bias

How Relevant Are The Lenses We Look Through?

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Shifting and exploring perspectives is one of the things I do a lot of. A lot of creativity and innovation, in my experience, comes from just that. I’ve thought of them as lenses that we look through – and how we look through them is defined by various modes of thought that we employ.

Let’s start with the lenses. We look toward the future through lenses scratched by the past – we can call the scratches ‘traumas’ in some contexts that give them a negative connotation, but in some contexts learning not to burn your hand on the stove is what I think is a necessary trauma.

Bias isn’t always error.

If we dare step out of our individual shells, we see things like this culturally as well. I’m pretty sure when a tribe got sick after someone showed up that didn’t belong to the tribe, they might consider anything foreign bad. Anyone that doesn’t look like them, doesn’t worship the same ‘God’, or… the list can go on. So we stare through that lense, culturally, wherever the accident of geography of birth placed us.

This in turn impacts the individual lens, which has a feedback loop to the cultural lens, and if you get a group of people who share the same view through the lens, it can create a subculture or if enough people are involved, can churn to become a part of the greater cultural lense.

When healthy, such lenses can keep people from harm.

When unhealthy, those lenses can be harmful not just to those who look through them but those who are looked at through them. Those that are looked at also look through lenses much the same. Perspectives can clash violently, which we’re seeing every day in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Africa – but it’s probably happening right outside your door.

One of the keys to understanding situations is being able to understand the lenses. How do you look at something? How does someone else? Why do you look at it that way? Why do they?

In this way, we sometimes find ourselves taking shortcuts again – they are evil, they are stupid, they are animals, etc. Once that happens these days, there’s bound to be violent change (but not necessarily violence) not too soon after, and more importantly, it keeps people from actually resolving whatever issues they have.

That doesn’t seem like it’s progress. So how do we fix that?

That seems like one of the biggest questions of humanity. I don’t have the answer and I would worry if someone said that they had one. In my own life, my experiences with this have had inconsistent results and I think that’s because sometimes being self-aware and mindful are not enough. Sometimes no matter how we try we’re looked at through lenses that we have no control over.

Maybe the trick is everyone understanding their own lenses, their own biases, but is it a bias if everyone around you looks through the same lens, as in an echo chamber? Not everyone will do that.

It begins with questioning our own beliefs in contexts outside of our comfort zone, maybe.

Shades of Grey’s Anatomy

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

There’s been a lot of talk of diversity that I’ve experienced since the 1990s, and what is accused of being diversity is just an addition of more labels and managing interactions.

I can say that from where I sit that it’s all been pretty stupid.

I like medical dramas, and when I get an opportunity, I watch them because there are quite a few things I miss from my days of being a Navy Corpsman. ‘House‘ remains my all time favorite, followed by ‘ER‘. ‘Greys Anatomy‘ has managed longevity and has some interesting stuff in there too – and as it happens, it’s what prompted this post.

In speaking with someone here in Trinidad, I brought up a surgery enacted in Grey’s Anatomy. I don’t recall the details, but the person I was speaking with is an East Indian1 doctor. That doctor told me he was disgusted with Grey’s Anatomy because they don’t represent Indians often and when they do they go to the less preferred stereotypes.

Being half East Indian myself, I was curious. I don’t really identify as East Indian or any other race since I am mixed, but I acknowledge that a lot of people had sex that lead to me and they were pretty diverse. Still, particularly in Trinidad and Tobago, because of my name, in some circles I’m seen as East Indian and all the stereotypes that come with it. It’s good to be aware of how one is perceived.

What’s funnier is that Indians, particularly those in the United States, generally have had a snobbish attitude with me, which is particularly amusing because they’re upset that some of my ancestors left India before their ancestors did. Worse, being of mixed descent, I’m not of any particular ‘race’, so I’ve found some of the sneering Indian ‘would not wipe my feet on your back’ sort of rhetoric almost normal and comical from that section of society. When someone tells you who they are by how they behave, don’t ignore them.

So I watched Greys Anatomy a while, and I saw what was meant. There was a glaring lack of East Indian representation and, when when they did show up, they were fired. Meanwhile, LGBQT is trendy on the show, mixed marriages, empowered Americans of African descent are sharing power with their former masters, Asians get a little better than token representation (Dr. Christina Yang left after some seasons as I understand it), the little Mexican representation was a single bisexual character and the Mexican Day of the Dead and… having seen the last season’s episodes, everyone is getting represented except Indians.

I don’t care, really. It’s not as if Indians have been particularly nice to me – quite the opposite. However, I do also know that not all Indians are like that, my experiences notwithstanding. Across the Internet, I’ve interacted with many from India who just view me as ‘another human being’, which is all I have ever expected of anyone, and all I try to offer.

It bugged me and so I did a search on it to find that I was not the only person to look at this, and that I was also quite late in looking into it. One of the better articles I found was from May 2020: ‘Grey’s Anatomy is failing its audience in a significant way‘.

It’s the United States, where 8.5% of physicians are of Indian descent – so if there are 10 doctors on the show, almost 1 of them should be of Indian descent to be representative. They even have an association – the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin, founded in 1982. Nevermind the nurses.

Now, there is a culture of East Indians. Famously, Richard Feynman (Nobel Laureate) was passing through Trinidad and Tobago and had a taxi driver take him around Port of Spain. The taxi driver, according to Feynman, observed that the East Indian parents would lose their teeth to send their children to get an education. This, however, is not a stereotype of Indians as much as a stereotype of immigrants.

People who leave one bad place to get to another generally appreciate that they have it better and they generally want better for their children, enough so that they make sacrifices like that mainly because they’re starting at zero – or even below zero. Despite stereotypes of crime, partially earned I expect, there are immigrants I have seen who just work hard.

In Costa Rica, I saw it in Nicaraguans who were disliked in Costa Rica. In the United States, I saw the Mexicans, and later more Puerto Ricans and later still those from Republica Dominicana. I saw it in the 1970s with East Indians from Trinidad of my father’s generation and earlier in the United States. It’s not about race, or any culture other than immigrant culture. These are people who wanted a better life for themselves and their children and showed how much they wanted it.

So, Grey’s Anatomy is pretty annoying in this regard for people I expect are East Indian, and judging from what has happened in the show since 2020, Shonda Rhimes doesn’t seem to care much about it.

What’s most interesting to me is that there has been a lot of focus on ‘non-binary’ gender, but not enough about ‘non-binary’ race. In the United States, you’re pretty much white or a shade of brown that is still treated as black.

…Diversity has been at the forefront of the Hollywood discourse in the last few years, but it shouldn’t be confined to black and white. When certain minorities are excluded from the conversation, it is the same problem.

Meehika Barua, ‘Grey’s Anatomy is failing its audience in a significant way‘, DigitalSpy, 18 May 2020

There’s a lot more to black and white in these conversations that should be outdated, and I’ll get into that with the next post.

1 In the Caribbean, particularly in Guyana and in Trinidad and Tobago, ‘East Indian’ is used to distinguish from ‘West Indian’, and in acknowledges the orphaning of the Indian diaspora who left India during it’s period of British Rule to attempt a better life somewhere else as indentured laborers.

A Personal Twist on Influence.

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`

I wrote in response to something today1, “We’re all pretending to be someone else.”

We all are. Every day. We hear about masks, we hear about all sorts of other things. Generally speaking, most people who know me will say I am as I present myself, for better and worse, but I’d rather be judged by who I am than live too many lies at the same time.

I write that because I’ve been watching this ABC News series, “Age of Influencers” (Hulu), and there’s some pretty serious stuff in there that should have people really considering what media they consume. The psychology of selling seems to have eviscerated the psychology of sanity in the cases presented.

If you’re on the Internet, you should watch “Age of Influencers”. Since it was produced in the United States, it has that bias. We had someone in Trinidad and Tobago, a man, advising women to wipe themselves with newspaper if they had a yeast infection, and other ‘bush remedies’, which should be embarrassing but apparently isn’t to this particular fellow. I won’t even bother linking him.

Stupid shouldn’t be famous.

This lead to some introspection, too, about how I curate my thoughts online in writing. I don’t know that I would have what it takes to be a caricature of myself on Instagram, or TicTok, or whatever. The land of duck lips and caked on makeup with filters and… I’m not sure I could do that.

I’m more of the ‘chat in the coffee shop while disheveled’ sort of person. I’m not going to get dressed up to stand in my own home. That seems silly. In fact, I will go ahead and say that it is silly. I don’t know why people are attracted to it, but it’s like moths to a candle.

No, I write about things that are on my mind and as people do follow my writings (thank you for those who do!), I hope to do something strange and weird to the Internet: Stuff of value. I’d like people to read something on my sites and say, “that makes sense to me”, or, “I need to think about this.”

We’re stuck on this planet, and we can chase each other’s wallets around or we can try to figure out what we’re doing, whether we should be doing it, and if we should be doing it how we could be doing it better.

I think about things. Just a few moments ago I was contemplating whether our ability and need to detect weather has diminished as our progress allowed us detect weather. During the Ice Age, things were cold and miserable. When you woke up, you didn’t need a weatherman to tell you that. It was likely just rated by how cold and miserable that particular day was.

We take ourselves way too seriously, and by that I also mean all that we have created in modern society, from currency to marriage. We’re people, but we’re silly people and because of that we should not take ourselves too seriously.

Right now, there are things going on that we can’t control within our own society, and most of us are just too busy leading silly lives to notice.

Everyone’s in a hurry and mostly not getting anywhere. Some of us spend our entire lives waiting for a moment that will not come, all because we were told in our childhood by people we trusted that it would come – or we found it in a book we believed, or maybe we read some rabbit entrails. They are equally arbitrary, though reading rabbit entrails might tell if you’re pregnant.

We’re out fighting over pronouns. I have no other real quibble with LGBQT+ folks but the pronoun thing is a bit of appropriation, because in the pre-pronouned world, when you wrote, “They are not happy”, it meant a group of people was not happy. It had commensurate weight because of the implicit number of people.

My issue is one of language. The rest of it is quite simply not my business, just as my sexual identity is not yours. Do as you wish with whomever you wish with consent, you don’t need mine to exist. And hey, use the bathroom. I don’t care about that either. Seems to me those are petty things.

Women’s rights? Well, I don’t know why people turned the clock backwards. I certainly did not want that, and to add to that suddenly humans who at least had functioning testicles for a while are competing against women in events? Ladies, I apologize, this seems a bit much for any group.

Women are going through a rough period, but that doesn’t mean that they should take it out on us men either. Instead of tearing men down, maybe elevate the ones who you do like. There are plenty of good men on the planet who don’t call themselves feminists but believe in overall equality, or better, equity. Yes, it’s a patriarchal system, but that system didn’t benefit all men, it benefited very specific groups of men. Go look up where ‘whipping boy‘ came from.

There’s a point to this. I am biased. I do have biases. We all do, and if we admit them, we can work around them. As an example, a majority of people on this planet are sexist to an extent based solely on which gender they want to have sex with.

Lately I’ve been writing lately about a lot of the underlying concepts we have to use to understand the implications of this Information Age. Most lately that has been about artificial intelligence… and I have been doing it with 2 approaches: ‘introducing tech/artificial intelligence to humanity‘ standpoint and then from the ‘introducing humanity to artificial intelligence/tech‘. The concept of bias plays a very large part of that.

Understanding our biases is important for our future. It’s something we can do. If there’s something I’d like to influence you to do, it would be to examine your biases. Examine what you believe and compare it with what you can demonstrate or observe.

Think. I want to influence people to think. It’s a romantic idea, I suppose.

1Someone, once again, had had someone create a rogue copy of their Facebook profile and claimed to have been hacked. Not the same thing.

A Canvas Of Time.

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

Yesterday, when I wrote about meaning, and I want to propose one to consider.

We are all given a canvas of time. It helps to picture a canvas, or a blank page. We’re even given some crayons when we start off, and we decorate our time with them.

Later, we move onto more complicated stuff. Pens and markers, where we begin to realize that mistakes cannot be undone.

We move on to charcoal, maybe, and learn how messy life is and that when we are not decorating our decoration smudges the rest of our life- which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Later, we get paint, moving from watercolor to oil paints. I don’t know, I failed art in secondary school because I never did my art on time and you can’t time travel wet paint to dry.

The point is that this is probably our meaning. How we use our time is influenced by our biases, the biases other try to introduce, and those biases in turn influence what we think is ‘success’.

So here’s a story that is true, and how I came up with this. It started, like most things, from bullshit. From trying to help someone understand someone important to them that I happened to understand.

Some years ago, before his father died, a young cousin of mine was telling me how terrible a businessman his father was. My cousin had been studying business and at the time it seemed like he was good at it.

I was sipping coffee, head down, and I listened to his tirade of all the things his father had done wrong. As far as business, to be honest, that Uncle, like his brothers, wasn’t very good, and after talking to a good business man about my grandfather, I understood why.

“…and that’s why the business is not a success, and I don’t think he will ever be a success either.”, was the end of his tirade. I remember I chuckled and met his eyes, suddenly feeling a lot older than I had moments before, a new weight settling on my shoulders.

I told him that his father had managed to provide for 4 children, sending 2 of them to college in the United States, and his last – him – through a local satellite college. He had bought all the boys cars – the daughter married – and one brother was setup with his own house, another was sent abroad to Canada and partially supported for a while, and he was living in a house that was once home to all of them and then 2 families at peak.

He had seen all but one of his children married, and the bachelor was sitting across from me and would soon be married. He had followed his passion of religious knowledge and even tried practicing it a bit. He had been married himself for at least 40 years, I don’t know, and had taken care of himself and his wife.

There are times when we sons think our fathers are idiots. It works both ways. But my Uncle, despite how much his son disagreed with his business practices and other things, was certainly not a failure. He put his family first, and every bad decision was generally a decision where he put his family before his business.

My Uncle, despite my own misgivings, was someone who had found his own success, based on his values. My cousin grumbled, and maybe it stuck, maybe it didn’t, but it stuck with me.

On the canvas of life, the theme was family and connection. If you were looking for corporate art, he wasn’t your guy. I’d say that was a success.

The question is figuring out what is success for you. There’s your meaning.

I’m trying to figure mine out still, so please ignore the mess, and be careful what you touch and where you step. Wet paint everywhere.

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”.

The Red Dots of Life.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 36 Comments
_red dot

There’s a life skill to have that I think these days is more important than most. Probably the easiest way to explain it is by the ubiquitous cat and laser pointer that, by now, people in the Amazon jungle likely know about by carrier parrot.

Those of us that have had a cat of any generation have played with cats in one form of the other, but when the Theodore Maiman created the first laser in 1960 at Hughes Research Laboratory I’m fairly certain that he didn’t think that it would become something carried in pet stores. For those of you who don’t know, in the early days of the laser pointer, it was marketed for humans to use on humans for much the same reason.

In the days of boards and projectors, it was marketed as a tool to focus people on things. It worked really well until Microsoft decided to put out PowerPoint and making every meeting involving it a snooze fest. There was that window where the laser pointer had it’s day, only to be promoted to cat tormentor.

We think the cat is playing, but what is ‘playing’? The dictionary definition is doing something for enjoyment, and yet we don’t know that a cat necessarily enjoys attacking something it can’t actually stick in it’s mouth, which is where every other cat toy and other household item that catches their interest ends up. It’s instinctual, and one can argue that it’s a way of practicing hunting.

famous-cat-meme-which-started-and-launched-the-website-i-can-haz-cheezburger

You Can Haz Cheezeburger?
How would you feel if someone kept sticking a cheeseburger image in front of you? You’d practice grabbing it and would never get it. I don’t imagine it would be fun. Granted, moving laser dots on the carpet don’t have a taste other than carpet, but work with me.

Now take a breath and look around you every day and find the red dots in life. These are basically just some group of people trying to direct you to do something. Maybe it’s a good thing like washing your hands.

Maybe it’s a thing where when you’re hungry or thirsty, maybe that last sticky advertisement will guide your money to a place where you think you’ll get what you’re thinking you want.

I don’t even need to name food chains, they likely already popped into your heads. Maybe just the word ‘cheeseburger’ had you thinking of a particular food chain because you associate that word with their product.

no cheeseburger

The movie ‘Detached’ has a clip going around now about ubiquitous assimilation. It’s about those red dots and developing our minds beyond the quick and dirty memes that get passed around like a joint at a barbecue. They get passed around by people who never read Richard Dawkins books much less ‘The Selfish Gene’. They likely have no idea why we call them memes. They’re just memes, which occupy attention like little red dots. We have marketing trying to sell products, we have people trying to market their own ideas with memes, and then sometimes some of those memes work to the benefit of everyone.

And sometimes you just get a mouthful of something that’s blech. Sometimes you might get a good cheeseburger, sometimes you might get a bad cheeseburger, you never know. Social media has people, little ones too, just chasing red dots.

That particular scene from ‘Detached’ has Adrian Body’s masterful delivery of such a simple concept that we should not only be teaching children but also reminding adults of. If your clicky clicky ain’t getting you cheeseburgers you like, stop chasing them.

Criticism is often met by gaslighting, blaming an individual for not getting the cheeseburger that was shown. Somewhere in some very fine print that you need to have compound eyes to read there’s a catch somewhere. As we grow older we learn to expect them – but rarely read the fine print because… you effectively need compound eyes. Imagine having your lawyer look over every software license, copyright license, terms of service document… you’d get nothing done, and you need to get things done.

What do you need to get things done? Are you chasing red dots again? What are you actually accomplishing? Do you have a sense of accomplishment? Do you get the cheeseburger in your mouth feeling, or do you get the red dot on carpet taste?

We need to spend time on ourselves so that we are less susceptible to bullshit red dots. Shine your own for yourself.

And maybe think about what the cat wants when you play with it.

Untitled Introspection.

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It seems a lifetime ago when, having gained radio privileges in boot camp, a young Seaman Recruit stood looking down aisles of perfectly lined up aisles of bunks when Pink Floyd’s, “Welcome to the Machine” started playing on the radio. It was one of those moments when everything came into focus, where the mirror and the self have no boundaries. There are moments like this throughout our lives, but there’s a reason I picked this one.

While I’ve not been publishing everything online, puzzling over the various narratives that have impacted me and whether they were worth keeping or discarding. In discarding things, I found myself floating, trapped sometimes not by narratives but by a lack of narrative to guide me through wherever I was transitioning to, if even I was transitioning at all. Trapped

When you start peeling away the narratives, you start peeling away the destinations those narratives provided. In the simplest form, narratives get us from point A to point B. It’s more complex with interactions of many things, but at their core, that’s what narratives do – they give us a way to get somewhere, even if that somewhere isn’t really where we want to go, or the end result is to be someone who we don’t want to be.

We’re born into them, we build other narratives on top of them, and even what we can imagine later on because we’ve been guided by narratives. This is not a bad thing – but it can be. When there is a sense of being trapped, there’s something that’s wrong. For me, I don’t know that there wasn’t anything wrong. I found that to push beyond the boundaries, I needed to find where they were and why they were there in the first place. It takes time, honesty with one’s self, and lots of time because we’re almost never honest with ourselves.

Frank ZappaBut when things do go wrong, we do need to look at that. When we factor in other people who have other narratives, as has happened with globalization combined with the social media explosion, tempers flare, cracks begin to show, and we pretty much have the world as it is today – an unapologetic mess of battles of narratives, flaring here, simmering there, and ice elsewhere.

Now, if you’ve never heard of Frank Zappa, he has a great quote where he talks about decorating a piece of time, in the context of a guitar solo – but it’s something we all do with our lives. There are the beaten paths of life that society presses upon us, and then there are the parts of life where we find ourselves making paths. Some people stick to the beaten path more than others. Speaking for myself, the beaten paths rarely fit – if ever.

Decorate as we wishIf there’s a book on it, it’s either a beaten path or may become one. It lacks originality, that shiny luster, after a while – either it succeeds or fails as a narrative based on the number of people who subscribe to the narrative. Tolkien made Hobbits, Dwarves and Elves cool, and all that followed – as original as some of it may have seemed – was from a beaten path. What Tolkien did was borrow from other things to make something original, compelling, and even a message of hope in camaraderie. And this is one of the reasons, aside from the personal, that I started unraveling my narratives.

Somewhere along the way I sort of got lost, which I expect is par for the course. A lot has happened in my life, and I expect yours, and if you have the luxury of time to unravel everything it can be uncomfortable since these narratives have been the things pressing you in this direction and that to take you to where you think you’re supposed to go.
a-person-trapped-in-a-prison-of-their-brain-thumb
This seemed all very new to me – maybe it was the lack of humanities in my formal education when I was younger. In secondary school, the options were ‘sciences’ or ‘modern studies’, and the science path chose me more than I chose it, and the English Literature fell by the wayside. The nuances of humanity, which we all need to know better, are best described in our art – not our science.

Did I ‘find myself’? Nope, I think that ‘finding yourself’ stuff is bullshit. But I got to see more past myself as I figured out what was behind myself – and I found a point where I needed help, so I started seeing a psychologist and it has helped me find things I didn’t see before. The right questions can help us see things anew, the right observations can give us insight and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with enlisting a professional to help with that.
With a bit more confidence in knowing my own biases and understanding why I trod my paths.

And merging with the rest of the world in moments.

Broken

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 5 Comments

266843669_10165786532015150_2257642047355982724_nDouglas Adams was on to something with The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. If it were an option, I would have left the planet decades ago in the hope of finding something better, running away from the problems. I’m not proud. I’d love to be transported into a future where just changing the polarity of shields would solve a problem.

It just doesn’t work that way, nevermind the pet peeve I have with Roddenberry naming the USS Enterprise when it’s mission wasn’t to protect merchant shipping. ‘Discovery’ might have been better, really.

These past years have shown plenty of weaknesses in systems that we humans have depended on for sometimes centuries. Everyone’s talking about how much of a problem the pandemic is when it’s only been a problem because antiquated systems continue to fail, and we continue to shore them up. I’m not saying we should descend into anarchy by any stretch, but looking around it’s pretty clear the anarchy of our world is having a field day with our systems.

Trust the governmentIt’s sensible to distrust systems that pretty consistently fail, and almost always these systems has something to do with government. Nobody, regardless of their political lean, goes out and blames the trees for bad weather. Nobody shakes their fist at a hurricane and says, “I didn’t vote for this!”.

Well, not yet anyway.

The speed with which we see the problems, globally, is sped by our ability to communicate while the response of government has not kept pace. Bureaucracy, as Gleick pointed out in ‘Faster’, was designed to slow change – it keeps things from happening too fast. For centuries mankind has been frustrated by systems that are slow. When things are slow, as individuals, we tend to find ways around them because we don’t have time for dealing with them. We’re busy running around trying to get shiny things to trade for things we need within other systems that are not working for lots of people.

Is that a condemnation? No, it’s an observation. As individuals, we don’t have the time to figure out everything that affects us because of the sheer complexity of the system. Right now (February, 2022), the Inland Revenue Service (IRS) in the United States is overwhelmed in processing tax returns – people haven’t gotten returns from 2020 (this is 2022), and the tax system is so complicated that an entire industry has been built around taxes.

Let’s take stock. The system by which monies are given to the government has become so complicated that people are making money off of making it simple. The only reason that’s not considered corruption is that the laws permit it – if I told you I could speed up a government process if you paid me, under different circumstances I could be a criminal. I’m not saying that people and companies that help with the tax returns are criminals. What I am saying is that the system got complicated enough that it’s easier to pay someone else to deal with, and that means people are paying money to get diminishing returns. Who wouldn’t be upset about that? How far have we come from hiding livestock from the King’s tax collectors?

“We are so POOR, sir…”

1555562_10152473548405197_3394893658298250242_nHaving lived here and there, and having visited here and there outside of the tourist traps -they are, after all, traps – I can say that the problem is global, and if there is a human somewhere that doesn’t have issues with the system of taxation, they are a distinct minority. We double down here, because how that money is spent is decided by people who win popularity contests. Politicians.

What’s more, in the United States, with the case Citizens United vs FEC, corporate spending entered U.S. politics and with that, marketing which has been used effectively to sell people stuff that they didn’t want by creating a need, or selling products that are less than useful, like politicians. There are children who will say that they want to be President and yet I have never met one who aspired to be a politician. Maybe I hang out in the wrong circles, but if you do too, well, we have the beginnings of something more than anecdotal.

Meanwhile, it seems like every media outlet is echoing a sentiment of how much is spent on things that people believe are important, such as education. This is not a good metric. I can go buy a car that meets my needs for a few thousand dollars or a few million dollars. If you spend a few billion dollars on education and students aren’t learning more, what does that spending mean? Worse than nothing, it means that money is being wasted. Is it the government’s money? The government says so, but whose money is it? The money of those governed, with the exception of monarchies, authoritarian states and oligarchies where they don’t bother being dishonest about it.

Things are broken. We live in an age where we can communicate faster and somehow we manage to say less in unit time about things that are important. How do we change that?

First, we have to recognize that there is a problem. Sure, we recognize that there are problems, but in the acknowledgement of some problems it’s always about them. They caused this. They did something, or they did not do something. They. Them. The exception would be those that use they and them as pronouns, and while I don’t have an issue with people asking to be called by specific pronouns, it seems like an odd set up for self-persecution when we always seem to blame thems and theys. That seems inconvenient for them, but it is what it is and the flag has already flown.

When we weed through that mess and stop blaming people out of a matter of convenience, what we find is that there are people who simply believe differently about things. And why is that?

Education, largely, or lack thereof – and not training for jobs, but actual education, and ongoing education. Marketing of narratives for politicians and their parties. Biases in cultures we don’t understand, even in the same countries, much less what is known about other countries. And, largely the most important aspect: personal responsibility that gets lost in over complicated systems.

Beyond

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

VISIONS: Seeing the Aurora in a New LightThe world we accept tends to be the world we see and we assume that we see all there is – but what we see is never all there is.

How we see it, too, is a larger issue. We have two systems of thinking (see Thinking Fast And Slow by Daniel Kahneman for a more in depth look into this) that we know of so far. The first system gives us our feelings and inclinations – our ‘gut’, as it were – and the second system is how we decide whether they become our attitudes and intentions.

This simplification certainly doesn’t represent these systems and how they interact, but the example provides a firm enough basis to realize that our prejudices, which are not limited to those we consider bad (sexism, racism, et al), are decided at some point by system 2, our rational and conscious mind, and left untouched unless we decide to revisit these prejudices.

What we see is all there is, even when we know what we see is not all there is. We can only act on what we know, and as disturbing as that should be, it isn’t. And this is where mistakes come in to being valuable.

Mistakes, when recognized, teach us to look for more beyond what we knew. In the graveyard of these mistakes we find progress.

And every day, we should strive for beyond, if only to make more mistakes to bury.