Of course, this fires up the imagination – effectively, it’s a first contact scenario, which can include all manner of mistakes that could have repercussions. It’s not hard to think of them saying funny things. Imagine chatting with an old, grizzled whale who effectively says, “Get off my lawn!” or a young whale that is going through puberty and is only chatting to impress a female whale somewhere around the planet.
There’s so much that we might get wrong.
Imagine a group of Marine Biologists of the most serious sort chatting with a pod of whales for the first time.
Marine Biologists: *summoning call*
Pod of whales shows up and starts making noise.
Marine Biologists chattering to each other, “What are they saying? They’re talking a lot!” The resident AI expert – Bob, of course – says, “Give it time, give it time, the AI is catching up. There’s a few of them making whale sounds!”
Finally, the AI spits out some text: “What do you want?”
The Marine Biologists start chattering among each other and trying to decide what to send back.
The whales leave since nothing else is happening, making sounds that carry across the oceans around the world…
The Marine Biologists gape at one another as they stare at Bob, who in turn is staring at the screen waiting for the translation:
“There’s someone pretending to be one of us but they don’t know what they want. Ignore them. Fake news!”
One of the Marine Biologists sighs and says, “Well, we screwed that up…”
I was taught at a young age that the world made sense but when I grew up I found that it made as much sense as we had made sense of it.
I suppose as a child being made comfortable with the idea that the world made perfect sense made me easier to deal with.
Some people never seem to get past the need for the world to make sense. The very idea that we don’t understand the world is too much for most of us. I wake up every day wondering about something I don’t yet have the answer to – at least one thing. Every morning when I wake up there’s an implicit acknowledgement that the world doesn’t make sense and it’s fun learning new things.
Some people don’t see the world that way. Some people fear new things. Some people prefer the comfort of belief that they do understand everything. These people trouble me. In fact, they trouble other people who believe different things. No, I’m not talking about religion. I’m talking about politics, which effectively is another religion. If I point out weaknesses in a candidate, these people default to thinking I must be on the ‘other side’. That’s almost never true.
People pick their own narratives, and there is nothing wrong with that. The only side anyone should pick in a democracy, in my humble opinion, is their own. You’re supposed to vote your interests in a democracy.
In this past election, some people voted for the building that they sought comfort in. Some voted for the wrecking ball because that building bothered them for some reason, though there are no plans to build anything in it’s place. This election is a reset on a lot of things in that regard, and the next one could be better, or it could be worse, and everyone will have an opinion on that and some will be told their opinion by people with impossible hair on their favorite news channel.
All you need to be a pundit is to get people to believe that they are less intelligent than you are, and it’s alarming how easy it is. Cherry picking facts, painting with a broad brush, and hair that defies the body it’s on.
Part of getting past that is understanding our own biases. Someone in an urban setting sees the world one way, someone in a suburban setting sees it another way, and someone in a rural setting sees it in yet another way. Each one grows up in a different culture and while we like to think they have the same values, there are small differences because of the different cultures.
If you can step outside of your biases long enough, the world is not the same. Yet political pundits like you right there where you are. The systems, many of which seem broken, are designed to keep you where you are – that’s the role of bureaucracy, to stall change. And the people who profit from it all? There you are.
Does it make them bad people? Nope. Being ‘bad people’, too, has a lot to do with culture. Famously, the Greeks called anyone who wasn’t Greek a barbarian, and here we are still waiting for the barbarians.
…Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
Constantine P. Cavafy
For lack of actual barbarians, maybe the political pundits should be who we call barbarians.
There’s little that hasn’t been written or said about the U.S. Presidential Election. When asked about it, I have been saying that there were two bad candidates and one of them had to win.
This pisses off people who are emotionally attached to one of the two. I’m ok with that. One represented individual oligarchy, one represented corporate oligarchy, and if you can’t tell which is which then maybe you’re part of the problem.
The people whose candidate won have been pretty happy. The people whose candidate lost have been trying to figure out why. It’s gotten so bad that LinkedIn has become a toxic waste dump of curated perspectives on… well, that, the Democratic party, and all the other stuff that probably shouldn’t be posted by people who want to hire someone or be hired by someone. It’s become further polarized because of it.
And that’s what helped get the result. People are viewing ‘those people’, whoever they are, as all sorts of negative things without understanding things.
Jon Stewart and Sarah Smarsh had a conversation about it… and the content probably should have been spoken about decades ago. It’s almost an hour long, but some people really need to watch this.
Identity, class… things that I hear progressive democrats talk about a lot and yet they somehow miss the boat consistently on that.
America is a big and diverse place, and it’s bigger and more diverse than most perspectives I’ve seen expressed. I have friends across the spectrum. I don’t have to agree with them, but I do have to understand their perspectives.
When looking at politics, people look at the narratives provided and if it fits their personal experience and identity better than the other narrative, they choose that one. Rationality might be discussion before voting, but voting is emotional for a lot of people.
It’s about people. Stereotyping them in a negative way ain’t gonna make things better. Understand the people who a democracy is supposed to represent, don’t depend on data analytics.
Go outside and listen. Respect people enough not to treat them like spreadsheet.
So… it’s been quiet around here lately, though my mind has not been. One of the things I was waiting for was jumping to a new host. Goodbye, Automattic! Goodbye WordPress.com! The tiers of managed hosting were not priced to my liking, the AI scraping thing that I really didn’t like the default setting of, etc.
Freedom comes at a cost, so I’ll have to be more about managing the site than I used to be – but it ain’t really that hard for me. Wrestling Drupal 11 would be much more of a headache at this point, but I almost did switch…
Web hosting is a thing. I have a technical mind, as you will see if you visit KnowProSE.com, but I have more than a technical mind, as you see here on RealityFragments.com. We are more than just one mind.
That’s a bit of a hint about one of the projects I’m working on which is a hint about one of the projects I’m working on – mainly writing.
Other than that, quite a lot has happened since last I wrote here. Despite everything, the world has managed to continue rotating.
Yesterday was Independence Day in Trinidad and Tobago, complete with parades and traffic schedules that go along with it. There wasn’t the usual amount of national colors, but when I got my eyes tested near the parade route, there were plenty of young men dressed as trees with automatic weapons stationed on corners. I even saw a truck filled with them, as if the Ministry of Agriculture had some greenification project going on.
I don’t know that celebrating independence is anything but a polite lie in any nation. The world is made up of co-dependent nations. I don’t think any nation is truly independent in the strictest sense of the word. I’m not even sure that it would pass a lazy inspection.
Where I live, the service elevator is down causing people to run into each other more. This is generally a good thing. A middle-aged woman asked me why the elevator was down, and I explained about a nearby lightning strike that seemed to have overloaded the circuit board in charge of the frequency of electricity that drives the motor. It’s something most people wouldn’t even know about. It allows the motor to slow without jolting, and since most people have never even imagined that jolting, it’s an ‘invisible’ feature’. Like living in a colony.
The man accompanying her said something in what sounded like a British accent, something about it taking a while to fix, and I said that the provider doesn’t keep those parts on hand. There’s just not enough of a market to bear that expense. I ended with, “Welcome to the Colonies” and a smile.
Indeed. Welcome to the colonies.
Today, I felt like having a Peanut Buster Parfait, so I drove down to the nearest Dairy Queen. They of course did not have the chili hot dog I was also thinking of. A Canadian guy was there – no, I imagine you’re picturing a white Canadian, but it wasn’t. He was getting exasperated himself, complaining McDonalds didn’t have this or that, that Dairy Queen didn’t have this or that, and telling me he would be taking the kids to Pizza Hut later. I told him I wished him luck.
He didn’t drop it, so I simply said, “Welcome to the Colonies.”
He didn’t get it. This is the experience of colonies. Sure, Trinidad and Tobago gained independence from the British Empire in the last century, but it seems it was a part of a larger cost reduction strategy of the British Empire. It’s a small market, run for decades by governments by governments whose level of corruption is a constant topic of discussion. There’s been no diversification of the economy, there’s been no worthwhile attempts to create new revenue streams.
The present government seems to be balancing between Chinese soft power, finding ways to work with Venezuela without irritating the U.S. over the sanctions, and gaming numbers to keep forms of assistance coming in. It’s an election year coming too, so that will be more interesting.
I was mildly surprised that the Dairy Queen didn’t have a cover for the Peanut Buster Parfait. Welcome to the Colonies.
Independence, as anywhere else, is an illusion.
As with any colony, wherever you live, it’s not too hard to find the colonial masters.
Some people I trusted lied to me recently, knowing full well that I would find out within a matter of days. I, of course, found out earlier because of the relationships I have built over time, and so it came back to me almost immediately that I had been lied to.
Clearly, I’m not going to trust those two people as much again, but I suspected them not telling me the truth because of their behavior. The confirmation only proves what I suspected: They are poor liars.
It wasn’t about something important enough to make a difference, but two things bothered me about it: First, they knew I would end up finding out and were dishonest anyway, and second, that they would risk a relationship built over years to be dishonest to me.
Clearly I had valued the relationship more than they did, which is often the issue when it comes to forms of betrayal. If you value a relationship highly and the other values the relationship less than you expect, ‘betrayal’ is often what we feel. This is an important thing to know since I may have positional authority over them soon, particularly since as I have come to understand that they may have been instructed to lie by someone who will be an equal in the near future, which also tells me that the equal doesn’t see themselves as equal. They see themselves as above, and that does not bode well for any sort of relationship. Or maybe it’s just insecurity.
I tend to live my life openly and transparently. I value authenticity of people and provide the same. If I can’t say something because it might betray a trust, I say that or avoid being put in a position where I would have to say that. The people I try to surround myself with respect those sorts of boundaries, because if I invoke it for someone else, I will invoke it for them. Because of this, I have a small circle of people I call friends where the level of trust is high, and this could be because of my own attachment disorder as well; I understand I have one and have pushed back against it for some time. It’s hard to tell where it begins or ends. How one feels about a person isn’t always about the person.
This is pretty important to be able to work through. It seems like a life skill that we should pay more attention to, particularly in an age where people are having their text generated by algorithms trained on the output of what could be the most dishonest and delusional species on the planet.
In that regard and a few others, I am thankful for the dishonesty – it tells me who is not trustworthy over little things, and when they are not trustworthy over the little things, the big things are always suspect – for they are made of the little things.
Half watching the world’s rhetoric spinning against it’s axis, I ended up in a conversation with a supporter of the opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. We both agreed that the present leadership of the opposition party, the UNC, should step down, and the argument presented was that ‘we need to support her because…”
It’s a bad argument, albeit pragmatic. It’s like saying you’re going to have another drink when you’ve just dodged the barstools to get to the bar, weaving as if the entire bar were being tilted like the old pinball games. “One more drink…”
It’s a short term solution to a long term problem, and like such solutions, it generally comes with a hangover.
This same person – a friend, someone I respect – made the mistake that the U.S. Presidential debate hosted by CNN demonstrated why Biden should step down (I do not disagree) and why Trump should win. So the short term solution only applies to something he’s passionate about, but at a distance discussing another country, his argument changed. Why?
Passion disguised as pragmatism versus pragmatism.
There are so many problems with democracy that it makes young intelligent people look into other modes of government, from communism to socialism, and they’re equally screwed up at best because people are… people, regardless of what system you put them in. I’m half surprised sometimes that someone doesn’t suggest monarchies again, but then what is a dictatorship but a crownless monarchy, and what does democracy do when it wants to protect it’s interests? It embraces dictatorships with the belief that they can be controlled as much as voters think politicians can be controlled.
If you find yourself on a planet where they vote for politicians, leave. That’s my advice.
Politicians dress in whatever fabric of society is most popular, and like good marketers, sometimes they create the need to fulfill. Elected officials don’t do what we want them to do, they do what they want to do. We could simply remove them and vote on things rather elevate puppets we cannot control. You want to go to way? How much in taxes are you willing to put that way? Are you willing to go fight? To send your children to war? No? Well, you don’t really want a war.
You want to help here? Great, how much are you willing to pay in taxes to do so?
Of course, that dooms underprivileged communities, but they were doomed by the same systems that rule the world now, and no, no matter how much you protest, you’re still part of a system that allows and ignores protest. It’s not about voices, it’s about what’s trendy and popular because people don’t vote for rationality, they vote for comfort. When they get in that voting booth, all bets are off: It’s about how they feel.
And who are they most feeling about? Themselves and their circle, not some ideal that is lost when people outgrow Disney remakes of the classics. People aren’t as good at thinking as feeling.
That, you see, is how democracy died. The marketers became campaign managers, and the game is completely rigged.
Being ‘woke’ and being ‘enlightened’ are different, and are vectors, not scalars.
There’s a lot to consider these days regarding intelligence and consciousness. I’ve developed my own thoughts over time, as we all have to some degree, but few of us it seems have the time or inclination to really sit and think about such things.
What separates us from other forms of life on the planet? Only we have excised ourselves from the rest of life on the planet as far as we know, and that’s fairly narcissistic of our species, a species where we accuse individuals of our species of narcissism – which must mean that they’re pretty bad if they merit a diagnosis rather than suffer armchair psychologists around the world.
When we boil down what reality is for us, it’s all derived from our senses. We look, we smell, we touch and we listen – these are our inputs, and from it we develop a model of the world within what we call our minds, which we blame our brains for. Yet there are other senses we have related to our own bodies and how we physically and emotionally feel at any given time, and influences how we perceive the world.
How that interacts with others is akin, if not the same thing, as a ‘sphere of influence’ – something my father often talked about, since he had heard about spheres of influence somewhere: I’d read all the same books he had, sometimes even before he got finished reading them. I don’t know where he was introduced to the concept, but the concept is worth fleshing out in an era where we’re all data streams to fund some billionaire’s stab at a version of success that seems disassociated with the rest of the planet.
It is always fashionable to point out others live in bubbles, and saying that billionaires live in bubbles doesn’t let us off the hook. Some people admire the bubbles and want to get into a bubble – a sphere with that much influence.
I’ve been listening to Lex Fridman podcasts on YouTube in the background off and on over the past month, and I forget in which of them he mentioned that he wanted to use his influence for good in an election year, or in some other thing, and I admired his honesty in that and worried that his own sphere wasn’t broad enough to truly have an effect I would desire. Often he seems a supportive role in whomsoever he talks to. I forced myself to listen to his episode with Elon Musk – at least one of them, they seem to talk offline a lot – and in that podcast there seemed a lot of soft pitches to Musk, and much of it was nothing more than what I call an advertorial.
To his credit, the casual listener may not have picked up on that with Musk, and those who want to be like Musk (in whatever way) wouldn’t want to notice it, but as someone who is not impressed with Musk, I forced myself to listen to the interview and be as objective as possible. Musk, like everyone else, wants to make the world a better place, but the way that he sees the world is often incompatible with reality in my mind. That being said, I listened and found myself mildly impressed with how human he came across. Yet when I thought through everything, it was a mildly entertaining soft pitch for Grok throughout, while not actually challenging Musk.
The comments on the video were quite supportive of Musk. It’s a hit. Lex Fridman, then, would see how many views the episode had, read the comments, and think it was all wonderful – but having listened to many of these sessions, and watching the body language in the videos, some of those interviewed (and I include Musk) weren’t really challenged and where criticism of them was either ignored or simply peacefully bridged, as if the opinions didn’t matter.
And yet, there were gems, like this one with Sara Walker. It’s long, it’s worth it, and while she does seem to have what I call a ‘Valley Girl vocal tic’ which I generally don’t find endearing and often have trouble taking seriously. ‘Fer shure!’ and stuff like that have been grossly overdone with shallow movies, and isn’t something I hear often outside of that context – but she is amazingly well thought, and like me, she likes playing with words (and also like me, apparently, doesn’t think in words).
It was a soft pitch for her upcoming book, too, but in this context – and I’ll give Musk credit for saying this, paraphrased – advertising that is contextual to what a person wants or needs at a time is content. Well, maybe, it depends on how the want or need was created. It happens that she was talking about things that I was thinking about and she randomly popped up in YouTube. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, watch the video. She’s quite well thought on all of this. She’s someone I wouldn’t mind having coffee with, if she could put up with my speaking style – I imagine it works both ways. Regardless of how Sara Walker says it, she says a lot worth listening to1.
When ideas collide in the ether between we humans, it’s because of language communicating a common concept between people. It can be between two people, and that develops a common language. It can happen within a group of people who work or play with the same things, which gives us lingos. On rare occasions, these lingos – words or acronyms – can go mainstream, as the meme about memes did by Richard Dawkins. And even then they can be curtailed by languages2, and when it transcends language, it hits very mainstream.
One of the beautiful things that Levy writes on is IEML, a semantic language he created that has challenged me more than I have had the capacity to challenge it. I have yet to see someone come up with an equivalency, which may exist. I have also yet to see anyone approach a lot of knowledge management in the same regard, particularly in an age where Large Language Models are also ‘Literal Language Models’.
These spheres of influence are telling. Pierre Levy resides mainly in academia, and AI resides in the mouths of people marketing stuff that while initially impressive has demonstrated more and more that it can regurgitate the opinions of others based on what it has read. This marketers have celebrated as a success, and this I have seen as a limitation that more data is not going to solve.
‘Spheres of Influence’ also… aren’t spheres. They are shaped by what we are exposed to, and when people focus on one aspect I describe it as wobbling, because these ‘spheres’ spin, and it’s convenient to talk about spheres since they are so perfect – but we are not perfect, we have our biases, some of us delve deeply into subjects and change our centers drastically. People who are more open minded would be more fluid, like water, and those who are closed minded can be like concrete.
This kind of stuff is part of the basis of the novel I’ve been working on. Would love to hear more from others, though my own sphere of influence on the internet is not that large. Comment below.
Her book comes out in August 2024, and I’ll get a copy because of how she expressed what she did: “Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence”. I didn’t agree with everything she said, and that’s exactly why she’s worth reading for me. I may not know enough. 🙂 ↩︎
I prefer the Spanish word idioma for language – it seems much more sensible to me as it encapsulates dialects as well. ↩︎
It’s been an interesting week researching and, for some time, beginning to interact with some select people that give me a break from the flat screens within my cave. Most of it has been spent reading and listening to the latest theories on life, evolution, and the thing being marketed as artificial intelligence.
Interspersed in the writing, you’ll find some things I felt like pointing out that persist on the planet, from strange signs to flattening balls to sell them differently (for the same price).
We humans do some pretty dumb things.
One of my ‘favorite’ things is seeing lowered cars in Trinidad and Tobago behind me, because with the roads as bad as they are, you never know when the geniuses who lowered their cars will swerve or suddenly hit the brakes.
I’m not against lowering cars. I just think you have to be pretty dumb to do it in a country with notoriously bad roads. In my experience, and mainly for humor, I point out that the lower a car is in Trinidad and Tobago, the worse the road is that it’s owner calls home. It’s an expensive form of limbo, leaving behind all manner of exhaust parts on the road.
It’s sort of a willful version of stupidity that affects others on the road. It can’t possibly be ignorance. It’s just that people choose not to care. It’s strange to me.
Then there are the odd signs, like this one that on the surface makes sense – use the stairways during a fire.
Most people don’t even blink when they see signs like this, and yet…
If you actually look at it… Go ahead…
A person is walking down the stairs into either an inferno or is summoning a demon from downstairs.
Now this sort of thing is about placement, and I’m not a graphic artist, but I have to think there would be a better way to do a sign like this. People who lower their cars to drive on bad roads might think they’re supposed to walk into fires.
If that were true, I imagine upset people might be lighting fires at the bottoms of staircases to solve one problem – which I’m betting is illegal anywhere you live, so you should not do that. It would probably involve arson, though I imagine it would be hard to prosecute a case for manslaughter or murder when people willfully walked into the fire.
Still. Don’t do it. I wrote not to do it. Don’t do it.
The picture of meatballs being sold and underneath small sliders being sold just doesn’t look right when I resize it – but the local grocery makes meatballs and then flattens some of them to make ‘sliders’. They charge the same per weight, so it’s not a gimmick.
Some people are apparently just too stupid to think of flattening their own meatballs to make miniature hamburgers.
This – aside from the willful ignorance/stupidity of some – seems to be because no one takes the time to observe and think. Why is that?
Because people are deluged in a world. Overloaded. Some people don’t cope well with it, and based on what I see, it seems to be the majority.
I want to write so much more about this, but instead I’ll simply ask that you take a few moments wherever you are and really take a look at things you normally don’t look at. No, not on social media. Look in the real world.
I had some dalliances with the outside world, some with interesting people, but mostly not. The community I live in is remarkably ignorant and petty. Someone dropped an egg on the stairs and the janitors had not gotten to it, so that was a point of discussion. A security guard had laid on a couch was another, which became a matter of pettiness as well – the guard was unwell, it ended up. The ‘rain flies’ of Trinidad became a topic or so I thought – it ended up that the recent deluge of rain flies (termites) was accompanied by actual flying ants – alates – that befuddled the denizens of this strange community.
Recently, in a group chat, someone posted a video of an extraction fan in a bathroom and said they thought they had animals in their ceiling. Upon listening, it was clear that there birds involved, and being a curious person I had long found that the extraction fans connected to open air rooms where the split AC units vented their heat to the world. Like most chats, I was late to it and a day’s worth of speculation had already gone into it with only one person out of maybe 10 involved actually getting it right: birds. I don’t know how people couldn’t identify it, and the original poster retorted to me that she didn’t have time to watch the discovery channel.
I live on a planet where being able to identify the sound of birds was being shamed. Discovery Channel? Most of this can be found by simply walking outside and observing. Listening. Watching. Noticing. Finding the right questions, and thanks to the advent of a communications network filled with information, finding the right answers to questions. It used to be much more laborious with encyclopedias and the Dewey Decimal System alone. How can you not know the sounds of a bird in Trinidad and Tobago? What sort of life has one lead for not knowing the sound of birds to be defensible?
I sat drinking beer with a friend a few evenings ago, and said as much. He, too, has a curious mind, and like me, his advice is often ignored by people not as far away from brandishing pitchforks and torches over small and petty things while larger issues loom. We commiserated, laughed, and went about our lives after a few beers, but it bothers us both not that people don’t know as much as people don’t seem to want to know. What if I told you the person with animals in the ceiling was a musician? How does a musician not know the sound of birds?
Are we so removed from our world, staring at the flat screens in our caves that we shout complaints at these same screens about things we should know? How is not knowing the sounds of birds defensible? What sort of life does one have where one doesn’t hear the birds around on a daily basis? What sort of silence is in that cave?
Is it a cave, or a tomb with wifi?
Is it that the red dots of life have replaced the sounds of the outside world?
Like every morning, I sat with my first cup of coffee listening to the birds – the orange winged parrots and their revelry of cacophony, while every now and then the sounds of various tanagers and the croaking of the orependola rings through. The ever present Great Kiskedee chimes in now and then to a natural symphony of sunrise every morning. Not all would know the different instruments involved or name them, but certainly we should be able to hear them and know that they are birds. Rodents are not known for their voices. Birds are. One doesn’t need to be a naturalist to appreciate the songs of the morning.
It seems we absorb more and more silence around these flat screens that we expect that as nature when it is not, but I know it is not silence. I hear the fans of my computers, the whine of electrical devices all too well, and in time I tune it out but it also takes a toll on me where I need to hear the other lack of silence. That there are people who are different does not surprise me, and still I wonder after over half a century why people don’t know more about their world when the information is so readily available.
My knowledge of birds came from observation and answering questions that came to mind. My knowledge of insects was the same way, with trying to understand which insects were beneficial or not to households and plants pushed me on minor quests to get more knowledge, and I do not claim great knowledge of these things, yet the ignorance of others about these things has become as palpable as the shroud of silence they seemingly snuggle in. What sort of life is there without curiosity and only complaint?
We are the noisy ones on the planet, mostly, and we are deaf to our own noise. We are deaf to the sounds around us, it seems, and we are blind to the world around us as well if it is something inconvenient.
It seems despite my best efforts, I am surrounded by the deaf and blind, who lash out at the smallest inconveniences, and who will complain as if it’s their problem while acting as if it isn’t.
We do not live in silence. We live increasingly in ignorance, it seems. The troubles half a world away, where people die because other people choose to kill them, are likely filled with people who appreciate the songs of birds as a welcome interruption to the sounds of the weapons of their enemies.
What luxury we live in to not know the sound of birds. What depravity.
AI should replace some of these people, for that is all they have become – large language models with no questions and hallucinated answers.
