Isolation and Sporcle

It's pouring down rain this morning. The dog went to the door, looked out and said, "No way." And then demanded a treat, just for looking! The canine nerve.

Isn't this a crazy story about Nancy Pelosi's husband, Paul? I read some statements to the press by a guy who used to employ Paul Pelosi's attacker, and he said the guy had been pretty reasonable until recently, when he became more and more obsessed with online message boards and Q-Anon type conspiracies. I have a theory about this, and I suppose it's not very revolutionary. I think the problem is isolation.

When humans live in social groups with real-world interaction, we moderate each other's behavior. Just by talking to each other and living side by side, we even out every individual's wilder tendencies. But when we spend more time by ourselves and go online, delving into more and more specific, self-selecting subgroups of like-minded people, that moderating tendency goes away. We develop the feeling that all people think like we do, even though we may in fact hold some crazy, extreme views.

In other words, if you spend all your time in online chat rooms devoted to hating Nancy Pelosi, you're going to think everyone hates Nancy Pelosi. Because that's all you're exposed to.

People need to rub elbows with other people of different viewpoints. It's what makes our society healthy and keeps us all in the center of the road, so to speak. There's not enough of that going on these days, and that's partly why extremism has taken hold so deeply among so many people. We've siloed ourselves into like-minded online communities where information isn't so much exchanged as reinforced, and the moderating influence of others who may think differently is absent.

Like I said, not a very revolutionary theory. In fact, pretty widely accepted, I think. But all of that was rolling through my mind yesterday as I read stories about Paul Pelosi's assault.

Of course, I'm sure mental illness plays a role in all this, too. But again, healthy socialization can also help keep mental illness in check, as we saw during the pandemic when people were deprived of contact and mental health issues soared.

Here's a little quiz I took yesterday while on a work break. A web site called Sporcle offers a variety of challenges including one to name all the world capitals. The quiz begins with an empty map and you simply type in the names of capital cities, which then appear in green. You have 20 minutes to name all of them.

As you can see, I wound up naming 151 of 197 world capitals. (I missed the ones in red.) My weak spots are Pacific island nations, Caribbean nations and the Balkans. I really think I would have come up with Minsk, Tirana, Singapore, Brazzaville and a few others if I could see the map better, but anyway, I didn't think it was a disastrous result. The timer adds an element of tension that I think interferes a bit with recall.

Also, spelling counts. It took me multiple tries to nail the spelling of Tbilisi. On the other hand, if you enter the old or colonial name for some cities -- like Colombo, Sri Lanka or Dar es Salaam, Tanzania -- the quiz changes it to an apparently more modern name that I didn't know.

Then I took the US state capitals quiz and could only name 43 of 50 on my first go-around, which shocked me. I definitely knew all of them when I was in school and for years thereafter! But it's knowledge I don't use much and it's amazing how it slips away. I couldn't even name the capital of New Jersey and I LIVED THERE FOR TWO YEARS! Anyway, I took it again later and got all of them, so hopefully that knowledge has been reawakened in my memory.

(Top: A very autumnal-looking bus shelter in West Hampstead.)