Just hit it with a bigger hammer!

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Everyone is an armchair critic about something.

Unfortunately, often we don’t much have useful information to add because we don’t really know what we are talking about, but we like to think we do. We frequently really have a very poor foundation for the criticisms that we make because we only have a surface knowledge of the circumstances. That’s partly the fault of whatever media we are consuming, and partly our own for thinking we are smarter than the people in whatever situation we are criticizing.

We make assumptions about how we would respond, usually based on unreasonably optimistic grounds and limited data.

We criticize based on our own motivation or our narrow reservoir of factual information.

We express outrage over topics that we know almost nothing about, but which we have formed strong emotional opinions that we seem to think need to be respected.

We yell at the screen, call out athletes and politicians, safe in our armchairs, secure and self-righteous in our ignorance.

“In my day…”

“If I was in charge…”

“Why don’t they just…”

“All they have to do is…”

“Just hit it with a bigger fucking hammer”.

Awesome.

Thank you for your helpful commentary.

I’m sure that 10 year old child trying his/her best to make that goal missed on purpose.

I’m sure that engineer with two degrees and 30 years’ worth of experience never thought of that.

I’m sure that guy who took a shot at the bear to try and protect his two kids from future bear encounters didn’t consider the vast environmental expertise you have amassed from looking at pretty pictures of bears on Instagram.

I’m sure that the hundreds of people trying to salvage fish on the river don’t fully comprehend how much you wanted to catch one this year and that you even paid for a licence to catch that Chinook.

All of those things seem very different, but they aren’t.

They are all fundamentally the same series of mental gymnastics that brought us to a conclusion that we arrived at by sifting through inadequate information.

Yes, you have been fully and completely wronged and you know more about everything than every expert in every field.

While you sit safely and comfortably on your couch, no one anywhere else can do anything right. Clearly they aren’t trying hard enough. Clearly they are all idiots. Clearly they are just all royal fuck-ups and they should all be fired.

Sorry about that. You should have been consulted because the experts didn’t realize that you had so much more information from reading Facebook and listening to YouTube. Yes, they should have done that too and maybe every situation would be resoled to your liking.

Thanks Captain Obvious, the thousand or more people involved forgot to consult you and they obviously wouldn’t have thought to hit it with a hammer. Because that would fix everything in an instant.

Or maybe not.

Clearly it’s all the Prime Minister’s fault.

Vote the bastard out.

That’ll fix everything and make you feel vindicated somehow.

You showed him.

You showed everyone, didn’t you.

It takes a moment to throw a hammer into a machine and destroy it.

It takes a long time to repair the damage and build a new machine.

We have shitty memories and short attention spans. So it’s always this guy’s fault or that guy’s fault, we forget who threw the hammer.

We don’t think that we share any blame by our crazy vacillations and need to punish this or that government of the day. If we stopped to think about things in a larger scale, rather than from our own narrow vantage point, we might actually have some stability to make some solid long term headway.

Gasp, we can’t have that!

If you aren’t in right there, in that situation, you probably don’t know the full story of what the options are, what the risks are, or why the decisions were made the way they were.

That kid on the field/rink/court is probably terrified of missing but his adrenaline is pumping and his field of vision is not the same as yours in the stand. He can’t see the other kid rushing up behind him.

He made an instantaneous choice based on the information at hand. His other choice was do nothing…he did something.

Did you help?

No, you just criticized.

That engineer on the ground sees the cracks in the rocks and sees where the flow is tearing away at the base of the cliff and knows that if he/she places a charge in that spot the situation will get worse, not better.

He made an instantaneous choice based on the detailed information he has at hand. His other choice was do nothing…he did something.

Did you help?

No, you just criticized.

That guy who shot the bear in the face with birdshot is concerned for his two daughters who walk to school, he sees people in his community being mauled because tourists are overrunning the valley and placing food in stupid places just so they can get their instagram photo. Then they leave and the residents have to try to coexist with habituated grizzly bears that present a lethal danger to their neighbours.

He made an instantaneous choice based on the information at hand. His other choice was do nothing…he did something.

Did you help?

No, you just criticized.

Those people trying to salvage fish are doing so at the expense of their other work. They are’t getting paid huge salaries to go up and work long hours for greedy corporation. They are there to try to help salvage something out of a terrible situation, they weren’t ordered there, they volunteered to help. For every fish they save they, depressingly, witness hundred of others smash themselves against the rocks and deplete their energy reserves in a vain attempt to get past a barrier that nature unexpectedly created, and float downstream as they expire.

They made an instantaneous choice based on the information at hand. The other choice was do nothing…they did something.

Did you help?

No, you just criticized.

Everyone has an opinion, and it’s usually more poorly informed than they realize.

Everyone seems to think that the experts – the firefighters, the police, the engineers, the scientists – should have consulted them to get their opinion and everything would have worked out differently, somehow.

Why? What secret nugget of information do you think you hold, from your vast position of ignorance, that would have somehow changed the results?

Everyone is a critic, but they rarely help.

We like to feel good about ourselves. Criticizing someone else’s work or decisions makes us feel good, it makes us feel superior, at least momentarily, because “we would have done X better”; we just love to offer our (often poorly informed) opinions.

Getting a handle on all of the bits and pieces that informed someone else’s decision process requires effort, questions, curiosity.

That’s hard, because that requires thinking. Judging is so much easier.

Unfortunately we usually start from a conclusion, and when we start there we generally only process the information that fits our preconceived notions.

Right now I am frustrated with everyone who is criticizing everything about things they know very little about, or on which their opinions are formed from mere news bytes with no breadth or depth.

(Oh, and Kirk has clearly reduced his hammer collection, because this was all I could find for this photo.)