Month: April 2024

Unwinding After A Day: Mostly Writing.

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Daily writing prompt
How do you unwind after a demanding day?
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What an odd writing prompt for me on a Sunday, which is when I unwind for the week. Sort of. Kind of. Maybe.

After a demanding day, there’s a few different things I do.

I go find something else to occupy my mind. It could be staring off as the sun sets, leaving the human presences in the valley of my view as insistent dots of light. Some move, some stay still. I’ll pick one and try to understand why that dot of light exists. It’s like staring at the stars which I cannot see because humans are littering the landscape with their candescence.

I might play some Starcraft, though some of the random teammates might have me wanting to cut off an ear and move to the South of France.

Most of the time, though, I write – not for publication. There’s an exercise called free writing where you start with something and just run with it, following trains of thought. I try to compose my internal visual language to a symphony of letters and punctuation. I’m one of the apparently rare people whose internal dialog isn’t like other people – I do not think in words, I think in what I can best describe as moving images that I communicate through the common labels of words and metaphors.

When I started free writing in the late 1980s, it was a conscious act and it was hard. I would stare off into the nothingness around me and try to find ways to communicate what I knew. Now, it has become second nature through what seemed at the time heroic effort.

It’s not for everyone. It keeps me centered. During periods when I don’t do it, I can appear garbled in my head to others because I haven’t figured out how to express things. Most times, the things I express never see the light of day, only to become tools or parts for writing other things.

I smile when I hit ‘select all’ and delete, or rip out the page and crumple it up. It’s an odd thing I don’t expect people to understand, but it works for me.

How I use social media.

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Daily writing prompt
How do you use social media?
View all responses

It’s not often that I respond to WordPress.com writing prompts. “How do you use social media?” popped up, and using the WordPress.com reader I started looking through the responses.

That’s the key thing for me when it comes to social media – looking for things of worth, people with good ideas to discuss, etc. It’s about finding pieces of a puzzle that doesn’t have a picture on the box to refer to.

Scrolling through the responses, there are the few that mention making money, like the old advertisements in the back of 80s magazines with the get rich schemes. The way to make money off social media is telling people how to make money off social media. The way to make money off a product or service is to have a good product or service and not shoot one’s self in the foot when marketing it.

I don’t use social media to make money. I don’t use social media to be popular. What I do use social media to do is explore other perspectives, but in an age where everyone and their mother is training artificial intelligence, I am leery of social media sites. Even WordPress.com has been compromised in that regard, though you can take action and not be a part of it.

Unknowingly, many people are painting the fence of generative AI, giving the large companies building and training generative artificial intelligences the very paint and brushes that they need to sell back to them. It confounds me how many people on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok are going out of their way to train artificial intelligences.

This is why I have gone to Mastodon. The Fediverse offers me some protection in privacy. I post links to social media accounts to stuff I write, but I only really interact on the Fediverse, where I feel more secure and am less likely to paint generative AI’s fences.

Find The Others.

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When I was basically told off by some people who thought I was ‘looking for a cookie’, then dug into the history and growth of ‘Some Other Race’ in the U.S. Census, I was surprised. I had no idea how many people didn’t fit neatly into the categorizations of race existed in the United States, and how much they had grown.

It’s a far cry from when I grew up. Of course, because the people who claim some other race are so diverse, there is not much to connect them other than the U.S. Census which is as flawed as the concept of ‘race’.

Speaking for myself, I just don’t like being pigeon-holed, sent into a color-coded box to make someone else happy. That’s not my identity and it never will be.

It is simply extraordinary that there are so many people out there with their own stories. People who group people together diminish the stories of individual identity, of not feeling like one fits in to a system that tries to force people to fit in. It begs the question why the system exists in the first place.

In perusing around some more on the topic, I came across the famous Timothy Leary quote, the last 3 sentences of which are in the pictures.

I could not find the source of the quote, which bothers me a bit because it’s something that, before reading the quote, I lived.

“Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?”. Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others…”

Timothy Leary (attrib), no source found.

The others. Generally, the most interesting people I have found could resonate with this quote. The ‘others’. The ones who defy the need to fit in, who identify more as themselves than what others expect them to be, either by peer pressure or societal pressure to belong to a group. Those in groups are at least partly defined by the groups they identify with, and all that comes with it.

It’s not about ‘race’, or any of that other nonsense – and it is nonsense. To be defined by a color or nationality or a job description is limiting. If all you are is defined by society, then you have been shaped by society more than you are shaping it.

Leary was right. We do need to find the others, the gente real, the real people out there who don’t want to be defined by someone else’s hatreds or acceptances. Maybe, just maybe, if we connect, we can create a better system, more granular, of people who have more to contribute to us solving our puzzles than attempts at hierarchy that implicitly demean.

We have more original cookies, I think, or at least we don’t pretend someone’s cookies are better than others based on categories.

The Spider.

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It wasn’t a very big spider. In fact, as spiders go, it seemed like a fairly small one. We took a moment to consider each other carefully.

I had opened my door leading to the corridor, leading to the elevator – something I had not done in some time. I cannot tell you how long. I had been holed up in my cave, writing away, looking out the window on occasion. Had it been a day? Two days? 3? I don’t know. Generally I look at my watch to know what day of the week it is, and I only note the days where I put on jeans to go out into the world. Going without pants is not recommended.

On opening the door, a web, and a spider. On inspection, it was harmless to me. It was likely some sort of trans spider, for it was androgynous to me – that seems important to note these days. We couldn’t communicate, so it couldn’t give me pronouns, so I will simply call it Spider and hope I don’t get cancelled for the wrong pronoun. That’s a real risk these days, and I don’t want to be insensitive.

The spider, in the center of it’s web, was close enough to eye level. I tilted my head and drew closer, wondering how the opening of the door had not broken the web. This was a surprisingly strong web. I nodded at the spider. It did not nod back.

There was a dilemma. I needed to go out. I didn’t want to destroy the spider’s home, but the web didn’t give me any options. I am not afraid of spiders, and for the most part, they do not seem afraid of me. We have a mutual respect. An understanding. They eat bugs, I leave them alone, yet now, I was forced to make a decision.

It wasn’t a particularly good spot for a web. Even insects fear crossing my door, for there is a madness inside that only escapes through the keyboard. It is where I stay away from the asylum of humanity, like Wonko The Sane, and every now and then gasp at the profound lack of understanding of those in the asylum.

I went to the kitchen, procuring a sharpened piece of bamboo from the glass where I kept such things. Sharpened pieces of bamboo are handy for all sorts of things, but the pointy end was not necessary for this. It would be a part of the Spider Relocation Program.

It took some convincing, but soon I had the spider on the skewer, unharmed though I imagine some of the dignity was as lost as the web. I carried spider to an air room nearby, with good air circulation and a better chance of catching flying creatures. It’s near the garbage room, too. A much better spot, I would think, but ultimately I don’t know. I was simply trying to be thoughtful. We need spiders.

And so I left the spider there.

Today, I opened my door again, because on inspection in the mirror, my hair had voted for a haircut.

The spider was there again.

I had clearly misunderstood the spider.

It had bigger plans.

I repeated the process, and hopefully the spider takes the point, or I may have to take stronger measures. I don’t want to, but I am prepared, and I told the spider so.

There are other people on my floor that might make better meals. There are even a few that I won’t miss. This I also told the spider.

We shall see tomorrow. If you do not hear from me again, please – don’t feed the spider.

We “Others”

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‘Some Other Race’, or as I say, ‘Other’, is a growing demographic as I mentioned yesterday. Had I not been given as much resistance in discussion, I would have gone along thinking that

A Colorful History

The United States Constitution (Article I, Section 2) established representation in the U.S. House of Representatives was based on population determined by census. It’s a very interesting read – I encourage the reader to follow links I provide to get a feel for the broader picture. In writing this, I am writing specifically about the growing demographic that is of ‘Some Other Race’, or ‘Other’.

Of course, the census was quite different in 1790. The questions asked were:

  • Name of head of family
  • Number of free white males age 16 years and upwards, including head of family
  • Number of free white males under 16 years old
  • Number of free white females, including head of family
  • Number of all other free persons [free African-Americans]
  • Number of slaves

This basically slotted everyone into one of 3 categories: free whites, all other free persons and slaves. To date, while there are discussions about other races, the one that pulls all the oxygen out of the room is just the same from the outside looking in. There is reason for this, but with such a growing demographic as ‘Other’ has been, the choice to use ‘some other race’ is increasingly a larger minority made up of many types of people.

‘Free Whites’ was a part of the 1790 Nationality Act. Only white, male property owners could naturalize and acquire the status of citizens. Women, people who were not recognized as white and indentured servants could not. In so doing, a legal category of “aliens ineligible for citizenship” was created and racial restriction for citizenship was not completely eliminated until 1952. If you were not eligible for citizenship, you weren’t permitted to own property, be represented in court, have public employment and voting. At this time this affected a lot of Asians.

Mulatto was added in 1850, bringing the categories to 4, and it was all based on whites and blacks. By 2010, there were 63 possible race categories. Of related interest and reading is the ‘One Drop Rule‘, which culturally still seems to be used. We’ll get back to that.

From 2016, we have this:

“Something unusual has been taking­­­­­­ place with the United States Census: A minor category that has existed for more than 100 years is elbowing its way forward. “Some Other Race,” a category that first entered the form as simply “Other” in 1910, was the third-largest category after “White” and “Black” in 2010, alarming officials, who are concerned that if nothing is done ahead of the 2020 census, this non-categorizable category of people could become the second-largest racial group in the United States…”

“The Rise of the American ‘Others'”, Sowmiya Ashok, The Atlantic, August 27th, 2016

It’s awkward to say that ‘Other’ is a racial group, which presents the inherent bias in a system designed to track people by race – a cheap attempt at color coding humanity into things to manage. As Kermit the Frog might say, it’s not easy being green.

From 2018, we have:

…The United States census breaks our country into six general racial categories: White; Black; Asian; Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander; American Indian or Alaska Native; and Some Other Race. “Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin” is treated not as a race but as an ethnicity — a question asked separately. So someone may be White (Hispanic) or Black (Hispanic) but not simply Hispanic. As a result, many Hispanics check “White” or, increasingly, “Some Other Race.” This ill-defined category is what mixed-race Americans, like me — half Burmese, half Luxembourgian-Irish — often check. It might just as well be called “Generally Brown.” Today, the third-largest racial group in America is “Some Other Race” — and it is made up overwhelmingly of Hispanics…

“The Americans Our Government Won’t Count“, Alex Wagner, New York Times, March 30th, 2018.

It ends up that there may have been some padding in the statistics, too.

“…It is also no coincidence that the reforms the administration is resisting would have decreased the number of American “Whites.” Census research showed that when presented with the proposed changes, Hispanics identified as “Hispanic” alone at significantly higher rates than they did as “White (Hispanic)” or “Some Other Race (Hispanic).” The same was true for residents of Middle Eastern origin, who, when given a category of their own, mostly chose it over “White.”

This would have exposed the fact that the category of “Whites” has been artificially inflated, eroding its primacy at a time when whiteness — of the decidedly European strain — has gained new currency…”

The Americans Our Government Won’t Count“, Alex Wagner, New York Times, March 30th, 2018. (ibid).

The article goes on to say that to claim to be either Hispanic or Middle Eastern in the United States is a political act. I don’t know about that. I don’t know how many ‘Other’ are this and that or the other or something completely different. It’s completely different based on what someone is willing to identify as to a government, to offices, and to apply for grants at a financial aid office.

From 2021:

“…What was once the country’s third-largest racial category in 2000 and 2010 outpaced “Black” last year to become the second-largest after “White” — and a major data problem that could hinder progress towards racial equity over the next 10 years…”

“1 In 7 People Are ‘Some Other Race’ On The U.S. Census. That’s A Big Data Problem“,
Hansi Lo Wang, NPR, September 30th, 2021.

That article goes on to give the history of ‘Other’ in the U.S. Census. First used in 1910, it was the job of census workers who assigned people to a race by observation, and were instructed to label those that they couldn’t recognize as ‘other’, and write down the race. One of the bureau’s 1910 census reports even included Hindus as a race: These would be East Indians, from India, in an era when Native Americans were still called ‘Indians’, the Columbus idiocy that would not die quietly.

In 1960, the bureau allowed U.S Residents to self-report their racial identities, and in 2000 the checkbox came along.1

…”For a long time, there was the sense that there wasn’t anything wrong with the question, but rather that Hispanics didn’t understand the question. And I remember thinking, ‘Wow,’ ” says Clara Rodriguez, a sociologist at Fordham University and author of Changing Race: Latinos, the Census, and the History of Ethnicity in the United States. “‘Some other race’ was something to be taken seriously, not to be dismissed as a misunderstanding on the part of the Hispanic population.”…

“1 In 7 People Are ‘Some Other Race’ On The U.S. Census. That’s A Big Data Problem“,
Hansi Lo Wang, NPR, September 30th, 2021. (ibid)

I have no doubt that some people who identify themselves as ‘other’ are of Hispanic origin, but it’s hard to say that all of them are. In fact, there may be some, like me, who just think it’s an insulting question, but there would be many other individuals with their own reasoning. What’s the incentive for filling out a form and telling them what you identify as? This seems to be an application of the ‘One Drop Rule’, as previously mentioned.

Generally speaking, people like to belong. People announce their love to the government through marriage licenses, so announcing their tribe to the government makes about as much sense. Yet, the numbers of ‘Some Other Race’ have been consistently growing, and I have yet to be invited to an ‘Others’ meeting.

The one thing that connects ‘Others’ is the one thing that divides them: The U.S. Census and it’s use of race. It underlines how silly the system is, where people either can’t or won’t claim a race in the census. Humanity is a melting pot.

It is mildly disturbing that in it’s bid to be more granular, the U.S. Census Bureau is finding nationalities in ‘some other race’ respondents. A Brazilian could be any combination of heritages, but since I know Guyana a bit better and they are mentioned, the majority of the population of Guyana is of a mix of African descendants (from slavery) and Indian (Indentured Laborers), and so those reporting themselves as Guyanese could be either one, both, a mixture, indigenous, or even of majority European descent. During World War II, many people blended into South America in various nations.

The system is as cleanly cut as what race is – a social construct that was originally created to allow some to be ‘greater’ than others.

It begs the question of whether race is itself still a pertinent way to track people. It only benefits those that already have purchase or the capacity to purchase, not those who do not. It’s clearly an administrative nightmare, built on the politics of the moment. To what end?

It ends up that ‘Other’ is a pretty big data problem for a system built on counting how many of each race as well, something that potentially can skew a lot of other things.

Those Others.

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‘Some Other Race’, or as I say, ‘Other’, is a growing demographic.

In 1987, a 16 year old version of me walked into a financial aid office in Texas. I was an emancipated minor, of severely mixed heritage and no idea of my actual genealogy beyond my immediate parents.

I was asked if I had any ‘black’ or ‘hispanic’ in my heritage.

As far as I knew, the answer was ‘no’.

I filled out a bunch of paperwork during registration, and the first time it asked me about race it presented me with options that didn’t fit me, and at the bottom, “Other”. Disaster averted. Below, a line asked what I was if I had chosen other. I stared for a while. I contemplated.

“None of the above.”

This would be how I filled out every piece of paperwork asking me about this. When I joined the Navy, the recruiter asked me the same question about being black or hispanic, because they got points for that. I shook my head ‘no’, but my recruiter said, “You look hispanic”, and I suspect that despite my denial he may have put down hispanic for my recruitment. After all, it was more points for him, and it didn’t really affect my enlistment.

I’ve always considered myself a tribe of one, but I’ve been mistaken for other tribes more than once. In the U.S., depending on how I grew my facial hair, I was some version of Latino, with the exception of Hawaii where I was considered Filipino. I got all the prejudice that came with that. In other parts of the world, it varied, but I was generally an outsider with the exception of Hawaii where I was pretty much accepted for who I am by Samoans. Good folks, those Samoans.

A conversation on Mastodon had me pipe in about those that show up as ‘other’ related to financial aid. I was shouted down – some folks seemed to think I was airing some ‘white grievances’, which was most amusing because at least 2 of the people were, based on profile pictures, melanin deprived. One even said it appeared as if I was looking for a cookie. Real inclusive people, these. Glad I didn’t meet them in a dark alley, they might think I wasn’t persecuted enough and throw a beat down on me.

I hadn’t attacked anyone else’s needs for assistance, or denied anyone else’s persecutions. I was simply pointing out that people who didn’t neatly blend into the discourse on race existed, and had their owntroubles – troubles I myself am not worried about since I have managed and am on the slide down from. Younger generations deserve the acknowledgment as they begin the stairs to that slide. Present systems ignore them because… well, because the system wasn’t designed for ‘others’.

It ends up ‘Other’ is a growing statistic. I’ve been doing some research, and will follow this post up with some pretty interesting stuff related to the U.S. Census Bureau. It ends up on pulling on this thread, a lot of problems start showing up, from social media to healthcare to… well… other things.

More tomorrow.

The Nest.

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The insistent tick of a man cutting bamboo with a cutlass outside makes it’s way through the dusty window, while an orange winged parrot surveys the scene with interest in a nearby hollowed palm.

A nest.

All that parrot is concerned with is the protection of it’s nest, and while the bamboo cutting is happening some meters away, it monitors the situation. This is what many creatures do when their offspring are not ready to leave the nest yet. They keep an eye on things and, if threatened, will either make a lot of noise or will attack creatures disproportionately larger who might be a threat – like the nearby osprey, who are held at bay by the noise of the cutlass cutting that bamboo.

Sometimes, a parent isn’t available to do these things. Sometimes a predator gets a foraging parrot. Sometimes a human shows up to capture it and put it in a cage. Sometimes life is ended otherwise, and the young parrots within have to either learn to fend for themselves or die.

I sit outside with my coffee and observe. I do not know much of these nests and families. I was a young one who learned to fend for myself at a young age, even with a parent around. The idea that a parent is constantly around for that sort of thing seems… alien to me, and so I always watch how animals and people act in families – and then by extension, tribes, and then by extension… well, it gets messier and messier.

It all revolves around The Nest.

Humanity is different, The Nest has largely become a derived function of society, and I am a product of that, and I am also the dividend of The Nest I came from, whatever good that is. In the grander scheme of things, I am of No Nest, of the caves, left tapping away at a keyboard as insistently as the man with the cutlass cuts at the bamboo patch.

I type faster than he cuts, but he gets a tangible result where I do not. He is cleaning his nest, I am sure, and I am building mine one word at a time, weaving words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into pages and chapters of a life lived with open eyes and a burning question.

AI will not be trained on his work, as important as it is. Generative AI will not be cutting bamboo anytime soon.

Yet in time, that bamboo may grow back, the words will have fallen away, and all will be forgotten.

Reinventing a Toolset in the Age of AI.

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I’ve been going over the tools that I use and dealing with the uncertainty that generative artificial intelligence brings with it. It hasn’t been easy.

AI Tools I Use – and How.

I’ve used ChatGPT 4 for general queries, research, and finding connections between things that aren’t obvious.

Recently, I’ve found that Perplexity.AI is much more useful for how I generally use generative AI. The citations are a very important aspect for me, allowing me to curate sense from what is often nonsense in traditional search engine results1.

ChatGPT4’s subscription gets me use of DALL-E, which is pretty decent for image generation for blog posts. DeepAI.org I use for better quality images, though DeepAI tends to not be able to generate more obscure things that I would like despite all that it offers.

I draw the line at using generative AI to create content: Everything I write is written by me. I’ll quote a generative AI at times, but it’s pointed to as a quote, and increasingly, an image with the relevant text.

I have a low opinion of those that use generative AI for writing for various reasons.

Writing

I’ve moved away from using Google Docs and other cloud services for things I write, not that I ever really stored writing there, but it was also a possibility.

I used to use LibreOffice but it became cumbersome for writing for me, so I moved to Scrivener. That was a pretty big step for me because Scrivener is proprietary and not Free Software/Open Source, something I advocate the use of. I wrestled with it, and decided for writing, until something free and open turns up, I’ll stick with Scrivener.

Image Editing

Most people I know who edit images do so professionally, and they’re all about Adobe Photoshop and related offerings. I have managed to stick with the Gimp and for quick edits, Paint.net.

Websites

As I write this, the site has managed WordPress hosting through WordPress.com. Because of the recent selling of data by the owners of WordPress.com, Automattic, and how it was handled, I’m considering other options.

I shouldn’t have to unvolunteer myself after having been volunteered by a host. That’s just crappy.

In looking around, I am seeing more cost effective ways for me to continue web presences. When I started on WordPress.com, I was very tired of constantly having to wrangle issues with Drupal. When I want to write a post, I don’t want to get sidetracked by a bunch of stuff that the content management system needs to have done. In that regard, WordPress.com has worked well for me.

I’m presently looking at hosting and content management system options, which include self-hosted WordPress, managed hosting WordPress sites, Drupal 102, and Django.

At the core of this is having as much control over what I write as possible. How the data sale Automattic has done with WordPress.com and Tumblr has debased the trust I had in the platform, and trust is not something that comes easily. Also, the tiered payments are not that great when one looks at what one can do outside of WordPress.com. They are pricing themselves out of a market.

Social Media

I’ve moved off of Facebook and all offerings by Meta, and I’ve moved away from centralized social media and generally use Mastodon now to connect to the Fediverse. It’s been a good move, overall, and despite not being connected with as many people, the number of visitors I have on the websites has increased slightly and has become more geographically diverse.

Because of the training of AIs with user data, and how much information is collected on those centralized sites, I simply don’t wish to be a part of them.

LinkedIn I’m somewhat active on – once a day – just to look at what people would pay me for because of bills. Historically, LinkedIn has never gotten me jobs or contracts, and I’m careful not to write full posts on LinkedIn because I’m pretty sure Microsoft is training it’s generative AI models on what people write there. I don’t know that they used linked content, so that’s a risk.

I have paid for Google One, but I don’t store anything I consider of real value there.

If your what you write has value, people will use it, and that I have no issue with. When they use it and demand you pay for stuff you helped contribute to, there is a principle involved.

Programming

Yeah, I code. Most people don’t see it, but off and on I get a wild idea and run with it even if it goes nowhere, particularly because that ‘nowhere’ is not a place my mind has gone before. Python has become my weapon of choice, though I still work with C, C++, .Net and PHP when I have to.

Overall Philosophy.

The guidelines I use at the time of this writing are pretty simple.

  • If there is a Free/Open Source tool for the job that is workable, work with it3.
  • What I create shouldn’t be used to train an AI unless I’m compensated. Granted, that’s like a mosquito floating on it’s back with an erection demanding the draw bridge be raised, but I think it’s important to draw that line. I think we all should. So I do.
  • Give credit where credit is due because I would like to be credited with things, not out of some narcissistic trait but because I like discussing ideas and making them better and the only way to be able to do that is through being known for that. Our human creativity is not found by looking at one thing one way but by looking at many things many ways.
  • Be human.

  1. I never would have thought I would use a phrase like, “traditional search engine results”, for I remember when search engines were cute kittens and now they have become ill-tempered cats always asking for food. ↩︎
  2. Drupal is an odd one. It’s been steered very hard toward the Enterprise, and it’s unforgiving between major version releases which is why I tend to steer people away from it these days unless they have a big budget or really need it’s abilities out of the box. Most people don’t. I don’t think I do, presently, but to do some of the things I want in the future, I may have to reach for it. ↩︎
  3. Using Scrivener undercuts this, but Scrivener gives me so much of what I like for writing the book stuff that I went that route. ↩︎

The Culture of ‘Why?’

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

There are times when the world falls away to make way for a new one in my mind, where focusing on one train of thought can change the way I see the world. These are moments unscheduled or planned, usually starting with a question. A simple question. Why.

If you forget how to ask that question, listen to a child and their litany of ‘why?’. They want to know, they want to understand, they want to… well, unfortunately, they generally want to be adults. Poor things.

The asking of ‘Why?’ is so important, and so many people seem to forget it’s importance.

Richard Feynman illustrates the point pretty well with his response in the video below.

Nobel Laureate, Richard Feynman, asking ‘Why?’.

There’s a particular feeling that goes with it. A great example of expressing that feeling is by Nikola Tesla.

I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success … Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.

‘Marconi and Tesla: Pioneers of Radio Communication‘ (2008), Nikola Tesla, quoted by Tim O’Shei

I’ll sit sometimes with a cup of coffee, looking out onto the world, and just consider a question, or a problem, and in doing that I find other questions to answer, and before I know it the coffee will get cold, the sun may have moved significantly. In doing this, though, I update the world that is built in my mind, the reality that I exist in, and by changing the reality I exist in, I change.

When you’re younger, you try the bigger questions. Life, the Universe, Everything sort of questions. It’s a lot to contemplate to answer those big questions, and you end up asking lesser questions. Decades later, you might have made some progress on the big questions, but if you have you probably just borrowed someone else’s big questions and were fed their answers.

Then, you have to figure out why that answer isn’t right, or why it’s not good enough – why it’s not satisfying. And you start again.

From professional lives to the universe around us, there’s a daisy chain of ‘Why?’ that needs answers, if only we dare ask the questions and be rigorous about the answers.

The Social Spiral.

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Yesterday, I wrote a bit about echo chambers, social networks and ant mills. I had a conversation with ChatGPT about it – if you can call it a conversation – and it told me that the equivalent of ant mills couldn’t exist in human society because humans think critically.

That seems like a hallucination. So I asked it if human critical thinking was in decline, and it gave me a list of pros and cons and did not take a side. It basically said, “You figure it out, moron, if you’re a critical thinker you should be fine.”

There seems to be an implicit assumption by large language models that we humans are smarter than we are in practice. I’m not going to say that humans are stupid, but I will say that humans do stupid things all the time and that what we call intelligence is pretty self-referential and easily gamed for the good of some.

The point, I suppose, is that ChatGPT communicates as high an opinion of humanity as humanity likes. That seems dangerous, but I’m ok with it handing out participation trophies to everyone because… well, because after some sleep, it became apparent to me that we’re all actually in the equivalent of an ant mill, except it incorporates elements of musical chairs.

Regardless of where we are on the planet these days, we are born into some culture and within some geopolitical line drawn sometime in the past, usually more than 100 years ago where 100 years is roughly 4 generations of humans. A lot changes in 100 years.

Within those geopolitical borders, there are these patterns as we grow as individuals. Education, work, procreation, death. Born into systems made generations ago in what hopefully made sense then, the systems don’t get updated too often and historians call them revolutions. Agricultural revolution. Industrial Revolution. People work less physically hard, but productivity is expected and productivity is pretty hard to define because it’s subjective. In this day and age, ‘productivity’ is almost always defined by someone else or something else.

And so we spiral around following each other, just going through the motions expected of us because to dare to think of another way would lead us from the spiral, away from where everyone else is.

People generally don’t like the spiral, so they gravitate to people they believe know a way out of the spiral and follow them, which explains why Donald Trump and Elon Musk have followers. These cults of personality persevere because the spiral sucks and, as oddball as they are, they are followed by those who hate the spirals enough that they are willing to put their own critical thought on hold because, really, the system sucks for a lot of people.

In the United States, who best represents the system? Presently, traditional Republicans and Democrats. Generations have seen what they have to offer, and that offer is at best shitty for most people, so when Trump comes along and shakes things up, the chance to get out of the spiral – however untrue – is attractive.

It seems like we’re seeing this a lot around the world. People don’t want to grind away in circles, but even the cults of personality that seem so attractive to some are just different spirals. All that needs to happen, really, is people stop following each other around and using their own critical thought – at least according to a generative artificial intelligence that thinks highly of we humans because we told it that it should.

We aren’t lost. We know exactly where we are because we’ve seen it all before on the last revolution, and it’s going to take more than funky hairstyles, speaking styles, and gravitas to get beyond it. It’s going to require substance, and just like the ant mill, all we have to do is be willing to blaze a new trail.

Now go off and think critically to help us get out of this spiral.