After careful thought over the months since my last post. I've come to the conclusion that this blog doesn't serve the purposes I originally started it for. There is simply to much nonsense floating about in people's heads (including my own), to have a rational exchange of ideas. It seems that the world isn't ready for open debate, and the variety of experience that each of us has breeds conclusions of certainty that are often lacking in-depth investigation to the outlying context of the subject mater itself. Put another way, our intuitive emotional natures get in the way of logical discussion, regardless of how logical we believe ourselves to be.
I had originally intended to use this blog to explore the depths of my own thoughts and feelings about various subjects, and allow for others to comment and challenge said thoughts with rational dialogue to help me grow as a person. This was not what was happening and I found myself defending my points from the feelings of others. I really don't care how right an individual feels they are about a subject, I simply accept it and listen to it the same way I would listen to anyone expressing themselves. Often with patience and sometimes awe, but on occasion I will point out how their ideas could lead to hurting others if left unrestrained. Subjective beliefs are fascinating to me, but as I have plenty of my own on most subjects, I don't feel the need to debate them. I would prefer to investigate and explore them.
I have debated such things in the past and learned a few universal truths about subjective beliefs. They are often not based in factual evidence. When they are based on facts, it is often only one interpretation of said facts. Most people never go back to reanalyze those beliefs once they have made them. When they do, they often just follow the previous line of reasoning, instead of forcing themselves to use another one. Even when this is done, the entire growth process has to be gone through for each subjective belief that an individual holds. It is an exhausting process that quickly tires an individual and is rarely achieved overnight. While the challenge of said process can be fun and rewarding in the long term, there seems to be little practical use for such a skill concerning subjective beliefs.
Subjective belief are often unprovable until put into practice, and often that can only be done with a large number of people willing to go along with the practice. The irony is that this usually creates a false sense of the ideas working, because everyone involved buys into the idea that it can work. This is often unchanged by a catastrophic failure, because it is easy for us to assign blame to individuals involved in the project, of proving the belief, instead of recognizing that the belief itself is wrong. This is an example of being too close to the subject to have a detached observation of what is actually happening.
So it seems to me that a blog is a poor place to investigate such beliefs. While there is merit in sharing them so that others may think on them as well, a debate is a foolish endeavor because little will be resolved. The participants in such a debate will likely just double down on their individual perspective, and slip away from the intention of rooting out the actual problems. Subjective beliefs rarely change from debate, but often from observation and contemplation. The debate causes an adversarial situation that we are biologically programed to attempt to win. it is only later that we can actually learn anything from it.
As a result from this point on there will be a 24 hour limit on comments per post. This will give everyone a chance to add their piece to posts, but will keep a days long debate from actually developing on the blog itself. In the various social media comment threads this will not be true, but I personally don't care about what is said out there. Social media is the forum to share ideas, but those ideas are usually without greater context. Hence why blogging is supposedly dying even as twitter is gaining in popularity. To many people seem to think that quantity is greater than quality.
So if I continue to post here it will be to find quality in subjects over quantity. I will link and post things I come across here and either add initial thoughts to them or let them sit until have had time to think them over. I will be shifting my practice to searching for the actual greater context of ideas and shape the posts into greater studies of the ideas within even as I delete the fragments that will be pushed over into the greater posts surrounding the subject.
In short I will be making things TL;DR, because the rest of the internet has plenty of 140 character long superficiality. Thank you for reading. Have a good day.
I had originally intended to use this blog to explore the depths of my own thoughts and feelings about various subjects, and allow for others to comment and challenge said thoughts with rational dialogue to help me grow as a person. This was not what was happening and I found myself defending my points from the feelings of others. I really don't care how right an individual feels they are about a subject, I simply accept it and listen to it the same way I would listen to anyone expressing themselves. Often with patience and sometimes awe, but on occasion I will point out how their ideas could lead to hurting others if left unrestrained. Subjective beliefs are fascinating to me, but as I have plenty of my own on most subjects, I don't feel the need to debate them. I would prefer to investigate and explore them.
I have debated such things in the past and learned a few universal truths about subjective beliefs. They are often not based in factual evidence. When they are based on facts, it is often only one interpretation of said facts. Most people never go back to reanalyze those beliefs once they have made them. When they do, they often just follow the previous line of reasoning, instead of forcing themselves to use another one. Even when this is done, the entire growth process has to be gone through for each subjective belief that an individual holds. It is an exhausting process that quickly tires an individual and is rarely achieved overnight. While the challenge of said process can be fun and rewarding in the long term, there seems to be little practical use for such a skill concerning subjective beliefs.
Subjective belief are often unprovable until put into practice, and often that can only be done with a large number of people willing to go along with the practice. The irony is that this usually creates a false sense of the ideas working, because everyone involved buys into the idea that it can work. This is often unchanged by a catastrophic failure, because it is easy for us to assign blame to individuals involved in the project, of proving the belief, instead of recognizing that the belief itself is wrong. This is an example of being too close to the subject to have a detached observation of what is actually happening.
So it seems to me that a blog is a poor place to investigate such beliefs. While there is merit in sharing them so that others may think on them as well, a debate is a foolish endeavor because little will be resolved. The participants in such a debate will likely just double down on their individual perspective, and slip away from the intention of rooting out the actual problems. Subjective beliefs rarely change from debate, but often from observation and contemplation. The debate causes an adversarial situation that we are biologically programed to attempt to win. it is only later that we can actually learn anything from it.
As a result from this point on there will be a 24 hour limit on comments per post. This will give everyone a chance to add their piece to posts, but will keep a days long debate from actually developing on the blog itself. In the various social media comment threads this will not be true, but I personally don't care about what is said out there. Social media is the forum to share ideas, but those ideas are usually without greater context. Hence why blogging is supposedly dying even as twitter is gaining in popularity. To many people seem to think that quantity is greater than quality.
So if I continue to post here it will be to find quality in subjects over quantity. I will link and post things I come across here and either add initial thoughts to them or let them sit until have had time to think them over. I will be shifting my practice to searching for the actual greater context of ideas and shape the posts into greater studies of the ideas within even as I delete the fragments that will be pushed over into the greater posts surrounding the subject.
In short I will be making things TL;DR, because the rest of the internet has plenty of 140 character long superficiality. Thank you for reading. Have a good day.
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