I don’t take advice well. I think I’m naturally mistrustful of the presumptuous, despite being very presumptuous myself. When people give me well-intentioned guidance, I usually disregard it. Thus, I have no expectation that any of you will consider the following seriously. In fact, I’ve never expected anyone to agree with anything I wrote here (there’s a special circle of hell for those that do). But some of you read it, and that’s good enough for me. So, without further ado, I present to you the wisdom of decades (and I barely qualify for the plural) in 900 words. As far as the Unreasonable Man is concerned, here are the two things you should know about life.
The first is that no one can be extrapolated. I’ll explain what I mean. The world is awash in sloppy reasoning, mostly because it’s easier to take mental shortcuts than it is to come to terms with the staggering uncertainty inherent in human beings. I don’t blame folks for taking these shortcuts, but that doesn’t make them less troubling.
The most insidious of these fallacies is guilt by association. It happens when you claim to invalidate someone’s opinion or argument by associating it with an undesirable person or idea rather than addressing its substance. For example, arguing against the construction of divided highways because a certain German happened to enthusiastically support the construction of the autobahnen in the 1930s.
This fallacy has crept into our consciousness in less pronounced ways. I speak of the tendency to extrapolate other people’s beliefs, situation, personality, experience, and other personal characteristics from unrelated things that you happen to know about them. We do this with political beliefs when we assume that card-carrying Liberals who advocate for a national daycare program are also pro-choice, or when we assume that a union activist supports an increase in the minimum wage. We do this with language, when we assume that an anglophone living in Québec is not a sovereigntist. It’s more than stereotyping; it’s the agglomeration of stereotypes into mutually exclusive categories until there are, conveniently, fewer types of people in the world. It seems to be instinctive to think this way.
An economist, an accountant, and a lawyer visit Scotland. They come upon a field; in the field stands a cow. The economist says “Ah! I see that the cows in Scotland have spots.” The accountant says “No my friend, one cow in Scotland has spots.” The lawyer chuckles, shakes his head, and retorts: “You are both wrong. One side of one cow in Scotland has spots.” Professor Li told me this joke. It’s supposed to mean that lawyers lack the ability to make the inferences that facilitate normal human interaction. Perhaps this is true, but the same attitude is what allows us to fight the tendency to extrapolate. That’s the kind of lawyer I aspire to be. If you want to know something about someone, don’t infer it. Ask them. I’ve never met a person who couldn’t surprise me.