2020/12/12

Opinions are worthless

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There are four major content categories in my opinion; information, entertainment, opinion and scientific contributions.
 
I have never attempted to provide scientific contributions with this blog, and I have largely ignored news. It was always about some information and some opinion, and rather more of the latter. 

Now I'm a bit in a crisis as an author, for I have concluded a while ago that I'm at an age where I simply don't give a shit about the opinions of people any more. More about that later, but the immediate issue is that someone who doesn't give a shit about anyone's opinions any more maybe shouldn't write a blog that's more opinion than plain information. And the entertainment factor is limited to a few images in the link dump blog posts on each first Saturday of the month.

So why don't I give a shit about opinions any more? Well, there's a simple reason why opinions so often do clash: Humans are incredibly bad at forming conclusions/opinions. This isn't even about the availability of information, about experiences or about attention. Humans are outright terrible at the entire process of forming an opinion. It happened way too often that I write or say one thing, and the other person reads/hears something completely different. It's commonly "Trip to Jerusalem", just with two people and the result isn't funny. Most people can be confronted by a most solid fact and completely fail to appreciate or accept it. I've observed over and over again that people also fail at basic logic, such as theory of sets. Logical fallacies and psychological self-defence mechanisms reign supreme.

The opinions of individuals are crap, for individuals are crappy at forming an opinion. Our hope lies in the hopefully functioning decisionmaking of crowds and in getting lucky with picking the people for positions of great power [sarcastic laughter].

The concept that there are people whose opinions should be heard is bollocks. Information (facts) should be disseminated, but opinions? Why care? The opinions of individuals are but a detour between information and collective actions.

What a depressing thought; so much that's getting written or recorded is probably worse than even the most stupid forms of entertainment.

And the most depressing thing is that my opinion-forming is probably compromised by the same problems.

So sometime around Christmas time I'll take the time to re-think this. Maybe I'll shift my blogging style, maybe the subconsciousness will insist on doing things as usual. A switch to scientific discourse style would cause a horrible workload. I would suddenly be compelled to look up all that info and link to/quote it instead of simply recalling and using it.

S O 

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de
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2020/12/05

Link dump December 2020

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https://9gag.com/gag/aD4yAv9

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https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/china-has-done-human-testing-create-biologically-enhanced-super-soldiers-n1249914

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https://www.maritimejournal.com/news101/power-and-propulsion/dolphin-inspired-propeller-alternative-is-just-a-fluke

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https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/18/australia-afghanistan-war-crimes-438028

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https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/12/02/the-us-is-no-longer-a-more-developed-country-than-us-442407

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[added later:]

Germany appears to have the American sickness now. Covid spiked, but we didn't succeed at pushing down the daily case figures for a month. That's a society failure mostly known from the U.S.. The usual sequence of events in OECD countries is that an exponential growth becomes visible after a week or two, people and government react, and the daily new cases figures crash to previous level within a few weeks. This time, they didn't in Germany - in stark contrast to Belgium, for example. Even Austria is making more progress (albeit on a worse level).

I don't think that we can blame the tiny but loudmouth moron faction that agitates in effect pro-pandemic. The real problem is in my opinion a lack of self-discipline (I'm no fanatic hand-washer any more, either) among the general population (and in my region especially the retail employees).

It's a pity, for the Christmas time family reunions and festivities would be much better and in many cases much more complete if we still had 1/30th the daily cases figures as we had during the summer.

The ponderous decentralized yet mostly consensual decisionmaking in federal Germany seemed to work acceptably well in this crisis until recently. Now we can be glad that the federal government monopolizes foreign policy and defence policy (thought eh states have kind of embassies to the EU).

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[German] https://twitter.com/HonkHase/status/1334171963451957251

[German] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/geheimdienste-bundesnachrichtendienst-abhoeren-gesetzentwurf-1.5133098

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