all right welcome to this episode and today i'm super super excited to talk about how do we think critically in a golden age of content how do we think critically in the age where you know there's a whole lot of stuff going on in the world where there's always information coming our way how do we distinguish nonsense from truth how do we distinguish useless content from principles or how do we exactly reason with um internet content that are coming your way and how how exactly do we get a deeper understanding of the topics that we're
interested in um without falling into the traps of misreading or in philosophies it's especially important so how do we exactly deal with you know popular content without losing a grip on um on reason without really losing a grip on our realities or how do we exactly uh be intelligent about dealing with um information that's coming at us because um a part of my work that i really want to do with my work a part of this um goal of mine is to offer sort of like video essays on how do we deal with the world
um as a young adult but my perspective is kind of like this philosophical perspective of course you can watch other people with other perspectives but i like to apply philosophy to real life because i'm a very passionate student of philosophy and i like to apply what i've learned to everyday situations so that's a bulk of the work that we're doing here so before we start today's entire exploration and um mind you this is going to be a bit of a longer one but before we start start that entire exploration into the nature of speech versus
writing into the nature of um sort of like how do we overcome this obsession that we have with certainty and how do we exactly deal intelligently with information i want to give major credit to peter salmon who was um in fact a melbourne writer he wrote this brilliant book called um an event perhaps which is a biography of jacques derrida and derida's work in a sense is probably impenetrable to a general reading public but peter salmon's book provided a brilliant introduction into some of the works of dereda and most of these insights i'll be drawing
drawing a lot of insights from him and i'm actually a part of his winter course he's actually lecturing a course at the melbourne school of continental philosophy which i'm lucky to be to be a part of and his lectures are just some of the most engaging lectures ever and i've certainly it certainly certainly illuminated a lot of my understanding of dereda so the story all began with plato so plato and socrates if you were into philosophy what's gonna happen is that you would have realized that socrates had never written a word in his life socrates
never trusted really trust the written form and all of the books by plato they were written in what's called a socratic dialogue the form called the socratic dialogue and this is already gonna draw some sort of like this is already going to provide some answers to this debate between speech and writing and in the book phaedrus uh plato basically wrote down this conversation between phagers and um and play and and socrates so socrates went up to this athenian aristocrat and he basically started asking him questions like you know what do you think of this form
called writing what do you think of writing compared to speaking you know if i write something to you does it convey more truth compared if i just speak it to you right now you know so they have one of these little debates and socrates basically uh told the story or the egyptian myth of the king famous and his interaction with uh the the god of writing uh thieweth so one day thioth paid a visit to king famous and he said the king of famous hey look i got this gift of writing that i want to
give to you to give to the egyptian people you know it is this thing that's going to make people wiser because you can use this writing thing to you know write concepts down to write down scientific theories you can sort of like make people wiser you can give this piece of writing to everybody and then you can let everybody decide what they want to do with this piece of theory and you can sort of like um you can distribute knowledge quicker right it's going to make people wiser because writing is just distributing knowledge quicker and
it's able to do things that speaking cannot it's more complex than thinking i mean it's more complex than speaking you know it's a little more nuanced than speaking and you can use it to make egyptians wiser so king famous sat there scratched his beard and you know thought about it but then he shook his head and then he looked at theoeth theoth is like you know what's wrong with writing and then keith thames basically argued that writing is actually making egyptians stupider it's actually making them stupid because by the act of writing things down they
no longer have to remember anything they no longer have to exercise their faculties on a spot they no longer have to sort of reason on their feet right they no longer have to just like say something um to someone's face to confront a person instead they can just write them a note right and that's in a sense famous argument or king theme is argument against writing because um according to peter salmon writing without a father so writing in a sense without the presence of the writer or without that you know physical presence of the person
who's delivering the message um cannot defend itself so for example if i want um for example if i want my sister to pick something up from the store for me after um uh when she's on her way back home i'm just kind of like you know there are two ways to go about it i can either write her a list and send it to her or i could call her and you know tell her to get the thing for me if i write the list for her this list is is in a sense once i've
written it down it's outside of my control her interpretation of this list is going to be you know it's going to be different from my original intention it's going to escape my original meaning it's going to be without a father for example um you know this is a this is a really good example provided by rick rodrick i think and he's the lecturer on derrida so he basically said if i write my wife a shopping list and um and i leave that shopping list kind of on the desk and if i get run over by
a bus uh the very next second flat like like a tortilla then my wife can still make sense of that list but then without the presence of the writer that list is prone to a lot of misinterpretations or misreadings right and that list is basically prone to all sorts of weird sort of like um misreadings she could pick up the wrong thing from the store and could pick up the wrong quantities and could pick up the wrong sort of like color of the thing or could pick up the wrong type of apple for example so
writing always had this sort of um misinterpretation element to it whereas speaking speaking has a lot you know the the margin for misinterpretation of speech is a lot smaller so speaking is not you're not that prone to mishearing someone right you're not that prone to um misunderstanding someone if you're saying something to their face and of course um this sort of paranoia against writing this paranoia for rioting uh it basically went through the course of um thousands of years of western western philosophy uh aristotle later on coined writing as something that's defective it's merely a
symbol for speaking and the french enlightenment philosopher jean-jacques rousseau uh went as far as to call writing a dangerous supplement to speaking right it's it's a very dangerous thing because you can do all sorts of crazy crazy stuff with this so it's unnatural writing is unnatural it's a simple creation now i want to bring this debate between writing and um and speaking back to this idea of how do we deal with information critically in a modern age you know apparently uh robin you just went on a philosophical rant you know you're lost in the clouds
you know what is this writing and um speaking debate has to do with um has to do with anything that we're talking about here how do we think about information intelligently in a modern age how do we deal with instagram youtube tick tock how do we deal with all this content that are instead of like coming our way like sort of like taking up our mind space how do we deal with that i want you to notice that as you go on youtube or instagram or twitter or tick tock or um or even facebook if
you still use facebook that the predominant medium the predominant way of interacting with information is predominantly through speaking or speech even in a written domain online blog posts are in a sense written in a way that's supposed to resemble a conversation you know it's in a conversational tone and you know if we bring the example down to youtube or you know instagram reels you know whenever someone's telling you something on instagram or youtube you know that's just blatantly that's just plainly obvious it's a communication through speech it's no longer through writing captions are merely supplements
to um to speaking so in a sense we're so is correct it's a it's a supplement that's no longer dangerous uh whereas your whole attention when you're spending time on the internet when you're listening to a podcast where when you're listening to my youtube video or when you're listening to someone on tik tok or instagram you are relying on speech you're relying on this act of communication through speech you're relying on the speaker telling you exactly what the speaker's um speaker's um speaker's intention is you're relying that gap of communication where that gap of interpretation
is a lot smaller right so when i say something you can just understand me straight away and when someone else tells you something on the internet through instagram or something you can just understand them straight away that margin of interpretation is a lot um is a lot smaller there's less room for misinterpretation so hence you know that brings us the problem of just taking influencers uh at face value or taking ideas from the internet at face value because when i was younger um i started using a computer quite late so before when i try to
figure out how to uh how a certain thing works or how a certain subject is supposed to be i remember that i had a had an obsession with um with the structure of guns so that that was my obsession when i was a kid i was really into airsoft and i wanted to know how to how to do specific things with that with my airsoft like airsoft rifles and i had to go to the library and find a book on airsoft's and had to you know follow the instructions to really to really figure out how
the thing works right so i had to drag my mom to the library had to borrow her library card had to read through all of these entries and then finally i knew i know how to how to do this thing but whereas nowadays my my immediate impulse is to look up a youtube video on a subject or for example i'm thinking about some philosophy idea my immediate impulse is to consult philosophy tube or the school of life or you know something on the internet or a short article a short introduction to a thinker you know
that's my immediating pause and that's an impulse that i had to resist as i get deeper and deeper and deeper into into my reading right so i want you to notice that your immediating pause is to consult speech as a form of communication from the internet instead of reading something about it instead of consulting a source of information that's in a sense denser your first instinct is to watch a short youtube video on it is to read a short blog post on it is to um go to a forum and discuss it but realize that
entire exercise right that entire exercise it's still an exercise of speech because the content on the internet they're in a sense boil down to a very conversational level and then you're merely relying on these hearsays to construct how you should think about the world so you're cut off from that medium of critical thinking straight away because you're just taking people on that face value right you're taking influencers on at face value and i talked about this concept of um personality over content in my previous previous video essay you know the dangers of romanticizing the liberal
arts where i talked about that there's more of a focus on the personality of the person compared to the actual content the person is bringing and you can have non-experts telling you something on the internet and they actually don't know anything about the subject and um that's going to feed your brain with a lot of misinterpretation of the ideas or misreadings of certain philosophers or misreadings of history or you know yadda yadda there's a lot of there's a huge margin for um bad information on the internet because it's so democratized and it's sometimes hard to
figure out who to listen to or who not to listen to but if you're first seduced by the charm of the presenter it's going to be really hard for you to break out of that speech as truth right it's going to be really tricky right there so how do we resolve this problem with taking people out just at face value or taking people um just based on their words so in the summer of 1965 the french philosopher jacques derrida was on a cruise trip to vienna uh actually to to venice not vienna and with his
family on a holiday and he in a sense he was sitting on the steamship he was sitting there and he was thinking about some of the stuff that he published he was thinking about thinking about his academic work and then all of a sudden that insight hit him a granting site hit him and then he turned his wife margaret and he basically said to her you know i think something just happened to me and of course something did happen to him and what came out the other end was a gloriously bonkers book you know that's
peter simon's phrase a gloriously bonkers book called of grammatology so of grammatology i actually personally wouldn't recommend you to read this book i have to read excerpts of this book for this winter course but then this is a book that discussed everything from linguistics to phenomenology to uh to like um you know the to the chinese alphabet um to spelling systems of ancient civilizations uh to ideograms and i you know there was actually an entire chapter dedicated to masturbation and this is just like this gloriously messy book that tackled so many subjects there's so much
stuff in there and um and it's just like uh just a just a crazy book if you want to read it for entertainment value i would recommend you to read it it's a very fun book to read um the excerpts are really fun to read and at some point at some point i'm probably actually going to pick up the book and read it um in its entirety but right now um even the excerpts are just completely bonkers to read and besides all of this crazy stuff the key thing that daredevil was trying to one of
the key things in the book that dared i was trying to address was this distinction between writing and speaking right so writing and speaking he was trying to resolve that dichotomy so if philosophers for thousands of years they were concerned with this act of speaking as communication of truth then darada basically noticed that um that this idea of truth or fixing a truth or trying to get an objective meaning of what the speaker is talking about this is actually sort of like fixing something right this is actually putting a a solid meaning to something this
is actually putting like a fixed state to an object or a fixed definition of a thing but he basically realized throughout his you know rigorous philosophical thinking i'm just providing with a very very general overview this is a gross simplification of derivatives deconstructive methods but let's just run with it for the sake of argument but there it basically noticed that if you try to fix anything for example i give you a statement or i give you a definition of a thing or if you try to fix the meaning from the sounds that are coming out
of my mouth then we are necessarily excluding other interpretations through this process of fixing right and there it basically argued that this distinction between speaking and writing is obsolete because um even with speech when you try to fix a meaning there are still all of these excluded meanings that are within this some item of speaking that you're trying to fix a meaning on to right and in writing is just you know so much more so much more obvious it's just blatantly clear in writing that you can fix a reading of a very elaborate piece of
literature but that act of fixing is in a sense an act of violence you're excluding all the other possibilities and a really beautiful analogy is as a taxidermist if you want to capture a butterfly and if you want to pin this butterfly to the board then if you pin a butterfly down yeah sure you're going to have a stable structure of a butterfly you're gonna have this beautiful butterfly in the in a casket or in your frame but what's gonna happen is that you're excluding all the movements of this butterfly butterfly you're excluding all the
natural cycles to butterfly um the mating cycles how to butterfly axe in its um natural habitat you're excluding all of that in favor of a stable pinned down butterfly right the butterfly is dead so you're excluding out of possibilities all the life all the force of this butterfly but you're just pinning it down to a very stable concept and there i took it took it a step further and sort of like applied this fixing analogy to the rest of philosophy and he basically said that when philosophers are trying to define a thing for example there's
a there's a cup or there's a mug on this table right here if i want to say what the mug is by saying that this mug is x or this mug is held down by gravity or this mug is gray or this mug is something something something i'm necessarily making a statement about it i'm in a sense pinning this this this cup or pinning this mug like a pin a butterfly so i'm excluding all of these um variations of interpretations of this definition right i'm necessarily exclu excluding a lot of posit possibilities and daradat basically
equated that entire thing as um as an act of violence as an act of us trying to get a stable meaning whilst excluding the ambiguities of life excluding all the um all the crazy stuff that could happen so he's he's basically arguing like a stable form of viewing the world a stable concept that we can use to view reality with every concept is limited because life is a lot more complicated than any piece of concept and once we embrace that idea that once we fix the thing there's like other things going on around this thing
that we fixed then we enter a state of wadera coin as difference so difference is a state of deference you're deferring a meaning till later you're deferring this meaning to um you're not trying to define a thing but you're just trying to let it go you're trying to let it do its thing you're trying to give it its organic expressions you're trying to let the thing unfold now difference is going to directly give rise to this thing of what the greeks coined as aporia so aporia is a state of confusion and it's a state of
like um it's basically a state when you're confused about something aporia is just doubt of your own uh old logic right so poria could happen if you're in a situation that you've never experienced before a prayer eporya could happen in many different situations and if you're encountering something new aporia could happen and um if you're if you're dealing with something a difficult concept in mathematics or if you're dealing with um brand new theories when you're learning aporia is always going to grab you by the balls right so in a sense the journey of learning trying
to tie the entire video back together to the original point here the journey of encountering information and learning they must by necessity you have to encounter the state of aporia because reality itself is a lot more complicated than any theory that you can prescribe to it reality itself is a lot bigger than your frame of view of this reality and once you have new information coming in that's going to throw off your throw off your world view and that's in a sense a good thing and our impulse when we're confused is to run on the
internet to find an answer whereas you know um whereas you know according to derida you're supposed to embrace that confusion you're supposed to embrace that state of aporia you're supposed to open yourself up to a state of maybe i don't know maybe i need to think about it a little harder maybe i need to read more books on the thing or maybe i should watch a few videos and compare the perspectives of these videos and once you enter the state of not knowing about a thing that's when you're actually the most open-minded that's actually when
you're able to deal with information head-on that's when you're able to enter a true state of like um difference you can defer a certain meaning till later so you can open yourself up you can open up all the space in your brain to explore to explore like alternative mediums to explore different perspectives to get uh get contradicting views and somehow resolving those contradictions to become very comfortable with paradoxes right so that's the that's the power of deferring a certain definition until later we're not saying that you're never going to arrive at a certain definition you
know human beings need certain definitions of definitions to survive we need to know when we should act you know survival is very important but always when you're dealing with a new concept embrace that confusion embrace that state of like you know new information is coming in and and and i don't really know what to do with it should i act like this or should i act like that or you know should i listen to this intellectual or dad and lecture should i listen to uh jordan peterson or should i listen to schlafly jack you know
all this kind of stuff um you know just try your best to not know for a little bit put yourself in a state of like deferring a meaning till later because once you fix the meaning you know you're fixture forever you're you're left with a dead butterfly right but if you open yourself up to the uncertainty this open-mindedness or this sort of um state of not knowing then you allow more information to come and you allow higher quality information to come in so you're not just consulting youtube videos to complete your understanding of a thing
because you can't wait to to to know a thing so you're not just reading a summary of a philosophy book just to you know now i know what there it was about you know so you're not just reading some simplified explanation of a thing but you're able to open your brain up you're able to defer meaning you're able to sort of like open yourself up to allow an organic synthesis of understanding and that's really what i want for you the insight that i want you to take out of this video and it is a longer
video because we covered a lot of ground and um and i hope you guys have um gained a lot of value from this one and i hope you will check out uh the recommended readings of um on a companion article and i certainly linked a lot of resources to this one and if you want to check out the podcast episode in the description it's also available and at last if you want to support my work i have a link to buy me a coffee where you can support this channel through getting me a coffee feeling
my caffeine addiction so i can spend more time scripting these videos recording these videos for you guys and nevertheless this is the episode or should i say um critical thinking 101 uh on this channel and i hope you guys had enjoyed this episode and remember only through embracing confusion or embracing a state of not knowing can you allow the space for you to achieve a deeper understanding of subjects and rc walden here stay curious keep thinking and i'll see you in the next one
