Something I’ve realized only recently how surface level most people’s gloss of events and motivations for those events are.

I knew people were ignorant. What I didn’t realize is just how willfully ignorant they are. It’s not that they don’t know. It’s that they don’t even want to know.

At another site, I posted a comment about how Google’s HTTPS push had nothing to do with the best interests of the consumer and everything to do with Google’s desire to shape and to control the market — including in advertising.

At that site, you’d think I’d suggested that it was ok to decapitate kittens with lawn mowers. Not only was I some sort of deranged conspiracy theorist, of course the HTTPS push/putsch was all being done because fluffy, cuddly little Google cares about you and just wants to make you safer.

It’s not just that specific issue that concerns me — though that one is pretty blatant — but the general phenomenon. Not only are most “intelligent” people content to understand nearly nothing except received wisdom, they are also happy to lampoon anyone who wishes to comprehend anything below that perfunctory surface-level gloss.

I’ve realized it for a long time, but smart people as societally-defined usually aren’t all that smart.

Some of them — many of them, perhaps most of them — are in fact mulishly moronic, and not only don’t mind, they revel in it.

This is something I haven’t fully consolidated in my own mind, but this is sort of antipodal to conspiracy theorists — it’s the obstinate denial of the complexity of the world or that there is anything operating under the surface at all.

I haven’t made sense of it yet. But unlike those people, at least I realize there is something to make sense of.

Everything is obvious — once you know the answerhttps://t.co/xERAd1Fnv5 @duncanjwatts pic.twitter.com/WRAMAibQq6

— Dean Eckles (@deaneckles) August 21, 2017

Many people insist that sociology and psychology are worthless — because physics envy is so inculcated into everyone, no one can believe that a science that doesn’t deal wholly in numbers and equations has any value.

However, what many people perceive as “obvious” in the social sciences is obvious either way, as the tweet above points out.

I agree that it in many cases sociology and psychology need to be held to more rigorous standards (and no, I definitely don’t mean making them more like physics). However, asserting that they are valueless ignores the mountains of valid findings that have influenced nearly everything about our society.

All of this is true of Florida, but mainly because it is a huge state. Or rather, it is long. Very long.

To drive from Pensacola, FL to Key West, FL is a 13 hour trip (if you don’t stop) and 832 miles.

North Florida — where I grew up — is very Southern indeed. South of Gainesville, it gets less so as you proceed further down the interstate. On the coasts, it depends on where you are.

One time in the Army I had a guy ask me since I was going to Florida could I take him to Miami when I went. I said, “You know I’m going somewhere close to Jacksonville, right? That’s a six hour drive from there to Miami.”

He wanted to visit a friend there, and wasn’t very familiar with the state. He thought it was 30 minutes away.

And I think that is true of many people — they perceive Florida as being very small, perhaps because they’ve only flown over most of it.

But yeah, 832 miles from one end to the other (with a bend in the middle) over land. And a lot can — and does — happen in 832 miles.