Cutting Through the Bullshit
My Dad likes to often remind me that “The world isn’t black and white, it is many different shades of grey”. And that’s all well and good and I have now lived long enough to fully subscribe to this idea. Unfortunately, there are just certain discussions in society where the debate always feels far more black and white.
A really easy and forever topical example is Elon Musk: Good guy or bad guy? There’s a large group of people who think he’s a tax dodging, COVID denying right wing apologist who abuses workers and tweets such nonsense that nobody should take him seriously.
And then there’s the other rather large camp of people who think he is basically the modern messiah: a man who is not only disrupting one industry, but a handful all at the same time. He is single handedly moving the world onto renewable energy sources through Tesla and trying to make our species multi planetary with Space X. Oh and his side projects include revolutionizing public transportation and trying to build the world’s greatest AI and getting it into people’s brains.
The views on Elon are about as polarizing as they come, and if you knew nothing of the man then it might be hard to form your own opinion on the man because of the tribal nature of both his fans and his naysayers. It might be hard to you know, cut through the bullshit.
In this humble writer’s opinion, Elon Musk is up there with the greatest innovators of our age, however he still has many faults. I find myself wholeheartedly on the bandwagon of support for his endeavors, while also disagreeing with basically every tweet he does these days. It’s okay to have a nuanced opinion of someone or something. It’s grey, not black and white.
Now of course Elon isn’t the only polarizing topic in this world: Ever tried to decide between buying an Xbox or a PlayStation? Or a Mac and a PC? or even voting democrat or republican? It gets awfully tribalistic out there, and it can be really hard to find informed opinions which consider both sides fairly.
Why am I suddenly writing about polarization 5 years after 2016 which saw Donald Trump get elected and Brexit happen? Well, I’ve recently started attempting to learn about the world of cryptocurrencies…
The world of crypto is about as tribalistic and polarized as any I have come across. Merely trying to learn more about a given cryptocurrencies pros and cons on a Redditt thread is constantly interrupted by why this other crypto coin is far superior. It’s suuper hard to cut through the bullshit here.
(and maybe this is just a Redditt problem in particular, but if anyone has any good sources of crypto information that isn’t Redditt, please hmu)
If I want to like Ethereum, do I have to at the same time hate Bitcoin?! Can’t I just generally think that crypto is the future of the world and hedge my bets that one of these coins will end up doing well, and then we’ll all rally around that one? Or maybe this isn’t like deciding the democratic nominee for president every 4 years.
Now this is where I move to the next steps of how we can change the world to be less polarized, but you know what? I’ve got nothing. This is a full on societal issue that runs across topics and demographics, maybe it’s just hard wired into our DNA to have really triablistic opinions on certain things.
I’m going to continue my search for informative neutral “grey” voices, and subscribe to them and read them, and make sure that for every story I read on CNN, I also check out how Fox News is reporting the same thing (see also: BTC Redditt vs ETH Redditt). We have to be the change we want to see in the world, and only by understanding both sides of the argument can we make informed decisions.
1st April 2021
