WB and the Lexophiles

I have a longtime friend—I’ll call him WB—who always wants to debate politics. But if you debate him on any political subject, you’ll soon discover that by an amazing string of coincidences he is always right. He has always been right in the past and he will doubtless always be right in the future. I’ve debated him more times than I should have. If someone is never willing to concede a single point in a debate, sooner or later no one is going to debate that someone. What’s the point? It’s like talking to a telephone pole. You know “going in” that no matter what you say or how long you talk, that pole is not going to budge a millimeter in its position.

There’s an email going around with the title Lexophiles. It’s about the quirks of certain words in the English language. (If you haven’t seen it, you can find much of it here.) Most people find the email, at the least, amusing, and some people also find it thought-provoking about the English language. When I sent Lexophiles to WB, his reply was simply, “I think it’s more challenging to debate politics.”

Well by all means, WB, in the future let’s talk about things you and I find challenging. You enjoy politics, so we’ll discuss that subject. My favorite interest is quantum physics, so we’ll spend half our debates on that subject. I especially enjoy the topics of superposition, wave function, and wave function collapse. Speaking of which, do you prefer the Copenhagen Interpretation, the Bohm Interpretation, the Many Worlds Interpretation, the von Neumann Interpretation, or one of the several other interpretations of quantum physics? And speaking of wave function collapse, I’d like to discuss the role of the observer. How do you, WB, define the observer? Must the observer be a conscious entity or can it be a mechanism? If the observer is a mechanism, must the output of the mechanism be examined by a conscious entity in order to collapse the wave function? And how can an experiment conducted today change events that happened in the distant past? Can you explain Bell’s Theorem and the Bell inequality? But I’ll stop here lest we wander into the difficult parts of quantum physics. It’s a fascinating subject that I’ve studied for decades. It does help to have a good understanding of mathematics, so you’ll want to brush up on your differential calculus and integral calculus and linear algebra and matrix algebra. You know—the kinds of math you would expect to encounter in first and second year engineering classes.

Do you see the danger of only wanting to discuss and debate topics that you personally find challenging? Others may find those same topics deadly dull, or filled with conflicts that seem irreconcilable, while you simply brush all inconsistencies aside in order to “be right.” My experience is this: the more certain you are that you’re right, and the less willing you are to consider other points of view, the more likely you are to be wrong. There’s a divide in our country today, and it’s because there are two camps and each camp is very sure it is right and the other is wrong. Each camp believes that inasmuch as the other is wrong, there is no need to consider what they have to say.

So, WB, do we have a deal? Or perhaps, upon further reflection, you should stick to writing letters to the editor, and I’ll stick to my own studies of how reality works, and maybe we’ll both be more content.