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David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

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Irony abounds when reader proves my point by trying to refute it

By David McElroy · May 21, 2012

How confident are you that you understand what I write? Are you certain that you know exactly what I mean — and that your understanding can’t be mistaken? I wrote Sunday about the difficulties involved when humans communicate — how a message can be completely misunderstood because of the difficulty of moving a message from the abstract of one person’s brain to the abstract of another person’s brain through the medium of words.

Rarely have I ever seen someone so completely prove my point by disagreeing with me. The response that someone wrote is funny and ironic, so I want to share it with you as evidence of what I was saying. Sunday afternoon, a friend shared my article about communication on her Facebook page. A friend of hers shared it to his own page in order to write a rebuttal. Here’s what he wrote:

Since I am well convinced that David McElroy, in this clearly argued and written piece, perfectly communicated exactly the point he wanted to make and that I understood it perfectly well, McElroy’s own thesis — namely that objective communication in human language is defect, “imperfect” and semi-impossible — is thereby refuted. He commits the “self-reference-exclusion fallacy”: his thesis can only be true if its own content is excluded from what his thesis asserts. (Please spare me an extended discussion of Russell’s “theory of types” now: it is backassward and changes nothing.)

Throughout the years, my own Dad has often exclaimed to me: “Communication is impossible!” To which I always blithely answer: “Yes, I know exactly what you mean!” He’s never yet grasped my refutation.

It’s funny and ironic because this person proves my point. He states what he believe my thesis was — and he completely gets it wrong. He misunderstood what I was saying, because he was bringing his own biases to what he was reading. He thought the issue was about objectivity and whether it’s possible. That framing never crossed my mind. It wasn’t my point. So his assertion that I’m wrong because he perfectly understood what I wrote is the very thing that illustrates my actual point.

I can’t tell you how amused I’ve been about this.

For anyone who hasn’t read the original article yet, the point was simply about the difficulty of communication — about how we bring our biases to an interaction and how we have problems when someone sends a message and someone else interprets it. That’s about it. There’s no discussion of whether objective communication is ever possible. (If you dumb something down enough, you can be reasonably clear that something is objective, but it’s harder to be sure of clarity than you realize even with something simple.) Honestly, I don’t care enough about the specific subject he thinks I wrote about to spend any time on it. I’m interested in the effect that communication and misunderstanding have on people, not proving or disproving his philosophy.

From what the guy wrote, I’m betting that he’s an objectivist. If I’m right, he read my article through the lens of his objectivist bias. Since he was most concerned with the issue of objectivity, he assumed that was my point. It seems plain to me what I meant, of course, so there’s a part of me that says, “Hey, this guy must be an idiot to have come up with this interpretation.”

The truth is that he’s not an idiot. He’s just human. And he makes the mistake of failing to see his bias and doesn’t understand where I’m coming from, so he assigns his own explanation for what I said — in order to declare it wrong and his own pet theory safe.

Good communication is very difficult difficult. Maybe I didn’t communicate what I said clearly enough in some way. Maybe I could have written it in a way that this reader would have understood it perfectly. I doubt it, but it’s possible. I know what I meant. People who know me are likely to understand what I meant. But some of those who are coming from a different place and have different assumptions and difference intellectual or emotional priorities are bound to be confused.

Good communication is difficult, but it’s impossible when someone believes he can know for sure what someone else meant. The only real error here is the reader’s assumption that his understanding must be accurate. As it turns out, he completely missed the point. I wasn’t making a philosophical point. I was making a point about what it’s like for real live humans to try to communicate — and how easy it is for messages to be misunderstood. So I’ll just thank my confused reader for illustrating my point so well, even though I doubt he’ll understand that.

I’m laughing about that irony of that, too — the fact that he’ll probably never truly understand why I’m so amused at the irony. (Of course, I’ll bet he would argue that he understands perfectly.)

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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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