Confidently Wrong

Dearest Rachel –

One of the things about working the booth on Sundays is that you see things behind the curtain. That’s not to say that’s either a good or bad thing; while there’s something to be said about being a part of something decidedly Larger Than Yourself, this occasionally means you find yourself watching “how the sausage is made,” as the saying goes. In the constant effort to present excellence to the congregation (and to our real Audience of One), there are bound to be the odd slip-up here and there; indeed, a week without such gaffes is rare, since there are so many moving parts, each controlled by one fallible human or another.

So it was this past week, when the sermon was preceded by a special music number. It wasn’t a song I’d heard before, although by the time we’d rehearsed and performed it for each service, that had been changed a dozen times over. Granted, having been away from the lyrics for a good forty-eight hours, I couldn’t tell you many of them offhand, but there was this passage in the bridge that will stick with me for a while simply because, for whatever reason, our singer could not sing the correct lyrics at the correct time. It was a pair of couplet lines, one beginning with “Jesus Christ the Chosen One,” and the other with “Jesus Christ the Saving Lamb,” and for whatever reason, he kept getting the opening lines mixed up.

Since I’m the one displaying the lyrics on what we refer to as the ‘confidence monitor’ in the back, I was afraid for a moment that I wasn’t getting them up onto the screen, but no, they were up there when they were supposed to be. It was just that the singer wasn’t checking the words on the back of the room, as was simply singing what he thought were the lyrics in the moment. The good news was that, since this was a special musical number, I wasn’t displaying the lines for the audience to see – and he was belting them out with sufficient confidence that they would have had no expectation that he was singing them incorrectly until the next couplet came up, and he found himself having to repeat the line he’d just sang.

In that moment, it occurred to me that for all our efforts to aid him in singing certain lines at a certain time, there’s no helping someone who’s confidently wrong. And it’s amazing how often that happens – and how many people wind up being taken in by such confidence.

Again, in this case, it didn’t really matter; getting the wrong introductory line in a song isn’t undoing one’s whole doctrine or something. It isn’t like leaving the word “not” out of the Ten Commandments, and having a verse read “thou shalt commit adultery.” On the other hand, that’s a thing that actually happened and confidently went to print, resulting in the printing house being fined ruinously for the offense (and going out of business as a consequence), and the few copies of what came to be known as the “Wicked Bible” that weren’t destroyed as part of the Crown’s legal proceedings upon them becoming priceless collectors’ items. These sorts of things happen, and sometimes they matter quite a bit in the end.

And with the internet, information is spread that much faster, and with a certain appearance of authority that takes in that many more people. Now, I’m not one to suggest it should be suppressed – to be honest, it seems that the labelling of misinformation is done with the same misplaced confidence as those disseminating their opinions as fact – but I do wish there was a way to tell when a writer was excessively confident in the ‘facts’ as they saw them to be, as opposed to actual facts. Much like sarcasm and satire, confidence (or the lack thereof) is hard to detect in the written word.

I honestly don’t know how people can press forward in their faulty understanding, myself. You might remember how Daniel was as a child; like so many others of his age, he would ask many of those stock imponderable questions: “Why is the sky blue?” “How does Teflon stick to the pan?” “What does [whatever it was he was pointing at] mean?” I don’t know about you, but what frustrated me about him wasn’t the fact that he was asking all these questions, but that he simply would not accept “I don’t know” as a valid answer, even when it was the most correct one I could give him. I suppose I should have been flattered that he assumed that I, as his father, knew everything (and just wasn’t telling him, for whatever reason, which annoyed him in turn), but that was a belief I would have preferred to disabuse him of.

Eventually, you might recall that I settled on referring to what I referred to as “‘Liars’ Club’ Answers,” based on a short-lived game show I remembered watching at my grandparents’ place when I was a kid. The gameplay featured a celebrity panel informing the contestant about the provenance of an objet d’art, and the contestant would have to determine which of the panel was giving the correct information. The point of my dubbing my answers to him as such was that the other, false answers often sounded plausible enough to be convincing – and delivered with sufficient confidence (the panelists were actors, after all), they could fool the contestant. Ironically, by labeling my own answers as such, I was deliberately calling them into question, so that Daniel wouldn’t necessarily rely on them as gospel truth, but at least he would have a reasonable explanation to his question.

And hey, sometimes my guesses would turn out to be right, due to half-remembered information I’d stored in my mind from heaven-knows-when; which probably explains why I can’t remember truly important things. It’s not that I’m going senile or anything; my mind is simply cluttered like an old attic. Everything is actually up there, it’s just that I don’t know where any of it is until I stumble upon it by chance, and even then, I may not recognize it when I do.

But I rarely have the confidence to insist that something is true, and I don’t know how other people are able to do that. To be sure, for all that I don’t trust myself to get things right, I do make the error of assuming other people do because of their own confidence – especially with the internet, which is simply full of such confidently wrong people. ChatGPT is just this same hyperconfidence in exponential form, where the large language model starts with the foundational belief that “if it comes from the internet, it must be true!” and states its claims with enough confidence of its own that its users are fooled, unless it becomes egregious, like the LLM that suggested that cheese should be glued to a pizza to keep it from slipping off, or that people should ingest rocks on a daily basis to get their recommended allowance of minerals. Sure, these are funny, but how many other answers does it spit out with sufficient plausibility that the average user (like myself; come on, you’ve seen my pre-arrival research over the course of my travels) are fooled? And what can be done about it, assuming that anything can? It’s quite the quandary.

Fortunately, the things I tell you about are either my memories or opinions, so they can’t really be challenged. And again, it’s not as if they affect anyone if I get something wrong (aside from spelling or grammar; I wonder how many things I’ve sent you that you might get exorcised about, like the word “ain’t”). But it still leaves me wondering, and I thought I might tell you about it.

For now, though, I should probably get on with my day. I’ll talk to you again soon enough, but for now, keep an eye on me, and wish me luck. I’m going to need it.