I have had a couple weeks of absolutely delightful “talking point” conversations with people on Twitter. These have been with several people from the left and right of the modern American political spectrum.
I call them TP convos because they almost exclusively consist of things like, “Marijuana causes insanity” and “Virtue in the People is caused by laws from the govt” on the right, and “Corp greed is destroying America”, “We should equalize all wages” and “The 99% are powerless against big business so lets give lots MORE power to Washington” on the left.
These are really fun because they don’t require much mental exertion on my part and I figure I might be able to get through to people whose depth of thought/research on these topics seems to run rather shallow. Now I don’t say that as a criticism however, I naturally don’t think people SHOULD necessarily spend much effort becoming better acquainted with these issues. Being “informed” in even a marginal sense is a fairly intensive and significant investment of time and energy. Don’t most of us have better things to do?
However, what I am left pondering in more seriousness, is how few people seem to realize they have a shallow understanding of many topics. In our lives we very regularly have to make assumptions, work from incomplete pictures, act from faith rather than knowledge, in other words, most of our day, every day, is made up of a series of our best guesses. That seems fine because individually we balance our certainty (or lack thereof) against the potential outcomes and what we will invest in the action. I guess that Campbell Ave is my quickest route to school, but if there happens to be an accident, it may take me a few minutes longer or I hop over to a different road. In this case the consequences of error in my choice are shallow even when my knowledge is relatively deep (the route I take every day). That seems intuitively rational. Continue reading