Dear LPG, 

We, pensioners of today, have to be one of the very last generations who, in our youth, would have had to hear about so many new inventions, news and events that we never had the occasion to see because, since the 1960s, we have nearly all had a television in the corner of the living room, which has meant that news of such things came to us with pictures for evidence.   

But there are many examples of odd beliefs that people have perhaps because they use a different set of tools to apply the logic that most of us have learned to accept. 

I recently watched a television drama set in the 1890s where one character was trying to explain what a telephone can do to another who had no idea of what the first person was talking about and believed them to be lying.   I also remember hearing of a Japanese soldier who believed that WWII was still being fought over 20 years after it was over.  A look at the internet also taught me that a fair percentage of the world population still believes that the earth we live on is flat.  
What I am trying to get at is that while most of us accept such facts, there will always be people who, having learned all of them, still find a way of using them to reach some perfectly logical conclusions that don’t concur with what most people would regard as obvious. 

I am one of a few friends and family members who find ourselves in just such a position.  We are all trying our best to support a friend who is blind.  She doesn’t go out very often anymore and has been blind for the past 20 years.  This means that there are many things that she has only ever heard of in a way that a seeing person cannot conceive.    When it comes to any other topic she is as sharp as ever, but we cannot budge her on one point.   

Her children bought her an audio virtual assistant a few Christmases ago so that they can communicate with her more easily, and all was well at first.  Recently, she believes that the little chatty ball has been jumping off the sideboard, rummaging through her wardrobe, rearranging her clothes and pilfering food from her kitchen.   


We have all been doing our best to get her to understand that Alexa can talk to her but has no ability to actually do very much else without the help of smart switches, plugs, light bulbs and a lot more knowledge about how to set all that up than any of us have.  

For a while now we, her family and friends, have tried to have that correctional conversation with her both individually and in groups, but she insists that we are not telling her the truth.  Some of the conversations leave her thinking that we are doing our best to trick her and that is not helping the situation at all.   

At the moment, the latest tricks that her Alexa is up to are all we are hearing about, and she refers to the device as a ‘she’ even though we keep correcting her by reminding her that it is an ‘it’.  It is as if she thinks of it as a cat or a robot or something.   She is accepting of what is going on and you might say that we should leave her with her ignorance, but she tells stories of what the device is up to when no one is around, and while we worry about her living with this degree of uncertainty, it is such a good way of keeping in touch with her that we don’t want to disconnect it.     

With all this in mind, I took a look on the internet in a bid to work out how we might change her mind and convince her of the truth as we see it.   I found a few suggestions that might help, and the one thing that all the advice emphasises is the importance of not getting into an argument over the facts.  Depressingly, I also found evidence that we are trying to achieve success in one of the hardest endeavours that one can ever attempt. 


I suspect that most readers will agree that our predicament is quite funny, although we worry that it could become pretty problematic if ignored, but perhaps what I found might be helpful to a few other readers.   

Sometimes it is better not to force such an issue and play along with a notion that everyone else thinks is completely wrong, but when it really matters, trying to change someone’s mind about anything is a challenge.  If you really feel you have to try, I hope some of the internet ideas I found might help…   

SF, Forest Hill. 

 

 

SF offers the advice that the internet has to offer…

 

 

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