Where is the Love, III

 I saw something today which reminds me again why I am struggling to love my neighbor.

Let me back up a second.

I periodically cross check posts I see on Facebook - like a post claiming that feral cats were feeding mice to a mountain lion in a junkyard, supposedly so the mountain lion would deter people.

I don't know if you should sit down for this, but it was fake.

Not true.

I've checked a couple of other posts like this, especially those cutesy little political memes, and frankly you're better off assuming they're all false.

Don't trust anything you see on social media, not unless you see the same information coming from a more credible source.

And what is a credible source? While there are guides online, this is another thing that has been politicized and people will pick the guide that lets them continue believing what they want, so I'll give you a few heuristics.

Your source needs to have consequences for making shit up. The media, for example, will put their spin on things and may influence our views by deciding what to report in the first place, but for the most part if they say "a person was shot" then they have done their journalistic duty to verify that a person was actually shot. And if they didn't, they will be discredited and can lose their jobs. And since there are news agencies across the political spectrum, if media on the right and the left are saying something happened then it's got a pretty good chance of being true.

The framing and spin is an entirely different thing.

Ideally, your source will also be easy to verify. Like, scientific and academic studies will often give you the details of exactly how they collected their information, what processes were used to analyze it, etc.

Scientists are human too, so there's still room for bias and human error to creep in, but in theory someone else could do the same study or analyze their data and come to the same conclusions.

So my first two heuristics are this - consequences for lying and transparency about the source data.

I'll throw in a third one, though there are people pushing misinformation who will deliberately falsify this, so it's not the most useful one - the report will reflect the complex, messy, and contradictory elements of reality.

I got that description from The Hedgehog and the Fox, and basically what I mean is that reports and studies that are trying to be accurate are going to read like they were written by a Fox. There will be caveats, there will be references to how statistically significant something is, there will be words of caution against using the results for things beyond it's scope. If the report was created by someone concerned with giving you a real result, they are not going to simplify it into a tldr like a Hedgehog. Unless they're turning it into one of those cutesie memes for social media, of course.

But that is all backstory, and that's backstory that I want you to understand because - as I mentioned in another post - we are now six years after Covid first hit, and we can see the actual evidence for how effective the Covid vaccines are.

Barring some decades long consequence that we haven't seen yet, the evidence is clear. If you take the county vaccination rate and compare it with the death and hospitalization rates, people who refuse to get the vaccine are for more likely to die or be hospitalized than those who do not. 

You might even see one talking about the vaccine causing heart problems, but in true hedgehog fashion it also notes that getting Covid without the vaccine is even more likely to do the same. (It also talks about the likelihood of that happening, but I'll leave it to you to decide if even a 0.006% chance is more than you want to take, especially when getting Covid unvaccinated carries a 0.06% chance of doing the same.)

But if that's all true, then why do we keep seeing anti-vax sentiment?

And not just for the Covid vaccine, now we're seeing people upset about measles and TDAP and all sorts of vaccines that were commonly accepted when I was growing up.

So this is where I'm going to throw out a little conspiracy theory of my own. One that I hope is not true, hope that anyone involved with would have had the courage to speak out against, but one that fits the evidence better than the rampant misinformation I keep seeing about vaccines.

That conspiracy theory?

They're trying to kill you.

Sure, some people are easily manipulated or gullible fools who honestly believe that vaccines are bad for you. 

But I do not think these beliefs would persist for so long, with so little evidence, if there weren't interested parties pushing these beliefs for reasons of their own.

Ones who know better, who know that the vaccines work, and are trying to convince people they don't anyway. 

What do they get out of convincing a mass number of people not to take one small action that would easily prevent disease and death?

They get disease and death.

It's not just that they're parties to mass murder, though. Or rather, they're not trying to have indiscriminate mass murder.

It's mass murder that is targeting the gullible, the poor, and the disadvantaged.

Take Trump's recent push to change the MMR vaccine schedule, breaking what had been one shot for Measles, Mumps, and Rubella into three separate vaccines.

I was kind of wondering at first why they were even doing this. As in, why are they using up precious political capital to push for this? Especially with the situation in Iran, and Trump's constant attempts to waste government resources on unnecessary monuments and renovations? Why take time from blaming his enemies and threatening Canada and Greenland to push for a change that isn't actually about dropping the vaccines entirely? Just breaking it up into three different ones?

But if you look more closely, you'll see that this change is far more likely to hurt people who are poor and disadvantaged.

If  you have a hard time affording a trip to the doctor, or if you have difficulty getting time off work to go to the doctor, then the more visits you have to make the more likely that you're not going to do all of them.

Maybe you would have been protected from mumps, measles, and rubella if you got one MMR shot...

But taking time off to get the mumps shot, and again later to get the measles shot, and again to get rubella... 

and then do it all again, because most of these take multiple doses to be fully effective.

That change means it's far more likely that some people will not be fully vaccinated. And that 'some people' is most likely going to be poor people. Or disadvantaged people, since the same logic holds true for people with handicaps.

Now, I say this is all a conspiracy theory because we haven't actually had anyone outright say that's the goal here. And I think it would take multiple people working together to push for this. Or rather, multiple people 'in the know'. I don't think it would take just one person manipulating some gullible fools. 

And I like to think that if there are multiple people involved, that there would be at least one person who would realize how absolutely evil it is, and would speak up. 

In case I need to explain why this is evil - not getting fully vaccinated doesn't just threaten the health of the person who isn't vaccinated. It also reduces the effects of herd immunity, and puts at risk all the people who legitimately can't get vaccinated. That newborn who died of measles? The baby was too young to get vaccinated. People with weakened immune systems can't get it. So not getting vaccinated doesn't just put yourself at risk, it puts all those other people at risk, too.

Which means if there is a group of people deliberately pushing anti-vax views, they're a party to mass murder. 

Since nobody has publicly come out and admitted as much, I put this firmly into 'conspiracy theory' territory.

But every time I see some anti-vax nonsense - especially when it comes from family members that I don't want dying from something easily preventable - I feel anger and hatred at whoever is knowingly and deliberately pushing this crap.

One of the ten commandments prohibits murder, and while the commandment prohibiting false testimony seems focused on lying in court I think that commandment was because you can't build a very good society if people will lie and make up false testimony in order to get rid of their enemies... and I think if the ten commandments were written today it would also prohibit deliberately spreading misinformation.

So to summarize - I think anyone who knows vaccines work and tries to convince people they don't have broken two of the ten commandments and will be dealt with by God however he deals with such sinners.

And I don't know how to love neighbors like that. 

 

 

Where is the Love?, Part II

 I realized my last post is... incomplete. Let's see if I can organize my thoughts a little more, and explain.

 In my last post I said:

...sometimes the most loving thing you can do is make it clear that certain behavior is unacceptable.

 I feel I need to explain this a bit better, though as always it's complicated.

First - people naturally get defensive when they get negative feedback. All too often it feels like an attack, even when it's not meant to be.

Yet we know that top performers need it. That honest feedback is how we improve. That, for example, a star athlete that never has a coach point out where they can move more efficiently will never reach their full potential.

This is part of why in the Army we always had After Action Reviews (AARs), where we were supposed to note what went wrong, what went well, and what we can do better next time.

To get that top performance, you need a certain level of maturity and understanding from all the parties involved.

The person hearing a critique has to be mature enough that they don't take it personally. That people are not saying "you're a failure", but rather are giving them critical insights that they can use to do better.

The person giving the critique has to trust that their critique will be taken as intended, too. Because if they think the person they're critiquing will feel attacked and get defensive than they may create an enemy they didn't need to.

That's part of why good leaders absolutely have to set the right tone. They have to make it absolutely clear that they want the unvarnished truth.

More importantly, they have to demonstrate, over and over again, that they really mean it.

Because if they react poorly even once - everyone who saw that or heard about it is unlikely to risk telling them the truth a second time.

 At the same time, I use the word 'critique' because it absolutely should not be an attack, or personal. It's the difference between "that was foolish" and "you're a fool".

These are all things we generally suck at, tbh. All too often people stifle themselves until they can't any longer, and then when they speak it's a storm of emotions and everyone winds up feeling angry and hurt.

Sometimes it seems like it's an impossible thing, if not for the many real world examples where I see people doing better. 

But let's get back on track.

It's hard to explain how or why this can work to people who have significant experience with it failing, especially when we're talking about human interactions. Body language makes up 80% of that, and people are often not self-aware enough to realize what signals they are sending. Which is why someone can claim that they are being calm and logical, while the other party sees them getting defensive and angry.

However, if you figure it out, miracles can occur. Because in some ways we all crave having a true friend. 

Someone who knows us inside and out, sees us with all our strengths and weaknesses, and loves us anyway.

And when someone is able to offer feedback, loving feedback, that doesn't carry an undertone of attack implying that "I hate you for doing this" or "I can't love you when you do this", then it's more likely to be listened to and heard.

It's moments like that which make people truly feel connected, and as studies repeatedly show - human connection is the primary source of happiness.

To expand on this a bit more -

This is why there's such a trope of the 'poor little rich boy'. Over and over again it seems like the rich and powerful just naturally find themselves surrounded by 'yes men'. And women. People who don't give honest feedback, who hide away their true opinions and true selves, because their position and power comes from pleasing that person. They have to make a very concerted effort to prevent that, and not everyone understands why it matters or how to do it - or even has the maturity to do so.

So we see the rich and powerful start living in bubbles, surrounded by liars and sycophants, and they lose touch with reality. 

Negative feedback is watered down or even hidden away completely. Nobody wants to tell them that their idea or project isn't working out.

And I think, on some level, the rich and powerful feel this. They know that these relationships are empty and hollow, the junk food of the soul.

(I will not claim all of their relationships are like this, though. I hope they've got at least one good one somewhere).

 You and I can say the things we wish they would hear, but they have no reason to trust us or believe us, and have a whole posse of people willing to soothe away any doubts. Tell them that "it's just sour grapes". That they're special - smarter and better than the rest, and that the opinions of nobodies don't matter.

I'll also admit that they're not always wrong. Not so much about the 'smarter and better' because really, arrogant much? But there are people who are just jealous of success, and will criticize and tear you down.

Which is another reason why it's so important to have those trusted relationships. They can help you sort out what's valid and what isn't.

Anyways, I could go into the things I personally wish they would hear, but... it feels like quite a bit of this blog has already done that. 

Actually give a shit about people - not just your privileged buddies. Everyone. And if you're not mature enough to listen and learn, then quit trying to control everything. 

You're just making things worse. 

 

 

Where is the Love?

 While I do like the Black Eyes Peas song, the title of this post isn't because of that.

Rather, it's because of something my father said in passing. Iirc he was talking about how people interact on social media, how they talk about politics, and he commented that the arguments and criticisms were being said without love.

Sometimes Dad has a perspective that is far different from everyone else, and when I thought about it I had to admit - he's not wrong.

I do not consider myself very religious, yet I know and accept that much of my world view was shaped by 11 years of Catholic schooling. That plus being raised by pretty devout Catholic parents. And Dad's comment about love reminded me of the old church song I heard growing up. The one that says "and they'll know we are Christians by our love."

Yeah... is there any wonder I question the 'Christianity' of Trump supporters? Not seeing the love there. Or if it is, it's a small and pitiful thing that is only for those like them.

But many people have pointed that out already, and the ones I'd want to hear it have so far seemed unwilling to see it.

Rather, I find myself pondering my own attitudes and beliefs here. Because even without going to church regularly, I do try to do love my neighbor as myself. And if I consider my father's point about how we talk to each other, I have to admit I'm not exactly showing the love either.

I am, in fact, struggling to feel it right now. Emotionally, I would put it like this.

The United States has been the shining city on the hill, one that casts a deep and dark shadow. Both are true about this nation I have loved. It has valued some grand ideals, and it has fallen horribly short of actually living up to them.

But right now, it's as though someone has started pouring a greasy, filthy, rank coating of oil over that shining city. It's dimming the parts that used to shine, and deepening the gloom in the shadows.

And as the lights keep going out, one by one, too few seem to even try stopping it.

Those so-called Christians? They're helping pump the filth in.

And I have watched as Trump politicizes... everything. There isn't even an attempt at being president for all of us. He is petty and vindictive and withhold aid from blue states, block normal procurement procedures so he can funnel resources to his allies, and basically make everyone around him angrier and smaller and pettier. 

And people cheer.

But I do feel like responding with the level of venom and hate that I have seen just exacerbates the problem. It's the Sunni and Shi'a spiral in Iraq all over again. And it also feels like Trump and his allies want that to happen. It gives them an enemy to point at, someone to blame and justify cracking down on his opponents even harder.

So I am trying to reconcile these very different points of view. I'm not sure I would even call them that, as they're not necessarily very coherent. 

Love thy neighbor.

Forgive each other.

And yet, I don't want the harm I see go unaddressed. I don't want that 'forgiveness' or 'love' to mean just ignoring it as ICE disappears people, and blocks any oversight of what's going on in their detention centers.

I don't want us to just ignore the completely unnecessary (and illegal) bombings of boats in the Caribbean.

I don't want all the slimy and disgusting filth to be covered up in some desperate bid to pretend everything is fine. 

Yet I also don't want things to turn into a witch hunt. Or rather, I don't want the pendulum of crazy to swing the other way.

 I want actual nation-wide healing. Some resolution. Some movement towards cleaning up that shining city, and even putting in some street lights so there aren't so many shadows.

And so I think a bit more, about what those Catholics schools taught about the sacrament of Reconciliation. 

Forgiveness and spiritual healing. The whole sacrament is not about pretending you never did anything wrong. It's about helping you address those wrongs, so you can reconcile with God. If you're given a penance, it's not about punishment or discipline. It's about helping you make reparations.

(You can see some similarities to discussions of our criminal justice system - and the debate over whether it's purpose is punishment or reparation.)

What I want, impossible as it seems right now, is for those who have been pouring out and spreading that rank filth to repent. And if they can't see the harm they are doing and repent - which I admit seems highly likely - I want society to have the political willpower and resources needed to address that.

Not in a "now we're the top dogs and we can punish you" way. That just makes the whole filthy mess continue, especially if it allows all this misinformation to continue. 

More in the 'Nuremburg trials' way. Something that gets at the real truth, in as open and fair and honest a way possible. One that holds people accountable, not out of hate or anger, but because sometimes the most loving thing you can do is make it clear that certain behavior is unacceptable.

That spreading misinformation (as one example) is one of those things, and that there are consequences to knowingly doing so.

That threatening to withhold resources simply because you don't like the governor of a state is another.

That nobody is above the law - something I used to think we all agreed on, but apparently do not. 

And we definitely need to address the abuse of power the current interpretations of executive privilege are enabling.

Maybe...

Maybe, if we can find the political will to address these things, we can recover from this disastrous administration.

It's hard to see it happening right now, though. 

 

Predictably Irrational - Thoughts

I'm reading a chapter exploring market norms vs social norms and it hit me-

People have described certain individuals as 'transactional'. Often with a negative connotation. (Trump is, ofc, the primary and most common example)...

And the reason for that, I think, is that it's obvious he's applying market norms even to things that normally are social norms.

Like marriage.

It also reminds me of stories I've heard about the 1% regarding things like splitting the check for dinner. 

I suspect that part of what we're seeing is a culture of market norms. One that is, frankly, horrifying to those of us who know the joys of social norms. Of friendship and community and connections that aren't all about 'what's in it for me?'.

Strictly a theory of course. Some days I think I'd like to win the lottery, just so I can mingle and rub elbows and sort of make a personal study on the different cultural norms.

For my own curiosity - I'm definitely not going to be writing up proper scientific studies or anything. I just feel like I'm guessing at why they do the (short sighted and foolish) things they do, and it's mostly by trying to read between the lines of various reports and things. Not really reliable. 

Seriously, though. Why do we consistently see the rich and powerful grow arrogant, out of touch, selfish, greedy, and controlling?

Is it truly inevitable? Human nature? The natural corruption that comes with power?

Enquiring minds want to know.

Vaccines, Mid-Terms, and Other Things

My parents taught me without saying a word, that while we may be part of society and share a culture and history with society, we can pick and choose which parts we want to keep for ourselves.

For Halloween, for example. My parents didn't like the phrase "Trick or Treat'. I forget the exact way they phrased it, but basically you're threatening to trick people unless they give you candy. So they taught us to always say "Happy Halloween" instead.

Oh, they also never taught us to believe in Santa Claus. 

They didn't like black comedy. Mom didn't like us having the TV on when we ate together, and they didn't have cable TV.

So we were part of society, but we were also sometimes different. Maybe even a bit nerdy and weird.

And that's okay. For the most part I kind of liked it. Sure, it's a bit weird to have everyone talking about a show you've never seen. But years later I saw an episode of that show (Beavis and Butthead) and tbh I don't really understand why it was that popular in the first place.

The point of all that is to say this:

While I would not say I'm completely independent, that I never follow a crowd or do things without thinking, if I have decided something than it's decided. 

And I don't really care how many people disagree.

 That's kind of where I am with regards to vaccines, and with regards to Trump.

For vaccines - and the Covid vaccine in particular - it has been six years since Covid hit. Almost six years since the vaccine was released. And unless there are long term consequences in twenty-thirty years that we won't learn about until we've reached that, we have pretty good data on it's effects and side effects.

There are studies now that are able to look, county by county, and compare the vaccination rates to the death rates and hospitalization rates.

It has been long enough that the data is available. We're not waiting for reports to trickle in.

And the evidence is overwhelming clear. 

Vaccines save lives.

This is not up for debate. This is not in doubt. 

And anyone trying to argue differently just makes me question their judgement.

Which, given the widespread anti-vax attitude, means that I'm questioning the judgement of quite a few people. Some of them even somewhat distant family members that I care about.

It's a similar story with Trump supporters. The fastest way to make me question your ability to make good decisions is to tell me you support Trump.

The fastest way to make me question whether billionaires deserve their wealth is to see them propping up and enabling Trump. (And see the way they treat their employees too, tbh.)

I don't really care how many people seem swayed, how many sing his praises, how many cheer. All it does is show how deep the rot has spread.

And right now, it's clearly spread pretty deep.

The problem, right now, is what we're going to do about it.

I don't want an America that makes people 'disappear', whether their immigrants or not. 

I don't want an America that bombs civilian boats, especially when their engines could have been shot and evidence collected. If they're drug runners doing something illegal, arrest them. Whatever happened to due process?

There's so many statements that start like that. So many things I thought we cared about, that apparently 'we' do not.

I am worried about the midterms. Not so much the votes themselves, since it seems quite clear that the midterms will go against Trump and his sycophants and manipulators.

I am worried because they've already proven they don't care about the rule of law. They're already continuing to lay the groundwork to sow doubts if they lose. To try to mobilize their supporters and overturn the results when they don't go their way.

These people are clearly the type who will keep pushing, and pushing, until someone forcefully makes them stop...

And I don't see the willpower to make them stop.

Not consistently, at least.

Not on the same level. 

 

AI

 I have described myself as AI skeptical. That was because I knew and felt the same frustration most people have had

 with AI, and yet I also see the potential.

I have long thought that computers and humans were... complementary. They're better at certain things than we are, we're better at other things, and I frankly look forward to dumping all the tedious, mind-numbing and boring work on artificial intelligence. 

At the same time, the term 'meatspace' has become common for good reason.

If you're using AI to read e-mails and articles, and then using AI to write a response, and all you're really doing is sitting at the keyboard as a meatsuit for the AI... what are you even doing here?

And don't get me started how tech companies have pushed AI on us. Foisted it. It's one thing to have a nice little icon on the menu bar letting you know it's an option. It's another thing to rearrange your entire website so that the only think you see is an AI prompt window. 

But that's all casual observation, as a customer or user and not as a coder or programmer. 

Ever since my company purchased a subscription to one of the major AI coding platforms, and I realized that (as we lost a team member, and there's only one other member of my team stateside at the moment) I needed someone or something to answer questions and help me resolve issues while I learn my job, I have been using it at work.

And...

It's been a bit like the Gartner Hype cycle, all happening in about a month.

It's a powerful tool. A really powerful tool. But it will also go off on wild goose chases and tangents unless I stop it.

I've also worked hard at creating a 'coding harness', though I didn't even really understand that term when I started. I just knew that I wanted it to remember important parts about how our self-service application worked, and that I didn't want it to keep all that information in it's context window if it wasn't relevant. So I had it create a 'lessons learned' document, and reference documents, and also added in some hooks and workflows to try to make it consistently perform well and not hallucinate or write some crappy slop.

I... am not sure about that last part. I am still learning our application myself, and it's been great at helping explain what the code is doing and how it's doing it, but when you have multiple steps in a flow where one function is calling another function which is calling yet another, I am not entirely sure the AI understands the full flow properly. But that's what code reviews are for, right?

Anyways, in terms of troubleshooting, it's really, really good. Almost scary good. I had it create a skill so it knew what logs to check to see how a request was handled (this took some work too, because I gave it about four examples of different types of requests and had it look for the log entries related to it... and at first it was like "I didn't find any results, expanding the search window from the last 30 days to the last 60 days" and I had to stop it very fast and point out that the examples I gave were all from the last couple of days. Basically if it's not finding results with it's query, the issue is with the query and not with the date-range.)

Anyways, once I got it all configured it proved it's worth. It actually proved it's worth while I was configuring it, as a help request came in while I was training it and I decided to use that as an example. It very quickly noticed that the reason our company's customer support person wasn't able to get an account on their client's instance for troubleshooting purposes was because the group we were trying to create their account in had another group with the exact same name in it, and the duplicate names meant it was erroring out.

The skill has been... a life-saver, tbh. It's helped identify root causes and find workarounds more than I want to admit.

However - it still needs human judgment.  Human involvement. If it starts going down the wrong track it just keeps on going. 

It reminds me a bit of Mickey Mouse as the Sorceror's Apprentice in Fantasia, when he got the broom to start carrying the buckets of water. Except that things soon got out of hand, the brooms multiplied and kept carrying water and kept carrying water and kept carrying water...

Because here's the thing.

A human would eventually notice that the water was overflowing, that continuing to bring buckets of water didn't make sense, and they would probably stop before things got out of hand. They'd at least ask you if you really wanted them to keep doing it.

That broom, however, did not.

And an AI will not. Not unless on some level it's programmed to.

Anyways, as I see the discussions of AI going around and look at what tech companies are doing and consider it's usefulness and it's challenges, I think the heart of the problem is this:

Some people are using AI as a replacement for real people. 

And that, at least at our current level of technology, is going to fail. 

Update

 It's been a while since I sat and typed out some long posts. I've mostly just been throwing in some quick links for articles that interested me.

I don't think I've really talked about my thoughts on AI since I started using it at work, for example. And of course I'll have to write something about current events.

But overall - things are going well. I still love my job, am still working remote, and if it weren't for the ongoing decline in *looks around and skims the news* pretty much everything else, I'd say things were going well.

Oh, and I might have a business trip to Poland soon. I haven't been to Poland yet, so I'm looking forward to it.