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Can We Strike A Balance That Helps Us With The Implausible?
The battle between being ingenious or being ingenuous rages on.
Plausibility is a false friend. It is entirely unreliable and inevitably biased. We decide what is plausible and what isn’t — or worse, someone else does it for us. In either case, the decision is subjective to a fault while it appears to be based on fact. This makes plausibility exceptionally deceptive, with the plausible being almost as likely as the implausible as far as we can tell.
I remember the early 2000s well. I remember being one of the first kids in school to have access to the internet at home. A bunch of us met up at my place to explore the exploding world wide web. As you can imagine, we didn’t browse scientific papers but surfed (remember the term?) to the nearest chat room. These days, you google what you want to do and choose from the top three results; back then, I remember having to know in advance the address that would serve your purpose.
The experience was akin to witnessing magic, which is often the case when we first use any incomprehensible technology. We chatted to this other human being who supposedly was sitting in front of another computer, miles away. It all happened on the screen. We struggled to find questions to ask that would prove that there really was a…