Month: April 2023

It’s Not About Success.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 4 Comments
_Gustave Le Bon Error

I was reading GS’s “Not Successful Enough?”, and I wanted to take this in a different direction because I don’t think it’s about success.

Success means different things to different people, but most of the time when people refer to being successful they mean financial success, or career ‘success’, whatever that might be.

What do you consider successful beyond those red dots? We’re told that’s success, we’re indoctrinated to believe it’s success because we send off the little kids to go to school so that they can get jobs so that they can be… successful.

In some part, our parents and family determine what we believe what success is, but it’s institutionalized in our schools and even in advertising what success is.

They also say you need to have children, which makes sense in a way since that’s how you pass on all that genetic soup made up of male and female zygotes so that they too can be… successful. Most of the zygotes, by the way – the vast majority – are not considered successful, not because they don’t have jobs and fancy titles, but because their job is really to be numerous in the hope one of them is successful. That’s really the larger game being played with jobs and titles by homo sapiens.

I used to think that money mattered, and it does to some degree but not as much as people who want you to buy their crap want you to think. I never really thought titles mattered because I have so many people who are in some sort of authority that are idiots and consistently screw things up that I’m not impressed by titles, or diplomas, or academic degrees.

If there is any success for a human in this world, it’s based on a value. Different cultures have different values, different families instill (or not) different values, and different people have different values. The question about success is really a question of, say it out loud, values.

If you don’t feel your successful enough, take some time and consider what you believe your values to be. Look back on the things you felt successful about, or what you believe you failed at. You can’t miss the feeling of success or failure, they stand out. Maybe write a list. Maybe do a spreadsheet. Just do it. Examine each success and each failure. Examine the values associated with them. Examine the circumstances around them.

And work on the values, maybe. Maybe what you presently believe is success is not really what you feel is successful. Maybe you’re just making yourself unhappy for no good reason, stressing out over the need to buy meaningless crap to impress meaningless people with the net result of having a meaningless life.

There are two people who drive nice BMWs in my neighborhood, and I’m friends with them despite having a Hyundai. They constantly complain about parts, service, etc. They’re successful, right? Are they? They’re unhappy with their cars, so that doesn’t seem much like success to me, but people see them in these cars and believe they are successful because… why?

I believe that while we’re all in this artificial rat race of life that gives some advantages over others – and regardless of how it is done, some people will always have some advantages – if you can find meaning and value in what you do, you are more of a success than advertising campaigns would have you believe. You may well be a success in many ways and are simply wanting to appear successful.

The people who matter in life see your value beyond what they can use you for and what they can get from you. If you’re being told you’re not a success, question the intentions of the people making you believe it.

Meanwhile, be nice to the people who deserve it and even some that don’t.

Characters: From Canada to Coffee Cups.

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_coffee cup lady

Sometimes I wander out to get coffee somewhere – I wander coffee ships around Trinidad and Tobago fairly regularly, and the closer I am to home the more likely the staff will recognize me and confirm my order rather than ask me. Why? I people watch. People are interesting, telling stories about themselves with minimal involvement. Some are best without involvement at all.
Today, I ran into a Canadian as I gently nudged people ahead to pull the queue together since people were being forced out the door and even without a basic understanding of geometry, there was sufficient space for it while not breathing on each other.

We stopped breathing on each other in public. It’s sort of like masturbation but breathing on people without a mask is now legal again. Masturbation in public, for those of you uncertain, is not legal in most parts of the world except some of the more risque areas.

I digress. Our Canadian friend asked me about the nearby Rituals, and I filled her in – they do have better food, but personally the coffee (while better priced) offers me less value in general. If I want to eat – Rituals. If I want just coffee so I can bounce off the inner walls of my brain, Starbucks. She asked me if the Starbucks would allow her pay with the app, and I had no idea but was curious so I asked her to go ahead of me in line.

Starbucks in Trinidad and Tobago does not use the app, at least at present. And I was duly informed by our traveling Canadian, adorned with a local shirt, pseudo-dreadlocks (I need to start knowing the names of these hairstyles), and a complexion that fit in, that Jamaica had the same issue. That’s interesting. She wandered off later with her order, leaving me wondering about a few things about Trinidad and Tobago and technology. Filed.

Interactions like these are pretty interesting. This person is now a character. A character who was from Canada, had been to Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago at least, who knew a lot about maple syrup and bacon.

Clearly, she was a Canadian Spy. Very polite, blended in as best she could. She really did look like a Trini, but the ‘Carib’ shirt was a tell – but not a good one, as beer companies will pay any woman with breasts larger than their nipples to wear their brand, and they almost never drink the brand. It’s not just media, folks, socioeconomics and sex sell beer. I shit you not.

You get the point, though. That’s really not her life, but you can think of characters that way. It’s good to have an ensemble down. When we interact with people for the first time, we see what they’re consciously comfortable with showing in public which isn’t that much, so we fill in the gaps. We have poetic license. We don’t have to do it accurately or well. However, you also need to remember that’s not really who they are in case you bump into them again.

Another woman that springs to mind this week was the Coffee Cup lady. Coffee cup lady was local,well dressed in a tasteful  and relatively bright cultural dress that hid as much as it showed. It was Middle Eastern or African styling, or a mix of the two, but this is a weakness for me – women’s clothing – so as a writer, I need to research that. She wore a slightly straightened hair, dyed blonde, seemingly pasted to her head (again, I need to research women’s hair), and was in front of me.

She kept looking back at the wall of cups as the line moved like the syrup they add to children’s drinks. She was not ashamed of it, not the odd glance back, she was doing it, unashamed, as so many people do. Somehow we ended up talking, and I brought it up. Her response was very honest and straightforward, only slightly smelling of a weakness, as she told me that she didn’t understand why, but she just could not stop buying the coffee cups.

She proudly said that she had bought so many that she now gave them to friends. There was nothing amiss about her, no weirdness, that was just her thing and she wasn’t ashamed to share it. A serial coffee cup buyer. I joked that she might be better off buying stock in Starbucks. She shook her head, clearly having thought of that, “It’s the cups.”

We continued talking and the rambunctious group of children with all 3 parents (3 sets of kids? or 1? Wouldn’t that be a story?) and our new Coffee Cup friend, J, and I were discussing how it ‘used to be’, when children were sent to find places to sit and leave their parents – and the line – unmolested.

We shook our heads sagely, her maybe less than 5 years my junior, and she said, “I try telling that to my daughter about her children…”, drifting off quietly, thoughtfully. I just looked at her sideways softly asking, “They’re all children, aren’t they?”

Suddenly she and I were friends, in that moment. She introduced herself, I responded in kind, and we went our ways later. But the coffee cups? Now there’s the character thing.

Let’s forget my new friend, I expect I actually know her reason. Why would anyone do that? Obsess over something enough to buy variations of them? Well, there’s all sorts of people who collect things, and I used to be one in some ways, but why do people do that? It’s an interesting twist though, coffee cups, because in a way, you could now tell who her friends possibly were when they got new coffee cups. It’s an interesting detail related to a character.

And that’s why I go people watch. People have real stories, from the mundane to the extraordinary, but those are their stories to do with as they please. Our stories don’t have to be their stories, and I’d offer it might be in poor taste to make them one and the same. First impressions, though, can give us excellent jump points for new characters.

You never know when you’ll need one.

To Be Misread, or Unread, on Social Media.

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_facepalm error
Image by Tumisu from Pixabay

When I wrote “Is Output from ChatGPT A Derived Work“, the idea was to get people thinking and discussing the issue. There’s not much in the way of comments on the site, likely a function of WordPress.com’s painful way of adding comments for first timers. The Facebook conversation on my public post did get some bites and some thoughtful discussion, but it’s the odd response I’m writing about.

In a private conversation through Facebook messenger, I was made aware that one of my connections decided to feed some of my personal information into ChatGPT to have it write a poem about me – really, a rap song – and thought I would be pleased about it when the whole point of what I wrote was that it takes stuff from the Internet and creates derived works, which she did by sharing information about me. The last thing I really ever wanted was to feed any of these large language models information about myself. In fact, in that posting I linked to an article which even says you shouldn’t do that. How much more apparent should I have been?

I couldn’t be more apparent. It’s not on me. It’s the tragedy sometimes of writing when other people aren’t reading and just… well, to speculate would be unkind, and the point is not to be as unkind as she was, whether consciously or not. But it is annoying.

I don’t know why people are like this. People get so caught up in trying to say what they want at even the shortest prompting which isn’t meant to be a prompt for them, and it’s a reality. Just like the reality of algorithms and red dots driving people into manic sharing of things not relevant and sometimes even damaging. Caught up with themselves, even when one politely points out that (1) it wasn’t asked for, and (2) It runs contrary to what the article is about, they can do damage.

In this case, I imagine it’s quite slight, but it’s the principle of the thing. It’s not the first time it has happened to me, I don’t imagine it will be the last. In it’s own way, statistically, it means that at least the article was gaining attention, even the bad sort.

I don’t know what to do about these sorts of things and I’m open to ideas. We’ll take any sort of action that is immoral off the table since illegal has too much wiggle room because of a society that thinks laws create ethics instead of the other way around.

Stewed Biases.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 3 Comments
Nowhere small

Our lives are impacted by our decisions and the decisions of others, for better and worse, and humanity has this strange propensity to make things either/or when the dimmer switch has been around at least since 1959. We know that there’s more than 2 options for a light bulb, we have known for generations, but there is this cultural imperative to boiling things down to 2 choices.

If you see only 2 choices, you’re likely missing something. Even matter has at least three states we are taught of in basic physics and chemistry: Solid, Liquid, Gas.

One of the things I appreciated in the 1990s were thrift stores – books in particular, with knowledge on paper handed down from what I expect were dead people who did not throw away their books. I could walk into a thrift shop and use it as a used bookstore, where the books had been condensed into things that people found value in and so did not throw away. This, of course, was muddled by the books that were just donated to make space, but the good books to bad books ratio was pretty good, and it was a great way to get books cheap for someone like me. An intellectual omnivore.

Quite a few books changed my perspective on things, some because they had ideas worth adopting, and some had some antiquated ideas that formed the basis of modern ideas. Both had value. One of these books was “The Theory of Error” by Yardley Beers. A surprisingly slim book, it cost me all of 25 cents at the time, yet it gave me pause in dealing with calibrations, statistics, and everything else under the sun.

One of the major aspects of it was demonstrating something very simple that most people don’t consider: When there is a degree of accuracy, there is a degree of error. Understanding the nature of error and decreasing error is a powerful thing, the basis of which had me exploring fuzzy logic and bayesian probability for predictive things but also interpreting aspects of life. It was not Boolean (which oddly enough, accuracy and error are in an odd way), so there was room for more than 2 perspectives on anything.

As a then young software engineer that during formative years was obsessed with the idea of artificial intelligence, I found myself using these ideas where I could in code that wasn’t always understood by others but which worked. Some of it may still be working after some decades in what must now be an antiquated system that decided which medical transcriptionist to send a Doctor’s audio file to based on affinity and experience, weighted choices instead of the former ‘must match exactly’ choices.

What is hot for someone can be cold to someone else, what is warm for someone can be hot or cold for others. We live in an inexact world because what we as human beings process is subjective. I often wonder if this is why people have different favorite colors. Do certain colors appeal more to someone because of how they perceive it through senses? Maybe, maybe not, but we do know that we associate colors with things. We don’t really know, but we have some interesting guesses based on studies, statistics and… probability.

I bring up the favorite color because it’s a bias. And that bias demonstrates other biases, like the pseudoscience of racism, the idiocy of politics, and which brand one associates with a simple thing such as a hamburger. We are biased creatures, all of us, and we are often blind to our own biases.

The odds are good that by an accident of geography, you were born in one spot on the planet, with certain weather, with certain politics, with a certain predominant religion, with a culture, tradition and the bureaucracy that comes with them. When we encounter others who are different, they are the ‘thems’, and we are the ‘us’es. Are we open to others? That can have a lot to do with the red dots of life, too, where we are influenced by someone else’s laser pointers, and underlying it all is a stack of stuff we think we need to accomplish so that we have some purpose or worth.

It’s worth reflecting, every now and then, on this stuff because simply recognizing we are biased and allowing that our biases can be wrong can have impacts not just on ourselves and those around us, but in allowing that other’s biases impact them when they are dealing with you.

It’s a weird soup of reality we all share. Now that we’re so much more connected, we have gotten into our little tribes that throw rocks at each other and never find the commonalities as endearing, perhaps because we like our biases too much, guarding them against everything so that we can live a simpler life.

Sometimes we simplify too much, sometimes too little, and it’s in this grey soup of bias we see the worst and best of humanity. And now we’re seeing output from different things accused of being artificial intelligence reflecting those biases in interesting ways.

This could be an opportunity.  The choice is somewhere between “Now Here” and “Nowhere”.

Walled Poetic.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment
_isolated writer and reader

I live alone.

I do not mean physically alone, which I do only because I like being dwarfed by the space around me more than being around others. What’s funny about that is that it’s possible to have another human being live with you that isn’t intrusive, and reciprocation is necessary for that to happen over time.

No, I mean that I live alone in my mind, devoid of languages others know, with orbs of different gradients symbolizing things, with feeling heard more than felt, a low rumble in my being that influences the colors and sizes of those orbs at different rhythms, distilling that sound into something I can associate with a word or phrase to communicate. This life requires constant stimulation, from music to sound to visual, in an effort to find new ways to communicate effectively with others.

When it gets tiring, it can be unbelievably heavy if I don’t feel like I’ve communicated what I’m trying to communicate.

If it sounds childish, it is – that look on the face of a child trying to express something but unable to is the same thing you would associate with it, and if you’re anything like me, you know the feeling. Maybe it’s not childish. Maybe it’s just honest and something we threw away with our childhood like the one throws the baby with the bath. Maybe that sincerity got drowned out by complexity.

Maybe what we wished to communicate lacked the appropriate finesse. Maybe it needed to be more driving, more emphasis. Maybe it required an ironic twist to stick, connecting two things for people in a way that allows them to receive a message. Maybe they got the gist of it but not the high notes of the idea and interconnections.

And maybe, just maybe, they are not interested, or worse, unable to see why they should be interested. They may be in pursuit of red dots, whether for their own good or not, and not have time to pause for a TLDR from someone – which means you have to compete with the red dots, a shrill voice trying to rise above the constant murmur of people giving bad directions to others, to get where they told each other that they need to go.

Just like we’re all trying to do.

Meanwhile, they released large language models that are scraping content – let’s be honest, probably ours too – and maybe that’s not too bad, since it will likely write more likely to be read by those who read, but it doesn’t credit the original person of the idea, giving them slight bit of prominence so that others read the prose.

Then maybe something stirs in them beyond the writing equivalent of a self-satisfaction toy of choice: a large language model. Something that can please you without needing to be pleased, it hums and vibrates according to your preference. It allows you to prolong or not at your discretion. Something that tells the stories we want.

I don’t write what others want on this small part of the Internet. The experiment with sharing my content on Facebook has revealed that while I have many connections no one either sees (algorithms) or therefore shares unless you throw some money into Zuckerberg’s wallet – no, not the crypto Zuckerberg, the the Zuckerberg that started a website by scraping college women’s pictures off the Internet and generating profiles. Then there’s the Google search algorithms, the Yahoo search algorithms, that other company’s search algorithms… starts with a M and based in Washington? Strange, Mickey Mouse lives in both Florida and California, but that’s Disney, and that doesn’t start with an M.

What’s funnier is that because this is such an isolated bit of the web, does that mean that the large language models didn’t scrape my content? How did they decide what to scrape? I’m betting it was the first x pages in search engines on a topic or phrase. That’s what I’d have done.

We started off with orbs and sounds and feelings and ended up in this mess of complexity that does isolate us.

It happens to all of us. Connection through technology can disconnect. Cavafy demonstrates the idea is not new, and with a twist of Thoreau, unbridled technlogy is showing us that we have become the tools of our tools, the walls of our own prisons.

Poetry that is ‘less filling and tastes great’ to slake the demands of the hungry ghosts.

Earth Bound Misfits.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 10 Comments
_earth_alone_networked

I may offend some folks with this, but it’s hard to write anything these days to do so. My intent is not to offend but to present my perspective.

I had to explain to someone that there is a difference between anti-theism and atheism itself. It’s tiresome.

Anti-theism is the akin to the political far right of atheism, finding all sorts of things to blame theism for, and with convincing and rational arguments that just don’t work on the religious.

Conversely, the religious arguments against atheism tend to be of a religious nature and only cherry pick logic.

As an atheist, I don’t care enough about religion to debate it, and I understand that for at least some people it’s a source of enjoyment. Can it be misused? Certainly, but so can just about everything else humans do. Take a look around. Once the religious stuff doesn’t adversely impact my life, I don’t care too much. A public holiday is a public holiday.

People talking about being nice to each other is something we could use more of, and if some people require religion for that, that’s fine, but withholding aid to people in a disaster zone unless they join your specific religion is just shitty salesmanship. Bad things happen with anything people are involved in and religion is no different. The same with science and technology.

The arguments on both sides tend to center around everyone wanting people to be nice to each other and fighting over how it should be done.

Now, atheism is more complicated because everyone has their own personal version. In fact, atheism is a complete lack of belief and the only reason there is a name for people who don’t believe in a deity is because the people who need deities needed something to call the others who didn’t. Personally, I prefer being called a heretic. It conjures in my mind some guy living in a cave somewhere with a rabbit bone in his beard, dancing around a fire just for the joy of it.

My version of atheism is just being awed by the world around me without the need to blame anyone or anything for it. When you drill down into the finest details of everything we know about everything around us on the planet, from plants to fungi to the thinking meatbags we thing we are, it’s simply astounding that it all exists. This is the platform from which many people’s faith springs, and I applaud them on that. I, however, understand – even believe – that we’re just an accident in a universe of accidents.

We would like to know why we’re here, but it’s peculiar that’s not the first question a baby asks. We’re sensory creatures, social creatures, and our first questions are not about the universe but on what’s practical for us. No child says, “I’d like to know about all this God business”, instead, they are sort of put on a path based mainly on geography for better and worse. I was thrown into various religions as a child and came away fairly unscathed, with no ill feelings toward the religions – but a little scared by the bad things people who are religious will do in the name of their deity of choice.

__Earth Distance

Me? I have come to an understanding with the universe which is as lopsided as everyone else’s. When I view the world, I view it as a tourist because, in the end, that’s what I am.

All the beauty, all the ugly, everything combined showing just how complicated a single world is, with we earth bound misfits constantly stretching the bounds of our knowledge through science and technology. To date, no one I know has prayed and received a better algorithm for anything, but it might happen. Who knows?

But please, don’t try to tell me that science is evil while using an app on a cellphone whose signal is bouncing off the earth through satellites, powered by harnessed electrons finding their way to ground through our mazes, as you type on a device containing very rare elements on Earth.

The Grand Coddiwomple

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments
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When we’re born we’re put on a course based on our parents or lack of them and where we are on this ball of life hurtling around the sun as the sun pierces it’s way through space as… well, you get the idea. We don’t know a lot. It takes us a few years to master being bipeds, and then while our brain is soaking in all around us we become influenced by it. It’s neither good nor bad, but it can be either or both.

From there, we’re subscribed to whatever education system there is, with all it’s flaws, but we’re not told about the flaws because nobody likes talking about them. Allegedly, it works for most people based on what the education system says about itself.

Having seen many ‘successful’ products of education systems over the years in the real world, it remains a mystery to me that a system of education can grade itself in that regard. It’s sort of like a politician investigating himself and finding himself awesome all the time, and no one calls that out except the muffled voices of some in academia who slowly get strangled by the administration that says does what any bureaucratic institution does: It protects itself.

Religion? Same thing. In a way, education has become a religion, sainthoods being handed out as awards, certifications, degrees and smiley faces. It generally starts with smiley faces.

Generally speaking, based on whatever ‘level’ of education one attains, one goes about this business of life in a direction that has been per-ordained by the bureaucracy itself. At this point, we get jobs of some sort and go about the business of the maze of the snakes and ladders of whatever field we’re in. Maybe we find someone to procreate with. Maybe we don’t. Maybe we do some traveling and expand our perspective of the world, maybe we stay in one place and grow deep roots. Maybe you lose a job, maybe you find a new job, maybe…

Life is this huge ‘maybe’. In our youth, we place our backs against a sense of certainty that our childhood gave us, be it a real certainty or a contrived certainty. Life, though, is uncertain, and eventually we figure that out. Nothing in education prepares people for that uncertainty, and many people simply stop learning once they get their academic achievements because of reasons ranging from simply hating to do the work to thinking that they know enough for a lifetime. They don’t, generally.

We are told by many institutions that life is certain. We are told if we do certain things in certain ways we will attain certain goals, and this is not necessarily true. It’s the white lie that snowballs. Uncertainty is real. Life is uncertainty of varying degrees.

Our lives are just coddiwomples. We purposefully stride into the unknown based on what we’ve been told and it never quite ends up the way we were told.

That’s ok, if we accept it. The truth of the matter is that we’re all just bumbling through life, as our parents did, and our ancestors did. You’re here based on the coddiwomples of those before you.

A Peopley Earth.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment
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This planet sucks. It’s full of people, which doesn’t have to be a bad thing but we seem to like it that way.

The people do silly things, play with anything with a flat screen that has some sort of light coming out of it, chasing red dots while sticking food in their mouths.

They drive around either in gasoline or diesel powered vehicles and pollute or buy electric cars that someone else already polluted to create.  The drive past each other, looking smug at each other about how they’re ‘saving a planet’. Carlin was right. The planet doesn’t need saving, we do.

We have billionaires who say really weird things and do weirder things, but that’s ok because they’re rich and eccentric. If they were poor they’d be locked away in an asylum somewhere. Billionaires just live in bigger asylums and nobody knows whether the inside or the outside is the actual asylum.

We have politicians that are dishonest who get elected to office on promises. People do it every election cycle and are surprised things don’t change. There has got to be a party somewhere where the other mammals get together and just laugh at us. I would. I’d go, but they’d probably want me to wear a hat and ride a tricycle.

I’m sure I wouldn’t like the hat.

Incoming: The Tide of Marketing.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment
_google_ai_marketing

Browsing Facebook, I come across this in my feed and it’s as if they read what I wrote in Silent Bias:

…With social media companies, we have seen the effect of the social media echo chambers as groups become more and more isolated despite being more and more connected, aggregating to make it easier to sell advertising to. This is not to demonize them, many bloggers were doing it before them, and before bloggers there was the media, and before then as well. It might be amusing if we found out that cave paintings were actually advertising for someone’s spears or some hunting consulting service, or it might be depressing…

Almost on command, this shows up in the main feed on Facebook – sponsored content by Google. I haven’t used Bard, but I fear I have suffered Bard’s work because… I imagine that they used Bard to generate that advertising campaign for Bard.

The first thing that every sustainable technology has to do is pay for itself. The magnitude of this, though, is well beyond cave drawings. As it is, marketing has used a lot of psychology to get people to chase red dots.  Now that this has become that much ‘easier’ for humans, and now that it’s being marketed as a marketing tool…

How much crap do you not need? We need to be prepared for the coming tide of marketing bullshit.

English Bias: Overcomplicating Things.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment
_bureaucracy


Just last night someone wrote about an electrical outage, “The apparatus on the feeder pole has an issue”. It annoyed the hell out of me because the only thing on that ‘feeder pole’ is a transformer with it’s fused connections. Why not just say it’s a transformer problem rather than making the issue more complex than it is? It confuses people, it doesn’t inform them, and it only gives the appearance of information to quell those with questions. They might as well have said, “You’re stupid, you won’t understand, so we can just say gobbly-gook to you and you’ll like it. If you ask about it, we’ll just give you more complicated bullshit.”

I take it as a symptom of bureaucracy, and before you say technologists do it too, technologists do have bureaucracy. I know. Some people consider me a technologist, but I consider that a bit of an insult through pigeon-holing. Technology is a tool, no more, no less.

Bureaucracy confounds me. It likely confounds you to. It comes up a lot when I write (both here and here) because it just doesn’t make sense to me how we can make the simple so difficult.

I read something this morning that floored me. Hidden in this article, “Unnecessarily Complicated: Hidden Bias Influences Everyone – Even AI Chatbots“, I was a bit boggled to read the following:

…Language that deals with the idea of “improvement” is often associated more with enhancement, rather than reduction. This can prompt us to take actions that unnecessarily complicate the things we aim to enhance…

…The research also finds that other verbs of change like ‘to change’, ‘to modify’, ‘to revise’ or ‘to enhance’ behave in a similar way, and if this linguistic addition bias is left unchecked, it can make things worse, rather than improve them. For example, improving by adding rather than subtracting can make bureaucracy become excessive...

I drilled down and found the study, “More is better: English Language Statistics Are Biased Toward Addition“. The authors were kind enough to make the paper available under a Creative Commons License, so you can actually read the paper which I did, and I’m fortunate that I understand enough of the math to understand how it was done. If you’re into math and can handle Bayesian probability and binomials, I encourage you to read the paper.

Suddenly, much of what I have seen and continue to see around me makes sense, and the science looks right to this layperson, so I’ll fold this into my brain though I had it banged into my head long ago, “Simplify, Simplify, Simplify”.