https://medium.com/@johnlicato/the-philo...0f7e7d935b
EXCERPT: In a dark basement, illuminated solely by the light of a laptop, sits the overthinker. His goal is malicious; he seeks to ruin your buzz, man, and he is a self-styled “philosopher,” wasting our time with navel-gazing, unanswerable questions like “what is the meaning of life?” He argues semantics on the internet, demanding that undefinable words be defined before actually addressing any arguments. Internet debate is a game of throwing poorly-thought-out opinions at each other, and he cowardly refuses to commit to a side. The overthinker thinks deeply, but not clearly. The solution: he should stay away from harmful thinking, especially if it produces no immediate, concrete benefits to our personal lives, and fight our natural programming to think too much.
That’s the motivation behind a recent piece by Zat Rana, entitled “The Philosopher’s Problem: When and Why Thinking Can Be Harmful”. Unfortunately, Rana’s piece is written in a way that can be interpreted as crossing the line into anti-intellectualism. I’m going to argue that broadly urging people to think less, especially when that urging is done incautiously, is enormously harmful. If YouTube and Facebook comments on political articles are any indication, two things are obvious: (1) generally speaking, most people are not “programmed to think deeply”, and (2) our society is desperately in need of people to think more, and encouragement to do so, even when it leads to thinking that some might consider unproductive....
MORE: https://medium.com/@johnlicato/the-philo...0f7e7d935b
EXCERPT: In a dark basement, illuminated solely by the light of a laptop, sits the overthinker. His goal is malicious; he seeks to ruin your buzz, man, and he is a self-styled “philosopher,” wasting our time with navel-gazing, unanswerable questions like “what is the meaning of life?” He argues semantics on the internet, demanding that undefinable words be defined before actually addressing any arguments. Internet debate is a game of throwing poorly-thought-out opinions at each other, and he cowardly refuses to commit to a side. The overthinker thinks deeply, but not clearly. The solution: he should stay away from harmful thinking, especially if it produces no immediate, concrete benefits to our personal lives, and fight our natural programming to think too much.
That’s the motivation behind a recent piece by Zat Rana, entitled “The Philosopher’s Problem: When and Why Thinking Can Be Harmful”. Unfortunately, Rana’s piece is written in a way that can be interpreted as crossing the line into anti-intellectualism. I’m going to argue that broadly urging people to think less, especially when that urging is done incautiously, is enormously harmful. If YouTube and Facebook comments on political articles are any indication, two things are obvious: (1) generally speaking, most people are not “programmed to think deeply”, and (2) our society is desperately in need of people to think more, and encouragement to do so, even when it leads to thinking that some might consider unproductive....
MORE: https://medium.com/@johnlicato/the-philo...0f7e7d935b