impossibility of consensus

welcome to introspection ft. harsehaj! ⭐️ i’m harsehaj, a 19 y/o always up to something in social good x tech.

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btw, feel free to reply with topic ideas you want me to write about for future posts.

onto today’s topic: impossibility of consensus 🤺

sure, a group of 10 random group could unanimously agree on something. maybe even 10,000 with a stroke of luck. ultimately though, it is impossible for everyone to reach a consensus, even just on whether or not the sky is blue.

someone annoying person is definitely gonna pull up with the “erm, it’s actually indigo right now. 🤓”

our imperfections, individuality, and heterogeneity make us all the more human. we will never agree on everything.

with the weight of all the issues perpetually plaguing the world (often driven by human conflict and/or disagreement) i sometimes wonder how great it would be if we all thought the same way.

but, would it? would such a robotic world be so great? if we all shared the same thought processes and conclusions for everything, what would be the difference between us and a computerized program spitting answers based on a formula? 🧮

our disagreements, fights, exploration, discovery and desire to disrupt is exactly what humanity is. it’s both ugly and beautiful.

i’m sure that agreeing on baseline morals and unanimously vowing to abide by them would be fantastic, but even then, humans are so complex. standardization is hard when it comes to us, and that in and of itself characterizes us. we are all so different — our life experiences birth nuanced mindsets which help form our opinions on anything.

disagreements advance our society, the same way they also cause it harm. if scientists accepted what we could see with our eyes as the extent of our reality, space exploration would have never been actualized. 🌙 if women never protested for the right to vote and instead agreed with the status quo, we would still be living in an intense patriarchal society. if all humans agreed that ai is good, we wouldn’t be investing money into bias mitigation and implementing policy for impersonation.

the impossibility of consensus also characterizes humanity. both how horrible it is, and how wonderful it can be. :)

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