...I'm still not sure if he was outright lying, thinking I was as dumb as I looked, or if he honestly believed what he was telling me, but nothing of what was running through my head can be repeated in an open forum.
I think what is often going on when we realize an explanation someone is earnestly giving us has a snowball's chance in hell of being correct, is that we humans, in our instinctual desire to understand outcomes, reason backwards from the outcome, arranging various "facts" in a sequence we decide to believe to be correct in such a way as to arrive at what seems to make causal sense to us, given the outcome.
It's not lying, but a working hypothesis which the speaker is comfortable believing and handing off to you.
My wife does this, quite blithely, a lot, whereas I try to actually understand reality.
(But what REALLY irritates me is when I spend a long time analyzing the hell out of why something is the way it is, and then finally realize that the reality of it is unknowable, and that I have been wasting my time, while, meanwhile, my wife has, without an ounce of remorse or reflection, found her hypothesis works just fine and has moved along to the next issue and I am reduced to saying, "Hey! Wait up already!")
Well reasoned!
