ok Bahri, look – I meet with my neighbors downtown. In fact, we just had a thoughtful seminar last night, shared dinner, and discussed. No conclusions were reached. We will see each other around soon – walking our dogs, chit-chatting after church, picking up each other’s mail when we are out of town – calling each other up in the middle of the night when we hear something strange outside. You get the picture.
What Elon Musk is saying is that Twitter is like a town square. Think: what do town squares and Twitter have in common? Spaces to share information, offer comments about the information, exchange comments about the comments. We can construct gathering points for competing ideas (we hope).
Next, to break down the analogy, ask, how are town squares and Twitter different? Answers will vary. For me, Binary systems, while helpful in bounded ways, left unchallenged, lead to binary thinking. The richness of culture easily disintegrates, becoming Us-Them. Surveys and polls and other marketing devices, pitched to profit, can only lead to more and more stochastics. And the linearity of “more equals better” is just that, a linear function. Not lifelike, 2-D, cold, hollow – your basic nightmare. There is a lot of that going on these days, right?
All analogies, helpful though they can be, do break down, and it’s important to know exactly where, so you don’t digest the proposed similarities wholesale, and fail to see and expel the differences. Practice critical thinking: Grab for the third instance, pinpoint fallacies of the undistributed middle, and learn everything you can about logical fallacies. Hope this primer helps. Good to see you.
