House of Eratosthenes

Regardless of how the election goes, I’m still concerned. Things are good, but broken. They are good in spite of being broken, and may not remain good for long because of the breakage. And the breakage didn’t happen overnight. Things got broken in phases, and they’re still breaking.

I’m seeing a lot of people “winning arguments” by saying “I don’t care.” What is that? If you don’t care about something, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you shouldn’t care about it. Maybe you should, in which case, if you still don’t care about it, that makes you something of an ignoramus. It doesn’t make you superior to anybody. Really when you get down to it, apathy is just a feeling. That’s the problem here. People making important decisions based on feelings, not taking into account all the things they should be taking into account because they “don’t care.” It’s incompetent decision-making. And it’s seemingly become the default.

I see people brushing aside evidence of something by saying “There is no evidence of that.” What they really mean to say is, although this is just the latest circumstantial evidence of something, there hasn’t been any direct evidence. They’re refusing to consider trace evidence of something, suggestive evidence. They don’t like where it points. So they’re laying down a new rule, of sorts, that you have to prove things beyond any reasonable doubt, in order to merely consider them as possibilities, and if you can’t do that then you’re not allowed to even mention them as possibilities. That’s quite absurd. More incompetent decision-making.

I’m seeing there are people elevated to these platforms of “expertise,” as in, “Let’s listen to the experts” which means just do what they say without question. We see a lot of this in tech. The “experts” often turn out to be kids embarking on adulthood, who’ve been hailed as “technophiles” and “techies” because they know more about tech than anybody else in the family…and more often than not, that turns out to be computer games. They knew how to deliver a killing blow in Mortal Kombat involving four, five, six or more buttons pushed in rapid sequence. It’s a common confusion: People who use the tech, are worshiped by others as if they built the tech, and they come to believe that this is the tech they’ve mastered, building what they in reality merely know how to use. Kids who’ve been gifted with smartphones too early in life, hailed as if they’ve mastered all it takes to engineer the phone.

Learning disabilities: We just diagnose them, medicate and move on — leaving the child handicapped for life. Because again, “the experts” have spoken. This is a particularly pernicious habit we have, for the effects are long lasting. “Experts” are people who profit from the prevalence of this hitherto undiscovered learning disability, and yet once they say someone has it, the rest of us who do not share in the profits, aren’t even allowed to talk back.

What these all have in common is an open discussion that should be happening, and isn’t, because too many people either don’t know how to discuss things or aren’t comfortable with discussing those things. Perhaps that’s the epicenter of the breakage, the original point of origin of where things started to get broken. Discussing things is something we should supposedly stop doing, because discussing is arguing, and arguing is heated. So we stopped discussing?

But we haven’t stopped arguing, and things are heated.

That’s why I think maybe, just maybe…we as a society took a wrong turn back there. Should have kept discussing things.

Someone stands up and says “Stop discussing things, just do it my way” we should have said “Sit down, junior, we’re going to keep discussing it” instead of what we did say. Something like “Yeah, sure, okay, I don’t see why not, let’s do that then.”

We should discuss things, because people are flawed. It’s easier to come up with a bad idea than a good one. But no idea is so toxic that we’ll be doing further damage merely by talking about it, or defining what it is, or defining some of the arguments against it. If people don’t know how to discuss something, that’s really their own problem and we should treat it that way.

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Go Ahead and Discuss ThingsMonday, September 30th, 2024

Go Ahead and Discuss Things
Monday, September 30th, 2024