Jul 16th, 2020 - Category: Communication
Over the last several decades, mainstream thinking has become more and more influenced by a deluge of online information and opinions. It started with a trickle in the 1980s when CNN became the first 24 hour all news network. In the 1990s, personal computer ownership increased to 35% and services like American Online (AOL) became popular communication tools. Next, AOL and their Instant Messenger (AIM) inspired the first mass messaging services and “chat rooms.” In the 2000s, these services matured into the massive global communication tools we use today like Twitter and Facebook. At each step, more and more of the general population gained access to a platform that could reach the entire world. We now have instantaneous access to information from every field and every part of the planet. However despite all this information, even when a person tries to focus only on information from confirmed “experts,” there still seem to be major disagreements on basic scientific “facts.”
The result is that it is becoming necessary to think for ourselves: fact checking everything and filtering information through our own critical thinking. This is difficult. Richard Feynman (the famous physicist) has talked about applying critical thinking and skepticism to our own thoughts, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself… and you are the easiest person to fool.” Another famous thinker, Derek Sivers, explains in his most recent book “People say that your first reaction is the most honest, but I disagree. Your first reaction is usually outdated. Either it’s an answer you came up with long ago and now use instead of thinking, or it’s a knee-jerk emotional response to something in your past.”
So how can anybody hope to uncover the truth about anything? Maybe one way is to approach subjects like scientists: embracing uncertainty while still making every reasonable effort to test ideas out with as little personal bias as possible. It’s a tall order and the implication here seems to be letting go of searching for an absolute answer. Our sources of information are always going to be limited in one way or another. For example, it wasn’t too long ago that human flight was considered impossible by experts. How many times have foods like coffee, wine, butter, sugar, etc. gone from the “bad” list to the “good” list?
We think our modern world is complex, but taking a close look at nature reveals an intrinsic complexity in seemingly simple subjects. One of my favorite examples of this is graphically demonstrated in the famous film “Power of 10.”
“Powers of Ten takes us on an adventure in magnitudes. Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, this famous film transports us to the outer edges of the universe. Every ten seconds we view the starting point from ten times farther out until our own galaxy is visible only a s a speck of light among many others. Returning to Earth with breathtaking speed, we move inward — into the hand of the sleeping picnicker — with ten times more magnification every ten seconds. Our journey ends inside a proton of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule in a white blood cell.”
Again, none of this means that we should give up on experts or scientific thinking. As another great person once said, “It is never a question of belief; the only scientific attitude one can take on any subject is whether it is true. The law of gravitation worked as efficiently before Newton as after him. The cosmos would be fairly chaotic if its laws could not operate without the sanction of human belief.” This fairly advanced comment was exchanged between two people who already were practicing critical thinking to a high degree.
On a lighter note, the comic Iliza Shlesinger’s recent monologue on the Jimmy Kimmel show was a humorous exploration of the perils of modern communication. She put it in terms of so-called “cancel culture,” but it was really more about being compassionate to each other as we adapt to these radically new forms of communication and thinking. Wise words Iliza!