The “Strange Idea” Dialectic

Accepting people’s claims before misjudging them

The “Dialectic”

Would you believe me if I told you that I invented a time machine? I know that you wouldn’t even think about believing me. Let me be honest, I did not invent a time machine, but I have the right to tell others about that if I did and they should respect my claim and act positively towards it even if it seemed weird. It is a “Dialectic” because people tend to misjudge the claims that seem strange to them, even if these claims were true. But they also put themselves inside the same attitudes and demand other people to respect them when they propose an idea about something, and claim that their idea is going to work.

Yes, it happened to me!!

You must have misjudged someone one day and later found how painful it was to that person when you set off your misjudgment. Here is a little story of the challenge that made me think twice before misjudging any person. One of my colleagues at the university gave me an A4-sized paper and asked me to figure out a way to make a circle using that paper in which I can step inside, and then pass it up to my head.

After he set that challenge, I laughed at him and underestimated his smartness that I thought it was impossible to happen. My friends also told him the same thing and asked him to stop wasting our time with his silly challenge. However, he only smiled and made the same as you will see in the following video:

Years later, I was asking one of my lecturers to help me with a code issue I had to deliver its solution that day. When she knew that I was a foreign student, her face changed and seemed that she underestimated my abilities to succeed in that course. She rewrote the code from scratch and gave it back to me to mail it to the prof of that course. When I took her code, I reread it and found that she coded it wrong. I talked to her to refix her mistake, but she said: “you are such an ignorant guy, how could “YOU” find anything wrong with your lecturer’s coding?”. When she said that, I smiled because I finally understood why my friend had smiled when we underestimated him for his challenge years ago. I did not answer her back, rather took the code, fixed it my self, and mailed it to my prof that gave me an A+ as a result. The lesson I learned made me always ask people to be more humble towards others’ thoughts and ideas.

So, from now on, even if someone tells you that he invented a “time machine”, just be kind and ask him to show you how it works. Who knows? Maybe he invented something useful!