Since I was young, I was befuddled by the insistence of people labeling centuries by numerical count rather than by the hundreds they represent.
I get why the first hundred years (1-100)1 are the “first century”. I just couldn’t ever understand why we apply this convention so ubiquitously in naming them. It has endlessly confused me for one having to waste precious mental calculation space to piece together something like “Okay, Notre-Dame was begun in Paris in the 12th century, which means the 1100s . . .”
Here comes Dynomight to the rescue. He argues with me that we should stop counting centuries.
The issue, of course, is that “counted centuries” are off by one from how we normally interact with dates—the 13th century starts in AD 1201.
There’s a simple solution. Avoid saying “the 18th century”, and say “the 1700s” instead. Besides being easier to understand, it’s also slightly shorter.
And—what’s that? Do I see an objection in the back?
They aren’t the same!
Yes, yes, I know. Technically speaking:
They’re different. But if the difference matters and you really want “the 18th century”, then you might want to spell out the dates explicitly. Because are you sure the person you’re talking to knows the above table? And are you sure that they will be sure that you know?
No one gets confused about what “the 1700s” means.
Now that we’ve fixed that, let’s turn to Scott Sumner who seems to be attacking me. Well, no. He is not attacking me per se. But he is making a good argument that pushes back against some of my disposition.
When I say don’t be a contrarian, I mean don’t be someone whose entire identity is contrarianism. Don’t be a person who notices, “The elites say X, therefore I need to search out evidence that ‘not X’ is true.” Guess what, it is almost always possible to find at least some evidence that not X is true; that doesn’t make it wise to hold the view that not X is true.
Instead, I’d suggest that the best way to respond to the claim that X is true is to look for all sorts of evidence about X, both supportive and opposed. In most cases, you will discover that the elites are correct; X really is true. The moon landing was not faked. Oswald did kill JFK.
So by all means you should be willing to hold contrarian views. But don’t be a contrarian. Don’t adopt contrarianism as an identity in the way that a person might be a Cubs fan or a Yankee fan, rooting for their team.
As much as I admire, celebrate, and explore counter-conventional wisdom, I try to be careful not to be a contrarian for contrarianism’s sake. Indeed, this is a delicate balancing act. Despite my best efforts and consistent with what Sumner alludes to, many opponents in argument attempt to push me into a corner they paint against such a point of view. Whether this is an indirect ad hominem attack to discredit me or a clumsy attempt to force me into a reductio ad absurdum point of view remains to be seen.
Most of the time conventional wisdom is partially if not largely correct. That leaves room for it being incorrect, but generally just at the margins. After all, all models are false, but some are useful. But when conventional wisdom truly fails, it fails hard if not spectacularly. And that is where I try to come in.
Finally as Saul Zimetexplains at Human Progress, the report of the Maldives’ death is . . . “I’m not dead yet!”
For decades, leaders, media, and the climate commentariat invoked the shrinking islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans as examples of the existential threat that humanity supposedly faces. Climate change comes for all of us, they said, but faster for these low-lying islands, which will literally cease to exist in the face of rising sea levels.
The visually stunning New York Times piece “The Vanishing Islands That Failed to Vanish” by climate reporter Raymond Zhong and photographer Jason Gulley explores the very obvious fact that the low-lying Maldives haven’t vanished.
…
Humans, it turns out, don’t stand around haplessly waiting for a slowly eroding shoreline to make them homeless—be they rich nations like the Netherlands or poor, developing ones like the Maldives.
What’s facing the Maldives is a rough microcosm of the broader climate change questions—yes, things are changing in the natural world, and no, we aren’t powerless to how they affect us. There is a way to be concerned about the state of nature and how humans are changing it without devolving into terror, hyperbole, and anti-humanism.
Notice it is not 0-99, all you people who think the latest millennium started in 2000, et al. But that is part of Dynomight’s point. No one would say that Wilson Phillips hit the top of the charts with “Hold On” in the eighties in 1990. And we were partying like it was 1999 BECAUSE that was the end not one year removed from the 20th Century being over. Ah! I just did it, didn’t I?
