It’s not that our society doesn’t appreciate proofs of things. Generally, they do. In the right situation, they love seeing the hero or heroine present a slam-dunk case–as in this brilliant scene from the genius film, My Cousin Vinny. (Be advised, though, the film makes copious use of profanity—though not in the scene shown below.)
People don’t always enjoy proofs, though–especially when they have to produce them themselves. For many, it’s about intellectual convenience—about avoiding mental work. Believing a thing is much easier than proving it. And even if you’re motivated to try to prove it, coming up with a poor proof is easier than coming up with a really strong one. And what’s easier still is coming up with somebody else’s proof—with hearsay—with something you have not vetted yourself.
I think we’d all be surprised if we were to see the actual numbers on how we handle proofs—of how often we:
- Believe/promote something without any proof.
- Believe/promote something with a poor proof we’ve constructed ourselves.
- Believe/promote something with a poor proof we’ve repeated from hearsay.
- Believe/promote something with a great proof we’ve repeated from hearsay, and don’t actually know that it’s a great proof because we haven’t vetted it ourselves.
We are, it seems to me, a society that is quite comfortable “shooting from the hip” rather than taking careful aim. Someone determined to vet everything (as if it were possible to live life with zero assumptions–which it’s not—but that’s another topic) would quickly discover lots of errors in popular belief. They’re everywhere. They’re in the news. They’re in the textbooks at school. They’re in the commentary on TV and radio, and they’re all over the Internet. They’re in the TV shows and movies we watch. We live in a society in which errors in fact and logic abound.
Is everything wrong? Of course not. But neither is everything right. And it stands to reason that we can make our lives better if we vet more things before believing and promoting them. And while we don’t have time to vet everything, what if we were to prioritize things by importance? What if our goal were: “Vet more important things”?
Would that make our lives any better? Would it increase our knowledge and understanding? Would it decrease our costly errors?
Of course it would. But two things would have to happen for this to work:
- We’d have to think it was worth the trouble; and
- We’d have to gain some vetting skills (think fact, logic, and sourcing)
Our culture is not great at these things—and doesn’t think they’re always worth the time. So, if someone were to decide to move these things higher on their priority list, they’d be deciding to live in something of a “counter-culture” way—swimming against the tide, as it were. And that’s a thought that would scare many people senseless, which is likely why so few are diligent vetters/provers.
The choice often comes down to which is more important to us: the truth, or the emotional/intellectual comfort of keeping our habitual mental routines running, and of maintaining our comfortable social routines with those around us. New information often threatens both of these things, forcing people to choose what’s most important to them.
