Obvious or False?

New and true: it’s obvious* or false

* Ah, actually someone might have said this before – I don’t know.

False or Obvious: the blogger’s dilemma

After blogging for any time on the internet, you may become aware that every idea people come up with is placed under one of two categorizations; it’s either obvious or false.

False we can understand, but what’s the use of ‘obvious’? 

Obvious is for when someone comes up with an idea that is actually agreed with but people don’t want to credit them with it.  Therefore they say that it’s ‘unoriginal’. 
I’m guilty of doing it too.

I’m as guilty as anyone.

“Your blog would make an excellent handout to be given to phil 101 students on their first day.  Have you ever considered becoming a philosophy lecturer or something like that?”

– Me to John

So you get called ‘unoriginal’.  Where do you go from there?  Probably you have a long debate about whether you’re original or not.

So at that point there’s several people arguing about originality.  Sitting in their houses in different corners of the globe.

Someone may be typing away on a computer and those physically close to them may ask “What are you doing?”

That’s a very legitimate question.

Do they say “I’m devoting some time to convincing someone that they’re not original?”

What kind of activity is being performed here?

It’s clear there is some kind of ‘fail’ because there can be no benefit to anyone.  The reason that people still do it is that for most of the history of humankind, if someone communicated with you it meant they were close to you and therefore relevant.  Now it no longer means that, but our brains can no longer conceive of any other way.

This generally means that blogging in a social sense is quite useless, but it might help to hone conversational skills for genuine social encounters.

Then there’s the dumb reciprocalness of it.  If i go away and comment on a bunch of people’s blogs, and especially if I say nice things, then they will view and comment on mine.

Its like if only the people who wrote letters ‘to the editor’ of the newspaper got to write stories.

There’s the ‘star factor‘:  If Richard Dawkins wrote a blog with some bad argument against religion everyone would just call him wonderful no matter what it was.  You can check out this phenomena on his website if you like – maybe even add to it!

There’s the temporariness.  Only the latest blog matters, and then only if the latest blog is recent.

That’s enough about the crappyness of blogging for now.  But it’s all part of the buildup to the end of philosophy.

“See you at the end of philosophy”