So Today I'm Bitter

I'm bitter today, and it's not just that the Packers lost by 11 points at home to the worst team in the NFL. It's more the thought that Jimmy Kimmel has been on for like a year and a half. That wouldn't be so bad, but what have I done in that time? Nothing. I'm going through a classic crisis -- what the heck am I doing with my life? It's ugly, so I'll spare you the details.

A large producer of the bile I feel is Work Today. Work Today sucks.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the concept I came up with called "reverse naivete". It's where you're so cynical and streetwise you end up circling all the way back to naive. I came up with the concept during the whole G-Mail fiasco, where Google was going to launch an e-mail service that scanned the e-mails by computer for keywords and then run targeted ads at the receiver. This is what I said:

You guys who don't object to Gmail because your e-mail is already being spied on are being reverse naive. There's a difference between national security and a company looking to target ads at you. Now, you might be thinking in reverse -- that it's worse for a government agency to have your email than a private company. But, ultimately the government is responsible to us, the people. It may not seem like it, but it's true. And while the legitimacy and efficacy of scanning people's emails for national security purposes is certainly debatable, the legitimacy of scanning people's emails for advertising purposes is certainly not.

Now, I could take this in one of two directions: the evil of advertising; or, the concept of reverse naivete and what it means to you. On the second topic: Do we see lots of reverse naive people running about, so streetwise they not longer care about being streetwise?

For next time, think of two (2) examples of reverse naivete in everyday life. Discuss.

I've also thought of a similar but differently nuanced concept to being reverse naive -- one that is much more common and insidious. I haven't come up with a name for it yet, but we'll temorarily call it blind naivete. It's when person A calls out person B for being naive when person A himself is advancing a position that is just as naive. This you see all the time, especially with scientists. It's like oat bran: A regular naive person eats whatever they want because they think, "It's food, they wouldn't sell unhealthy food, now, would they?"; A blindly naive person would tell that person to eat more oat bran because science has discovered it cures cancer; A reverse naive person would tell that person that sometimes science has been wrong about things, so therefore all of science is wrong, and therefore we should eat whatever we want.

Of course, in this case the oat-bran cures cancer thing has been proved false, so the reverse naive person turned out right almost despite himself. He died from eating too many french fries hours later, btw. Who's naive now?