Tags: #cultivate-taste , #notes-app [[0003. kelly clarkson and singing your heart out]] | [[0005. FOMO is a result of scarcity mindset]] Here's a common scenario: I'm in conversation with a friend or family member. Maybe there's a group with us, or maybe it's just the two of us. Typically prompted by some news segment or article they saw, the friend/family member goes off on a tirade or impassioned argument or casual observation, then asks me my opinion. A few years ago someone might have seen an article or morning news show discuss impossible meat and its merits or drawbacks. A good recent example was prompted by a news segment on deepfakes. There's a bunch of pretty good deepfakes of tom cruise floating around on tiktok. You can still tell they're fake, but if you were just flipping through, or you didn't have a well-trained Internet bullshit detector, you might think they were real. So let's say this friend was discussing how deepfakes can destabilize society through misinformation campaigns, most people aren't going to do their due diligence and discover it's a fake, etc. Then they asked for my opinion. My opinion? Well...I don't know. I mean, I can express my gut emotional reaction to the topic, which is fear about how deepfakes might be exploited to influence people I love, but is that my opinion? What I truly think? I don't know enough about the topic. I might have seen an occasional Twitter thread or article about deepfakes, but I would need to do way more reading and research to come to an informed opinion. I haven't talked to enough people in the field about how good deepfakes are, where they see the technology being in a few years or a decade. I haven't considered if there are good applications of deepfakes, if there are pros that outweigh the cons. So now I'm wondering, should I have an opinion? Should I be more knowledgeable about all this random shit that comes out of the news, and think more about it? Maybe, but developing an opinion is time consuming. And I'm not sure that deepfakes are important enough (***to me, at this time***) to have an informed opinion about. There's only so much time in life to do the work of crafting nuanced opinions. Better pick topics that are actually important to you to develop an opinion on. However, in many such conversations, it's highly probable that the actual opinions don't matter. In my experience, it's merely a game of conversation. My conversation partner has served the ball in my court. If I say, "I don't really have an opinion on deepfakes and you probably shouldn't either given that all you know about this is what the news told you, that would be refusing to hit the ball back". And that's no fun for anyone involved. Perhaps the value in having some semblance of opinion on the myriad topics that people bring up at dinners and parties and conferences, is so you can play the social game. So you can have those conversations, build rapport, make connections. From there, perhaps a few relationships become deeper and you can break out the opinions that are actually important to you (if you've developed those). I've discovered that this is one reason why I tend to struggle with Interintellect salons. It feels to me like I am surrounded by all these smart people who appear to me to have done the work of developing their opinion, which I have not done, or at least haven't done well enough to be able to meaningfully play this game with them. So I think the takeaway here is twofold: 1. You want to be well-informed enough to play the conversation game, so that you can continue playing the game long enough to make deeper friendships. How to go about this varies a lot depending on the game's setting and players. At a family event, where everyone is debating mask and vaccine mandates in bad faith, I'm likely to refuse to play the game, because there's no chance of deepening my relationship with anyone through that conversation. At a dinner party with close friends from college, where we have a lot of shared experience and I'm more comfortable, I might quickly brief myself on some news, both generally and on things I know they're interested in. I might consider specific questions I want to ask them or future events I want to invite them to, but I don't need to do much prep in terms of developing opinion (although this is an assumption I should challenge). Now, for an Interintellect salon, I'm likely to go through all of the suggested reading materials and check out anything the Salon host has written or tweeted. I often still feel like the salon guests run circles around me in terms of thoughts and conversation, and this is because I haven't done enough of 2. 2. Identify what things you really care about and want to develop an opinion on, and go deep. I think that through this process, you naturally expose yourself to enough ideas to get better at 1. This undertaking is something I haven't spent much time on, at least not in any disciplined or rigorous fashion. But I think that's the point of this web of notes. To explore. To play. To have fun figuring out what I'm about. --- Created: November 08, 2021 Last Modified: November 08, 2021