psychology

A Note To GenZ About Social Media And More.

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I was reading ‘Social Media Companies Are Having a Bad Moment‘, something written by Nick H. Penniman, who I assume is a GenZ based on the call to action, and I smiled a bit. I can never keep the generations below GenX in any form of structure, which is a failing of mine – these are generations that simply came after mine.

I suppose I could dedicate the time to keep track of which generation is doing what, but I think that’s not time well spent for me. After all, I am of GenX, a Third Culture Kid and a latchkey kid, and I was raised by Kermit The Frog.

I’m gonna let everyone in on a secret: The screens aren’t the problem, social media isn’t the problem, the message is. We can go back and forth about the medium being the message, but it’s a bit simpler than that. This is not to dismiss the concerns expressed in the article but to instead to underline the actual issue.

Every advance in communication technology was disruptive because it changed the way we did things. There was a time when reading a newspaper around others was considered anti-social. Before that were other things, like the printing press and literacy removing power from the literate. These things humanity survived.

What is different now is that during all those communication upheavals, messages got more and more sticky because everyone was trying to sell everyone else their shit. Some of it was good shit. Some of it was bad shit. In fact, there was a time when you could tell how bad a product was by how sticky the marketing was – when I grew up, if I ever did, a good product sold itself. A bad product required a lot more marketing.

Being raised by televisions, I saw a lot of advertisements targeted at me for toys that were shitty. I saved up my allowance and bought some pretty shitty toys and figured out pretty early that all that glitters is not gold. This doesn’t mean I didn’t buy crappy products in my lifetime, but at least I knew the risk.

Where things went off the tracks is Web 2.0 – the focus on marketing. Everybody got on the Internet and started selling good shit and bad shit, but the common denominator was that it was shit. If you look at the companies that survived the DotCom boom, you’ll see that those companies didn’t sell shit. They added value – some of it short-lived, some of it longer lived.

You have to be able to figure out what the shit and the value is. That’s why I wrote about the Red Dots of Life, because everyone wants to twist your ear and fill your eyeballs with their product as much as they can. If they could beam that directly into your head while you were sleeping, they would, because it’s about them. It’s not about you at all.

That’s the trick with social media. It’s about the signal to noise ratio, and the first step in that is deciding what is signal and what is noise. There’s trial and error involved. There’s a need for guidance for the younger generations who are impressionable so that they can tell the difference – and the truth is that even those of my generation and before are susceptible to all of this. In fact, politicians use it to great effect.

When you get on social media, there should be a purpose. In the days of Sesame Street’s first decade, the intent of Sesame Street was simple: Teach kids. Guide kids. And it was done by trustworthy people – to this day, nobody talks about the secret lives of Mr. Rogers and Jim Henson, and all that worked with them. Their intent was clear. They wanted to give us sticky things to help us deal with the world and, more importantly, each other. They showed up once a day and did just that for us, and we had the time to interact with our peers and elders to practice what we were taught – and my generation, the ‘Seen but not heard’ generation, didn’t do too bad despite all the problems we faced.

We did face problems, they seemed insurmountable, but somehow we survived and even thrived enough to scatter our genetics to the next generations. Like every generation before, we screwed you guys up a little. It’s what we do. We’re imperfect as a species, particularly when you get large groups of us together.

But now it’s much more dangerous. Social networks collect so much data about people that the social network companies know more about people than they themselves do – and it’s used for marketing because – guess what – they want to sell you shit. Some of it might be good shit, some of it might be bad shit. The trick is to find where the value is, and that has become more and more difficult.

When you’re young, time is cheap. As you grow older and claim more responsibility, time becomes much more expensive. It’s a part of the generation gap.

If, as individuals, we gravitate to value instead of shit, we can create a valuable world instead of a shitty one. Oh, and ease off those social networks mining your habits. There’s plenty of social media that is decentralized where you can find information, and while the social networks allow connection with others, they do not replace actual connection with others. Time away from the screens is good, but cutting them off entirely is not a good plan.

You are competing with people of your own generation to eek out a living. Those of you that win should be the ones who find value and create value, not sell shit. That’s what every generation seems to consistently get wrong.

As you’ll find, the most dangerous people of generations that came before you – dangerous to you – are the ones that are just selling shit instead of creating value.

It’s harder and harder to tell which is which, but the future of the species depends on every generation getting a decent value-to-shit ratio.

Can I tell younger generations what should be of value to them? Nope. I have some ideas, things related to being able to be do things for yourselves and invest in yourselves rather than just spending money. An hour exploring the thoughts and philosophies of others in classic books isn’t a bad place to start. Finding out why things work or don’t work is always a good thing to do.

But if you find yourself just mindlessly being entertained, that’s a symptom of a larger disease.

When your kids come around, GenZ, it’s gonna be worse. AI is already more persuasive than humans because it learned from our time tested and evolved persuasive communicators.

The Psychology of Machines.

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Most people are familiar with Robert A. Heinlein‘s work “Starship Troopers” because it was made into a movie. There were other movies based on his works, but never my favorites.

One of those favorites is, “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress“. Within it’s pages, a young teenage version of myself found a lot to imagine about. In fact, the acronym TANSTAAFL became popular because of Heinlein. Yet that’s not my focus today.

My focus is on the narrator Manuel Garcia (“Mannie”) O’Kelly-Davis and his relationship with the Lunar Authority’s master computer, HOLMES IV (“High-Optional, Logical, Multi-Evaluating Supervisor, Mark IV”).

HOLMES IV became self-aware, and developed a sense of humor. Mannie, who became friends with HOLMES IV, named it ‘Mike’ (Sherlock Holmes reference).

Mannie, a computer technician, ended up having a fairly complex relationship with Mike, and I thought about him being Mike’s psychologist. A computer technician as a psychologist for an artificial intelligence.

If you have read the book, you might see what I mean, and if you haven’t, I encourage it.

Throughout the years as a software engineer, I would jokingly call myself variations of a computer psychologist.

Now in 2023, Artificial Intelligence ‘hallucinations’ have become a thing, and if we reference Andy Clark’s work in his book, “The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality“.

“Since brains are never simply “turned on” from scratch—not even first thing in the morning when I awake—predictions and expectations are always in play, proactively structuring human experience every moment of every day. On this alternative account, the perceiving brain is never passively responding to the world. Instead, it is actively trying to hallucinate the world but checking that hallucination against the evidence coming in via the senses. In other words, the brain is constantly painting a picture, and the role of the sensory information is mostly to nudge the brushstrokes when they fail to match up with the incoming evidence.”

“The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality“, Andy Clark, 2023.

The Marginalian has a post that pointed me to Andy Clark’s book, which I encourage you to take a look at.

When artificial intelligence folks talk about hallucinations, this is the only reference that makes sense, and yet I think ‘bullshitting’ might be more appropriate than hallucinating. Of course, ‘hallucinating’ is something more professional to say and it could be correct in instances where the large language models are attempting to predict what the user wants. I’d have to study the code. They have, I haven’t, so let’s go with hallucinations for now.

There may be a space in our future for ‘artificial intelligence psychologists’. Psychiatrists, not so much maybe.

This could be a fun topic worth exploring. Hacking what our minds create could help us understand ourselves better.

We Don’t Talk Enough About Mental Health.

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RFTaranOhioBackyard

I’m an imperfect human being. Over the years I have had to remind myself of that when I might have been being too tough on myself, too arrogant, or too demanding of others. It’s a way of keeping myself real, and maybe I do it too much or too little at the right and wrong times. I’m an imperfect human being. We’ve covered that.

One of the friends I checked on today – Sunday, I check on friends – is going through a rough patch and mostly I read what she had to write. It seemed she was being very hard on herself, something I know about, and I asked her to consider this quote:

“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”

John Steinbeck, East of Eden.

It’s a good quote to throw around in your head if you’re unfamiliar with it. Personally, I survived most of my life by being harder on myself than people in authority were. I’m not recommending it, people who get yelled at more frequently seem to be happier for some peculiar reason. This is meant to be lighthearted, work with me here.

I only have my experience to work with, and again, I’m an imperfect human being and when it comes to these sort of things, I happily point people toward where they can get help instead of attempting it myself and possibly making matters worse. Yet there is a stigma with going to talk with someone who can be objective about us, because as friends we are biased.

There are so many stigmas about mental health services that admittedly I haven’t gone myself until fairly recently. It wasn’t anything dramatic, I simply finally decided it was time because it was possible I was having issues and I needed someone objective. For me, I was fortunate and found someone by hopping on Google Maps and searching for a psychologist. It can be more complicated with health insurance, but I lucked out.

We all have blind spots. For example, a guy I know seemed like a real jerk after a few drinks. I cut ties quietly, and one of his female friends mentioned, “I don’t know why he’s like that. It’s as if he’s bipolar when he drinks”, and it dawned on me that I almost always associated women with being bipolar but not men. I mentioned this to my psychologist, and she pointed out some interesting facts: Women are more likely to avail themselves of mental health services, and that women are more commonly diagnosed with the condition.

That gets to we guys. A lot of reels I have been seeing on Facebook recently, relate to we men not having people to talk to. Dave Chapelle went as far as to say that only women, children and dogs get unconditional love. There are expectations of men. I don’t know how true it is, but it resonates with my world experience between friends and my own personal experience. Maybe this is a factor of being of Generation X, maybe it’s a factor of all the workplace stuff that was a minefield during my days in offices, and maybe part of it is a bit of culture that needs to change.

I don’t know.

I do know that there shouldn’t be a stigma related to getting help, asking for help, or going to see a counselor, psychologist or psychiatrist. Personally, I’ve found it valuable, not because I’m a raving lunatic – I am not – but because it allows me to see a reflection of myself through an objective mirror rather than the warped mirrors of life. I have found it helps me keep grounded.

Did I drag my feet getting to see a psychologist? Yes. To be fair, maybe I wasn’t ready yet. Maybe you’re not ready yet. Maybe your friend is not ready yet.

But maybe they need to know it’s perfectly fine to go talk to someone professionally, who isn’t going to judge you based on a personal relationship. Maybe it’s easier to climb the mountain than to carry it.

Incoming: The Tide of Marketing.

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Browsing Facebook, I come across this in my feed and it’s as if they read what I wrote in Silent Bias:

…With social media companies, we have seen the effect of the social media echo chambers as groups become more and more isolated despite being more and more connected, aggregating to make it easier to sell advertising to. This is not to demonize them, many bloggers were doing it before them, and before bloggers there was the media, and before then as well. It might be amusing if we found out that cave paintings were actually advertising for someone’s spears or some hunting consulting service, or it might be depressing…

Almost on command, this shows up in the main feed on Facebook – sponsored content by Google. I haven’t used Bard, but I fear I have suffered Bard’s work because… I imagine that they used Bard to generate that advertising campaign for Bard.

The first thing that every sustainable technology has to do is pay for itself. The magnitude of this, though, is well beyond cave drawings. As it is, marketing has used a lot of psychology to get people to chase red dots.  Now that this has become that much ‘easier’ for humans, and now that it’s being marketed as a marketing tool…

How much crap do you not need? We need to be prepared for the coming tide of marketing bullshit.

The Hedgehog’s Hot Summer.

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hedge-hog-fight-768Many of we humans that litter the planet aren’t used to this concept of ‘social distancing’. It will be tough for many; for people like me it is amazingly easy as we have been doing it for some time, for varying individual reasons.

You know us. Barely.

At best, you know us as well as we want you to know us, at worst, you don’t know us well enough to allow us to associate with you. And now, here you are, at home, working from home… if you have others at home, the rest of this may not benefit you. Or maybe it will. I don’t know.

There’s this guy – Arthur Schopenhauer – he died in 1860, long before I could meet him. He wrote about the Hedgehog Dilemma:

A number of porcupines huddled together for warmth on a cold day in winter; but, as they began to prick one another with their quills, they were obliged to disperse. However the cold drove them together again, when just the same thing happened. At last, after many turns of huddling and dispersing, they discovered that they would be best off by remaining at a little distance from one another…

…By this arrangement the mutual need of warmth is only very moderately satisfied; but then people do not get pricked. A man who has some heat in himself prefers to remain outside, where he will neither prick other people nor get pricked himself.

What has happened around the world is, because of the Covid-19 Pandemic, the quills have become longer. They have become longer much more quickly. People are scared, and when people are scared in a time when pitchforks and torches aren’t easily accessible, they apparently buy toilet paper and produce and share memes, and it’s hard to argue which of the two is more pragmatic. It’s always handy to have toilet paper, and it’s always good to laugh a bit when things aren’t as nice as we would like.

I could write something about mediation here, but this sentence should suffice for people who understand what mediation means.

That being said, as people adjust to the new normal, those who live by themselves will find themselves alone. For some, this is disconcerting.algorithmsfear

Being faced with the prospect of not having the usual suspects as distractions, new distractions will arrive. Algorithms tell social media that people want to read more and more about Covid-19, and the reality is that we do largely know what we need to know already and the constant barrage of updates will become tiresome – but the algorithms have to be taught that.

Algorithms cannot replace fear, but they most certainly enable it.

Step 1 to your new solitude is to understand that, and limit exposing yourself and the others connected to you to a bunch of stuff that will simply burn everyone out. Less social media.

But what will you do? Ahh, it is a scary world, solitude, but it is ripe for use with books, with in home projects you never quite seem to get around to – and with sleep, with music, with movies… and yourself, perhaps the scariest thing in the world for most people. No matter where you go, though, there you are, and you can do things like reflect. Exercise. Think. Perhaps write, perhaps whatever, but the void you might feel can be bearable.

We know. We not only survive, we thrive this way – but it’s alien and scary for others. Yet, over the course of the coming year, at least for some months, it will be the new norm. And it can be ok if you let it.

Vacation Thoughts

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Bananaquit from aboveThe time away was a wonderful thing; I hadn’t realized how much I needed a vacation.

There was time for some necessary culling of what I have been doing over the years by not doing any of it. I wrote for days in a notebook, a means I have for clearing my mind. I started doing that as a teenager, a way to get everything out – every sting, every joy, every itching wound. That writing is never to be published – simply an exercise in free writing that cleanses and, which at the end, is destroyed.

An open letter to the Universe as some might see it, an open letter to the Self as others might see it. The physical act of making everything inside external, the mechanical process, is something that works for me because then you can look at it from the outside looking in. The shift in perspective is then more easily done, going through one’s own life as the reader rather than the author.

You find petty things, you find important things glossed over, you find a character whose world-view is affected by things no longer present, whose actions are affected by that world-view in both good and bad ways.

And then I burn them – a symbolic thing I have always done, watching the black ink contrast less and less on the pages that go from white to ash.

Then you’re left with a start, and in that start, in a space where you can be yourself, you find what’s really there now. What I found was not what I had thought was there – faux rationality is easily scattered from the urn and you can see yourself for what you are, the world for what it is…

And then the vacation starts where you can do the things you want to do.

One morning I idyllically tossing a tethered waterproof camera into an area of deep current, just because I had one and some 550 cord.

Another morning I traipsed around on the abandoned paths of Blue Waters Inn – full of life, absent people who wanted to spend money to go see things and were out and about. I saw new things.

I sat with a hummingbird for hours, watching it feed and chase others from it’s source.

Most of all, I figured out what the next me was going to do with his life, if only for a while.

Relativity

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RelativityAs I hinted at, I got rid of the last pickup – codename Artsy – and have since moved on to another vehicle. I won’t mention make or model – I’m not going to do free advertising for some company when I’ve only had the vehicle a few days.

But I like it. This is what the article is about – because I told someone I visited today that they are now less far away with this vehicle.

They didn’t move. I didn’t move. The distance hadn’t changed. What I was driving had.

Artsy’s job was to create trails in the bush with me at the wheel. This she did well – so well, in fact, that I saw her on the way home and for a moment wondered what my pickup was doing there… when it’s not mine anymore. She looks well. 

However, things have changed and so the requirements of the vehicle have changed as well. And this one doesn’t have to go in the bush. Trails, maybe, but no more bush. Mainly, roads. Parking in the cities. And, finally, it’s not a manual transmission.

It’s a dual clutch transmission, which for the sake of people who don’t know enough about cars, is more efficient than a manual and as convenient as an automatic.

The air conditioning is awesome. The back up camera makes parking so much easier. The audio is so good stock, and plays my MP3s and more. The seat is comfortable.

And so, now, what used to be a long distance for me is a shorter distance – just like that. This is probably not news to a lot of people, but I’ve always sacrificed things.  The RX7s had their AC’s take out for weight reduction, Artsy had noisy mud tires, and so on, and so on. These were things that were necessary for the tasks at hand.

With this vehicle, I did not sacrifice. I ordered the pizza with everything on it. It has features I may never use.

But today I saw the value in that spontaneous simple statement, it dawned on me.
It dawned on me that relativity and the hierarchy of needs are related in the human experience – something I knew – but at a new depth.

And, after all, even the Spartan minimalist has to acknowledge that the new chariot is a worthy tool for the next part of my life.