[5]The short thinking:
Especially at ILP (ilovephilosophy.com) I feel I have noticed many short thinkers, and what I mean by this, is that they put little energy into the process of forming a thought or reading of an idea. Opinions are thrust forward before they have a chance to fully form or mature. I call this short thinking. On the other hand, the babbling philosophers have put too much time into one idea or set of ideas, but at least they can forward somewhat matured ideas. Matured ideas may even be uncommon, so that the obsessive thinker can become famous due to his knowledge of details. In some cases it might be so that the short thinker acts this way out of habit, while in other cases it might be that the short thinker acts in such a way due to his genes. There could be other factors besides. To me it seems that the short thinkers are almost inhumanly wrong when forming judgement, even misunderstanding simple ideas. I would wonder how they could function in daily life, but I have seen even more amazing foolishness as well which was even more mysterious as to how the person could function in daily life. The illusion of efficiency, it seems to me that in some cases this exists, so that the person feels they are being efficient when they put only a small amount of time into specific thoughts. What I’m trying to describe is the inner sensation of speed and correctness. A real philosopher is critical of himself, and he should notice if he is making too much error. However, a short thinker will probably not even take the time to reconsider himself. Due to the error-ridden nature of the human mind, I consider it vital to reconsider and question one’s self, in moderation, but often.
I wanted to post this because I think it is a very real problem.
It is a part of a text file I was working on.
This is a worthwhile subject to explore on a philosophy forum. One might argue the true mark of an environmentally aware thinker is the ability to put forth a ‘tall’ or otherwise strong and well-formed idea, and have it conform to the succinctness that favors the internet. I think the average time spend on a given website is something like 51-57 seconds.
Dan you’ve gotten much better at this over the years. Faust is very good at this, in my opinion. A few others.
I’m not very good at this on forums, but when I write articles and sales copy professionally I am obsessed with trimming the fat.
I think what a good idea must conform to is based mostly on the finer things we understand about nature and life.
Thanks for checking out my thread. I’m hoping someone will learn something, but also I made this post out of personal desire as well.
Your threads are so predictable.
You start by attacking the entire Forum by singling out a cadre of people that you accuse of something you find unacceptable without ever looking to yourself. What happens then is that the thread tends to continue, and you disappear because the content has moved far beyond your original vision to a place you did not consider.
Your opening statement comes complete with a system of caricatures and polemic that is usually overblown and exaggerated. invective phrases:
obsessive thinker
inhumanly wrong
misunderstanding simple ideas
babbling philosophers
amazing foolishness
error-ridden
It seems to me that what you mistake for ‘short thinking’ is actually the result of a long process in the writer that you have no evidence for. Short answers are equally likely to be the result of a long history of forming an opinion, and such a person writing it is probably concerned not to waster his time on a person (you) that has already made up their mind that they are not as clever as him.
But the evidence of your lack of staying power on your own threads leads me to think that whilst you might spend a little time devising insulting introductions you yourself do not have sufficient long thinking to stay the course and to engage with others to the degree required to make such bold and insulting statements. As you rarely follow up on your own threads you are hardly in a position to make such bold and insulting comments that whilst denigrating others their purpose seems to be to aggrandise your own opinion of yourself.
Your last rather amusing example was your claim that aliens had given human kind the idea of ‘magic’ then left without trance? Ummmm? How long did you take to think-up that one?
I suppose its one way to enjoy an ad hominem without the consequences, but what you are doing is ad homines which seems always to exclude you. AM I to conclude that you are one of these aliens?
=D>
A great example of why ‘short posts’ are not evidence of ‘short thinking’: you have encapsulated everything I said with this witty piece of double irony.
People like hobbes almost seem as if they are here to fight instead of learn or teach.
Why is my OP so bad? Do you really think it was my intention to insult everyone?
I’m describing a category of philosophical error.
A big part of philosophy is spotting error, and ridding one’s self of it.
One way we understand error is through category.
This is exactly the sense I get every time I read him. A lot of resentment. The forum is already too full of witty double ironies that don’t lead anywhere or do justice to anyone.
Or if he can see no error in his thinking he should look to test his theory or position by thought experiment or logical mapping or some such standard against which he can honestly measure his ideas. Do you think short thinking often involves willful ignorance? Or do you think it is more often the result of pure ignorance?
Also, what did you mean in saying short thinkers are almost inhumanly wrong? What’s the distinction between wrong and inhumanly wrong?
As far as I can tell, it comes from a malformed mind, but that can happen any number of ways.
Ignorance is where we all start. Ideally we make a progression out of ignorance into modern enlightenment as we grow up, or better than modern enlightenment, but I feel that physically in daily life I have met some people here in canada which are the epitome of modern enlightenment. They don’t start shit. They’re respectful. They learn each day.
In that part of the writing, I was referring to how the wrongness almost seems inhuman to me, not that it is “objectively” inhuman. It’s just how it appears to me. I would have thought that life would no longer be possible for a person who was too wrong, because living does require a sort of truth, in daily life.
So you are proposing that there’s a correct way of thinking and a wrong way. Or might we say it’s more about how we handle our thoughts or utilize them to achieve what it is we want. Is there another instrument besides thought … another recourse? Probably not when it comes to wanting to understand something about why thought proceeds the way it does.
We may not know much about how to live life but, if it is our wish to know how to accomplish something as simple as just allowing one another to freely express ourselves in a cooperative environment where our survival is the significant purpose, then the ‘how’ of living and thinking beyond that might create an awkwardness among us. If thinking long or short on the issue of how to exist becomes more important than existence itself then we will be always going back and forth with answer after answer and reevaluation after reevaluation and perhaps even resort to hostility and aggression in attempts to win the others over to our side. Often times there is knowledge as being used for power playing and not for just the sake of knowledge. We could go on … I don’t know Dan, maybe it’s what’s behind the thinking – the aim or goal of it and not so much the length or depth of it.
The OP opens a topic expressing a critical view of a particular subject. Another person replies with a critical opinion of the OP’s original critical view, to which the OP replies with a critical opinion of the other person’s critical opinion of the OP’s original critical view. I wonder if the same progression would have occurred had the OP opened a “positive” or “complimentary” topic.
This is the stuff that Philosopher’s dreams are made of. Group hug
I don’t think Dan is suggesting an absolute wrong or right way of thinking; I think the issue is being raised because people may post their initial thoughts - which as concepts are fleeting - without preemptively evaluating them first.
Any person’s thought (regardless how small) is of course completely valid. It inherently makes sense to the conceptor, however it may need further explanation for the wider audience to understand. Without this additional detail, we are left with conjecture, supposition and sometimes confusion. An example might be, “I think xyz”. That in itself doesn’t help anyone else to understand how you arrived at that thought or how it applies to the given topic. At least that’s how I interpreted it(?)
Were you willing to learn you might have read my post that explains that in some detail.
No, more like anyone but you actually.
No you are describing a phenomenon that has more that one possible reason, which is beyond anyone’s direct forensic ability to decide one way or another without delving in into the background in detail of each person whose posts you have dismissed out of hand, simply it seems as they do not share the same point of view.
Your ‘category’ is what is known as a ‘dustbin’ category. You have blackened all who make short posts without really knowing why they are short. You have assumed short = stupid.
It is a failing of yours to generalise and to pigeon hole. It’s like you can’t resist.
Please review your first sentence.
“PEOPLE LIKE HOBBES”. You have a right to attack my post for my sake, and I can then defend my position. But what warrant have you got to lump me in with "PEOPLE LIKE HOBBES’ ? Can’t you see how that is prejudicial?
I can see how you might want to hit out with an ad hominem by attacking more widely - but that is no reason to generalise to a place you have no evidence to justify.
I am guilty of this, some of the time. I would say that when this happens, with me that is, there likely was thought over time, but that there was too little thought in reaction to the specific post. I see an outline and think I have seen the actual nuanced idea. If this outline seems like one of the many cliche positions, my response maybe short, blunt and miss the mark. And thus be rude.
Something related to what you are pointing out seems to be the conflation of being right with having argued well and being rational in one’s thinking. Some posters going so far as to want to eliminate anything not scientific or not a philosophical idea. They know and or ‘know’, from the outside as it were, that an idea is wrong, so the dismissal need not fit the actual post, one can simply deny it, perhaps with some short argument, but one that need not fit or work with the idea being put forward. IOW there is little love of process and knowledge/philosophy are being conflated with being able to answer a muliple choice test on reality. I think this can lead to short thinking as you are defining it.
But this pattern need not be limited to any particular set of philosophical positions. Certainly some postmodernists, for example, do this in relation to, say, science centered posts, in a way that is just as short.
This is not what I read. Just reread the OP again and I can see nowhere where he asserts that people making short posts are stupid. It seems to me like he is focusing on the process through which they reach the ideas they post, that this process is short and then also that it lacks information from self reflection and reflection on the thoughts themselves.
I would have responded to other places where it seemed you reframed his OP in a way to make it extreme in way it is not, but perhaps it’s better to focus on one thing at a time.
When i said stupid it was a short hand for ;
obsessive thinker
inhumanly wrong
misunderstanding simple ideas
babbling philosophers
amazing foolishness
error-ridden
I just did not want to repeat the list of insulting phrases.
A moments thought will tell you that the claim that he is “focusing on the process through which they reach the ideas they post”, is a false claim.
MY point is that a short post is not evidence of that. That you simply cannot claim to make assumptions like that if you only have a short post to go on.
I think some of the most brilliant philosophers would be as likely to respond shortly as the most poor thinker. You just don’t have the evidence from a short post to make that wild generalisation.
If there is a lack of information then the fault is as likely to lie with Dan as with the poster.
Short posts. Where does he say that if you write short posts you are stupid?
Again, it seems to me he is critical of a kind of short thinking…etc. I could have missed it. But I didn’t catch the part where he gave the simple criterion: short posts = short thinking. I just did a page search, in case I was missing it, and I cannot find the phrase ‘short post’ or ‘short posts’ or even the word ‘post’ in his OP. Is it possible you missed a more complicated and nuanced set of ideas and launched into an insulting dismissal of a straw man?
And I find this rather strange. He uses the phrase ‘short thinking’ many times, writes about reflecting one’s thoughts, he writes about inner sensations during the thought process and wonders if efficiency is a motive for ‘the thought process.’ Did we read the same OP? I have to say that in context it might need to be said ‘a moment’s thinking’ is not enough, it seems.
I do see he used the word ‘babbling’ when talking about some posters whose thinking is also problematic but, in his estimation, less so. So one could draw the conclusion that short thinkers might post with less words. But notice…this does not mean that if you make short posts you are stupid. Since other people might make shorter posts for other reasons.
It seems to me you took something more complicated and nuanced, boiled it down to an incorrect oversimplification.
That’s sloppy short-hand. The “obsessive thinker” and “babbling philosopher” were actually somewhat praised in contrast to the “short thinker”:
If you read the OP carefully, you also see that his view of short thinkers is a bit more complex. A short thinker is not necessarily stupid or irredeemable, which is perhaps part of the reason for Dan~'s post. Someone who has drifted into short thinking (don’t we all at times?) can be better.
I’ve given it more than a moment’s thought, I’m sure Moreno has too, and this is exactly what I believe Dan~ is reaching for: the process through which one reaches his/her ideas and how to improve bad thinking habits. I see no reason to think Dan~ is talking about the length of a post at all. I think you took the OP too personally when he mentioned ILP. Don’t, he isn’t singling anybody out here. Dan~ has been here for awhile and has observed a lot of people come and go and lay down the gauntlet for their ideas. He is simply taking stock of his experience and formulating a theory.
