One of the favourite mantras of the techno-optimist is that “the wisdom of crowds will save us.” That with a million collective inputs, we will find solutions that make the world a better place.
Is this true?
Why is it that wisdom and not madness is the state of crowds? There are too many examples of foolishness in crowds. I don’t think we can have the wisdom of crowds without their madness.
Jacob Silverman’s piece on Facebook as a right-wing company in The Baffler is pretty damning. Just this week, Facebook conferred trusted status on Breitbart, the Nazi lie-peddling rag. Facebook gladly accepts ad revenue from politicians like Trump and friends who purposely lie to pander to ignoramuses in their base. As Silverman points out, there is no longer any neutrality. Zuckerberg has declared that he and his company are instruments of the right-wing.
Personally, it’s going to be hard to go back. I don’t know that I will. No interaction with Facebook for a month. I suppose I’ll stick with my plan of quietly checking it out on the first of the month, once a month. And that’s it.
This month I worked very hard on re-establishing some important habits, including habit-tracking, that had lapsed after some setbacks. The stats are a little odd because I didn’t start tracking everything until sometime well into the month.
In an effort to complete the 10,000 word Brown Russian vocabulary list by the end of May 2020, I need to do at least 15 words a day. This month, I logged 395 new Russian words in Anki. These words are often, but not always accompanied by example sentences that I study in a separate deck. This month, I added an additional 348 new sentences and 83 new grammar cards.
I’m a big fan of David Cain’s raptitude.com. A post from 2017 entitled Wise people have rules for themselves is one that a come back to frequently.
In short, he makes the point that productive and consistent people don’t leave important (or even some trivial) aspects of their lives to chance. They create rules for themselves around certain behaviours and tasks. He also makes the point that others often attempt to undermine or discredit those who create rules for their own self-governance by labelling them as joyless, rigid, or overly competitive. Cain likens this to the “tall-poppy syndrome.” I had to look up that one.
Listening to a series of excellent dharma talks from the San Francisco Zen Center, I first learned about the ancient poem “Trust in Mind”^[Full text of the poem, “Xinxinming”.] by the Third Ancestor of the Zen tradition, Jianzhi Sengcan (鑑智僧璨)
It captures beautifully, even in translation, the essence of Zen.
“The Perfect Way is only difficult for those who pick and choose;
Do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear.
Make a hairbreadth difference, and Heaven and Earth are set apart;
If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against.”
