🔒Agnostic Extremism: How Neutral Questions Become Political

I'm currently on vacation. This is a slightly updated version of an article I wrote some years back. I hope new subscribers will enjoy it just like new. Brand new content resumes next week.

The novelist, comedian, TikTok guy Jason Pargin has a bit that he’s been doing for as long as I can remember. Every couple of years he brings it up again, on TikTok or on Twitter or wherever he wants to stir shit, and I’m pretty sure he does it just to watch the world burn. Here’s how it goes:

Imagine a 747, the runway is a treadmill moving backward, set to the same speed as the wheels. So the plane can’t actually move relative to the ground. The question is: Will the plane take off?

Now, this question has an answer. I almost don’t want to tell you what it is, because it will make some of you angry. But then, the anger is my point. The fact that there is an answer, and how people react to that, is more important than what the answer is. I’ll tell you, but you have to promise not to argue about it in the comments, okay?

Yes, the plane will take off. It takes off because the propulsion comes from its engines, not its wheels. The plane still moves forward on the treadmill because the wheels aren’t even powered. The error is actually in the question: The treadmill can’t be set to match the speed of the wheels because the speed of the wheels is by definition faster than whatever the speed of the treadmill is.

Here's the thing: The larger the group of people in the room with you when you explain this legitimate fact, the more it sounds like an opinion. This is what happens to the comment section every single time Pargin unleashes this infuriating hypothetical to the masses.

“You idiot, of course the plane can’t take off, it’s not moving! You absolute clown! You buffoon!” They’ll start explaining the physics of aeroplane wings and air dynamics. They will start talking to you like you are a child, or you have some developmental disorder. They take pity on you for being unable to parse the simplicity of the scenario for the parasites eating your brain.

What’s important to understand is that although you are right, they are exactly as confident as you are about their own correctness. You can draw diagrams, you can make analogies. You can tell them to picture a normal sized treadmill and imagine pushing a toy car along on it, or a pizza cutter, or a rolling pin. Of course you can still move it. Still it’s futile. A shit ton of people are going to tell you the plane can’t move because it’s on a treadmill. It says it right there in the premise.

Eventually you’re going to reach the infuriating stalemate: Golly gee, it looks like nobody knows what would happen.

Call Robert Ripley, we have a legitimate paradox here. This one’s unsolvable, folks. I guess we’ll never know. I guess we’ll have to (shudder) agree to disagree.

The idea that truth—that is, all truth, facts themselves—is essentially subject to a kind of democratic process is endemic to humanity and, I would argue, probably arises from the same desire most humans generally have for some form of liberal democracy as the ideal model of society. We have a natural disdain for authorities being forced onto us against our will and with no say in the matter. And what are facts if not just another kind of authority about the nature of reality?

We want to elect our leaders, the same as we want to elect our facts. And this is how facts become inherently political.

It’s hard to think of an issue like the infernal plane-on-a-treadmill question as being political, but it has many of the features of a political issue. There is a correct answer (the plane takes off), which is rooted in observation, reason, experience, and education such as the knowledge of how planes work (for example, that the wheels don’t provide propulsion), but this answer is also less immediately intuitive, more complex, and more difficult to explain. The other answer is wrong, but equally if not more popular because it sounds right: The plane can’t take off because it's stuck on a treadmill, duh.

What it turns into is people ganging up on the truth. You’ve got one group, who have the knowledge and experience to but maybe more trouble communicating it; You’ve got another group, let’s call them the populists, who have a simpler but more intuitive incorrect answer, and they reinforce and galvanise each other’s beliefs; Then we have a third group, let’s call them the centrists, who see all of this bickering, conclude that nobody knows any better than anybody else on the matter, all anyone has is opinions, and we’ll never know either way.

The centrist’s position only helps the populist.

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