Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Better to have the world think your an idiot than to utilise social media to remove all doubt.

Mark Twain may have 'tweeted'. This post though isn't really about social media. It's about reachig a point where I feel just smart enough to know how truly dumb I am.

At some point in the future some friend of friend of friend studying developmental psychology may recommend my blog for benchmarking the point in which an adult brain feels smart, then developes into stupidity after achieving a certain degree of self awareness, and then hopefully becomes truly smart...

But that is just an idle hope, wishful thinking, for I don't wish to study becoming truly smart, unless that truly smart = an engineering degree.

But, recently I have almost aggressively written on this blog because I have known the flaws in my worldview before I even expressed them. I just had to power on through.

The reason being I have learned far more about reason than I used to know, and having a view on anything at the moment seems to be a subject in futility.

For example, I know about bias' like survivorship bias, recency bias, confirmation bias... and so often an argument I make is subject to one, and thus invalid.

Even on the subjective, there's Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crud.

This means when trying to criticise any particular genre, or artist or even compare any subjective material - eg. music from the 2000's vs music from the 90's, there is no shortage of bad examples to dredge up. Reducing any argument on the subjective, or trying to create an objective justification will simply boil down to - this is what I like and everything else is crap.

And I find it pointless to write about what I like. Because I like deconstruction, and I hate reading blogs that are in essence Amazon wish lists with commentary. I can't remember the last time I wrote a post that recommended a product... I can't remember the last time I did that in real life.

But if you take an argumentative tone like I do, the mistake was to become aware of all the formal, informal and generally accepted logical fallacies. Now I know them just well enough to catch myself having done them after I have committed them to the internet.

I don't recall the latin names as such, but there's argument by accident, the slippery slope falacy, the 'Hitler liked that therefore it must be bad', 'Winston Churchill does this therefore it must be good', virtue in poverty falacy, virtue in wealth falacy, arguments from vested interest, blinding with science...

The fact it seems to me, is that almost everything I say is fallacious, and there's simply too many holes to fall into. I seem to have thus attained a new level of understanding how little I understand.

I'll probably spend the next few years, hopefully, being the annoying person that points out logical fallacies in other peoples arguments, until I am confident enough to make arguments and have opinions again.

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