There are four major content categories in my opinion; information, entertainment, opinion and scientific contributions.
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
