Archives for category: skin in the game
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Wishing for the best.

August 6, 2024 //
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Expect nothing.
You’ll never be disappointed.
Buddhism 101

Language, one the tools we use for thinking, is an interesting subject.
For study!

Whenever there are two different words referring to something not exactly different, there’s a huge opportunity. For us to understand how our minds work.

Buddha said nothing about wishing. As far as I know, and I’m not an expert in Buddhism…
But since all those who bother themselves to help us becoming the better – read happier – version of us quote Buddha as speaking exclusively about ‘expecting’ and nothing about ‘wishing’ … I’ll just consider it yet another fact of life.

When speaking about expectations, Buddha starts by saying that “attachment to desire causes suffering“.
Which brings us back to the minute differences between words!
Wishes, desires… expectations…

Buddha’s first Noble Truth is stated as “Life is Suffering“. Very interesting formulation but today’s subject is somewhat different.
Life, as we experience it, needs a living organism.
Which living organism, in order to remain alive, has to meet some of its own ‘needs’. Subsistence, shelter…
For us to experience something – including life – we need to become and remain conscious. We need to build and preserve self-esteem…
For our living organism to inform our conscience about its needs, the body sends sensations to the higher echelons of the mind. Where sensation is transformed into perception. And becomes desire.

‘Pangs’ become perceptions of hunger. And our mind discovers that it – or ‘we’, as in ‘body and mind’?!? – desires to eat.
Is there any reasonable way in which we – any of us – may give up trying to fulfill this desire? This need, actually…

‘I wish I had eggs for breakfast!’
Nothing unreasonable about that, right? Nothing likely to make us suffer…

Well, maybe for us.
For me, writing this on a computer, and for you reading my thoughts over the internet. Highly unlikely for any of us to be unable to fulfill such a ‘dream’. Those allergic to eggs are excepted, of course.

This being the moment when I draw your attention to what other people may think. Feel…
Parents who can feed their children nothing but stale bread. If at all. And not for lack of trying!
Hungry teenagers who expect their parents to be able to feed them. Decently…

“Fifteen-year-old Cyril Jose was a tin-miner’s son from Cornwall. With the region suffering from heavy unemployment, the boy with a strong sense of adventure joined up.”https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29934965

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

Make believe

August 4, 2024 //
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Observe the abnormal.
The out of ordinary.
That’s how you might figure out the regular…
Psychology 101

We live on faith.

Without faith, one cannot even raise from their bed in the morning…
‘What’s the use?’

Animals start looking for food whenever hungry.
Human beings, for as long as they remain conscious, check whether there’s any chance of finding food before attempting to find it.

Faith in what?

Living organisms are made of matter.
Atoms and molecules stacked in a certain order and interacting according to certain rules. Rules being preserved, managed and passed over from generation to generation as ‘genes’.
Individual organisms have very little influence about the whole process, except for some ‘checks and balances’. Which checks and balances work according to some rules also contained in the genes.
Species, generations and generations of individual organisms, evolve. The genetic information passed over from generation to generation becomes slightly altered as evolution forces it to fit the changes in the environment.
According to Ernst Mayr, evolution is about the demise of the unfit. Individuals need to be able to survive in the environment where they happen to have been born. If the genetic information inherited from the parents is suitable for that environment, the individual has a fighting chance. To live and to pass over the genetic information which made survival possible.
The nature of life – the existence of successive generations and the mechanisms which pass genetic information from one generation to the next one – makes it so that genetic information may be slightly altered when copied into the new organism. The alterations appear haphazardly and ‘survive’ only if they don’t jeopardize the existence of the individual organism harboring them. If the organism survives for long enough, the alteration is passed over to the new generation. If the alteration happens to be beneficial for the organism in the context of circumstances where it needs to survive, that alteration has increased the chances of survival for the organism. And its own chances to be passed over to the next generation. Please note that no agency is involved in this process. Nobody and nothing but happenstance has anything to do with what’s going on here!

Conscious organisms are made of animals plus conscience.
You need a living organism in order to have a functional conscience.
Which conscience is nothing but a set of rules learned from the other members of the ‘species’ to which the individual belongs. In fact, conscience – individually speaking, is nothing but a set of ‘cultural’ genes.
Lumps of information passed on from generation to generation which allow us to actively interact amongst us, people, and between us and the environment where we happen to live.
Each individual conscience is like a ‘cultural’ organism riding on top of a biological one.

The difference between the cultural organism and the biological one being the fact that the cultural organism is aware of itself.
Of its mortal nature!

Being an organism, conscience has only one job. To survive for as long as it can and to pass over the information it has gathered to the next generation.
Just as a biological organism is driven by a ‘vital force’ – named ‘survival instinct’ by those trying to make sense of this whole thing – conscience is driven by hope.

Biological organisms have a symbiotic relationship with their environment. They ingest substances and excrete the consequences of their metabolism. They also notice information and react to it. Individually as well as collectively.
As a consequence, the world we currently live in is the ‘byproduct’ of 3 billion years of countless biological organisms having already lived on this planet. Without this teeming life we wouldn’t be here and the planet would be barren.

Cultural organisms have deepened and accelerated the process.
Not only they have physically transformed the planet but they have also built meaning.

As I mentioned before, consciences need hope in order to survive.
In order to have hope, you need meaning.
Things have to make sense.
Out of sheer necessity, we’ve built explanatory scenarios for what’s going on around us.

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

Communism

August 1, 2024 //
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The Polish state broadcaster on Saturday suspended
a television journalist who, during the Olympic Games opening ceremony,
reacted to a performance of John Lennon’s “Imagine” by saying it was a “vision of communism.”

Communism is perfect!
Communism is the perfect lie…

Communism was ‘invented’ by Marx and proposed as the only solution to a real problem.

The problem with communism as a practical solution is that it cannot be put into practice!

Humans, both at individual and social level, need freedom.
Without individual and social freedom, individuals regress to an animalic state and societies fail. Abysmally!

According to Marx, communism was the only solution for what he had perceived as a problem.
According to Marx, when a critical mass of people belonging to the middle class will become destitute, they will accept to be led out of their predicament by ‘the communists’. But since the rest of the society continues to enjoy their perks or to ignore the dangers ‘lurking in the future’, in order to achieve their goal – communism for everybody, including for the unwilling, the communists will have to institute the socialist dictatorship. As a transition phase to communism. A phase in which the unwilling will be convinced.
According to history, no dictatorship – including the socialist – has ever survived. Has ever achieved its goal.

Communism, at least for now, is unattainable. For the simple reason that humankind has not yet learned how to survive dictatorship. How to live without freedom.

On the other hand, communism is very alluring.
For the idealists amongst us…
Communism is a very suitable subject for dreaming. A very nice thing to have, albeit impossible to achieve…

Since the idealists are hard to convince, let me speak to the practical minded amongst you.
John Lennon invited us to dream. To dream a world with ‘no possessions’ and with ‘no need for greed or hunger’. What’s not to like in this dream, except for the fact that it can’t be put in practice?
Hunger is natural. Why eat if not hungry?!?
Greed is also natural.
Who doesn’t like/want more of what they consider to be pleasant?!? The wise amongst us?
How do we become wise? As wise as each of us is able to become…
By interacting with others? By learning from them? And from the consequences of those interactions?

Property – possessions – is a tool.
A tool society uses to make order. If each of us knows what they are able to use for what purpose things go smooth. There’s no need for outside intervention. Granted, this is valid for only as long as each – well, at least most – members of the society have enough to eat, where to sleep and what to protect their backs with.
Without the order construed by the society, collectively, using the tool known as ‘property’, how are the people going to cooperate?!? To interact? To learn, even…

How about we wake up?
Sleep is essential and dreaming a normal part of it.
But we also need some wake up time!
Pun intended…

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Categories 1989, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, democracy, freedom, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, skin in the game

Imagine

July 31, 2024 //
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The Polish state broadcaster on Saturday suspended
a television journalist who, during the Olympic Games opening ceremony,
reacted to a performance of John Lennon’s “Imagine” by saying it was a “vision of communism.”

And now I wonder…

What kind of communism had Przemyslaw Babiarz, the Polish journalist, experienced?
And where, since the Polish people did not enjoy what had been dished to them by the communist rulers?!?

What a waste of energy….
John Lennon had invited us to dream!
The communists, the real ones, had acted worse than the worst robber barons.
What I had experienced under communist rule, in Romania, had nothing to do with what Lennon had invited us to dream about.
Comparing Lennon’s dreams with the crimes committed by the communists is narrow minded to say the least.
Firing a guy for airing a ‘less than inspired’ statement and pretending to do it in the name of “Mutual understanding, tolerance, reconciliation” is nothing short of idiocy!
For it gives ammunition, and plenty of it, to those who wish to torpedo any mutual understanding and tolerance that still survives.

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

Expectations

July 29, 2024 //
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Each of us expects the others to behave rationally.
While each of us rationalizes their own biases.
And considers this to be normal!

Not so long ago – evolutionary speaking, things were free. As in ‘up for grabs’.
Our not so distant forefathers fed and clothed themselves by picking ‘things’ from nature.

By talking to each other they had become conscious human beings.
Then came up with the notion of property.

‘If I/we have this thing, you cannot have it too’.

Using this notion, they introduced some order unto the social stage.
Some things, albeit fewer and fewer, remained free/up for grabs while the rest – specially ‘the things of interest’ had become private.

Entertaining the notion of property means that individuals are able to link an object to its owner.
This link is a piece of information.
Discussing and remembering who owns what, our forefathers realized that information is important. Not only the information regarding the link between owners and their property but also information in general. Whatever ‘useful’ things had been learned, remembered and passed around.
Thus information became ‘a thing’.

The order created by the communities using the concept of property and by actively circulating information among the members had become the premise for those communities to thrive.

Somewhat naturally, the members of those communities had reached the conviction that:
Property is good. And that more property is better.
Old people are precious. For the simple reason that they deposit what had happened. By sharing their memories, old people make it so that the younger ones don’t need to learn again and again.

Since property and remembered information were good for the community, the communities using them developed faster and had a way better survival rate than those who didn’t. For whatever reasons.

Since in reality people rationalize rather than think rationally, they have reached the conclusion that the rich and old people were the ultimate cause for the well being of the community.
The individuals, not the modus operandi of the community.

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, collective identity, cooperation, effective communication, In English, limited rationality, Mutual Respect, skin in the game

Gaming the System

July 18, 2024 //
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“To use rules or laws to get what you want in an unfair but legal way”
From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English

Having a name for ‘it’ means that we’re aware of it’s existence.
We’re still using it, though.
It is wise?

We’re not the first ones to use the method.
The HIV virus has somehow ‘learned’ to hide itself inside our immune system.
Not only to ‘bend the rules of life’ – all viruses do that for a living – but to bend the very rules of immunity!
But we are the first ones to use ‘it’ knowingly!

Not fully aware of the consequences but nevertheless on purpose!

How did we get here?

By ‘gaming’ the laws of nature!
Our ancestors believed flying was reserved for birds. By making good use of what we’ve learned about the ‘system’, we’ve been able to overcome many of our limitations.
We’ve also overcame our common sense…

We forget our planet is limited.
Vast but still limited.
We also tend to forget that our knowledge/understanding is also limited.
We’ve become so confident in our ability to game the system that we tend to ignore the two facts I’ve just mentioned.

Even worse, we’ve given up ‘the brotherhood of man’.
We’ve become humans by talking to each-other. By hunting together. By tilling the earth together.
Then we’ve started to fight. For the same earth we’ve been tilling together…
We’ve invented ‘capitalism’. A manner of doing business which relies mostly on trust. On the rational expectation that the partners will rather fulfill their respective parts of the deal than becoming known as fraudsters.
About the same time, we’ve also invented ‘democracy’. A social arrangement relying on mutual respect.

And we “saw that it was good“.
It lasted for a while…

Recently, capitalism has been gamed into a relentless hunt for profit.
Currently, democracy is being played with alternative facts.

We’re becoming viruses!
Some of us, anyway.


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

Out with a Bang

July 15, 2024 //
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“The early details that have emerged about Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was shot dead by law enforcement, show a young man working an entry-level job near his hometown in Pennsylvania, where he graduated from high school in 2022 with a reputation as a bright but quiet classmate. His high school counselor described him as “respectful” and said he never knew Crooks to be political.”

“Two years ago, Crooks graduated from the local high school, where he showed no particular interest in politics, according to one classmate who asked not to be identified. Crooks’ interests centered on building computers and playing games, the classmate said in an interview.
“He was super smart. That’s what really kind of threw me off was, this was, like, a really, really smart kid, like he excelled,” the classmate said. “Nothing crazy ever came up in any conversation.””

At least one of his classmates perceived him as ‘an outcast’ while another – and his high-school counselor – perceived him as being ‘bright’. Neither ‘saw it coming’.

So why would a very young adult attempt to assassinate a very well known, and very well guarded, public figure?

“Jameson Myers, a former member of the Bethel Park High School varsity rifle team who graduated alongside Crooks in 2022, told CBS that he did not make the team.
“He did not even make the junior varsity team after trying out,” Mr Myers added. “He never returned to try-outs for the remainder of high school.”

Let me rephrase the question. Why would a 20 years old male with a steady job, who had graduated from high school two years ago “with a $500 prize for maths and science“, attempt to shoot somebody out, from a distance, given the fact that he wasn’t trained for it. Nor exactly talented in this domain…

Are we sure this was Crooks’ main target? To assassinate a former, and possibly future, President of the USA?
Or was he trying to end it all? Once and for all?

What were the odds for him to get away with it?
To survive after shooting the first bullet?
He was unanimously described as being ‘smart’…

What drove Thomas Mathew Crooks to the conclusion that his life was no longer worth living?

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Categories 1989, awareness, Bounded rationality, effective communication, In English, Psychology, skin in the game

Skinning cats

July 11, 2024 //
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With Chandler Owen, A. Philip Randolph founded and became co-editor of The Messenger,
an African American socialist magazine, in 1917.
In 1925, Randolph established the first predominantly black labor union,
the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, to improve working conditions
for the nearly 10,000 black railroad employees.
The Brotherhood would enjoy longstanding prominence in the labor and civil rights movements.

According to the English lore, “there’s more than one way to skin a cat”.
According to the cat, ‘who cares about how I lose my coat? I’ll end up dead anyway!’
According to the fur tanners, ‘the manner of skinning the pelt is of utmost importance for the end-result of the operation’.

Whom to believe? Specially since all of them seem to be right…

Well, truth has a marked tendency for being complicated.
Hard to comprehend in its entirety and even harder to express in a concise manner.
Meanwhile we, conscious human beings, have a marked tendency to notice only what we’re interested in. To notice only what we care about…

In fact, the manner in which we notice things speaks volumes about who we are. About how we relate to what we call ‘reality’.

The white colonists inhabiting a certain area in Northern America had become ‘Free Americans’ after fighting the British. Only after they had freed themselves through battle!
A. Philip Randoph had fought for his freedom. And for human rights.

All this fighting leads to a bout of pondering.
Are we free together? As in ‘all of us’ and ‘once and for all’?
Or our freedom is defined against other people? Who might try to steal our liberty from us?

What is freedom, after all?
A zero sum game? Where liberty is up for grabs but in limited supply?
Or a ‘grace’ we impart with and upon our fellow human beings?
Something to be jealously guarded or something to be collectively and cooperatively maintained and enhanced?

And one final question.
Why would anyone attempt to steal other people’s freedom?
When history gives us plenty of evidence that whenever freedom was out to be shared people were happy while whenever freedom was in short supply the entire society eventually crumbled under it’s own weight…

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Categories 1989, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game, Trust

In search of leadership

July 10, 2024 //
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What is going now in China – and in Russia, for that matter –
has nothing to do with the ‘left’.
With what is understood as “left” in Europe…
Instead, it has many similarities with fascism.
‘Corporatist’ states imbued with revindicative nationalism.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has introduced the concept of “Skin in the Game“.
In short, it is about the fact that the decisions made by people who do not directly and immediately ‘enjoy’ the consequences of their choices have a high probability of being bad. A phenomenon that is accentuated as bad decisions are not immediately sanctioned by those who suffer.

Taleb’s observation only confirms the fact that all dictatorships/authoritarian regimes have collapsed.
Without exception!
Alternatively, it is very easy to see that democracies ONLY last as for long as they manage to maintain their ‘functionality’. That is, for as long as people can – and undertake – to voice their grievances. And for as long as people listen to each other. Respectfully! In vain, some shout about being ‘hungry’ if nobody listens/cares ..

Returning to the idea of ​​’leadership’, yes, countries are led. By some who consider themselves/are considered to be ‘elite’. ‘Led’ only from the operational point of view, however…
Countries are living things, ‘natural selection’ still has the last word!
Ernst Mayr, a biologist, said that ‘evolution is not about the survival of the fittest, but about the disappearance of those who cannot find their ‘right’ place. The misfits. ‘. That’s right, countries have big problems if/when they don’t manage to take down the ‘misfits’ who happen to have clambered into power.
Why countries don’t succeed to do this in a timely manner? How did they clambered there in the first place…
Everything starts when the popular dissatisfaction reaches a critical level. Which dissatisfaction is engendered when the members of that country no longer care for each-other. When mutual respect has disappeared.

I will conclude by returning to the major difference between communism and fascism.
Both of them appeared in situations when enough dissatisfied people were ‘wandering aimlessly’ while looked down by the rest of the society.
Some low-life profiteers seized the occasion and ‘grabbed the helm’. Profiteers who have been able to operationalize the dissatisfaction festering in the society. And the lack of vision of those who hated the others. I repeat myself, both communism and fascism had appeared when various sections of the society despised, and sometimes hated, the ‘others’.
The minor difference consists in the fact that the proto-communist dissatisfied looked up without having any chance to get there, while the proto-fascist ones wanted to return to where they had once been. The Russian muzhiks dying during WWI versus the unemployed German workers who had just lost WWI.

This being where the difference appears.
The difference which makes it hard to recognize what’s going on now in Russia/China as being a form of fascism.
Both the Russians and the Chinese have a lot better lives now than they had under communist rule. Statistically and from the material point of view! Psychologically speaking…
Those who live in well-established democracies – people who respect each other – have a greater tolerance for ‘insecurity’. Each of them knows they can rely on the others. In that environment, failure is temporary. People try as many times as they need to succeed. Or that’s how it used to be…
In communism, we had learned – the hard way, that one was not allowed to make mistakes.
When Russia and China switched to ‘capitalism’ and people saw what could happen to them – to make mistakes while trying – they had become frightened!
And, at least some of them, chose to return – especially psychologically, in the past. Where they felt safe…

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Categories 1989, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, effective communication, In English, Mutual Respect, skin in the game, Trust

Free Will

July 6, 2024 //
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“An effective way to undermining something of authentic substance
is by producing versions that closely resemble the real thing
but lack genuine substance.
The skill is in knowing the difference.”

On the other hand, we must keep in mind that fakes are also facts. They exist, don’t they?
Even more so, fake facts do engender consequences!
In fact, it’s these very consequences which impart fact-hood to ‘successful’ fakes.

Also, it is high time for us to understand that this undermining might occur ‘naturally’. Due to our attention being distracted rather than ‘intentionally misguided’.

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, man induced fragility, skin in the game, Trust
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