Demonstrate
Topic: Human Behaviour
Ah... the old days of my role-playing youth... when rules lawyering was the status quo, brilliant ideas were squashed by a homicidal, unimaginative GM, and you could never have too many dice.

Occasionally, someone would mention some twisted concept, such as "you can fight better without armor than with armor, and they won't hit you because you're too nimble and they're in armor, so they're slow." This doesn't work, because you're not trying to run away and avoid being hit. You're trying to stand right in front of them and hit them and avoid being hit. But people would insist on this, because they somehow, in their 16 years of being alive, knew more than what 10,000 years of Humankind fighting each other has taught us. Biggest stick wins, 9 times out of 10. What you define as a stick could be martial arts, cannons, or whatever. But the bigger stick wins.

To prove the point, my favorite response was "Try it." In the above argument, they'd say "I can't prove that point, because I'm not a skilled martial artist." I'd reply "Neither is your character. He's a guy with a stick. Pick up a stick and you'll be a remarkable simulation of your simulation of a real person that doesn't exist. Try it." And that's pretty much where the arguments "end..." with him sure that he's still right and grumbling how the world is full of morons, and the rest of us following the game rules.

I still use this concept today, but in a different way and different environment. Sometimes, when people tell me something ludicrous that you can do with a micro-wave oven, six yards of cheese-cloth, and a burrito, and in return get limitless power for running your computer, I'll tell them "Try it." It ends up not working (or something even more spectacular, but extremely dangerous, happens). They swear their very reliable source's brother's cousin's third-grade-teacher read something about it in a science fiction magazine from the 1920's he'd found in his attic only partially obscured by water damage and printed in Swahili had a footnote that swore it was absolutely true, and people could have all the free energy they wanted, just as soon as the microwave oven was invented.*

The great thing is, there's no end of people that are willing to put their ass on the line to "prove" that their wild story is absolutely true. Very often, you can tell someone that has just stated you can jump-start a car with the static electricity from fourty rabid badgers and a pair of jumper cables to try it. They'll happily endure scratches, bites, injections into their stomachs, and so forth as they vigorously rub fourty badgers with a balloon and shout to their partner in the car to "try again, you almost had it last time." "The trick," they'll say, "is keeping the badgers all together and touching at least one other badger." Which raises the question: do you wire badgers in series, or in parallel?

'Round here, we just use another car battery with a good charge.**

Usually, though, you can help a person realize they're insane before they actually prove it, when they start putting their little experiment together and they realize that there is no way it will work the way the "instructions" claim it will. And who knows? Maybe they're really on to something. But the point is that they'll never know unless they give it a shot and see what happens. They may prove an old wives' tale is actually effective. They may find something that helps you in some way.

Or, at the worst, you can provide yourself with entertainment and an effective way of testing the 911 system in a practical application, just by telling the person with the wild idea to put up or shut up. It's way more fun than just arguing about it and telling them they're idiots.

But don't take my word for it. Try it.

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*That, or it was a recipe for cheese-cloth wrapped burritos. His source's brother's cousin's third-grade-teacher never had much ability to read Swahili.
**We don't need no stinking badgers.

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