Ask A Genius 606: “Just because it’s funny thinking doesn’t mean that it’s not good thinking.”
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/07/11
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: All right, the proliferation of good and bad ideas. What are your further thoughts on it?
Rick Rosner: Well, beyond what I said last time, the deal is in America right now, probably other parts of the world, but certainly in America, people who fall for bad ideas, at least bad ideas from conservative media, have been getting tenderized for decades now. Where what you have was left among the number of the percentage of people who are Republicans has been dropping, not precipitously, but the last party affiliation survey had America being 24 percent Republicans, 30 percent Democrats, and 44 percent independents, which a couple of percent, I guess, didn’t say. But you know, that’s way down for both Democrats and Republicans, but Republicans more. And it’s a tricky little nugget of people who will fucking fall for anything. They’ve been, you know, fed Republican material, which is terrible material. It’s bullshit for decades. But these are the ones who are left to believe. And at this point, they’re inclined to believe anything they hear from their preferred purveyors.
Fox News now has even more conservative news channels like OAN and Newsmax. The websites, like Breitbart and beyond. And whatever happens, some conservative pundits will come up with some explanation, no matter how far-fetched, that fits somehow into their worldview. At this point, they’re pretty divorced from holding what they’re told, accountable for reasonableness and agreement with reality. So, the second thing is that bad ideas need a bunch of people in easy touch with each other to support those bad ideas against the resistance of reality. And it’s helpful if you’ve got millions of people who’ve been pre-tested on being receptive to bad ideas. And that’s where we are now, where we did this experiment with Trump for four years, and it’s clear that he was a terrible person. He was awful for the country. We had more people unemployed under Trump than at any previous time in history. Because of COVID, more people died in four years under Trump than in four years under any other president. With most of the people who died. Not because we had more Americans, which means more deaths. But because we had COVID counts for 40 percent of those excess deaths, increased population, 30 percent opioid overdoses, probably at least a quarter of those deaths.
Trump said he’d fix the opioid problem, too. He didn’t do that. He didn’t do anything. The only significant thing he did was the tax cut for rich people. The last time we had an infrastructure bill pass was in December 2015, under Obama. Trump accomplished nothing. And it’s evident except to the people who like Trump. So then you asked me about what makes a bad idea versus a good idea in general. And I’ve been listening to many comedy bits on Sirius radio, where they have several comedy channels all the time. A good joke routine rests on a good observation. And it reflects good thinking; just because it’s funny thinking doesn’t mean that it’s not good thinking. Somebody takes an astute observation and matches it up with some personal anecdotes to back up the thesis of whatever the bit is. So you have things that help a good idea. Be good or familiar. You take something that people are aware of – they know about in the world – and you come up with a good novel idea about them.
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Only some things in a good idea have to be a familiar thing. You can take some familiar aspects and add something that people need to learn to develop a good idea. But generally, some familiarity will help. A good idea will help ground a good idea. The good idea has to be consistent with people’s experience, to the extent that it has to be accurate. What you’re saying isn’t a good idea if it doesn’t comport with what people know. Just off the top of my head, it’s not a good idea to say if we just paid ten people 10 dollars not to drive drunk, they wouldn’t drive drunk because that just doesn’t comport with anything. It doesn’t comport with our experience of drunk people that somehow ten dollars, either before they’re drunk or when they’re drunk and stop them from doing something. The logistics need to be clarified. How is how would that work? Where is the money going to come from?
So all that like that has the earmarks of a bad idea. So, a good idea is familiar elements looked at with a fresh point of view. Well, a fresh idea about details, some of them every day, many of them new and theories that comport with what would make sense to people. Bad ideas tell you things that aren’t true. You know, they misstate the facts often and come up with you, I don’t know, they don’t comport with what people know and understand. And they’re overly complicated and require hidden into, well, OK, the wrong idea is that people are getting fed from conservative media that are often conspiratorial but don’t trust your direct experience of the world. That is a fiction. Let me tell you what’s happening secretly where you have no evidence of it; you have to take my word for it. So there you go. I mean, I could go into further, I don’t know, bullshitting around good ideas versus bad ideas, but there is just the beginning of that discussion.
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