The pope and the tooth fairy

Two types of conversation

Here, I consider two different types of conversations that have an important role in our everyday lives - so much so that they deserve naming, so we can spot them in the wild, and treat them appropriately.

Here’s a few examples by way of scene-setting.

Some hilarity from Texas

A recent Texas Monthly story tells of Courtney Gore, a ‘far-right’?¹ online talk show co-host, who soon after winning a school board seat in her conservative Texas county, began examining the district's school curricula. She had campaigned on eliminating ‘inappropriate’ content related to sexuality and race, citing conservative Christian values. However, after reviewing hundreds of pages of lesson plans, Gore was surprised to find no evidence of the indoctrination she had warned about. Instead, the curriculum focused on social-emotional learning, teaching children how to be good friends and humans, without any signs of sexualization or critical race theory.

Gore had a fatal flaw, it seems - she had an interest in empirical reality - in particular, in aligning her thoughts with what she could test and verify out there in the world by actually examing what was actually taught, rather than just asserting that certain things that need to be censured were being taught.

She mistakenly thought others in her group would be similarly minded:

Gore rushed to share the news with the hard-liners who had encouraged her to run for the seat. She expected them to be as relieved and excited as she had been. But she said they were indifferent, even dismissive, because “it didn’t fit the narrative that they were trying to push.”

The evidence Gore assembled did not support the claims being made by the group - but rather than standing down their protests, and accepting the evidence as disproving their stance, the believers/ideologues/social affiliates chose to keep up their point of view, irrespective of the evidence that they were wrong.

They showed no openness or willingness to hearing contrary evidence at all: preserving group cohesion and safeguarding their ideological priors were more important tasks than discovering reality.

open circle and closed circle conversations

• In praise of talking: Conversations are complicated

• 'I'm just asking': Consenting and cooperating - We cooperate more than we think are likely to - even to very intrusive requests

• Conversations and protest #3

• 'Let's have three meetings at the same time to discuss it...'

• Lie to me: Conversation is easily-contaminable trace evidence

(below the line: Brexit will (not) be brilliant; French Olympic Failures; and much more)

The pope and the tooth fairy