When to NOT Believe Your Own Eyes

 For those of you who've not enjoyed a thorough education in the history of comedy, you may be unaware of the origin of that audio clip that I included at the end of the theme song for the show. Well, that clip comes from the 1933 Marx Brothers movie, Duck Soup.  In it,  Chico and Harpo Marx play spies working against the president of Fredonia, Rufus T. Firefly, played by Groucho. There's a scene where both Chico and Harpo dress up like Groucho in order to get some secret plans from Firefly's rich benefactor, Mrs. Teasdale, played in all her magnificent exasperations by Margaret Dumont.  In Mrs. Teasdale's bedroom Harpo, dressed up as Groucho, gets the combination to the safe where the plans are, and runs out. And then Chico, also dressed as Groucho, emerges from hiding under the bed.  Mrs. Teasdale is rightfully perplexed, which leads to this exchange:

Mrs. Teasdale: Your Excellency, I thought you left.
Chico: Oh no, I no leave. 
Mrs. Teasdale: But I saw you with my own eyes.
Chico: Well, who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?

Now, this is the classic gaslighter's line. While it wasn't originated by the Marx Brothers, theirs is probably the most famous use of it in popular culture. The problem is while we certainly shouldn't listen to gaslighters ever, how completely should we trust our own eyes?  In this episode, I want to explore a few specific instances when you most definitely should not believe your own eyes. Stay tuned.

I'm Craig Boreth, and this is The Great Ungaslighting, a podcast about the ways we've been conned into accepting a human culture that's out of sync with human nature, and how we can fight back and start to put the kind back into humankind.

I have a friend who works for the local police department, so he either sees firsthand or hears about in a very close secondhand, pretty much every bad thing that happens in town. If there's a major crime or an accident or a fire, he knows about it.  Recently, there has been an uptick in local crime, so he feels it about as clearly  as anyone could. In his mind, things are pretty dangerous out there.  Now his wife, very intentionally avoids the news. They don't have a TV and she's not on social media.  In her daily life, she would only experience local crime to the extent any regular person would. And since she hasn't had any firsthand experience with this uptick in crime, it barely registers with her. In her mind, things are about the same as they've always been and she thinks things are pretty safe out there. So who's right? Well, as far as their individual experiences go, they're both right.  As we discussed in a previous episode, there is no objective reality.

So for each of them, their reality is reality. 

Obviously, it's a great big world out there. And even if we walked around, all day, every day in a different place, we'd only be able to experience a tiny, tiny fraction firsthand of what's going on in the world. So how can we understand the rest of it? The vast majority of human experience that we can only infer through the stories we read or see or hear, online or through mass media, or even from friends telling us about stuff they've read or seen or heard.  Actually the really interesting question for me  is, how do we end up misunderstanding what's going on?  Either through an innocent misinterpretation of incoming data, or because someone very intentionally wants us to misunderstand what's going on, for their usually financial or political benefit.  So I've got a few ways that we tend to misunderstand things. And since so much of our understanding of the world, these days comes from social media. I'm going to kind of focus on that.

Now.  One way that we tend to misunderstand the information we access.  Is we assume the distribution of opinions online is the same as the distribution in the overall population.

Now recently someone had said to me, "I appreciate you"  instead of "I appreciate it". Like, Hey, I appreciate you for what you did.  And I thought, you know, I've heard that a few times a little bit more recently, and I wonder where that comes from. So I did a quick online search, just like the origins of, "I appreciate you".

And those of you who are Ted Lasso fans might remember hearing  it on that show frequently.  And it's just kind of something that is becoming more normal in conversation and in my online search, one thing I discovered is that it really pisses people off.

Like people hate this. And I of course thought, Wow, I had no idea that this many people hated the line I appreciate you. But then I thought about for a second and I realized well, who is going to take the time to complain about something online. It's people who are really pissed off by this thing.

Not just people for whom it sounds a little weird or people who kind of like it, or people who don't even think about it, right. They're not going to post some comment about it, especially a negative one.  For that it's going to predominantly be people who are really pissed off. So it distorts the impression that we get as to how widespread this hatred of this phrase is.  The pissed off- ness of it. Is going to appear much more frequently online than it actually exists in the real world. 

Now, one of the specific places where this kind of selection bias tends to really amplify the opinions of the more upset among us is next door and other neighborhood apps. And there actually was a 2023 study that showed that the use of nextdoor and other neighborhood apps like it led to inaccurately high perceptions of local crime rates.

It's interesting in that we believe because these are local comments that we are getting an even more accurate assessment of what's going on locally, because these are actual people reporting, actual things. But we have to keep in mind how subjective they are and who is going to comment and who isn't going to comment. And in addition to that in a more general sense. It's important to keep in mind how information travels online. There was this really broad 2018 study from the MIT Media Lab focused on Twitter and they found that false news stories are 70% more likely to be retweeted than true stories are.

And it also takes true stories about six times as long to reach 1500 people as it does for false stories to reach the same number of people.  And these things combined, this sort of selection bias with the speed with which false stories can spread online, compound each other and make our online experience something we really need to be skeptical of and question what we are seeing and hearing and reading.

another mistake that we make online.  Is that  while the outrageous stuff online is clearly unrealistic and we know that, we assume that the normal everyday posts of friends reflect actual reality.  But when you think about it, you realize, of course they don't.  While we may know consciously that the posts people make on social media, especially Facebook are curated, misleadingly perfect versions of their actual lives.

Nevertheless, if that's pretty much all we see about the vast majority of our friends' lives, then subconsciously we're going to believe that their lives are pretty much perfect,  or at least way more perfect than our own lives.

This is certainly one of the aspects of social media that is plaguing adolescents. I mean, for those of us who grew up without the Internet, it was difficult enough to  navigate the world of comparing yourself to other people.  When you have social media doing that for you and we have this sense that everybody's lives are more perfect than ours, better than ours, whatever.

So it becomes important for all of us to remind ourselves over and over again, that what we're seeing is not in fact reality, and we shouldn't necessarily trust our eyes in these cases.

another mistake we make in believing what we think we know.  Is that the things that are so normalized in our culture that we don't even pay attention to them, we think they must either be laws of nature or they're not nearly as problematic as those big disagreements that grab the headlines and polarize society.  The problem is when a misunderstanding  gets so entrenched that people don't even think about it,  it may actually be more dangerous. Because it's not even considered as a possible cause for the problems that we, as a society should be trying to fix.  I'm sure most of you have heard that quote from  Upton Sinclair, who said "it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."  And kind of a more modern version of that is that it's hard to get someone to understand something when the reelection of their representative or the viewership of their media outlet or the bonuses of a CEO depend on them not understanding it. For example, I've never seen a study of this phenomenon but I've done some unscientific surveys and I'm pretty confident in saying that most people don't understand how a graduated income tax actually works. Which is weird because everyone complains about taxes. But it's possible we don't understand the most basic structure of how they work.  So we've all heard this line about getting bumped up into a higher tax bracket. As a matter of fact, one of my favorites comes from The Big Lebowski: 

The Dude: "Speaking of which, do you think you could give me my $20,000 in cash.  My concern is, and I've gotta check with my accountant, but that this might bump me up in a higher tax...uhhh."

Now that line, I don't want to be bumped up into a higher tax bracket, suggests that once you're in that higher tax bracket, your entire income will be taxed at that higher rate. But that's not how graduated income taxes work. All it means is that your income above the threshold for that particular tax rate will be taxed at that rate. This is an example I think of where high-income folks want you to believe that they're paying much higher taxes than everyone else. When a better way to think about it is we all pay the exact same amount in taxes to the extent that we make the same amount of money. Like everyone's first $11,000 is taxed at the same rate.  And everyone's next $33,000 after that is taxed at a slightly higher rate. And then everyone's next $50,000 after that is taxed at a slightly higher rate still and so on and so on. So by the way, another thing to keep in mind is that when people complain about taxes and speak almost enviably about poor people who pay no taxes,  they mean they pay no income taxes. They're just conveniently leaving that out. They pay other kinds of taxes and in many cases end up paying a higher percentage of their income in total taxes than very wealthy people do. In fact in 2018, according to data collected by two UC Berkeley economists, the top 400 richest people in the United States paid a lower percentage of their income in taxes than those in the bottom 10% of income. So this is something where this little phrase that we don't even think about, I don't want to be bumped into a higher tax bracket, leads to a misunderstanding that I think percolates across society and prevents us from addressing tax inequities in a truly productive way.  

One more way we  misunderstand information that's coming at us is we assume that those speaking are doing so honestly, now I'm not talking about politicians or chamber of commerce boosters. What's the old joke about how do you know when a politician is lying? His lips are moving. 

I'm talking about normal people who you'd think would have no reason to be misleading.  And one example I have is a bunch of years ago, I was walking down on Venice Beach and I noticed there was a little commotion up over to the side and I saw Jay Leno was there, who at the time was hosting The Tonight Show. And he was out doing his JayWalking bit , where he goes out and he asked people questions and it shows just how stupid the general population is because they can't answer the question. It just makes us look like a bunch of buffoons. And a woman came up to me. And with a clipboard and a legal release and asked me if I wanted to be on JayWalking. 

And I said, sure, yeah. So she said, well, Jay is going to come over and he's going to ask you a couple of questions and I just want you to answer in the dumbest possible way. This is actually what she said. She said, so for example, if he asks you who was the first man on the moon? You might want to say it was Louis Armstrong. Or if he asks what the DC in Washington DC stands for, you could say something like da Capitol.

So I of course was like, why would I want to do that? And she looked at me kinda funny, like  why wouldn't you want to do that? You'll be on TV.   But even these instances, right? Those of us who grew up with reality TV, we kind of know when we think about it, that it's clearly not reality.  But we don't really think about it when we see things like this, like the great Jordan Klepper interviews on The Daily Show.  And you have to realize those are heavily edited to show you the worst of the worst of people that they interviewed. And it's very misleading and really counterproductive for you to interpret that as a true reflection of reality. 

And it was at that moment when I thought it's not so much that you shouldn't believe everything you see on TV, it's that you shouldn't believe anything you see on TV or online or pretty much anywhere for that matter until you can thoroughly vet it for yourself. 

Now, one of the last misunderstandings I think we make is that we believe that in this day and age, we have access to all the information that has ever been available to humankind, so therefore we should be making perfectly informed decisions. 

Now, obviously that is not true. Even with access to the best information as we saw, different kinds of information travel around the Internet more quickly, different opinions are elevated above others, usually based on how outrageous they are or how misleading they are. But in addition to all the things we see and have access to, we don't think about the things that we don't see and don't have access to. We assume that as technology improves, the more information we have access to,  but that doesn't mean that we necessarily have all the information we need to make the best possible decision.. I remember hearing a talk that Ted Koppel gave a bunch of years ago and he noted that people during the Civil War had quicker access to photographs of dead soldiers and wounded on the battlefield than we had in the nineties during the first Gulf War. And that will continue to this day. Gate keepers will continue to keep information from you. I'm not really addressing that kind of censorship per se, just understanding that it exists and that it happens is important when thinking about how fully informed you actually are. 

So the big question is what do we do about all this? How do we remedy this?

The most important way is to just remind yourself over and over again, that you have imperfect information almost all the time.  If you're convinced of something new it's quite possible that there was an agenda behind that convincing or it was made with incomplete information. I'm not saying you were conned, necessarily, or that you believe a lie, although that's possible. All I'm saying is that we should be a bit more humble and skeptical about our own beliefs and challenge them like any good scientist would to test their own theories.  Now you may very well find that your understanding of something holds up to that scrutiny, the way Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection has held up.  Or you may discover contradictory facts that cause you to question what you believe.  The key is not to feel embarrassed that you were misled or get defensive and protective of your original belief. The key is to understand that this is how knowledge advances and to appreciate the positive evolution of your understanding of the world.  

Another strategy for overcoming this kind of misinformation is to avoid consuming information from outlets that you know are going to be skewed in the way that I discussed above.  I remember a long time ago Dr. Andrew Weil, who was one of the first integrative medicine doctors to gain traction in the United States, he had some simple suggestions for improving your health. One of them, which I have heeded to this day was don't watch the local news. And I haven't for decades. And as we discussed, the modern version of this is probably get off of NextDoor.   I don't think it's really a net positive in the long run. 

Another thing that I highly recommend is posting more realistic representations of your actual life on social media. 

We talked about René Girard in a previous episode and how we imitate each other, and that leads to conflict and eventually to scapegoating of innocent outsiders to mitigate that conflict.  By the way Ted Gioia, great local LA writer, just posted a really cool piece on his Substack called "12 things I learned from René Girard". I'll post a link to it in the show notes. You should definitely check it out. So all of this perfection that's posted online, causes a lot of stress and anxiety for everyone as we all strive to meet the unrealistic images of seemingly perfect lives that we observe all day, every day.  So I think we can all do our part to kind of help out our friends. And do that by posting real things online, post the bad and the mundane along with the fabulous. Post pictures where you don't look so great. Post pictures where you're just doing normal stuff or where you're struggling with things. 

And as Girard says, if it's all imitation,   rather than prompting people to try to imitate what appears fabulous in your life, when everything looks perfect and everyone looks beautiful, let people imitate your honesty, your bravery and your resilience  In the face of bad hair days, challenges, disappointment, even failure.

Well, that's it for this week. Until next time, be kind to yourself, cut each other, some slack, and if you have to be out there on the roads, remember, drive nice, honk twice.   And it has always use your damn turn signal.