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Special kind of stupid…

April 21, 2020 //
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Let’s face it, in the present circumstances the picture above might mean a lot of things.

It can be a prank – somebody might have made the whole thing up just for the fun of it.
It can also express the frustration of somebody who isn’t such a good speller. Or of somebody who suffers from dyslexia?

What really interests me is how we, the ‘intellectual’ public, react to things like these.
Do we understand the frustration which lies at the bottom of this?
Do we even try to?

Or we just dismiss it as being a manifestation of stupid?

No, I don’t consider the economy as being more important than life preservation. Some very sound arguments can be found here.

But I’m absolutely convinced that treating the ‘others’ with disdain is what brought us here in the first place.

You don’t like the manner in which the likes of Trump treat those who don’t agree with them?
Then why are you doing the very same thing?

You consider yourself to be better than Trump?

Prove it.
Be nicer than him, not worse.

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Categories 1989 and the Global Financial Crisises., altruism, arrogance, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, complementary ways of attending knowlege, Economy, effective communication, evolution, fail better, forgiveness, In English, man induced fragility, Mindset, Mutual Respect, Psychology, The kind of world we are building for our children

Growing up.

April 20, 2020 //
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Humberto Maturana teaches us that human consciousness can be understood as our ability to ‘observe ourselves observing‘.
In other words, consciousness might be reduced to self-awareness.

I’m afraid it’s not enough.
While no individual can be described as conscious if not commanding a certain degree of self-awareness, being able to observe their own observations doesn’t elevate an observer to fully conscious status.

How many of us have ‘enjoyed’ messing up ants or other insects just for the fun of it? When we were teenagers, of course.
OK, we continue to squish the cockroaches we happen to see and to spray our gardens against mosquitoes and other pests.
Only we no longer do it for fun. We employ a ‘healthy’ rationale to justify our actions – cockroaches/mosquitoes are ‘bad for us’.
And we try to do it in a reasonable manner. We don’t soak the entire garden with the most potent insecticide available. Simply because we’ve understood, the hard way, that bees are also important for us.

Otherwise put, it’s not enough for us to be able to keep tabs on what we do, we must also take responsibility for our actions.

After all, we’ve been able to notice that bison ‘engineer’ their own environment.

“Herds of bison milling through Yellowstone National Park may seem aimless to the average visitor, but a new study reveals the animals are hard at work engineering their ecosystem. By rigorously mowing and fertilizing their own patches of grassland, the big herbivores essentially delay spring until late summer.”

Maybe the time is ripe for us to understand that we, humans, have done the very same thing for quite a while now.
The world we live in is, to a certain – but rapidly growing – extent, the consequence of our own decision making.

The faster we learn to accept that, the higher the chances we won’t repeat past mistakes.

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Categories 1989 and the Global Financial Crisises., altruism, awareness, Choices we make, collective identity, complementary ways of attending knowlege, cooperation, Culture, effective communication, evolution, Frames of mind, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, The kind of world we are building for our children, The kind of world we live in

Heavily in debt.

April 14, 2020 //
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Covid-19 is a good eye opener.

While socially distancing to save our asses, we have the opportunity to use our brains.
And understand how many people contribute, ‘under the radar’, to our well being. To us leading a civilized life.
As civilized as we, as a community, have been able to put together.

This morning I realized how much we owe to the garbage collectors.
To those who clean up our cities.
To the people who make it so that we, the socially distanced, may continue to entertain the illusion of leading a normal life.

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

Meaningless

April 11, 2020 //
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“Yes you can! No people to feel/live/see it, no spring.”

Remember Protagoras? “Man is the measure of all things”?

Without man, there’s no meaning?

Yes, our world becomes meaningless.
The moment we no longer care enough about it.
The moment we stop paying attention.

The other day I had a riveting conversation with my son.
With my 21 years old son.

I asked him to comment on my previous post.
The one about too many people allowing sentiment to cloud their judgement.
The one about even reputable news agencies using click-bait titles to entice readers. Hence reinforcing the habit of sentiment being allowed to cloud reason.

‘Life was never better for so many of us’, explained my son. ‘Since WWII most of us had enjoyed peace. Since the Spanish Flu, we hadn’t experienced a pandemic. Since Salk, we’ve led ourselves to believe we were safe from disease. Since the fall of communism, even the ideological divides have paled down. And now we have enough technology to feed the entire planet, comfortably. The point being that we have no idea how to deal in this situation. What to do. How to behave.
Simply because we have no relevant prior experience.
Until recently, historically speaking, we have successfully dealt with wars, famines and pestilence.
But it’s the first time that we experience such abundance.
We need to adapt to the new reality.
To transform it into an opportunity. Into an opportunity to go forward.
We have to avoid, at all costs, the pitfall of allowing this abundance to bog us down.’

Heartening, isn’t it?
That a person so young can find such deep meaning.
If I may say such things about my own son…

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Categories 1989 and the Global Financial Crisises., altruism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, effective communication, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, skin in the game, The kind of world we are building for our children

Knowledge

April 3, 2020 //
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Any attempt to learn something, to increase your knowledge about a certain subject, is nothing more and nothing less than an attempt to become intimate with it.

Students have two open roads ahead of them.

One which implies a lot of wooing, patience and a certain degree of self appeasement.
The other asks for a direct, almost blunt, approach.
While the first is more like the student dancing around the subject, the second is akin to a hands on combat.

The results are, obviously, different.
Not exactly different. Only fundamentally.

The difference is very much like the difference between courtship and rape.
The end result might be a child. But…

Same thing with art and science.

It is true that in order to have sex, both partners need to be, at least somewhat, naked.
But there is all the difference in the world between having sex and making love!

The end result is only apparently the same!

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Categories arrogance, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, effective communication, In English, Intent, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, Mindset, Mutual Respect, Psychology, teleology, The kind of world we are building for our children, Transparency, Trust, yes but

SF

April 2, 2020 //
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Where S stands for Sociological.

So. Let me present you with a sociologically fictitious scenario.

We have an intelligent observer and and a trans-galactic vehicle.

There are no details available about the observer except for the fact that it has access to a comprehensive real time stream of data about what is going on inside – or, more exactly, on the surface, of the trans-galactic vehicle.

And here’s what the observer had recorded.

The vehicle is being continuously transformed by its passengers.
In fact, there are two manners in which the passengers change their vehicle.
By interacting directly with it.
And as unintended consequences of the interactions which take place between the passengers themselves.

The passengers are evolving.
During the observation period, some of them had become dominant.
But no matter whether they had become dominant or not, most of the passengers had disappeared. Both as individuals and as species.

The current dominant species is the most intriguing ever.

It displays a strange mix of intelligent behaviors and suicidal tendencies.

It is composed of rather autonomous individuals who are adept at finding ingenious solutions to almost intractable problems.
But, strangely enough, they haven’t yet been able to figure out two basic things:
The limited nature of the vehicle on which they live. In both time and space.
Nor how to balance their individual functional autonomy with their need to cooperate towards their natural goal. The survival of their own species.

If the whole ‘project’ were a SF movie, the text above would have been the opening.
Followed by:

Currently, the dominant passengers are being taught a lesson by the apparently most insignificant amongst those transported by the vehicle. By a virus, as the dominants refer to it.
The virus – like all of its kind, is able to hijack other organisms and somehow convince them to work for him. At a very high cost for the hijacked organisms.
In this case, the hijacked organisms belong to the dominant species.

And what have the individuals belonging to the dominant species chosen to do?
Inform each-other promptly and cooperate earnestly towards the common goal?

Not exactly. Not yet, anyway.

Homework:
What would the intelligent outside observer think about the whole situation?
Would He consider to lend a helping hand?

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Categories awareness, biology, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, effective communication, evolution, Frames of mind, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, Mindset, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust

Frames

March 28, 2020 //
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https://i.imgflip.com/3ua749.jpg

Well, we must remember that solutions came a lot easier when we refuse to think inside a box. Inside any box. No matter how large or how nice.

Every time I understand/notice that somebody tries to frame my thinking process, I go ‘ballistic’.

I try to raise my mind perpendicularly above the frame. So that I may observe the limits.

Every time when somebody is presented with an ‘either/or’ option there is a strong likelihood that the situation merits a more nuanced approach.
As in ‘yes, the government was terrible at handling COVID-19’ and ‘yes, the government – as our servant, should be mandated by us, the people, to coordinate the help we need in our hour of need’.

How can we reconcile these two?
Simple.
Hire a better government and keep a keen eye on it!

And, if I’m not mistaken, wasn’t democracy meant to do exactly this?

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Categories 1989 and the Global Financial Crisises., awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, effective communication, evolution, fail better, Frames of mind, freedom, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, manipulation, Mindset, Mutual Respect, Psychology, The kind of world we are building for our children, Transparency

So close. Yet so far apart…

March 28, 2020 //
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About half of our manufactured goods come from China. From half-way around the world. A shipping container needs about a month to arrive to Rotterdam from Shanghai. While ordering the merchandise takes some five minutes over the internet.

Shanghai is in China. A country so far away that hourly wages are a fraction of those in Europe. Or in the US. That being the reason for so many of our manufactured goods coming from there.

China is a country so far away that it took more than a month for the rest of the world to find out that a pandemic was brewing in Wuhan.
China is a country so far away that the CDC expert embedded in China’s Disease Control Agency was deemed useless by the current American Administration.

China is a country close enough for the Chinese tourists to had been a staple for the Italian hospitality industry. “5.3 million overnight stays in 2018“
China is a country far enough for an “official opening ceremony” to had been “held at the Auditorium Parco della Musica, a multicultural complex, in the Italian capital on Tuesday, at the presence of Italian Minister of Cultural Heritage, Activities and Tourism Dario Franceschini and Chinese Minister of Culture and Tourism Luo Shugang.”

The ceremony was held because “2020 has been designated the China-Italy year of culture and tourism, as the year marks the 50th anniversary of China-Italy diplomatic ties.”
“Tuesday” was the 21st of January 2020.

The same day

  • United States confirms its first case in Washington state, a man who traveled to the Wuhan area.
  • China confirms two additional deaths, a sixty-six-year-old man and a forty-eight-year-old woman
  • New cases are announced in China, including in Beijing, Shenzhen, and Shanghai.
  • Chinese state media raises number of confirmed cases to 291 and confirms 15 medical workers in Wuhan have been diagnosed with pneumonia.
  • Hong Kong confirms its first case, a person in their thirties.
  • Taiwan confirms its first case, a woman in her fifties.

The above timeline was ‘borrowed’ – through the Internet, of course, yet another example for how close we are of eachother, from https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/updated-timeline-coronavirus on 3/28/2020, 12:30 GMT
Which Internet pulls us together by pooling information/data while simultaneously rips us apart by feeding us a constant stream of fake news.

We are so close together that you can send/receive almost everything (from) almost everywhere.
We are so close together that everybody who has a smart phone can see their similarly equipped buddies halfway across the world.

We’re so far apart that we still have to make up our collective mind about which comes first. The Economy or the People.
We’re so far apart that we haven’t figured out yet that there’s no such thing as a running economy without enough able bodied and mentally sane people. To produce, transport, distribute and buy the things we need.
We’re so far apart that we haven’t yet figured out that the present number of people cannot survive – let alone maintain a decent living standard, without a running economy.

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Categories awareness, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, Economy, effective communication, evolution, Frames of mind, In English, limited rationality, man induced fragility, Money as goal, Mutual Respect, Politically induced fragility, Psychology, skin in the game, The kind of world we are building for our children

"Mullahs & COVID-19: Iran’s failing response reflects regime’s priorities"

March 22, 2020 //
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If you live on the Moon, or if enough time had passed since I’ve written this, click on the picture to read Jonathan Spyer’s excellent rendition of the facts which have driven me to post this.

Or you may proceed.

For me, there is a striking resemblance between what’s going on in Iran and what would happen in a hardcore libertarian society.

The mullahs are concerned only with spreading/enforcing their faith and consider everything else will take care of itself.

The extreme libertarians are concerned exclusively with upholding their understanding of liberty and consider that everything else would take care of itself. By itself.

And I’m convinced that everything will indeed take of itself!
After all, life has continued after communism had failed.
The communist leaders had been professedly concerned exclusively with enforcing their understanding of equality. And convinced that everything else would had taken care of itself. If only that equality could have been instated…

Yet I don’t think communism will be missed.
By those who had experienced it hard enough to understand it…

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Categories 1989 and the Global Financial Crisises., authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, effective communication, evolution, Frames of mind, freedom, In English, man induced fragility, Psychology, religion, The kind of world we are building for our children

Insider trading.

March 21, 2020 //
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Let me make something clear.
Crystal clear!

Money, and its ‘derivatives’ – from ‘capital’ to ‘financial market’ and ‘stock exchange’, are the tools we used to get where we are now.
Without them we would be still foraging in the woods.

Only something rather insidious has started to eat the whole scaffolding from inside.
Same process has been happening with weapons. We invented them for hunting. Then used them for self protection. Against large beasts and fellow humans.
Finally, after using them to conquer and defend our liberty, we used them to subjugate others. To impose our will upon some other people.

In other words, we used guns to shoot ourselves in the foot.
Unwittingly.
Both as hapless individuals and as a cultural species.

Money – and its derivatives, have suffered the same degradation.
We used it, at first, to coordinate our efforts.
The Stock Exchange had been an excellent way to coordinate otherwise disparate means. Very few of the corporations who have changed the world into what it is now – for good and for bad, wouldn’t have come to life without the money which fuel them.
Nowadays, too many of those who trade on the Stock Market do it in a ‘barren’ manner.

They do not contribute anything but extract value.
The inside traders being only the visible part of the iceberg.
Which iceberg might tank the whole contemporary ‘arrangement’.

If we keep sleeping during our watch.
And there’s no one else on deck…

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Categories 1989 and the Global Financial Crisises., awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, corruption, effective communication, fail better, In English, man induced fragility, Money as goal, Politically induced fragility, teleology, The kind of world we are building for our children
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