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Continued contradictions become nonsense: illogical, irrational closed systems perpetuated by mass-concensus, dogma, and momentum. The danger of engaging, even to critique, is to become corrupted (contradictory) yourself.
To avoid corruption, we must return to bottom-up rationality instead of top-down nonsense.
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Frustration at contradictions is an alert: the system is not serving us.
For instance: we have starvation amidst abundance. We are more connected than ever, yet people feel more alone and despondent.
When a system’s goals are out of alignment, either the stated goals are lies, or the system is not built to accept adaptive feedback.
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After reading a social media article you agree with, studies show that it further polarizes you into your prior beliefs if offered the opposite point of view. The opposing extreme is too foreign and alien to draw you to the middle.
When you’re shooting for a target you do not aim for the edges (polarized views); you aim for the center. If you want the conversion to a thoughtful reality, aim for the center instead of radical evangelism.
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Magic is in you, you can’t become magic.
Technology, on the other hand, promises empowerment through application and effort.
However, technology often becomes anti-egalitarian by limiting access, rendering it’s promise back into the realm of magic.
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Are you using technology or is it using you? more complicated: are you using health, or is it using you?
Under the guise of use, we find reliance. Unexamined lay the imperatives of deeper programming driving us.
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Almost all of our values (and thus ideas) are based around the preeminence of humans: declaring humans as most valuable and worth protecting at any cost.
This is obviously a contradictory bias.
Humans work to displace and victimize ourselves with superior intelligence (artificial intelligence) while destroying the planet we rely on. To protect humans, at any cost, we would 1) not make ourselves obsolete and 2) cease to be a threat to the long-term sustainability and survival of any superior intelligence.
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Deciduous trees use vital resources to grow leaves, only to discard them in the fall as a blanket of decay. Next year, they do it all over again.
Our economic, rational self rejects this logic of recirculation for a linear logic of grasping, owning and hoarding. This is, clearly, unnatural.
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To conflate profundity with complexity is common, but what if profound solutions are simple yet have infinite depth?
We are disposed to think novel solutions must be complex, requiring vast intelligence (otherwise we would have already figured it out), while in reality the solution may be hiding in simplicity.
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We rely on method: we expect results and discovery without needing to understand. Simply follow the rules.
In building the “how to” checklist we democratize complex techniques and knowledge, but do not make innovators. We produce very good followers.
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The human mind treats rhymes as more truthful, equating clever with correct. We crave simplicity and elegance in our laws and principles, as if our ability to grasp or recite the law makes it more true.
The paradox is that we only really need to understand a handful of simple, foundational truths well to do well, but these do not imply the world is simply summed up.
examples of elegant or rhyming truths, that are not always true: E = mc2, an apple a day keeps the doctor away
examples of foundational principles: logic, inversion, falsifiability, and non-linear statistics (probability)
