Thought Systems: Ideas and Ego

Being a college town, the place we live is rich with ideas. Even so, why do they seem so homogenous? The answer, in short, is that no one, myself included, is as unique as they think; they’re all exposed to similar epistemic stimuli. To examine how one internalizes an idea, we need a foundation of what learning is to argue from. This has been provided by the field of psy- chology, and goes something like this: Learning can fall under three broad categories, those be- ing operant conditioning, explicit/deliberative learning, and classical conditioning. Operant is largely reinforcement-based, explicit is that “critical thinking” we’re always being told that Gen Z lacks, and classical conditioning is what we are focusing on here. Classical conditioning is the type of learning that forms an association with a specific stimulus: think Pavlov’s dogs, or an unwitting baby learning how to use a tablet. In these cases the reward is dopamine, and the subject forms a connection with a specific ac- tion and obtains the reward. How does this in any way have to do with epistemology?
Well, it doesn’t, but it does have to do with its bastardized and widely practiced cousin. For lack of a better term, let it be known as “opinion- slop.”
Opinionslop looks very similar to its dear cousin, but the two really couldn’t be more dif- ferent. This difference lies within how a final thought is reached: epistemic thought follows the process from start to finish; opinionslop only concerns the final opinion, usually drip-fed via algorithm. It’s important to note that these terms refer to process, not outcome. Opinions obtained via opinionslop might be just as intel- lectually valid as those obtained with the tradi- tional epistemic process. It’s just that without the connection from start to finish, an individual exposed to a lot of opinionslop is less adept at justifying or defending those beliefs — aside from common rhetorical arguments.
A common attribute of ideas reached via opinionslop is the tendency of the holder to be very passionate about whatever unsupported idea it is that they hold. This is mostly because, for opinionslop to be effective, largely passion- ate rhetoric involving morals and/or a binary involving one “correct” answer is used. If the belief itself is internalized, nine times out of ten it’s internalized using a charged framework. The charge is what these thoughts need to employ in order to be exported across various social me- dia algorithms, creating massive, homogenous blobs of unsupported opinion.
Though opinionslop varies regionally — blue vs red voting tendencies, culturally accepted narratives, biases, etc. — this is only because some regions were more receptive to some nar- ratives than others. Over time, our algorithms will sand it down until eventually all thought produced by opinionslop produces the same, self-derivative conclusions. Or maybe regula- tion prevents people from getting their news from Instagram reels and Twitter — formerly X — who knows.