Once upon a time, in a land not-so-far away, Mary and Bob* owned a hotel, more of ritzy one, on the side of a beautiful lake. Accordingly, they had built a nice balcony for their guests on the side of their hotel so said guests could enjoy the beautiful views of the lake and mountain beyond.

Behind the balcony, there was a dining area, with large floor to ceiling windows, again with ideal of allowing their guests to experience the view they paid for.

Unfortunately for Mary and Bob, this created an interesting problem. Many of the guests would go out to the balcony, not with the benign purpose of viewing the scenery, but with the more pragmatic instruments of pole and hook. They would then proceed to fish off the balcony.

This turned out to be multiple levels of bad. Not only is fishing a smelly business, not only does rods sticking up off you balcony look terrible to the five-star clientele, but a misplaced cast, a line snapped too hard, and...

SMASH.

The dining room windows would shatter. And every single time this happened, Mary and Bob would have to replace the windows. While most of the time they could hunt down the perpetrator and not suffer monetary loss, it was a big hassle and loads of paperwork. So Mary and Bob decided to fix this problem. They ordered themselves a bunch of signs that read

PLEASE DO NOT FISH OFF THE BALCONY

in big bold red letters, and placed them in everyone's room.

Unfortunately for Mary and Bob, this failed catastrophically. More people fished off the balcony than ever before. In fact, these new devious fishermen did so late at night, making it twice as hard to catch the perpetrators!

* * *

If you tell someone not to do something, they want to do it.

You've probably heard this rule a half a gazillion times, or at least some variation thereof. There appears to be, in the human race, a mechanism that enjoys getting away with stuff. So Mary and Bob added to the intent to fish the thrill of subverting their intentions and (possibly) not getting caught. In addition, there were probably a bunch of people at the hotel who never would have thought to go fishing off the balcony if they hadn't seen the sign telling them not to. Now something they never even thought of suddenly had an appeal. A dark appeal, to be sure.

Fortunately Mary and Bob learned from this thought experiment, and removed the signs from people's rooms. They hired someone to watch the balcony instead.

I bring this up because I think this might apply to debate. Last blog entry I posted disclaimers and inserted phrases in my response to preclude a certain type of misconception. In essence I was telling people: "Do NOT think this; do NOT believe this about me; do NOT respond this way."

And people connected the dots. I theorize that each and every one of us can immediately tell when someone wants us NOT to do something, and then are very tempted to do it anyway. It doesn't matter how it is phrased, whether it is a disclaimer or what-have-you; most of us can sense the other person's intention.

Worse, this can happen entirely subconsciously, I think. You read something, sense the other person's intention of precluding the idea, rebel against it, and instantly you start typing out the response that the person doesn't want you to type. You don't know that you caught the intention and you don't know that you rebelled against that intention, all your conscious mind registers is that this is your response to what you just read (and may even generate lies to mask what your mind is really doing!).

Now, do NOT believe that any of this nonsense is true.

*I heard this story from someone else; it's mostly true. Details have been changed to protect the innocent and/or expanded for dramatic purposes.