It’s a bit odd but…
I’ve recently been feeling like a lot of what I say and write is redundant, in that others have already expressed similar if not better ideas in the past with far better exposition and depth.
Though these great ideas can be often scattered all over the place, the peculiar way my mind works leads me to believe that everyone else has at least the same knowledge as me, if not more. That is, if something is known to me—if I see a connection between two distant ideas—others will too, so I need not elaborate further or even present them together, since everyone already knows.
This is absurd. Yet, this very delusion has been killing my motivation as of late, thinking that all the knowledge I have—the books I’ve read (and the books I’m still reading), along with the ability to think and contemplate—should be completely redundant, since everyone else also has the ability to think and read; if they weren’t able to do either, they wouldn’t be able to read anything I write anyway, rendering it equally pointless.
Trying to get over this hurdle will be a significant challenge. At the moment, all I want to do is just point people at things to read instead of basically rewriting the very same ideas slightly differently on my website, as if pointing people at things will magically give them the knowledge they need. It brings the immediate contradiction: if they already possess at least all my knowledge, why I be able to provide an answer to any of their questions? Wouldn’t their questions be, by definition, outside my realm of knowledge—something neither of us can answer?
There are still some questions only I can answer
All that being said, there should, theoretically, still be certain knowledge that others cannot obtain from reading or thinking alone, and that is my personal experience. Instead of trying to write about scientific topics only to find out others have presented the very same ideas with far more eloquence and erudition than I could imagine, I plan to simply maintain my book list and highlight any interesting things I read, while keeping the rest of the blog mostly personal and casual. Let’s leave the expert stuff to the experts, shall we?
I still love science and philosophy, and I still envy those who write essays with tons of useful references (okay, the number of contradictory and poor references I’ve seen makes me wonder if certain writers—even those with PhDs—only add them for the sake of adding them, but let’s ignore that) that make them seem more credible, but I cannot motivate myself to submit relatively inferior work when there are so many great books to read.
Recently, I’ve been reading Pseudoscience: The Conspiracy Against Science, which started out by immediately demolishing my prejudice against people who subscribe to pseudoscientific beliefs. It demonstrates that, all things considered, most of us siding with science aren’t actually all that different. If you believe that religious people or conspiracy theorists are necessarily stupid, you’ll be in for a surprise: people who believe in science can also be equally stupid.
The key takeaway is that it’s not about what we think; it’s about how we think. As for learning how to think… well, I’m afraid there’s no right answer, but philosophical reasoning offers some clues (again, doing the thing where I assume people just magically know where to find the information I possess). There may also very well be a correlation between pseudoscientific beliefs and relatively lower intelligence, but point is that evaluating someone’s intelligence based on that alone may be less accurate than you think (especially vice versa).
It also explains why many otherwise well-educated and scientifically-literate people can be religious or conspiracy theorists without experiencing much inner contradictory turmoil: they’re using the same (flawed?) method for acquiring their beliefs. An example may be a misplacement of trust and poor/inconsistent evaluation of proper authoritative sources, landing them in different camps without even realising it. Just as one can blindly believe a wacky conspiracy theory, one can also blindly believe in scientific theories.
Another challenge to writing proper essays
Is that I tend to ramble and derail instead of staying on topic (like what I literally just stopped myself from doing), writing incoherently as a result by trying to present too many different things at once. I once tried to describe the way I think to someone else, and the closest I managed to describe it was by using a bolt of lightning as an analogy:
Notice how messy it is with all its forks? That’s not what a proper essay should look like. Only one of them is actually reaching the ground—the one people actually care about; the rest are tangents that lead to dead ends.
This is in tandem with presenting ideas that don’t really mean anything, potentially confusing people who aren’t quite sure which of my words they should actually take seriously, and which are just meaningless tidbits for thought. They would if they knew me as well as I knew myself, but this falls into the same earlier trap of believing that others know everything I know.
Closing
At the risk of letting this post run on for too long (it was supposed to be only half as long as this), I’ll hurry up with the conclusion before things get out of hand.
In summary, I’ll be steering this blog more towards my personal life instead of trying to write better-researched essays that spend months in draft states and never actually get finished (my backlog keeps growing by the day which is unsustainable in the long run). Looking at my post history, it may seem that I’m already doing so, but that’s only because they don’t get stuck as drafts for eternity.
In other words, there will be more posts to come.