THB #399: Rhetoric Over Reality

I was going to do a “stuff I meant to write” column today, but what might be the first real negotiations of the WGA strike - obviously considering if Lucy will let anyone kick that football - got me thinking about the conflict of what we feel and what we know.

We all speculate endlessly about all kinds of things.

But for some reason, we are in a cycle of our passionate mythologies coming before facts in our way of dealing with our issues. Rhetoric over Reality.

I am, at least professionally, highly fact-driven. I have an emotional reaction to whatever idea first. And if I am going to argue it in public, I then start working on the factual side of it. Very 8th grade science… hypothesize and test… hypothesize and test.

Sometimes, my idea gets easily proven in a variety of ways and while it can still turn out to be wrong, I am comfortable in asserting the idea in public.

As often as not, the details around an idea turn out to be right in some ways and wrong in others. One reason why I tend to write so densely is that I don’t want to hide the facts that undermine my hypotheses, even if they don’t change my mind overall.

Even better, for me, is that the research into the facts which lead somewhere other than my own assumptions usually takes me somewhere else… often, somewhere richer and more fascinating to me. At that point, I need to assimilate the new information (new to me) into my thinking and seek out the most realistic hypothesis possible.

I will get to the Strike analysis, but over the decades, I am probably best known for box office analysis and Oscar prognostication. Both areas of analysis are guaranteed to go sideways over time, more art than science. I have been right a lot more than I have been wrong, but when I am wrong, I can be very, very wrong.