When I was young I had plenty of opportunities for going along
with groups built around some ideology. I think I would go as far
as saying I was looking for a group to belong to. And to some
extent my wish was that the group would be somehow
"revolutionary". A group that changed the world.
I never found that group though. The ideological, revolutionary
sort. And one that I felt comfortable with. The problem with
each of them was that I had a certain kind of intuition about
people. Sort of a bullshit detector. It didn't detect bullshit
per se, but instead it detected if the group had a strong
tendency to deny evidence that was challenging some part of
the group ideology.
This detector has been extremely valuable to me in professional
life. I would have been completely in the weeds if it wasn't for
my ability to remove myself from the sphere of influence of
people who are internally too convinced of their own ideas to
consider re-plotting a course before it turns terminal.
Today I started wondering what is happening to this detector
in our society as we move deeper into the world where people
have grown up not grounded in reality but instead on computers
Will the new generations have this ability at all?
The reason I would assume it will disappear is that people will
not know they are missing anything. The golden standard of
communication being a jump-cut video, you will not be able to see
the signs. They are subtle things. Too long pause, too short
pause, uncalled for aggressiveness and so on. These are things
that can only be spotted if you listen to a person relatively
long time. You can do this with long podcasts or videos, but
I think that if you start without knowing about the possibility,
then the chances are you won't spot it in these technologically
mediated forms of communication.
I don't like to make this sound more than it is. It is a way to
sometimes be able to tell when a person has a bias against
rationality. Rationality is not a standard to choose your friends
with. But it is quite useful when choosing which source of
information to trust.
