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Perspectives

December 12, 2022 //
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Whom would you rather have as President?

President Biden walks into a bank to cash a cheque.

As he approaches the teller he says “Good morning, ma’am. Could you please cash this cheque for me?”

Teller: “It would be my pleasure, sir. Could you please show me your ID?”

Biden: “Truthfully, I did not bring my ID with me as I didn’t think there was any need to. I am Joe Biden, the 46th President of the United States of America!”

Teller: “Yessir, I know who you are, but with all the regulations and monitoring of the banks because of impostors and forgers, etc I must insist on seeing ID”.

Biden: “Just ask anyone here at the bank who I am and they will tell you. Everybody knows who I am”.

Teller: “I am sorry Mr. President but these are the bank rules and I must follow them”.

Biden: “I am urging you please to cash this cheque”.

Teller: “Look Mr. President this is what we can do. One day Tiger Woods came into the bank without ID. To prove he was Tiger Woods he pulled out his putting iron and made a beautiful shot across the bank into a cup. With that shot we knew him to be Tiger Woods and cashed his cheque. Another time, Novak Djokovic came in without ID. He pulled out his tennis racquet and made a fabulous shot and the tennis ball landed in my cup. With that shot we cashed his cheque. So, Mr. President, what can you do to prove that it is you, and only you, as the President of the United States?”

Biden stood there thinking, and thinking and finally says: “Honestly, my mind is a total blank. I can’t think of a single thing”.

Teller: “Will that be large bills or small bills, Mr. President?”

A guy who openly admits he has no solution for a particular problem? And doesn’t pull rank…

Or someone who is convinced ‘his people are so smart’ that he can do anything and ‘not lose any vote‘?

Here’s the consequence:

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology, yes but

Rules

November 13, 2022 //
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People are promised:

Do ‘this’ and you’ll be happy.
Follow these rules and you’ll reach ‘nirvana’.

Some of us heed to this advice.
Only to discover that the only happiness they reach following this path is that produced by a dutifully fulfilled task.
That of following rules…

The catch being that following rules – the right ones, is required but never enough.
Following rules – the right ones, again – is helpful towards survival. Nothing more.

Drive safely and you’re more likely to get there.

Where?

That’s up to you.
There’s no rule about that!

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Categories awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, evolution, In English, Intent, man as a measure for all things, Mindset, Psychology, skin in the game, yes but

Future

July 23, 2022 //
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“A priest and rabbi see a child walking down the street.
Priest : Let’s fuck that child.
Rabbi : Out of what??”

Alternativelly

“A priest and a communist pass by a boy.
Priest: lets fuck that boy.
Communist: and blame it on capitalists.”

When I was growing up, fucking was about bringing new life on the face of the Earth.
Or about all those involved reaching orgasm.

Nowadays we find it funny to joke about children being raped.

Then we wonder…

“Who fucked up future?!?”

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, Bounded rationality, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology, The kind of world we live in, yes but

The ‘social’ construct of ‘reality’.

February 7, 2022 //
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The title is misleading enough to become an abomination!

What Leschziner said during the interview was:

“what we term reality is entirely a construct of our nervous system.”

Guy Leschziner is right.

And the guy who wrote the title is an a$$hole!

In the sense that for that person, ratings – a.k.a. ‘money’ – are far more important than presenting an as accurate as possible version of reality…

Hence the public belief that ‘media are not to be trusted’.

A reality created by the greed with which we, as a cultured species, attempt to transform everything into money…., power…, or any other kind of ‘influence’/relevance we happen to covet….

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/feb/06/guy-leschziner-reality-is-entirely-a-construct-of-our-nervous-system

https://nicichiarasa.com/2021/02/10/reality-101

http://perflensburg.se/Berger%20social-construction-of-reality.pdf

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, Intent, man as a measure for all things, man induced fragility, Money as goal, Psychology, Trust, yes but

“My body, my choice”

January 15, 2022 //
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The way I see it, it makes more sense to tax those who don’t want to get a jab than to bribe people to accept the vaccine.
The vaccinated individual enjoys the benefits, the jab is already paid for by the community… and the community, as a whole, is safer.
You don’t want to be jabbed, for whatever reasons, you should pay for the privilege.

After all, this is a matter of personal choice.

There are three kinds of personal choice which impact the wider community. Regardless of who covers the financial costs of healthcare, people being sick is a burden shouldered by the entire society.

Eating too much.
It can have a whole series of consequences but most of them are of a ‘personal’ nature. You can be a bad example for your kid but that’s about all you can do to negatively impact the health of others through eating too much. Except for the financial implications, of course.

Smoking.
Still a personal choice. But the consequences of your bad habit directly affect those who happen to be around you when you exercise your ‘right’. Smoke travels freely…

“My body, my choice.”
Refusing to ‘put experimental substances into my body’ is, again, a personal choice.
But getting sick with Covid has far wider consequences for the wide community than smoking. Let alone the fact that smoke is visible while the virus is not.
Smoking in a plane won’t give a lung cancer to each of the passengers present but a person infected with Covid breathing inside such a cramped place can directly infect many. And god only knows how many more after the passengers reach their final destinations …

Since the above mentioned decision of the Supreme Court – that government should not tell ‘the people’ what to do with their bodies (unless federal money is involved) – things are getting murkier.
Smoking seats might return on planes. Smoking tables in pubs.
And who knows what else…

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, biology, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, man induced fragility, Mindset, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, yes but

Logic is not nearly enough.

September 5, 2020 //
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“For a proposition to be true, it is not enough for it to be logically correct. It also needs to make epistemological sense.” Oscar Hoffman

Ricky Gervais is right, right?
There’s no logical connection between being offended and being right…
There’s no doubt about this!

Only Gervais is wrong.
Wrong in saying it, not in what he said.

Yes, there are people who declare themselves to be offended in an attempt to get something. Sympathy, some slack… or even the others to accept their version of things. That ‘they’ are ‘right’.

But this is not always the case!
Some (other) people are so offended by the manner in which things are unfolding that they actually need to express their feelings.
To send the warning ‘don’t continue in this manner or you’ll loose my attention/will to cooperate’.

In this sense, Gervais is actually wrong.
His saying had been used by numerous meme builders to create a bubble inside which callousness is actively encouraged.
‘Go on disregarding other people’s sentiments. They’re nothing but pussies.
It’s just words, not sticks nor stones.’

Here’s a more detailed analysis:

So fucking what?!?
Somebody just told you they are not going to stop paying any real attention to what you are trying to say to them and you don’t care?
Why did you start communicating in the first place? Or ‘performing’ the ‘offensive’ thing in public?
Was the ‘offense’ premeditated? For a reason or just for fun? Then it’s not ‘so fucking what’ anymore…
Or you just hadn’t thought about it beforehand? And you’re looking for an easy way out?

No, you don’t have to pretend to like people when you don’t.
But, in the longer time frame, it pays to honestly respect those you get in contact with. All of them.

Your life will get a lot better!

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Categories altruism, arrogance, awareness, Choices we make, collective identity, complementary ways of attending knowlege, cooperation, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology, yes but

Si vis pacem, Parabellum.

May 29, 2020 //
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-Si vis pacem, para bellum- resounds in the heart of any warrior. “If you want peace, prepare for war” that is how it was hundreds of years ago, and that is how it will remain forever. As the new SECUTOR, you mark your own destiny grabbing the Bellum, ready for combat, ready for warfare.

War has been the subject of many books. From war novels to ‘how to’ treaties.
When the subject is mentioned, two stand up high. Sun Zu’s “The Art of War” and Clausewitz’s “On War“.

I’m not going to discuss the relative merits of the two treaties. Only to point out a few parallels.
The authors had been involved in wars. Wars between states inhabited by more or less the same people. Sharing more or less the same culture. Wars which had ended when the warring parties had coalesced into what we call nations. China and Germany, respectively.

Yet we currently refer to those two treaties when we consider war between totally different nations/cultures.

Furthermore, we consider those two as being the pinnacles of strategic thinking. In a sense, that would be right. After all, both had been written by the winners of those respective wars.

But what happened next?

What major war had China won after becoming an united nation? WWII? When her enemy had been first beaten to a pulp, literally, by the US?
What major war had Germany won after becoming an united nation? The one against France in 1870? OK. And afterwards?

And what is the real meaning of ‘Si vis pacem, parabellum’?

‘If you want peace, prepare to wage war’ or ‘if you want peace, make your self resilient to war‘?

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Categories altruism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, effective communication, evolution, Frames of mind, freedom, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust, yes but

‘Fact check’

April 21, 2020 //
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There are facts which need to be checked.
And facts which are ‘somewhat’ obvious.

USAToday felt the need to fact check whether Bill Gates sponsoring a ‘pandemic simulation’ didn’t predict COVID-19…

What next?
Fact checking whether a fire crew exercising fire fighting didn’t predict the next … fire?!?

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Categories awareness, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, fail better, Frames of mind, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, man induced fragility, Mindset, Psychology, skin in the game, The kind of world we are building for our children, yes but

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

Loyalty

February 9, 2020 //
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– What have we done, Gabriel?
– Nothing but what we’ve been told to!
– But look at what they’ve done of our work:

We gave them ‘hand’ and they’ve clenched it into a fist.
We taught them how to make tools and they used them as weapons.
We told them to ‘fill the earth and subdue it’ and they started to fight among themselves for the best pieces of land.
We warned them ‘it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God’ and they’ve somehow convinced themselves that ‘greed is good’.

– True enough but this is out of our hands. They’ve been endowed with ‘freedom of will’ by their Maker.
– Then what are we? Mere robots?
– Nothing but loyal servants of our Master. He orders and we accomplish. Unerringly.
– Exactly as I’ve just told you. Mere robots. When we somehow convince ourselves that a particular idea which has blossomed into our heads comes from Him, we no longer think. We just put it into practice.
You call this ‘loyalty’. That’s fine with me.
But to whom are we to extend said loyalty? To somebody who’s authority stems solely from our acceptance of it? Or to what we perceive as being the ‘greater good’?
– You and your questions, Lucifer… Look at what happened to those poor people after you helped them into self-awareness… They’ve completely lost their erstwhile peace of mind.
What are you trying to do? To make me give up mine?

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Categories awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices that we make, collective identity, cooperation, effective communication, evolution, fail better, Frames of mind, freedom, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, religion, The kind of world we are building for our children, Transparency, Trust, yes but
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