There's a feature of conspiracy theories that's rarely mentioned. Conspiracies assume widespread, covert, coordinated malice.

For all that we see badness in human nature, conspiracy theories are typically false, partly because they assume more malice than is typically widespread, covert, and coordinated for long periods of time.

That is, conspiracy theories are often false because they're overly pessimistic about human nature.

Imagine that.

So conspiracy theorists have perhaps an exaggeratedly low regard for humanity, along with an exaggeratedly high regard for their own ability to assess data without error. To strengthen the brew, throw in an excessive belief in their own intuition without the need for anything so petty as diverse evidence to fall back on.

Evidence can tell one story convincingly. Tweak it a little, introduce a new piece, and it can tell an utterly different story convincingly.

Conspiracy theorists seem never to have progressed to the level of understanding this last point. They believe their eyes when they should be asking more questions, or at least summarizing the weaknesses in their argument, the places where their data could be misleading them.

They're too impressed by their own efforts. They think simply looking into a thing makes them experts. They're easily fooled by the story that what they're reading or hearing is only known to a few, or has been actively suppressed. They love the scandal, and think the scandal will tell them everything, if only they have a few hush-hush or obscure links to brandish.

If you post things according to whether people respond to them with interest (surely the more affable thing to do), you risk letting yourself get pushed away from what may be no less interesting, but that people do not respond to. All else equal, I'd rather be saying the thing that's just as interesting yet no one else happens to be saying right now, or even that no one really finds very interesting at first glance, yet maybe they should.

That's my bad attitude on social media and elsewhere in life, which has always haunted me. There's this obtuse, defiant core. There's a resistance against doing or saying what others do just because they do or say it. There's an insistence on following a train of thought for the sake of reality or discovery, not to please someone. But I'll stand up for it.

That's the goal, anyway. But I still share mostly stuff that might be too obvious to even say, so maybe this entire thought is a little hypocritical. I err on the side of caution, which makes me boring. Then again, I also (in another sense?) err on the side of throwing off chains in a spirit of play, which makes me sloppy and undermines the more serious stuff I try to get across. But I'm not going to stop being sloppy. Everything's sloppy before it's perfect.

Perfection, perfection. Perfection is possible in short, select settings. People say there is no perfection. That isn't true. What we forget is that perfection is a feeling. Perfection is seamlessness where no seam is needed, clean lines where clean lines are needed. Yet we only reach perfection by daring to be sloppy.

Suppress the one at risk of preventing the other. Take it from a shy person. I've lived the danger of saying too little my entire life. What I type can get verbose - I know because I touch and reread (often dozens of times) every letter - but I can get through most situations saying far less than most people say. Brevity is a double-edged sword.

Takeaway: I type too much to make up for what I'm too afraid or tired or blank to say in person.

Thought of the day: when people get offended that you're challenging their beliefs, this is a strong hint that they do not challenge their beliefs enough themselves. If you challenge your beliefs all the time as you develop them, you don't see challenging a belief as offensive. Why would you?

Oh, sure, it's a little uncomfortable when someone springs a "You're wrong!" implication on you. Sure. But offensive? No, not offensive. You do that with yourself all the time, and that's the only way you know the opinions you hold on to might be worth holding on to.

The ideas I keep coming back to after killing them? Those are the ones you might associate with me as opinions I hold.

Killing them isn't offensive at all. I'm a serial killer of all of them.

Ideas don't experience pain, and when you kill them, they aren't dead. So this is nothing like being a serial killer in the usual sense. Sometimes people act a little like they're possibly the same. No. They really are not!

Sometimes I hate being right. They say "the only thing you get for being right is being right." That isn't entirely true. The world goes round because people understand what's going on, at least some of the time. Society would crumble otherwise. It's satisfying to figure things out, and you can solve devastating problems with the right answers.

But wherever it's an issue that you might be right, that very possibility suggests someone else isn't, and there's often going to be resentment. It's the plight of the objectively inclined person that they face a lot of resentment for, basically, doing a good job.

If you feel that's your style, you should still try to figure out how to take responsibility for communicating as well as possible. Just being right rarely overcomes people's defense mechanisms, and often bitterness will be thrown at you, whether it's made entirely apparent or not.

Usually people don't resent you simply for being right - or, anyway, that isn't what they tell themselves. Once they can admit that - that they hate that you're right - they're well on their way to shaping up. But typically they believe they're being resentful about something else. For example, they think you're full of shit. It's a lot easier to resent someone who's full of shit and won't shut up than it is to resent someone who happens to be making accurate statements that displease you.

We all fall for our own illusions - sometimes. The person who "is wrong" doesn't set out to get it all wrong. They simply fail to catch their illusions in time, and proceed under those illusions.

I have this theory that putting dishes in the sink makes them dirtier, not cleaner. And - this is less a theory - dishes piled in the sink make the sink harder to use, and encourage the proliferation of sink entrees. Further, dishwashers only work when you've already washed the dishes, which defeats the purpose of their supposed water and energy efficiency. And worse, even when they work, they seem to work poorly, requiring inspections and extra rinses from the cupboard.

So I don't put my dishes in the sink, or the dishwasher. I put them next to the sink, with a bit of water in or on them, if possible, and I clean one or two gradually when I'm at the sink and feel like it. If I take care not to keep reaching for unnecessary new dishes, it works perfectly.

I find it irritating to read reviews, increasingly. Many people cite George Orwell's advice not to keep saying "I think," because everyone knows that if you're saying it, you think it. But there's this spoiled brat tone in the average unhappy review. It isn't just that you didn't like it, or it didn't work for you, or the one shipped to you was defective. It's this is a piece of junk, this is horrible, this is hideous, this doesn't work at all, nobody should ever buy this, etc, etc, etc. I find it so off-putting it's almost nauseating. I hate the imperious tone of a consumer who didn't get what they were hoping for, and wants everyone to know this is the worst.

There's a trope of people going around correcting others with "That isn't what irony means, btw." Maybe I don't know what irony means myself, even after having helped hundreds of students one-on-one with (among many other things) the meaning of irony, including worksheets on different types of irony. (I'm not being sarcastic. None of that makes me an expert, and I'm not.) But imho, people who I hear saying "That isn't what irony means, btw," ironically have peculiarly restrictive personal definitions of irony that match neither the dictionary nor standard use in English classes. It's an easy way to feel clever, casually implying that others are being stupid. I'm doing it myself right now. But I didn't start it this time.

Irony, as far as I understand it, is roughly identical to paradox. Anything that seems paradoxical or contradictory is a candidate for description or comedic application as irony. If you expect one thing and approximately the opposite thing happens, that's irony. If one thing seems true and you go around correcting people, but you are the one who should be corrected, that's irony.

This all started, I think, when the public took to bashing Alanis Morissette's song "Ironic." For example, here's a quick analysis: https://copyblogger.com/did-alanis-morissette-get-irony-right/

Personally, I think some of the situations described are ironic. They aren't ironic enough to be funny. They betray a sense of entitlement, or at least of naivete or optimism. If you are Pollyanna, life will constantly thwart your expectations. But, as Morissette points out, life will also thwart your expectations if you insist on visions of doom and gloom. If you believe the old pun that "God is an iron," then some of the irony of this world, which you might or might not call "cosmic irony," seems to work almost homeostatically. No matter how bad things look, ironically, the very fact they feel so bad is an indication that you'll be seeing some sunshine. Yes, that is perhaps the gambler's fallacy, but it's most people's lived experience: "It's always darkest before dawn." Though things also go from bad to worse, or from good to great, we can be forgiven for thinking that "God only challenges us with what we are able to handle." Even a pessimistic atheist has to admit life often seems contradictory or untenable yet somehow covered in boxing gloves at the last instant. (I'm naturally a pessimist, verging on optimism via corrective action, and an agnostic atheist. So I speak from experience.)

I would argue that "Ironic" is a song about perceived irony, about life expectations, a song whose examples are not effective irony from a comedy standpoint. Life defies our expectations. That's the irony in the title. And, yes, that isn't spectacularly ironic. "Expect the unexpected," right? But personally, I fail to see that irony is utterly missing from the song (that's just too easy to say for commentators to resist, imho), and I don't say this because I'm an Alanis Morissette fan, or because I was ever particularly aware of the lyrics or attached to any interpretation of them.

The song doesn't 100% lack irony. It's naive... and also perceptive. But it isn't going to make you laugh.

Let's say you've got a scene from a film in which a person walks around all day craving a cigarette, asking people, getting turned down, arriving at stores just before they close, losing the pack they finally managed to buy, having a whole box of matches fail, etc. (The smoker's version of The Discrete Charm of the Bourgoisie, if you will.) Finally, they sit down on a bench by a store front, take a deep breath, and light a cigarette with a ridiculous lighter they'd never ordinarily care to be seen using. The camera pulls back and you see a "No Smoking" sign to their left (our right), and as it pulls back further, you see a police officer casually walking into the frame with a billy club, not yet seeing the smoker.

I consider that ironic. Would it make me laugh? Maybe not. I'm not sure. But there's irony in it. The only difference between this and similar setups in the song is the amount of buildup and misdirection.

When you're late and you get on the road only to find a traffic jam, that isn't particularly ironic because you have no very good reason to expect there NOT to be a traffic jam. There isn't any buildup. But it's still the opposite of what you were hoping for, and if you usually leave on time and usually encounter no significant traffic, then this double misfortune is the beginning of irony. (To use a cartomancy metaphor, it's the ace of irony, or maybe the two of irony, not the ten of irony, or the queen, or king, or whatever.) The traffic could have happened any other time. It's a little ironic that it happened the rare day you happened to be running late. In itself, it isn't particularly ironic; you'd need to have a naive outlook for this to seem especially surprising or contradictory. There's no inherent contradiction, exactly. It's a coincidence. But irony can be coincidental. For all that we know, despite our excess of scientific accumulation (far more than any one person can ever hope to profit from), it seems the nature of reality is (often, but not to a t) to do what we don't expect, almost as if it knew what we expected, and worked to subvert that. If there were a God who loved us all, you'd think that, say, when you're running late and praying for clear roads, there would be less traffic, rather than more. Yet few sane people would claim that the traffic occurs as a punishment for past transgressions; it's just incidental. So is there a sentience behind all this, or not?

These things are only truly ironic if you expect plans to go as planned, which you shouldn't. But then why would you plan? Because plans won't go as planned. It's a little... contradictory. It's a bit of a paradox, from a certain angle. But there you go.

It seems likely enough that Alanis Morissette wrote a song on the theme of irony but failed to make her case. Or maybe she said, "isn't it ironic?" once and someone said, "That isn't what irony means, btw," and she disagreed, and decided to crowd-source opinions about this with a hit song.

Or maybe she *did* write a song with a bunch of irony near-misses and called it "Ironic" in full conscience.

I'm not really invested in any of these considerations, except I don't think "irony" is some specialist term that clever people should make others feel stupid about for not using in an approved clever way.