Why assume people are smart? And why does that matter? It’s a starting point for just about everything else I do as a sociologist. I learned people are smart by spending over a decade of my life studying what they do and why they do it (and a lot longer than that interacting with them). What I mean is that people have reasons for doing what they’re doing that are as complicated and well thought out as the reasons you have for doing what you’re doing. Because I am a pragmatist, this wouldn’t matter if there wasn’t some benefit to assuming people are smart, so I offer three rules, things to gain from assuming that People are Smart, and not the opposite, based on all this.

Mint chocolate chip ice cream is, in my opinion, the best flavor of ice cream. Maybe that isn’t a popular opinion to hold, or to express. I know lots of people prefer rocky road, or chocolate, or vanilla. But it’s an opinion I hold, and you may, or may not, hold the same opinion. No big deal, right? If I like mint chocolate chip ice cream, I can eat it, and if you don’t, you don’t have to. It is easy to have an opinion, express an opinion, and respect one another’s opinions. That’s what an opinion is…

Putting together what I know about the social world and being human, when we lose someone, we can make sense of loss simply trying to consciously honor their memory. Not just by thinking about them, but in our actions. I want the lessons I learned from my college mentors (two of whom have now passed away) to be reflected, in a practical sense, in what I do with my life after they’re gone. But it’s relatively easy for me to see how to honor them, especially since I became an academic myself. It’s not that much harder to figure out how to honor the memories of family members who lived to a ripe old age, as well as friends whose lives were cut tragically short, as honoring a person’s memory involves learning from both their triumphs and missteps. When I die, I want people to have learned at least as much from what I did wrong as what I did right so they can get it a little less wrong than I did.

I do not believe. That is a complete sentence. I am not a nihilist. In fact, no one is a nihilist because nihilism doesn’t make sense—to attack, or defend, a viewpoint, you have to have standards of truth (what is), morality (what ought to be), or both—the very things nihilism is defined by rejecting. What I mean is that as soon as I discover a new idea inspires or fascinates me, I set to work trying to figure out how it might be incomplete or wrong.