The idea of sitting down and finding the One Eternal Truth about anything is a fantasy.
Is the world flat?
Sometimes much certainty may be possible—perhaps even easily. Overall, this may ‘the exception rather than the rule’ (for now).
acknowledged nothing, and stopped responding.
Perhaps this follows the same rule as:
Here’s something I’ve noticed about myself: If I read something great, I’ll sometimes write a short comment like “This was amazing, you’re the best!” Then I’ll stare at it for 10 seconds and decide that posting it would be lame and humiliating, so I delete it and go about my day. But on the rare occasions that I read something that triggers me, I get a strong feeling that I have important insights. Assuming that I’m not uniquely broken in this way, it explains a lot.
No one is better than the combined efforts of a large group of people.
I’d say it’s more rare than impossible. There’s also times when a group of people are all convinced of something and they’re all wrong. Here, the nuance is may be less ‘exceptional, rather than the rule’ and more ’different groups of people, in disagreement and
they can’t all be right
or
what’s correct draws from the groups in disagreement, but is complicated (and may be unpopular both due to the groups and the complexity)
(empirical tests remain to be done to determine, etc.)′
Good editors are gold.
Fascinatingly, they may also be free. Perhaps other experiences are possible involving ‘editors’ - whether paid, or writers sharing what they write with each other, and this can give feedback, while being less unpleasant—if only because it might involve higher quality criticism. This may not entirely beat ‘exposed to the internet’ - more eyes can catch more bugs...but if groups of people working together are better than individuals, then why should posts -so often—be written by one person (modulo non-unitary selfhood, or whatever).
Looking through comments can also take time and effort. One person doing that...sounds like a bottleneck.*
*It might not always reach capacity and be an issue but...there are limits.
There’s an argument that most writing has no value. It goes like this: Every hour, more text is produced than you could read in a lifetime. If you can write the best piece on a given topic, great, but otherwise we don’t need more content. And don’t kid yourself—to write the best piece, you’d need to pick a single topic, become a world expert, and spend months polishing the writing. Most writing is just people yelling over each other for their own reasons.
Quality is not a dice roll. Improvements—and iteration—are possible.
This is a great article.
I didn’t see a lot of that here.
(This comment is currently a work in progress.)
Is the world flat?
Sometimes much certainty may be possible—perhaps even easily. Overall, this may ‘the exception rather than the rule’ (for now).
Perhaps this follows the same rule as:
I’d say it’s more rare than impossible. There’s also times when a group of people are all convinced of something and they’re all wrong. Here, the nuance is may be less ‘exceptional, rather than the rule’ and more ’different groups of people, in disagreement and
they can’t all be right
or
what’s correct draws from the groups in disagreement, but is complicated (and may be unpopular both due to the groups and the complexity)
(empirical tests remain to be done to determine, etc.)′
Fascinatingly, they may also be free. Perhaps other experiences are possible involving ‘editors’ - whether paid, or writers sharing what they write with each other, and this can give feedback, while being less unpleasant—if only because it might involve higher quality criticism. This may not entirely beat ‘exposed to the internet’ - more eyes can catch more bugs...but if groups of people working together are better than individuals, then why should posts -so often—be written by one person (modulo non-unitary selfhood, or whatever).
Looking through comments can also take time and effort. One person doing that...sounds like a bottleneck.*
*It might not always reach capacity and be an issue but...there are limits.
Quality is not a dice roll. Improvements—and iteration—are possible.