I have been thinking a lot about Astros and how much they have done to debase themselves and a sport that I have loved since childhood. I am not a particularly competitive person with sports, but I was sad the years the Dodgers had fielded such an excellent team only to come up empty at the end—at the hands of the Astros. I saw the thing as unfortunate—something that happens in sports. There’s always next year.

I don’t really know what you do with the title. You can’t award it to the Dodgers, unlike the perpetually omniscient Bernie supporters about election 2016, we have no idea whether the Dodgers would have won or not. But I do think they should take the title away from the Astros and make them pay back their gains. Give it to charity, something.

Beyond that, those jerks ruined Bolsinger’s career for him. Yeah, he might have washed out on his own. But he won’t ever know now, either.

The reason why I am thinking about this is that I am reading Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum’s A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault Against Democracy. It’s a really useful book; I am a fan of Nancy Rosemblum’s work in general, and this book doesn’t let me down. She and Muirhead explain the difference between the conspiracy theories that have always been around in American politics—since the Revolution—to what the authors refer to as the “conspiracism” onthe Right today in the US. Conspiracy theory, they note, requires theory and most
evidence. Much of the evidence is wrongly interpreted, but people still
work to find evidence of the truth.

In conspiracism, truth is irrelevant. Conspiracism is a mindset that deals with anything event or evidence that is counter to what one wants to be truth by ascribing it to a conspiracy on the left. We dislike Hillary Clinton so she’s a criminal. Running a pedophilia ring from a pizza parlor. Clearly. Can’t find the evidence. It was hidden by Deep State Democrats. Also, even if there is no evidence, it could be true. It’s disturbing. What matters isn’t whether it is actually true, what matters is eyeballs and circulation and maintaining your in-group status by echoing it and liking it. Alex Jones gets rich doing this, Donald Trump gets elected.

It’s dangerous and tempting because it rides on cognitive biases, and in particular, confirmation bias. We want something to be true, and conspiracism gives us an excuse to believe it is true regardless of the evidence and facts presented to them. Contradicting evidence has been manufactured by a cabal of scientists or a media cabal,
or a cabal of FBI agents, those notorious deep-state liberals. Mike Bolton goes from being ever-present on FoxNews to suddenly being a liberal stooge. Any evidence that does verify what we want to be true gets pulled in and elevated to serve our confirmation bias. Ha! We were right!

Randy Crane was pretty clear when I was a PhD: the more you believe something is true, the more you work to disprove it. If the hypothesis is left standing, you migh have something. We try in research, or we should try, to discipline our cognitive biases to the degree we can.

At the time the Dodgers were losing, I was surrounded by Giants fans who
haaaaaaate the Dodgers. This behavior is hard for me to respect, but people do engage in these sports rivalrie,s and I have to chalk it up to a human social behavior my autistic mind doesn’t quite grasp—or potentially, it comes down to my fundamental laziness in getting worked up or becoming engaged in something where my efforts really have little to do with outcomes.

It also fails my cost-benefit criteria. Friendly rivalries with genial ribbing I suppose is fine, but I don’t see much of that these days. Anywhere. Instead, I see friendships getting strained. The number of times I have seen my gentle, pure-hearted husband flinch as some Giants fan is all “Dodgers SUCK” in his sweet face….sports just don’t seem worth that to me. It just makes us small instead of what it should do.

This chorus of individuals who hate the Dodgers and who surround me supplied all the reasoning we needed to understand why Dodger pitchers were doing so poorly. The pitchers simply “sucked” I was told, over and over. And over and over. I remember watching Bolsinger get lit up again and again. That guy, I was told dipositively, always sucked, and there he was, sucking. And, of course, it never occurred to me to think otherwise. The Dodgers pitchers, I was told, were overpaid, lousy, overhyped. I
believed the chorus. People were so confident in their assessments.

But it turns out, there was another explanation, one that would be discovered by an Astros fan whose chose to observe instead of opine, who noticed too much banging on trash cans and too many Astros hitters showing way more discernment than they normally did. They didn’t accept the easy answer the way I did, and I am so impressed and grateful.

.Question everything, within reason. That’s where discovery is.

The Dodgers pitchers may have choked all on their own. We don’t know. The problem was…way too many of us think we know when we do not.