People truly Opposed to e-cigarettes are driven by misinfoception or belief.
Whether we're at a cocktail party, a family dinner, or on the internet, one of the trickiest conversational skills to master can be recognizing the difference between the two.
If you aspire to seize your Good Deed information-sharing opportunities where you find them, making that key distinction is an important skill, because as I'll shortly belabor to death, you can't argue with a belief - but you can clear up a misconception, and you can correct misinformation.
Let's say someone mentions e-cigarettes, and someone else says, "yeah those things have arsenic in them," and a third person nods in agreement, "they're full of old lace, too, I heard. Bad stuff. My brother-in-law got lace worms just from smelling one. Had to have an operation."
What should you do? Is there any polite way, in that situation, to present factual information for the benefit of the alarmed-looking Impressionable Young Smokers who are listening to the conversation, while at the same time respecting the beliefs of the speakers, if, in fact, they are speaking from belief and not misconception? How can you tell?
If you'resneaky socially adept and rhetorically agile enough, you might start by politely asking the one who spoke first where he heard that about the arsenic. His answer might at least shed some light on the question of whether this is something he believes, or just a bit of misinformation he picked up.
If he launches off into impassioned oratory about the presence of arsenic, not only in e-cigarettes, but salad dressing and laundry detergent, put there intentionally by space aliens, with the goal of turning us all into zombies, that's almost certainly a belief, and the challenge before you now involves seizing any pause the speaker makes for breath and finessing an exit, maybe inviting the young folks to come out onto the patio with you for a "smoke"...
In such a scenario, there's a 50% chance you just made the wrong choice.
Had you asked the other man instead, "old lace? really? in e-cigarettes?" and looked interested enough, he might have said that's what his sister told him, but she takes a lot of tranquilizers, so who knows? and if you're willing to encourage him to talk about his brother-in-law's stomach trouble while people are valiantly trying to spoon down their crème brûlée, you might realize that the doctor said "lesions" but due to your dinner companion's regional accent and flawed table manners, he was talking with his mouth full of tourte parmerienne, so you, still reeling from the notion of fine needlework floating around in little bottles of RY Alençon, heard "lace worms."
That's probably a misconception, and our natural instinct is to start spouting facts and figures, especially when we're young and bursting with newly-acquired facts and figures, and, if truth be told, a little bit of pardonable pride that there are things that we really do know more about than some of our elders and people who have already finished their dissertations.
Misconception: Simple vs Invested
My natural instinct is to break things down into these little neat stacks of absolutes, but until the world catches up to me, I'm obliged to acknowledge that misconception comes in two flavors: simple and invested.
A simple misconception is one the holder is happy to have cleared up. It's just something they read or heard, they may not even remember where or from whom, about a subject they don't know much about, and may not even be very interested in it.
An invested misconception, as the name implies, is one in which the owner is emotionally and/or intellectually invested. This is something that he heard from a source he's invested in, an entity he wants to believe, and/or about a subject, or touching on one, in which he has a strong interest.
Example: "The electrical cigarettes? You know, my Bukusu professor was in on that study where they found traces of asbestos in those things."
It's still a reasonable doubt or two shy of a belief, that carapace hasn't yet hardened, that would make it entirely impervious to facts or reason, but there is that element of investment, which means the owner will be reluctant to break up with it immediately.
If you're getting deja vu to the part about some of the FauxPosed, there's a reason:
Invested misconception lives in that shadowy land between misinformation and belief, and guess who else lives there - Feelings!
Returning to our example, it would probably not be very good strategy, and certainly not very polite, to just charge in like a bull on San Fermin's day and hotly declare that they found one Bad Thing, that wasn't asbestos, but some other Bad Thing nobody can pronounce, in one product, made by one company, that went out of business the month the study came out, and that his professor was only there to translate for one scientist who was only there to stand up in one meeting and say that all the ones they tested in Kenya had nothing in them but propylene glycol and strawberry flavoring, and were found by the panel to be harmless, though several people thought they tasted more raspberry-ish, and thus further study was recommended.
In practical internet forum application, this might mean starting up a conversation with someone else, that the invested misconception holder will see, and skillfully working your facts and figures, complete with links to all the Venerable Monographs reposing in distinguished dignity in the cool, dim recesses of the ECF library, including all those sections that are libraries even though they're called something else.
If the invested misconception is far-fetched enough, you might encourage the owner to tell more about it, not to hold him up for ridicule, but to give him the opportunity to listen to himself, and give his listeners the opportunity to google and dispel his misconception for themselves.
When they recall the incident, they may not remember your involvement at all, but you still did a Good Deed!
Belief At Last!
Whether the subect is e-cigarettes, hedgehogs or raisin toast, and whether the venue is an internet forum or wacky old Auntie Kim's backyard luau, if you talk to another human being for more than five minutes, one of you will reference a belief, directly or indirectly.
In a previous rant, I touched on this subject a little bit, but it bears repeating in big letters:
You can't argue with a belief.
We all know this, but few of us can say we've never caught ourselves in the act of doing it, or at least had some strong cravings, even though we've all seen, online and off, the unpleasantness that can result when people don't catch themselves in time.
Beliefs can conform or be diametrically opposed to the very faith or cultural tradition in which they're ostensibly rooted, they can be rooted in nothing but the believer's own whimsy, they can be about any and everything, from science to soup to whole groups of people, to individuals.
Anything you imagine, and a host of things you'd rather not, you can be sure that somebody, somewhere, believes it.
Whatever its subject or provenance, whether it's a source of comfort and solace or a vehicle for harm, all beliefs do have some things in common.
Information has no effect - the believer will either reject it because it's not in accord with their belief, or they don't even want to see it - because it might be.
Standing before the awesome power of belief, facts, reason, and logic are as powerless as Superman in a Kryptonite onesie.
Because belief is not based on any of those things, nor does it even recognize their existence, it's impervious to them all.
So what's a would-be doer of Good Deeds to do?
Depending on your own beliefs, you may find yourself precariously on the proverbial horns of the even more proverbial ethical dilemma: You respect the beliefs of others, but you also feel a moral imperative to prevent and/or reduce harm being done, especially when the universe hurls the situation directly onto your monitor or otherwise in your face.
Give into those cravings and try to argue with the belief, and you risk becoming nothing more than a specimen of of the common annoyance Evangelicus Peskius, that glassy-eyed loon who's always running up to people in airport parking lots and insisting that they read a pamphlet or perform some religious ritual, intstantly squashing even the tiniest spark of curiosity that the victim might have had about the sect or its beliefs.
Do nothing, and you risk become nothing more than one of those angst-ridden souls gazing mournfully at his reflection in the bathroom, whispering things like "complicit" reproachfully at himself.
Not all horses can be led to water, but they all have a place by their head where you can leave a bucket.
Beliefs can, and frequently do change, but the believer is the only one who can make that happen.
According to my belief, we can't teach anyone else anything.
All we can do is make resources available and enjoy watching them learn stuff.
Especially if we're packed Leos born in a Dragon Year with an inflated sense of our place in history, we all like to think that there's something we can say that will inspire someone to examine a belief that's doing harm to the believer, other people, or both, have a Great Epiphany, and go running out into the streets like a ghost-visited Scrooge on Christmas morning, handing out turkeys to random passers-by.
The chances of that happening are small, but there's a good chance that you'll be able to successfully calm your own moral prickles by the simple expedient of quietly leaving buckets of information next to the heads of believers.
Next: What The Opposed Believe
Whether we're at a cocktail party, a family dinner, or on the internet, one of the trickiest conversational skills to master can be recognizing the difference between the two.
If you aspire to seize your Good Deed information-sharing opportunities where you find them, making that key distinction is an important skill, because as I'll shortly belabor to death, you can't argue with a belief - but you can clear up a misconception, and you can correct misinformation.
Let's say someone mentions e-cigarettes, and someone else says, "yeah those things have arsenic in them," and a third person nods in agreement, "they're full of old lace, too, I heard. Bad stuff. My brother-in-law got lace worms just from smelling one. Had to have an operation."
What should you do? Is there any polite way, in that situation, to present factual information for the benefit of the alarmed-looking Impressionable Young Smokers who are listening to the conversation, while at the same time respecting the beliefs of the speakers, if, in fact, they are speaking from belief and not misconception? How can you tell?
If you're
If he launches off into impassioned oratory about the presence of arsenic, not only in e-cigarettes, but salad dressing and laundry detergent, put there intentionally by space aliens, with the goal of turning us all into zombies, that's almost certainly a belief, and the challenge before you now involves seizing any pause the speaker makes for breath and finessing an exit, maybe inviting the young folks to come out onto the patio with you for a "smoke"...
In such a scenario, there's a 50% chance you just made the wrong choice.
Had you asked the other man instead, "old lace? really? in e-cigarettes?" and looked interested enough, he might have said that's what his sister told him, but she takes a lot of tranquilizers, so who knows? and if you're willing to encourage him to talk about his brother-in-law's stomach trouble while people are valiantly trying to spoon down their crème brûlée, you might realize that the doctor said "lesions" but due to your dinner companion's regional accent and flawed table manners, he was talking with his mouth full of tourte parmerienne, so you, still reeling from the notion of fine needlework floating around in little bottles of RY Alençon, heard "lace worms."
That's probably a misconception, and our natural instinct is to start spouting facts and figures, especially when we're young and bursting with newly-acquired facts and figures, and, if truth be told, a little bit of pardonable pride that there are things that we really do know more about than some of our elders and people who have already finished their dissertations.
Misconception: Simple vs Invested
My natural instinct is to break things down into these little neat stacks of absolutes, but until the world catches up to me, I'm obliged to acknowledge that misconception comes in two flavors: simple and invested.
A simple misconception is one the holder is happy to have cleared up. It's just something they read or heard, they may not even remember where or from whom, about a subject they don't know much about, and may not even be very interested in it.
An invested misconception, as the name implies, is one in which the owner is emotionally and/or intellectually invested. This is something that he heard from a source he's invested in, an entity he wants to believe, and/or about a subject, or touching on one, in which he has a strong interest.
Example: "The electrical cigarettes? You know, my Bukusu professor was in on that study where they found traces of asbestos in those things."
It's still a reasonable doubt or two shy of a belief, that carapace hasn't yet hardened, that would make it entirely impervious to facts or reason, but there is that element of investment, which means the owner will be reluctant to break up with it immediately.
If you're getting deja vu to the part about some of the FauxPosed, there's a reason:
Invested misconception lives in that shadowy land between misinformation and belief, and guess who else lives there - Feelings!
Returning to our example, it would probably not be very good strategy, and certainly not very polite, to just charge in like a bull on San Fermin's day and hotly declare that they found one Bad Thing, that wasn't asbestos, but some other Bad Thing nobody can pronounce, in one product, made by one company, that went out of business the month the study came out, and that his professor was only there to translate for one scientist who was only there to stand up in one meeting and say that all the ones they tested in Kenya had nothing in them but propylene glycol and strawberry flavoring, and were found by the panel to be harmless, though several people thought they tasted more raspberry-ish, and thus further study was recommended.
In practical internet forum application, this might mean starting up a conversation with someone else, that the invested misconception holder will see, and skillfully working your facts and figures, complete with links to all the Venerable Monographs reposing in distinguished dignity in the cool, dim recesses of the ECF library, including all those sections that are libraries even though they're called something else.
If the invested misconception is far-fetched enough, you might encourage the owner to tell more about it, not to hold him up for ridicule, but to give him the opportunity to listen to himself, and give his listeners the opportunity to google and dispel his misconception for themselves.
When they recall the incident, they may not remember your involvement at all, but you still did a Good Deed!
Belief At Last!
Whether the subect is e-cigarettes, hedgehogs or raisin toast, and whether the venue is an internet forum or wacky old Auntie Kim's backyard luau, if you talk to another human being for more than five minutes, one of you will reference a belief, directly or indirectly.
In a previous rant, I touched on this subject a little bit, but it bears repeating in big letters:
You can't argue with a belief.
We all know this, but few of us can say we've never caught ourselves in the act of doing it, or at least had some strong cravings, even though we've all seen, online and off, the unpleasantness that can result when people don't catch themselves in time.
Beliefs can conform or be diametrically opposed to the very faith or cultural tradition in which they're ostensibly rooted, they can be rooted in nothing but the believer's own whimsy, they can be about any and everything, from science to soup to whole groups of people, to individuals.
Anything you imagine, and a host of things you'd rather not, you can be sure that somebody, somewhere, believes it.
Whatever its subject or provenance, whether it's a source of comfort and solace or a vehicle for harm, all beliefs do have some things in common.
Information has no effect - the believer will either reject it because it's not in accord with their belief, or they don't even want to see it - because it might be.
Standing before the awesome power of belief, facts, reason, and logic are as powerless as Superman in a Kryptonite onesie.
Because belief is not based on any of those things, nor does it even recognize their existence, it's impervious to them all.
So what's a would-be doer of Good Deeds to do?
Depending on your own beliefs, you may find yourself precariously on the proverbial horns of the even more proverbial ethical dilemma: You respect the beliefs of others, but you also feel a moral imperative to prevent and/or reduce harm being done, especially when the universe hurls the situation directly onto your monitor or otherwise in your face.
Give into those cravings and try to argue with the belief, and you risk becoming nothing more than a specimen of of the common annoyance Evangelicus Peskius, that glassy-eyed loon who's always running up to people in airport parking lots and insisting that they read a pamphlet or perform some religious ritual, intstantly squashing even the tiniest spark of curiosity that the victim might have had about the sect or its beliefs.
Do nothing, and you risk become nothing more than one of those angst-ridden souls gazing mournfully at his reflection in the bathroom, whispering things like "complicit" reproachfully at himself.
Not all horses can be led to water, but they all have a place by their head where you can leave a bucket.
Beliefs can, and frequently do change, but the believer is the only one who can make that happen.
According to my belief, we can't teach anyone else anything.
All we can do is make resources available and enjoy watching them learn stuff.
Especially if we're packed Leos born in a Dragon Year with an inflated sense of our place in history, we all like to think that there's something we can say that will inspire someone to examine a belief that's doing harm to the believer, other people, or both, have a Great Epiphany, and go running out into the streets like a ghost-visited Scrooge on Christmas morning, handing out turkeys to random passers-by.
The chances of that happening are small, but there's a good chance that you'll be able to successfully calm your own moral prickles by the simple expedient of quietly leaving buckets of information next to the heads of believers.
Next: What The Opposed Believe
