When most people oppose an idea, they try to squash it and promote its exact opposite. Yet most established ideas are partly true. Even when they're completely off-base, there's either some fragment of truth hiding in them, or some aspect of human psychology that helps them feel accurate even though there's nothing right about them. In short, if you can't understand why a person wouldn't understand what you're saying, I'm not sure you have much business lecturing them.

Hypocrisy is usually defined as holding others to standards you don't meet yourself, or giving advice you can't follow. But I think the first is sadly almost universal and people don't realize it, while the second falsely condemns good advice just because the person giving it has fallen short. A better definition of hypocrisy is a cultural atmosphere in which lying is expected or even required and people ignore this fact. In other words, it is culture that is hypocritical more than it is individuals. When you feel you can't tell the truth about how you feel, what you believe is true, etc, and especially when these are genuine and accurate, the reason tends to be standardized hypocrisy.

Today I want to talk about a sense of entitlement doctors have. They go through a ton of training and typically have a ton of experience in the serious domain of health and life and death decisions. They also need to cut through nonsense and get their assessments and directions heard and followed. So it's understandable that they can seem a little commanding or dismissive.

However, I've found that most of them go a bit too far, in that they assume you know nothing, and assume they know everything there is to know - or everything that matters in the circumstances - or at least try hard to give that impression, to a fault - after they've made a diagnosis. I can't count how many times I've understood things a doctor apparently didn't about a condition I had, a medication I was taking, etc. Now, as a teacher, I know that often it's better to start off assuming your listener knows nothing, and give them kind of "bonus points," if you will, if they do happen to know more, and adjust on the fly accordingly. Maybe I'm at fault here, too, for listening too politely and patiently to details I already had in my pocket. And of course, you and I should both be careful to wonder whether I knew those other, additional things, or only had an opinion, and might be getting ahead of myself. But even when I have pulled out a fact that is known by the medical community at large, for example a direction about how to take a medication, I've found doctors who didn't know this thing talking down to me, telling me only the most basic stuff I found out months or years ago googling, and acting as if (or telling me outright) they would certainly have heard about it if anything even remotely like XYZ were true. But if they were more interested in listening, if they showed more curiosity, I might demonstrate otherwise. Instead, they come across as authoritarian, closed-minded, presumptuous, and condescending.

I know they're trying to help. They're trying to do their job. But the trouble is that their opinion, however they choose to present it, is ultimately also an opinion. It's true that they need to take a tone that gets them listened to. Maybe the real problem here would be all the patients who are too foolish to know what's good for them when it's told to them point-blank. But not everyone is a fool to be goaded, or a total layperson with no facility for research, skepticism, objectivity, etc. In the end, most of the medical treatment I've received has come from myself, and I've worked out a great many things that fly or don't fly for me, and more often than not, I've been able to diagnose my own issues, much the way I've been able to figure out what was wrong with my MacBooks before taking them in for repairs I didn't want to risk doing myself. It's only an opinion until the repair is accomplished and everything works again. Then it isn't an opinion but a fact.

In the case of medicine rather than computers, it isn't so cut and dry, but you either have a migraine or you don't, for example. So - that the turmeric extract called Meriva works to cut off headaches before they become migraines (at least very often) is not an opinion, it's a fact I rely on in my daily life. No doctor told me about that. In fact, I don't do anything for my migraines that a doctor told me about. Everything I do to treat my migraines I learned on my own, through the internet and trial and error. That isn't because I haven't talked to at least a dozen doctors about migraines.

All the medically supervised interventions turned out not to be effective or sustainable. That or I already knew about them. It's nice to get another prescription for ibuprofen, I suppose, but I know what ibuprofen is, and in the end, 800 mg pills aren't the way I use it, so while it seems official and supportive and validating, it doesn't help my particular condition. In fact, I think the 800 mg ibuprofen prescriptions I've gotten - dozens of them? - are a good example of my relationship with doctors. It's friendly. I listen. Sometimes they listen as well as I would like. But I keep feeling that I know more than they do on this topic, and I'm the one listening, and they only listen here and there and jump to conclusions I've already superseded, and unlike me, they feel a sense of finality in their opinion which, on the objective criterion, they have not earned, because they just aren't right.

I could not have treated cancer on my own. Doctors and nurses and technicians and other staff saved my life when I had cancer, and it was a very complicated and involved a course of treatments that lasted the better part of a year. For that I am endlessly grateful. This post is not meant to undercut the medical establishment. It is meant to comment on human fallibility.

I'm not a drinker (maybe four servings a year and not all at once), but I have always found it disgraceful that people are worried they won't be able to find a decent job if there's a picture online of them clearly drinking or inebriated. Any job that assesses candidates this way, or so I'm inclined to think, is looking for people who are compliant all the way up to and past the point of hypocrisy.

I'm sure we can find better ways to establish whether someone is hamstrung by alcoholism than the presence or absence of photos from gatherings where people had drinks. Good Lord, why am I the only one who finds the ridiculous ridiculous sometimes?

Who wants to be the odd one out? Everyone knows (while rational) that a picture from a party doesn't mean you're alcoholic or unreliable. The people who value their job search in an ordinary fashion will remove such signs because others do. They don't want to stand out for the wrong reasons. But those would be, in fact, the wrong reasons. The criterion is wrong. What's actually being measured, for the most part, is people's willingness to go along with the hypocrisy.

Isn't it a bit disgusting?

Sure I can see the practicality of this norm, but strip-searching immigrants and torturing defendants could also be practical, but that doesn't make it right. Maybe hiring over-judgmentality is less wrong than those examples, but can we really quantify the net harms across millions of instances, and is anyone even trying to tally them?

You might live with an alcoholic and not know, because they're often that good at hiding it until their nuclear core melts down. The photo test is not how society should handle the issue.

I don't say this for myself. Nor do I say it to oppose anyone as a person. I say it because this normal practice is disgusting, disgraceful, hypocritical, and backwards.

One way or another, I'm not that smart. I'm curious, and I'm simply lucky enough to be smarter than average. There's a big difference between luck/curiosity and sheer brilliance! To take the motion a step further, I'm curious partly because I make a point of cultivating this trait (how I was raised), and partly because I have ADHD.

Following my curiosity is a way of fighting off depression. It's also a way of dealing with anxiety. Learning will lead to solutions where you thought there could be none. Channeling fear to alert you or point you to what you don't know is ultimately healthy. Once it's done that, you can give it a nod and let it go. But there are costs to curiosity, as well.

I hate one-sidedness, and one reason I hate it is that we should know better. Yet you look around and listen to people, and everyone's goddamn one-sided. Whatever happened to pausing and considering the opposite of what you feel or think, as if it might have some merit?

I recognize that sticking to your guns is sometimes essential. I do. Believe me, I know. But do you recognize, in turn, that most people, probably including you and me, are too one-sided too often?

Besides, if you know where the ground is, you don't have to treat it as if it's going to run away.

Here's a possibility to consider: one-sidedness can be worse than bias. Human minds are all biased in various dimensions. But if you move away from one-sidedness, you're open to adjustments. You could be a hair away from the Ultimate Truth, but if you're entirely one-sided, you could be entirely lost.