Ground Bogo

In Soviet Russia, blog reads you

All jobs are the same. Your instinct would and should be to challenge that statement, but if you think about it, everything and nothing is the same depending on how basic or detailed comparison you would like to make. Since I will obviously try to make a grossly overstated generalization here, it should be evident that this post will be devoted to the basics. The foundation of every job is judgement: this is your purpose and main task. Coincidentally, this is also what guarantees that your workplace will not be taken by a machine for the next 1/5/10/20/50 years (depending on what you do).

You can ask, if all jobs have the same basics, then how come one person is better suited for something and another for something else? The answer lies in the fact that judgement is not always a hard-cut decision; if it were black and white, then let us be honest, you would be useless. Therefore, judgements are hazy, and their outcomes are not so trivial to predict with an untrained eye. Thus a better judgement can be made by a person who is better qualified to make it. It is qualification and capacity that separates different people on different jobs: the qualification and capacity not to do the job itself, but to make the judgements that it requires. All your hard work in education and later on in work training is oriented towards arming you with the capability of making better judgements.

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It’s late. I’m at the back of some bus again, alone. I’m headed home, provided that I got the bus number correctly of course. It doesn’t matter anyway. Just take me somewhere else, I’m pretty tired. Yet another time when I curse the fact that personal teleportation devices are not invented yet. Just another random thought, lot’s of bullshit, here and there…hop, a fake monkey got on the bus, hop, an empty shell and a horse got off. Are we people, or are we the shadows of people, the hint of people, the suggestion of people…or maybe we are just animals. We are animals, and we are taken out of our habitat, and we are tortured by problems that were never meant to be ours in the first place. We are tortured by externally imposed issues: solitude, anger, frustration, depravity, isolation, an invasion of our fucking minds…Were we ever meant for all this? Possibly, but certainly not to the extent that we are currently subjected to. Read the rest of this entry »

Conviction seems to be the most powerful deception in the world. I realise now that it is close to impossible to change another person’s mind. I have seen this so many times around me. I have seen people who would argue their point for hours after they have been shown how wrong they are. I have seen perfectly reasonable arguments being dismissed because they don’t fit one’s ideas. I have seen grossly unreasonable arguments being adopted in a similar manner. I never really spent any time thinking about this, and perhaps this is why it strikes me so much now.

First of all, a distinction between conviction and persuasion has to be made. You can persuade someone to do something, but that does not imply that you convinced that person that what he/she would do is right. All it means is that a compromise was reached, one way or another…or the argument simply became boring. I myself have never enjoyed arguments and debates, even before I realised how pointless they are. I have seemingly affirmed someone else’s opinion so many times simply to spare myself the trouble of going in the worthless discussion to follow. I know you’ve done it too, at least if you are smart.

Why is convincing someone of something seemingly impossible? People have formed their opinion one way or another, after all. Would it be that hard to change it? The answer is yes, of course, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this . Under normal circumstances, an opinion is swayed once at most. Either you come to a conclusion by yourself and defend your point until hell freezes over, or the first convincing argument that you hear forms your opinion and closes your mind to any counter-arguments. Perhaps people see agreeing with someone else’s opinion as a lost battle. It is, in a way, a surrender of a piece of your mind for a piece of someone else’s. However, it’s not really that simple. Self-rectification by betterment of one’s views of the world should be seen as a victory and not a defeat…well, should be. Then again, it is the resilience of an idea in a person’s mind that has allowed for so many great things to happen throughout human history…as well as so many bad ones. It is essentially one of the bases that define us as humans.

As nice as it is, the myth of conviction means that debating and arguing in any form is like playing a game of tic-tac-toe. There is only one way to win, and it is by not playing.

P.S. This blog post will not change your mind. Your mind was already made up before you came here. Hence, all things written here are pointless, and I just wasted your time. Congratulations .