feeling dumb
I frequently feel very stupid. I am not an expert on anything. Worse, there are important deficits in my knowledge - not specific facts, but an ignorance about scientific method, about how to analyse statistics, a limited mathematical knowledge, and a poor ability to construct and analyse arguments. This means that whenever I encounter arguments I disagree with it is difficult to formulate a response on anything more than a reactive level.
It does not help that writers and thinkers who have helped to shape my opinions through their writing appear to have such seriousness, clarity, and the discipline to support that with research. And having not grown up with many friends, having been more interested in what adults had to say than my peers when I was child, and having a greatly elevated sense of self it is an unpleasant truth that I will compare myself with great thinkers. I am not a great thinker, but at the same time I constantly revisit what I think and believe.
One thing I have found immensely frustrating over a lot of my life is a progressive hardening of ideological positions. I am not sure why this is - I have an unsubstantiated idea that it might be that since the cold war dissolved people are less certain what they know about anything, that there is no longer an enemy. But since almost the whole of the last century was poisoned by two world wars and a cold war we have become accustomed to hate. It has become normal to adopt antagonistic, intractable poses against those with whom we disagree. It is no longer possible to negotiate and accommodate, instead arguments have to be won by whatever means are possible.
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It does not help that writers and thinkers who have helped to shape my opinions through their writing appear to have such seriousness, clarity, and the discipline to support that with research. And having not grown up with many friends, having been more interested in what adults had to say than my peers when I was child, and having a greatly elevated sense of self it is an unpleasant truth that I will compare myself with great thinkers. I am not a great thinker, but at the same time I constantly revisit what I think and believe.
One thing I have found immensely frustrating over a lot of my life is a progressive hardening of ideological positions. I am not sure why this is - I have an unsubstantiated idea that it might be that since the cold war dissolved people are less certain what they know about anything, that there is no longer an enemy. But since almost the whole of the last century was poisoned by two world wars and a cold war we have become accustomed to hate. It has become normal to adopt antagonistic, intractable poses against those with whom we disagree. It is no longer possible to negotiate and accommodate, instead arguments have to be won by whatever means are possible.
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