If we're relying on evidence and some form of the scientific process - this is maybe what makes people feel threatened - then the best idea WILL win.

We just have to keep talking, analyzing, and testing... and give every hypothesis a fair shot.

People try to bend the stakes to (emotionally? persuasively? abusively?) help their favored idea or moral.

But you don't need to do that. Accurate statements eventually win, just naturally.

I think we've all seen situations where the lie prevails. And that's part of the fear. Communist Russia. Nazi Germany. Many debates, probably.

But if people are trained to analyze ideas right, accurate statements will prevail.

"Magna est veritas et praevalet." It's in the Bible. I wish people understood it.

"The truth is great and it prevails."

It's usually quoted in Latin because actually it isn't in all versions of the Bible... it's a disputed line, ironically.

It might be the truest damn thing in the whole book.

When you write essays as a habit, you find yourself going over the same topic again and again and again. It's sometimes quite nauseating. If the writing is prompted by problems out in the world - and in yourself - it's also exhausting. You are constantly facing down the opposition party in your mind - the representatives of prejudice and misconception or whatever it is you feel you must rail against. And you face them down with nothing but words on a screen, and words, often, that no one but you will see. It feels futile.

It's like being caught in a boxing ring in front of all the arrayed cameras, only you have no skill at boxing. You are modestly armed with an expensive toothbrush. If you land any blows, the footage will be deleted. And there is no crowd. They are a laugh track played backwards and further modified to sound like screams of disapproval whatever you do. That's approximately what it feels like to write. Yet some people just keep going, keep writing, and after a while, they'll have some versions of their thoughts that they feel might stand up to outside attention and turn a mind or two in a newer, better direction.

How much money I'm making has almost never in my life been a reliable indicator of whether I thought I was doing much good, or the right kind of work for my talents and sense of purpose.

For me it's an irrelevant signal, like static from the other room.

Yes it's important to make money. But the money gradient field is, I think, incredibly deceptive.

The work that aligns most with my purpose in this world makes not a cent, because I'm too ahead of the curve, and I'm not a one-man PR show.

(It should be noted that ADHD and depression both alter your sense of motivation, and can force you to evaluate and reevaluate very carefully what you're trying to do here while alive. Someone else's laundry is not on that list, though you like doing laundry and could take on a task like that. It's just not on the list, so you aren't putting it in the list. No one's asking. That's good. You don't need hard "no" too often, you just chase your highest purpose in this world. That's plenty to attend to. You don't need distractions. There are plenty already. And you weave a big net - ideas of all kinds zing into that net, and you set them free, like fish you don't want to hurt. In setting them free, you bring them to life, or at least keep a record of them in a journal. See how it works?)

I am basically a spider waiting for ideas.

One lands. TWING-G-G-G-G...

In 2nd grade, everyone in the class disliked me. They ostracized me because the funny guy in the class decided to mock me until everyone turned against me, because he resented my quiet smarts. He was always getting into trouble. Many times a day. Whenever the teacher got mean to him, which seemed like every time they addressed each other, I felt bad for him. She seemed to be missing something. She was being a bitch. Not too badly, the way you might expect from a teacher getting interrupted. But the thing is I understood the moment he started his mockery campaign against me: this was his life. He wasn't just beeing cheeky and should shut up. This was his everyday. This was a world in which the teacher was generally a bitch to him, and probably many other adults were similar. Sure, he was laughing out of turn, and making jokes the students found funny and the teacher didn't. That's an incredible life skill right there. He just needed to hone it. And when was he going to do that? Not under her watch. So he rebelled.

I wouldn't have used those words, but in the moments of embarrassment as I wondered if and why he had something against me, this is what I understood. And I knew that I was better at this sympathy business than he was, most likely. And that was a thing and also not exactly his fault.

But yeah, from that moment he got everyone in the class to dislike me for the rest of the year, give or take two girls who half-heartedly defended me or wanted to be my friend, respectively.

If you are sure that you are on the right side of an issue, prove to me that you didn't get there by blind luck. Show me the thought process. Show me why you're so convinced, if you can.

Show me that you recognize holes in your point of view. They're always there, even in 2+2=4. If you don't see them, that's a problem. (Is 2 apples plus 2 oranges 4 potatoes? No? What about 2 apples a thousand years ago and 2 apples today, is that 4 apples you can eat? Hm. What about 2 apples here and 2 apples in the backpack you left at work? Can you juggle 4 apples right now? Not exactly? Thank you, we have some provisos after all.) Show me that you are seriously considering complexities and other arguments that don't agree with your conclusion. Show me that you aren't above provisionally disagreeing with your position, or hearing a challenge to it in good faith.

To prove a thing, start by allowing it to be very much in doubt. Let any and every criticism fly. Invite tomatoes of criticism to be thrown. Throw some of the tomatoes at this thing yourself. Next, squeeze out most of the doubt by fair, transparent, reliable methods. Don't cheat by shutting out disagreement or shitting on people who don't fall in line. Let the best idea win in a free exchange; show that one idea wins naturally because it has the advantage of accuracy.

That I respect.

The rest? I respect the people, I respect that they have opinions, but I think the opinions are farts in a breeze.

I spent a good 5 years in various Christian schools as a kid.

I'm not a believer, but I'm agnostic and sympathetic - even if my outspokenness might have sounded harsh here and there.

One day in 6th grade, like so many other days, I didn't have my homework. And it was already a backlog. But I didn't bring in the backlog. Needless to say, I was very anxious about this, and was dreading having to tell my teacher, Mrs. Evans (who, incidentally, I consider one of the best teachers I've ever had).

She was not happy. In fact, she sent me next door. To 5th grade.

So I sat in a carrel against the righthand wall in 5th grade and worked on my backlog, feeling somewhat humiliated.

While I was there, the teacher was teaching the class about Charles Darwin.

She attacked his character. He wasn't really that smart. He'd been a bad student in school. He wasn't a genius. He was more of a flunky. He was lazy. No wonder his theories didn't add up.

And so on.

Soon, the class were engaged in cracking jokes about how WE weren't monkeys, HE was a monkey, ha ha ha ha. One person would joke, and the others would laugh. And that would spur on more.

And it occurred to me - I'd had the same insight the first day of school in Kindergarten when kids made fun of my British accent - that this was part of the mechanism. This was part of how they deluded themselves.

I wasn't an expert. I didn't know FOR SURE that this teacher was deluded and Darwin was right.

But you know what I did know?

I knew that the way they were critiquing him was utter garbage and had nothing to do with the issue.

"The internet’s tailored social media feeds and algorithms have herded us into echo chambers where our own views are cheered and opposing views are mocked." 

People conform in an effort to seem normal, trustworthy, and good. When you challenge the crowd, you can easily seem abnormal, suspicious, or bad. So people often don't.

This is something I became acutely aware of in 2nd grade. That year I was, I'm pretty sure, the most disliked person in my class.

It started when the class joker launched a campaign of picking on me. He was jealous of my quiet smarts, which the teacher quietly approved of, whereas he was constantly getting into trouble and looking like a buffoon. That's what I intuited the first time he openly and somewhat meanly mocked me - before that, I thought he was funny and sympathized when he got in trouble. But he had something against me, and within a week or two, he'd gotten basically everyone in the class against me.

Admittedly I threw some insults back, but one kid against the whole class is kind of a lot, and he had started it and persisted in it. I was not interested in attacking him, but he was interested in attacking me.

The irony is that I was more compassionate toward the people who disliked me than vice-versa. But crowds don't like being told they're wrong. They want you to respect the fact they all agree. Even if what they agree on is that you suck. If you act like they're all stupid, they'll fucking hate you, at least until the individuals and climate mature a bit.

On the last day of school I asked this boy Nick, who I'd made friends with on the first day, what happened. "I thought we were friends," I said. "What happened?"

He seemed to gloat with contempt and jumped into an "EVERYONE knows you're..." and then stopped. He looked confused.

"I'm what?" I asked. He was silent. "Not COOL?" I finished.

We never spoke again.

He'd been that other guy Jake's right-hand man when several boys ambushed me on the playground, leered at me in a circle, and threw a football in my face, leaving my ears ringing. It was a Nerf football, but it did make me lightheaded, and I saw stars. Another time, Jake and Nick ran by, Jake closer, close enough to touch my hand with a wet feeling. A little stunned, I looked. He'd left a booger on my left hand, on the webbing by the thumb. I just never did anything like this to any of them, nor did I want to. His rationale was, apparently, according to what he yelled in passing, "Whoever smelt it dealt it!" It seemed as if he was dealing it and I was smelling it.

So after the football in the face, with my ears still ringing and my head still a little dizzy, I tried to understand why they all felt so justified. They clearly did, somehow. What was that look of contempt on Jake's and Nick's faces, and the others'? What were they getting revenge on me for? What had I even done?

And via various clues, I made sense of it. I challenged them collectively. Yet I wasn't cool and fun about it, I was shy and down on myself, a signal they could rationalize as inferiority. This latter related to a helpful tip from Nicole, the girl who sat next to me later in the year, and who was the only person who (half-heartedly) defended me, and was almost a friend. I was (this comment from someone else was true) "having a hissy fit" because I was so upset about struggling with cursive letters. They looked terrible, I felt awful. But she pointed out that many people were struggling, and some might even think I was doing well, and if I was beating myself up about it out loud, how did I think that would make THEM feel? This was an incredibly astute and useful comment.

In general, I was a naysayer, a critic, a skeptic, contrarian. Yet not cool, but rather - introverted, shy, perhaps insecure. Yet still enough of an oaf to be bold against a group. It's the clash of those two things that people can really hate. Bragplaining is one example of that kind of inferior/superior clash, and how unpopular it can be.

It was the same kind of thing that got Socrates executed, I later learned. "I am the gadfly," he liked to say. "I know that I know nothing," he would say, and then he'd claim to be the smartest man in Greece. He'd question people in ways they didn't know how to answer, but rather than admitting ignorance, they'd often get defensive or deflective. He claimed to be smarter because he didn't do that, because he could see through the illusion of their sure knowledge, and of his own. That's admittedly a little inflammatory. But hatred? That's frankly a downright stupid response, and anyone offended by that comment probably deserves to feel offended.

And my tendency to react in such a way - by actually saying something like that, because it's probably true - is exactly why I was deeply unpopular in 2nd grade.

I told people they were being stupid when they were being fucking stupid, and mean to boot.

They fucking deserved it. Morons ganging up against one shy kid with a sense of compassion for them. Morons unable to identify their own animalism as the cause.

Fucking idiotic. Then blaming me.

Oh yeah, I had a part in it.

The part I had in it was fighting back but not sinking quite to their level. Exactly the part I would still take today, though I'd use better methods.

There is still a stigma against social anxiety... which reinforces the anxiety. People experiencing it will usually talk about "anxiety," because everyone knows this is something not to beat people up for. They almost never call it "social anxiety" even when it obviously is.

You would think most people would be sympathetic, given that just about everyone experiences social anxiety here and there. But that expectation is just one of those fallacies.

If you tell people about your social anxiety, or you tell people you grew up in a dysfunctional family, expect to feel a bit avoided afterwards. People don't mean it, usually. But it's something about human nature.