Ah, my wish for pundits (I hate them) everywhere.

I don’t understand @marinelife‘s loathing for pundits. After all, we’re all amateur pundits on Fluther, and I don’t feel a generalized self-loathing nor for others here, either. Of course, once things have been set in motion then we like to think that we’re smart enough to predict where they will go, or where they should go “for the greatest good to the greatest number”, for instance.

But I agree with your sentiment that it’s not only healthy but entirely natural to be open to the unbidden. After all, most of life happens around me without my being at all able, much less ‘anxious’ to control it.

Que será , será, and all that.

This is how I try to live my life.

There’s a phrase from a Swedish army manual that sums it up: “When the map and the terrain disagree, follow the terrain”. We all have our cognitive maps of how the world works, but the map isn’t the terrain. There are people who are so intent on their cognitive map that they’re caught unaware when the terrain of reality no longer conforms to the map. They either plow ahead blindly, or try to change reality to conform to the map.

It’s natural and, more often than not, helpful to have some conceptual model for how the world works, but we’re better off keeping our eyes on the terrain and regarding the map with due skepticism.

@WasCy My loathing is precisely because pundits get paid for pontificating. They are so-called experts, but I don’t see a lot of expertise.

But @marinelife we employ and pay politicians on exactly the same basis, and we don’t have a choice about whether to pay them or not. Pundits at least you can turn off, not read, or ignore and not face sanctions. Not so, politicians. I reserve most of my loathing for them.

I just hate anyone with any measure of power, it seems so much easier.

As for the phrase, I dislike “openness”. But I agree everyone has gone insane.

@WasCy Silly me, I thought we paid politicians to represent the people not for their expertise or pontification.

Though I am not particularly keen on the phrase I like what it signifies. The world is more interesting when we don’t try to control it too much. I believe that the great flaw in Western civilization is that it strives to harness and dominate and control often with unfortunate results. The philosophies of the east are more accepting of the world as it is.

I like the phrase too. I believe that much in our universe is deterministic, but that there appears to be pure chaos as well. There is deterministic chaos, but there is also white noise chaos. I know that as of today, nobody knows enough about the initial conditions and attractors to predict what will happen in any deterministic dynamical system with many control variables when it is pushed far from equilibrium. To accurately predict the behavior of millions of people would take a whole universe full of supercomputers and measurements of a number of initial conditions approaching infinity. So open or not, the unbidden happens all the time.

I consciously seek “openness to the unbidden.” It’s what prompted me to ask this.

@optimisticpessimist

Surely you’ve noticed before now that what politicians are ‘supposed to do’ and what they ‘actually do’ are often at odds. Maybe even more often than not.

@WasCy I have noticed. I guess that is the optimistic part of the name. I am hoping the other voters will notice as well:)