If you don’t bring the ‘knife’ of critical thinking to a Clubhouse conversation (aka Room), stay away.
Knife-Honing on Clubhouse: developing critical thinking in the digital age
As evidence of the conversation/Room’s value, I gained 23 new followers who are in turn followed by > 45,000 Clubhouse members.
I’ve been exploring Clubhouse for a few months now. I find it to be an effective platform for deploying/developing critical thinking. We are living through a transitional moment: an old world is falling away, and a new one is being built. The culture wars that are raging right now — and fought every day on Clubhouse — are one powerful sign of this change.
I currently have about 900 followers and, in turn, follow about 1,000 people of quality (link to CH etiquette at the bottom). Unlike other social media platforms, CH encourages critical thinking. It's not just about etiquette.
I’ve learned:
- Before becoming caught up in the social numbers (above), seek out topics and clubs that you are interested in and in which YOU BELIEVE YOU CAN CONTRIBUTE TO THE CONVERSATION (sure listen for a while, but the real fun is conversing — RAISE YOUR HAND, TURN OFF YOUR MIC, AND GET READY FOR YOUR TURN).
- You should be willing to follow those that can articulate a point NOT JUST THOSE YOU AGREE WITH (really, you’d be surprised what you’ll find in these other minds and who will follow you as you converse).
- If you find an interesting person ‘Moding’ (i.e., moderator — yes, already CH jargon) a Room, see what Club they may run and join it. YOU WILL FIND MORE INTERESTING CLUB MEMBERS TO FOLLOW (you will likely start as a ‘follower’ of a Club and only made a ‘member’ when the Club founders deem you worthy of that privilege — Membership has privileges).
- While following celebs (i.e, Jared Leto has 4.5M and Van Jones 4.1M followers) or Clubhouse celebs (Eric Wheitstein has 3.1M compared to 485k on Twitter) don’t get too caught up in the social media game — WHO FOLLOWS YOU IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN WHO YOU FOLLOW.
- Once you have found worthy conversants, be ready to contribute to the conversation. You can also use back-channel communications — Twitter/Instagram/private room — FIND CLUBS, CONVERSATIONS, AND PEOPLE WITH WHOM YOU WANT TO CONVERSE.
What sets Clubhouse apart from other social media platforms is both the HD-verbal cues of speaking and the emergent conclusions a CH Room can reach. I’ve seen some rooms balloon into the thousands and last for up to 48 hours.
“Any new technology, any extension or amplification of human faculties when given material embodiment, tends to create a new environment. This is as true of clothing as of speech, or script, or wheel. … It is in the interplay between the old and the new environment that there is generated an innumerable series of problems and confusions. … As an environment it is imperceptible except in terms of its content. That is, all that’s seen or noticed is the old environment. But the effects of … the environment in altering the entire character of human sensibility and sensory ratios is ignored.” [Marshall McLuhan ‘The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment,’ 1965]
WHAT IS A CH CONVERSATION?
Sure you think you now what a conversation is about, but I’m taking a CH conversation (aka ‘CH Room). Consider a worthy CH conversation as a good big-band jazz song. As with a jazz band, you need to listen carefully to the rhythm section (Mods) and the solos (speakers) and be able to tailor your solo (contribution) to both the SONG (topic) and preceding SOLO (the person you follow). ALWAYS BE READY TO RESPOND TO A COUNTER-POINT.
To be honest, the best thing about CH is real authentic conversations where participates deploy their critical thinking skills (AKA the KNIFE).
THE NEED FOR THE KNIFE (Critical Thinking)
Critical thinking, or the Art of Measurement, employs a metaphoric rhetorical Knife as a tool to divide between sense and nonsense. This analytic knife is the ability to name and split the whole world into parts of your own choosing, split the parts, and split the fragments of the parts, finer and finer and finer until you have reduced it to what you can use. Then it is time to raise your hand and speak.
The art of using the Knife takes place not as an inherent, natural trait, but as a learned trait, only gained by practice.
Prepare yourself for the spotlight of speaking by contributing to the narrative of the conversation that is underway. Critical thinking will not emerge on its own. Humans rarely abstract general principles from examples, therefore, we use STORY to help identify and formulate the common strategies and methods that underlie critical thinking.
The first conversation/room I hosted (I’ve been invited to be a Mod dozens of times) was sponsored by the CROWDSOURCED Club — 1,600 followers and 150 members (What I got wrong about our American Meritocracy). The CH room (what a CH conversation is called) had over 220 visitors with a maximum of 60 and ran for 2 hours (double the planned time).
**As evidence of the conversation/room’s value, I gained 23 new followers who are in turn followed by > 45,000 Clubhouse members. — This a social media metric of measurement that has value in our new digital age and a core methodology we use for sense-making.**
D. Emergent Potential of a CH Conversation/room
A room can be characterized as “a global neural workspace” or a whiteboard where many participants have access to information. The potential of the room emerges when incoming participant information is broadcast globally to other participants. Now is when the knife-work begins.
The Knife allows us to recognize faulty arguments built into stories and evaluate whether a chain of reasoning leads to a valid conclusion. As we gain info-literacy, we can recognize there are hierarchies in source quality, pseudo-facts often masquerade as facts, biases can distort, and framing does matter in the Art of Measurement.
The goal is to use the Knife to divide facts into manageable pieces, make a measurement, and then incorporate these into the conversation/room narrative.
Once we define the data with the Knife, we use this data to develop a model that maximizes the likelihood of the outcome shown from the data P(D|M). This process of generating a model is the art of measurement and the goal of any worthy conversation/room.
My participation in more than a hundred conversations has revealed to me that PUP students need a critical thinking tool — THE KNIFE — to learn Plato’s “the art of measurement” aka rational decision-making in our modern world.
While our modern cultural narrative assumes an inherent ability of dis-interest, I have rarely seen a room where this is always the case. Rooms are a live environment where Mods should control to allow the emergence of a decision-making loop and avoid impulse reactions demanded by the misinterpretation of the environment as demanding either domination or submission (e.g., “You are wrong. The earth is flat!”).
A well-run room operates in an all-encompassing audio-field of protection that allows the emergence of a sense-making machine. The greatest danger to this potential is the reliance on intuition when the conversation/room has no alternative narrative. As for the Jazz analogy, the Mods have to “keep the timing of the rhythm section or the soloists will mess everything up.”
HOW RISKY IS A CONVERSATION WHERE EVERYONE BRINGS A KNIFE?
The analytic knife is the ability to name and split the whole world into parts of your own choosing, split the parts, and split the fragments of the parts, finer and finer and finer until you have reduced it to what you can use. You must cut deep to get at the root of a thing.
You have the illusion that parts are named, as they exist. However, you can name them quite differently and organize them quite differently depending on how the knife moves. Once you have arrived at workable pieces, it is time to measure. In our modern world, we have a precise guide to clear thinking and deploying the art of measurement.
“SCIENCE is neither a philosophy nor a belief system. It is a combination of mental operations that has become increasingly the habit of educated peoples as the most effective way of learning about the real world.” Wilson pg 49
One must be extremely careful and rigidly logical when dealing with the conversation/room: one logical slip and an entire edifice comes tumbling down. One false deduction about the world can hang you up indefinitely (e.g., in my hosted conversation, we spend our time on WHAT is the meritocracy instead of HOW it works).
While some amount of risk aversion is normal, it can derail a conversation. Encourage a Knife fight.“The emotional fabric of defensive decisions differs from that of risk aversion… [As] part of the crowd behavior” you can take excessive risk in a CH conversation/room. “The problem is not simply risk aversion, but lack of a positive error culture.” Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions by Gerd Gigerenzer 2014 of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development pg. 156
My goal is to encourage a positive error culture (calling people/arguments out) on CH with some degree of decorum and courtesy. Only then can the emergence of new concepts and understanding of our Digital Age may emerge.
The metaphorical knife was first described in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig.
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