Human beings are, obviously, very complex creatures. For any given person we deal with, we understand them to a degree, but only so far. And then on top of that they have free will and can choose to do things contrary to their nature. So we’ll never fully understand another human being—on this side of death, anyway.

Having said that, sometimes when people do things we thought they would never do it becomes clear that we misunderstand people’s motivations and thoughts. This happened to me recently with the YouTuber Logicked. A while back, as a joke for the beginning of Deflating Atheism’s 2,500 subscriber special livestream, I collaborated with Rob to make a satirical sketch with the premise that the YouTuber atheist “Rhetoricked” was criticisng the livestream before it even happened. The video on my channel where I put it up included a few minutes of context if you haven’t heard of Logicked before:

Just a few days ago, he made a serious response video to my comedic sketch! Here’s the description:

Missing the Mark is still mad that I didn’t like a few dumb things he said, so he parodied my videos in an evil beekeeper costume. I’m sure it will be a deeply honest representation and not remotely hypocritical.

For the record, I wasn’t mad. I found the idea of him making 3 videos criticizing things I said in the Deflating Atheism 1000 subscriber special—which was a hangout among friends just chatting, having fun, and reminiscing—to be a little absurd, and since my sense of humor tends towards absurdism, I decided to add to the absurdity with a comedic sketch on the Deflatheism 2,500 subscriber special. I actually didn’t expect him to watch the video. Or, really, for all that many people to watch the video. Livestreams rarely get all that many views and though it would probably be reasonably popular with my scubscribers—all of my Just For Fun videos are—I don’t have all that many subscribers (at the time I uploaded it, I had around 1500).

Anyway, I never dreamed that Logicked would do a response video to it. And yet he did. Being that wrong means I need to rethink some things. But first, I’ll explain my reasoning:

First, Logicked rarely does response videos. Full disclosure: I haven’t actually watched more than two of his videos in their entirety (one about me which I responded to in two parts, and an early, very short one in which he’s tempted by some sort of devil in exchange for subscribers). But I skimmed the titles and also searched on YouTube and he’s got the word response in something like 2 other videos besides this response. His videos are almost entirely critiques. That is, he takes videos which weren’t about him and then criticizes them. So this was just atypical.

Second, his YouTube channel is a business for Logicked. Keeping on-brand is good business. Giving free air-time to people criticizing you is not a good business practice. This is summarized in the phrase “never punch down”, though people have been using the phrase “punching down” to mean other things, so it might perhaps be best summarized as, “never give publicity to critics who can’t hurt your bottom line on their own”. Now, as several friends of mine have pointed out, judging by his comment section, Logicked’s core fans are several dozen light bulbs short of a full picnic basket (i.e. they’re not intelligent), but core fans typically draw much of their energy from peripheral fans, and peripheral fans are the people more likely to be swayed by criticism. Not that any one act of criticism will hurt all that much, but why take unnecessary risks with your primary source of income?

Third, the draw of YouTube atheists is the air of superiority which they assume. They are basically selling confidence. I described this in my video The Value of Atheist Hacks:

And it seemed to me that on some level Logicked understood this because by sticking to critiques he maintained his position of superiority from which his viewers could derive vicarious confidence. Doing a response video puts him in a position of equality with me. He can maintain as superior a tone as he wants in the video, but fundamentally in a response he is defending himself rather than being on the attack. Again, this isn’t going to change anyone’s opinion of him drastically—and certainly not consciously—but it comes back to the question: why take unnecessary risks with one’s primary source of income?

Being a professional YouTuber is a one of the professions in which a person is being professionally popular. Being popular—even with a sub-group—is not an easy thing to do. Humans are incredibly fickle creatures. The mob which one day shouts “hosannah!” may be shouting “crucify him!” the next week.

There’s also just the fact that as a professional YouTuber, Logicked needs to be charismatic, and seeming thin-skinned is very un-charismatic. And giving a serious rebuttal to an obvious joke does seem very thin-skinned.

Now, the problem with taking chances is not that they always go wrong, but you become vulnerable to two things going wrong at once. And that’s where the bad stuff tends to happen to people—when two things go wrong at once. And that’s why people with responsibilities like a wife and child tend to avoid risks. This way when the bad stuff that you can’t control happens, you’ve got a chance you can survive it without taking any damage.

And I thought that Logicked knew all this. And maybe he does, in which case there was some other force in his life which resulted in this very odd action on his part. For example, it could be that Max Kolbe is right and atheists are all narcissists. An older version of this would be Saint Thomas More’s maxim, “The devil, that proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked”. (It should be noted he was comment on prayer, as the beginning of that quote is, “Prayer makes mock of the devil”.) I would still need to personally be a little important to Logicked, though, and I really doubt that I personally matter to him at all.

It’s possible that the parody was too spot-on and since it was public he felt embarrassed, but the thing is, it wasn’t a very spot-on parody. I was just being silly—which I think is very obvious from the costume I used, as well as how over-the-top the things I said were—and obviously played very fast and loose for fun. I don’t think that anyone could take the specifics of what I said to be a cogent criticism of Logicked.

It could be that Logicked is desperate for material and is confident in his ability to pull off seeming thick skinned and just having fun. Of the ideas I’ve seen, this may be the most likely.

Whatever the answer, it is clear that my misprediction of his behavior means that I misunderstood him. By which I really mean people like him, since I don’t know much about Logicked the man. It’s important to be able to recognize these signs of being mistaken and learn from them both with less confidence in predictions as well as in needing to do further research in understanding human beings.