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Miehkrud

August 30, 2024 //
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Classic sociologist Emile Durkheim theorizes that crime exists
in all societies because it reaffirms moral boundaries and at times
facilitates needed social changes,
while former U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan believes that
Durkheim’s views omit the possibility of too much crime, especially violent crime,
so that deviance as a serious social problem is not addressed.

“Normlessness and deregulation are poor translations of dereglement for several reasons. They did not enter into common English usage until the 1960s and certainly didn’t exist in Durkheim’s time. Dereglement is difficult to render in English. It carries with it in French the connotations of immorality and suffering, but is perhaps best translated as derangement. Anomie as dereglement implies a condition of madness or something akin to sin. This concides with the observation that over 20 words denoting sin were translated as anomia when the Bible was translated by St. Jerome and others.”

Durkheim was right after all.
‘Crime’ does fulfill a social function.
Some deviance, when well ‘managed’, can be useful. The US have somehow managed to transform a rather high level of deviance into ‘speed’. 250 years ago, the 13 American colonies were almost insignificant.
Today, the US is the most powerful/wealthy nation on Earth. While the Union continues to be the most ‘deviant’ among the civilized nations. On all conceivable metrics.

The key words here being, of course, “well managed”!
Maybe the time has come for the likes of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan to go back to class. And to finish reading what Durkheim had to say about things.

The problem with the current political class, not only in America, being the fact that too many politicians ‘outsource’ responsibility!
It’s not history’s job to maintain accountability!

The politicians themselves need to provide enough reasonable alternatives for the ‘people’ to chose from!

Durkheim, read from both ends, told us that much.
We are the ones who need to maintain the balance.
For it’s us who will bear the consequences!

No matter who was the culprit, we’ll have to clear up the mess.
So we’d better stop the fan from spreading the mess around!

After all, shit happens. It’s a natural occurrence.
We have to eat so we need to relieve ourselves.
But how about doing this in a civilized manner?
And not rewarding those bragging about ‘inappropriate behavior‘….

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Categories 1989, awareness, Choices we make, collective identity, In English, Mutual Respect, Rule of Law, skin in the game

Which? If any…

August 29, 2024 //
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If you use your mind to study reality,
you won’t understand either your mind or reality.
If you study reality without using your mind,
you’ll understand both.
Bodhidharma

According to “William Stein, a technology analyst at Truist Securities“, as of 28th of August 2024, “Tesla self-driving vehicles not ready for big rollout“.

Self driving vehicles rely on AI to navigate. The streets. To relate to, and to avoid, the other ‘objects’ which happen to be/pass by in the vicinity during the feat.
In a sense, each of the self driving vehicles behave as if they are alive(ish).

They take matter/energy from their ‘outside’ and transform it into ‘action’.
They attempt to ‘survive’ by reacting to what’s going on around them. They gather information through sensors and decide according to already learned algorithms. Which algorithms do include a certain lee-way.

So far, self driving vehicles – or, more exactly, those who promote them – haven’t performed convincingly enough to be accepted by ‘the general public’.

The ‘problem’ – one of them, anyway – resides in the manner we, the ‘general public’, understand ‘artificial intelligence’.

Which ‘artificial intelligence’ is a huge misnomer!

‘Intelligence’, the word, means at least two things.
An ‘ability’ shared by most human beings. Unevenly, but this is another subject.
An individual ability, used by each of the individuals to pursue their individual purposes. Each behaving according to their individually ‘accrued’ manners.
In this sense, individual intelligence is already ‘artificial’. Individual intelligence is relative to each ‘individual endowment’. To each individual’s ‘brain power’. The manner in which each individual tends to use their intelligence has been shaped by education and life experience. And each individual is able to choose, inside the ‘parameters’ I’ve already mentioned, what purposes to fulfill. To which ends to use their individual intelligence. And how to behave while attempting to fulfill those goals…

If individual intelligence is already ‘artificial’ then what about AI?

Let’s discuss first the difference between artificial and synthetic textile fibers.
We have natural – cotton, wool, silk – and man made fibers. Tencel, cupro, etc – collectively known as rayon – and nylon, Lycra, acrylic. Tencel is made of wooden cellulose. Cupro – a stand in for silk, used mainly for stockings, around 1900 in Germany – was made from ‘cotton waste’. Meanwhile, nylon, Lycra, acrylic and others are made from oil.
So, basically, both artificial and synthetic fibers are made by man. The artificial ones by slightly adjusting the nature of the original material while the synthetic ones are ‘achieved’ after the raw material – oil – has suffered a series of drastic transformations.

Same thing with ‘intelligence’.

As such, intelligence is an ‘animal’ ‘thing’. It’s the animals who do ‘intelligent’ stuff. We haven’t, yet, identified any intelligent actions performed by plants. Or fungi…
Each animal species has it’s own kind of intelligence. And each individual animal belonging to each of those species has its own level of that specific intelligence. But seldom in the animal world, with a few exceptions and in a rather limited manner, individual animal intelligence is honed through interaction between individuals.
Maybe this is why we, humans, consider some animals to be superior to others? Those who are able to learn? As they live? From us, as well as from other animals?

Compare animal intelligence with it’s human counterpart.
We learn during our entire life. We deposit the consequences of our intelligence – accrued knowledge – for later retrieval. By successive generations of intelligent agents willing to learn from past experience.
In fact, our collective intelligence is the consequence of a collective effort and all of our individual intelligences have been shaped through human interaction. Hence human intelligence, the collective as well as each of the individual ones, is ‘man made’. Already ‘artificial’.

But there’s more.
Life shapes its environment. The place it inhabits. Builds its ‘habitat’.
Yeast dramatically changes the dough, grasses transform soil into meadows and wolves fine tune the ecosystem in the Yellowstone park.

“Back in 1968, said Smith, when the elk population was about a third what it is today, the willow stands along streams were in bad shape. Today, with three times as many elk, (wolves had been reintroduced in 1995) willow stands are robust. Why? Because the predatory pressure from wolves keeps elk on the move, so they don’t have time to intensely browse the willow.“

Life, in general, shapes its environment.
In a natural way. ‘Unassumingly’ and without any intent, the mere interaction between life itself and the environment where living takes place shapes that very environment.

Humans have changed the nature of the interaction between life and the environment.
By assuming to know what they are doing and by having precise intentions about what they want to achieve, humans have started to build on purpose.

And the first thing we’ve built was an ontology.
While the rest of the living takes place directly in what we call “reality”, we live in the image we’ve built, for ourselves, about ‘reality’. While the rest of the living takes place directly in the hard reality – our ancestors had started their evolution in the very same place – we’ve gradually moved out to an ‘alternative’ reality. One – two, actually – of our own making.
We have the hard, but artificial, reality we have built for ourselves. Cities, agricultural fields, means of communication, pollution, global warming… and the image we have about ‘the Universe’.
The ‘stone built’ reality we inhabit and the culturally accrued understanding we have been distilling, since becoming conscious human beings, from the hard realities around us, for our own use.
Nolens volens, our hard reality has to be anchored in the real/natural hard reality. For it was made from the same ‘raw material’. Furthermore, our ontology has to make sense. Otherwise it would be contradicted – as it so often was – by the implacable real reality.

We have currently reached a very interesting moment in our evolution.
Until now, technology – the manner in which we put into practice the understanding we have about the world – was mostly about ‘outsourcing’ physical labour. A tool to extend our ‘practical intelligence’. Then we have invented the computer. A tool used to extent our ‘brain power’. Yet another lever…
At first, the computer apps were used to ‘mechanically’ amplify our individual intelligence. You know what I mean. Even now, if you have enough individuals with pen, paper, adequate knowledge and powerful enough communication means, you can calculate almost everything a computer can calculate.

Machine learning has changed all that.
Not only that we can’t replicate what’s going on inside the machine, we no longer fully understand the process.
‘Machine learning’ actually means that a machine develops its own understanding of something. Its own understanding/image regarding a piece of ‘reality’. Given the fact that machines learn/try to understand starting with/from a data base provided by humans… I have to conclude that the understanding/image developed by an AI machine regards a piece of an already artificial reality. A piece of a man made reality.

Meaning that the intelligence appeared/grown as the consequence of this process is a fully synthetic intelligence. And that the machine generated ‘ontology’ is twice removed from the hard reality.
Twice removed from the hard reality we try to understand by ‘training’ our machines at it…

For this is what we’re trying to do. Willingly or unwittingly…
We attempt to outsource thinking.
By training what we call ‘Generative Artificial Intelligence’ we attempt to build machines which would elaborate an alternative understanding of the world. Alternative from ours…
Will any of those alternatives fit?

Into the hard, real, reality?

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game, Transparency

Read!

August 27, 2024 //
0

Redistribution of wealth is an anti-marxist technology.

Taxing the super-wealthy and redistributing the proceeds towards education, health care and infrastructure makes it possible for the middle class to survive.

Otherwise, the marxist prophecy will come true.

“No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.
The lower strata of the middle class — the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants — all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.“

Read what Marx had to say about things if you want to avoid the marxist abomination.

Marx’s idea of revolutionary progress was based on the notion that property, hence wealth, must be abolished. Abolished, altogether, and not redistributed!

‘Redistribution of wealth’ means everybody pulling their own weight/contributing their fair share instead of ‘the the already rich taking the lion’s share’.

Redistribution of wealth means preserving the concept of property/wealth and maintaining the functionality of the capitalist free-market.

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Categories 1989 and the Global Financial Crises, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, democracy, effective communication, In English, skin in the game, teleology

The Long and the Short of ‘IT’

August 25, 2024 //
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‘Universe’ has no meaning. Other than what we assign to be its meaning…

‘Universe’ is a word we use to encompass everything around us. Whether we know of it or not. Whether we understand (of) it or not.

From ‘where’/’when’ we are in/attempt to perceive this huge environment, things look like ‘this’.
Depending of the wavelength of the light we use to ‘reinterpret’ the picture…
Nota bene, the colours were assigned by a computer app, starting from a series of ‘black&white’ images shot using filters which select short intervals of light-wavelength.

By sheer change, life appeared on Earth. And on who knows, if ever, how many other planets.
Evolution, an impersonal process, playing the odds in the current setting, had engendered the set of circumstances into which we happened to ‘burst’ into existence.

We, for better or for worse, have shaped the planet into what it has become.

Regardless of what each of us believes, religiously speaking, it doesn’t actually matter whether a god did or didn’t do anything. Since each and every religion currently biasing human thinking on Earth speaks about individual responsibility – hence freedom, for you can’t have individual responsibility without freedom – it actually doesn’t matter whether any of the teachings we refer speak about have been induced by an outside agent or have been produced ‘in house’.
Since each of us is individually responsible for our thoughts/actions – hence ‘free’ – then the meaning we assign to the object of our judgement, the ‘Universe’, belongs to us. To each and to all of us.

‘God save us!’

But since we’re ‘free’, we must save ourselves.

And since nobody can be free on their own – freedom has been defined by ‘us’ and put in practice collectively – saving ourselves will be a collective effort.
Or else.

Nota bene!
We are a ‘collection’/community of individual human beings.
We either ‘save’ ourselves maintaining what makes us human – our distinct individual individualities – or we become a hive. Of something else but ‘human’.
Of what we currently understand as being ‘human’…

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game, Trust

Terror Management System

August 20, 2024 //
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“According to their records, Hilda is 81,
but she says recently her family killed a pig to celebrate
her “100th birthday or something like that”.”
“Many Tsimanes never reach old age, though.
When the study began,
their average life expectancy was barely 45 years – now it’s risen to 50.
“But for Hilda, old age is not something to be taken too seriously.
“I’m not afraid of dying,” she tells us with a laugh,
“because they’re going to bury me and I’m going to stay there… very still.””

Big Bang 1.0 had been inconspicuous. There was nothing there to vibrate so sound could not travel. Also, there was no space so light had nowhere to travel to. On top of everything else, there was nobody there/then to notice.
What am I talking about? There even weren’t any ‘there’ nor ‘then’ at ‘that moment’…

Not for us, anyway!
Hence ‘Big Bang’ is a rather blatant misnomer.

Big Bang 2.0, the currently unfolding one, is an increasingly flashier event.
It began when we have started to talk. And developed conscience as a consequence. According to Humberto Maturana.

The first thing our ancestors had discovered was that they were heavily dependent.
On each other and on what we currently call ‘nature’.
Not having any of what we consider to be ‘scientific knowledge’ they didn’t know much about how things worked.
But they learned, slowly, to use fire.
How to make tools. And how to improve their dwellings.
All these things – fire, tools and protection from the elements – were auspicious circumstances for the first qualitative transformation of the genus. Not only our direct ancestors – Homo Sapiens – but also their cousins – Homo Neanderthalensis – had started to consider ‘the future’.

‘What is going to happen to me/us?’

This question, ‘am I going to eat this much/tasty again?’, demands three things.
A full belly, some time off and a (proto)conscience. At least some self awareness.
The fact that our ancestors, both the Sapiens and the Neanderthalensis, buried their dead and used tools to build/carve ‘jewelry’ strongly suggests that both of them did have a certain awareness/preoccupation about their own condition.

We don’t know whether they were ‘religious’ people.
What we do know is what people very close to what was going on then were doing until recently. And some continue to do. Populations which until have been ‘discovered’ were living like our ancestors used to do. They used to thank their totems for the food they hunted. And they erected ‘altars’ to celebrate the movements of the Sun.
Which strongly suggests that ‘what am I going to eat tomorrow?’ was far more important to them than ‘how much longer am I going to live?’.

The way I see it – following Maslow’s cue – people who live in rather ‘undeveloped’ communities don’t have enough ‘time’ to think about ‘death’.
They are accustomed to it – death is a lot more present in their life than it is in ours – and they still haven’t solved the ‘basic needs’. Not to the tune of reaching the ‘re-actualization’ stage.
They do think about tomorrow but they do it in far more practical terms than we do it.

They are not afraid of death as they are of dying of hunger. Painfully. Or both.

It was us, the ‘civilized’ people, who have become afraid of dying.
Concerned about ‘redemption’.
Thirsty for ‘meaning’.

Which ‘meaning’ brings me back to where this post has started.
One of the experiments which have convinced Rosenblatt et all to develop the ‘Terror Management Theory’ involved a number of municipal judges. Half were ‘primed’ by making them think about death while the others were left ‘unprimed’. The primed ones had imposed tougher bonding conditions to similar fictional suspects.
The experimenters posited that death was so important to them that thinking of it changed the conclusions they derived from the information available to them. Which is more or less correct.
Yet this experiment suggests something even more interesting. To me, at least.

Death is, besides a biological phenomenon, a cultural construct. An artifact.
And the fact that the judges had to be primed in order to be influenced by ‘death’ is a strong suggestion that they were rather influenced by the artifact than by the biological phenomenon.

We do know that we’re gonna die.
But we don’t constantly think about it. Our mere mortality isn’t a constant presence in our mind.
For it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t help any. A waste of brain power which brings no real benefit.

What we do think – those of us who have a full belly and enough spare time, only during some of that spare time – is ‘what’s all this fuss about?’

What’s the meaning of all this?
Of all this man-made terror which is creeping on more and more of us…

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, cooperation, corruption, effective communication, In English, Psychology, skin in the game

Power

August 18, 2024 //
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An amount of interaction expressed in the considered amount of time.

Where ever there is power, there is also resistance.
Michel Foucault in the footsteps of Isaac Newton

Michel Foucault used to be a post-Marxist philosopher and sociologist.
As the rest of the Marxists, two of his main subjects were Power and the individual’s (philosopher) duty to put their own convictions into practice. To make a difference, preferably ‘against’ the establishment.

From a Darwinian point of view, Foucault’s insistence that we shouldn’t restrict ourselves to the ‘straight and narrow’ makes perfect sense. The ability to change along with the changes in the environment is paramount to survival. Furthermore, the ability to induce change is paramount to what we call ‘progress’.

On the other hand, life itself demands that we, successive generations of individuals belonging to different evolving species, need to retain a certain congruence.
Succeeding generations share the genetic information needed to preserve the nature of the species.
Species living together evolve in such a manner as to maintain the viability of ‘their’ ecosystem. Or else…

The ‘law of the jungle’ is nothing more than something we believe to have noticed. And then convinced ourselves that we were right when we have formulated our observation in the current form. “The law of the jungle…“

“Power” is but a word.
And words have the nasty habit of cloaking more than one meanings. Well, most of them…

“Power” means many.
From a ‘certain amount of work divided by the time in which that work had been performed’ to ‘the influence somebody has over the people happening to live in the vicinity.
And also something very pervasive yet seldom noticed.

Something which ‘permeates everything and “makes us what we are”‘.

Contradictory?
A tool, teleologically yielded by agents, or a fixture of the ‘environment’?
Both a the same time!
Imagine a group of people cavorting in a pool. Each of them using water to splash the others.
Or two ‘teams’ of angry men fighting near a river and using stones retrieved from the riverbed to crack each-others’ skulls.

‘A fixture of the environment’ identified as such and used by agents as a tool with which to further their goals.

Knowledge is power and power creates knowledge...
Both Bacon/Hobbes and Foucault have been right.
By identifying new and increasingly powerful instruments people have transformed knowledge into power while by putting power to work, the powerful have generated new meaning and driven things towards where they wanted them to be.

Having been able to draw from more accrued knowledge (a.k.a. culture) than Hobbes. Foucault is marginally ‘even more right’ than his predecessors.

“People know what they do;
frequently they know why they do what they do;
but what they don’t know is what what they do does.”

This being the explanation for all ‘social arrangements’ where power has been concentrated in a too small number of hands/heads having eventually failed.

A society where schools and prisons are hard to tell apart – or perceived as such by those who have to spend time in any of them – is sooner rather than later going to reconsider it’s ‘knowledge’ regarding ‘power’. Or else…

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Categories 1989, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, collective identity, effective communication, In English, skin in the game, teleology

Framework

August 17, 2024 //
1

“statuuntque latiores terminos scientiae Dei quam potestatis,
vel potius ejus partis potestatis Dei (nam et ipsa scientia potestas est)
qua scit, quam ejus qua movet et agit:
ut praesciat quaedam otiose, quae non praedestinet et praeordinet”
Francis Bacon, 1597
“and they set wider limits for the knowledge of God than for power,
or rather for that part of God’s power (for knowledge itself is power)
by which he knows, than that by which he moves and acts”
Google Translate

“scientia potentia est“
Thomas Hobbes, 1668

E=mc2
Einstein, 1905

In fact, power produces; it produces reality;
it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.
Michel Foucault, 1991

“They” – as in ‘the knowing people’ – ‘set the limits for the knowledge of God’.
Then it was ‘they’ who had the real power over (their) God…

A little later, another thinker simplified the whole thing into ‘knowledge is power’.

Which, already collective, state of mind morphed into the socio-cultural environment into which Einstein was able to notice that E=mc2. That apparently different things can morph one into the other, given the right circumstances.

Which brings us to Foucault noticing that power produces reality. Including knowledge…

But is there a real difference between ‘power produces reality’ and ‘they set different limits for God’s knowledge than for God’s power’?
In fact, there is.

According to Foucault power is exercised directly.
According to Bacon, people exercise power by ‘fine tuning’ their ultimate tool. Their God. Which god, like all others, acts like an agent. Its powers might be limited – it is able to do/know only as much as those who have faith in it believe it to be able to know/do – but inside those limits it is as free as each of those who believe in it.

And the difference is huge.
As soon as Nietzsche had noticed that ‘God was dead’, ‘reality’ had shattered.
While God was alive, power created one reality. Also known as “God”.
As soon as there was no more God to mediate between reality and those gathering knowledge about it and exercising power while recreating it… reality became many!

And not only many versions of reality are competing for our attention, each of these realities are farther and farther away for the ‘hard’ one. The one harboring Einstein.

“People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does.”

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization:

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Categories 1989, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, complementary ways of attending knowlege, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game, Trust

Two millennia. And counting…

August 12, 2024 //
0

“Until philosophers rule as kings or those who are now called kings and leading men
genuinely and adequately philosophize,
that is, until political power and philosophy entirely coincide…
cities will have no rest from evils…
there can be no happiness, either public or private, in any other city.”
Plato, circa 375 BC

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways.
The point, however, is to change it.“
Marx,1845

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?
What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?
Nieztsche, 1882

“The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits“
Milton Friedman, 1970

“Real life, says Heidegger, happens when beings become ‘unhidden’,
when we help bring things out of their hiding places
and step out of our own along with them, into the light of being itself.
It happens in rare moments when we see links between
‘beings themselves, the human world, the work of God.’
It can only occur, he says, when you’re disturbed by a sense that real life is elsewhere.”
Peter Holm Jensen, 2023

Wood is the raw material we use to make timber. And paper.
Steel is the raw material we fashion into tools. And weapons.
Words are the raw material we shape into ideas.

We use timber to build houses.
Paper to print poetry.
Tools to transform nature into civilization.
Ideas to make sense of the world we live in. And of ourselves.

When angry, we burn houses. Print lies. Transform tools into weapons and use them to destroy.
When angry, we no longer see eye to eye about meaning.

Almost two and a half millennia back, Plato told us us that “until political power and philosophy entirely coincide…“
We had chosen, while ‘angry’, to interpret Plato’s warning as being a ‘blue print’. A ‘boiler plate’ for ‘how to breed appropriate rulers’. https://www.britannica.com/topic/philosopher-king.

Karl Marx, while terribly angry – and not without reason, had chosen to put in practice, tentatively, the generally accepted version of Plato’s work.
“The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.“.

Nietzsche confessed, publicly, “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him“.
We have chosen to place the onus on him. As if it had been he who killed God. Alone…

Friedman – Milton Friedman the economist, not a word-smith nor a philosopher – had formalized the public opinion prevalent during his ‘tenure’. That corporations should stick to what they were good at – producing things in an efficient manner, hence being profitable – and leave social intervention to those concerned with solving that line of specific problems.
NB. I’m not suggesting Friedman was right. More about ‘being right’ in a short while. I’m only stating that both Friedman’s sycophants and detractors – including me – have been near-sighted.

Heidegger was the guy who brought back into discussion the notion of Aletheia. “the presocratic way to truth, as unconcealment.“
Truth as the the ‘politically’ sanctioned expression of reality. “until political power and philosophy entirely coincide…“

In a sense, we’ve spent the last two and a half millennia updating Plato’s to Heidegger’s wording of how to make sense of truth.
We haven’t been able to come up, yet, with a convincing version because we’ve chosen to ‘ignore’ Buddha’s “truth that misery originates within the craving for pleasure“. That ‘misery’ originates from our ‘rational’ desire for ‘being right‘.

That misery originates from us being angry, collectively, for not being able to reach ‘the truth’ individually.
That misery originates from each of us, individually, craving to be ‘right’. Each on our own…

“The Buddha taught that nothing is permanent and that everything is impermanent.
Therefore, people should avoid getting attached to things as eventually everything will change.
People suffer when they crave and when they get attached to people and objects.“

Being right, individually, is both incomplete – as Heidegger pointed out – and temporary. According to both Siddhartha Gautama and Karl Popper.
Being angry about not being right is not helpful. On the contrary…
It compels us to defend our version of truth and it blinds us towards all others. Regardless of how they complement ours.
Renders us incapable to politically sanction a comprehensive version of truth. Renders us incapable to build Aletheia.

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, skin in the game, teleology

The Law of the Instrument

August 8, 2024 //
0

“I suppose it is tempting,
if the only tool you have is a hammer,
to treat everything as if it were a nail”
Abraham Maslow

I write this blog in the hope that ’embodying’ my thoughts will somehow help me.
Help me solve some of the quirky questions which have been haunting me for sometime now.

Why so many people have been convinced that thinking may help them make sense of things?
Why so many otherwise smart people have convinced themselves that thinking ‘in solitude’ would take them to the ‘right’ place?
Why so many seemingly reasonable people have somehow become certain that their version of things was the only one valid? To the tune of trying to impose it to those happening to be around them?

The first answer was easy to find.
Because that’s how we make sense of things.
And because that’s what people do when they have no other alternative.
They start thinking about how to get out of the mess into which they have entered by not thinking! Enough…

The second one was also easy. Ish… specially after I did come up with the question formulated like this.
Apparently, to shield their minds from ‘distraction’. From the mundane ‘minor’ problems which might have wasted their ‘brain power’.
In reality, simply because they could do it. They had a great time doing it – thinking, that was – so they indulged on every occasion they had. And smart as they were, they made it possible for them to have more and more time available for thinking.
And they cut themselves off from the rest of the world because the few people able to partake in the process not always shared the same opinion. Thus otherwise smart thinkers ended up in the company of sycophants…

Having found the answer for the second question opened, wide, the door for the third answer.
No, it wasn’t the presence of the sycophants which convinced the otherwise reasonable thinker that their was the only valid solution for whatever problem they had in mind at anyone time.
Sycophants showering praise were only a ‘favorable circumstance’. A mere opportunity for it to happen.

Unhindered by any outside intervention, the tinkering thinker turned his tool to his own head.
And hammered out all the remaining doubts his mind was still harboring.

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Categories 1989, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, Psychology, skin in the game, Trust

Turning the Tables

August 7, 2024 //
0

I also believe that people – well, some of them – are able to change their minds if presented with the right arguments at the right time, in the appropriate manner and in auspicious circumstances.

People are not robots. And, for certain, not rational!

We are rationalizers. We use rational arguments to fortify our already held conclusions. And the more we love those conclusions, the further we go in our quest to find the ‘right’ arguments in our favor.
But given enough time and if the arguments which contradict our convictions are presented in an un-injurious way, we might be persuaded.

And here’s the catch.

For quite a while now, some of those familiar with how rationalization works have used their knowledge about the innards of our minds to further their own goals.
Nothing wrong with that?

Are you familiar with ‘divide et impera’?
That’s the strategy used by every would be dictator to breed trouble in the population they planed to take over.
Divide and conquer. Make your followers despise everybody else. To the tune of transforming ‘the others’ into sub-humans.
Make your followers believe they are ‘special’ while the others, all of them, are nothing but vermin.

‘And what’s wrong with believing yourself to be rational?!?’

It’s not wrong. Only delusional.

Making your mind up only after carefully considering all of the available ‘arguments’ means having a scientific attitude.
You know? Science, the fad currently popular among many of us…

The problem with the scientific attitude being the fact that this attitude has been developed in the context of hard facts. The scientific attitude has been ‘minted’ by those studying physics, chemistry, biology… fields where every minute transgression becomes evident in real time! Where people could not ‘fall in love’ with their own conclusions. For the simple reason that those conclusions had to be changed along with the new facts continuously discovered in the process of learning.

The concept of rationality had been minted late in the development of human thought.
Sometimes during the XVIII-th and the XIX-th centuries. When philosophers had started to concern themselves with ‘how we think’ on top of ‘what we should be thinking’.
When philosophers – and lately psychologists – have started to understand how we reach/build meaning.

Some of those philosophers have reached rather strange conclusions.

Nietzsche posited that ‘God is dead’ while Marx rationally convinced himself, and others, that there was a way – and only one way, his – to make everybody happy.
Nietzsche opened the gate and Marx led us through.

And now, that we’re dwelling in no-God’s land, everything is up for grabs.

Including reason…
What is here to prevent us from using our knowledge of how mind works in order to further our own, personal, goals?

Goethe did warn us.
The Sorcerer Apprentice made the very same mistake. Overconfidence in his own ability to ‘play the rules’. To fidget with reality.
The difference between Goethe’s poem and what we’re currently doing is the fact that Goethe’s was a work of fiction while we’re playing with our own future.

I’ll wrap up highlighting the extreme perversity of the message.
‘I have a mental illness…’
Loosely translated, this means that everybody who doesn’t follow those arguments to the same conclusion where I have arrived myself must be (also) mentally ill.
And now, that we’ve reached the conclusion that at least one of us is ‘crazy’, it no longer matters who is on the ‘wrong’ side of the fence!

We both are!
We no longer see eye to eye. Each of us is convinced that the other is sick.
Unworthy!

We’re both ready to be taken over.

The only way out is to start listening, respectfully, to what the other has to say.
‘Respectfully’ means, first and fore-most, ‘don’t mess with GIGO‘!

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, Psychology, skin in the game
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