I’m not complaining here, just making an observation. Far too many people (even intelligent and educated people) lack real balanced critical thinking skills. You may be able to provide strong arguments for or against something, and pick someone else’s reasoning apart, but the doesn’t neccesarily mean you are able to see things clearly and think critically about something.
Jump on the...
Even the best of us, st times, have the tendency to jump on a bandwagon and once we decide something is good, we only mention the good things about it without spending time to consider the faults or potential problems with it. This is especially true when there is an obvious positive aspects to it. Then from there anyone who questions potential problems that aren’t yet imminent is considered a downer, told they are thinking too much or just flat out ignored.
We all seem to be capable of critical thinking at first but once we latch on to some idea that we like, we suddenly lose this ability. On the other hand, if we dislike something or first notice it’s negative aspects, we become so critical that they aren’t capable of seeing the positive in anything, or become obsessed with conspiracy theories. For all we know some of these theories may be true, but belief in these theories with certainty based on a little evidence is just as bad as belief with certainty that the theories are not true.
We are no better
This community is really no different. I remember Hard fork 19 clearly. People were just happy that their last payouts from before the upgrade were significantly larger due to old voting habits on the new payment system. You couldn’t question the long term effects of the changes without being shot down.
There are a few people who do great things for the platform. It doesn’t mean I agree with everything they do and often, if they have power here, they generally do what they want without much contemplation or insight from others, and most of what they hear from smaller users is also blind support anyway. It goes the other way too. If great minnows don’t make money, it must be because “whales are evil”.
People blindly rave about blockchain without contemplating the deeper implications of the technology and how it could potentially be used. Buzz words and phrases like “disruption” and “decentralization” and “freedom” get thrown around without much thought about what they mean. Most people generally try to find an “expert” that they trust and adopt a majority of their opinions or mix and match. I do this too but I try to see things that they may have missed and always assume there are a few.
The blockchain is forever. It may have the potential to be anonymous but with KYC and social media platforms on the blockchain, it becomes perfectly transparent. Steemit may not give your information directly to third parties but that information is all available directly on google, they give it to anyone. Decentralization of what? Of money? What does that mean? Money still attracts money so even if you have decentralized data or decentralized exchanges, the power will not neccesarily (or likely) be decentralized.
You may be able to “monetize your data” in the future, but we still don’t have a clear picture of what this will look like and there will still be means of using metadata to find out anything about us without our approval or how social pressure may make life more difficult for those of us who just don’t want to share something.
“The banks are all shitting themselves”. Please. The powers that Be are not idiots. Nor are they pure evil incarnate as those overly critical will suggest.
Steemit: The future! or Steemit: A Shallow Shithole!
Either “Steemit is the future!” and going to solve all our problems, or “it’s a shithole that is getting worse and worse every day”. How many people are willing to admit that it's most likely somewhere in between? Yesterday posts that raved about all the positive aspects of steemit were constantly trending. Now it seems like a desire to give up and find something new, something better, is the new trend. Nevermind what we can do together to fix this place.
Are you running away?
Recently with steemit competitors popping up there seems to be a lot of what I would call “blind faith” being put into a certain project. I admit I am also interested, and I appreciate people taking an active role in trying to steer it towards becoming the best platform it can become. I want to help, and I don’t want to give up on steemit either. I want strong communities and a free exchange of ideas to be the norm everywhere, so I don’t fel the need to choose a side.
But I hear very little critical analysis over what might potentially be wrong with this platform from the people who have taken an interest in it. I find it disheartening because I actually want to take a more active role in helping this new platform succeed, but I don’t blindly support things and a whitepaper and some “credentials” aren’t really enough for me to start raving about anything. I wish there were more critical questions being asked and more of a desire to seek out the flaws, not to be negative but to try to help fix them. I wish people weren’t so eager to jump on the bandwagon without first getting a more direct understanding of not only a “philosophy” (which is merely words), or a CEO, but understanding more about how they plan on dealing with certain inevitable problems and what kind of user base and material they are going to attract with their marketing and governance, also what implications that governance model will have.
What is lacking? Why is critical thinking so hard?
This really relates to my last post about how people tend to be leaders or followers and how few people are used to collaborating from an equal footing. It also has to do with imagination and how we are stifled from the time we are young. I don’t think for a second that most people are truly “stupid” or incapable by nature, nor do I think I’m better than them, and I’m sure I have my blind spots as well.
There is also a tendency to oversimplify things. Relying on stereotypes all the time is a perfect example. So is the idea that stereotypes are always bad. Essentially, people want to feel they have a grasp on the situation and so they oversimplify it in order to ease their insecurities.
The fact is, no one has a full grasp on anything, not Stephen Hawking, not Alan Watts, not Noam Chomsky, not Dan Larimer, not Vitalik Buterin, not you, and not me. We need to constantly recognize this and always allow for a chance to find flaws in our thinking and reasoning.
We need to be more agnostic towards information and less polarized.
I am not being negative here. I don’t propose we take a nihilistic approach that we can never understand things, or that there is one right answer we should all agree upon. I don’t think that blockchain is certainly going to lead us towards dystopia. In the end, it depends on us.
I believe that by being positive and proactive, we can create the best possible outcome for ourselves. BUT that positivity needs to come from a well rounded understanding, attention to context, and with attention to our own biases.
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Confessions of the Damaged - a collection of short stories
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