Folks make mistakes and say dumb things.
It happens.
But when they move in lockstep, making the same mistakes as each other, that’s fascinating.
Like every Mandela effect.
Or when everyone made the same jokes about video game streaming, back when Twitch was a writhing newborn platform. “Who’d want to WATCH someone play video games?” they said, as if watching people play sports and have sex weren’t billion-dollar industries.
Or the religion of Islam.
Here’s an example from 2002. I don’t even know if anyone else noticed it, but I saw half a dozen of different folks from different backgrounds make this same mistake in rapid succession.
Then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gave his thoughts. From Wikipedia:
Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.
It’s an obvious idea, but it was less obvious back then. This simple paragraph coined the phrase “known unknowns” – before then, it was an idea without a catchy label.
But let’s be real, his wording there is clumsy.
So it led to a parade of folks all spouting off the following nonsense over the following months.
“Rumsfeld is an idiot. What a stupid thing to say. So ridiculous. So absurd. Obviously incorrect. I wonder if he has brain damage. And yet, in a strange way, that perfectly describes [insert field of interest].”
Sure – in other words, what he said was smart, relevant and profound. Of course it perfectly describes your field of interest, because it describes every field of interest. But the consensus was that his remarks were dumb, so people had to twist themselves in pretzels.
(History has been kinder. Looking back, folks get what he meant – mostly because they understand it better. At the time, there was a conceptual gap – folks couldn’t grok it, so they assumed it was dumb.)
Luckily, 2002 was the last time the masses mimicked the same stupidity in perfect unison.
…
*cough*
Right. Well, that’s a shame, ain’t it? I guess we’re doomed to all follow stupid ideas forever.
That “we” includes you and I.
But with this at your fingertips, you’ll do it a lot less.
That might sound like much… is another example of a common, foolish belief. The wise money knows the value of curbing your mistakes.
So curb away: