Month: February 2024

How To Be Unpopular.

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Information, opinions, misinformation and misinformed and irrational opinions flood us every day and it seems to be accelerating. When I wrote about the lack of comprehensive human rebuttal about Noam Chomsky’s take on AI, it accidentally seeded this post because it’s about something we just don’t seem to have the opportunity to do much of anymore.

Reflect. Consider. Think things through.

I was looking through Facebook reels as I unfortunately do, and looking at the comments on them. There’s a lot of value signaling going on about videos that don’t give the greater contexts of the situation. It’s amazing, really, how because of that value signaling people go about constructing strong opinions without rationale. In turn, people want views because if you don’t have views, what’s the point of doing it?

For me, the point of doing it would be to share good knowledge. We didn’t get where we are today as a society by not sharing good knowledge, but the signal to noise ratio has become… well, a noise to signal ratio. Add into that the up and coming role of artificial intelligence in the mix, with the US Presidential election coming up and the continued aggression of Russia against Ukraine, the tragic affair of Hamas and the state of Israel with a lot of humans in between… things aren’t going to be better soon.

It’s time to be unpopular. To think things through. To find the meat that is hidden in all this tasty, cholesterol-ridden fat presented to us because people want views, likes, shares, etc. It’s a good analogy, actually, because some people have more trouble with cholesterol than others. If I walked past a steak my cholesterol would increase, so I won’t tell you what I had for dinner last night.

Some people are more gullible than others. Some people are more irrational than others. We know this. We see this every day. I often make jokes about it, as I told a cashier a few days ago in a store, because it’s my way of coping with the gross stupidity that we see.

So how does one become unpopular? It’s pretty simple.

Worry about being wrong. Decide not to do something because you’re not sure the impact it will have. Humanity tends to gravitate to strong opinions, however wrong they are. Marketing tends to maximize that, and marketing has become a part of our lives. I see lots of videos and ‘hot takes’ on Dave Chapelle and Ricky Gervais, but they tend to take them out of context and beat them with an imposed context – and somehow, despite all of that, they are popular and no one stops to consider why. Why are these comedians still held in regard? Because they dared to be unpopular. They, and I dare say this, dare to be authentic, thoughtful, and funny despite how many people think that they are unpopular.

All too often people are too busy value signaling to think about whatever it is. They need to have an opinion before they watch that next video, read that next tweet (It’s Twitter, Elon, it always will be)…

Slow down. That’s how to be unpopular. Think things through before communicating about it. The world will not end if you don’t have an opinion right now.

Once upon a time, there was value in that.

I’ll let you in on a secret: There still is.

Here’s what to do: Watch something/read something. Find out more about it. Think about it in different contexts. Maybe then do something or say something if you think there is value, or maybe just don’t say anything until you do.

On Disagreement With Noam Chomsky’s Opinion On AI.

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Recently Noam Chomsky‘s opinion on AI as published in the New York Times has been making the rounds again, and the arguments against what he wrote are… aspiring to juvenile when it comes to the comments sections.

While he’s probably best known for his social activism, Chomsky is one of the founders of cognitive science and is by no means someone whose opinions should be dismissed lightly.

I disagreed with him on Ukraine and unless his opinion has changed I still do. He seemed to be focused on the quantity of life, whereas in listening to Ukrainian voices I heard them more concerned about their quality of life. “Life free or die” could summarize what I was hearing, with their option of being annexed in any way or form being something that didn’t seem like something they were willing to do. And why should they?

The point is that when you’re disagreeing with someone who has certainly demonstrated a high level of thinking, it should be at least at a similar level of thinking.

In that regard, searching for a rebuttal to his points was sad. The top result on a Google search was Jon Cronin’s asking ChatGPT what it thought about it.

The answer itself was evasive and went to it’s talking points like a politician. It glossed over much of what he said.

This rebuttal, written by a human and found much lower in search rankings, is guilty of pretty much the same thing by ignoring the points raised and starting off with, “but it’s good for the global economy…”

Which, amusingly, is sort of Chomsky’s point – that in pushing this advance in technology, which he did not deny, the chasing of the bottom line is somehow supposed to make up for a lot of rubbish.

That’s kind of what got us here, and where this is isn’t that palatable for everyone. He also pointed out the deficiencies.

His points are valid, whether liked or not, and true. This is why I wrote ‘A Tale of Two AIs‘. In Chomsky’s opinion piece, he’s discussing the reality, and in every rebuttal I have read so far which includes ChatGPT’s response posted on a LinkedIn page (people still use it to post stuff!) is about how AI is being marketed.

It’s not a disagreement. It’s just trying to talk over the reality of what these generative models actually are… so far.

That’s not debate.

Seed.

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I was tending my bonsai projects yesterday when I noticed a seed sitting in one of the bonsai pots.

It seemed to be a bougainvillea seed. It had gotten wet when it landed, expanding as they do. I puzzled over it.

There are no bougainvillea within sight of my little window to the outside world, several floors above the ground floor. Clearly it had come from a bougainvillea somewhere. I let it be as I ran some errands, did some other things, but the seed stayed on my mind.

Other people have similar views. Yet that one seed found my place, found that particular pot, and it landed. The odds of that seem extraordinary. It’s not as if there was one nearby. The winds had brought it to there, up into my little external window to the world that is open about 15 feet by 7 feet. Somehow, of all the places to land, it had settled there.

Life. Opportunity.

Some people would talk about it being meant to be there, as if there were some intentionality involved. The only thing that happened is that a bougainvillea somewhere out of my sight had dropped a seed to the wind, probably one of many, and one landed in my little area to try to find purchase in this world, within the lines that demarcate my little viewing area. Was it an opportunity for me?

Not really. I don’t like bougainvillea. They are pretty from a distance, their colors vibrant, but they have no scent. They have thorns that make managing them cumbersome at best, painful at worst. No, I do not like them at all.

A few hours had passed and I went back to decide what to do with it. Should I stick it in a pot? Should I throw it away? Should I…

I looked, and it was gone.

The same winds that had dropped it there had likely taken it somewhere else, the burden of decision taken away as easily as it was given. Had I acted decisively, it would be planted out there, something I would tend and care for, or thrown in the trash, but I didn’t care for this opportunity.

It moved on, as have I.

You don’t need to jump at every ‘opportunity’. It gets tiresome, you end up investing time into so much and you may not find value in it at all. Or it could be very rewarding, fulfilling you in ways you wouldn’t expect. You don’t really know which is which. You hope that you get it right, but sometimes you don’t.

Things happen. We want some things to happen, we need other things to happen, and there are things that just happen.

Regardless, things just happen, just as sometimes you happen to other things. The difference is that we get to respond to things, that we can want things to happen and even sometimes conjure them into being on a whim.

Sometimes you can’t.

Things happen. If it’s a thing you want, you need to be prepared, and if it’s something you don’t want, you have to be prepared.

The seed escaped my judgement because I was prepared. I was prepared to allow what came into my life to leave in the same way.

It took a long time to learn that.

Instincts.

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On Monday, I was sitting at a coffee shop I sometimes meet with some friends at. They have a menu I like, they have coffee that is probably the best I have had in Trinidad, and I can sit there undisturbed.

The downside is that all the chairs that have one’s back to a wall are shared areas. I like having my back to a wall, but still, the place was quiet and nobody seemed to bother anyone.

This was me trying to push back on being comfortable in public places, where I’m always hypervigilant. The psychologist said it was probably because of an amalgam of ‘traumas’ over the years and had served me pretty well in life. She didn’t seem wrong, but I decided to take a chance and see what happened.

I could sit there, scribble notes, research things on my phone, chat with the baristas occasionally, and leave unmolested.

A friend of mine introduced me to the spot, and with it came some of his friends. One of them set little alarms off in my head, but given how much time I spend alone I gave the benefit of the doubt. There was something about how he looked at people, something about how he talked to people, that irritated me. I’ll call him ‘R’.

Last week, I was sitting with my back to the room at the bar and sipping coffee and eating my sandwich – eggs, bacon and cheese, just to keep cardiologists employed – and I got pushed from behind forcefully enough to cause me to turn. It was this guy, and while the smile was friendly, the eyes were not. They were calculating. We exchanged niceties quickly, and I thought little of it because it could have been an error on my part. Maybe I was reading the situation wrong.

On Monday, I was sitting in the same spot, doing the same things. I had grown comfortable in this little coffee shop. A man in Muslim garb walked in and began looking at the menu at one end of the bar. I glanced at him occasionally from the corner of my eye because his voice had started at a whisper, but was becoming increasingly louder. The manager told him that if he wasn’t there to buy anything he should leave. He started talking about wanting justice, etc, and I suspect it had something to do with some of the issues in the world. Perhaps even the plight of the Palestinians. I don’t know. He left.

Yet I did notice he was looking around quite a bit. I mentioned that to the manager, and she was aware. It set me on edge a bit. I decided to leave after I finished my coffee since I wasn’t comfortable anymore. I sat responding to someone on Facebook, and suddenly I felt my shoulders being slapped hard enough for the sound to echo in the coffee shop. Startled, I jumped a bit and saw ‘R’s face shoved next to mine, then shoving his face to see what I was doing on my phone.

I did what comes naturally.

I called him an asshole.

I’d suspected he was one for some time, but in that moment with his eyes staring at my phone, with my shoulders stinging slightly. That’s something an asshole would do, and verily, he proved he was an asshole to me. He was a bit upset about being called an asshole, so as I was leaving I saw him seating and told him not to do that again, to which he responded, “What are you going to do about it? You’re fat, you can’t do anything.”

Well yes. I am fat now, it’s a battle losing the weight, but… I know my way around self defense pretty well, and had I reacted differently in that moment, he would have been hurt. I wasn’t telling not to do that again as much for my benefit for his. I stared at him a moment and then I saw that inner asshole light in his eyes and thought, “Yup. This is one that will need to be taken down a peg or two and someone else can handle that.”

He tried to gaslight me into thinking I was overreacting, which I was trying to avoid in the future. I could easily have just shoved an elbow behind me, or grabbed a hand or arm for a lock or bar, or all manner of things without even thinking. That’s how bad things happen even with the best of intentions, and they happen fast.

Had it happened once, I might have blown it off and not said anything to him. Had it been a tap on the shoulder, it definitely wouldn’t have happened. If he hadn’t shoved his face in position to look at my phone, it wouldn’t have happened. Yet, the pushing prior was the warning that I ignored.

So the lesson I decided to take from it was to follow my instincts more when it comes to spotting assholes. The whole incident reinforced a lot of what I was actually experimenting with changing.

Walls and Lines.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

The greatest travesties of our world seem to be about being born into lines that one has not drawn.

The accidental geographies of our births have us delineated into a way of life in a society of rules. The lines of sociopolitics sometimes harden into walls. The Berlin Wall eventually fell in 1989. Despite ourselves, in 2002 humanity built a new wall somewhere else because we’d forgotten what walls do.

Wall technology has gotten pretty mature over the lifetime of humanity. We like walls, except when we’re contained within them and we cannot breathe.

Without reflection, without mercy, without shame,
they built strong walls and high, and compassed me about.

And here I sit now and consider and despair.

It wears away my heart and brain, this evil fate:
I had outside so many things to terminate.

Oh! why when they were building could I not beware!

But never a sound of building, never an echo came.
Insensibly they drew the world and shut me out. 

C.P. Cavafy, “Walls“.

Walls are a congealing of the polarizing issues that happened because of a border, and negotiation of walls is difficult.

Of The Caves.

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We are of caves.

We’ve found caves with cave paintings and ways of communicating over time and between people.

We’ve found underground cities where the caves became networked, like in Cappadocia, Turkey. There are underground cities all over the world.

And what are our homes above the ground but customized caves that we build of different materials?

And what so many workplaces but caves? What is most transportation but mobile caverns? They give us a false sense of security as we careen from one cave to another, hopefully avoiding other mobile caverns along the way.

Drinking and hurtling is not only not suggested, it is actually now Law in most places in the world.

Like all caves, we have these views of the outside. When people congregated in the same geography, they had similar views. When two neighbors look outside, they see the same thing from slightly different angles. The larger the distance between people, the greater the angles, the greater the difference in perspectives.

This could be pretty manageable once the view was not too far away. It helps if everyone’s looking at the center, at the same thing, but that’s not how it works usually and also seems pretty much like a panopticon: a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control.

Meanwhile, our world evolved.

It was pretty manageable. Then we got mass communications and installed another ‘window’ into the caves we run back to, and people within range could see and/or hear exactly the same thing at the same time.

That was pretty manageable.

Channels showed up, people followed their preferences, and things got a bit more complicated.

We have curtains in our caves, and we pull them when we don’t want the light to come in, or we want privacy which is little more than a sense of security for our secrets.

We change the channels in much the same way, sometimes forgetting we can close all the curtains if we want to.

Since people now can pick channels, from the radio to the Internet, we get people seeing the same ‘views’ from their caves despite geography. People who view the same content may be as far as way as possible on our planet, or right next door – but the probability that people are looking at the same things decreases the more channels we have. Echo chambers of indeterminate populations show up, and confirmation biases are fed to maintain the echo chamber because living in caves can be expensive.

We all want our own version of the ‘best cave’ after all. We want to be near the best food, not unlike our cousin primates that fight over fruit tree territory. We want the best stuff near us, and we want to have it but what we consider to be the best varies.

An advance here may seem like the opposite of progress there. A developing country’s citizens may see the rapid advances elsewhere and feel that they have no way to advance to the same level.

Broadcasts will have people believing that the ‘grass is greener’ in one area even though it isn’t, too. People may want to get caves where the grass is greener. This causes all sorts of fun immigration problems as people try to cross lines that someone drew some time ago.

Sure, people unite for good reasons, but sometimes they unite for bad reasons dressed as good reasons. Their views collide.

Here we are, staring from our caves, trying to negotiate the future from the comfort of these caves. We’re all watching different channels, we’re all more interested in some channels than others.

Somewhere along the way, going outside of caves was considered beneath some of us, and because of that the reality that the caves exist in is lost to them. A person worried about the affairs of some distant nations may not notice the garbage piling up right outside our doors because the view through the flat screens have a higher priority than one outside.

I’m sure I knew where I was going with this when it started, but it will be a stub for now. Think ‘Allegory of the Cave‘ clashing all over. Also, consider the following quote:

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”

Edward O. Wilson

A Thought On Democracy.

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By Saioa López, Lucy van Dorp and Garrett Hellenthal – López, S., van Dorp, L., & Hellenthal, G. (2015). Human Dispersal Out of Africa: A Lasting Debate. Evolutionary Bioinformatics Online, 11(Suppl 2), 57–68. http://doi.org/10.4137/EBO.S33489 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4844272/, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50508700

Those of us in democracies think that they’re the best way of doing things that we have found so far. We tend to think that democracy started off when it was first called democracy by the Greeks.

Yet, if we look throughout human history, we see what democracy looks like.

However you believe humans showed up, be it by deity or evolution, the common thread is that humans started somewhere. From that somewhere, humans scattered all over.

We don’t talk about why because we don’t know why.

We could have fun speculating. Maybe there wasn’t enough food in an area. Maybe one group migrated away from another group because they couldn’t agree on which end of the spear to use when hunting, where the group that used the wrong end was erased by history because of their stupidity. Maybe they couldn’t agree on how many stones to throw at an adulterer. Who knows? The point is that a group made a decision to leave and voted with their feet.

There’s a reason we use this term.

This was democracy. If you didn’t like how things were going you could leave. You could wander off that way in the belief and/or hope that things would get better over there, and maybe it had something with the society where you were.

Humanity did this until it started running into each other again. Our technology advanced, and we could cover greater distances than our ancestors did, and we could do it faster.

Suddenly, there’s nowhere to go. We run into situations these days where nations that are democratic are often split close to 50/50 on decisions, and nobody can leave. No group can get together and form it’s own nation-state, really, because that would require every other nation-state to identify that it is a nation-state.

Nomadic humanity has nowhere to go. We don’t talk about this because there’s quite simply nowhere to go. We can’t go anywhere without bumping into other humans, and there’s always some reason that we can’t get along that magically seems to reinforce those borders where people who are dressed the same wearing rubber gloves. There is a ritual to crossing borders, a ritual which has become more and more complex because people find comfort within their boundaries.

You can get political asylum, but the people within the nation-state you’re going to have to agree that you need it.

We have people that have built walls around other people, then complain about how they behave within those walls even if they don’t agree with the way people do things within those walls. That never ends well unless the wall comes down.

What are these borders worth to us? I’m sure I don’t know. They’re worth it to some people.

For now…