Woke

 In my previous post I implied that most people were following their programming... but it's not really as simple as that.

It's more like - sometimes we're more alert than at others. Myself included. There are times we go on auto-pilot, for example. Like when you drive home and realized you spaced out and don't even remember the drive.

At other times, well. That's what all the stuff about mindfulness is about, right? If you meditate, concentrate, you can bring yourself more fully in the moment. You could almost say that sometimes people are sleepwalking through life, and at other times we are...

Woke.

Yes, I know that term has become politicized and given negative connotations. I'm not even necessarily using it in the way people think, except I think in some ways my usage is closer to the original meaning. That when we are aware, and focused, and can sit and think about our history and how we've treated minorities over decades, that the ones who can listen and respond without that reflexive defensiveness are woke.

Of course, that sleepwalking? When most everyone around you is acting like that, the ones who are awake can be a bit like Jonathon in The Mummy.

As for the right wing trolls that try to get a rise out of people... rather than trying to blend in like Jonathan does here, it's more like they're looking at these sleepwalkers and deliberately pushing a big red button that triggers their defenses.

Except I don't think many of them are doing it because they're any more awake then the ones they're observing. It's more like they've reprogrammed themselves... like they're playing a game where they get more points the more times they hit someone's button.

I do wonder about Trump though. See, the sleepwalkers tend to just follow social norms. Those invisible rules that surround us all, and they seem to do it just because that's how it's done. That's what they learned to do, without really any thought behind it.

The way he ignores all those norms and conventions?

I can't tell if that's because he's more awake - but malicious - or if he's just programmed like some of those right wing trolls. 

Again with the question - deliberate malevolence? Or just malevolent programming?

But let's bring this back to the sleepwalkers with the big red buttons.

I would say that a large part of what I do is try to find ways of... Idk. Kindly trying to wake people up? Gently? To bring things to their conscious awareness without triggering the big red button.

Which is part of why I found leadership positions exhausting, at times. It's a lot of work to carefully think about what to say, so that you can get the point across without triggering an automatic defense. You have to think about all that stuff they say, about using 'I' words and avoiding accusatory 'you' statements.

Also part of why I'm picky about who I would date. I don't want to have to constantly watch how I say something in order to make sure that they don't take it the wrong way. Once in a while is fine. We all have that big red button and we all have things that will make us feel defensive. It just... shouldn't be to such a degree that you can't talk about the things that bother you. 

If something is bothering you and you feel like you can't bring it up, you're forced to either constantly suppress the issue (which, especially with people sleepwalking through life, rarely works and just means whatever it is tends to come out at the worst times and in the worst ways) or you end up bringing it up and having them react predictably badly and then the relationship is damaged. Neither is very good, and certainly not the way I'd want to build a relationship with someone I hoped would be a life partner and helpmate.

(This is not to say you have to be cruel or demanding or always tell them negative things. It's just that if it bothers you enough that you can't really let it go, then you should be able to bring it up in a way that gets it addressed. Whatever it is. 'Addressed' doesn't mean they have to do what you want, but they have to show they heard and are willing to work towards some sort of solution that lets both of you be okay.)

You could say the same for the Americans who've suffered due to racism and other mistakes. Honestly, we probably don't deserve black Americans and other minorities for their willingness to overlook so many slights and other infuriating behaviors.

Russian Misinformation

Saw this post about Storm-1516 discussing Russian disinformation activities, and it reminded me of a loosely related point. 

A while back I'd been reading about Russia and Putin's rise to power, and it was talking about how the KGB (or their successor org, I forget the exact details) blamed the west for the collapse of the USSR and essentially started to hide resources to fund efforts to continue fighting the West. (Which is part of we why it's so hard to tell if anything done in Russia is done by criminals, the government, a business - or generally a blend of all three).

Anyways, at the time I found myself wondering - if they hadn't misdirected so much of money, would the dissolution of the USSR have been so painful? 

It reminds me of a story I had heard, which supposedly illustrates a common Russian mindset, though I don't know enough to say whether that's true or not. Basically a man was jealous of his neighbor, because his neighbor had more goats than he did. So given the chance to make a wish - rather than wish he had as many (or more) goats, he wished for his neighbor's goats to die. 

Anyways, I can't imagine all those troll farms and disinformation campaigns are cheap. Well, who knows? It's not like I can find a breakdown of their budget. 

But I do have to wonder - how different would it be if they'd spent that money in Russia? 

Trust

 Something I read asked about trusting other people. Our brothers and sisters... and as I thought about it, about whether I trust people, I find myself thinking the answer is - 

No.

That's overly simplistic, of course. I don't think that people are inherently dishonest or untrustworthy, actually. So this post is about feeling out my thoughts on the matter in order to clarify that.

What I trust is that people will be... people. That they will be true to themselves, really.

But what does that even mean?

It's like... people often follow patterns without thinking. Almost robotic, as though they were a program. If you know their history, nature and nurture, what the inputs are, they will generally respond in predictable ways.

That is not always the case. I do believe in free will, and that people can change or rise above their pasts. I just don't think many people exercise that free will.

To give an example - when confronted by something that feels like an attack (criticism, failure, or something just not going 'right' the way they expect) most people will get defensive. And perhaps even lash back.

If you put it in a martial arts context - if someone throws a punch, most people will punch back. 

There's a whole lot of other options, of course. Turning the incoming punch into a judo throw by stepping in and aiding and directing the momentum. Stepping aside so it misses. Blocking. And so on and so forth...

But most people don't really learn how to control their responses and deliberately choose one. They perceive an attack, they punch back.

Of course, not all of those 'attacks' are true attacks. Sometimes it's just feedback they don't want to hear. And I like to think it's better, if you have the time, to perhaps sit with it. Just think of what happened, how you feel about it, and what your options are... and then choose the one that best gets you where you want to be.

Most people don't really bother, imho.

So you see something like Facebook, right? And they get criticism, and it feels like an attack, so they get defensive and want to punch back.

Something similar happens (or is perhaps exacerbated) when you feel your livelihood is threatened. Your status, your income... of course people who benefit from something like oil will get defensive when told that their entire livelihood puts the world at risk. 

In an ideal world, of course, they might initial believe such claims are false and dismiss them... but as the evidence mounts, and especially when a scientific consensus forms, they would reevaluate that and act accordingly.

But we all know that that hasn't happened. For the most part, at least. Even if (if they had accepted it and acted accordingly) they might have managed to shift everything so that they no longer depended on oil for their status and livelihood, or even worked to ensure a smooth transition.

No, it's more natural to double down and work to block anything that threatens that.

Same with control... anything that appears to threaten their ability to control something comes across as an attack, and a threat. Even though things would be better (and not just for the ones they are trying to control!) if they learned to monitor that sort of instinctive response and choose better responses. 

After all, while you may not have direct control if you come across as supporting people in their own goals you can often have more influence than if you're perceived as a threat right back.

Learning to listen and enable other people in the pursuit of their goals is better, imho, then having control and using it to steamroll over what they want.

I don't like to pick a political party because most of the time the extreme partisans appear as little more than programmed robots. You say your party supports or opposes something, and the partisans follow along like lemmings without really giving it any thought.

And you lose all that complexity, all the grey areas, all the potential for alternatives. It all becomes black and white, your side is good and the other side is evil, and in the process you demonize the other side and justify whatever your side does.

Reflexively

Without really even thinking about it.

And if you aren't careful, you learn to dismiss any argument that doesn't support what your side is pushing. Ignore any criticism. And then you start forming a bubble, where all you hear and see are the things that reinforce what your side wants.

I don't generally think either side is evil or bad (except for the cynical manipulators who know they're lying for political purposes. It's one thing to honestly believe the science was bad, and another to know and accept they're telling the truth and still propose policies and push influence campaigns to block any potential solution. Especially when it's coupled with callousness and an 'I got mine, how you do?' attitude. Though evil sometimes sounds overly harsh and judgmental, even if the end results sure seem evil.)

So in that sense - I don't trust people to evaluate a situation with an open-mind and make wise choices. I don't trust them to get past what appears to benefit themselves the most, especially when fear or hope are affecting their thought processes.

And I don't trust that they will hear criticism and use that to improve something.

Which does make it really, really, really hard to fix anything.

Take all the talk about 'woke' politics and DEI and all the crap the Trump administration is doing. 

They are trying to cover up the bad things in our history, and act as though even mentioning them is an attack.

Except - those things did actually happen. The Tulsa race massacre happened. Sundown towns were a real thing. 

Our history is incomplete when we pretend otherwise, in ways that have a real and horrible impact on people who are still not treated like real Americans today.

Saying so feels like an attack to certain people, though. So rather than sitting with it, thinking about it, and learning how to handle it in ways that will let us do better... we get Trump targeting Smithsonian programs to block any sort of discussion on those topics, and claim that the Smithsonian is the one that is divisive and rewriting history.

They remove pictures of American service members who earned medals, simply because they are black.

It's things like this that lead to discussion on 'white fragility' and 'toxic masculinity'... because how can we ever address racism or live up to the ideals mentioned in our founding documents if we can't even discuss our failures without leading to bs like that???

So do I think people are generally bad, or liars, or anything like that? No.

But I don't trust them to act logically, or respond to criticism well, or to know how to get past their own programming.

Well, that's not quite true.

People can 'get past their own programming' if they have certain types of life experiences. I mean, obviously people do. Sometimes. 

It's just that there's no fast and hard rule about when and how it happens, and some of those experiences are arguably just replacing their programming with something else rather than helping them learn to consciously choose their own.

After all, to people who want a specific result and have the power to force the outcome, conscious choice appears to threaten that outcome too. If people are consciously choosing, you can't manipulate them and force them to choose what you want. You have to offer your arguments and hope they're persuasive enough on their own.

Very Thought Provoking

https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/the-status-cheats

Jotting Down a Thought

Read more of the book... Perhaps I was too kind in my assessment yesterday. 

Anyways, it gave me an idea for something... But ofc I don't think I'd have the interest, resources, or time to really develop it. I just was thinking about what sorts of alternatives to Facebook would be possible. 

It'd probably have to be some sort of subscription service too, if only to avoid the worst excesses that come when your business model is more about using knowledge gathered from people to make your profit. 

Odd Thoughts on the World Today

 I picked the book Careless People back up again (between the death of my brother's fiancee, job hunting, and various other things I'd stopped reading it for a while) and it reminded me of some thoughts I'd had a while back.

Namely - that not everyone has the same background in my fields of interest.

I know, I know... that's sort of a 'well, duh!' statement. Bear with me.

I remember first thinking about this when recalling my experience with some of my fellow officers in the Army. 

Actually, thinking even further on this - the military offers actual leadership training, in a way I don't think many people get any more. That's where I first heard 'leadership is an art and a science', after all. And my ROTC commander was the one that encouraged us to read business management books, like the One Minute Manager. 

I'll admit that I didn't initially see the connection between business management resources and the military, but both deal with people, so there's some overlap. (And actually, there are multiple reading lists for junior officers, and the reading choices are not just about military history. Oh... my first battalion commander gave us an assignment to read one and write a book report, and I got a very positive comment on mine. I think I did it on Embattled Courage? I probably still have the report somewhere, but I'm not going to dig through my old records to find it.)

Anyways. The point was that people have different backgrounds, and things that I considered obvious and well known are... not. At least, not to someone who didn't have the same schooling.

Which I think about, with regards to Careless People, because I have had a life long interest in decision making and public policy and so on and so forth... and while I won't say these people are actually dumb, it's quite clear that their backgrounds did not include any of that. My impression is that most of it was all tech related, maybe business management related, but they were really not the ones to grapple with how tech effects society. At least, not initially.

Which, well... I get that it's the company you created, and of course you want to be involved in how it grows, but I can't help thinking that if you really dislike all that boring policy and people stuff that maybe you ought to reconsider being the CEO? Find someone who actually wants to do what the job requires? 

Well, that's neither here nor there. It really seems like people who didn't have the background to understand - Idk how to describe it, but people in general? The social sciences? It's not just about politics or public policy after all, it's all those fuzzy things that don't have neat and clear solutions - they just sort of stumbled into a situation that required skills and understanding that they just didn't have.

Which, well... okay. I would have hoped for and expected some sort of due diligence and attempt to learn that, but whatever. I also would have expected better from the one guy who really was involved with politics, but honestly if that's what Harvard is turning out these days then you probably could have just pulled some random person off the street and the same knowledge level. But then again, people go to those schools more for the connections and networking, don't they? (Yet another reason why I won't call them 'elite'. Or maybe just 'elite at networking' or something.)

So they stumbled into a situation that a tech and business background wasn't really enough to address, and instead of really sitting and thinking about it the responses were more reactionary. 

Just... dealing with situations as they developed, which meant sometimes being pushed into making policy decisions on the fly. 

And then Facebook became the influential force we all acknowledge it is today, but by that point the initial reactionary responses and the natural tendency to resent being told what to do came into play (even if the pressure to regulate, especially with dissatisfaction overwidespread misinformation, was entirely predictable and probably could have been handled earlier if people had sat down and really thought about this. With the right people, of course.)

Furthermore, as I've said before, this seems like just a snapshot of what the wider 1% is like... and that's discouraging.

Yesterday I talked about how wise monarchs were rarely followed by similarly wise successors. I think part of the problem is that we aren't all that great at passing along wisdom. In game theory, they talked about how copy mistakes meant that in an ongoing game of competing strategies where a successful strategy was copied... sometimes it didn't get copied exactly the same, and that would change how things played out.

I think passing along wisdom is kind of like that. The successor may copy parts of their predecessor's strategy but never the whole of it. Which is also probably why we sometimes get a wise ruler after one that was less so... it's not always one way of course.

Anyways, the point is that it seems obvious the wisdom of earlier Americans (and the most powerful of them) have clearly not been passed along to the current era.

Separation of church and state is one of the big ones. These white christian nationalists don't seem to care about how ugly it gets whenever that is ignored. Do they really have reason to believe it'll be different this time?

Not that it'd be okay even if they had, since they'd be disregarding the faiths of all the non-christian Americans, as well as atheists. I've got nothing against people of faith practicing in their private lives, but you would think a religion in which we are told 

“And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you."

 Matthew 6:5-6

And 

“[God] … shows love to the foreigners living among you and gives them food and clothing.  So you, too, must show love to foreigners, for you yourselves were once foreigners in the land of Egypt.”

Deuteronomy 10:18-19 

And when the Samaritans were a distinct ethnic group that grew alongside Judaism and we have an entire parable about how the Samaritan who had mercy on a man who had been mugged and left for dead was a better role model than the priest who avoided him because he wanted to avoid having to do all that ritual cleansing for touching a dead body (or perhaps fear that it was a trap and he'd be mugged as well). Point was, the Bible itself tells us to love our neighbors, that those neighbors can be foreign or different, and that it's more important to care for each other than to get bogged down with other details.

Ahem.

Right, white christian nationalists are only one part of the problem. There's also what seems like a very childish and juvenile level of partisanship, which cares more about putting one over on the other political party than about governing. And after our Founding Fathers wrote all that stuff about the evils of partisanship!

It's very frustrating to see people with the power to truly make a difference - and then they just absolutely waste it making things worse.

Seems like they don't deserve all those rewards our system gives them.

Interesting Article

This seems a bit relevant to yesterday's post

https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/03/28/daniel-dennett-rapoport-rules-criticism/