We begin today's journey with a Douglas Adams quote:

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

I've always been a big fan of thinking about thinking. When you're thinking about what other people are thinking, it's called theory of mind. Humans are particularly notable for being able to think about what another person is thinking they're thinking about. Like Adams notes with learning, though, people seem disinclined to do so.

I bring this up as a result of Richard Wiseman's most recent Friday Puzzle. In the discussion, as has happened with previous puzzle answers, some people go to great lengths to explain why nobody should be able to solve the puzzle. It never occurs to them that they simply have an underdeveloped theory of mind.

That is, most people who get a word problem ("A train leaves New York traveling at 60mph...") understand that the person asking the question is after a particular answer, and that a toy situation is being set up by the questioner to make the math (or logic) a little more fun. If your theory of mind developed properly, you got past the particulars of the setup and solved the problem as posed. If it didn't, you were that annoying guy who wouldn't shut up about "Oh, but teacher! Wouldn't the train have to slow down around corners!?! Or stop for fuel!?!"

So, with a bit of irony, by trying so eagerly to show that they're oh-so-smart, they become Impossibly Stupid by showing they don't have a fully developed theory of mind. Instead of figuring out what the questioner is thinking of as an expected answer, they construct elaborate reasons why no answer can be correct. They think doing so makes them insightful, because they are open to all the possibilities, but what it really shows they've regressed into the mind of a 3 year old.

I think that kind of thinking is becoming more common. I think you know why I think that's a sad state of affairs.

As I have mentioned before, I'm a big fan of inversions. They seem to thrive along the fine line of things that are impossibly stupid. One of my favorite quotes related to that is by Neils Bohr:

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

I was prompted to tip the hat again because Darwin has been getting a lot of attention over the last year, and a segment on a podcast (ABC Radio National's The Science Show Daniel Dennett - why are we here?) really hit home for me. It nicely ties together a number of inversions, and all sorts of other ideas in a way that makes me so much happier to know what I don't know (and possibly not even know that). You owe it to yourself to listen to or read the entire thing, but here's a particularly nice excerpt quoting a critic of Darwin:

who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think absolute ignorance fully qualified to take the place of absolute wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill

I like it most because it folds back into itself so well. Proclaiming yourself to be on the side of "absolute wisdom" is just about the boldest setup for circular reasoning you can get. Absolute ignorance, on the other hand, has nothing but an upside. Maybe Oscar Wilde said it better:

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Did you notice I used a swear word a couple posts back? The FCC would have, and acted like idiots about it if they could. Judge Pierre Leval, and seemingly every other judge present, gets the Impossibly Stupid Seal of Approval for saying:

What are you protecting children from?

U.S. judges mock broadcast regulator's 'fleeting expletives' policy

As someone who still remembers being a child, I assure you that the lack of seven words being broadcast didn't keep me from learning them at a young age. More to the point, I only figured out they were worse than other words because the adults made a fuss about them. Even Sesame Street taught me to pick out when one of these things is not like the others:

• buck
• duck
• funk
• luck
• muck
• puck
• suck
• tuck
• yuck

Have you ever been left (or do you ever leave people) a message like this:

Hey, it's Bob. There's something really important I have to talk to you about. Call me back as soon as possible.

Am I really expecting too much for them to just say what this critical matter is in their voice mail? And if I don't recognize the voice immediately, the lack of context makes it that much harder to figure out which Bob to call, assuming it isn't a wrong number in the first place.

But this post is not about that kind of voice mail. It's about what kind of oddness a similar thing would be in the real world, because that's what happened to me last week. Anybody who knows me knows that my life already has an elevated level of strange, but even so it saw a little spike last week when I found the following in my mail:

The return address:

Richard L. Dodson
P.O. Box 1818
Cumberland Md.21502-1818

is unknown to me. Even more odd is the postmark, which appears to be:

Roaring Springs, TX 79256

Needless to say, that's nowhere near Maryland. Someone who wasn't impossibly stupid might just dump that kind of suspicious, unsolicited material right in the trash. I was dumb enough to open it and find inside:

That's it. Just a white CD, apparently audio, labeled only with "Carrar". That's the limit of my stupidity, though. I don't have anything to play it other than computers here, and I'm not about to stick a strange CD into one. What I was willing to do further is a little searching online to find out what this could be. High on my list of I-bet-it-is-a was some annoying marketing gimmick.

But there was essentially nothing about it. The only thing relevant I could find were these comments on Amazon, which seem irrelevant to the product listed. I don't recognize the names of the two people posting there, either. At least I knew I wasn't the only one who had gotten this; both of the others relatively recently, too. Curiouser and curiouser.

Since one of the people commenting there actually played the CD, it wasn't at all comforting to hear it was some kind of religious diatribe. I can only guess at why this might have been directed at me or those people. I'm still not convinced there isn't also some kind of malicious program on it as well.

So what's the big idea? If you're sending these out to people across the country, please leave a comment and say why. If you've received one yourself, let's hear about it! I especially hope Charles H. Murphy IV and Bill Flynn find their way here and can comment further.

A little something to make your job as a parent easier, or maybe harder:

The difference between
"do as I say, not as I do"
and
"do as I say, not as I've done"
is subtle, but significant.

I'd have put this under No I Didn't if it didn't demonstrate a stupidity beyond politics. Linda Sánchez is the foul, disgusting, filthy, unprincipled, sordid author of the following in H. R. 1966:

Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

I find it to be incredibly coercive, intimidating, harassing, and causing of substantial emotional distress for my First Amendment rights to be threatened by her using electronic means to repeatedly transmit this severely hostile legislation to citizens of the United States. If she really believes in this course of action, I expect her to volunteer to be the first person to serve 2 years for its violation.

Ever overheard just a part of a conversation in passing? Sometimes it doesn't matter how innocent the parts you didn't hear were, your impossibly stupid brain writes its own story. Witness:

And the worst part is that now it's not enough unless she uses two.

I don't know how your brain fills in the possible story before that (feel free to post a creative comment), but odds are it's nowhere near as boring as the real story. I'll post the mundane true details if the comments get too exciting and need to be checked. Alternatively, post a sentence of your own that you've overheard recently and wish you could unhear.