Opus 2025-362: The Guitar Fallacy

Somewhere in my copious bits of notepaper I have a list of games that people play.  It’s based on what I’ve experience with my family.  I have a new one to add if I can find the list.  I’m calling it The Guitar Fallacy.

This goes back to my days of working with young people.  This Fallacy bit me at church summer camp.  A young campter came up to me and asked me if I knew how to play a certain song on the guitar.  Not only did I not know how to play it, I don’t think I’d ever heard of it.  He got a look of total disgust on his face and said, “I thought you knew how to play guitar.”  Keep in mind that I was one of the ones leading the nightly singing with my guitar and playing numerous songs strictly from memory.  Because I didn’t know the one song he knew or wanted to know, I didn’t know how to play guitar.

I run into this on a regular basis now.  People will ask me, “Did you hear about…?”  And since I was not listening to their You Tube feed, I have no idea what they’re talking about.  Then they look at me as if I am totally out of contact with the world.  When I figure out what they’re talking about, I may have heard about it.  In fact, I may know more than they know, but I didn’t know about it with the vocabulary choices that they were using to express it.  Other times what they’re telling me I find out about later and it’s pretty much a bunch of nonsense.  I am the one who is ignorant because I do not know what they know.  I get this about weather forecast.  I get this about Politics.  And of course there is all the advice about our health.  It’s fairly common.

So don’t get too excited about experts who come to you and tell you some great insight, or a bit of knowledge that you’ve never heard of before.  There’s a good chance that they weren’t listening very closely when they heard it.  There’s a good chance that if they were listening closely, they didn’t understand what they were hearing.  And there’s a good chance that wherever they heard it, the Clickbait was lying to them.

Be leery of The Guitar Fallacy.  Just because you don’t know their song doesn’t mean you don’t know how to play the guitar.

homo unius libri