Among the more pernicious ways to slip a meme past the defenses of the unwary is to state opinion as fact, as when debaters explain that debate, and the ability to argue either side of a proposition convincingly and with equal conviction, provides a valuable way to understand the world.

That this is preposterous is easily demonstrated: At the end of a debate, the judges declare the winner based on his or her ability to argue. Nobody declares which side of the proposition is more correct, which surely is what matters.

Except, that is, in a court of law, where the jury has to do this, knowing that, as professional debaters, there’s no point taking the sincerity of the arguers into account as they reach a verdict, as they’d have been equally sincere on the other side, if it was the other side that had hired them.

Then there’s this one: Engaging in sports when young promotes a wide variety of virtues.

I’m sure it does and, if required to take this side in a debate, could surely develop a list of convincing examples.

But while I do accept the virtues of participation, I’m pretty sure the damage done by learning to be an enthusiastic spectator more than offsets them.

Consider what young’uns learn about life from learning to root, root root for the home team:

Conformity: It isn’t as if I had a choice in becoming a Cubs and Bears fan. In Highland Park Illinois, they were the home teams and that was that.

Think this is trivial? Most people chose their religion, or, more accurately, had it chosen for them with the same level of due diligence. Among IT professionals the same is likely true for their preferred operating systems.

Kill the umpire! When I was growing up, fans screamed this innocuous phrase whenever the umpire … no, not when he made a bad call, but when he made a bad call that favored the opposing team. Bad calls that favored the Cubs were welcome, and would have been even if the Cubbies didn’t need all the help they could get.

I challenge you to read your newspaper without finding at least one example a day of the fans of one political entity deriding the findings of those officiating something or other based solely on its impact on my team, not on its merits.

Us vs Them: It’s sadly routine for the fans of one team to engage in anything from beer dumping to semi-organized combat against the fans of the opposing team.

Why would anyone think this is okay? Because in one way or another, most of us divide the world into us and them.

We’re the source of all that’s good and right with the world: We’re smart, we’re strong, we’re virtuous. We demonstrate excellent personal hygiene, and we’re snappy dressers, too. That’s in contrast to them. They’re ignorant, stupid, and too ignorant to know the difference between ignorance and stupidity. Their morals are unsavory, they smell bad, and their mothers dress them funny.

And they root for the wrong team.

Taking undeserved credit: Earlier this week I watched the Bears beat Dallas. We won! Somehow or other I felt as if I was part of the achievement. But really, as already mentioned, I can’t even take credit for deciding to root for the Bears.

When I got the family calendars to synchronize with some level of reliability, I felt like I’d accomplished something clever, too, just as I did when I installed an optical splitter on our television so we can use either the sound bar or our wireless headphones if we want to.

But really, what am I taking credit for? I had nothing to do with developing S/PDIF, engineering the television that outputs it or the optical splitter box itself, or even making it easy to find and buy on the web.

Excusing bad behavior: Fans are likely to excuse even the worst off-field (or off-court) behavior when it’s by a player on their team who scores a lot.

We’re likely to do the same for any celebrity member of the group we call us.

Armchair Quarterbacking. Yes, it’s misnamed and should be called armchair coaching, but never mind that.

What matters is how well we’ve all learned that our own expertise, gained by tirelessly watching game after game after game while drinking beer after beer after beer, exceeds that of professionals who have invested probably ten times the time, and stone cold sober time at that, studying and perfecting their trade.

Of these, my favorite is armchair coaching. But then, I’m a management consultant — clients hire me to do it. If your organization needs someone to second-guess management decisions and practices, give me a call. I’m at least as qualified to recommend what your organization should be doing as I am calling plays for the Bears.

If your ears are in decline you can buy hearing aids. Poor vision? Depending on the cause you can be fitted with glasses or contact lenses, or get cataract surgery or cornea transplants.

Can’t smell well? Mostly, you’re out of luck.

Being insensitive to aromas can be debilitating, as when I briefly tried to become a wine snob. I had to give it up after drinking a glass that supposedly “… opens to reveal lifted fruit aromas of bright strawberry and jammy fruit, mocha, and vanilla, along with toasty oak notes. Expressive boysenberry, blackberry, dark cherry, juicy strawberry, and toasty mocha flavors lend complexity and depth on the palate.”

The gentleman running the wine tasting provided this account (well, it was sorta like that recitation; my memory isn’t good enough to provide the verbatim version) shortly after I was asked to provide my assessment. “Well,” I suggested, “It’s a dry wine, and I’m pretty sure the recipe included grapes of some kind.”

Actual anosmia and hyposmia, while rarely tragic, are still worth curing when a cure is possible. And yet we, as a nation, invest little in developing better treatments, as evidenced by the National Institutes of Health, which includes the National Eye Institute and National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, but no National Institute of Schnoz Syndromes.

Canines live in a different umwelt (perceptual universe) than human beings. If they ran the country, olfactory impairment would be a much higher priority, smell being a dog’s most important sense.

They don’t, and there’s a parallel in the business world (of course there is!).

If you’re among KJR’s IT readership, the situation is familiar to the point of distraction: Something in the IT architecture needs to be fixed because in its current state it’s debilitating with respect to IT’s ability to do what its business partners want it to do, or it’s well beyond its end of life, likely to fail unpredictably, or otherwise in an unacceptable state for highly technical reasons that are very real but quite difficult to explain to a non-technical audience.

That is, you’re the dog. You and the rest of your pack can try to explain just how bad it smells to the humans who decide priorities, but their umwelt limits their ability to truly(oh, what the heck, as long as we’re shoveling obscure terms around) grok the situation.

Reverse roles: If you’re among the humans who are listening to the dogs barking about the need to invest more heavily in the IT infrastructure, your eyes will start to glaze. They more or less have to as the primary arguments are aromatic, not visual, and there’s no way to add fragrances to a PowerPoint deck.

And … trust me on this … if your IT dogs are barking about infrastructure risks you aren’t going to placate them by scratching behind their ears while saying, “Who’s a good sysadmin? You’re a good sysadmin! Yes you are!”

It’s become commonplace to gripe about the extent to which humans base their (not our!) decisions on emotion rather than logic. I’ve made this point myself (for example, here). Mr. Spock notwithstanding, the criticism, while not wrong, is often a misdiagnosis of why people find even the most compelling evidence and logic unconvincing.

More often than not the problem is as much a matter of conflicting umwelts as of emotion overpowering logic.

In most companies, engineers, including IT professionals, live in a different perceptual and cognitive universe than business management. Fail to bridge the gap and tragedy ensues, as it did with the Challenger disaster, and again more recently with Boeing’s 737 Max.

The deep-root-cause isn’t emotion-based decision-making, or corporate greed, or some other personal characteristic.

It isn’t, that is, personal so much as it’s interpersonal. People have trouble spanning the gap that separates different umwelts. In my experience, at least, what more often needs to be fixed is a lack of sufficient empathy on both sides of a conversation.

When I can’t see the world through your eyes … or, more significantly, when I see the world through my eyes and your understanding of the world is based on your nose … all the evidence and logic in the world aren’t going to paint a picture I can properly understand.

So if you want to become more persuasive, don’t start with evidence, logic, or emotion.

Start by understanding how the other person experiences the world.