Perception explores how David Bloomberg and Spencer frame reality through sensory input and brain interpretation, revealing biases shape views—like anti-vaxxers blaming COVID vaccines for DeMar Hamlin’s collapse despite medical evidence. Social conformity (e.g., Twitter debates, juries) either reinforces errors or corrects them via patient engagement, akin to sales tactics. Evolution’s shortcuts, like colorblindness or hearing loss, clash with modern disinformation, demanding conscious scrutiny of mental models to avoid skewed truths. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host, and I'm back again today with David Bloomberg.
How are you doing, David?
Good, good.
How are you?
Good.
So before we start, I just want to remind everyone that all feedback for this podcast, please send it to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
I want to hear all the feedback, especially if you don't agree with what we're saying.
That's the most important feedback is the negative feedback, as we're learning when we see what some of the rich people in our world do.
Anyway, you're saying you're not going to ban anyone who gives you negative feedback.
No, that's not how it works.
The topic for today, we want to talk about perception, just as a topic as it relates to our experience as humans, perception itself.
So what's your first take?
You actually suggested this as a topic for the podcast, and I appreciate that.
But what's your first take on this perception?
Well, it's, I mean, there's lots of different ways that we could go on this.
It came up for me because as listeners may know by now, I do a regular survivor podcast.
And one thing that my podcast partner there and I often discuss is that perception is reality to the survivor players.
And in this particular season, we had a situation where the ending was something of a surprise to most people.
And so we had to kind of dive into what were the perceptions of the players on the jury, the players who decide, such that they came to this conclusion.
How did they see these things when we were seeing other things and when we were hearing other things?
And so it just, it kind of all came together to be like, this would be an interesting topic, not just in survivor, but outside of survivor as well.
Right.
So in kind of coming up with the notes and the approach for this, I did send you an entire, what would really be an entire episode of things to talk about related to this.
It was all from a neuroscientific perspective about how we build models in our minds that help us to work with the world and to actively predict.
I wouldn't call it predicting the future.
Only it kind of is.
You're predicting something, then you're using that to make a decision in this moment that's going to be the best thing for you in the future.
And then after I sent it, I immediately got into a truck to drive for six hours.
And about three hours into that, I had reworked the entire thing and I couldn't write it down.
And I was very frustrated, but I did eventually get where I was going.
And I got to a place where I could write it down.
And I wrote down a completely different view, a whole new perception of perception, if you want to call it that.
And the new approach I'm thinking about is that to me, it's a good time to mention a thing that I always like mentioning things, not things that people don't know, but that people do know, but they don't think about.
So this is a thing that I think everyone kind of knows, but no one ever talks about.
No one ever really thinks about it much.
And that's the idea that there's sort of two parts to your thoughts, your brain.
There's one part that's just your observations.
It's your senses are feeding you data from outside of your body to the inside of your body.
And that's really the only way anything makes it from the outside of your body to the inside of your brain, to the best of our knowledge, your five senses.
Some people think there's a sixth.
I'm not convinced yet.
Jury's still out.
But until such time as we've proven it, there's just the five senses.
Those are feeding information in.
Those are your observations of the world.
And then there's another thing happening there where your brain is interpreting the observations that are coming into your brain.
And the interpretation is often very often mistaken for just another observation.
And that's a thing that really makes that I feel we have to kind of pull apart before we can really look at this.
But the action of making an interpretation is really where perception sits.
It sits in this black box where we have input coming in from outside the body, and then we have output coming out in the form of an interpretation.
And the perception is happening inside that black box device that's kind of in between there.
What's your thoughts on this?
I've skirted around most of the neuroscience here, but I still have it.
Yeah, I think that makes sense.
You know, you see something or hear something or smell something or taste something, whatever.
And whatever happens inside your brain, like you said, or even inside your senses can skew the way you interpret it.
So I mentioned survivor, and I think I mentioned one thing we say is perception is reality to the players there.
But we never mean that literally.
It's to them.
And so in your situation that you just described, perception appears to be reality for the person who is perceiving it or who is sensing it.
But it doesn't change actual reality.
Right.
And so this can impact everything from the deeper concepts like politics and science to simpler ones like the senses that you were talking about, light and sound.
So for example, in the latter areas, I'm colorblind in kind of the pink-purple area.
I just can't tell the difference between certain shades.
I perceive them as being the same, but that doesn't change the objective fact that those colors reflect light in certain wavelengths.
And those wavelengths are different.
Yeah, they're measurable on a machine that can measure the wavelengths and you can tell by using that machine that's not the same machine as your eye.
Right.
Right.
And that adds to another layer that I'm going to try to gloss over and not mention too much today.
But, well, because I kind of do have some thoughts on a whole other episode.
Oh, okay.
Right, right, right.
But I don't want to try to squeeze two in one here.
But the machine is then, in essence, doing its own observation and interpretation process that's then showing something to you that's then a new observation for you.
And you're observing a thing that another machine has interpreted and on down the line.
And that process can become increasingly complex.
Right.
Yeah.
In this case, I see colors that just look the same, but I also see a machine telling me, no, those are different.
Right.
And I have to decide which is real, which is true, my own perceptions or the perceptions of a more objective machine.
You hope.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah.
The machine can also be inaccurate.
Yes, that's true.
That's a guy that's worked in the lab and had to do recalibrations of things.
I know absolutely many of the ways in exactly how it can be inaccurate.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, in another way, like in sound, there are certain tones that younger people can hear, but older people can't.
Yeah.
And so, you know, again, you have an objective fact that a tone may be played, but I won't be able to hear it, even if the kid sitting right next to me can.
Yeah.
And I guess, you know, in days gone by, before, and maybe they still do it now, but I don't think so, before you could, you know, get notified on your watch or through some other way when the phone was ringing, younger people might put this tone as like a ringtone or a cell tone.
So they would know they got a notification, but their teacher or other adults wouldn't know that they got a notification.
Well, clever.
And so, you know, again, it comes down to these, you know, these are more objective, straightforward perceptions that can be fact-checked against the real world.
But I think, you know, obviously where it gets more interesting is where there is more subjectivity to it in the way different people can interpret different situations.
Right.
So you mentioned something earlier.
You mentioned you briefly said point of view.
And I didn't want to interrupt your train of thought, which you're doing there, but that is a necessary component that we have to talk about, which is that there is a thing that we call perspective.
And, you know, this is a part of our perception because our perspective is a limiting factor for what data we get in.
When you view a thing happening, let's say, let's say it's a football game and you are in the stands and you're watching from the stands.
You have a perspective on the game.
You can see more than what's shown on the camera because you can see things happening up the field and down the field that's outside of the narrow view the camera's seeing.
You're not seeing it as close as a camera is seeing it.
And it's possible that there's another camera from the other side that's showing it from another angle.
So this is this is a thing that's mentioned among people who go to watch live sporting events and then also watch them at home is that there are things you can catch when you're at the event that you can't when you're at home, but there's also things you can catch when you're at home that are harder to see when you're at the event.
And that's because of the limitations of perspective.
And as soon as you have any perspective, I think that's a thing that's really important to underline is that every perspective is a limitation in itself.
Until we such point as we have enough cameras that we're actually omnipresent, there's always a limitation to our view.
There's only so much data we can pull in via our senses, and that's always a limitation.
And so already you're never getting all the data.
You're never getting all the data.
No one's getting all the data.
Even an attempt to get all the data will just still fail in getting all the data.
It's not really possible.
So you're going to build a model of the world in your mind.
And that model is always incomplete.
It's incomplete because it's more simple than the world, but it's also even more incomplete because you're not even getting all the data and it's impossible to do so.
And so you can have a situation where two people are watching something and they're right next to each other.
Let's say they're watching the same football game and they are right next to each other in the stands and they're far enough from the field that they pretty much have exactly the same field of view of everything, but they can still come up with different interpretations of what just happened on the play.
Right.
And that's because there's another factor here, other than just the perspective of your eyes.
It's, well, I would call it two other factors.
The next other factor is that there's your ability to interpret properly, right?
But the other factor is that there's another, I mean, we call this thing kind of a black box device.
And we had your senses coming in one side and we had the interpretation coming out the other.
But there's another line of data coming into this black box, and that is from your experience.
So your experience is feeding in here.
So you are comparing, inevitably, you're comparing the event you're seeing, whatever that event is, to previous events.
And sometimes you're primed, as in when you're watching like a football game, you're primed to compare it to other events much like that one.
And so you might have it, you know, the two people, even though they have the same field of vision, have usually different experiences and different abilities to pull up the appropriate experience.
So even two people who have watched all the same football games, one might think of the relevant connection faster than the other through means that you can't, you know, the human brain, we haven't figured out why some people just remember a certain thing faster than others.
And it's not even that the same person will remember the Ething faster than everyone else.
It's just your brain searching for stuff and one of the brains finds it before the other one finds it in their memory banks.
And this can lead to different conclusions about the interpretation of what just happened.
That was a, I don't even know what the plays are called in football.
Dave, help me out.
A touchdown.
Yeah, well, that was a running play.
That was a blitz.
Yeah, yeah, sure.
That was a, the defensive back was really close to getting the quarterback there.
And the other guy says, well, really, I, I didn't quite catch that.
That wasn't, you know.
Yeah.
And so through this black box device, you can get drastically different interpretations of the same event.
And that's a, that's a thing that we need to deal with in our world because in our very complicated world, we are coming up with very different interpretations of not just different events, but the shape of the world itself now.
And that's, that's a greater thing we have.
You know, that's a bigger problem we have to unpack.
Right.
And I mean, going, you know, first staying with the sports situation, I think there are multiple things that go into perception.
Now, when I'm watching a sporting event, even though I am obviously or almost always obviously cheering for a team, I still try to stay objective in terms of, oh, yeah, he was out or he was safe or that was a touchdown or that was a drop pass or whatever.
And, you know, there's a lot of interpretation in there.
And you can often see it if you're, if you're at the game or if you're watching with other people, or even if you're just on Twitter, you can see someone will be like, no, that was obviously a touchdown.
And, you know, no, that was obviously an incomplete pass.
And you watch it.
And the people who have a rooting interest tend to, you know, lean certain directions.
And I try to stay as objective as possible and say, that was my team, but it was an incomplete pass.
But, you know, if the ref rules it a touchdown, okay, I'll be okay with that.
I'm just saying it wasn't a complete pass.
Right.
And other times, you know, in theory, the refs are objective.
The announcers are supposed to be objective.
And yet there will be situations where the announcers will say something and be like, oh, yeah, that was obviously a touchdown.
You could see it on the replay.
That was obviously a touchdown.
And the refs will come back and say, nope, not a touchdown.
And you're like, what did the refs see differently there?
What, how were they looking at it differently?
They saw all the, they had all the same video feed, and yet they came to a different conclusion.
And it shouldn't have been because they were biased one way or the other.
You know, theoretically, they shouldn't have been.
And so that's always interesting.
Like, I do wish they would do, and the leagues will never let this happen.
It's like the leagues will fine a coach or a player if they criticize the refereeing or the umpiring.
So they'll never let this happen.
But what I'd like to see happen is, you know, for example, there was a recent college playoff game, and there was a pass caught that to me and to most other people seemed to be obviously a touchdown.
And the refs said, nope, not a touchdown.
And because it wasn't a touchdown, they had the ball at like the one-yard line.
They fumbled on that one-yard line, turned it over.
They ended up losing the game by about a touchdown.
And so I would just love to see someone ask the replay refs, what did you see there?
Because they don't explain their calls in the game.
But what was your perception of what happened there that is so different from everyone else?
But we don't get those answers from them.
So that should be objective, but it can go into other subjective areas.
Like I was watching a Bears Green Bay Packer game.
Okay.
And Aaron Rodgers, the quarterback for the Green Bay Packers, has just beaten the Bears over and over and over again.
And in this Bears fan's opinion, he has mocked Bears fans previously.
But the announcers in this most recent game were saying, ah, Aaron Rodgers, he likes to joke around with the fans.
And I'm thinking, I don't think saying I own you is joking around with them.
I think he's saying, stick it, you know.
But I mean, so that's a more subjective perception.
You know, like, was he joking with the fans or was he telling them what he really thought of them?
As a Bears fan, I viewed it a certain way.
The announcers viewed it a different way.
I don't know what the actual answer is.
You're right.
Yeah, that's a good point that you bring up that I, I mean, I mentioned experiences are feeding into this black box device, but that you're right coming with those experiences is any biases we have, prejudices, right?
Generalizations that we just normally sit there and biases, prejudices, generalizations, these are sort of, as is directly stated in the meaning, you know, when you pull apart the word prejudice, pre-judging, these are things we have sort of worked out in advance.
I mean, this is our brain's way of trying to speed up calculations of other things when it's coming up with these.
And this, you know, so biases and prejudices, they are always going to be there until our brains evolve enough that we're finally rid of them.
And it's unclear which pressures are going to cause the biases and prejudices to weed out at this point.
But that's really what it's trying to do.
It's just trying to make it more efficient to come up with a conclusion.
If your brain thinks that it can just say that the refs are the refs are all against my team, then, you know, when you're watching the game and you're attempting to interpret the play, you know, you'll find that prejudice in there.
You'd be like, oh, those refs, they're always, they're always making those calls against my team.
They're always against my team.
And that's just a way of your brain trying to make it faster to come to the right conclusion or any conclusion.
Because I think we've had this conversation a little bit before.
We disagreed slightly.
We never got into it.
But you felt that being more efficient necessarily included the need for the thing to also be accurate.
And I disagreed.
And I think that in the evolutionary context, that's supported by what's happening is that it doesn't matter if more of your answers are wrong if you're just making the answers faster.
Because if you're getting bogged down with one single problem, you're getting behind all the other creatures that are getting ahead of you and all this stuff.
It's better to like, you know, not worry about getting the 100%.
If you can get 60% and just, you know, do five tests in the time it took 90% over here to get one test done, you're winning.
Yeah.
Right.
And so that's a thing that evolution has done to us.
It's attempted to make our decisions faster, even if they're not quite as accurate.
And that's part of that machine that's doing that is that the prejudging that happens, the biases that occur inside us.
That's our brain trying to think about, oh, am I going to see that again?
If I am, then maybe, you know, it helps me to know something about it, make a little model in my brain where it says, okay, that's probably going to switch that way.
And then when I see it again, sure enough, I'm there.
Oh, those refs, they're always making those calls against my team.
Yeah.
And I think that, you know, when it comes to efficiency, I think, and I don't remember exactly, I remember we talked about it.
I don't remember exactly what we said, but I think that, yes, you can efficiently get to a wrong answer, but clearly we should strive to get to a right answer.
Because if, you know, like when I went to college, you had three hours to do your final.
Okay.
Yeah.
And I had one final where I very efficiently finished in like an hour.
And I didn't get many answers right because I just really didn't know.
And I got up to hand in the final and people were looking at me like, holy cow, how did he finish?
Well, it's easy to finish quickly if you don't know the answers.
I was, I made very efficient use of my time, but I was wrong.
I would much rather have been one of the people who actually knew what they were doing and took the full three hours and got that 90% that you were talking about.
Yeah.
So, yes, sometimes efficiency works, you know, if it's a question, if it's life or death.
And well, that's where our evolutionary standpoint was when it developed.
Yeah.
Exactly.
If I'm driving and I see something out of the corner of my eye and I'm driving all by myself, there's no cars behind me, nothing else.
And I see something out of the corner of my eye that I think is going to hit me and I slam on the brakes and it's not there.
Well, then I haven't really lost anything.
And it was a good use of my perceptions to say, hold on and make a quick stop.
If instead I decided to slowly look around to try to determine what's going on and there actually was something there, well, I might be dead by the time I do that.
So in that case, efficiency is much better.
And having senses and perceptions that make you react quickly is a good thing.
But in this modern world, the human brain hasn't adapted to the modern world yet.
The modern world has just moved far too quickly for evolution.
And so we have a lot more situations where people are coming to these snap decisions and they're just not true.
You know, you talked about earlier, and I don't know whether you're talking about this metaphorically or literally.
I suspect literally, because you talked about it goes to the shape of our world.
Yeah.
And, you know, when it comes to science, there are objective facts, and then there are the ways people perceive them.
So, you know, the fact is, when it comes to the shape of our world, the earth is a spheroid.
But for many years, people who didn't know better believed it was flat because, well, that was how they perceived it in their immediate vicinity.
And there was no reason to think differently.
And they may not have left, you know, their immediate area, their cave, their farm, their, you know, small area of land, their village.
So whether it was flat or a globe really literally did not matter to them.
Yeah.
But even today, where people should know better, and the vast majority do, but there are some who believe that it's flat despite the overwhelming evidence, both because of their preconceived notions or the fact that they've been fooled by someone else, just like, oh, look at this, look at this.
And they efficiently come to a wrong decision.
And they cannot perceive the spherical shape.
They look around, they see it's flat.
Someone gives them a couple of wrong pieces of information.
And they're like, oh, yeah, that matches my local perceptions.
Yeah.
Must be a flat earth.
Yeah.
And once they build a world of that shape in their mind and they picture it that way continually, it's more and more difficult to convince them otherwise.
And that's, I was talking literally and also metaphorically because the shape of our world is also in how the institutions interact with each other.
I mean, if you're going to imagine that the government behaves this way instead of that way, are they likely to be trying to find ways to get more money, tax money from us?
And then also, are they looking for more ways to reduce the population by giving us a vaccine that's going to kill us all off?
I mean, the difference between those two things is very useful to know.
And the idea that they are selfish and maybe working against our interest is true in both, but one is much, much worse for us.
And someone might say, well, you better just not get the vaccine just in case, but that comes with its own threat from a thing that doesn't have a conscious mind to try to plan anything to get rid of us.
The virus doesn't care, doesn't know about us.
It doesn't even know that we are humans.
It doesn't have the ability to conceive of any of these things that we have around us.
It's just trying to live moment to moment, create new cells.
That's all it's doing.
It's finding a good way to do it.
So we have another danger that we have to avoid.
But we have to account for this as we start to think about the future, I think, because you're right that evolution hasn't prepared us for these decisions.
And we have to adapt.
And we can't rely on just what's naturally generally clunking around up here to make that happen.
We have to consciously be aware of what I would call this one of the pitfalls.
One of the facts that your brain, in many ways, in much of what it's doing, is just trying to get to the answer faster so it can then solve a new problem right after that.
That's what it's been doing for millions of years.
And it's been doing it very well and better all the time.
And it's not useful for a world in which people are deliberately trying to feed garbage into the machine.
And you will come to the wrong conclusion, not because your meat computer is functioning improperly, but because it's getting the garbage in.
And you have to think about the method by which the interpretation was found, the method by which another person comes to their interpretation.
And really, everyone's going to have to become a scientist at the end, I think.
Everyone's going to have to be able to know how you evaluate evidence, how you form a proper hypothesis, and then make a proper experiment to determine whether that hypothesis is true.
Because knowing that helps you to understand when someone else has done it and when they haven't.
And when we talk about science education, that's a big part of that, I think, because you don't need to know about biology in order to understand that the biologists have performed experiments and the experiments were actually real experiments and they're not faking it.
But I saw this video on YouTube.
Yeah, the video on YouTube said, yeah.
And they appeared to be doing something.
They use a bunch of sciencey words.
So obviously that's also good data, right?
Yeah.
I mean, and that's the thing.
We need to have science classes that are not just memorize the periodic table, learn this.
You know, we need separate critical thinking classes because not all of us will ever be scientists, but everyone should be able to determine better anyway, fact from fiction and at least understand certain things.
Like I saw a Twitter discussion earlier today or yesterday where someone said, okay, what I'm saying has been reviewed in peer-reviewed journals.
And someone responded by saying, well, that's what we're doing in this Twitter thread.
We're peer reviewing.
It's like, yeah, that's not even close to the same thing.
Peer review and Twitter.
Yeah.
But again, that is how that person perceived the concept of peer review.
Yeah.
Or thought of the concept.
Now, they're completely misinformed, but their, as you called it, meat computer, it's looking at things a very particular way.
And so its perceptions are completely skewed by that.
And so when we talk about, you know, the vaccine and we talk about these people claiming that there are a bunch who have died suddenly, a bunch of sports figures who have died suddenly because of vaccines.
And every time I tweet about it, someone will respond back with a clip from Tucker Carlson's show where some ex-cardiologist who now believes every COVID fantasy conspiracy was on Tucker Carlson.
They'll be like, oh, look, see?
It's like, okay, so you believe this one doctor, but you don't believe the thousands of other ones who have said this doctor is wrong.
And it's all in their preconceived notions.
And in the way they are perceiving the world around them, they are only listening to those who they want to listen to, only those they agree with.
Yeah.
And they're not understanding that there are many different views on things and you need to look at all of them.
And it's just so frustrating.
I mean, I end up just blocking those people because it's very clear that there's no, there's no way you're going to have a conversation with them.
You are much more patient on Twitter.
And people can see that.
You know, I tried being, I used to try being much more patient.
People can, of course, follow us.
I'm at David Bloomberg.
And you try to engage them a bit more.
And it's interesting in watching that because eventually you come to the conclusion and you'll say to them, oh, so actually all this discussion, you haven't been trying to actually be honest.
You're just a troll.
Yeah.
And it's funny because I'll look at it and I'll be, you know, I'll have seen from their first tweet that they respond.
I'm like, oh, that person's a troll.
I'm not going to bother with them.
But, you know, you're, you're more patient in that regard.
I try to be sometimes, but when all they're doing is, you know, responding in trollish ways, I move on.
I take a more efficient route.
Sure.
I might get there.
Yeah.
And so, you know, I know we've kind of gone far afield from perception here, but that's part of it.
Yeah.
And it's just the way people are seeing the same information and perceiving it completely differently.
And of course, as we're recording this, we are only a few days out from Buffalo Bills player, DeMar Hamlin, being injured in a football game and collapsing.
And many doctors have hypothesized, theorized about what caused it.
And it's a particular heart issue.
But immediately, within moments, the anti-vaxxers were posting, see, see, another COVID vaccine issue.
And that's how their perceptions are geared.
They see something happen in a game where people are literally hitting each other, running into each other.
This man took a shoulder to the chest.
And they're like, yep, must be the vaccine.
It's like, what?
And it's because their perceptions are just so geared towards only one answer.
And they're very efficient about it.
They're just also very wrong.
So just kind of getting closer to wrapping up here, but I do want to mention two distinct points that you touched on there.
One is that, I mean, we talked about having these biases, prejudices, and whatnot are sort of logical speed bumps.
They are getting in the way of coming to proper conclusions.
It's possible that your bias and prejudice is right, but if it is, it's usually only by accident.
It's not because it's actually right.
And of course, we mentioned about how this is a process of observation leading to interpretation.
So many times I've seen people take things that are interpretations and consider them to be facts.
And that's a thing that at some point I think we need to pick apart more because how a person even recognizes that what they're talking about is not really a fact and it's just some interpretation of a fact.
That is right there where we're talking about science education, I think, because usually when I think about how I know that, it's all grounded in what I know about science.
And so I think naturally everyone else should learn it that way.
There might be other ways to learn it.
I'm not sure.
But I want to touch on one very particular point you mentioned, which is that there are some social factors here that if you have four people and they go and they all go watch the game and there's a certain event that happens and then they start talking about the event.
In talking about it, they can all come to a consensus view on the thing.
Even if that consensus view is wrong, even if it doesn't really match with what they saw, it's still possible to come up with that view.
And that's the social factor that's a part of this.
When you have two people who watch the same event and they separately write down what they saw without looking at each other's notes, you know, that's one thing.
But when they talk about it first, they're much, much more likely to mention very similar or the same thing.
And that has something to do with a social factor that's really like a drive to fit in and conform with our peers, right?
That's really what we're talking about there.
And that can lead to, I mean, what it can lead to is more people being wrong about stuff.
Really, it can lead to more people being right about stuff too, right?
You can, you know, and so these social factors, they need to be used sort of properly, right?
Like, I think we need to more often, that's why I'm more patient on Twitter, because I want to draw the people in.
I want to use sales tactics against them.
I want to get them to buy into the conversation a little and then get them to examine more and more of their own view until it just falls apart, because I know it will fall apart.
I know before I started, it'll fall apart.
That's the one thing I know.
Right.
If they are willing to actually examine it.
Right.
If they're willing to stay long enough in the conversation to examine it.
But that's why I use sales tactics against them.
I get them to do a little bit.
And once you sell someone a little thing, it's possible to sell them a much larger thing.
And that's what I do on Twitter.
I get little conversations and then I just keep at it a little bit, chip away at it and keep them on.
And the longer they're conversing, the more likely they are to converse further.
And as long as I'm not trying to push them over to a you're stupid and you're wrong sort of chasm, sometimes I even get people to the point where they're willing to give on some points.
And I think that's small victories.
And what we need, we don't need one large victory.
There's no one silver bullet that's going to kill the werewolf in this scenario.
We are Lilipushans in this.
We have to each gather and throw our little string over top of the large beast that's about to lay waste to our land and we have to tie him down.
I mean, that's what we are.
That's the metaphor we're looking for here.
And so each one of us has to keep at this, I think.
We have to keep having conversations with people that are on the other side and try to get them to examine this world they've built in their head because we know it's not accurate.
Right.
With more examination, it should fall apart.
Right.
And I've gotten to the point on Twitter where I can usually tell those people from the ones who are just trolls.
That's right.
There are people who are looking to do that at all.
Right.
Right.
And yeah, there sometimes, you know, can have a good conversation with someone who disagrees and maybe even reach some detente.
Yeah.
But it's unfortunately rare and getting rarer on Elon Musk's platform.
Yeah.
But you're right about, you know, going back to the, you know, group of people seeing things the same way or, you know, coming to see things.
You know, even in a football game, there are times when an official will throw a flag, say there was a penalty, and then the others will come together.
And then the referee will step out and say, nope, there was no penalty.
Well, it's because the one person who threw the flag thought there was a penalty, but then someone else comes in and says, no, no, what you couldn't see from your angle was this.
Right.
And that is good.
There was a situation at a basketball game I was just watching last night where a guy tripped over his own two feet and the ref called a foul on the nearest opposing player to him.
And it's like he didn't do anything.
He didn't even touch him.
But the ref was not at the best angle from his angle.
He saw someone go down.
He saw someone next to that person.
He made an assumption that there must have been tripping there.
If there had been another ref, if there had been as many refs at a basketball game as there are at a football game, then someone would have likely seen, oh, no, he just tripped over his own two feet.
But there weren't enough, you know, from the right angle.
When you have the cameras at all the right angle, and then you can see that, but they don't, they also don't have the same kind of slow-mo instant replay at basketball games as they do at football games.
Yeah.
And so here's this poor guy who gets a foul called on him and he didn't do anything because there wasn't a group to correct that.
And then, you know, a similar situation is, although more serious, is in juries where, okay, you need to get a unanimous jury to convict someone.
And if you are on a jury and you're one person sitting there saying, no, I don't think they did it.
I don't agree with the evidence.
And you have 11 people like, come on, man, he did it.
We want to go home.
We want to see our families.
We want to have dinner, you know, whatever.
Just he did it.
It takes an immense strength of character to sit there and say, no, I don't believe it.
Now, sometimes it's a good strength of character.
And it turns out, no, that person wasn't guilty.
Sometimes it's a prejudicial situation where, no, I don't think that that person did it because I'm a white guy.
He's a white guy.
He killed a couple of African Americans.
So therefore, he was probably, you know, he was probably doing the right thing.
Now, they may not espouse it the same way, but they may have those prejudices in them that make it more difficult to get that sort of a conviction.
And we've seen that in our society.
So it can work, you know, both in good and bad ways.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, with that note, with a sly reference, I noticed to 12 Angry Men, one of my favorite movies, we'll wrap the podcast episode up.