The Pathless
The Truth has no path…
Purpose and Ground Rules
This is a place for ideas, discussions, and strategies for destroying dichotomies, breaking binary thinking, and facilitating actual problem solving for social, cultural, economic, and political issues. This is not meant to be another blog or newsletter where you come to perform your weekly bobble-head exercises. This is also not an independent journalism site working tirelessly to fit everything that happens in the world into a singular narrative or perspective. While well-defined and examined narratives are useful, we must triangulate many to get closer to “Truth.”
To facilitate the early demise of dichotomous thinking and fracture the systems in place that encourage it, we must build systems of our own. Furthermore, in order to design and build these systems, we must stand upon a foundation that will allow us to combat or bypass our evolutionary tribal nature (i.e. our need to incessantly dig-in, scream at each other, and accomplish exactly nothing). As a starting point, we will explore both the concept of Truth and how to practically seek it as an individual, culture, and species. To enable this process, we will build upon the framework explored by Shane Snow in Dream Teams, encouraging cognitive diversity, productive conflict, and (above all else) intellectual humility in our discussions.
It is my belief that in order to solve global and society wide problems, we must have global and society wide “Dream Teams”. But how? This is a much taller order to fill than just creating effective teams within a corporation or sports league. How do we systematically facilitate, collect, sort, and triangulate thousands and millions of perspectives in order to make better decisions based on better truths? This “system” is what we will be exploring here in addition to testing it on specific false binary societal breaking points. To accomplish this, dissenters are not just welcome, they are required. In fact, we need a legion of dissenters, devil’s advocates, critics, and creatives all working towards a singular purpose: designing a better system and a better way of collaborating in mass to consistently solve the complex society wide problems that are holding our species back.
To be frank, this is possibly an impossible task. However, I don’t think the perceived impossibility of the task, or the probability of failure, is necessarily a signal to avoid the task. We all just need to manage our expectations. This will be a slow and arduous process. To hopefully smooth the progress of the grind we are going implement the following ground rules for effective debate and discussion.
- Curiosity is king. If you don’t understand someone’s view, ask questions instead of just making opposing declarations.
- No personal attacks. Attack the idea not the person.
- No taking things personal. Your ideas are not you; they are ideas.
- Identify logical fallacies when you see them and accept that everyone uses them, even you.
- Try to keep the discussion to “facts” and logic, rather than interpretations and extrapolations.
- Be intellectually humble. Concede as often as possible.
- Be rhetorically honest. “Debate Bro” tactics are not welcome here.
- Recognize at times we will all fail miserably to follow all of the above. We are Human.
In summary, you can either be right, or we can solve the problem; both cannot be true. If you are only interested in proving your point to be “right,” then you are not welcome here. Together we must learn to question all narratives- especially our own. In the end our individual perspectives are but one small grain of sand on an infinite beach. Alone, we are an infinitesimally small portion of the whole, just waiting to be washed into the abyss by the waves of time. Together, we are the beach that weathers the waves for eternity.
Welcome to The Pathless.
