Critical Thinking and Tech Evangelists

It is a phenomenal piece of work, and it's substantial. It is longer than two hours. I think it's like two hours and eighteen minutes of information about n f t S, cryptocurrency, blockchain, There's a bit about Web three in there, and more. Host Dan Olson presents a meticulously researched and well thought out take down of all of these things. And I imagine he could and maybe will do something similar with metaverse concepts, which tie in into

a lot of these concepts as well. And I think it's really darn amazing when you consider that his challenge. His channel is supposed to be about quote deconstructing the craft of visual narrative end quote, and a lot of His videos are about things like how editing can make or break a movie, and how certain narratives become hopelessly muddled because of bad editing, and that sort of stuff. UM really interesting to see him branch out into this.

He's using his incredible ability to put together substantial arguments to focus on things beyond narrative storytelling and those those videos, by the way, are also great. I've learned a lot by watching his videos. Anyway, Dan, I would say, is even more opposed to cryptocurrencies and n f t s than I am. And if you are a frequent listener of tech stuff, you already know that I'm not exactly

a hype man for n f t S and cryptocurrency. Now, I couldn't possibly cover the material more thoroughly than he has, so I'm not gonna I'm not gonna go through and regurgitate the points he made. He makes them very well, and like I said, the video is fantastic. If you are at all interested in learning more about cryptocurrencies, blockchain, n f t s, all that kind of stuff, it's

well worth a watch. Line goes up the problem with n f t s. So instead, what I want to talk about is related, and it's something that he touches on in the video, which is critical thinking within the context of tech evangelism in general. So let's start off with the origin of the word evangelism, because that's the tricky one already. It's rooted in religion. Specifically, it's rooted in christ Yanity. The concept of evangelism is to spread the Gospel, with the end goal of this effort being

to bring more people into the fold of the religion. Now, in more recent times, some folks use the word evangelist to describe an enthusiast who speaks about or writes about or you know whatever. They communicate in some way they're chosen focus of devotion and an effort to get more people to get into it. So you could be an evangelist for lots of different stuff, not just religion, although that again is where the word has its origin. You could be an evangelist for a sports team and try

and get more people into watching a sport you like. Now, to be clear, being an evangelist isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm not trying to suggest that being enthusiastic and communicative about stuff is a bad thing. If it were I wouldn't be a host of a podcast, because that's essentially what podcasting is. You could be an evangelist for a cause.

For example, you could be spending time and effort to get more support for a worthy cause, and you might believe wholeheartedly in it, and any support you help build contributes to that cause. That's a good one. But an evangelist can be a bad thing too. But it definitely can be a bad thing as well. The tools that someone uses to attract people to support a good cause are the same tools that can be used to attract people to supporting something less altruistic or predatory. Scam artists

depend upon this. They use an evangelical approach pretty regularly, although they frequently target things like people's greed or fear in order to do it. And even folks who are not scam artists, who might actually believe in something because of their own investment, may use these tools to get other people on board, probably because they've already invested so much into this particular technology. So crypto is a good example of this. Now, I will not go so far

as to say that crypto is a scam. Dan Olson might go that far, um and you know, he makes a very strong argument, but I would say that cryptocurrency is just not a very good system. It's definitely not a good system for replacing currency. It does not do a good job of that. I think that's pretty clear.

It's really not that good of a system for building wealth unless you were wealthy to begin with, or you just happen to get in on the ground floor and when there was no expectation for it to go crazy, and you just happen to make a ton of money that way. But for most people, it's not a good

way to build wealth. But if you wander into crypto forums, you're gonna see a lot of folks championing the philosophy of cryptocurrency in general and then debating with one another which cryptocurrencies are great and which ones are garbage, And boy howdy, there's an awful lot of disagreement on that topic. I bet you can guess what the the defining factor is. Whichever cryptocurrency you've invested in, that one, gosh darn better

will be a great one. And that's the thing, right, Like a big driver of cryptocurrency value is demand for that cryptocurrency. If there's a greater demand for the currency, then you typically see the currencies price go up. And it's a little more complicated and sophisticated than that, but that's kind of at the heart of things, at least for cryptocurrencies that are not directly tied to some fiat currency.

So if folks get scared about a cryptocurrency, demand typically goes down and the value will go down too, And the more scared they get, the more it goes down. It becomes kind of a self fulfilling prophecy does this in both directions, not just when it goes down. So let's take a scenario. Okay, let's say that you have sunk tens of thousands of dollars your life's savings into

a particular cryptocurrency. And let's say that you bought into this cryptocurrency when each unit of the currency was like five bucks, so five real world dollars to one of these cryptocurrency units. Now, when this unit first launched, before you got into it, its value was that fractions of a penny per unit, So if someone got into it initially, then they would have seen their investment grow to incredible

amounts by the time it gets to five dollars. So if you had bought it when it first launched, you would be wealthy beyond measure, but you didn't. You're in now when it got to five dollars, and in fact, that was when you bought in. Now we're a little further along, and let's say that right now that value

has actually dropped down to three dollars. Now you hope this is just a momentary depth and that the cryptocurrency is going to increase in value again, maybe increasing at that exponential speed it did when it first got huge, but there's no way to really know if that's going to happen. Well, you would have a pretty strong incentive two talk positively about your investment. For one thing, there's

the dreaded sunk cost fallacy. This is a tendency to stick with a strategy because you've already heavily invested into that strategy, and you stick with it even if it becomes obvious that if you jump ship you would be better off. By the way, while we talk about sunk costs a lot in financial matters, I argue that the

same thing is true with like emotional investment. If you've ever been in a relationship, whether it's a romantic relationship or a friendship, but you knew, you kind of knew you would both be better off if you kind of split up. But you've already invested so much emotional capital into this relationship that you can't bring yourself to to do that. That's very similar. That's essentially the sunk cost fallacy.

So if you invested tens of thousands of dollars into this cryptocurrency and then this cryptocurrency drops in value by forty percent, well that means you lost your investment, right, Your investment is down, And while you could get out with the sixty percent remaining minus any transaction fees, that doesn't really feel good, right, It doesn't feel good to get out of the system was significantly less money than when you went into it, especially when you know that

folks who jumped into this cryptocurrency wagon before you did had made up like bandits. People who bought it when it was fractions of a penne per unit, they made hundreds of thousands of dollars. Don't you deserve that money too? Don't you just served to be a bandit? Huh? Smoky? So that's one incentive that you know you have invested this money, so you you have an incentive for you to stick with it and try and get it to turn around. Maybe you actually really believe in this cryptocurrency.

Maybe it's not just a here's an opportunity, I'm going to jump on it, but that you actually believe in whatever the cryptocurrency stands for. There are people who do that um, but there are a lot more who are just kind of opportunistic. So you might start to feel sick because you've lost so much money in your investment. Maybe you go into the crypto forums and you're really

cheerleading the currency. You're trying to get other people excited about it, and if others do, they might buy into the currency, and maybe that will drive out the value, which means those lost investment dollars would start to filter back. If you could build enough momentum, you might push the value further than the five bucks it was at when you bought it, and then it's to the moon. Baby, You'll be rich in no time. But here's the thing.

This kind of operation is frightening lee similar to scams like pyramid schemes or multi level marketing schemes. Now I use the word scams, and I use the word schemes, because in my mind, that's kind of what they are. But MLM businesses, technically, if they're actually selling a real thing, are viewed as a legitimate form of business. I just find it really similar to scams to the point where

I'm very uncomfortable by them. Now, if you aren't familiar with what mL M schemes are, I'll fill you in. So essentially, you make money in one of two ways, or in both ways. So one is that you get recruited into an mL M. Someone convinces you that you should join this business, and then it becomes your job to sell something to people. Let's say it's cosmetics, because a lot of MLM companies are in the cosmetics business.

So you start to sell cosmetics to folks, maybe mostly through word of mouth and like selling it to friends and family, and you get a portion of each sale you make. Now you might actually have to spend your own money to get your supply, though obviously you know you're buying supplies at a lower cost than what you sell them to to other folks. So that's method number one of how to make money. Method number two is that you recruit other people to join the company. You

essentially become their sponsor. So you are now sitting upstream of those recruits who are downstream from you, and now you get a little piece of every sale they make. When they make a sale to someone else, you get a little You get a little portion of that sale. Upstream from you is your sponsor, the person who recruited you into the MLM. They get a little piece of

every sale you make. And you do this so on and so forth until you get to the very top of the chain, where a precious few are reaping in lots of these little slices of pie from all the recruits who are downstream. These are the people who are actually getting wealthy off this, because they're getting a cut off every transaction, and even if that cut is teeny tiny, it adds up as the organization grows, and that means for the folks at the very top, there's this huge

incentive to push for more recruits. Now, you do still need to sell stuff, or at least have recruits buying supplies from you, otherwise you don't have revenue coming in. But the more active people you have in the system, the more money you can make. So a huge part

of your business strategy comes in the form of recruitment strategies. Similarly, with crypto folks who have large holdings in the currency would love more people to come on board because it can boost the value of the individual unit and it can make their own substantial investment grow significantly. It's also not nearly as easy to extract yourself from a cryptocurrency market as you might think. That means that once you bought in, you might not feel like getting out is

a good risk. You might feel like if I get out now, I'm gonna lose out on future growth. Or I might have to spend so much in transaction fees that I'm really cutting into whatever profit I made. Or with certain cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, the transaction process takes long enough that it's possible you'll actually see a significant loss of wealth from the moment you start a transaction to

the moment it finally concludes. Okay, we've got some more to talk about when it comes to critical thinking and tech evangelism, but first let's take a quick break. All right, we're back now. One of the things that you'll here in cryptocurrency forums whenever a given cryptocurrency is having a rough go of it is you'll have a group of folks telling everyone to hoddle or h o d l or hold on for dear life. Essentially, what they are saying is, hey, don't dump your coins now, just hunker down.

You can wait this out. Things will be fine, they'll get better and then to the moon. And that sounds like good advice, right, but it's really reinforcing that sunk cost fallacy. There's no guarantee that things will get better. Maybe they will, maybe they'll get better than they've ever been before. We've seen that with Bitcoin several times where the value grew too incredible heights crashed and then grew

even more. Um if it does that again, then that means we're gonna see bitcoin go over sixty dollars per unit if it repeats that cycle. The problem is there's no guarantee that cycle will repeat. There's nothing inherent about cryptocurrency that makes it reliable for this sort of cycle. It could happen, but maybe it won't, and so that

sunk cost fallacy really starts to weigh on you. A lot of people will give this advice because they have their own significant investment in that virtual coin, so they don't want to see people jumping ship, because every time that happens, there's the potential for the coin's value to decline even further that would hurt their own investment, So they have an incentive to keep people on that currency

and try to convince more people to join in. They there's also the phrase by the depth, meaning when cryptocurrencies go low, that's when people should be buying more because that's when they're going to see the biggest return when the cryptocurrency recovers its value. If it recovers its value, then yeah, sure, if it covers its value, and it may be that you know, again, you bought it at five dollars, it's now at three dollars, so you're telling people, hey,

by now because it's gonna go up. You're kind of trying to create a self fulfilling prophecy to make that happen. So my point here is it's always good advice to think critically about tech evangelist claims. And I know I've picked on cryptocurrency a lot so far in this episode, but it's really true for pretty much all technologies, particularly ones that are early on in the hype cycle. That

might be the metaverse. In fact, I would say the better verse is a really good one to think critically about. VR A R. Both of those are good to think critically about. I'm not saying they're bad technologies, but that you have to critically evaluate claims about the technologies. The same is true for A I or really any given tech product. Now, I am not saying that tech is

worthless or anything close to that. I'm saying that you need to examine the motivations of tech evangelists to understand where they're coming from, what is incentivizing them to evangelize this particular technology, and to keep that in mind when you start to evaluate their claims. It may turn out that their claims are perfectly valid, but it may turn

out that they're somewhat biased or really biased. So if someone comes up to you and says, hey, the mataverse is gonna be huge, look at how many companies are getting into the metaverse. Well, that's true. There are a ton of companies that are all trying to get into something related to the metaverse. But you might want to ask questions like, how is the person who's telling you this, how are they connected to the metaverse, what is their

investment in it? Maybe they're just an enthusiast, so it's an emotional investment, it's not a financial investment. And it might just be that this is a person who's been swept up in a lot of height. Honestly, that's very easy to have happened. I've had it happened to me lots of times. I am not immune to it. I think I'm getting slightly better at recognizing it early on and then adjusting expectations, but I'm not perfect by any means.

Or maybe it's that this person runs a virtual real estate business and they're kind of hoping you're gonna PLoP down some real world cash to buy some virtual plots of land that may or may not ever be connected to a notable virtual landscape in the metaverse. Assuming we ever get something like that, then you know, maybe it would pay off in the long run, but there's no guarantee. And again, like we're still in a space where metaverse

doesn't actually mean anything yet. There's too many conflicting ideas and definitions and approaches, so buying into something specific right now is really taking a long shot. Like, if you're gonna do that, you might as well just be ready to say goodbye to that money. Maybe it pays off, which would be fantastic, but there's a real good chance it won't. So just like if you go into a casino where the house always wins in the end, you need to just sit there and say, all right, this

is money I am comfortable losing. I am not going to suffer if this money is gone forever. I might as well just assume that it is gone forever, and if it turns out otherwise, that will be a huge bonus. Or maybe a tech evangelist might out a particularly interesting aspect of a technology, but they might fail to mention the whole story, or maybe they don't even know the whole story. So for this I'm gonna touch on something that Dan Olsen talks about in that video I mentioned

at the top of the episode. So with n f

T S, one of the benefits you'll hear of. This is a benefit that's often marketed towards artists, is that the person who meants and n f T, which again stands for non fungible token, the person who ments a token can get a piece of every future transaction involving that n f T. So let's say you are an artist and you create a work of digital art, and you meant an n f T to represent this piece of art um which by the way, exists independently of the n f T. The n f T itself isn't

the art. It's a smart contract that represents the ownership of that art, and by ownership I mean of that instance of that art. It gets really granular. So you sell this n f T to someone for ten whole dollars, they now have a token that says they own that instance of your digital art. Good. But then let's say that there is this this crazy n f T boom, Right, people just go nuts speculating on n f T s. You've already sold your n f T for ten dollars.

The person you sold that too then goes on and resells that n f T, but they sell it for ten thousand dollars. In the real world, if this were to happen, if you were an artist and you sold your painting for ten bucks, and then later on the person you sold it to were was able to offload it for ten grand, you probably wouldn't see any of that money, right, because you already sold the painting. You're

you're out of luck. Now, the best you can hope for is that there would be a jump and interest in your work, and that future sales that you would make wouldn't met you more revenue. But with certain n f T market places, like whichever marketplace you initially meant the n f T n the creator can get a portion, a royalty, as it were, of each future sale of that token. So let's say you sell your n f

T to buyer one. Buyer one sells to buyer two, and some of that sales price will actually go to you, the person who minted the token in the first place. Buyer two sells the same n f T to buyer three, and again you who minted the token, gets a little cut of that. It's ongoing passive revenue, which is the dream. You hear about that a lot online. Ways of creating

ongoing passive revenue. That, by the way, that's a that's a phrase that should always raise red flags and prompt you to think critically about what is being sold to you.

But that's another topic for another time. Here's the thing about the n f T model, because I mean that is true, Like if you if you have this in this marketplace, yeah, you can you can keep on getting little cuts of each sale, except it only applies to whichever n f T marketplace you minted the token in the royalty system isn't built into the n f T s themselves. It's built into the marketplaces where the n

f T s are bought and sold. So nothing stops somewhere from taking an n f T out of one marketplace and then putting it up for sale into another marketplace. So if buyer one purchases the n f T for ten bucks from you, but then they move the n f T to a different marketplace and they sell it for ten thousan dollars, well then you're not getting any passive revenue because it's no longer on the marketplace where you minted it. And the royalty system doesn't work across

marketplaces yet. I say yet, because it potentially could in the future. It just doesn't. Now, you might think, okay, but how often does that scenario pop up? I mean, usually it's just going to stay in the same marketplace, right. Well, there's another issue at play here, and that's transaction fees. And this is how marketplaces make revenue. They put on a transaction fee for any transaction that happens within that marketplace. The same sort of thing is like credit card transaction fees, right.

This means that someone has to pay a little bit extra for this transaction to actually happen, so that when Buyer two buys from buyer one, this transaction fee also has to be covered. So a lot of buyers would prefer to do private transactions but directly between digital wallets and just avoid marketplaces entirely, and that way the transaction is just for the actual transaction, there's no fee on top of it. That way, you don't have to spend

extra money just to cover a fee. And when you switch to private transactions, the person who mented the token is left out of the whole process. No royalties. In other words, so while the royalty idea is great and it addresses an issue that digital creators encounter all the time, the execution is actually not that great and it doesn't

really solve the problem. But it sure does come across as a cool selling point for n f t s. And if you're someone who is dependent upon making money by selling n f t s or by driving up the value of n f t s so that your own purchases aren't a sunk cost, you are likely to talk up this feature even if it doesn't you know,

works so good. Now, all that being said, there are folks who are constantly working on evolving these smart contracts within eno f t s so that it might be possible that one day this will be fixed, it will be addressed, the royalty system will be more robust, and n f t s will fulfill the promise that people are making right now. It's just that right now, they don't do that right, not in every case, not as long as anyone can take something off of one marketplace

and put it on another. So I would say, don't count on the problem being addressed right away, and keeping that in mind so that you don't just fall into a system that doesn't work as well as what people are promising. All right, Let's talk about a different scenario in which critical thinking comes in really handy, and this is one that I totally failed. Ultimately. I did come around, obviously because I'm talking about it now so I have awareness about it. But initially I did not consider the

big picture properly. I did not think critically when it came to this topic. And I'm talking about autonomous cars around a decade ago, I was really, really hyped for autonomous cars. I was convinced it was right around the corner. We were going to have driverless cars, that no one would ever have to drive again, that traffic accidents would become a thing of the past, that we would have

these incredibly efficient systems all across the world. And when I was thinking about the discrete components, I could see why I was all swept up into the idea. But over time the veil fell from my eyes, and I realized that this is a much harder challenge than I gave it credit for when I was first thinking about it. All Right, I'll talk about that whole process after we come back from this quick break. Okay, let's talk about how I got swept up into the hype of autonomous cars.

My thinking was, well, of course, the computer would be better at driving a car than a person would. I was thinking about driving a car strictly in the sense of reaction times and perception. Right, a person has limited perception. You can only see a certain field of view, and

that's just whichever direction you have to be facing. You can only hear so much, right, There's an entire world around owned you that you cannot directly perceive all the time, anything that's outside of your peripheral you can't directly see it, and you have to rely on things like mirrors to compensate for that when you're driving, right, that's why you have side mirrors and rear view mirrors, So you use the mirrors to help compensate for the fact that you

don't have eyes in the back of your head. Even if you are a mom, I'm onto you, moms, I know you don't have eyes in the back of your head. Now, these mirrors have blind spots, right, just because the way the car is designed. So even with the mirrors and even checking mirrors frequently and being alert, you're going to have flawed perception. You cannot have perfect perception. It's just impossible. You can be really, really careful, but even the most

careful driver is going to have blind spots. But a car with a sophisticated set of sensors, well, in my mind, I was like, well, it could have three sixty degree vision all around the vehicle at all times. In fact, it could even have it so that it has vision above the vehicle, well beyond what we humans can do, and that would be phenomenal. I mean that the car would be able to detect every possible obstacle all around

it constantly. Then when it comes to reaction times, you know, we we have a problem with latency when it comes to perceiving something and then being able to act not. It all depends upon the sensory input we get. Uh, if it's by touch, we actually are able to react much faster than if it's visual. I think by touch it's like a hundred fifty milliseconds. Visual stimuli, it's like

two fifty milliseconds. It's a quarter of a second. Now, a quarter of a second is fast, don't get me wrong, But if you happen to be traveling in a vehicle that's going seventy miles per hour, then a quarter of a second lag between seeing something and being able to react can potentially mean the difference between avoiding an accident or being in one compute. As obviously, can react much more quickly than humans can. So of course, in my mind,

an autonomous car would be better at avoiding accidents than humans. Right, that just makes sense. They're able to see everything we can't, They're able to react faster than we can. That was my thinking, But I didn't take into consideration that the decision making process is a really, really complicated one, and that perception is more than just seeing. Perception is more than just I recognize there's something in front of me.

It's recognizing the nature of that thing in front of you and then being able to decide what to do about it. So we humans, we can make decisions really quickly. We're good at that. Generally speaking, it's not always the right decision, but we're really good at making them. We're also pretty good at adapting to new situations. We can draw on experience from even situations that might only be remotely similar, and be able to use that to guide

us into a course of actions. We're good at discerning the difference between a threat, such as say, a piece of a car's bumper laying across a lane of traffic, and something that's not a threat, like some leaves that are on the road. But computers do not have this native capability, and so one huge challenge with autonomous cars is training systems to recognize situations where emergency measures should be taken versus ones where things should just proceed as normal.

If a car applies the brakes suddenly because it thinks that a floating plastic bag ahead of it is a solid obstacle. The car might cause an accident on the roads because it stops short when it shouldn't. Similarly, if a car fails to detect that a semi truck is

crossing lanes of traffic, tragedy can strike. We know this because we've got examples of autonomous vehicles or least vehicles operating an advanced driver assist modes where the vehicle failed to detect a semi truck that was crossing lanes of traffic, possibly because the system misinterpreted the side of the truck to be the horizon, and as a result, the autonomous car crashed into the truck and the driver in the

autonomous car died. And as time has gone on, my initial enthusiasm for driverless cars has been tempered by the reality of how complicated this challenge really is. I've learned to be a bit more skeptical about autonomous car systems. And it's not that I think we aren't going to get there. I think that we will eventually, but I now realized that my initial perception of the nature of the challenge was way too narrow in scope. I was

being naive. I was thinking of the typical situations that you might find yourself in when you're driving down your average road. But the truth of the matter is that driving conditions very greatly from place to place and at different times of year, and unusual events can happen at any time. Now, that unusual event might be something really dangerous. It could be like mud slides or rock slides, that kind of thing, or it might be something more benign,

like some leaves are being blown across the road. But while we humans can interpret those things very quickly and then react appropriately, computer systems don't magically have that ability. That was just something I did not consider. Now, I definitely use critical thinking when I consider driverless cars today, and I recognize that there are some really sophisticated systems out there that, within restrictive parameters, work incredibly well. But

they still need those restrictive parameters. They're not capable of operating in every region, in every condition with incredible accuracy and reliability. But back in those early days, I was really a tech evangelist. I love the idea of driverless

cars virtually eliminating car accidents. I mean that means tens of thousands of people would not die from traffic accidents each year if we had reliable driverless cars, hundreds of thousands of people would not be affected by the sudden loss of a loved one, and then the benefits ripple out in ways we can't even imagine those people continue to be able to contribute to society. We don't have these these uh hits, financial hits that come with the

fact that we have these traffic accidents. You have all these different things that are are great if you're able to eliminate accidents. So of course you would want that kind of future. I mean, that's a future that that I think everybody would long for. But as beautiful as the potent chill is, that doesn't necessarily make it any closer to reality. Just because we want something to be true doesn't mean it is true, or that it's even

close to becoming true. In fact, that's when we really need to use critical thinking to make sure that the thing we want is in fact possible and not just some diversion. Like just because you want that cryptocurrency to go up doesn't mean it's going to go up. Just because you want two buy an n f T and and make a huge amount of money. Doesn't mean that's

gonna work either. Just because you want a web system that is divorced from the massive companies that currently dominate the web Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple doesn't mean that the new system won't have its own pillars of centralized authority. Right. Just because you change one thing doesn't mean that it's actually better. It made us be different anyway. If you're someone who loves tech and gadgets and whatnot, I think that's awesome. I mean, I still do love tech. I

love gadgets. I love learning about technological systems and how they work and sometimes how they don't work in quirky ways. I don't think we should just give up on tech. I don't think we should be unenthusiastic about technology. I don't think we should just automatically shut down if we hear someone talk a technology up. I don't think that that's,

you know, the right course of action either. If someone comes up and says, hey, I really love this new phone, you don't just automatically just say ah, chill and turn around and walk away. But you should engage in critical thinking. Ask yourself and ask others questions about the various claims and promises, look into them, really examine them, find out if the things that are being promised are even possible. Like Saraos should have taught us all that this is

something we need to do on a regular basis. That company reach the levels it did because people failed to ask realistic, critical questions and a lot of people lost a lot of money because of it, and some people are going to jail because of it. If the tech holds up to whatever level of scrutiny you've given it when you started to ask these tough questions and all the answers are pointing to great things, holy cats, you are onto something. Hold on with both hands. That's awesome.

Maybe it doesn't hold up entirely, maybe it fails in a couple of respects, but really that could just mean that your expectations are now more realistic. Maybe you still want to adopt the technology, but now you know what it's limitations are, and so you're not disappointed when you run up against them because you're aware of them. You ask the right questions and you're you're you're not expecting

it to do something that it cannot do. Or maybe you find out the thing you thought sounded cool really has nothing going for it, and you avoid stepping into a trap. Whatever the outcome, you benefit from the use of critical thinking. I really do think critical thinking is something that needs to be taught formally, and I think

it needs to be taught early. I did not really encounter it until I was well into high school and really more into college, and I feel like I would have benefited from that perspective much much earlier on than when I was exposed to it, because well, especially as a teenager, I was resistant to ideas that I didn't already have because you know, that's awesome. Uh. I'm not proud of that, but it was a phase and I

think a lot of people go through that. So if it had been introduced earlier, I'm not saying I still wouldn't have been a little jerk as a teenager, but maybe I would have been a critically thinking one. Um Anyway, I know, I just did a rerun where I talked about critical thinking, and I know that people can get a little tired of this topic, but when I see examples pop up over and over that really reinforce the

idea that folks are failing to think critically. I feel like I need to talk about it again just to reinforce that and to remind people. And it's okay if occasionally you fall short. I still fall short all the time. But it's good to try and keep it in mind because it might mean you avoid calamity in the future, or it might mean you actually find the next big thing. But if you don't think critically, that becomes way more a matter of luck than of actual determination. All Right,

that's it for this episode. If you have suggestions for future topics, there are a couple of ways you can get in touch. One is you can go to the I Heart radio app. You can navigate over to tech Stuff. The app is free to you. Is it's free to download. Just go to the tech stuff part. You know, use little search engine. Go over to tech Stuff. There's a little microphone icon you click on that you can leave

a voice message up to thirty seconds in length. And at least for the time being, you can still go to Twitter and send me a message tech stuff. Hs W. I'll be talking tomorrow about Elon Musk again and Twitter, because that story has changed again. In fact, it changed yesterday, but it changed after I had already filed my podcast, so that's the thing again. We'll talk about that tomorrow, but anyway, Yeah, get in touch with me, let me know what you would like, and I'll talk to you again.

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