10 Years Since "The Dress" | 80 Years of Lies and Deception | 100 Best Sports Moments of the Quarter Century

The Numbers Issue

If there’s an organizing paradigm for this issue of Second Drafts, it’s that there’s a number in each article’s title. Don’t read into it; everybody needs a gimmick.

Sources and articles for this issue includes:

• Slate: It’s Been 10 Years Since “The Dress”

• Forbes/The Guardian: 80 Years of Lies and Deception: Is This Film Proof of Alien Life on Earth?

• The Ringer: The 100 Best Sports Moments of the Quarter Century

Comments are open after each article if you feel inclined. Numbers are optional.

Thanks for reading Second Drafts,

Craig

PS: Don’t forget the one-click reader survey at the end of this newsletter.

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It’s Been Ten Years Since “The Dress”

You remember the conundrum: was the dress white and gold or black and blue? The debate took over social media back in 2015, and while I can’t recall which color combo I saw, I remember being fascinated by whole groups of people on both sides of the debate starting online battles to argue their perception as reality.

Ten years later and this is (still) the Internet (and the world) today. However, perception is not even reality anymore; it has become, as this article in Slate suggests, an assumption of priors. As the article’s author, NYU clinical professor of data science, psychology and neural science, Pascal Wallisch, writes,

“We’ve known for a very long time that our perception has a lot to do with our brain’s guesses about the world. In the days after the dress went viral, my guess was that the dress had something to do with illumination. In 2017, I published a study showing that this was, indeed, what was happening. Surveying 13,000 people, some of whom I found via my writing about the dress on Slate, I found that people’s assumptions about the light source strongly affected the colors they saw.”

It’s an interesting (and somewhat demonstrable) thesis about how context makes meaning. But here’s where Wallisch’s conclusions get really interesting:

“Your brain never tells you ‘We really can’t tell what the color is because we don’t have all necessary information available.’ There’s no flag that goes up saying ‘Just FYI, your assumptions did much of the heavy lifting here.’ The brain prioritizes decisive perception (giving you the ability to take decisive action) over being paralyzed by uncertainty and doubt. Your brain helps you make a snap judgement, a snap judgement that might be wrong. This streak carries through all of cognition.

This might be all fun and games when applied to internet memes, but similar convictions—sincerely held and self-evidently true to the individual—in domains like religion or politics will also be determined in large part by differential priors. It can be hard to believe anyone could truly, deeply believe the dress to be white and gold if you see it as blue and black, and all the more so if you’ve been able to see the dress in person and know the truth; the same can be true for people on opposite sides of all kinds of disagreements.”

What Wallisch is saying is that people’s perceptions of whether something is right or wrong, good or bad, are more likely influenced by their priors—that is, their personal contexts and experiences—than by objective absolutes. This, of course, is relativism, but it’s a relativism that goes beyond merely manifesting itself in “speaking your truth”; we’re now to the point (and have been for a while) where people are unable to consider or speak anything other than “their truth.”

In other words, society at large is increasingly becoming unable to hold up an idea and consider its merits apart from others who tell them how to think.

Consider the progressive who only reads and regurgitates progressive media and cannot speak apart from the soundbites of the congressman with a “D” behind his name; or the conservative who only acknowledges something as “progress” or “problematic” as the President or a congressman with an “R” behind his name labels it accordingly. This is not critical thinking; this is not thinking at all.

So what’s an alternative to the ever-increasing vitriol? It might seem an exercise in futility, but I’m not sure I have a better idea than what Wallisch suggests:

“Rather than thinking people must just be plain wrong, or stupid, a better way might be to take the disagreement seriously and try to actively elicit and discern the differential priors that led to the diverging conclusions. Between sincere and well-meaning parties, the very fact that the disagreement exists in the first place must be due to a difference in the priors that informed the formation of the conviction. All that remains is to determine what those might be.”

Ultimately, only until people try and learn to stretch their muscles and determine their differences in priors—some might call them “presuppositions”—are we going to have an honest shot at things improving. That’s the good news.

The bad news is, until people venture outside themselves and their parties’ echo chambers to seek what Christian apologist Francis Schaeffer called “true Truth,” “truth” will likely continue only to be “my truth.” This will not help anyone come to grips with reality (it sure didn’t help determining what color the dress was).

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80 Years of Lies and Deception: Is This Film Proof of Alien Life on Earth?

Speaking of truth, cue The X-Files claiming that it’s out there. From Forbes:

“A gripping new UFO documentary just made its debut at SXSW this past weekend. The Age of Disclosure features interviews with 34 members of the U.S. government, military, and intelligence community, exploring claims of a long-standing cover-up surrounding alien life…

…Directed by Dan Farah, The Age of Disclosure describes itself as an “unprecedented and revelatory” documentary that arrives on the heels of the historic bipartisan Congressional hearings on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs, also known as UFOs).”

Watching the trailer, one notices two things that make this particular documentary a step up from the oodles of basement-edited, fuzzy footage films about aliens and their ilk: 1) the production values and quality of images of UFOs/UAPs is higher; and 2) an interviewee collection that seems semi-respectable. According to this write-up in The Guardian,

“A bipartisan group of government officials, including the former senator for Florida and Trump’s new secretary of state, Marco Rubio; the Democratic New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand; and the Republican South Dakota senator Mike Rounds, also call for more transparency on the subject, citing their personal experience struggling to access any information on UAPs. All participants, according to the film, disclose as much information as they lawfully can—which isn’t that much in terms of hard evidence, as several critics have noted.”

Though some critics have dismissed the documentary, saying “nothing is proven, and thus nothing can be refuted,” others recognize its place in the UFO/UAP genre, according to Luis Elizondo, a former Department of Defense official and member of the government’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

“It is still the most serious and sourced documentary on the government’s handling of UAP information to date, surveying years of growing public interest in the subject even as it proclaims, in Elizondo’s words, ‘the greatest paradigm shift in human history.’ The Age of Disclosure is ‘the most historic documentary ever made on this topic,’ said a key participant, Jay Stratton, a defense intelligence agency official and director of the government’s UAP taskforce, during a post-screening Q&A at the festival’s marquee Paramount Theatre.

‘This is a very real situation, and the stakes are incredibly high, and it’s clearly the most bipartisan issue of our time—leaders from both political parties made it clear to me how serious it is,’ said [director Dan] Farah, a producer on Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One and the 2020 UFO doc The Phenomenon, during the Q&A. ‘But the public has no idea. The average person on the street is just completely in the dark.’”

Second Drafts readers may remember my making mention of this phenomena in my January review of journalist Rod Dreher’s book, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery & Meaning in a Secular Age. In that review, I wrote:

“An interesting development in all this is the legitimacy given by government and tech big wigs to a new religious syncretism. Dreher continues on page 112:

“There are a startling number of quite intelligent and influential people who believe that these intelligences are coming to us as ‘gods,’ to solve our problems and lead us to an age of enlightenment and progress. ‘Aliens’ are the kinds of godlike beings that a secular society—one in which science and technology hold supreme authority—can believe in when they have discarded the God of the Bible.”

He’s not wrong, though he’s not completely buying it, either, at least not in terms of who these “aliens” might actually be. Dreher ultimately believes (as do I) that any such beings shilling for false religion are demonic, not extraterrestrial nor inter-dimensional. Anticipating eye rolls, he writes,

“Put out of your mind the idea that ‘UFOs are demonic’ is the kind of thing only rural fundamentalist preachers say. Michael Heiser, a sophisticated Bible scholar who before his 2023 death from cancer became famous for urging his fellow evangelicals, on biblical grounds, to take such things more seriously, strongly believed that UFOs were both real and of demonic origin.” (p. 116)

All that to say, the trailer is interesting, and it will be equally interesting where any of this goes beyond the big or small screens. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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The 100 Best Sports Moments of the Quarter Century

I stopped caring about and following sports around the same time I stopped listening to new music, which was just before the turn of the century when we started having kids. It wasn’t really a conscious decision to do away with either outlet; my little girls were just more fun and interesting, I guess.

Sure, I watched my fair share of Major League Baseball playoffs in October back before MLB decided bigger money through cable channels was more important than free network viewership for the everyman. Lord knows I fell asleep on the couch watching football on more than one Saturday or Sunday afternoon (usually with a small child on my chest), but that was it. Sports were background at best.

I write all this as prologue to this list of The 100 Best Sports Moments of the Quarter Century only to say that while I’m vaguely familiar with a good bunch of these, they don’t hold as much meaning for me as the article purports they will, probably because I stopped looking to sports for meaning after high school.

“With such an unparalleled ability to bottle up the human condition—the highs, the lows, the adversity, the intensity, the buildup, the release, the heartbreak, the triumph—sports are capable of delivering moments of true wonder that become memories, that become part of our lives. When the impossible becomes possible, when the definition of absurd is redefined, when men and women turn into superheroes—you don’t easily forget something like that.”

This isn’t to say I am completely unaffected by sports; on the contrary, entry #9 listing the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series in 2016 brought back the existential angst I felt for at least a couple of years, as the Cubbies were never - ever! - supposed to win the Series in my lifetime. But, God love ‘em, they did (though I would argue we still suffer negative societal consequences as a result).

Lists like this are always subjective, but the editors at The Ringer (a sports website I’d never heard of) were kind enough to disclose the criteria used in assembling their rankings. Those criteria (titles and explanations theirs) were:

• The Collective Joy Factor: Simply put, did the moment spark joy? (The “collective” part here is pretty important, too: It’s not like you’re gonna find a Yankees fan who loved the Red Sox comeback in ’04, but everyone else had a great time.)

• The Ubiquity Factor: Did it transcend its sport and become a moment of monoculture?

• The Holy Sh*t! Factor: Did it make you say, well, “Holy sh*t”?

• The “I Remember Where I Was When …” Factor: The staying power of the best sports moments is such that you can remember not only the moment but also where you were sitting when it happened—the shirt you had on, the people you were with, the way the bar smelled like popcorn…

• The Championship Stakes Factor: After all, great moments are often born out of great pressure.

• The Key Characters Involved Factor: Relatedly, great moments often feature sports’ most important figures coming through in the clutch. (This is admittedly a chicken-or-the-egg thing, as sports’ most important figures often become most important through great moments.)

• The Legacy Factor: Did the moment burnish or solidify the legacy of a given athlete or team?

• The Nickname Factor: Because let’s be honest: If a moment has a widely recognized moniker, it’s probably one of the best.

• The “Will You Talk About This in 25 Years?” Factor: If your grandkids aren’t going to hear you drone on about it, it’s not that great of a moment.

A fair list, methinks, so for those who enjoy sports, enjoy this! And after reading, leave a comment as to a listing particularly meaningful to you (and why).

(Note: If you’re a Cubs fan, be sure to check out #47, which was definitely one of my favorite sports memories of the past 25 years.)

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“Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.”
—Wendell Berry in The Unsettling of America