My bad idea radar

Several times in my life, I've heard an idea that was really verging on too complicated or too outside my expertise for me to understand, but my brain and my guts and my instinct just rebel against it, certain that it must be wrong. "Wait," I cry out, "How does that possibly make any sense???" The problem is these things are truly beyond anything I'm remotely qualified to have a knowledgeable opinion on. Often, I know so little about them that I can't even articulate why they seem like bad ideas to me. If this world is at all logical, the people who came up with the idea should very much know exactly what they're doing, and it just isn't making sense to me because I'm not smart enough or knowledgeable enough to understand it. And, in fact, if I mention to a subject-matter expert that it doesn't make any sense to me, they get all condescending and treat me like I'm an ignorant fool.

Here are some ideas that have triggered this reaction:

- The kinds of investments that caused the current economic crisis
- The idea of buying a house as an investment with the assumption that housing prices have nowhere to go but up
- The dot-com boom
- NATO's military presence in Afghanistan
- The US military presence in Iraq
- World War I*

I know very little about economics or real estate or investing or international relations or warfare. By all rights, anyone who actually does these things should know exponentially more than me. But in all these cases, years after my instincts rebelled against the idea and I spent days' worth of showers trying to wrap my brain around them to little success, it became apparent and/or generally socially accepted that they were bad ideas.

Now you're asking "But surely sometimes something seems like a bad idea to you and ends up being a good idea?"

I can think of one such case:

When I first moved into my current apartment building, I asked if the whole building switches over between heating and air conditioning, or if we can switch our suites individually. It often gets hot outside during the period where the landlord is still legally obligated to provide heat. So if it gets hot in April, can I turn on my A/C? "No, you can't turn on your A/C in the winter," the rental agent said, "But you can turn on the heat in the summer!" Yeah, like that really helps!

Turns out it does help. The law requires the landlord to maintain a temperature above a certain threshold from September to June, which functionally means that they have to have heating available. But because we can have the heat on in our individual suites even when the building as a whole is switched to air conditioning, that means the landlord is free to switch the building to A/C whenever the weather gets hot, regardless of date, because their legal requirement to provide heating is still fulfilled.

So that is the only case I can think of where my bad idea radar has led me astray. Every other time it worked. So now I tend to trust it.

So why am I blogging this? So that next time something triggers my bad idea radar, I can just link to this explanation without having to go off on a whole tangent about why I trust this gut instinct even though it's illogical.

*You're thinking "Um, WWI kind of already finished well before you got here." In this case, this reaction was triggered when I learned in history class that the war was caused by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. I could not imagine at all how that would trigger a war, but my history class just proceeded merrily along as though that made perfect sense. It took me several years and a lot of hard-core research to determine that it did in fact make as little sense as I thought.