I can never get enough of public radio. I know where all the stations are in my area. I know when my favorite shows are on. I sometimes sit in the car for an extra 5-10 minutes after reaching my destination just to finish listening.
The end result of this is that I’m kind of sort of informed about a wide variety of subjects. A connoisseur of tiny tid-bits, if you will. I can carry one side of a conversation with someone that knows more than I do pretty well. It’s when I try to tell someone that has less knowledge than I do, about any certain subject that has caught my fancy, that we find ourselves in trouble, people, since I really don’t know what I’m talking about. I have, some people might say, just enough knowledge to be dangerous (and/or annoying).
What I notice, however, is that my feelings on the subject are not proportional to the amount of knowledge I have. For example, if I know 20% of all there is to know about immigration, shouldn’t I be 20% on the scale in how strong I feel about it? This is theorizing that there is a way to quantify the amount of knowledge on any subject that is to be had. But instead I find that I get passionate about some things right from the start and I want to ‘share’ my feelings and point of view with others. My small and puffy mind wonders if this is a problem for other people as well. Do the people in the public eye know more than I know? Do they spend the time to really know their subjects well, front and back, before formulating an opinion and going out on the path to support Pro-Choice or Pro-Life? There are times when Iām completely hot under the collar and spewing strong opinion and passion everywhere only to find out a few days later that Iām actually full of crap.
Since I am by nature an impatient person as well as slightly lazy, or at least drawn to comfort and ease as opposed to being driven, for the most part, to spend my days researching politics and current events, and because I have this public format that I am free to use any way I wish, I might as well spill my over-saturated, passionate feelings about subjects I don’t actually have all the facts for here. I need a name for these new recurring posts.
In this series, I will not even try to pretend that I know everything about the subject at hand. I will merely state my current opinion and hope that you, dear reader, will agree or not agree in my comments so that I can actually get a well-rounded and more full knowledge base on said subject. Look for the first installment this week.
I hope you are all having a wonderful Tuesday.
this sounds like fun!
just remember, whatever opinion i share, just realize that i also reserve the right to declare myself full of crap a few days later š
leah, at least you have opinions and passions. if your mind works anything like mine (big on intution, not so much on the practical application all the time), you often jump right to the bottom line, gut feeling and find yourself having to work your way backward to make rational sense of it. like the kids in school who arrived at the math answer but couldn’t show how. it’s okay, the answer is still your truth.
i like hearing you process aloud, making connections backward and forward. I see myself in it.
k.
Brandon, quit stalking me.
k.
š
You and I are alot alike in that sense – but I’m game. Let the bullshit commence! (and I mean that in the nicest way possible)
You’ve just described a situation I often find myself in. What’s worse, I usually start spewing crap to someone who is extensively informed and they just look at me and smile and nod and think I’m out of my mind.
This is a great idea! I’ve never commented here before now – and I’m sure to comment on these posts in the future. I love debate and the exchange of ideas. I’ll be respectful, of course.
…and such is the beauty of blogging
Guilty of that too. And what is even more painful for me is that I forget important details. So I begin using technical words like “um” and “stuff” or “you know that thingy thing”. Geez, I make myself puke.
I will form an opinion on emotion in a heart beat. I will repeat, “I don’t like that thing but I cannot remember why I don’t like it. It is stored in my emotional reaction bank somewhere.”
But I ask, does that mean that we are any less an authority? Sometimes those who are not married to the details can see things a lot more clearly. Am I right?
Can’t wait. Love new stuff.
I always enjoy your opinions, informed or not. I suspect the rest of the world would enjoy them as well. š
I’ve never commented here before. Hope you don’t mind! I must say that what you’re doing is such a great idea. I often wish I would be more knowledgable about certain subjects and/or issues, but I do not find the time these days to read the newspaper or watch the news, etc. Perhaps I’ll give this a try! š
Just wanted to chime in here about those people who are “extensively informed ” I have a friend like that, who shall remain Nameless..
Nameless is constantly spewing facts and figures and statistics to support her view. One day I asked her, (I said nameless, not genderless) “How can you remember all that detail?” and she admitted she didn’t really, just made the details up on the fly… that for example she may remember that she read that it was a really large percentage of people who did X, so she’d just make up a number that sounded “really large.”
I also think that often people spew all those facts simply to overwhelm. Another example, I had a boyfriend with whom I was having a dispute over a Star Trek (TNG) episode where they let Hugh the Borg go back to his Borg collective, Boyfriend argued that they should have destroyed their enemy when they had the chance… nevermind the prime directive… ANYWAY, he started spewing historical facts (I’m bad at history) and military history (I’m even worse at military history) and finally the lightbulb went off… and I said, “The Spanish Armada?? …You’re using the Spanish Armada as an example?? HELLO! this is science fiction TELEVISION… the Spanish Armada is completely irrelevant.” SCORE! (we don’t date anymore by the way)
…sorry for the long ranting comment…. I guess I’m jonesing to do my own blog entry š
Motto: If you can’t dazzle ’em with brilliance, baffle ’em with bullshit.
Eons ago, there was a book and a movie with David Niven in which he played some sort of statistical wizard in advertising. His trick was to create statistics that had multi-decimal points. 25% of x do y isn’t so impressive; but 25.32% of x do y—hell, no one’s going to argue with that!