Month: September 2023

Deviants

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If we were to take any cross section of society, we’d end up with a median – ‘normal’ – and all the rest of us. Broadly speaking, within the first standard deviation, we’re all ‘normalish’, in that we aren’t completely normal but are ‘normal enough’.

This works for age, weight, and even I suppose sexual identity these days. IQ, an attempt to measure intelligence, is in the mix, as well as how much money we have in the bank, and how many people we want to hit with a stick.

I mean, think about it. How many people do you want to hit with a stick? We don’t talk about that because that is not… normal. It’s not even normalish, we like to think, but there are times are genetic roots have us looking around for a stick. I haven’t felt that urge in some time, but to be fair, I’ve also cut down on being around people who I would have that urge with.

A psychologist would call that avoidance, I would agree, and I would be normalish. Why? Because I have not hit a person with a stick since childhood, and according to my mother was quite fortunate someone didn’t lose an eye.

It used to be normal to think that there was a bunch of people who had lost an eye to such incidents. Now a bit over half a century later, I can tell you that people with one eye have been pretty rare in my life. I thought there would be more of them.

Right there, a shift in what is normal. My mother, trying to instill in me the value of not hitting people with sticks – a survival trait, really – had also instilled in me this idea that there were lots of people losing eyes. This could be because that line worked and less of us hit each other with sticks. We may never know.

But as adults in in a normalish society, we know that’s simply not done except in defense, and even then, you should consult an attorney before doing so in some places. Sometimes the laws of society and how they are enforced make it easier to die or be wounded, perhaps even maimed, than actually hurt someone else in self-defense. But then there’s the whole question of what constitutes defense and what doesn’t. This is not to say it’s wrong or right, it’s a simple statement of fact. It’s the way it is.

Statistically, if you don’t break the rules, you’re a standard deviant. You’re not what Malcolm Gladwell would call an Outlier.

What’s standard varies over time.

Wit’s End, and the Prioritization of F*cks.

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Sooner or later, we all end up at Wit’s End.

It’s generally a good thing thought it doesn’t feel that way. It means something has to change. It’s the rock bottom of a perspective.

It wasn’t long ago I had read, “The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach To Living A Good Life” by Mark Manson. I’m a little surprised I didn’t write about it since it jives so well with my own observations about life.

His follow up book, “Everything is F*cked“, also fit my own observations within my life.

It’s all about what one cares about. What one gives a f*ck about. It’s about priorities and how they impact our worldviews.

Thus, I was surprised when I found that there is a movie about “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck”.

Well f*ck. 🙂

Excerpt from ‘Everything is F*cked*, Mark Manson. May explain why he never worked at Starbucks. 🙂

So I watched it, and if you do watch it – for those of you who don’t read – you’ll see some pretty good examples of worldviews, like that of Hiroo Inada who fought for decades in a war that was long over because he never got new orders that he thought were credible.

Life is largely about expanding and changing our own perspectives, changing our inner worldviews to suit the actuality of the world around us.

Yet there’s more to it than that, at least for me.

When we’re interacting with others, what the other people are concerned about becomes a driving force. Collectively, this explains everything from political parties to football teams. On individual levels, it explains relationships that have a bigger ‘us’ and ‘them’ associated with them.

The famous story of Romeo and Juliet was about both Romeo and Juliet valuing their relationship more than what divided the groups they belonged to by accident of birth into families. I hate reading Shakespeare but he has some great plot lines.

It’s about what they cared about, their priorities, etc.

Of course, that’s fiction. Some even say it’s good fiction, if they like reading Shakespeare’s prose (I don’t). Yet all around us we see it all the time if we decide to… get ready… care about it. I’ve seen marriages go to divorce over one side of the family, or both. I’m pretty sure if you look around you’ll see that as at least a factor too.

Negotiation in business is a lot about what people care about. For example, I have had some fairly good ideas and still do for technology and business, and I’m sure if I presented them to some venture capitalists I’d get maybe a chance at doing them – but I would have to sacrifice what’s most important to me in assuring they achieved what I considered fruition of the ideas, so I don’t do that. I’ve seen too many good ideas twisted by venture capitalist control. I’d rather fail on my own rather than be driven by market forces and the whims of those that care more about the bottom line than the idea.

It’s all a balancing act of who cares more about what. Maybe I could have been excessively rich, maybe I still could be, but making loads of money has never really been my goal – something which has disappointed people and even had family members on my father’s side consider me a ‘failure’. I could do what they did, but intellectually it just never excited me. Having a new thing isn’t that exciting to me, therefore money isn’t that exciting to me.

I don’t want to see the Titanic. I know the story, and if I’m curious those unmanned submersibles give pretty good video.

Back to Wit’s End, which is how we started this. If you find yourself at Wit’s End, it means something has to change, something is untenable, and when you find yourself wishing other people would just do ‘what they should’, the only person you really have control over is the one at Wit’s End.

You.

And the only thing you can really do when you’re at Wit’s End is find another way to be.

That’s life.

Oh, congratulations to Mark Manson. A movie? Well, I didn’t see that one coming!

Balance.

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Today I posted a quote to a friend who had commented about guilt. It’s a quote from the movie, “Seven Samurai”. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth seeing. Set in feudal Japan, some samurai get hired by poor villagers – but there is much more to it than that, and I won’t spoil it for you.

The guilt? The guilt was about using open source software projects without contributing somehow, which is pretty much impossible when you’re a one person show with a budget of your bank account.

The quote?

“By protecting others, you save yourself. If you only think of yourself, you’ll only destroy yourself.”

Kambei Shimada (Seven Samurai).

The full context of this is ‘in war’, but war is simply an escalation of conflict, and that conflict is really the deeper context. If we change ‘protecting’ to ‘helping’, where protecting is a specific type of helping.

So by helping others, you help yourself because if you think only of yourself you’ll destroy yourself.

Still not quite right. In the context used, we can say it’s about being selfish, and therefore if you’re selfish you’ll destroy yourself. So let’s try again.

By helping others, you help yourself because if are selfish you will destroy yourself.

That about sums up teamwork, doesn’t it? But not much of our lives these day are about teamwork because everyone has their own goals, some of them conflicting. That’s why nobody calls a committee a team (or vice versa), which is a fun tendril of thought to traipse down.

This is the sort of thing that some were taught growing up in various ways. But what does it have to do with guilt?

Well, if you’re so focused on others that you don’t guard your ability to help others, you will also destroy yourself. There has to be some level of selfish involved to assure one can help others.

And so we wander through life, some of us, just hoping we manage to get that mixture right.

It also seems like a lot of us don’t understand even the surface of this sometimes.

The Line.

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I’ve written about all of this before, and yet it’s still something that amazes me if we imagine through history.

You’re born into an environment that’s artificial beyond the natural challenges. Nowadays, natural challenges are rare, it’s humans we mostly have to worry about, those creatures like ourselves. They are like ourselves, remember that.

A little over 2,000 years ago, you might have been born into the wonderful life of being a peon – the odds are much better for that than what many written stories and movies suggest. Statistically, less people on the planet.

The peon could run away somewhere else and disappear, or move to the top of the mountain to avoid people only to have them show up asking for advice. That might have been a nice option for the hardy individuals.

Nobility, too, was born into – like wealth is born into today.

So let’s go further back. Let’s say your parents were hanging out with the crew drawing pictures of deer in the caves, your mother did a swish of the tail just so and… 9 months later you show up. Childbirth wasn’t very easy then for mother or child. Suddenly, you’re in a tribe, including that whacky guy who keeps wandering around chewing on poppies. What’s for dinner? What the tribe gets.

What the tribe gets. So that’s pretty much changed, hasn’t it? How often do you hear of a group of people born into a group working together? I know, in a perfect world we might call that family, but in a family the goals aren’t always aligned – unless it’s Disney. Everyone has their own thing going on.

What else?

If you go back far enough, the focus was on ‘staying alive because our environment will kill us’.

Slowly, we pushed back on that environment. Thousands of years later, nobody’s worried about the environment hurting us. It’s the other way around, but we’re more worried about all the civilization stuff that comes with it – paying bills and other things have become more important to use as individuals than worrying about the environment killing us – and us killing the environment that will kill us.

When did that happen? When did we cross that line? I wonder.

Leisure And Creativity.

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I was reading something about leisure and creativity, referencing the influential Margaret Mead and her own observations in cultural anthropology. It made great points on leisure and creativity, but I thought there might be something deeper to it.

Creativity, I think, might have an interesting parallel with intelligence within the Western framework, and because of the global economy is the global framework.

If we go with leisure and creativity being connected, we can assume those with less leisure would have less time to be creative. This goes hand in hand with pretty well accepted studies on how much intelligence is required to be poor. If you’re constantly wondering where that next meal is coming from, that can rob you of 13 IQ points.

I’m not a big fan of intelligence measurement for a variety of reasons, but it’s as good as we have until someone gets creative and thinks of something better. The point is, we use more intelligence toward our survival than leisure.

This makes sense following the theory of evolution, since we don’t see that many creatures on the planet with leisure other than us because we created these civilizations that centralize enough resources that if you follow the rules of the civilization, and are part of the group that civilization works for… you would have more leisure. Technology marketing is built on wanting more leisure, but civilization as it is demands productivity within that relatively new ‘leisure’. The last decade, the promise of more productivity builds on that implicit understanding that leisure comes from increased productivity.

It doesn’t always, does it?

That’s not a call for any form of ‘ism’ or ‘acy’, by the way, just an observation. If we didn’t require productivity to maintain the civilizations, we’d all be laying around sipping drinks and throwing paint at canvases while listening to the latest grooves.

We don’t.

Increasingly, we don’t spend as much time at leisure because we don’t have enough time outside of ‘being productive’.

Here’s a thought. Write down somewhere how much leisure time you had each day, where you and no one else demands anything from yourself. Measure that against time you spent being ‘productive’ with a tangible result, and compare the two.

Monday Traffic Thought.

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It’s that time of the week again as I watch people begin their rolled marches to work in their vehicles, the beginnings of Monday morning traffic on the nearby highway. It’s a highway in Trinidad and Tobago, but in larger countries it might be simply a road, just as what we call a river here would be called a drain in Guyana.

The traffic, though, is real, as people grind their way toward dropping their children to school, getting to work and maybe even being productive there after the standard amount of time talking about how bad the traffic was this morning.

Somewhere in government, some idiot is probably trying to find a new way to decrease traffic while filling their pockets. The usual suspects will get contracts and kick money back, and there will be more roadways to have traffic on such that more people can talk about it in the morning.

Over the weekend I encountered an unnamed local politician’s question on why the local temperatures were so high, as if he had just awoken from a slumber. The question bothered me for a few reasons.

First, it was a question central to Trinidad and Tobago, as if the rest of the world didn’t exist – and I expect in his mind other places only exist to hold money outside of the purview of the local government. He may have even visited these places and treated them like Narnia, coming home to tell everyone of the wondrous and terrible things he saw. Maybe he could write a book. The fact that temperatures have been breaking records world-wide seemed to be something he was completely oblivious to.

Second, and probably even more importantly, as someone with all these connections to have his position, the fact that he didn’t know why temperatures were so high should bother people, but it doesn’t. People were helpfully commenting on his facebook post, trying to remedy his lack of knowledge.

These are the sort of people that are ‘leading’ society in Trinidad and Tobago, it seems, and perhaps why the solutions they present suffer their own lack of understanding of the problems.

Or maybe they’re just popular idiots. There seems to be a trend globally for electing popular idiots.

The Theory of Sanity.

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The world has often had me interrogate my own sanity, and with what I could find in the relatively new age of the Internet as well as a lot of reading, I believed I was sane. Self-diagnosis, however, is a bit of magical thinking particularly in this regard. If you’re not sane, you’re likely to believe you’re sane.

And of course we lie to ourselves. Sometimes these might even be good lies, where we push ourselves that much further than we thought, and sometimes they are bad lies, the ones that perpetually continue something that is self-destructive. Addiction is a good example of a ‘bad lie’.

I write all of this because my psychologist and I parted ways a few days ago, having met the goals originally set out. She told me I was sane, and that I seemed to be clear of any genetic predispositions I was concerned about. Of course, she didn’t say I was sane unprompted. I always joked about my sanity with her because, as above, the world makes you feel insane.

This is because the ‘civilized world’ is insane by itself, made up of a collection of seemingly sane decisions at varying levels that when looked at holistically… or, in the case of we lowly individuals, practically… make little to no sense at all, and these same things are repeated creating a pattern and that pattern demonstrates insanity by it’s recursiveness. I could add the Einstein quote cliche, but…

I feel like a fair amount of my life has been broadcast to me from whoever had the remote. It’s a strange metaphor because we never think that it’s probable that the people who have the remote are also the ones broadcasting only because our magical thinking makes us think it’s impossible.

Disney doesn’t encourage you to watch competing channels, do they? Do any channels do that? No, of course not. That’s why we need to turn off all that broadcasting that we’re on the receiving end of because there’s ‘nothing better to watch’.

We settle, and as we settle, standards drop, and as standards hit the ground like dead bodies in a video game, we wonder why people are accepting things as they are. Even as they were before they got to how they are. Often, the remedies are that of the addict: Short term solutions to long term problems.

I’ve stepped back from it increasingly over the years watching from further and further afar, not unlike the prisoner who finds freedom in prison and begins smiling and whistling while everyone’s grumpy. If you ask me a good question, I’ll give the honest answer which is not usually the polite answer, and can be so sarcastic that it impacts the gravitational field in the area. People have dropped things. Really.

There were so many times I interrogated myself before pushing forward on something that everyone else thought couldn’t work. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but whether it works or not while I’m off trying to spin the planet in the direction I’m choosing it will spin me right back in interesting ways. People talk about ‘getting caught up in a wave’, but I think that’s just a symptom of the friction that gives us that spin.

The world, as we experience it, is about how we live it, what we experience, and how that experience shades what we experience in the future.

The counseling gave me some new lenses to look at myself through. It will remain useful. I have no problem talking about it now, but I think a lot of that has to do with how I’ve been forced into shapes of what others needed by the people who had the remote by default.

What is crazy in our society – outright insane – is the stigma associated with seeking help with mental health. It’s availability, too, is a problem for many people.

There’s nothing wrong with going and getting a checkup, letting a professional peek under the hood and give you an unbiased opinion.

It seems sort of insane not to.

Of Possibilities and Probabilities.

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I’ve been revamping a few ideas related to the book, and I found myself vacillating on a few points. It’s one of the fun types of procrastination I’ve cataloged when it comes to setting thought to the written word.

It’s fun because you get to argue with yourself, and who better qualified to argue with you than the person who you think knows you best? I learned that when I was a child, playing myself in chess, pitting strategies against each other while in the same brain space, a task that one can never perfect but one can practice.

The last few days I’ve been trying to come up with a better way to deal with a ‘magic’ aspect of the book since there were some updates in our scientific knowledge that made some of it obsolete. Science does that, sneaks up and advances when you least expect it, and when you’re writing science fiction I suppose it’s safer to write purely about magic rather than science if you want the longevity someone like Gene Roddenberry or Isaac Asimov has.

Those two names should pop out to Trekkies and anyone who has ever heard a bad story about a robot. The two authors did something that few authors actually do – they set up very human stories in a technological framework.

Speaking for myself, I don’t know why the Enterprise warped around so much (or why it was named ‘Enterprise’, which is quite Ferengi). You’d think that some form of communication wave would work for stuff rather than having a flagship warping around so much. The Enterprise is largely a carrier pigeon in that regard, but Roddenberry drew us in. He was probably writing about going back and forth to the surface on the shuttle so much he came up with transporters, too.

The technology, though, wasn’t central to his stories or those that have come after in the initial framework he created. The technology was about the future, a nice comfy future, and people want a nice comfy future while people go off and fight the Gorn and Klingons. It’s easier to give them medals than to go do it yourself, so give them medals. Starfleet is hard. Plus all those directives and rules…

That is Roddenberry’s actual story. The directives, the rules, the ethical dilemmas, the perspectives shifting within the framework and expanding it. It challenged us as individuals and as a society. That is what Roddenberry was really writing about within his framework. Watch anything Star Trek and you’ll see it.

I suppose I should mention George Lucas, but honestly, he could have kept the first 3 episodes of Star Wars and saved us that mess. And the conclusion… man, that looks like a BMW hatchback where the designers began drinking at the front and were blackout drunk at the back. Terrible.

Asimov didn’t have to invent too much science. Instead, he used a fairly predictable framework that lead to the desired results related to artificial intelligence but he really didn’t write about the technology. He made some stuff up. I can’t think of anything he made up, but I’m sure he filled in some gaps.

I wonder, too, how much he was annoyed about people talking about the Laws of Robotics as if they were sacred when the whole point he was making was that they couldn’t work. He stepped us through that whole thing and yet people don’t get that. If I wrote that, I would be annoyed by everyone who points to the Laws of Robotics as some form of solution.

Both of these authors – and I would wax more poetic on Asimov, but he’s somewhat of a niche for some of us – they had a balance of the possible and the probable.

When we are children, we live in a world of possibility: the monster under the bed and the friendly dragon under the maple tree. When we are adults, we live in a world of probabilities – it’s very unlikely that there is a monster under the bed or a friendly or unfriendly dragon under the maple tree.

Roddenberry’s works were more about the possible than the probable. A civilization with warp technology could probably do a lot better at communication than carrier pigeon. The lean on the officers rather than those non-officers fits the time of his writing well also, since officers were supposed to be the ‘best of us’. I’m former enlisted, and I know this is not as true as many seem to believe.

Roddenberry had no trouble pulling the Bob Ross to fill the gaps, to cover inconveniently improbable with magical technology. It works.

Asimov leaned more toward the probable than the possible. His framework was that of technology itself and it’s impacts on humanity, and the grounding of computer technology he uses is pretty solid to this day because it hasn’t changed that much and we’re on the cusp of making an intelligence that may not recognize us as intelligent. I wouldn’t.

So here I am, trying to decide what mix of probable and possible should be in what I’m writing, and I haven’t quite figured that out yet.

Thus, I wrote this post and still haven’t made up my mind. 🙂

Of Gordian Knots.

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I started watching ‘Ancient Empires‘ and in the very first episode found myself shaking my head when it came to the story of the Gordian Knot. I’m not a historian, I don’t play one on the Internet, but something about the observations about the mindset related to Alexander cutting the Gordian Knot in the city of Gordium.

The background they gave on Alexander was of a young man who grew up in the shadow of his father, was schooled in warfare, and who after his father was killed was proclaimed King and decided to use his authority to go ‘civilize’ the Persians. These were less politically correct times, now we ‘give people freedom’.

Anyway, he shows up in Gordium and looks at this knot. The legend was that whoever undid the knot would become the ruler of Asia, and I imagine Alexander understood well the nature of establishing his personal identity to everyone.

Personally, I wouldn’t have gone with ‘Great’, I would have gone with ‘Awesome’ because of the alliteration – but that makes the point. I’m looking at it as I am now, not as it was then.

So as they tell it in the documentary, he ‘looked at the problem in a new way’ and ‘solved the problem in an unexpected way’.

First of all, I’m pretty sure that there were people who just didn’t try. It’s pretty hard to be the ruler of Asia while you’re tending your goats. Next, this culture of not trying was likely enforced by some that wouldn’t allow people to try because the world was like that then. It’s like that now too, but we won’t get into that.

Lastly, there’s this King who has an invading army going through Persia and he has chosen a path to employ his will on areas he’s conquering – the sword.

So is it really that surprising that Alexander took a look at the knot, said, “screw this” and pulled his sword out and took at least one whack at it? He wasn’t solving an impossible problem with some ingenious solution – he was solving a problem in a manner he was comfortable with, that he clearly reached for in his problem-solving toolbox.

When someone just cuts through a knot with a sword at the head of an invading army, no one is going to say, “Umm – hey, wait, you were supposed to untie it” either. Maybe someone did, and maybe their body is in an unmarked grave somewhere. We don’t really know.

We tend to romanticize history. We like a good story. Because of that, we sometimes miss a good point. In this case, use what you have on hand and that you’re comfortable with to solve a problem and do it as quickly as possible so that you can move on to the next problem.

Creative? Nope. He just used what was handy, and had the audacity to do it in a way that maybe others thought of but could not do because of social standing, or because they decided they had enough trouble dealing with their herd and family and didn’t feel the need to impose their will on the world.

Alexander the OK, though, doesn’t really have that ring to it, does it? No. To warrant that title, people rationalize all sorts of things about him that may not be true.

If I’m staring at a knot to be undone and happen to have a sword in my belt, I think I’d take a whack at it myself. Wouldn’t you? I bet you’ve done it in your lifetime without even thinking of the Gordian Knot.

Beyond Star Stuff.

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Brown Dwarf. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

I’ve been lost in thought for a few days because I’ve been reading a lot and putting some things together to try to make sense of a lot of… well, what we consider reality.

Everyone needs a hobby.

It’s matured a bit since ‘Who Are We?” as I’ve pulled and tugged on it.

Not long ago, my psychologist asked me to describe anger in my own words. I puzzled on it and decided to describe a planet with a molten core, and when that core got too hot or when the crust on the surface had weak points, the molten core would pop up through the surface – except you don’t know exactly where that will happen. She pointed out that most people simply described a volcano, and I responded.

“Then they rob themselves of being a planet.”

The point I was trying to make – and maybe I made it, I’m not sure – is that while we describe the feeling of anger as a volcano, a volcano doesn’t exist without a planet. In fact, if you talk to people who know about planets and stuff, they’ll tell you a certain set of circumstances causes volcanoes and not all planets have them, and some might have them more, and some might have them less.

Like us.

My point was also that when angry, I didn’t know where that anger would have impacts on my surface – and how much of an impact. When dealing with your sex of choice, it’s a lot like having a dreaded pimple in the middle of your forehead suddenly appear and distract from the rest of you.

“He was a nice guy, but that pimple made him look like a cyclops!”

You get the points, hopefully. You might get angry at work and, because you can’t vent there, you might vent at home, and that may impact your home relationships even down to the goldfish. It goes the other way as well. And when you can’t vent in either place, it builds until it vents somewhere.

I thought this was a good description of anger.

It’s also a good description of how our worlds interact, these planets rolling around the galaxy – but planets don’t really do that outside of star systems, so it’s more like stars.

Suddenly, we’re not just made of stardust. We are stars ourselves. Figuratively, anyway. Anger becomes flares, flares that can travel across or even burn relationships completely – or both. And before you know it, you’re in this world of stellar flame that affects more than just you and even gets reflected back even after your flare is long gone.

We all don’t burn the same way or the same rate, so it can get really awkward fast. So maybe you dodge out of that area of influence and find yourself elsewhere. You start over, but if you carry the same problem, you create the same problem and the cycle repeats. No matter where you go, there you are.

And that’s just anger. There’s so much in the way of dynamics that fits. Maybe we’re all spherical gears held together by society aggregately impacting each individual like a driving module – but it’s really about the closest people who are also the same spherical gear, but with different ratios – spots where things don’t push against each other the same way. Someone who doesn’t mesh then doesn’t fit in and is either broken by society or causes society to grind to a halt when made of exponentially sterner materials.

Let’s dive deeper.

What if the ‘gearing’ on the surface of each of those spheroids was the topography of our inner skies – how we perceive the world, the topography our limits – those with different experiences again don’t fit in because they don’t mesh.

This has a fun depth to it. It’s making sense so far.