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But to what goal?

May 17, 2018 //
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I’ve ended my previous post by saying that we, humans, are tempted to see almost everything as a potential tool.

And the present one by asking myself ‘to what avail?’.

What are we trying to accomplish?

I kept telling you that we, humans, haven’t invented much. That everything we do has already been experimented by our predecessors. Plants and animals…

Well, one of the things that we did invent was ‘intent’. As in ‘premeditation’.

We don’t know whether plants are driven by anything else except their ‘vital spirit’.
Same thing is valid for ‘inferior animals’ (those which don’t have brains) while the superior (a.k.a. brained) ones seem to be driven by what we call emotion.

Including us!

No matter how much we pride ourselves about our ability to reason, we’re still driven by emotion.
Actually, we’re not even close to being rational!
At best, we rationalize our emotional impulses. Before or even after we put them into practice.
Dan Ariely and Daniel Kahneman, among others, have already settled this point.

Then why am I talking about ‘premeditation’?!?

And who said ‘premeditation’ is necessarily rational?

It is planned, OK, but …

You see, the real difference between us and the rest of most other animals is our ability to ‘watch ourselves watching the world‘. As if something inside each of ourselves is able to send a probe somewhere ‘outside’ and then examine its own individuality as an outside observer. I didn’t say an impartial observer, just an outsider. However biased.

I won’t elaborate on how we got here, Maturana had already done that. Brilliantly. I’m far more interested in the consequences of each of us being able to observe their own selves ‘from outside’, keeping in mind that our rationality is heavily bounded – Simon Herbert and others, and that we’re mainly driven by emotions.

The very first thing that each of us observes about their-selves is the overwhelming fragility which defines us.

And this is why we search solace in religion. In no matter which one of them, atheism included. There is ‘safety in numbers’, you know…

Our goal, professed or not, is to find inner peace.
No matter whether you call it salvation, redemption, nirvana, self acceptance or whatever else, what you crave is peace.

The sentiment (illusion?) that you are safe.

At least for a moment.

How long is that moment going to last?

Well, that depends on how you got there!
And who accompanies you…

 

 

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Categories Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, Frames of mind, freedom, Mutual Respect, Psychology, Trust

This is too thick for me…

May 9, 2018 //
1

Let’s take it one step at a time.

A guy hires a woman. A ‘working girl’, to be precise.

After a while, an attorney pays a hefty sum to the working girl and has her sign a confidentiality contract.

When asked about the whole thing, the guy first said that he didn’t know much about anything and then that he had reimbursed the hush money to the attorney.

The attorney apparently gets a lot of money from somebody else. Which somebody else might be, now or become in in the future, in a conflict of interests with the organization presently run by the guy who had once hired a working girl.

It becomes apparent that the attorney is a confidante of this guy. Or, in plain English, that this attorney takes care of the dirty laundry that ‘happens’ around this guy.

It also becomes apparent that this attorney is not satisfied with the amount of money he gets from this guy. That this guy is not his only client. And that this attorney is not very particular when accepting other clients.

What am I to understand from all this?

This guy is cheap?
This attorney is very greedy?
This guy is not very particular when choosing who takes care of his dirty laundry?

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Categories Bounded rationality, Choices we make, corruption, effective communication, Frames of mind, Money as goal, Mutual Respect, Psychology, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust

We are a very complicated species…

May 2, 2018 //
0

thor

“Before being rescued, Thor had dragged himself around the streets of Mexico for months. A young woman named Eva pulled over to the side of the road seeing that the dog was barley alive. She took a picture and sent out a desperate cry for help. The REAL Bark (located in Los Angeles) saw it posted and immediately committed to this handsome pitt-bulldog mix. He was broken, paralyzed, and wounded, and a lot of doctors advised the rescue to put him down. Even if he lived, which was unlikely, he would need to be in a special-needs chair for the rest of his life. Jf Pryor, the founder of The REAL Bark, claimed that Thor’s eyes begged, “Let me live. Let me show you”- so instead of ending his life, The REAL Bark team began it.

Thor needed a miracle to survive. He needed to be stabilized, and then an impossible rehabilitation awaited.

His therapy, or “thorapy” as The REAL Bark team calls it, consisted of acupuncture, hydrotherapy, laser therapy, muscle building, and stretching. The most difficult part of recovery was helping end the enduring pain Thor was experiencing. Thor’s main doctor and biggest advocate was Dr. Jessica Waldman, the owner of California Animal Rehabilitation (CARE). When Thor attended CARE, the rescue team knew he needed a new set of wheels, a cart for him to pull his lifeless body along. Dr. Jessica Waldman surprised the team however with her response, “You can borrow a cart, but there is no need to purchase.” Thor’s doctor continued, “We will get him walking,” she said. “He wants to walk”. This hope kept the team going.”

eaten alive by scabies

“The scabies that infected Zeni’s body had become so severe that bacteria seeped into her bloodstream. She died in 2015 at age 93.

Zeni’s death is now the subject of a lawsuit filed against PruittHealth, a for-profit company that owns dozens of nursing homes, including Shepherd Hills in LaFayette, Ga., where Zeni lived for five years until she died. Shepherd Hills, a nursing home that had multiple scabies outbreaks in recent years and a history of health violations, failed to follow policies and procedures to prevent the occurrence and spread of the highly contagious disease, documents say. Instead of providing the care that Zeni desperately needed, the lawsuit alleges that the nursing home allowed her to die an agonizing death.

“The last six months of her life, she was in constant pain,” Prieto said. “She was literally being eaten alive from inside out.””

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Categories altruism, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, effective communication, evolution, Frames of mind, human rights, Mutual Respect, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust

‘Advertising’

April 13, 2018 //
1

Any way you look at it, a human individual is a decision making machine.

When living in the bush, the decision making process was rather straightforward.
Information was available on a ‘what you see is what you get’ basis and bad decisions had the rather nasty habit of becoming obvious after a very short time.

Now, when living in a social context, things are a little more complicated.
Other people want from us.
Other people actually depend on convincing us to do various things and not to do other things.

‘Convincing us’ means influencing our decision making processes.
Which can be done using one, two or a combination of the following methods.

By ‘managing’ the information we have at our disposal when making a certain decision.
By altering the way in which we feel about the outcome of that decision being put in practice.

The A&B of the matter, for those familiar with the domain…

But there are two other things which are rarely discussed about these matters.

How ethical is it to manipulate other people?
Specially when the manipulated are not fully aware of what’s going on, which puts the manipulator in almost full control of the whole process.

What are the longer term consequences of the whole thing?
Is there any difference between manipulating people to ‘consume’ things which are more or less detrimental to their health and manipulating people into making far reaching political decisions?

As in ‘is there any difference between convincing people that smoking isn’t that bad for them (or at least pleasurable enough to balance the risk) and convincing them to vote for/against … (feel free to pick your own candidate/issue)?

“The researcher whose work is at the center of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data analysis and political advertising uproar has revealed that his method worked much like the one Netflix uses to recommend movies.”

Matthew Hindman,
https://theconversation.com/how-cambridge-analyticas-facebook-targeting-model-really-worked-according-to-the-person-who-built-it-94078

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Categories Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, effective communication, fail better, Frames of mind, man induced fragility, Mutual Respect, Social justice, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust

Paradise Lost?

April 10, 2018 //
0

The American Revolution was fought under the banner of ‘Taxation without representation is tyranny”.
Meaning that the first Americans saw taxes as money well spent, as long as paying said taxes allowed them to vote. As in ‘being able to determine their own future’. Albeit in a collective manner.

In fewer words, the early Americans viewed liberty as being valuable enough to die for, let alone to spend some money in order to maintain it.

10% anual pay rise

time.com

And what made so many modern Americans willing to sell their hard won ability to vote? To determine their future?

Are they so poor that, for them, liberty has become an empty word?
Have they lost all confidence in the democratic process?
Are they so infatuated with money?

Any mix of all of the above?

 

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Categories Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, democracy, freedom, human rights, man induced fragility, Mindset, Mutual Respect, psihologie, Social justice, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust

To hell or not to hell…

April 1, 2018 //
0

“Vatican scrambles after pope appears to deny existence of hell.”

Francis washing feet of inmates

“The controversy came as Pope Francis washed the feet of 12 prisoners at Rome’s Regina Coeli prison on Holy Thursday. Among the inmates were two Muslims, an Orthodox Christian and a Buddhist. He told them: “Everyone has the opportunity to change life and one cannot judge.”
It was the fourth time since becoming pope that he held mass in an Italian prison. “I am a sinner like you but today I represent Jesus … God never abandons us, never tires of forgiving us,” he added.”

“The Holy See issued a terse statement saying a lengthy article published in La Repubblica on Wednesday by Eugenio Scalfari, 93, the newspaper’s founder, was “the fruit of his reconstruction” and not “a faithful transcription of the Holy Father’s words”.

While the Vatican conceded that Scalfari, an atheist who struck up a friendship with Francis in 2013, had held a private meeting with the pontiff before the Easter weekend, it said an interview had not been granted.

During the meeting Scalfari asked the pope where “bad souls” go, to which he was quoted as responding: “They are not punished. Those who repent obtain God’s forgiveness and take their place among the ranks of those who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and cannot be forgiven disappear. A hell doesn’t exist, the disappearance of sinning souls exists.””

OK, and where’s the problem?

“… in 1999 Pope John Paul II announced that hell was “the ultimate consequence of sin itself … rather than a place, hell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy”.”

Since ‘nihil sine Deo’, where’s the difference between ‘disappearing’ and ‘becoming definitively separated from God’?!?

“The Catholic church’s teachings affirm the existence of hell and its eternity, saying “the chief punishment of hell is eternal separation of God”.”

If I’m not mistaken – and I’m not, many people belonging to the same Catholic church once behaved as if sinners were able to buy ‘respite tickets from hell’, for themselves or for their friends and family…
“The Council of Trent instituted severe reforms in the practice of granting indulgences, and, because of prior abuses, “in 1567 Pope Pius V canceled all grants of indulgences involving any fees or other financial transactions” (Catholic Encyclopedia). This act proved the Church’s seriousness about removing abuses from indulgences.”

Humans are biased. We tend to interpret what we are told and to bend everything we learn towards what we want to believe.

How about going back to basics.

God loves us.
Simply because He had made us in His own image.
And, just like any other reasonable parent, He knows that His children are far from being perfect. Hence He must have had perfected a method to correct our transgressions.

On the other hand, eternal damnation doesn’t make much sense, does it?

What loving Father could envision any number of his children suffering till the end of time, whenever that might come?

What about a simpler alternative than trying to out-guess God?

“For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.“

1 Corinthians 2:11

Pope Francis’s words make a lot of sense. To me!
There’s also very little difference between his interpretation of hell and that expressed by Pope John Paul II.
How can anything continue to exist when separated from the all encompassing God?
What loving Father would give up, for good, any number of his children? Regardless of their transgressions…

Who has done this and carried it through, calling forth the generations from the beginning?

I, the Lord—with the first of them and with the last—I am he.”

Isaiah 41:4

You see, adding the fact that we’re all sinners to the possibility of an eternal hell would lead us to the conclusion that we’re all doomed. For the eternity.
If God would allow it, of course.

Doesn’t make much sense, does it?
Then how about us striving to minimize our sins here, while we still have this opportunity, and leave the rest to somebody who knows better?

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Categories altruism, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, Frames of mind, freedom, religion, Trust

Mind boggling

March 29, 2018 //
0

Apparently, modern civilization ‘is all about the money’.

Fundamentally, it’s still about trust.

Drivers trust their follow drivers that each will stay on their side of the road, stop at the red light and yield at the famous yellow triangle.

yield

 

Each of us trusts that the elevators we use daily won’t fall under their own weight, that our daily bread contains exclusively what’s mentioned on the label and that tap water has been adequately filtered before being pumped into our homes through proper pipes.

We trust, and follow their advice, ‘higher authorities’. Science people, teachers, government ‘agents’…

Modern ‘consumers’ order a lot of stuff online, food included. From people they’ve never met, trusting they’ll get what they’ve read about in an add they never asked for.

We keep a lot of data online. Mails, tweets, pictures, more or less intimate thoughts shared on our FB walls. That’s the ‘free’ part. We also pay increasingly handsome amounts of money to ‘upload’ for safekeeping ‘in the cloud’ a lot of sensitive commercial and personal data.

Where ‘apparently’ meets ‘fundamentally’, in our individual/personal lives, we are flabbergasted when cars become weapons and are used to kill innocent bystanders. Our friends and relatives.

When manufacturers implement planned obsolescence, artificially increase nicotine contents in cigarettes and replace sugar with corn syrup in ‘soft drinks’.
When piped water is dirty and the authorities shrug their shoulders.
When we discover that animal fat is not as bad for us as we’ve been told for the last 50 years or so. When we realize that our children are saddled with huge debts simply because they wanted a good education. When we realize that some of the people involved with ‘government’ become part of the problem instead of part of the solution.

When our personal data becomes a merchandise.
Traded to be transformed into a manipulative tool.
Used to influence us into buying certain things.
Used to influence us into making certain political decisions.

Trust will, probably, survive for a while.
But I fear the day when too many people will have lost it.

Price tag

 

 

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Categories Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, effective communication, fail better, Frames of mind, freedom, man induced fragility, manipulation, Money as goal, Mutual Respect, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust

Political correctness as a form of populism.

March 22, 2018 //
0

Some of my right-of-center friends maintain that political correctness is a leftist aberration while some of my left-of-center friends are convinced that most conservatives are bigoted male chauvinists cum white supremacists cum LGBTQ+ haters.

I’m afraid both are mistaken.

The way I see it, none of this has anything to do with left nor right and everything to those on each side of the divide driving themselves into self allocated and mutually exclusive corners.

Otherwise said, this dichotomy is a consequence of populism.
People residing in each ideological corner are constantly barraged with messages telling them exactly what they have prepared themselves to hear.
People residing in each corner are constantly barraged with messages deemed appropriate by those who reckon there is something to be gained, by ‘them’, from keeping those people as far apart as possible.

Maybe now, that Cambridge Analytica has just hit the fan, we’ll start to understand how fake this whole thing is.

And I can’t wrap this up without mentioning something which really bothers me.

“As I said in my How to Fail book, if you are not familiar with the dozens of methods of persuasion that are science-tested, there’s a good chance someone is using those techniques against you.“

Scott Adams, blog.dilbert.com

The ‘run of the mill’ populism is directed towards the ordinary people. Which have a valid excuse for not knowing what’s happening to them.
Political correctness is a self sustaining bubble which was generated and is maintained  inside a supposedly more sophisticated medium.

Intellectually more sophisticated medium….

political correctness zizek

Hopefully, Zizek’s arguments will help us puncture this bubble!
Click on the picture above and see for yourself.

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Categories Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, corruption, Frames of mind, limited rationality, man induced fragility, manipulation, Mutual Respect, politically correct, Psychology, The kind of world we are building for our children, Transparency, Trust

From cradle to grave.

March 21, 2018 //
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Recent developments connected with some people having used Facebook to manipulate the public opinion have led me to understand something absolutely trivial.

Almost everything can be used as a resource.
And it’s us, all of us, who are ultimately responsible for how these resources are being used.

For no other reason than it is us who will eventually bear the consequences.

Having said this, I’m now wondering about the wisdom of our ancestors…
And the nearsightedness of some of our contemporaries!
the golden rule

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Categories Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, Frames of mind, limited rationality, manipulation, moral hazard, Mutual Respect, Psychology, Social justice, The kind of world we are building for our children, Transparency, Trust

Don’t shoot the ‘Zuckerberg’.

March 21, 2018 //
2

So.
A bunch of ‘well intended people’ had somehow laid their hands on a ‘trove of personal data’ and used it, commercially, to influence electoral processes.
The data was gathered by ‘creatively’ exploiting the ‘opportunities’ put in place by the very existence of Facebook and by the manner in which so many people chose to use the said ‘social network’.

And most of us blame it on ‘Zuckerberg’.

OK, I can understand the psychology of all this.
I can also understand those who put the entire blame on anybody but ‘Zuckerberg’…

Let’s gather some facts.

“Facebook has lost nearly $50 billion in market cap since the data scandal”. recode.net, Mar 20, 2018
“In one day, Zuckerberg’s net worth fell $5 billion”. qz.com,  Second day it had fallen a further 4 billion…
Anyway, some 31 ‘missing’ billions used to belong to some other people but Zuckerberg.
Weren’t they supposed to take good care of their property? Weren’t they supposed to check what Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, was doing with their money?

 

“In Hidden-Camera Exposé, Cambridge Analytica Executives Boast Of Role In Trump Win” npr.org, March 21, 2018
“CA’s CEO wrote that the firm had “teamed up with Leave.EU” — then furiously backpedalled”
Impossible to say how much influence Cambridge Analytica’s efforts had over Trump becoming the 46-th American President or Brexit. If any at all.
Yet who bears more responsibility for these developments?
The guys who came up with those ideas in the first place? Trump and Cameron?
The guys who made them possible? The Republican Party Convention who had nominated Trump to run and the British House of Commons who had voted 544-53 in favor of the “United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, 2016”?
The guys who had campaigned above the board, in any direction?
Those who had exerted their influence ‘under the radar’? ” “We have already helped supercharge Leave.EU’sial media campaign by ensuring the right messages are getting to the right voters online, and the campaign’s Facebook page is growing in support to the tune of about 3,000 people per day.”

Or those who, through their daily decisions, had created the premises for so many people to convince themselves that Trump was good enough for President and that it would better for Britain to ‘leave’?

Yeah, it’s only normal to blame others for our own mistakes.
But how sustainable is it?

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Categories Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, effective communication, Frames of mind, freedom, limited rationality, manipulation, Mutual Respect, politics, Psychology, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust
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