On acknowledging ignorance

In an earlier post, I mentioned how I had the completely wrong idea about what in America is referred to as ‘pickles’. In a comment on that post, Crip Dyke made an interesting point that made me reflect on the question of ignorance.

[W]hen one has a reputation amongst one’s friends for being knowledgeable, one has more to lose by revealing that one has been making such an error … and thus the fear of this may very well be heightened for people who have a reputation amongst their circle as knowledgeable. Thus I sometimes wonder if my fear of making a clueless error is just my vanity in disguise. (though, of course, there do exist independent reasons to want to avoid error)

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Yanny or Laurel?

You may remember the big disagreement that emerged in 2015 over ‘the dress’, a photo of a dress that some people saw as blue and black and others saw as gold and white, and each side could not possibly conceive how anyone could see anything else. (I was in the blue-black camp) Now there is a sound equivalent, where people listening to a sound clip hear the word spoken as either ‘Yanny’ or ‘Laurel’. Test yourself.
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The damage done by bullshit jobs

In a recent post about the idea of a universal basic income, I mused at the end about what would happen to people if they no longer had to work because they had a guaranteed income. Would they begin to feel that they were no longer contributing to society in some way by working for a living, and would that leave them with negative feelings about their own worth? What I did not consider was the fact that many people who work already feel that way because they see their jobs as pretty pointless.
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The things I don’t know

Pickles are not something that I grew up with in Sri Lanka. They were a new food I encountered only once I came to the US and I found that I do not like them at all. When I find them in food, I carefully take them out before eating unless I accidentally eat them because they have been cut up small.

But for the longest time, I was not aware that pickles were just cucumbers that had been processed in some way. I had thought that pickles were a separate kind of plant. Then once in conversation with my daughters, I casually said something about pickle plants. After a brief pause of incredulity, they laughed hilariously at my ignorance and I discovered that I had been wrong all this time. I learned later that the word pickle is itself shorthand for ‘pickled cucumber’. If I had known the full name, I would have not been confused.

It makes me wonder what other things I believe that are absurdly wrong but common knowledge to everyone else. And what kind of event will bring my ignorance to the surface.

The strange behavior of clocks

Last week I gave a talk to the Northeast Ohio chapter of the Center for Inquiry on the topic “The Strange Behavior of Rulers and Clocks” where I discussed some of the implications of Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity for our notions of distance and time. After the talk, one of the participants whom I know teaches science told me that he had been unaware of one aspect of my talk and I realized that this may be generally true and so here’s a post about it.
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The special effects in the Hugo train crash scene

I recently watched the charming 2011 film Hugo set in 1931 about an orphaned boy who, trying to avoid being sent to an orphanage, lives secretly in a railway station in Paris in the area where the large clock tower is. The film is directed by Martin Scorsese and is quite different from the gangster films that he is famous for. A key scene involves a train whose brakes fail and it crashes through the barriers at the end of the track and out of a window before falling to the street below. The idea for this was based on an actual accident that occurred in 1895 in the Montparnasse terminal and was captured in this iconic photograph.

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A new way for whistleblowers to share secret information

Given the secretive and coercive nature of the national security state, we have come to depend upon whistleblowers to tell us of the abuses that are committed by governments. Governments in turn retaliate by threatening to hand out extremely harsh punishments to those caught divulging information they do not want revealed, though high government officials will freely leak secret information to reporters when it serves their interests and such people not only do not get punished, they are rewarded for such actions and even for their deceptions and lies.
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Merit-based points system for immigration

The Donald Trump administration wants to change the system that allows immigration into the US. At present, being a relative of a citizen or permanent resident counts for quite a lot but they want to change it to a so-called ‘merit-based’ system. This is because while family relationships were considered good qualities when the family members coming in were mostly white and from Europe, demographics in the US have changed and there are now many more people of color and efforts are being made to keep America white by making family relationships less salient. Trump himself has made no secret of the fact that while he talks of merit, in his mind that means ‘white’.
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