Thinking is really appreciated
I had a moment today to glance at Twitter and came across a tweet by the wonderfully funny Ivo Graham. His tweet was on the subject of the recent news that three effective vaccine candidates are considered safe enough to use to combat the Covid-19 pandemic. As you can imagine this tweet attracted an array of opinions in the comments, but one caught me. It said:
I spent a few moments trying to understand the thought process behind this tweet and it occurred to me that perhaps this type of response comes from having a conviction about the subject that overrides the thinking process. Specifically, when a person believes something to be true they do not stop to think about the comment they are about to make so that it arrives without having the strength to stand up to scrutiny.
My reply to the comment was:
What surprised me was that within a few hours my reply had over 500 likes. Now I’m not much of a presence on Twitter, in fact, I have only recently begun to tweet again after about eight years of virtually no tweeting. So I’ve never really had many reactions to things I have tweeted or commented on. But as this was in some way for me showing a little traction I wanted to look into why. My initial thought on it is that I did what many comments do on Twitter and offered a counterpoint to the comment I was responding to, but crucially I did something extra and added a simplified analogy that worked to help others visualise my thinking. I also posed this analogy as a question which I believe prompts the reader to actively visualise my analogy and therefore actively follow my thought process. I believe this process allows people to better understand my point.
It was particularly interesting to me that I haven’t, so far, had anyone argue against my comment. Did this approach disarm those who would ordinarily argue with me? To be honest, I can’t tell, but I had expected to be met with at least contrary arguments and considered that it is likely that some of these responses would be far from a well-constructed argument and more likely to be at least insulting in some way.
The Social Media guru that is Gary Vaynerchuk is quoted as saying:
“In a sea of a million stories, a great one is going to make you react” — Gary Vaynerchuk
I think that using a simple, but not simplistic, analogy is a good way of making the reader of your tweet or comment react bu having them think rather than allow their thinking process to be overridden by their own beliefs.
Of course, the same process is well used to stop people from thinking by offering a simplistic thought that doesn't pass deeper scrutiny but our brains are always looking for shortcuts so are likely to fall for a comment or tweet that does the thinking for us no matter how wrong it might be.
