Archives for category: Mutual Respect
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

The C Word

August 19, 2022 //
0

Social cohesion is a key concept in modern sociology.
There are many definitions – most of which complement each other, and the gist of them is ‘glue’.

“…the glue that bonds society together…“

Do you actually perceive modern society as being glued? Bonded? Together?!?

As an engineer – MSc in Mechanical Engineering, Bucharest Politechnica University 1986 – I’m primarily interested in ‘consequences’. ‘Causes’ come second. A close second but still second. Because it’s ‘consequences’ we have to face/endure directly, not ’causes’.
Whenever I feel bad, really bad, I begin by stopping everything that I was doing. To have enough time to determine the proper cause for my malaise. Identifying/dealing with causes ‘on the go’ – usually by having faith in what I already know, without realizing that it was exactly that which had led me to where I am now – is not such a good option.

Very few societies (countries, nations) continue to behave coherently. Many of them – most of them, actually, used to. Until very recently.
Yet most of my ‘recent’ colleagues – B in Sociology, Bucharest University 2009, continue to discuss about ‘cohesion’.

Communities continue to be cohesive. And, as a consequence, continue to behave coherently.
Why?
The easiest answer is ‘by definition’.
That’s how you recognize a community. A group of people who act coherently because they are ‘bound together’ by ‘social cohesion’. How that happened to be? Some other time!

Societies, on the other hand, no longer are.
Nations, which used to be whole, are now ‘fractured’. Not entirely, but they certainly behave a lot less coherently than, say, 50 years ago.
OK, this is not the first time that something like this had happened….

Civil wars are nothing new.
None of them had been ‘civil’ though. Which makes ‘civil war‘ an oxymoron…
Something so ‘impossible’ that we haven’t coined a proper word for it. Something so horrible that we speak about it using an ‘impossible’ name in order to properly mark its utter impropriety.

What is new is the amount of knowledge we currently have about the whole matter. About the inner workings of our collective psyche.
How we use that knowledge, what we have understood from learning it, the manner in which we allow that information to shape our actions … that’s another matter!

Whose consequences are in the making.
There are no other ‘makers’ but us.
Also, there are no other people to bear the consequences of what we’re doing now.

Tags , , , , , , , ,
Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, collective identity, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, man induced fragility, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology

Inflation II

August 18, 2022 //
1

I sketched earlier a brief description of how we got here.

Now I’ll attempt to offer an ‘alternative’ understanding of inflation. Not what it is – we all know that, but what it does.
It will be a functionalist view of the matter. Evolutionary, even.
As in ‘why do we still have inflation’. Why inflation continues to ‘survive’.

For most of our history, economy had been about solving needs.
Regardless of the market being momentarily free or not, for things to go on a balance had to be struck.
Demand had to be balanced by supply. Hence ‘price’.

Demand was mostly driven by the number of people needing something while supply was driven by the available natural resources AND by our ability to transform those resources into actual commodities.
For example, the price of wheat was influenced by the number of people living in a certain area, by the amount of arable land AND by the agricultural technology used at any given time. OK, the weather also had an impact but it was mitigated by the technology.

‘But how about imports? After all, ‘international’ grain trade is three millennia old. Ancient Athenian ships had been distributing ‘Ukrainian’ wheat all around the Aegean sea since before the Trojan war…’

Yeah, and how about emigration… the Irish had gone to America to escape famine, didn’t they?
We’ll get there. ‘Baby steps’, otherwise we may trip!

When population increased, they tried to add more arable land. If they could. If not – and/or in parallel, they tried to increase yield.
But the process was not linear. They could not ‘fine tune’ the increase of yield – by either method, exactly to the population growth. Hence the variation of price. Hence the ‘secondary mitigation measures’ – import/export and emigration.

‘OK, I understand. But prices can go both ways. Up AND down! Inflation only goes up…’

You’re speaking about individual prices. Which, indeed, go both ways.
And, yes again, inflation goes – in medium to longer time frames, only up!

You see, we have ‘price adjustments’ and (compounded) inflation.

Price adjustment is the mechanism through which the market – free or otherwise, balances the market for individual ‘items’. Encourages the consumption of wheat when the price is low and encourages the farmers to plant more wheat when the prices are high. Same thing for, say, shoe-shinning!
Meanwhile, (compounded) inflation is the mechanism through which the market – again, free or otherwise, balances itself.

‘Huh?!?’
For example, if wheat becomes too expensive, consumers (and suppliers) might decide to replace it with something else. Rice. Or potatoes.
Or, when grain prices become prohibitively low, farmers might abandon their plows and buy, say, shoe-shining tools.

‘But if rice – or anything else – would yield a lot more than wheat per the available arable land, the over all prices for food – and everything else, should go down, right? Not up…’

Well… in a rational world… maybe. That’s another long discussion.
The short version being that we usually wait for too long before making the necessary changes. Which is not necessarily wrong but that’s yet another long discussion. Only hindsight is 20/20…

Let’s say it would be possible to grow wheat and rice on the same plot of land without making any technological adjustments. If the growers would know what kind of weather would come in the next season, they would be able to plant the right crop. But they don’t. And it takes time for people to grasp the weather patterns have changed – and adjust the pertinent technology. On top of that, adjusting technology requires money.
Investment. Fresh ‘inputs’.

And who would do such a thing – plowing money into the ground, literally – without expecting an increased return? Something ‘extra’ for their effort?

In economic terms, nobody invests their money in a deflationary environment.
Why would anybody do such a thing?
Buy now when waiting till ‘tomorrow’ would make it possible to buy more for the same money?!?

That’s why inflation goes up. Period.
Cause otherwise the whole economy would become obsolete. We’d all be waiting for ‘tomorrow’.

NB.
This was a gross ‘simplification’.
A bare sketch.
Even in a deflationary environment, some prices do go up. For years overall prices have gone down – because of our increased technological prowess – while housing, education, healthcare and insurance have become more and more expensive. ‘Tilting’ the whole market.
More about this in the next post on the subject.

Tags , , , , , ,
Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology, The kind of world we are building for our children

The many wants we’ve taught ourselves to need.

August 10, 2022 //
0

We need to eat.
At some point, we discovered that by cooking it we got more out of the food we had at our disposal.
Then we learned to cook tastier and tastier meals.

Nowadays, more and more of us wonder

Why Do We Love Unhealthy Foods So Much?

Because we’ve some how convinced ourselves that being happy trumps being alive.

Evolutively speaking, pleasure is a ‘heads up’. It tells us that we do ‘the right thing’. That the food we eat is suitable for us. Nourishing.
Evolutively speaking, happiness is a heads up. That we’re on the right track. That we’re doing nothing to jeopardize our survival.

Those ‘heads – up’ were valid. Once…
And they still are. When ‘used with discretion’.

The problem being that we’re currently harnessing the horse behind the cart.

We’re no longer pursuing life as a wholesome experience.
We just want to be happy!
We no longer eat to remain alive.
We just want to have a better experience! An even better experience than the previous one…

Should we return to the Stone Age?
When so many of us died of hunger? Of illness?
Should we give up the ‘pursuit of happiness’ as a legitimate goal?!?

How about being happy while pursuing a meaningful life?

Tags , , , , , ,
Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Choices we make, effective communication, evolution, Food, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, Trust

Reading between the lines

August 5, 2022 //
0

I’m going to discuss four things in this post.

The difference between a scientific paper and a piece of ‘mere’ literature.
And what can be learned by analyzing a message.

I’ll start with the second.

A message has two layers of meaning.
The ‘prima facie’ and the ‘deeper levels’.

When somebody asks ‘What time is it, please!’, the first thing you do is to check your watch.
Most of the time, it’s the proper way to react in this situation.
But not always! Sometimes, the guy only wants to find out what kind of watch you’re wearing. To determine if it’s worth the effort. To steal it from you!

If looked at from the proper angle, most messages speak volumes.
The first volume is always about what the ‘speaker’ wants to convey to their audience.
The next ones are about the speaker. About their ability to speak, about their manner of thinking… and so on.
When speaking, the speaker wants to convey a limited amount of information. The intended message. When listening, an attentive listener may learn more about the speaker than about the issue at hand!

A scientific paper starts by stating a conclusion.
And continues by listing the arguments.
An ‘ordinary’ piece of literature builds a ‘scaffolding’. Introduces a series of ‘things’ and leads the reader towards a conclusion. Which is more likely suggested rather than imposed.

Should I continue?
About what I learned by reading the Amnesty International report?

The most important issue here – for Amnesty International, being the fact that “Ukrainian fighting tactics endanger civilians”.
As if Ukraine was the big bully. Who had enough resources to carefully select ‘tactics’!

“Attacks launched from populated civilian areas”.
Hello!!! Ukraine itself is a populated country! Mostly by civilians…
This is not a joust. Which may be organized ‘out there’, on an open field. If both sides agree…
This war, like almost all others, is about conquering, and defending, populated areas!

“Such violations in no way justify Russia’s indiscriminate attacks, which have killed and injured countless civilians“
Finally!

But shouldn’t this be the ‘main course’ of the Amnesty International report?!?
After all, it was Putin who had ordered the Russian army to invade Ukraine…
It had been his orders which had started this mayhem!

I will wrap up this post by introducing the third concept.
“The phrase useful idiot designates a naive or credulous person who can be manipulated or exploited to advance a cause or political agenda.“

Instead of any conclusions, I’ll be asking you a question.
What is the real importance of studying ‘humanities’?

“Formally, availability of education for children has increased around the world over the last decades. However, despite having a successful formal education career, adults can become functional illiterates. Functional illiteracy means that a person cannot use reading, writing, and calculation skills for his/her own and the community’s development. Functional illiteracy has considerable negative effects not only on personal development, but also in economic and social terms.“

Tags , , , ,
Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, Frames of mind, In English, man as a measure for all things, moral hazard, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology, Trust

Demographics

August 4, 2022 //
0

I’m getting old. Old enough, as a good friend of mine had noticed, to have a way closer relation with sex than ever before.

I am a sexagenarian!

Which gives me certain bragging rights.
You see, everything around us has been made – or started – during my watch. Or earlier…

There is a small catch, though.
Not everything around us is good. In working order. Sustainable!
Some 50 years ago, humankind had developed the means to destroy itself. Remember MAD?
We – our fathers, actually, took a step back. And took the necessary steps. In the end, nothing happened. We’re still here, in spite of having the possibility to spoil everything.
Nowadays, we’ve reached another inflection point. And no, I’m not speaking about ‘global warming’. Not exclusively, anyway.

Global warming is only one of the many things which may go wrong.
One of the many ways in which we may fuck everything up!

My point being that it’s not the first time in history that we are able to fuck everything up.
It’s the first time in history that we are fully aware of the many ways in which things might go totally wrong and we’re practically doing nothing!

Why?!?
Because we have grown old!

When I grew up, there were relatively few old people around.
A lot more than when my parents had grown up but a lot less than now.

When apes had become human – when humanoids learned to speak – old people were precious assets.
Having lived a lot – and being able to share their experience, in detail – they had become depositories of knowledge. The go-to place for when you wanted to learn about something. When you needed a certain piece of information.
Hence the old-timers had, gradually, accrued a lot of respect. As a category.
Add the fact that in order to grow old – to survive for long enough, it helps to make ‘the right calls’. OK, you also need to be lucky… but being smart does come in handy…

Are you done yet? Adding these two? Being looked up to because you are old with thinking good about yourself?

Did you get ‘confirmation bias‘?

In the ‘good old days’, people who had reached my age had their ‘confirmation bias’ tempered by ‘impotence’.
No, not only sexual impotence…
In those days, individuals were a lot more aware than we are today of how much we depend on each other. Of the fact that individually we are impotent! The old ones knew they were going to starve if the young ones would cease providing for them while the young ones were aware of how useful the old ones could be.
Nowadays… We, the oldies, continue to believe we know everything – we survived, didn’t we? – while the young bucks believe they can find out whatever they might need from the internet…
Meanwhile, we – the oldies – no longer need the youngsters to provide for us.

We are wealthier than ever before, we have pension plans and we vote as a team… the world is ours, as it should be!
And since we don’t have so much more to live…

But how sustainable is this situation?
For the shortest of the imaginable time-frames…

Tags , , , , , ,
Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Chance, Choices we make, collective identity, Culture, effective communication, Frames of mind, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, time, Trust

How to give yourself a freepass…

August 2, 2022 //
1

““Faced with reckless U.S. disregard of China’s repeated and serious representations, any countermeasures taken by the Chinese side will be justified and necessary, which is also the right of any independent and sovereign country,” foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying told a daily briefing in Beijing.“

‘Repeated and serious representations…’

‘I told you how I see things.
Hence if you do what I warned you not to, I’ll be free to punch you in the nose!’

Is this the epitome of ‘bullying’?

Or, rather, of pushing yourself into a corner?!?

Now, if Pelosi actually lands in Taiwan, how far will Xi go in order to ‘save face‘?
Let it go… he would lose too much of it. Too much ‘face’. Any threat he would utter from then on, would be met by deaf ears.

Do anything foolish…

On the other hand, China is the world’s biggest importer of food! And energy…

Tags , , , ,
Categories 1989, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, Frames of mind, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game

Fitting for a king

July 26, 2022 //
0

Sand for the statue and fences for protection.

Not for a particular king!
No.
Not even for kings in general.

Only for all those ‘in charge’!
As a reminder for the fact that their authority is very fragile.
Goes for only as far as it is accepted. Protected by those who respect it.

As a reminder for the fact that fences not only protect but also separate.

The point being that whenever those calling the shots no longer suffer the consequences, the situation becomes extremely fragile.
That whenever a ‘king’ needs to be protected from his subjects instead of by them…

Tags , , , , ,
Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Choices we make, effective communication, In English, limited rationality, man induced fragility, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology, Trust

Being

July 23, 2022 //
0

Interesting enough.

And yes, what you think about me is more about you than about the real me.

Nevertheless, the point of this post is:

For me,

You are what I think you are!

Tags , ,
Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, arrogance, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, effective communication, Frames of mind, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game

You can’t change the world!

July 11, 2022 //
0

‘So you’d better stop trying!
Why don’t you just enjoy life as it is?’

‘What about Copernicus?
Did he change the world?’

No, he only offered us an ‘alternative’ interpretation of it!
It was us, those who had accepted his interpretation, who did the actual change. By acting as if Copernicus’ teachings were true.

‘But Copernicus hadn’t been the first to utter those ideas!’

Indeed!
But until Copernicus, the world didn’t actually need that version of the facts.
Up until those times, for ‘regular Joe’ it made no actual difference whether the Sun circled around the Earth or the whole shebang moved the other way around.
The Sun dawned as advertised and spring always came as it was supposed to.
Which circled around who made no difference but for the academics!

Only when ‘regular Joe’ had started to sail around the Earth – and needed to accurately plot the course of his ship on a map, the relative motion between Earth and Sun had become relevant. For those belonging to/living in the ‘real’ world!

For the last 15 last years or so I have pushed myself to understand what was going on around me.
Each time I had the impression that I had discovered anything new I was soon disappointed. Very shortly afterwards I most often found out that somebody else had written about the subject. Describing it more or less in the same way as I understood it. Not to mention the fact that the vast majority of the answers I had found had been reached by reading.
My quest changed accordingly.

‘Why has this trove of knowledge been left aside for so long?’

Because regular Joe didn’t have any use for it? Until now, that is…

But, surely, the elite should have done something about this!
After all, ‘understanding’ – a.k.a. ‘making sense of things’ – is our only reason to be, right?

Not so fast!
The elite did something about ‘it’. As I’ve already mentioned, there’s nothing much to add to the things already understood by others and passed along to us from the depths of history. The very fact that all these pieces of information have been carefully preserved by countless generations of scribes and ‘book keepers’ is the living proof that the elite fulfilled its calling.
It’s up to us to make good of their dedicated work.
For our own sake.

And for that of our children!

So yes, I cannot change the world.
Neither can either of you!
Alone.

But together….

https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4258973/Crisis%20vs%20Aesthetic%20OGingrich.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y

Click to access Full%20text%20-%20Nicholas%20Copernicus,%20_De%20Revolutionibus%20(On%20the%20Revolutions),_%201.pdf

Tags , , , , ,
Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, collective identity, In English, limited rationality, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game

Cats on a hot tin roof

July 8, 2022 //
2

Quite a large number of people are complaining about how hot it is nowadays.
So uncomfortably hot that they have to stay indoors until late in the evening.

And no, they are not pensioners.
They work from home, earning enough money to be able to have everything delivered to them.

Which reminds me of my first job, right out of university.
A big factory building where water almost froze in winter and temperatures rose to 41-42 degrees Celsius in August.
Inside that building were, among other ‘run of the mill’ machine-tools, 3 top of the art automated Czech-built lathes.
This story goes back to 1986 and happened in communist Romania.
The lathes were very precise but couldn’t be used all the time. In winter they stopped working altogether and in summer they faltered. No amount of fine tuning could bring them back to yielding usable parts.
It took a few years for the brass to figure-out what was going on. The lathes were designed to work in a ‘controlled environment’. The temperature was supposed to hover between 15 and 25 degrees for the lathes to function normally.
Hence the lathes were ‘sheltered’ in an auxiliary building. A shed built inside the factory. And provided with efficient enough ‘temperature control’.

We, the people, had been left on the outside. Outside the shed but still inside the factory…. freezing in winter and sweat-drenched in summer. Still working, because we were sturdier than the top of the line machinery…

This morning I came across a FB post.

This brought about another memory.

Sometime in 1990-1991 I happened to lay my hands on a Newsweek magazine. Or a the Economist… I don’t remember exactly. Anyway… the article I was going to discuss with you was about the hard life endured by the American poor people. And was illustrated with a color picture.
I’m going to make a small break here and inform you that in the 1990 Romania colored magazines – let alone glossy, were hard to get by.
That picture, taken somewhere in the Bronx, contained a color TV and three pre-teen kids. All of them clad in blue-jeans and wearing ‘sports shoes’. You know, the likes of Puma/Adidas/ you name it.
In those times, in Romania, bluejeans or ‘sports-shoes’ could be had mostly on the black market. Where you had to fork out the wage earned in a whole month if you wanted to buy a pair of each. Or you could buy them in a brand store. For twice the price….

You see, the communist regimes have crumbled because the leaders had lost contact with reality.
The brass in the factory where I had started working couldn’t figure out – nor really cared about, the reason for which those lathes didn’t work properly.
And didn’t care about the fact that the workers had a very hard life. On the factory floor and outside its premises.

The liberal-democratic and capitalist regime has created huge opportunities. People used to live incomparably better there than in the rest of the world. And continue to do so.
On the other hand, in many of the ‘affluent’ countries people have lost contact with each other. The haves have no idea about how the poor live. Nor the poor have any idea about what it means to be rich.

We live in different worlds. In different realities.

Each of us on their own ‘tin roof’.

The problem being that all of them are becoming increasingly ‘hot’.
And I’m not thinking ‘global warming’ now…

Communism had crumbled because the rulers couldn’t understand what was going on. Couldn’t react efficient enough to changes brought about by normal evolution. Because the rulers had gradually lost contact with reality. Which inevitably happens in all authoritarian settings.

We are currently living in different realities. In ‘bubbles’. For now, these bubble still have something in common. We are still able to talk to each other. Sometimes we have a hard time understanding what the other has to say – or don’t really care, but the dialog is still possible.

I’m afraid of the day when the dialog will no longer be possible.

The guys in the pan are so obsessed about the taxes they have to fork out that they actually don’t pay attention to anything else.
The guys attempting to collect those taxes are so obsessed about what they want to do with the money that they actually don’t pay attention to anything else.

Meanwhile, the world is growing apart. The bubbles lose contact with each other. And with the hard core reality…

The cats can always jump down from the roof. Whenever it grows too hot or too cold.
Where are those two frogs going to jump when things will become uncomfortable?

Tags , , , ,
Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology, Trust
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »