Why I Made This Website

1. Speed Up the Learning Process

By far the #1 concern with self-education is you have no way of knowing if you’re on the right path.

You’re looking for a needle in a needlestack. Even if you find a needle, how do you know it’s THE needle?

As a visitor on this site, you are both student and teacher.

I despise the idea that teachers are the ones who “have it all” and the students have “none at all” at the mercy of their superiors. The most ‘educated’ aren’t exempt from false beliefs, and even the most uneducated are capable of their own thoughts.

In this classroom, everyone here is the great bearer of knowledge AND the brain-dead student who needs their hand held. You never know everything, nor are you doomed to know nothing.

Our education system is based on:

I don’t know something > I have to wait for someone to tell me what to know

We need to evolve into:

I don’t know something > I did some looking around and found some seemingly relevant info > share it with my peers for constructive criticism > adjust as I go along > rinse & repeat

I’m aware that this varies based on the subject. Don’t take it as an absolute formula.

Some schools do try to sustain this model, but the testing system kills curiosity and drives students to adopt an apathetic attitude towards the subject. It’s not rocket science that people are more likely to remember things if they actually care about it.

But apparently, it’s not about nurturing our minds to become enlightened individuals. How silly of me to expect that. It’s about showing that we can do what we’re told without questioning as to why; because that is exactly what we need more of in today’s world.

In my 12 years of public education, I can count on one hand the teachers I’ve had who encouraged us to practice critical thinking. And how coincidental that they were the ones to repeatedly tell us the system was not set up for us to succeed?

I see a parallel between intellectualizing and fighting, therefore I believe it’s best if you look at this site like a dojo.

Here, we do healthy sparring to hone our intellects. We practice intellectual humility and there is no place for egos.

You will get beat up and feel the humiliation. You may also be doing the beating but must keep your ego in check.

You will engage in intense mental battles so we can get the root of the issue at hand.

Feedback loops are what solidify the knowledge in our mental. These aren’t just grades that tell me I did something wrong, I can now see HOW I’m wrong. When a sport team loses a game, the coach doesn’t just scream that they’re losers, they show game tapes so they can see how they lost.

If you actually care about learning to understand and not just learning to pass, you will enjoy this site.

2. Clarify My Thought Process

This is my cry for help.

Information is what I live for, yet will also probably be the death of me.

My mental state is a constant oscillation from enlightenment, to anxiety.

I, like any other human being who doesn’t live under a rock, suffer terribly from overstimulation. There are countless bits of information being shoved in our faces every second. It’s not that we’re bad people for it, we have no other choice but to absorb the information.

It’s been over five years since I’ve read it, but I vaguely remember a line from Fahrenheit 451 about cars that go so fast you can’t read the billboards. Information is diluted and its hard to pinpoint what to pay attention to.

This is why FOCUS is a rare skill now. We have to learn to tune out the noise and direct our attention to our work.

I’ve seen variations of a post captioned, “Your grandparents lived through the Great Depression, while you are living through the Great Distraction”.

We are so overstimulated, we’ve turned doing nothing into an activity; we call it ‘meditating’.

I never did find that whole “ignorance is bliss” maxim to be as profound as people make it out to be, but I do agree there is such a thing as consuming unnecessary information.

There is no difference between the 4-year-old who watches too many cartoons and the 70-year-old who watches too much CNN.

Our minds have diets in the same way our bodies do. If you eat crap, you will feel like crap. So if you consume low-quality content, your mental (and naturally emotional) state will be crap.

Not taking care of our information diets is exactly why so many of us have poorly thought out opinions with no other basis of reason than how it makes us feel to think about it.

We need to dead this era of validating your opinion because of who you are. You now must be able to explain what makes you right. It’s absolutely hilarious how some people will combat this, “How dare you tell me I’m a regular human being who isn’t exempt from being wrong!?”

Most people just know of something. Few actually understand the thing itself.

A lot of these posts will be revisiting why something is the way it is.

So even if the subject seems obvious to you, I doubt you have an understanding of it to where you can deconstruct it.

The issue with public education is we’re told to do the assignment for the sole sake of doing it. Rarely do they elaborate on why it is important for us to do this. Approaching knowledge with this attitude leads us to only absorb information with the bare minimum effort required to complete the assignment. Once the work is finished, we have zero regard for what we learned. It then fades away like empty calories; we consumed it, that doesn’t mean our bodies are thriving off of it.

In the same way some people will oversimplify things, a lot of ‘intellectuals’ will overcomplicate things too. Neither of these are especially good for us. We can’t try to keep everything simple just because we don’t feel like doing more thinking, yet we can’t assume everything is rocket science out of fear of looking ‘simple’.

You’ve probably heard the adage, “Broke is a status, poor is a mindset”. I see an exact parallel for knowledge.

Ignorant is a status, STUPID is a mindset. We all start off ignorant, but how comfortable are you with that ignorance?

Anybody can keep their thoughts and ideas bottled up in their heads. It’s more comfortable to be right in your own realm of logic.

The act of writing something is when you realize you don’t make as much sense as you thought you did.

Writing is the detox of our information diets. If you have a bunch of thoughts in your head but don’t know what to do with them, you need to detox.

I’m hoping this site will inspire others to start writing. There is nothing to gain from being scared to face our own thoughts, so we might as well put them on paper, literally and figuratively.

3. Practice Communication

The ultimate tradeoff of simplifying information is it gets stripped of nuance.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to learn things simply. What concerns me is we’re getting to a point where people expect everything to be broken down into kindergarten blocks for them, and anything more demanding is out of the question.

You can’t get a Ph.D. understanding with a preschool effort.

Sadly, most decision-makers don’t have the patience to hear out the nuances of an idea. So I have no other choice but to break them down to where only the essentials (that they care about) are most prominent.

One of the worst things about writing in school is they’ll force you to drag out your points just to appeal to some obsequious word/page count. I can understand the basic idea of us needing to be able to articulate ourselves with specificity, but this is a major factor in how people will just ramble on and on about whatever they’re talking about just to convey an idea that could’ve been summarized in a few sentences.

Ultimately, if I can condense a 1000+ page essay into an elevator pitch (<15 seconds), and still retain the main points, my mission will be accomplished.

4. Decentralized Platform for Discourse

I’ve seen too many large social media accounts deactivated in mere seconds after a controversial post. I’m aware that this website could be taken down too if one tried hard enough, but this is a much safer space compared to those platforms.

You may have seen the term ‘echo chamber’ in passing. Most social media users only follow people who align with their views. Now if you use social media strictly for entertainment, I don’t blame you, of course nobody wants to follow somebody they’re not interested in. In reality, we know good and well a lot of people are getting their global news off of these platforms (not that TV is any better). This is unhealthy and only hardens our biases, which puts us in the exact opposite direction of where we need to go.

This especially applies to Twitter and Facebook, since they’re very ‘sharey’ platforms; it’s easy to see content you didn’t ask to see, even if it’s coming from people you follow. If all you follow are chocolate lovers, you will only see pro-chocolate/anti-vanilla content. This gets dangerous when you meet someone who only follows vanilla lovers because both of you are technically right in what you’ve seen about your ‘side’.

With this site, I aim to disintegrate this concept. If you say something, expect opposing views. I have ZERO tolerance for polarized thinking. All statements must be backed up with sound logic and sources as needed.

5. Find Like-Minded People and Build a Community

Let me clarify this before you accuse me of being elitist.

I truly believe that EVERYBODY has the ability to think for themselves. Are we going to pretend that everybody goes about doing that though?

I seek to find people who are fed up with the complaining and wish to pool our intellects together to solve these big problems.

Universities are as effective in handling these issues as public trashcans are in getting people to stop littering. Most institutions are too concerned with their image and appealing to the people who fund them. Why would you listen to a drug study from X school when the founder of the company is the school’s biggest donor?

I am not automatically dismissing those who study under institutions, but if you do, check your credentials at the door. Your tenure does not make you a genius here, you are just as stupid as the rest of us, if not worse.

I don’t have a care in the world about your professional background. I strongly believe it’s possible for the janitor to have more sense than the CEO. You can be the neighborhood junkie, if you have internet access, and are able to form a coherent opinion with civility, you have a place here.

You may find yourself proclaiming to be one of the types I’m looking for. If you haven’t already, put yourself to the test and head to my ‘Who This Website is NOT For’ page. You will see very quick if you’re serious about this or not.