Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
6. Defend your opinion
This is a bit of a mix of rules 4 and 5 to help foster higher quality posts. You are expected to defend your unpopular opinion in the post body. We don't expect a whole manifesto (please, no manifestos), but you should at least provide some details as to why you hold the position you do.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
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I'm not convinced your concept of your concept of concentration sending people insane. There's no evidence of that, unless you'd like to share some?
I think those groups (and the lawyers you mention) are made up of broard cross sections of the population. As with the general population, they include people who have empathy and compassion and people who don't. Those with empathy and compassion try to benefit everyone, those without try to benefit themselves. Sadly engineers, scientists, artists and lawyers who only seek to benefit themselves will consider and act on developing unethical things (weapons, toxic materials, propaganda, defending people doing unethical things).
I think the people who control the world tend to be the people with power, a group also made up of people with/without empathy and compassion. The groups you list who do unethical things might be included in the group of those with power, but they might also just be benefiting themselves by helping those with power but without empathy and compassion. The control remains with those with power.
When you concentrate on a thing you ignore pretty much everything else. Do it enough and that ignoring becomes blindness. And habitual.
Now your world is just a sliver of what it once was. But you still call this sliver "the world", of course. And upon this sliver is all your reasoning based.
That's what I'm calling insanity.
Those who concentrate best tend to succeed in our society. They achieve the goals, climb the ladder, implement the truth. The rest of us are slackers comparatively.
They are the ones with the greatest power. These alpha concentrators. And they are the most visibly insane.
But even the moderate concentrators have great power. A million software engineers surely have a power equal to a single billionaire businessman.
Two things
One, I'm guessing English is not your first language so you may not be aware that 'concentrate' has a primary meaning of 'thinking carefully' while what you seem like you are describing is 'specialization,' meaning 'studying narrowly, but deeply.' You seem to be claiming that over-specialization (studying narrowly and deeply, to the exclusion of relevant information) is bad. They are related but subtly different and part of the negative response may be due to a linguistic barrier.
And two,
By this definition, everyone is insane. It is definitionally impossible for anyone to fully comprehend the totality of the world. Everyone is focused on their tiny slice. Even people who spread their awareness across many areas can't comprehend all of it at once. You, yourself, are limited to the things you have had the chance to learn in your life. Everyone 'concentrates' their attention, or 'specializes' on certain subjects. Sometimes it is on the atomic structure of distant stars. Sometimes it is on the care of their loved ones. The limitation is universal, and not isolated to particular kinds of study.
I am describing the concentration of attention. Which includes a great ignoring. This is simple and obvious.
I am adding to that, habit. Unconscious action that is. Doing a thing while not aware that you're doing it.
Which, when we put them together, gives us a kind of blindness.
If that blindness is unacknowledged then yes, that's a kind if insanity. And it would follow that the more you concentrate the more insane you are.
If everybody does it (habitually concentrates) then yes, everybody is insane.
Is it necessary and unavoidable? I doubt it.
Am I being unclear here or just offensive?
I think I understand your meaning. However, if everyone is insane because they are blind to reality, does it matter that educated people are too? And if those who study deeply on something don't actually shrink their baseline awareness, (learning mechanical engineering doesn't make you less able to comprehend text, grow a garden, ride a bike, etc.) even if they only reduce their blindness in a narrow area, they are less blind/insane than the average person who is blind to most/all of the same things as the expert but also blind to the things the expert has studied.
Now, there is an effect where someone may see how much more sane the expert is and expect that the experts narrow knowledge will make them also saner in some other area where they are just as blind as anyone else. This is a big problem in our world because you get people who think they know how to run the world because they know how to write a few lines of code. The trick is, this is a blindness shared by almost all people, not just experts. The expert in chemistry isn't more likely to mismanage a school than the average person, but both are more likely to fail than an expert in education.