Your Opinion is as Good as Anyone Else's

Prodded (maybe) by our good friend Jaggon earlier today, I thought I'd expand on my earlier comment on a post by @nvrlsyrsml about having an opinion...

It may seem redundant to make a point like this in an era when entitled narcissist busybodies are trying to make the more level-headed among us believe that their opinions are somehow more correct than ours, for no better reason than that they have a deeply-engrained and irrational (read: emotional) belief which they cherish despite there being either patent disproof or lack of proof thereof, but the fact that this bunch of pointless Karens and Communists say these things at all - without a shred of irony - shows that they are not capable of independent thought. They are mere repeaters. It is deeply disturbing that anyone should take it upon themselves to try to enforce what is really just another person's (or group's) opinion upon other members of the populace without criticising it; it is rather like Thomas Kuhn's [1] lament, back in the year that I was born, that modern science was less concerned with doing its job properly and challenging a hypothesis than it was with "verifying" it, as the critical mindset took second place to the desire to secure future funding for research. However, the Karens (and others) of today do not appear to "research" anything but rather take in what they are told to think by the subversive mainstream media; their response to any challenge is cognitive dissonance, hence their illogical and irrational responses latterly to anyone not wishing to wear a mask, for example.

As I said in the earlier posting, whenever you ask someone a question, the answer that you receive is not necessarily a fact. This seems to be something that few people realise, as they have long since come to believe that the ideas in their heads are facts, when they are really opinions, which is to say, a temporarily-held concept given validity by its relationship to their existing schema, which, in a better world, would be an adaptive set of concepts and the relationships between them which would be capable of change as new data are taken in and interpreted; this is what I tell my students. Comprehension (in terms of understanding the meaning of new language input, which is what I and my students are interested in) is what happens when new information is integrated with what was already learned (and therefore already present in the person's mind), and the information so introduced into the recipient's schema allows him or her to use it in appropriate situations at some time in the future. However, as information may change, the relationships involved are tenable only until newer (and possibly contradictory) information arrives and also has to be accommodated in the schema. A rational person understands this, and thus anticipates that the current understanding will probably have to be modified at some time in the future. An irrational person, on the other hand, does not apply any critical faculty when new information is received, and simply incorporates it into their schema without asking whether it is contradictory with regard to earlier received information or not; the irrational "belief" is that the "fact" is true, permanently, and that questioning it is "heresy". I would not, personally, want to imply that they are not entitled to think what they want, but without critical thinking they end up with an increased likelihood of cognitive dissonance when they encounter cases where both (or neither) of two contradictory concepts (or in their case, "beliefs") are held to be true. More often than not, there is an overriding desire to be seen as belonging to the tribe that is "right", and hence the disconcerting displays of virtue-signalling that we keep seeing. It is the feedback we get from our errors which allows us to judge the veracity (or otherwise) of our opinions.

A similar phenomenon has arisen among the young people who have passed through higher education. The desire for validation from an authority figure (a person who examines and evaluates their work during the educational process) leads to conformity of opinion, and again, when challenged, cognitive dissonance and strange, possibly violent behaviour. We are seeing both of these types of people being active around the world right now. Young people are growing into physical adulthood with an essentially infantile mindset, and the lack of any robust concept of self-validation leads to a crowd response and mass virtue-signalling.

I suggest that the root of all this is a lack of personal responsibility arising from too great a dependence upon the validation of others generally, not just from authority figures. It does seem that those in authority, especially those in academia and various NGOs, have been put there in the long term for precisely this reason, but the source, which is thus shown to be actively exploited by interested parties, is no doubt the perception of validation as something which comes from without (i.e. external to oneself) rather than being something which is held within as a result of reflection and the desire for an independent life - meaning a life in which one develops a strong sense of self-validation. This is all the stranger a realisation when one considers that the whole point of a person going through education and having a career is, primarily, for independence both financial and physical. Parents eventually die - this really is an immutable fact - and maintaining adult minds in an infantile condition creates the opportunity for the pernicious state to substitute itself for the parents, and assume authority.

It used to be the case that young people wanted to be able, eventually, to leave the parental home and be independent. One drawback, however, was that parental (and familial and social) influences would limit what could be done. Recently, there have been a number of memes going around stating that (as in the case of Nikola Tesla, for example) solitude was essentially the mother of all invention, and this is not surprising, for society throws all kinds of distractions in an individual's way (one thinks immediately of others such as Isaac Newton and Leonardo da Vinci who - for one reason or another - were put into situations where solitude was unavoidable, and likewise reaped the benefits). It has always seemed to me that the reason for this is fear - fear on the part of wider society, and of friends and family close to any individual, of any deviation from the accepted norms. Yet there is little or no progress in "the accepted norms": the whole point of "norms" is precisely that they do not change, but are constant. People are afraid of change, and a thinking person will naturally commit actions which instigate changes. People may be disadvantaged by this (think: buggy whip makers) and therefore try to stifle original and critical thinkers, or (in the case of the buggy whip makers) any new invention which would threaten their livelihood, perhaps making their established skillsets redundant. So one is forced to move elsewhere in order to avoid this pernicious environment. That is why I left England - to get away from a social milieu which basically wanted to keep me in a certain situation and to not change, ever. Out here, I am free to think whatever I want.

It is when you wake up one day and realise that the answers you have been getting from people all your life were opinions (rather than facts) that you start to manifest the desire to change, and since everyone and everything around you wants to prevent this, it means getting out completely. No ifs or buts. You also can manifest an opinion of your own, based upon your own research and learning. No-one really has an opinion that is "better" than yours - that is just their narcissism kicking in. For example, after having my tumour removed a couple of years ago, I was startled to discover that the medical authorities involved had absolutely no information to give me about how I might avoid a recurrence in the future - despite the reasonable assumption that they were "experts" and should have better advice to give than virtually anyone else. Likewise, more recently, when I suddenly had high blood pressure and then a cardiac arrhythmia set in (temporarily, I am glad to say), the cardiologist's advice was not tailored to the readings he had been given by his assistants and instruments, but instead to research the condition online and to figure it out from there! I was being literally forced to find out for myself! Yet these same people will pooh-pooh (as we say in England) your opinion if it deviates from theirs. Needless to say... I do not find this a particularly helpful situation, but at this stage in the proceedings, I would not expect it to be any better elsewhere; it might be suggested that "opinion" is a synonym of "prejudice" when "experts" are involved [2].

Granted, making suggestions for the individuation of a patient's necessary lifestyle changes might be a tough call for someone with relatively limited English, but it is not only in the area of medicine that we find problems like this. The whole of modern science is riddled with irrationalism and narcissism. Modern cosmology, for example, is a complete joke. Our perception of the space around the Earth changed one day in 1958 when James van Allen's Explorer satellite showed that it was full of radiation; nowadays adherents of the Plasma Universe and Electric Universe theories seem to have more going for them than conventional cosmology, which still seems to think that the universe is dominated primarily by the effects of gravity (plus, the EU paradigm provides a more rational explanation for the background microwave radiation than it being "echoes of the Big Bang"... according to the EU, there was no need for a "Big Bang" in order to generate the microwave background). There are so many signs that the universe is dominated and formed by electrical effects, yet state-funded practitioners still insist on plugging their ears with their fingers or reacting in an irrational, narcissistic way when their beliefs (and that is what they really are - beliefs, not hypotheses) are challenged - and therefore this demonstrates that they are, in fact, part of the cult of scientism. I had had enough of that, too, and that was another reason why I decided to get out. I thought that I must have better things to waste my precious time on!

The bottom line is that since what you get from others when you ask questions tends to be their opinions rather than a set of facts, there is no reason to value their answers more highly than your own opinions, at least as long as you are well-informed. If their response to you arguing against them is to get upset because their narcissistic little bubble has suddenly been burst rather than saying something like: "Now that's interesting - where did you get that?", you can be absolutely sure that there is nothing wrong with your opinion. You should be going through your life with your opinions constantly changing as new information comes to light, as with scientific revolutions where the overwhelming weight of anomalies eventually discredits the existing paradigm. Those who have a problem with this are the ones with the deepest irrational, emotional attachment to the old paradigm as it is overtaken by the new; their attachments prevent them from reinterpreting what they already know in the light of the new paradigm and gaining a new perspective from it. Remember, a paradigm is essentially an interpretative model of reality, not an infallible and immutable painting of it. It is the irrational attachment which causes the damage, not the change itself. When facts (or the framework in which they are interpreted) change, the interpretation has to change, also. That is why a person cannot be the same today as they were twenty years previously, if they have adapted successfully to the changes of information.

The moment of my epiphany came about twenty years ago, when I bought the new edition of Lubert Stryer's "Biochemistry" and discovered that quite a lot of the contents had changed. Did this mean that the information had been removed because it was somehow no longer factual? As that seemed unlikely, it had to be because the big picture had changed as a result of the research which had taken place between the two editions. Reality had not changed; only its interpretation, as a result of continuing research and reinterpretation. That is a good model for your opinions: they change as you encounter new information, but you need to maintain a critical mindset, and always remember: your opinions are as good as anyone else's.

[1] Kuhn, Thomas S. (1970): The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-45803-2 (enlarged edition; first edition 1962).

[2] In British business jargon, when an "expert" is discussed, "X" is an unknown quantity and a "spurt" is a drip under pressure...