From: Jef Allbright (jef@jefallbright.net)
Date: Thu Sep 19 2002 - 09:29:28 MDT
The Extropians list is for many of us the place on the web where we feel most connected and understood. We share much in common, including a high ratio INTJ / ENTJ personalities, and and we tend to be in the upper percentiles of intelligence ranking. We also share an interest in technology and speculation on the future.
I suspect we also share a common experience, starting from our childhood, of being misunderstood by our peer age group. We may have felt isolated and tended to focus our attention and energy on our thoughts rather than on relationships with other persons.
In our interactions with others, how many of us have heard "Why do you always make things so complicated?". How many of us have joined a discussion, eager to illuminate the subject with our precisely wielded laser beam of logic and scientific knowledge, only to hear that _we_ are missing the point?
I think many of us have experienced this, and the point of this posting is to ask how we tend to proceed in such a situation.
Do we tend to broaden the scope of the discussion, find areas of common understanding and agreement, and then work together to refine our understanding of a topic?
Or do we tend to focus even close on what we see as the key points, recursively reducing the issue to its essentials in a display of our intellectual prowess and reductionist skills, smug and comfortable in our crystalline cathedral of order and logic? Our sense of superiority then reinforced, when our conversation partner decides it's not worthwhile to play any more?
How many of us have laughed out loud with delight when we first comprehend the inherent limitations of language and rhetoric, and mathematics, but then continue to polish, sharpen, and use these tools exclusively at the expense of developing skills in the areas of empathy, inspiration, and leadership?
We imagine and create amazing and wondrous visions of what could be, and find incredible beauty in commonly unseen aspects of the universe around and within us. We see connections everywhere and delight in discovering and sharing these with others.
Why then, do we so often feel disconnected?
- Jef
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