PEOPLE COME BACK FROM THE DEAD. There's a basement full of monsters, of alive people, dead people, alive-dead people. There's a person walking around in a burlap bag spewing fear gas. A drug that makes you invincible for several hours then turns your body to mush. A fear gas that turns the most beaucratic person into a violent, laughing Maniac. A toxin that releases your darkest desires. A dollmaker. Hypnotists. A psychic that actually tells the future. Acrobats. A guy had his stump turned into a mallet and a little chainsaw.
The person with a closed mind on any subject seldom gets ahead. Intolerance means that one has stopped acquiring knowledge. The most damaging forms of intolerance are those connected with religious, racial, and political differences of opinion [on both extremes of the spectrum].
– Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich - on The Major Causes of Failure
Death of Critical Thinking and AI to Closed-Mindedness and Racism
Wow! Talk about disappointment – not the paper mind you, but comments from a couple of individuals commenting on the topic.
A few days ago, I wanted to see what Joan Westenberg’s slant was on her paper “The Death of Critical Thinking Will Kill Us Long Before AI”.
Here are the first two paragraphs from the paper (only a 7-minute read):
We have witnessed a multi-generational decline in reading…
People in this site unironically block you for making jokes. I just find that the most amusing, retarded thing. It comes from their lack of understanding on the very fabric of our society, but not only that,this reveals the most disgusting truth about people: The need to be profound, the need to have a good taste in art, the fact that they think people fall under three categories: Serious,Dumb and crazy.
I can summarize my feelings with a comment I saw on a song by the band “ Blood on the dance floor”, song name:sexting. someone said something along the lines of “ I love this song, but the lyrics ruin it”. This person is obviously implying that music(a non-representational art) has an aesthetic definition of “good” and of what is “right”, and that aesthetic is probably the most pretentious and terrible of all: Art can never show the carnal,physical,honest,disgusting side of the human condition and psyche; it can only appeal to the intellectual side; It can only serve to perpetuate the blissful ignorance of pseudo-intelectuals .This comes from both narcissism and self-consciousness, and this is mindset is the reason for much,much bigger problems then an opion on a song.
The media and the establishment use the need people have to feel like they are a part of the solution for humanity to manipulate them,we see this in Hollywood,the music industry and on celebrity culture. People's need to be in the "right side of history" has brought us the most close-minded generation in decades. Hopefully Donald Trump will(probably without knowing so) end this once and for all.
These university students need to grow the hell up. Case in point:
“America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You've gotta want it bad, 'cause it's gonna put up a fight. It's gonna say, 'You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.'”
from The American President (1995, written by Aaron Sorkin)
It wasn't easy, but I had to say #Goodbye and #PartWays. #Criticism is required to find #truth.
So there I was, after discussing something off and on via Facebook with a few people all day, preparing to make a video (that I’m still going to make, I hope), when I happened to see something in my Facebook feed that immediately made me feel nauseated. All of the comments had been deleted, and instead was a comment from the original poster: Deleted all the comments. You want to rant, do it on…
I have been #vindicated, and it feels great. The #mob mentality, #conformity... #ChallengeAuthority
The week has been interesting. For those unaware, I posted a video heavily criticizing the Liberal Redneck Trae Crowder for being a disrespectful bigot and racist. Before you click Play, I’m gonna go ahead and warn you: if you’re okay with insulting Christians, or you’re okay with being racist against white people, then you’re not going to like what I have to say, and trust me when I tell you…
[Prefatory Note From Brian The Editor: What follows is a scathing portrait of a relatively common personality trait score. It is also a manifesto. It is also a paradox. Its author admits that he is not the highest scoring open-mindedness champion in the world, himself, and that if anything he only scores just high enough to know he scores just high enough (see text). Its author also admits that he could be wrong on even this count, and delusional, and closed-minded, and that he has no real way of telling for sure if he is in fact even minimally open-minded. The irony of this whole thing could be way over his head. That said, please enjoy.]
You may find novelty more exhausting than do people who score higher than you. The consequences for this are counter-intuitive. Open-minded people have more trouble than you do switching their attention from one new thing to another. They are still savoring the novelty of the previous thing, exploring every nook and cranny, analyzing it down to its finest and most abstract levels of detail. You grow bored more easily than they do, in other words, and so getting them to “Snap to” and “Stay with you” takes constant effort. You are easily annoyed with open-minded people, whom you view not as open-minded but as tedious and sensitive and prone to selfish over-exertion, and you probably try to avoid spending any kind of extended or intimate spans of time with them.
You may tend to prefer the path of least resistance, the path more taken, the path right there at your feet. Your beliefs about things change either never or else so minimally and gradually that hardly anybody ever notices. Your epiphanies, when seldom they do occur, are a huge deal to you, and but yet ring like burps in the ears of open-minded people.
Even if you are closed-minded and just don’t know it, you will unwittingly resist the complex, less-taken path toward admitting this ignorance, and instead calmly insist that you know that you are not closed-minded. This is the paradox of being so unskilled at a thing as not to know—as to be unable to know—how unskilled you are. The only way to learn whether you are unskilled or not is to meet a certain minimum of skill, and even then the only lesson you can learn is that you are currently somewhat skilled. Before this, you can only have false confidence, interspersed with at best maximally infrequent, strenuously clear-headed, readily discarded doubts.
You tend toward a basic, surface-level, detail-light impression of complex things. Granted, your understanding still has to feel accurate, meaningful, and internally consistent. That is, it needs to be well-simplified, so to speak.
Strangely, you are not very good at simplifying things by yourself. Simplification requires a complex understanding of simplicity. So you rely on outside help. Are you sure you’re good at finding it? Mostly, you gleefully ignore complexity, and not always on purpose. Too often, you proudly abhor it. “Quit over-thinking it!” “Stop making things so complicated!” “Keep it simple, stupid!”
The few complex and challenging things you do seem to love tend also to be easy on the eyes or ears, or else someone you know already loves them. Beethoven is pretty music. Mad Men is juicy drama. Neutral Milk Hotel is your best friend’s favorite band, and you will sit all the way through it one of these days, God willing. God, by the way, is Good. And so on, and so on. Frankly put, you’re drawn to complex things for the wrong reasons, and you persistently stop short of the challenging stuff (and will rage quit if it’s forced upon you).
You underestimate the reasons why open-minded people like the unapproachable things they like. You abhor, and regard as pretentious, their tendency to love something for its handling of certain themes, or for its brutal honesty, or for its cultural import. The sad truth is you can’t tell art from hokum, passion from practice, genuine aficionados from disingenuous posers, and so you treat them all with the same casual incredulity. You tell them they need to lighten up, quit taking themselves so seriously, and to remember that there’s no accounting for taste. After all, the easiest way to fake an appreciation for novelty, complexity, and diversity is to pretend to have transcended the need for these things altogether.
You like the art you like, and think the art you don’t like isn’t art.
You are neither happier nor unhappier than your open-minded cohorts on average, but you are missing out on their higher highs and lower lows. Accepting that you are closed-minded means accepting and/or rewording this fact: the depths of your emotions are shallower. You will also have to accept that since low open-mindedness is a stable factor, you will probably always be more or less like this. And in fact, as you grow older, statistics predict that you will get slightly worse. That last bit goes for all of us though.
Even if you were to dedicate yourself to becoming more open-minded, the odds would remain stacked against you. What you have isn’t a weakness to be overcome by willpower, exercised, transformed into a strength. It’s not a lack of anything, or some underdeveloped talent. It’s more like an anti-talent. Of the two opposing sets of biases and heuristics you could have subscribed to during your brain’s most critical (read: profoundly potent, near permanent) period of development--values like curiosity over certainty, individuality over community, experimentation over tradition, etc.--you chose (and/or did not choose) more members of the latter, close-minded set of values. This doesn’t mean you can’t value open-minded things, it just means you are coming at them with a handicap. It means you'll have to work at valuing them extra hard, and it won’t be much fun, and even at your best you won’t exactly blend in with the pros. If you’re cool with that though, and at peace with it, and don’t mind a little ribbing, then trust me you’ll be fine.
Best is just to admit your weakness, here. It’s no harder than admitting you don’t like to draw. Or you can’t sing. Or you don’t “get” math. You’re not the creative type. We only mock the rubes who refuse to admit they’re rubes, who won’t acknowledge the tragedy of their position, and who haven’t figured out how best to live honestly with themselves.
Hard as it may be, you can admit you’re shamefully closed-minded all day long, but this won’t do you much good by itself. It’s hardly an excuse for anything. What is truly needed is follow-through, like, say, an apology for any condescension or bull-headedness, and then a polite request for a simplified breakdown of your opponent’s position. Properly executed, it should be excruciating and humiliating. But if the person you’re arguing with is truly as open-minded as they purport to be, then they should jump at the chance to humor you. Challenge them to try. Be overt, since you’re not good at seeming curious. But then, and here will be the hardest part, be prepared to accede understanding when and if they should finally get their point across.
Find someone who you know for certain scores high on open-mindedness--your closest whack-o genius--and implore them to be your trusted adviser on matters of complexity, imagination, tolerance, et cetera. Let them help you learn to recognize your own bad habits as they occur, to find any patterns there, and to figure out how best you might reverse course. It’s tough and will stay tough forever. But you can try. That’s what you have to do with weaknesses. You have to try not to have them, even though you always have them.
If you made it all the way to the end of this, you’re probably in the clear.
