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Maslow’s

September 21, 2019 //
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Most commentators treat Maslow’s as if it were a pyramid. A succession of five receding floors constituting a structure in the three dimensional space.

Something which can exist, and function, on its own.

I see it as a mere triangle. Drawn on a two dimensional surface by Maslow’s imagination and imperfectly reproduced – according to our individual manner of seeing things, on the surface of our consciences.

My point being that each of those levels are nothing more than a set of opportunities.

The first two, which are described as ‘basic needs’ are the stages where we have the opportunity to learn how to drink, eat, manage our immediate environment and our own strength.

And so on.

Basically, it’s what we choose to do in each of those stages which determines whether we graduate to the next one.

OK, sometimes we are dealt with an ’empty set’ situation. There is no food available. Or no water. Use your own imagination.
But since in that situation there is nothing to be done except waiting for something to change – death is a form of change, that situation is of no interest for me. There’s noting to be decided so…

What we choose to do…

All that Maslow is trying to teach us is that our freedom of will might be free but will always be influenced by the situation in which we find ourselves.

When hungry, our attention – hence freedom of thought, will be necessarily drawn to finding food. We will still be relatively free to choose our individual manner of gathering/cooking it but much of our ‘bandwidth’ will be spent trying to fulfill that task.

And so on.

The really interesting stage/floor being, of course, the last one.
Where we’ll continue to feel hungry – from time to time, at least, were we’ll continue to be vulnerable to various potential aggressors, where we’ll continue to depend on friends and associates, were we’ll continue to pay attention to what other people say about us.
But where all those needs will be modulated by our manner of relating to them.
Ascending through the first four floors meant that our understanding of things was modulated by our needs. Reaching the top means that our conscience has finally learned to ‘turn the tables’. To peek on the other side. To trans-cede.

To whatever stage our precedent choices have set for us.
For us to play our freedom.

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Categories awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, teleology, The kind of world we are building for our children

Depression

September 19, 2019 //
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Laurie Santos – psychology and cognitive sciences professor at Yale, believes that ‘we really need to do something about it’.

” And I saw just students who were, you know, so depressed it was hard for them to get up in morning. I saw cases of students who were so anxious about their summer internships that they could barely function. And I thought, this is — first of all, this is what — not what I expected of college student life. You know, I remember college back when I was there in the ’90s as being relatively happy. And so, it was kind of striking. And the class came out of a goal that I had, which is that we need to do something about this as educators. We’re kind of like — we’re not in the position to really be teaching students if they’re in the midst of this mental health crisis. I think as professors we sometimes think we can teach students, you know, Chaucer and economics and things. But if the stats are right and 40 percent of them are too depressed to function and other two-thirds are so anxious that they can — you know, that they’re having panic attacks, you know, we really needed to do something about it. “

And why shouldn’t they be? Depressed and panicked, that is?

Not so long ago, universities were perceived as fountains of knowledge and dispensers of philosopher’s stones. Having a degree was one of the most coveted things in the world. And one of the most useful.

Nowadays?
Universities are described as the origin of evil.
“Just as Saudi-funded Salafist religious schools have radicalized large swaths of the Islamic world, American universities are radicalizing an increasingly large share of America.  This is aided by the fact that nearly 70% of kids now go to college, where most of them are taught not to think.“

That would explain the depression. But ‘panic attacks’?
Experienced by the young generation of the most civilized and affluent people in the whole world?
Well, just remember the financial burden students and their families have to shoulder…

So. Students are depressed and prone to panic attacks…
Which only proves that the die-hard ‘conservatives’ are right. Millennials and Generation Z are nothing but a bunch of sissies.

Yeah, right.
Only these two generations have grown under our watch.
They are our children. We raised them. We have built the world they have to cope with.

In fact, we are the ones who need to be depressed. And panicked.
Very soon we’ll need to retire. For no other reason than becoming too old to fend for ourselves.
We’ll actually need our arses to be wiped clean and our world to be managed by somebody else but us.

Who will step in our shoes?

Furthermore, what example are we offering the next generation?

Why would they care about us if we don’t care about them? Offering them an extremely expensive education isn’t a proper expression of our love…
Why would they care about us when we don’t care about our fellow human beings? Extremely expensive health care and unaffordable housing isn’t a proper expression of ‘love thy neighbor as you love yourself’.
Why would they care about us, their parents – after we will no longer be of any real use, when we don’t really care about our employees. About those who actually make things happen?
“Amazon goes further than gig economy companies such as Uber, which insist its drivers are independent contractors with no rights as employees. By contracting instead with third-party companies, which in turn employ drivers, Amazon divorces itself from the people delivering its packages. That means when things go wrong, as they often do under the intense pressure created by Amazon’s punishing targets — when workers are abused or underpaid, when overstretched delivery companies fall into bankruptcy, or when innocent people are killed or maimed by errant drivers — the system allows Amazon to wash its hands of any responsibility.“
You see, Jeff Bezos did a very good thing when maintaining that “Americans deserve an economy that allows each person to succeed through hard work and creativity and to lead a life of meaning and dignity.”
Only words without deeds… might mean that we, the eventually needy parents, might end up uncared for. Sweet-talked to the end but…

On the other hand, depression might be good. Evolutionary speaking, of course.
The depressed have less energy. Hence are unable to put in practice major mistakes. Except killing themselves, of course.
The depressed have a lot of time on their hands. Huge opportunity to think things over. To notice and understand the mistakes that led them here.

Those who will resist the urge to give up – either by actually killing themselves or by falling back into the old morass, will shape ‘tomorrow’.

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Categories altruism, awareness, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, Frames of mind, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, religion, teleology, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust

The small matter of agency.

August 24, 2019 //
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Ever-since Descartes –  dubito ergo cogito, cogito ergo sum, the western culture had considered that a person becomes truly human only after they actively start looking for answers. Start thinking about their own persona, in a conscious manner.
Otherwise put, we start existing only after we notice our existence.

The corollary of this concept had been ‘rational thinking’. The belief that it is possible to consider something – to emit a judgement about a subject, only after dispassionately examining all available facts – and only the facts, pertinent to the matter.

While the ‘thinkers’ were coining the concept of rationality, the more practical minded had come up with the scientific approach. Gather as much information as possible about the subject you’re interested in, interpret it and come up with a conclusion. But keep an open mind about any new information which might come up and be prepared for your conclusion to be invalidated – or, at least, ‘nuanced’, at any moment.

At first sight, there isn’t much difference between these two approaches. Only at first sight, of course…
Those who consider themselves to be ‘rational’ have a hard time accepting other people’s conclusions while the bona fide ‘scientists’ are actually happy when they are contradicted. ‘My work has been considered important enough for somebody to check it. I’ll just have to make amends and all will  be fine’.

Now, I’m convinced that you’ve all figured out that I’m joking.
There’s no such thing as a fully rational person who denies the facts which happen to contradict their conclusions just as there’s no such thing as a scientist pure enough to actually enjoy being proven wrong.

But I’m not joking when I observe that there are so many people who consider themselves to be rational and who refuse to accept as fact anything which contradicts their beliefs. Who have a ‘scientific’ approach. Who cherry-pick only the facts which confirm their theory and dismiss – as ‘fake-news’, all the rest. Just as many as the scientists who do the same thing.

I wonder who supervises their thinking processes.
Are they truly aware about what’s going on inside their heads?
Or about the consequences?

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Categories Bounded rationality, Choices we make, Frames of mind, In English, Psychology

Intelligence

July 19, 2019 //
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Trial an error (motor, muscular, directly related to actions)

Emotional

Discursive

All three depend, evidently, on memory. Different kinds – evidently, again.

This is a stub.

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Categories Bounded rationality, evolution, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, man induced fragility, Mutual Respect, Psychology, Stub, teleology, Trust

“The left behind”

July 14, 2019 //
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Reading this excellent article by James Poulter, BBC Three, I was reminded of Marx. Karl, not Groucho.

“The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.”

 Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848.

The XX-th century had been torn apart by two totalitarian lines of thought. Communism and fascism/nazism.
The communists had backed their claims on Marx’s class struggle while the fascists/nazists had used a plethora of other authors as pretexts. Despite the differences, the results had been the same. Callous spin doctors had used popular discontent to get uncontested possession of the political levers. And kept playing with them until entire countries crumbled under their own weight.

But what was it that made some nations destroy themselves on the left side of the authoritarian spectrum while others have done the same thing but on the right side?

The nature of the popular discontent!

At any given point, the majority of the people living in a country might see itself as being in one of the following three situations:
– Leading a relatively comfortable life and having a decent perspective to improve its lot or at least to maintain its present status.
– Having always led a bad life and finding absolutely no perspective of improvement.
– Having led a relatively good life for a while, lost that status and finding no way to resume it.

According to Marx, the first situation would have necessarily led to the third and, eventually, to communism.
According to history, people living in the second situation had always been manipulated into communism while people struggling in the third have been led into fascism/nazism.

Meanwhile, people living in the first situation have remained there for as long as they maintained their social cohesion. But that will be the subject of another post.

 

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Categories altruism, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, collective identity, cooperation, corruption, democracy, fail better, Frames of mind, In English, man induced fragility, manipulation, Mindset, Mutual Respect, politics, Psychology, skin in the game, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust

The Perverse Consequences of Science.

June 21, 2019 //
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Science is, above all, a state of mind.
One that posits the world can be understood, one fact at a time.
Science also says that The (complete) Truth will never be fully acquired, only people tend to forget that part.

Some history, first.
Science, as an attitude, had appeared on the shores of the Medieval Mediterranean Sea. The Arabs had just discovered Ancient Greek writings about the ‘natural order of things’ while the Catholics were trying to figure out what God had in mind for the future of the mankind.

“We have seen that the laws of nature depend on other laws of nature, which ultimately depend on God’s will.”

Put all these together – the wish to understand God’s will, the belief that God’s will is expressed through the natural order of things and the systematic observation of nature, and, Eureka, you have ‘science’.

Which attitude had made Europe what it is today. Both the good and the bad of it.

Europeans have initiated the orderly study of everything around them.
As I said before, the initial intent wasn’t any technological improvement. Technicians and scientists were two completely different breed of people. As in ‘tinkerers’ and ‘philosophers’. Tinkering was sometimes confused with witchcraft while ‘philosophy’ was almost synonym with theology.
Well, both ‘professions’ could lead those to practiced them to a ‘funeral pyre’… whenever either of them ‘trespassed’… Many of those who are able to read are familiar with what ultimately happened to Giordano Bruno but very few of us know the fact that the ‘un-certified healers’ were seen with ‘suspicion’.

“Questioned whether she heals sick persons, answered yes Sir.
Questioned with what kind of medicines, answered by picking betony up and washing it like salad and crushing it into a mortar to get its juice and to give it to her patients for 3, 4 and 5 days, telling them that the more they drunk it, the better it was.
With these words the healer Gostanza da Libbiano, tried for witchcraft in 1594,….”
“The difference between them (healers) and physicians was the specific kind of tasks assigned to doctors: physicians, who rarely touched impurities and who regularly graduated from the university, were believed to be able to make the pain cease, whereas the healer, due to the fact that she actually touched her patients, was able both to make pain cease and to cause it”

Donatella Lippi, Witchcraft, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, 2012

On the face of it, ‘science’ was, and continues to be, declared to depend exclusively on facts. Regardless of those facts being the expression of God’s will or, ultimately, of a serendipitous nature.
In fact, science is about what we, ‘scientists’, have been taught to accept as facts by our teachers and peers.

Another interesting thing.
When most scientists were still believing in God, their natural arrogance was kept in check by their belief that there was somebody who knew more than them. He.
As soon as God was declared dead, all hell broke loose.

‘Practical’ sciences continue to be kept in check by … well… practice! For any engineer, biologist, chemist, physician and all other related scientists and practitioners of science  it is obvious that Karl Popper and Werner Heisenberg were, and continue to be, right. No matter how much we will ever learn, we’ll never be able to know everything. Hence, we should proceed with utmost care.
Those who practice ‘secondary degree’ sciences – sci-Po being the most obvious example, share the belief that the world can be learned but are enjoying a far longer ‘leash’. Simply because the consequences of their actions come a lot later than those experienced by the ‘practical sciences’ practitioners. Add the fact that the ‘effects’ are harder  pinpoint to one specific cause/action…
And since God has become, at most, a personal matter… he no longer exerts the taming influence it used to…
Science has become independent. It is practiced for/in its own right, not as the only available manner of ‘divining’ God’s Will.
In fact, we use science as a manner to design our future. Independently. As each of us see fit and as allowed by those around us.
Which is good. Attempting to learn before proceeding is commendable, of course.
But proceeding with the unshakeable belief that we already know everything about what lies ahead of us is… foolish. Even more so when we speed up…  with total disregard about what other people, our colleagues/peers/fellow human beings, have to say and/or feel about the whole thing. Because we momentarily can.

 

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Categories arrogance, Bounded rationality, collective identity, effective communication, In English, Mutual Respect, Psychology, religion, skin in the game, teleology, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust

Good money drives out the good

June 7, 2019 //
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This rule of thumb is also known as ‘Gresham’s Law’

“At the core of Gresham’s law is the concept of good money versus bad money. The law holds that bad money drives out good money in circulation. Bad money is then the currency that is considered to have equal or less value compared to its face value. Meanwhile, good money is currency that is believed to have greater value or more potential for greater value than its face value. One basic assumption for the concept is that both currencies are equally liquid and available for use simultaneously. Logically, consumers will choose to use bad money over good money because good money has the potential to be worth more than its face value.”

‘Concept’, ‘the law holds’, ‘is considered’, ‘value’, ‘compared’, ‘is believed’, ‘assumption’, ‘logically’…
So. The way I see it, ‘Gresham’s Law’ is about people interacting according to their own ‘impressions’, ‘drives’ and ‘internal logic’.

But wait. Things are far more interesting than ‘commoners’ hoarding the potentially more valuable coins, when having the ‘opportunity’ to choose between good and bad money.

“The minting of coins provides the most basic example of Gresham’s law applied. In fact, Gresham’s law itself was built around the minting of coins and Gresham’s service to Queen Elizabeth I of England. Sir Thomas Gresham lived from 1519 to 1579, working as a financier serving the Queen and later founding the Royal Exchange of the City of London. Henry VIII had changed the composition of the English shilling, replacing a substantial portion of the silver with base metals. Gresham’s consultations with the Queen explained that consumers were aware of the change and began separating the English shilling coins based on their production dates to hoard the coins with more silver which, when melted down, were worth more than their face value.”

In fact, Gresham’s Law is about ‘commoners’ reacting in a logical manner whenever the powerful had tried to ‘trick’ the less powerful into accepting less valuable coinage.

Let’s examine the situation from another angle.

Gold and silver had been used to make coins for a number of reasons.
Both were rare enough to maintain their perceived value no matter how much of them might have been ‘suddenly’ discovered. For example, the Spaniards had brought shiploads of precious metals into Europe from South America without creating much ‘inflation’.
They, individually and or alloyed, were soft enough to be minted using primitive technology. The oldest coins made of precious metals go back almost 3000 years…
Both gold and silver are impervious to the passage of time. That being the motive for those coins having survived for so long.

For these three reasons gold and silver had been the obvious choices when people had realized they needed a ‘technology’ for making payments and for preserving and transporting value.

In reality, this is the intrinsic logic for which gold and silver had been valuable for us. They had represented the most convenient manner of making payments and for transporting/preserving value. As metals, gold was basically useless until the advent of microelectronics while silver had become really useful only after Daguerre started using it to make primitive photographs.

So. Ancient people had discovered that by using gold and silver coins they could vastly accelerate their economies. The most interested being, of course, the powerful of the day.
The rulers. Those who had the means and the authority to mint.
Some of whom also had the gumption to mess with the whole process. For their own profit, of course. Why do you think Hieron, the King of Syracuse, had hired Archimedes to determine whether a piece of metal – a crown, but the shape had no real meaning, was made of pure gold – as the goldsmiths pretended, or not?

Instead of a conclusion.
Since the start of time, some people have tried to swindle the others. No matter how high their position on the social ladder. And the rest have tried to protect themselves. Or, sometimes, even to emulate the ‘bad’ behavior.

This being the beauty of the free market.
Whenever a market is truly free, the reasonable people naturally weed out the swindlers.
Whenever the swindlers happen to have the upper hand, the rest have no other option but to follow suit. To hoard the ‘good’ money.
The consequence being the slowing down of the economic cycle. To the ultimate ‘bad’ of everybody. The swindlers included. And their children/suitors!

 

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Categories arrogance, authoritarianism, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, corruption, effective communication, freedom, Money as goal, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, Trust

Layers

May 25, 2019 //
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We live.
Hard to deny that, no matter what we may think about it.
The very fact that there are so many of us who do live simultaneously makes it a near certainty.

Since we do live, then there must be a place where this whole charade unfolds.

That place is called, by us, ‘Reality’.
Which reality had started to exist only after we, the living things, have become aware of its existence.

‘Hey, wait a minute!  a short moment ago you were arguing that our mere existence was absolute proof for the existence of ‘reality’ and now you pretend that ‘reality’ has appeared only after we’ve  noticed it… We’d been alive for way longer than that, dude!’

Of course. Our very existence does depend on the presence of a certain place where we may exist. Only there’s no need for us to know that. Nor for us to be able to name that place. The ants don’t ‘know’ there’s a whole world around them. Nor have a word to describe it!

What we call reality and the ‘place’ where we live are two separate things.
There is an intersection, of course. What is correct of what we think we know about the ‘reality’ and the collection of things that really exist. Only we don’t exactly know what is correct of what we think we know…

And it is here that things become really interesting.
We not only think that we have meaningful information about the thing we call reality. We also act based on that information, with the deliberate purpose of fulfilling our intentions. And in so doing, we decisively change the place. In ways we fail to understand comprehensively.

My point being that we change the place we depend on, for our lives, without having a clear understanding of how the place itself really works. Nor of the changes we implement – willingly and/or unknowingly.

At least, let’s have some respect. For the place itself.
And for us, as an important component of that place.

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Categories arrogance, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, Frames of mind, freedom, man induced fragility, Mindset, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology, The kind of world we are building for our children

A man and a gun

May 3, 2019 //
1

“In many ways, technology has leaped ahead of leaders and organizations, and the human element needs to catch up.”

Erica Volini et al, Introduction: Leading the social enterprise—Reinvent with a human focus

I’m afraid there is nothing new here.

‘Technology” has always been the elephant in the china shop.
Only it is very seldom that elephants enter by themselves. Anywhere, let alone in a china shop. And the mahouts who led them there were not always up to the task.

First things first.
“Technology has leaped ahead…” is an oxymoron.
Technology has always been one step behind the humans.
For no other reason than the fact that technology is a human invention. Each and every technological feat has been initiated and put in practice by a human being.

Hence ‘ ‘technology’, (wink) has leaped ahead of leaders and organizations, and the rest of the human element needs to catch up’!

Secondly, the ‘mahouts’ have a relatively easier job than those who drive the ‘rest of the human element’. Developing a technology is fairly easy but making sure that people do not hurt themselves while using it is fairly impossible.

The physical world is straightforward. It’s reaction is always the same. Once the experimenters learn what happens when they execute a certain action, the ‘response’ elicited from ‘that’ physical system by the experimenters’ consistent actions will never change.

On the other hand, people – conscious people, that is, are not that straightforward.
Being self aware, they constantly evaluate the consequences of their responses. They constantly evaluate what happens after they respond to whatever probes them from ‘outside’.
They constantly re-evaluate the consequences their actions produce upon themselves. They learn.
Only they don’t do it ‘mechanically’. Each of them has preferences and a certain freedom of will. Hence their inconsistency. Each of them learns slightly different things from the same situation. And each of them may choose to react in their own manner.
In spite of their assumptions, people are at best reasonable and never fully rational.

Bluntly put, it is fairly easy to evaluate the consequences of a gun being shot at a man but a lot harder to evaluate the consequences of a man shooting a gun.

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Categories awareness, Bounded rationality, Chance, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperare, democracy, effective communication, In English, man induced fragility, Mutual Respect, Psychology, Transparency, Trust

Why are we doing things like these to our fellow human beings?

April 27, 2019 //
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“A district judge has ordered the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office to release property that deputies took during a child abuse investigation and kept after the charges were dropped.

In October, the District Attorney’s Office dismissed sexual assault charges against a nuclear weapons expert who formerly worked at Kirtland Air Force Base. But the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office didn’t release the man’s property, which included thousands of dollars of electronics and a draft of a book.”

 

“They kept the kids in cages. And Excel spreadsheets. And more than 60 other government files and databases that made it nearly impossible to track the thousands of children who have been separated from their parents by the Trump administration while trying to enter the United States.

This is according to a new report released Thursday by the Department of Health and Human Service’s Office of Inspector General, which finds that, since 2017, the Trump administration has separated thousands more children from their parents than it previously disclosed and that it tracked these kids in ad hoc, disparate databases, including Excel spreadsheets and Microsoft Sharepoint accounts, further complicating the already tortured process of figuring out where those children are today.”

I have no first hand knowledge about any of these two separate ‘incidents’.
The first one might have been caused by a series of ‘misunderstandings’ while the second is only a portion of a hugely complex matter.

What really bothers me is what they have in common.

Both have been initiated by people belonging to/working for institutions put in place to protect the greater good of children. Children who are nothing but our future. Our only future.
Each of these ‘actions’ have been botched. By those who initiated them.
The institutions themselves had failed. To control the ‘runaway operators’ and to perform adequate ‘damage control’.

“Why are we doing things like these to our fellow human beings?”

Because we don’t consider them, in earnest, ‘our fellow human beings’?
For whatever reason?

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Categories arrogance, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, freedom, human rights, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mindset, Mutual Respect, Psychology, Rule of Law, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust
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