#culture

Of Spheres And Shapes

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

There’s a lot to consider these days regarding intelligence and consciousness. I’ve developed my own thoughts over time, as we all have to some degree, but few of us it seems have the time or inclination to really sit and think about such things.

What separates us from other forms of life on the planet? Only we have excised ourselves from the rest of life on the planet as far as we know, and that’s fairly narcissistic of our species, a species where we accuse individuals of our species of narcissism – which must mean that they’re pretty bad if they merit a diagnosis rather than suffer armchair psychologists around the world.

When we boil down what reality is for us, it’s all derived from our senses. We look, we smell, we touch and we listen – these are our inputs, and from it we develop a model of the world within what we call our minds, which we blame our brains for. Yet there are other senses we have related to our own bodies and how we physically and emotionally feel at any given time, and influences how we perceive the world.

How that interacts with others is akin, if not the same thing, as a ‘sphere of influence’ – something my father often talked about, since he had heard about spheres of influence somewhere: I’d read all the same books he had, sometimes even before he got finished reading them. I don’t know where he was introduced to the concept, but the concept is worth fleshing out in an era where we’re all data streams to fund some billionaire’s stab at a version of success that seems disassociated with the rest of the planet.

It is always fashionable to point out others live in bubbles, and saying that billionaires live in bubbles doesn’t let us off the hook. Some people admire the bubbles and want to get into a bubble – a sphere with that much influence.

I’ve been listening to Lex Fridman podcasts on YouTube in the background off and on over the past month, and I forget in which of them he mentioned that he wanted to use his influence for good in an election year, or in some other thing, and I admired his honesty in that and worried that his own sphere wasn’t broad enough to truly have an effect I would desire. Often he seems a supportive role in whomsoever he talks to. I forced myself to listen to his episode with Elon Musk – at least one of them, they seem to talk offline a lot – and in that podcast there seemed a lot of soft pitches to Musk, and much of it was nothing more than what I call an advertorial.

To his credit, the casual listener may not have picked up on that with Musk, and those who want to be like Musk (in whatever way) wouldn’t want to notice it, but as someone who is not impressed with Musk, I forced myself to listen to the interview and be as objective as possible. Musk, like everyone else, wants to make the world a better place, but the way that he sees the world is often incompatible with reality in my mind. That being said, I listened and found myself mildly impressed with how human he came across. Yet when I thought through everything, it was a mildly entertaining soft pitch for Grok throughout, while not actually challenging Musk.

The comments on the video were quite supportive of Musk. It’s a hit. Lex Fridman, then, would see how many views the episode had, read the comments, and think it was all wonderful – but having listened to many of these sessions, and watching the body language in the videos, some of those interviewed (and I include Musk) weren’t really challenged and where criticism of them was either ignored or simply peacefully bridged, as if the opinions didn’t matter.

And yet, there were gems, like this one with Sara Walker. It’s long, it’s worth it, and while she does seem to have what I call a ‘Valley Girl vocal tic’ which I generally don’t find endearing and often have trouble taking seriously. ‘Fer shure!’ and stuff like that have been grossly overdone with shallow movies, and isn’t something I hear often outside of that context – but she is amazingly well thought, and like me, she likes playing with words (and also like me, apparently, doesn’t think in words).

It was a soft pitch for her upcoming book, too, but in this context – and I’ll give Musk credit for saying this, paraphrased – advertising that is contextual to what a person wants or needs at a time is content. Well, maybe, it depends on how the want or need was created. It happens that she was talking about things that I was thinking about and she randomly popped up in YouTube. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, watch the video. She’s quite well thought on all of this. She’s someone I wouldn’t mind having coffee with, if she could put up with my speaking style – I imagine it works both ways. Regardless of how Sara Walker says it, she says a lot worth listening to1.

When ideas collide in the ether between we humans, it’s because of language communicating a common concept between people. It can be between two people, and that develops a common language. It can happen within a group of people who work or play with the same things, which gives us lingos. On rare occasions, these lingos – words or acronyms – can go mainstream, as the meme about memes did by Richard Dawkins. And even then they can be curtailed by languages2, and when it transcends language, it hits very mainstream.

This all fits really well with the concepts that Pierre Levy has communicate in his own way over the decades brilliantly. Being more steeped in being multilingual than I, reading his works was at first challenging.

One of the beautiful things that Levy writes on is IEML, a semantic language he created that has challenged me more than I have had the capacity to challenge it. I have yet to see someone come up with an equivalency, which may exist. I have also yet to see anyone approach a lot of knowledge management in the same regard, particularly in an age where Large Language Models are also ‘Literal Language Models’.

These spheres of influence are telling. Pierre Levy resides mainly in academia, and AI resides in the mouths of people marketing stuff that while initially impressive has demonstrated more and more that it can regurgitate the opinions of others based on what it has read. This marketers have celebrated as a success, and this I have seen as a limitation that more data is not going to solve.

‘Spheres of Influence’ also… aren’t spheres. They are shaped by what we are exposed to, and when people focus on one aspect I describe it as wobbling, because these ‘spheres’ spin, and it’s convenient to talk about spheres since they are so perfect – but we are not perfect, we have our biases, some of us delve deeply into subjects and change our centers drastically. People who are more open minded would be more fluid, like water, and those who are closed minded can be like concrete.

It’s something to consider when we assess intelligence, consciousness, or our own lives – and what we’re being sold, or what we’re being told should be important to us.

This kind of stuff is part of the basis of the novel I’ve been working on. Would love to hear more from others, though my own sphere of influence on the internet is not that large. Comment below.

  1. Her book comes out in August 2024, and I’ll get a copy because of how she expressed what she did: “Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence”. I didn’t agree with everything she said, and that’s exactly why she’s worth reading for me. I may not know enough. 🙂 ↩︎
  2. I prefer the Spanish word idioma for language – it seems much more sensible to me as it encapsulates dialects as well. ↩︎

Wanted: Another Renaissance.

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

It’s hard not to feel at least a little dismayed every day these days. It seems that the news is full of headlines that twist knives of fear in our fragile human hearts. We’re largely kept pretty busy simply maintaining our own lives.

Food and shelter are as needed now as they were needed when our ancestors first slithered from the primordial ooze. Our bodies did not evolve to stand our environment, instead we wore the skins of those that had. We did not evolve to consume abundant vegetation, so we ate those that do, yet our bodies did not evolve to become predators.

In fact, compared to most animals on the planet, our bodies aren’t that evolved to suit the planet at all – we’ve been ‘cheating’ with technology, appropriating as much as we can from others on our planet. Our technology has evolved faster than we have, our impact on the planet has evolved more than we have, and our technology is not really being used to reduce that impact.

We communicated, we coordinated, and we took on greater tasks. Oral cultures formed and passed down information from generation to generation, but there were flaws with this sometimes as we played the telephone game (or Chinese Whispers) across time. Contexts changed. We figured out how to write things down – to literally set things in stone. From there we found more and more portable ways to write.

Imagine the announcements of tech companies back then: “New stone allows more words on it for the weight and the size! Less oxen needed to pull! They will pay for themselves!” and later, “Use Papyrus! Have a stone-free library!”

So at first only those who were literate were allowed to participate in writing, but more and more people became literate despite those who once controlled written language. In a few thousand years, we managed to spread literacy pretty well across humanity, and the cacophony of it began to build on the Internet.

And yet we ourselves still haven’t really evolved that much. We’re basically still living in caves, though our cave technology has increased to a level where we have portable caves and caves we stack on top of each other to great heights.

We’re still basically pretty much the same with more of us, and our technology almost provides enough for everyone, maybe, but our great civilization on the planet is hardly homogeneous in that regard. Most people can point to a place where people have less or more than themselves, and the theory of hard work allowing people to progress seems flawed.

Now that so many people can write, they get on social media and jibber-jabber about the things that they like, most of it just being sending packets of information around through links – some not reading what they pass along because it has a catchy headline that meets their confirmation bias. Others have learned how to keep people talking about things, or to start people talking about things, and despite having the capacity to think for themselves, they only talk about what they’re manipulated into talking about.

Our feeds fill with things that we fear. Election years have become increasingly about fear rather than hope – any hope is based on fear, and people just twist in place, paralyzed by a lack of options. The idea that we could, for example, have women control their bodies and not fund a foreign government’s version of Manifest Destiny. We could have a better economy and better healthcare that isn’t wrapped in a sinkhole of people making bets on our health and forcing us to do the same – insurance companies. We could do a lot of things, if people simply trod their own minds more thoughtfully.

We’re insanely busy getting the latest technology because… well, technology is what we have to evolve since we haven’t. Tech companies are the new politicians, making campaign promises with each new release. It can’t be ‘new and improved‘ – pick one; you can only improve on the old.

They promise us more productivity, implying that we’ll have more time to ourselves in our caves drawing on the walls when we spend more and more time being productive for someone else. We’re told this is good, and some of us believe it, and some of us tire of the bullshit we believed for so long.

We could use another renaissance, if only so that people begin thinking for themselves in a time when AI promises to do their writing – and their thinking.

A Moment Between Worlds.

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

I have been living in two very different worlds lately.

The world I share with you has been full of violence, protest, nonsensical conflations and corporations taking advantage of individuals. It’s dystopian, and the only real commodity worth trading in a species that likes trading everything else is hope. Yet hope is often weaponized as a way to get the mob to do as others wish. I’ve lived long enough to see the fruition of false promises, and I’ve lived short enough to still be seduced by hope sometimes.

The world that I will share with you when I get done with it views our humble little blue dot from a distance, through many different lenses. It’s been hard to get there over the past week, but when I get there I stay longer. Everything is better there, because everything is different there. In writing this fiction, this world that I enjoy creating and manipulating, maybe it will allow the readers respite from the world we share. It’s certainly big enough for everyone, I made sure of that.

Our universe is really, really big and we forget that too often, that we actually do have larger issues to contend with as a species than who called who what name, what boundaries dead people set on flat maps of a round world, and why someone farting in court should be newsworthy. From that other world, we’re all raving lunatics, watching people who get dressed up to go to events escaping reality in their own way and then imposing it upon them and then complaining that they did go and didn’t say things we agree with.

I simply don’t understand why people gave them the platform in the first place, but I expect it’s about the same escapism, living vicariously through people we put on pedestals. Fortunately, just about all the people I have on pedestals are dead and every year the pedestals have gotten shorter. Manipulating them to do what we want seems more democratic than the insults to democracy that we call democracy in all these countries. By all means, take your attention away from them – but don’t blame them for the attention you gave them in the first place. Maybe you grew a little and their pedestals have simply become shorter. That’s not their fault. You’ve simply outgrown them – maybe – because if the intent is to hurt them, you still have them on your mind.

From a distance, we all seem silly. Even me.

Between A Rock…

Yesterday I found a nice rock. I’m not kidding. I liked the rock. In front of people who respect me, I picked up the rock because I had plans for the rock. A rock. It’s silly. I saw some potential in it, the handful of quartz with sedimentary sandstone in parts of it.

I soaked it in water overnight after teasing some of the sediment out with a bit of wire. People are generating crappy content all this time with generative AIs, and here I was working on a rock. I went to the hardware store and bought small diamond files and tools for scraping out the sandstone from the rock, giving me holes that I will someday run roots from a bonsai through. I saw that in the rock yesterday before I picked it up, and this morning I banged that rock against another rock to break it along the sandstone fault lines, so that the rock will fit in one of the bonsai pots.

It certainly beat looking at the news. The news is definitely a hard place right now, and there’s not much I can do where I can see a tangible difference. Thus, it seems, I went back to humanity’s roots and was banging rocks together.

That’s a little insane. I do hope the nebari of the tree I pick will work with this stone. It will be the hard place from which the tree seems to grow. Like me. Like you. Like everything else on this wonderful blue dot I enjoy more and more from a distance than I do through the windows of technology.

We Need To…

the world around us, even when it’s painful, even when we have an escape, because to grok the world around us is to grok the need for escape – and what better than escape than to make the world into a place we want to escape to? Why can’t we do that instead?

I wish I knew the answer, though it seems so many don’t understand that there is a question in the first place.

Protesting The World.

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

I have avoided this topic for some time.

I oversaturated myself yesterday about the college protests over the Israeli-Hamas war, where civilians have been showing up dead faster than police can arrest protesters around the world in the United States. Clearly, I have a bias, and that bias is for civilians, not a ‘side’, but in supporting the civilians, I end up having to look hard at the people killing and maiming them.

The children didn’t do anything wrong but be born in an accident of geography that happens to be behind walls – or in front of them – on every side of their existence. That’s pretty shitty1.

As someone without a distinct tribe, that’s what I see. As a TCK and a hyper-multicultural, I’m not vested in the tribalisms of yesterday, the present, and the future. I just see people.

This morning, washing dishes, I thought about it, and I recalled my youth and what my mother said about cleaning my room.

Anecdote on Perspective

As a boy, my room was… well, not something that would pass any form of inspection. My mother, who then in the 1970s spent all day cleaning, boycotted my room for her own reasons – some selfish, some not – and tasked me with cleaning my room. This was one of the first responsibilities given to me, and I did not like it. Since I didn’t like it, I didn’t spend much time on it – but time is relative, and as a child, play time is always less time than responsibility time.

This did not work well for my mother, who would ask me if I had cleaned my room and I would say, “Yes!”. Of course I said that. The backyard beckoned, the friends on bicycles beckoned, even the dog beckoned. And, of course, it was never clean. She would stand at the door, look in my room, and say, “That’s not clean. Keep cleaning.”

I didn’t know what she meant. Everything is exactly where it should be, in my eyes, even the dirty socks in the toybox thrown there in a rush so I could go out and play. I had no idea what she meant.

One day, apparently after taking a deep breath, she stood at the door of my room and looked in and said, “Come here.” So I did, and she said, “When you look at your room, pretend that you’re me and look at your room from here.” From that vantage, I could see I had not hidden my mess as well as I had thought.

Soon, my room looked clean from that vantage point, a tribute to my mother showing a different perspective, flawed by being twice my height at the time. It was flawed for other reasons, but from her perspective, it worked because she didn’t have to look at a dirty room when she walked by2.

This would serve me well on Navy and Marine Corps bases: Learning what inspectors looked for and making sure it was sat(isfactory). But it didn’t teach me why the room had to be clean. That would happen as I matured.

Battles of Perspectives.

The world has become so polarized that it seems often we forget to consider things outside of ourselves, or our tribes. As someone generally outside of the tribalisms, I often see individuals and groups fighting over things that they disagree about and forgetting everything they agree about. Sometimes it’s a matter of social inertia. Not everyone is cut out to be a free thinking individual3. I used to get upset about the blind followers, but having interacted with them over a half-century, I understand why some of them are the way they are and are probably better off that way.

Even so, the leaders of groups have a responsibility to their followers to be mindful of what they’re doing. Eventually, because humans tend to more vocal disagreement than agreement, people split off and do their own thing – which gives us diversity of perspectives that we often ignore. As someone expressly against the killing of children, Israel’s actions and policies do not align with what I would be willing to agree with – yet I cannot deny that the Jews I have known over the years deserve a place to live in peace. Israel increasingly doesn’t seem to be that place for anyone. I’m sorry if that offends anyone, but if you have to kill children to protect yourselves, you have to wonder what you’re protecting yourself from.

On the flip side, I don’t think kidnapping civilians is something that’s tenable. In fact, it seems an act of desperation, that things are so bad that you need to make a point by absconding with another human to imprison them until someone else meets your terms. Anything negotiated at gunpoint only results in ceasefires, and ceasefires are just pauses in war where children are born to die when the ceasefire is over.

Many people are trying to clean the room by hiding their socks in their toyboxes when it comes to ethical stances, while some are simply protesting to make the world a better place – a better place from their own perspective.

Protests.

When things get bad enough, people are moved to side with something because they want to feel like they have done something. When I saw the invasion of Ukraine, I wanted to go over and help with the medical as a former Navy Corpsman, and explored it seriously only to find that I had become old, I had a wonky knee sometimes, that battlefield medicine had evolved a lot in tools and equipment, and that I would be a liability in a war zone4. I had purchased tickets to get there that I cancelled, not because of the potential for death or injury to myself, but because I could cause others to die or be injured.

It was humbling in ways that I still wrestle with at times.

So I got on Twitter, pre-Musk era, and supported there through social media, because I could do that but I found myself looking at the mob and seeing things that I considered overstepping. I pulled back. I still support Ukraine sovereignty, but I am careful about weighing the cost to others.

Protesting for or against something isn’t as high of stakes, but in a way it is. I believe in peaceful protest, but peaceful protest always gets people together with perspectives that may be slightly different, that we overlook because at the time they may work towards our ends – and sometimes that hits us in the soft nether regions later on and undoes the good we thought we were doing.

It’s like when the Soviet Union was still a thing. Pilots in Germany would come perilously close to starting a war as the pilots tested each other constantly. With too many people on alert for different perspectives interacting so closely, things can get very hairy very quickly. Sooner or later, something goes just a little too far and both sides need to pull back because they don’t actually want a war. Only fools want war, thinking it’s like a Hollywood production of Rambo. If fools were the only victims of other fools, humanity would be much stronger for it, but fools have a tendency to kill people who are not fools simply because they disagree with them – even if they’re on the same ‘side’. There’s really no such thing as friendly fire. Just fools with excuses.

We should first do no harm.

Israel And Palestine

The sad truth is that until now, Palestinian children weren’t really counted when they were alive and now we count their dead. The sad truth is that the whole situation could have been resolved decades ago and the Palestinians have found themselves to be convenient pawns of the big players in Middle Eastern politics. The sad truth is that those same children grow to become adults and don’t want to be pawns anymore.

It would seem that the protesters for the Palestinians have the same thought, that they see something that should be fixed and want it to be fixed. This I can agree with wholeheartedly and without reservation. It’s clean, it’s ethical, and it reflects the values of humanity that we’ve all been taught at some basic level.

What I cannot agree with is supporting Hamas. What I cannot agree with is supporting the policies of Israel that have galvanized the attention of the world by their ruthlessness and impunity for human life, as Russia has shown in Ukraine.

I’m all for people living peacefully, but that seems almost oxymoronic because of the lack of mindfulness of leaders of followers, and of followers that should know better.

Now the violence is spilling blood on the other side of the planet, all because we as a species have let the issue sit for far too long.

I don’t know what the answer is. I know what the answers aren’t.

The answer is not ignoring the problem – we’ve done that for decades. The answer is not funding weapons to one side, ally or not. The answer is not becoming as polarized as we allowed the whole situation to become. The answer is not creating laws that make it illegal to criticize a country’s policies and actions. The answer is not violence between protesting groups. The answer is not making the world more unsafe. The answer is not giving to one group at the cost of another. The answer is not electing politicians who ignore the problems because of election cycles while effectively shouting ‘squirrel!’ and pointing at some other issue.

Sometimes, we have to sit down and wrestle with our humanity and acknowledge how ugly we can be, even if our own tribes don’t see it because they’re too busy dehumanizing the other side.

Humans are always stronger together, except when humans are together.

So I go back to my favorite quote and wonder what we can build together that would make things better, because the world is broken and we can’t afford the amount of glue to fix it. We have the technology and will to do great harm, but no one seems as intent on the greater good.

We should change that, through social media, through interacting with each other even when we disagree, and find ways to build things because otherwise we’ll run out of things to destroy.

We should be better than this. Let’s try that.

  1. I try not to use profanity, but sometimes profanity is the only way to express something. I wrestled with that sentence. ↩︎
  2. Closing the door would have helped her too, but it wasn’t something I would dare say at the time. ↩︎
  3. including some free thinking individuals. ↩︎
  4. I had good friends who allowed me the dignity of coming to that conclusion myself. ↩︎

Criticize By Creating.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment
Daily writing prompt
Do you have a quote you live your life by or think of often?
View all responses

If we truly look at we humans have achieved over the centuries, what we have created, it has been a reflection of how we wish to improve things.

A sculptor looks at stone and wishes to make it in a different image, an artist finds a way to decorate a blank canvas, a writer empowers imagination through words on blank pages – and we all decorate time. In fact, we regularly graffiti the tyrannical walls of time with our creativity.

We criticize by creating, our every invention a way an attempt to improve upon what already exists – or we would not create it at all.

Too often we get into a spiral of criticizing things without actually making things better, like over-exuberant sculptors working on sandstone with a sledgehammer, when maybe what we should be doing is simply building something different.

Sadly, it is not as easy these days to build great things- large companies seem to have sucked all the air out of the room in many contexts – but it doesn’t stop us from creating the small things, the little things that make the big things, the words that make the sentences that make the paragraphs.

I often have to remind myself of Michelangelo’s words: Criticize by creating.

Across Generations.

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

Writing is how we passed information on beyond our lifetimes. Many cultures did it verbally prior to it, but with the advent of writing it became easier. Of course, the ideas that were published made it further than those that did not, and those that controlled what was published controlled the way we read history. That’s pretty well accepted now.

Within that we got biases in what was passed along. It’s unfortunate, it’s true, and it’s unfortunately true that this is human. Even so, since other people with different perspectives could write on the same topic, a critical thinker could compare the ideas and decide on a perspective, or combine the perspectives, or reject perspectives.

In turn, they would write – standing, as Isaac Newton would say, on the shoulders of giants.

Now we have generative artificial intelligence writing things without thought – summarizing ideas based on whatever the owners of the generative artificial intelligences feed them, and they do that with little or no worry of transparency. Say what you want about humanity, we at least acknowledge voids in what was written throughout history.

Generative AI, so far, does not. And the books of history will be rewritten across generations.

We do not think across generations often, and perhaps we should. In the end it’s what we don’t know that gives us the best questions, and technology that only gives us answers is useless in this regard.

Find The Others.

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

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.

Those Others.

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

‘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 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.

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

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.