I Hate Thought Experiments

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While thought experiments are meant to challenge readers to think about things in different ways they always seem to miss the mark for me. They are like really bad stories with continuity errors, plot holes, and preachy subtext. Maybe it is because they are usually created by academics but thought experiments wreak of pretentious attempts to dumb down a moral, social, or scientific concept into a clever puzzle for the masses.

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Re-Post: Stereotyping Millennials

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I believe the term was originally used for marketing and political purposes but soon everyone was attempting to stereotype the group on every conceivable characteristic. Polls were taken and while the label was used to understand the demographic on a economic basis people started to make wild generalizations about the personalities and dysfunctions of the group in order to identify any "problems" that might arise as these people join the work force, become voters and start to spend money. Understanding the youth seems to be important to those attempting to predict and potentially manipulate the next big wave of adults but are such generalizations accurate? 

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Re-Post: Too Abstract

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Sometimes people speak too abstractly and lose something in the translation. Such as when a headline says, "Wrestling still isn't sure what to do with women..." What they really mean is that women do not occupy a major role in the wresting industry. "Wresting" isn't a thing that can do things to women. People personify concepts such as "wresting" and give it agency. This is partly in an attempt to understand it better and creates a subject in which to assign blame. You can't understand something better by defining it incorrectly and to blame a concept incapable of physical action is irrational.

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