. Sillies for sillinesses! As my accepted authority pointed out much later, and I still take it for astuteness, young people who rebel against society by wearing punk clothes are wearing a uniform together.
And elsewhere in elementary school, our friend and I tried to convince my brother that when a car goes round a bend, it leans *into* the bend, not *out of* the bend. My younger brother of course was right again. How did he know! He was younger than both of us! That's part of how we both "knew" we were right - we were older and couldn't imagine our mental image as a lie, couldn't imagine why a car would lean out, so how could we both be wrong? We were overruling him. Well, he particularly loved cars and is really clever, and he's the scientist now, so it all makes sense. But (also,) age has nothing beyond a faint fug of statistics to do with rightness, and neither has the ease of imagining a claim. Those particular faults are called ageism and the availability bias.
The availability bias is easy to confirm (if you're solid at physics experiments, or take it on authority) in the quantum real world under us, or in the terrifying clarity of your death in a plane crash as you lift off, or in your certainty that someone you have a crush on finds you disgusting or else is secretly in love with you despite ignoring you or treating you badly. (The last one also comes from an attribution error: your feelings are intense, but nine times out of ten, they have no particular feeling.) It's perhaps hardest to correct when we already have an explanation or intuitive image that (we feel) makes sense, and we don't immediately understand a better one that's presented to us. Believing the car tips *inward* rather than *outward*, though we couldn't explain it clearly, *is* intuitive because the car is accelerating inward, along the radius of the curve, yanked in the direction it's turning; but the occupants and mass will crowd and press in the other direction by inertia. If we'd actually been in a car at the time, on the other hand, we would have said it was *intuitive* that the car tips *outward*, because that's where we would feel thrown. But we had only ever seen cars tip on TV, so the image and the feeling weren't really connected, and the intuition of some car-pulled-into-turn was greater than our vague memories. Or maybe it was the intuition of riding a bike, leaning the direction you want to go. Probably - memory of the past is so often corrupted by our present beliefs and understandings: in truth, I don't think I understood at all about centripetal force then. And that was the problem! as my brother would quip today in a funny accent. The main thing I remember, besides brief yet emotional reflections on the absolute certainty that we were right, was our difficulty in expressing why exactly a car *does* tip toward the center. It was completely obvious, but we couldn't quite put it into words.
Zzzzzingggg. It was completely obvious, but we couldn't quite put it into words. Yet we both felt the same way, and we were older. It was completely obvious, but we couldn't quite put it into words.
Although I was probably right about something before middle school, I only remember the arguments I lost...
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I do remember imagining, in a car ride from school, when a babysitter picked me up, while gazing out the window at the blurring trees, how to get around pollution from cars. I imagined a wire under the road, and some futuristic car pulling electricity straight from it. Then my feelings sagged, because I couldn't see how such a stupid thing would ever happen. The electricity is in the road. What, does the car scrape through the asphalt? Is the wire left bare to electrocute people? That might work, like train tracks, but you'd never convince people. I could see the lawsuits and uproar that would never happen, because it'd never get a green light. Maybe there was something I didn't know, though. People always stop at the first hiccup, I thought; they want to look as if they know what's going on; that's why most people never become good science fiction writers. Today in California, there are buses that use exactly this technique: drawing electricity through the electric field, without contact, from wire under the road. Maybe I was in 6th grade, maybe 7th. I remember my school uniform, and those were the years I wore it. So I was right about something, just by wanting to invent something and using my imagination.
