readoldthings

A short post today on something that I've been thinking about for a while. There are a number of little rules, heuristics and aphorisms I've discovered or adopted over the years, and I'd like to share them here from time to time. Today is one I'm calling Joan's Law. 

(By the way, there is a trap hidden in this post-- see if you can spot it.)

Meet Joan

I once worked for a company-- let's not name them-- with an accountant I'll refer to as "Joan." Joan was a very interesting sort of accountant, in that she appeared to be terribel at math. I'm not sure how one gets an accounting job while being bad at math, but Joan did. I know that Joan was bad at math because every time you got your paycheck at this company, you had to carefully go through it and look for errors. When, almost inevitably, errors were found, you then had to bombard Joan with calls and texts in order to get your paycheck corrected.

Now, here's the other thing about poor old Joan-- her errors only ever went in one direction. Both I myself and everyone I knew were regularly paid the incorrect amount, but it was always less than we were owed, never more. Then as now I can understand being poor at math-- many people are, though it's an odd trait for an accountant. But one would imagine that, if simple innumeracy were the issue, the errors would be just as likely to be in our favor as the company's. And yet they never were. What ever could explain this discrepancy?

Well, you know the answer as well as I do. Joan wasn't bad at accounting. Joan was a shyster, and she was bad at honesty. Her sister and brother-in-law were the company's owners, and were themselves, well, let us say "given to morally dubious decision-making." 

What's the Point? 

The reason I'm talking about this is that it's occurred to me that we have a lot fo Joan's running around our society. Indeed, we all seem to play Joan from time to time. Not that we are all involved in scamming our sibling's employees. No, most of our-- can I call it Joaning? We do most of our Joaning in other areas of life. Above all, for most of us, most of our opinions are nothing but Joan. 

Let me give you two examples. 

What do aliens, Atlantis, extra-sensory perception, reincarnation, ghosts, Bigfoot, the lost city of Troy, reincarnation, astrology, and the theory of primitive matriarchy have in common? 

Taken one at a time, not very much. There's every possiblity, after all, that we may live in a world in which interstellar travel has been discovered by one or more alien species, but not a world in which a large primate has remained hidden for centuries in the North Americna wilderness, or a world in which the Dead occasionally speak with living human beings, but in which no individual can perceive future events by any means; or a world in which an urban civilization had formed on at least one Atlantic island by the year 10,000 B.C., but not in which any society has been ruled primarily by women. And yet, when we find supposed "skeptic investigators" looking into any of these matters, they always come up with the same answer: No. No aliens, no at Atlantis, no telepathy, no precognition, no matriarchs, no magi, no nothing. (By the way, did you notice that I snuck Troy in there? That's to illustrate a point; at one time one was required to believe that Troy was a myth, until someone went out and found it. What was the evidence, prior to Schliemann's excavation of Troy, that it had not existed? There was none.)

Here's another example. What do reparations, abortions, climate change, trade unions, immigration, gay marriage, and gun control have in common? Again, taken one at a time, nothing at all. It's easy to imagine being in favor of reparations for slavery but oppposed to further immigration, and it's equally easy to imagine believing that abortion is fine but that gay marriage is not. But we all know that in practice, if I know your position on any one of these issues, I know your opinion on all the rest of them. 

And the reason, just as in the case of so-called "paranormal phenomena," is that what you call "your opinions" are not actually your opinions. They're a set of opinions dictated to you by somebody else, which you dutifully repeat. And you do this not because you've examined them one at a time, but, ultimately, as a demonstration of allegiance. One cannot be a good member of the Skeptic community while believing in Bigfoot and reincarnation but not any of the others. No more can one be a good Woke Democrat while supporting gun rights and restrictions on abortion, even while towing the party line on all the other issues. 

And so I'd like to call this phenomenon Joan's Law.

Joan's Law states that if a series of repeated actions, whether in the form of accounting errors or expressions of opinion, don't seem to make sense, but all tilt in one particular direction, the tilt is the point. That is-- the accounting errors aren't errors, they're scams; the opinions aren't opinions, they're statements of loyalty. In fact, I'd suggest that loyalty tests are actually very common in human groups, and that proofs of loyalty underlie a great deal of human behavior, especially behaviors that don't otherwise make sense. 

And so a Corollary to Joan's Law: If someone's actions don't make sense to you, try to figure out who they are trying to impress.