I Am My Khakis

Permanent Political Annoyance

2011-04-07T11:16:00.000-07:00

Allow me to blather about government and money for a bit.

One of the purposes of having government is to allow us, as people, to buy things (like, say, roads) in bulk, in the cheapest way that can be arranged. Another is to have a referee for private enterprise; a regulator to ensure that corporate entities acting in the nation act in the interests of the people of the nation.

Government in North America has a mixed record on both these deals, by my view.

There are, in the market, such things as natural monopolies. These are businesses, often with a goodly cost of entering the market, where the more product you make, the cheaper each unit gets, up to a limit greater than the population. Insurance is a lovely example of this; as you scale up and get a bigger and bigger pile of people-with-insurance, risks and payouts tend more firmly towards the statistically correct, and the worry that people are buying in only because they're high-risk is reduced. So, the bigger your customer base, the better the deal.

From a "let's get this as cheaply as possible" perspective, the correct way to handle insurance - all major types of it - is to nationalize it, and put absolutely everyone in the pool. Throw the cost right in with taxes, and be done with it. This is, of course, socialism, and some people object to that. Personally, I can't - because the savings on the insurance I do want are so very, very huge that it would cover the types I don't need easily.

However! Natural monopolies aren't everywhere. In cases of, for example, construction, the costs of managing and organizing a nationalized construction company are greater than the savings. Much greater, in fact. In which case, the government should stay as far away from nationalization as is humanly possible, and instead work hard to set up anti-trust, truth-in-advertising, safety, and other regulatory law, to ensure a fair and competitive market. Some markets require very little regulation to be competitive. Some require more.

Politically, both sides of the political fence tend to be morons about this relatively simple thing, and I don't know why.

On the left, there are people who want to socialize things that are plainly not natural monopolies, or worse, see regulation as a means to do things like play with rent control (which creates black markets) and otherwise try to set prices.

On the right, there are those who want to privatize or keep private industries that are pretty blatantly never going to compete properly. Or, worse, who believe that all markets are naturally, magically competitive, and only need to be set free.

This annoys me. I confess myself annoyed.

Playing With Fire

2011-03-08T07:26:00.001-08:00

Human beings are social animals. We constantly communicate ideas, entertainment, principles, and technology to one another. If you share this blog post around, you're sharing ideas. If you talk about things you value, you're sharing principles. If you share a funny youtube video, that's entertainment. If you share a recipe for tarts, or give someone a chunk of your sourdough starter, you're sharing technology.

This is the nature of human society. A human culture is a bundle of shared ideas, entertainments, principles, and technologies. We have a top 40 records, and we share the technology of McDonalds by training new staff. Society may well be slowly shifting into having an Uberculture and a host of strong subcultures, too - but another day, for that.

Some of these ideas, entertainments, principles, and technologies are dangerous. Technologies which make it possible to put automatic weapons into the hands of every citizen are obviously dangerous; there are people who shouldn't have guns, and especially not those guns. Principles and ideas for limiting who gets to carry guns are also dangerous; an armed government presiding over an unarmed populace can go very badly indeed, for reasons that are also obvious.

This situation is extreme enough that society could be defined as "playing with fire together", and culture could be defined as "how our segment of society plays with fire". This is true in a nearly literal sense as well as a figurative one - after all, the use of fire is a technology we share.

A group of people who are being prevented from sharing and implementing dangerous technologies are being hobbled as a culture.

This isn't automatically bad. I've got an interest in, say, stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons - both in my own culture and in that of others. But interference of a blanket sort is often awful. Not only that, it's typically stupid, and doesn't work.

Think about this for a minute:

Attempts to stop kids from messing about on skateboards, because they might get hurt, aren't just attempts to keep kids safe. Likewise with all attempts to stop young people from messing about with the dangerous elements of the world. Youth culture often involves flirting with danger, not just because dangerous things are cool (though they most assuredly are), but as training for adulthood, where we are constantly playing with the dangerous stuff.

Smarter Facebook Groups.

2011-02-26T11:33:00.000-08:00

So, if it's easier to collectively organize than ever, and we're all smarter in aggregate than alone, why hasn't facebook made us all into network-augmented geniuses?

Well, because it's not a fantastic aggregator.

The tools we have could be improved, and new ones added. Let's look at three tricks for doing that, apps that could be added to your group page on an imaginary version of Facebook.

Iterative Editing: This is the wiki trick. Group memory as a thing people can edit, and revert, which has a small amount of hierarchy and a lot of open-ended "jump in"! A thinking group would want to be able to build up a memory that can be referenced; this is a solid option. Googledocs also does this trick, as did the not-so-late, mostly-unlamented Wave. But a group needs to be doing before it needs to remember what it did.

Signal Vs. Noise Pictures: Anyone can add a picture to this gallery,but when you visit it, you're prompted to vote which of a given pair of pictures is "signal", an which is "noise". Pictures with a bad enough "noise" record are slowly parsed away. Pictures with high "signal" ratings are used by the group as decoration on site, for protest signs if appropriate, and so on. The point here is that the group as a whole can develop and police their identity.

Decision Markets: So, joining gets you a little bit of "group currency", which can grow (by, say, providing high-signal stuff for the gallery above, or wiki-work, or organizing group events). This currency also goes to the Decision Market, where ideas for things the group should do are plunked down, and you can invest it in those ideas. Top ideas are also disseminated through the group pages automatically, as calls to action.

Now, are these the best of the best possible methods for getting group memory, cohesive identity, and calls to action? Probably not, but they're workable. Are those functions the most important functions a group needs to add in order to be incredible? Again, probably not, but they do belong on the list.

Why don't we have these tools on that platform? Well, because even though they're relatively simple, they'd take resources to develop, and having the group will to act is not the same as having the group impulse to get better at action.

In addition, these same tools can already be found scattered across the web - consolidating them into FB would only act as an accelerant, not an invention. We'll get the consolidated device, though - with these tools or others, on my imaginary facebook, or on some other platform for group action.

Slowly, one step at a time, we're building a lever which, in the hands of the motivated, the courageous, and the energetic, can topple kingdoms. It already works; I'd just like to see it work better.

Diversity (A Rant)

2011-02-24T13:06:00.001-08:00

If everyone was just like you, then the only things that could be invented, maintained, or done, are the things you can invent, maintain, and do.

I'm a big booster of open speech - though not totally free. I'm in favor of democracy - but not of mob rule. I'm in favor of good markets - which includes regulating them well.

I don't favor these things on general principle, but because they're good for me. And when I say "good for me", I may very well include you. Because your good is often my good, too. That's the basic principle, here; there's a win-win solutions in the world for most problems.

A free, open Middle East filled with vibrant, expressive, self-determining people, all striving for their own good? I don't want it on pure principle. I want it because it's good in very real ways; because a few million more minds seeking ways to improve their own lives will have bright ideas that work here, will have jokes to make me laugh, will look for ways to accrue investment from my nation, enriching all of us. And so on, a few million more times.

If you're concerned about Libyan revolt raising the price of your gasoline, and consider that to be the primary issue of their revolt, then let me say this to you: Fuck you, you myopic, shortsighted, racist pile of shit. Fuck you and your win-lose bullshit. Fuck your support for dictators on the grounds that they helped keep people silent, so that your government and mine could take and take and take. Fuck your endless cries of "But Stability!".

We play with democracy and risk mob rule. We can decide whether to have or not have a death penalty. We can decide just how armed or unarmed our citizens ought to be in relation to the government. We can play with 'how much regulation is right'. And we can do so despite the fact that these are incredibly dangerous tools. We can make mistakes, and we do. Because it's us, and we're in this together.

They shouldn't get to join in, because what? Yes, they might fuck up as badly as we have over the last century, learning their own lessons, teaching us their new tricks while learning from ours. And they probably will. Cope with it; either they're us, too, and we are in this together, or they're the big scary other, the enemy, the wrong color, they pray the wrong way...

A diverse group bickers, even fights and breaks the dishes. But diverse groups, acting in aggregate, are better at solving problems than monolithic groups. That's what makes capitalism so potent; it's what makes wikipedia so much smarter than it should be by any normal metric. It's why the odds on horse races, reshuffled with each bet, end up being better predictors than statistical agencies.

None of us are anywhere close to as smart, as powerful, as capable, as all of us together. Not because we are the same, but because we are not.

It's us against the universe, building the lives we want. Do you want a bigger team, or not?

Selling Sex

2011-02-22T06:21:00.000-08:00

You already know everything in this post. You may not look at it in this way, though; this is a play on perspective, not a presentation of new facts.

For starters, gere's a quick model of things that a marketing campaign is aiming to instill:

Category Awareness: The knowledge that a kind of thing exists at all; that there are such things as glasses of milk, or songs, or smart phones. Ads don't usually focus too hard on this aspect of marketing; it's implied in any ad.
Category Desire: That you want something in a given category. Advertisements for "Got Milk?" are category advertisements, rather than one-brand advertisements. This is generally an attempt to create a fantasy of 'how your life will be better (if only for a moment) with such a thing'.
Brand Awareness: This is awareness of a specific brand of good. Not just smartphones, but the iPhone 4. Not just milk, but Lucerne. Not just songs, but Britney Spears songs.
Brand Desire: Again, that you want this specific brand. This is, again, an attempt to create a fantasy of how your life will be improved by the giant app market, the wholesome calcium, the thumpy beats and sexy lyrics.
????
Profit!

Yes, there's more to it. Loads more. But for purposes of my point, that'll do. Now, here's a few things you already know, recast from this perspective:

When a company uses sex (images, terms, whatever) as part of marketing, they aren't just selling you the product. They're also selling you the sex. That is, the beer ad is selling you a cold Miller, but it's also selling you the hot babe, the fantasy of the hot babe, and the definition of hot-babeness that's been concocted for the ad.

Really great, highly competitive marketing for a product makes the competition seem less interesting by comparison. I'm totally sold on my PS3, and the 360 seems less engaging as a platform to me as a result of this. Getting seriously sold on the sexiness of a Katy Perry could make my actual relationship less engaging if there was competition between them. And 'competition' here includes redefining the category: If "hot women" as a category in media excludes a large number of very real women, then those women have a concern with being defined right out of their actual appeal....

...Women know this, of course. Maybe they wouldn't put it that way, but the idea of being in competition with other women is loaded heavily into culture. The idea that men are competing with other men for the beautiful ladies is, of course, also on the table.

The other thing that's loaded heavily into culture, even though we know it's bullshit, is the idea that winning the competition is absolute. Your partner doesn't only have eyes for you; it's a romantic overstatement, a piece of gross flattery, and it's lovely - but don't go thinking that it's a deep truth. Your partner is just as complex a being as you are, with just as many stray thoughts, just as great a degree of liquidity. But being at the dead center of how they define sexy is not a guarantee you'll stay there. And, equally, that your partner is dead sexy to you today doesn't mean that they'll stay that way to you; the categories in your head are susceptible to marketing, too.

So, if all this is true, then what?

Well, as with absolutely everything I talk about around here, we aren't actually passive targets in this process. We're active participants. We choose our media, and we choose how we engage in it. We can control our own fantasy lives, choosing which moments of internal desire to keep on the playlist, and which to reject.

So how do we deal with this?

You can market yourself to your partner harder, of course - and that's always the solution proposed by the commercial to follow. Cosmetics and fashion, as industries, have solid foundations in this tactic.
You can have flat requirements for non-competition. The general cultural package for a relationship comes standard with physical sexual fidelity. Hearing "I don't let my husband put up nudie pics in the garage" isn't a rare thing. In some open-relationship circles, there's a rule of "You don't touch one person while imagining someone else", which may seem odd, but has it's own kind of sense. On the exact opposite end, if the fantasy is of a person that doesn't actually exist... Well, if I get a request to put on a Thor outfit, I'm not about to turn it down, y'know?
You can accept that the competition isn't an absolute game; you don't get to be in charge of your partner's mind, and we'd all be better off discarding the idea that our partners are in any way owned by us.
Possibly the most important, which is almost never coherently discussed, is that you can (and should) market your partner to yourself. Writing sappy poems about your partner, buying them nice underthings, and similar such acts, didn't get a good reputation as ways to woo women simply out of thin air. Those acts are tangible proofs that you've been busily selling yourself on the idea of your partner, that's one of the reasons why they're so hot.

You're part of my brain, mister scientist. So start talking.

2011-02-16T10:56:00.000-08:00

The magnificent woman that I live with occasionally makes remarks about how she acts as my memory for a few classes of events - and she's totally correct. Equally, I have a whole host of friends that, simply by existing near me socially, and broadcasting the things that they do, are integrated into my general functioning.

I don't need to search up insane hilarity online; I have people for that. And it's not like they want money for it; it's just a thing they do. It can be assumed that I fill some equally odd functions for others, providing some form of cognitive hoopla that they use as grist for their own internal mills. Which is good!

My opinions on the news are often picked up from others. I don't have time to form complete and coherent opinions on every damn thing out there, so I borrow opinions from people with expertise.

By these mechanisms, a large part of my thinking is done for me by way of social interaction. I suspect that this is true of everyone.

....

It is for this reason that I think we need better "explainers" and "PR people" working in and for science and academia, and basic training in "explaining your shit" for everyone working there.

The expert is our friend, a potential expansion of our ability to think-by-appropriation. The ivory tower of jargon, of bad media reporting, of inability to explain? Those are enemies. In the sense of having a socially-managed mind, those problems are growing failures for my thinking, and I don't like them.

Consider taxes, and what they pay for. If you're not sure what they pay for, I invite you to consider the red labels in the picture below (which was also appropriated, of course):

That lady with the "Zero taxes" sign is not thinking clearly. Whatever social circle she's cribbing her economic ideas from is failing to provide her with some pretty basic information.

This is partly her problem, in that "Taxes pay for at least a few things you like" is pretty damn easy information to lay hands on. It is also partly a problem for her social grouping, because those folks have at least one serious problem in their group thinking. But it's also a problem for all of us.

Anytime you make your discipline harder to approach, you invite social schizophrenia; you risk making other people dumber by denying them whatever expertise you have.

Apply barriers with caution.

Identity, Virtue, Economy

2011-02-11T07:45:00.000-08:00

There are seven commonly-discussed virtues (sometimes noted as four Christian virtues and three Pagan ones), which have long been enshrined by western society as ideals. These are hope, faith, love, justice, courage, temperance, and prudence.

To aspire to a virtue is a statement of identity. To try and be loving alters who you are - as readers of this blog know, I argue that everything you do, wear, say, and aspire to changes to who you are, because you are largely the sum of those things (and maybe a bit more).

If you aspire to a virtue, you may become more virtuous. This may seem odd from me; as a modern intellectual, I can happily talk about virtues as 'things we built up' rather than as things we discovered. But so what? We also built soup kitchens, and schools. We built hospitals, and governments (both good and bad). We built tools to investigate the inner workings of the universe, and procedures by which we might approach the slippery bastard that is truth. That a thing is made does not make it unworthy. It does mean, though, that it can be lost, forgotten, cast aside.

I'm not about to try and call up some golden age of the past, but there are times when these virtues are actively improving specific parts of society, and times when they are not. At any given moment, really, prudence can be seen somewhere... But not always in, say, the housing market.

So, let me talk about some of those virtues in action, in a place where they do good work - by which I mean, in the marketplace.

The entrepreneur requires courage - as does anyone whose business model must change to keep pace with the times we live in. A collective failure of nerve can mean that things we could use to make our lives materially better won't exist, because nobody has the gumption to try and make them. In existing industry, the cry for deep protections against modernity is (among other things) often an act of cowardice.

A "bubble" on the market is a failure of both prudence and temperance among investors, and a perversion of faith and hope in the market. Artificial booms are caused by overweening greed of a sort that has little to do with materially improving the lives of many involved.

The very existence of Fiat currency is a matter of Faith and Hope. Money has value because we believe it has value; it's not backed by gold or plutonium or some other harder store.

A market where those involved possess a sense of Justice is one where cheaters are noted, caught, and ousted. Where that sense of justice fails, cheaters are lauded, stocks manipulated, businesses and lives ruined.

....

For some, this may raise up the spectre of Gordon Gecko's famed speech in the film Wall Street:

"Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed cuts through and clarifies, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed in all of it's forms. Greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind, and Greed, mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA."

...It's a magnificent lie, isn't it? The speech conflates all ambition, all aspiration, with his particular form. But the greed of Gordon Gecko, and of those who mirrored his actions, are a form of self-interest based on valuing numbers over people. Far from saving anything, the wild rush to play at the expense of others, in a market freed from all virtue, brings chaos, disharmony, and recession.

Our markets, governments, and all our institutions, can handle a little greed, a little overblown rhetoric, a share of hateful pride and scorn. We can put some measure of these things into harness and derive work from them. That's a strength of our systems, and no mistake. But it's not the basis of our systems.

The basis of these systems is virtue, not vice. A built thing, noble, worth preserving, but able to easily be lost and forgotten. And when we lose track of this, we invite dysfunction into our markets, our governments, our courts, and all else besides.

Open Lines, Win-Win arrangements, and the Jasmine Revolution.

2011-01-29T14:45:00.000-08:00

Where people can communicate openly, and find the means to sort their communications as they wish, they often discover more and more win-win arrangements that they can make between themselves.

This is obvious where trade is concerned. eBay is an open line of communication which allows people to arrange transactions where one person gets richer, another gets something they like, and both are happier. Social media allow people to support each other and coordinate in a multitude of ways. While we haven't yet mastered this stuff - the interface between life and technology being somewhat wild and unstable - we're making progress.

Of course, where new lines of communication are added, and new arrangements start being pointed out, it can easily mean that that arrangements made begin to escape the present controls. Tax evasion on eBay income is one manifestation of this. So are sudden protests arranged in dictatorial nations.

Open lines of communication don't create this effect. But they allow it, accelerate it, and enhance it. In Tunisia, in Egypt, protests and change are the order of our times. Perhaps these quick events will go further now, or perhaps they'll slow down for a time. But only for a time, I suspect, for the reasons I've stated above.

The information age has only begun; it is immature. But it is by nature transparent, instantaneous, well-informed. This is a world now where a protest that is put down by the police can be and will be broadcast with or without the consent of the government, even where attempts to shut down the internet occur. Where diplomatic cables can be spread worldwide by snarking stoolpigeons, and that's just how it goes. This is bad news not just for tyrants, but for much of the business of politics - for all the dishonest action, and for a share of the honest action, too.

Where we make a positive arrangement with a dictator, we have failed to make a thousand positive arrangements with a people. This has always been true, but it has been easier to make that one arrangement in the past; that's where the lines were open.

In the future? There are good reasons to think that it will be otherwise.

The Revolution Is Incomplete

2011-01-27T09:42:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine recently posted to Facebook:

"We have built invisible cubicles around ourselves, accessible only via text. This is the information age. The future is unfriendly."

-JLW

This sentiment has come around before, and it has a sort of bite to it - but I say to you that it's upside down.

Time was, and it wasn't that long ago, that we were far more deeply limited in what we could discover, in who we could stay connected to, in who we could be as a result. A sort of village effect defined both our happiness and our discontent in terms of personal relationships. You could write, and telephone, but the constant digital contact of the present Twittering Facebooker, wasn't even really conceivable.

We can now be much more of who we want to be and in contact with many more of those we wish to be with. And that's good, right? It's the miracle of the information age, it's a revolution in connection and identity; this is what we want - we're paying for it, and we're doing so because we want it.

But the revolution is incomplete. Or, at least, the revolution has not yet matured. There are people who meet online, and then come together and get married. In any long-running online community, there are "Let's have gatherings!" calls, and sooner or later you'll see wry jokes about "we should all get together and buy a camp, or move into a suburb, all together". We get this events, these statements, because our digital resolution is not all we want.

If a group of people who know each other online gather, and then go from here to there together, they won't go one at a time even if we know the way - they will sort by instinct a way to walk together - the cool 'group walking' that kicks up Reservoir Dogs is not an accident, nor are many of the other similar scenes. We're built to coordinate with each other in immediate ways, and when we don't get a chance to do that, something is odd. There's a sense of community that can be found in a construction crew that can't be found in the most refined sharing of inner thoughts and identity-bits online. It's not a "better" communal sense; it's just part of the other communal sense.

After the snow melts, the summons will go out to my friends, calling us to the local legislature to picnic and draw on the pavements with chalk. We'll draw individually and make something big together, we'll chatter almost meaninglessly about things we could have easily said in other media. We do this every year - and it's not nearly always me that makes the call; a lovely lady named Holly can be credited as the origin of our chalk days. In many ways, it's the most trivial and silly of events. In others... It isn't.

Moving and laughing and playing together, in the light, matters.

The information age is, in the end, a fantastic supplement. But if it's all you get, then you end up in a deep cocoon, wondering how it all went bad. The revolution, taken alone, is incomplete.

Economically Rational

2011-01-20T04:25:00.000-08:00

Homo Economicus, the Economic Man, makes perfect decisions. He spends money only when it is in his utterly selfish interests, and always in the most prudent fashion available. He has perfect information about the marketplace at all times.

Lies, all lies, is one wave of reaction. First, people patently don't have perfect information. Second, we aren't motivated solely by prudence. And third, people often act against their own utterly selfish interests.

Now, to that reaction, I'll grant the first two objections (for the moment). But not the third. Because people never act against their own selfish interests, ever. Rather, people constantly delude themselves about where their self begins and ends.

Your self and your identities are wrapped around each other indivisibly, to the point where what is in your interest can easily take on wild colorations. If you are a liberal, then there is some extent to which liberal interests are your interests. If you are a patriot, then there is some extent to which the good of your nation is good to you - even, in some cases, good enough to risk your physical body.

If you are a Pokemon Fan, then that which is good for the success of the franchise is in your interest. Before you snicker, consider your favorite franchises, companies, manufacturers, restaurants. Does their success somehow make you feel greater?

And if this is true of your interests and commercial identities, how much more true is it of those you love? The good of your children, if you have children, is in your interests. But I digress a little from my intended objective.

Imagine, if you will, the anti-establishment hippie, stoned off his gourd, staring up at you and telling you "When you, like, put on a suit and sell out to the man, you turn into a zombie - they own you, man, they own your mind". He's got a point. Of course, the point applies to him, in reverse - our stoner hippie has bought an identity, and when he occupies that identity, many of his interests are managed for him.

When you settle on components of your identity, you are giving the society that defines that identity access to your goals and your wallet. This is true even if the identity chosen is supposedly counter-cultural; does your counter-culture have it's own shops? And that's rational, economically, in the sense that you've made this group part of your self.

To control your wallet, you must first control your self-image.

The Value Of Legitimacy

2011-01-11T03:56:00.000-08:00

Most economics are based on scarcity and desire. We want clean drinking water pretty badly, but there's so much of it that we've made it effectively free in many, many places. We want diamonds some, sure - oh, and they're rare; and as a result, expensive.

And that's pretty good, as far as it goes. But we can make artificial diamonds pretty easily now, and make them indistinguishable from the real thing. Wouldn't that destroy the rarity entirely? Turns out, not so much - we require that artificial diamonds be labelled, see. And that's a distinction of legitimacy, which is something we're going to need to get a lot better at managing in the future. This is a strong relative, in some way, of the strange quest for the authentic that moves in many circles (some of which are purely marketing-created, but some of which are... authentic).

So, some equating:

Our desire for digital merchandise, for information products like music, programs, and so on, has not decreased. If anything, it continues to grow.

The scarcity of information products has dropped to zero, or so closer to zero as to make no nevermind. We are in a post-scarcity age for information. Living in denial of this fact, scrambling to create a scarcity in order to sell one, is one of the new games in town. I'd argue that it's a game for dumbasses, but Microsoft is playing it anyway; they must know something I don't. Or they're relying on people to be clueless. Or both.

What digital companies are selling, in truth, is authenticity and legitimacy. You give them money in order to possess their permission. And this is not a negligible asset. As a general example, iTunes is not significantly more reliable, nor significantly faster, than torrenting sites. PDF stores online aren't easier to use than rapid upload sites.

The question of an online sale is not how much you think your product is worth. The question is how much a customer group would value having a legitimate product, because the "legitimate" part is the part they're being sold. And the answer isn't as simple as one might expect - customers intending to use something one-time and then discard it? They don't need legitimacy. Customers for whom the item is a social product; something they will talk with their friends about? They have plenty of value for legitimacy unless their circle has already given up on legitimacy for that product as overpriced, stupid, a dolt's game.

The value of legitimacy in an electronic product is an output of the use of that product, and of the dialog that surrounds it.

That's the new market, as I see it. It's not quite the one most major companies seem to see, but there you have it.

Arcane Knowledge

2011-01-07T06:55:00.000-08:00

If there is knowledge in the world that is known only to the initiate and the adept, then the initiate and the adept will gain authority and power in the circles where that knowledge is important.

Consider, if you will, the history of Catholicism. While Catholicism isn't primarily a mystery cult, the same structure of appeal has been employed. Having occasional rituals, catchphrases, in a language that the participants don't speak? That helps keeps power in the hands of the elite, whether or not that was the intention. Or, back before the Protestant reformation - when the holy text itself was outside the grasp of the masses, and in the wrong language.

The possession of hidden or confusing knowledge grants the holder authority. But the knowledge need not be religious. Scientists and academics slowly aspire towards the social role that priests have held in the past. Confess to your psychologist, and consult your engineer. The knowledge of these people, however, is arcane not because it is concealed (though there is a little obfuscation of language); it is arcane and confusing because it is dense. The knowledge and the means of proving the knowledge are not, and should not be separated, in this way of knowing - one must cite sources; it ought to be possible to track each claim to the source.

But if this is a blanket truth, then what about the hermetic adept, the practitioner of alchemy, and the goetic summoner - shouldn't they have claims to authority somehow?

Well, in their circles, they may; but they made an error that took them from having power among the mighty to living in the small places. They decided to show their sources and make claims to proof, where none existed. They gave up on the mystery of the faithful initiate, claiming the mantle of dense but provable truth that belongs rightly in the hands of the scientific or even purely mechanical adept. The man who can fix your car is an adept, and we have learned, these days, to expect serious and visible results of our adepts.

In these days, seeing the power of our adepts, we slowly learn to question the value of initiates, too. Do you want to know the secret of the Templars? It will give you power! No? How about the secret of the Scientologists? Well, it's good for a chuckle, at the very least.

We, as people, can imagine a world in which can catch the scent of manufactured mysteries, and look on them with grave suspicion. Where the man with an arcane secret is always assumed to be selling something. It's a healthy world; it's where we primarily want to exist. But it's not a poetic, adventurous world; it's not where we want to live.

I think this conflict can be resolved, in most cases, by transforming our manufactured mysteries into artistry for the mind and the society. That lovely lady dancing with the veils has a secret, and she won't be revealing all her mysteries for you - her mystery is a device, wielded with skill.

It may be that one day, many of the mysteries of faith will be employed with equal grace. I hope so; as absolutes, as gates and demands and oaths, they will surely fail.

Batman & The Immutable You

2011-01-06T21:11:00.000-08:00

A lot of this blog is dedicated to the mutable self - even the name bears testament to the fact that the trappings we wear shape our identities. And this post is about that kind of thing, too.

But let's talk about Batman for a moment.

Over the years, Batman has had many artists and writers. And each of those writers tells Batman a little differently; they can't help it. The movie The Dark Knight is not the same as the graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns. Tim Burton's Batman is just as different from either. Wildly different artists, media, and outlooks were brought to bear in these things.

Each artist tells Batman differently, because each artist is different. Batman is like this blog's eponymous pair of khakis; if you're writing a Batman story, that's part of who you are, you Batman-story-teller, you. But there is some thing that will come through as different.

Joe can be a Star Trek convention geek and a pick-up basketball player. And when Joe picks up those identities, they do change how he acts and is. But he changes those things, too. Joe, Star Trek convention geek, isn't the same as Mark, Star Trek convention geek, if you're in any position to pass anything beyond cursory judgement.

I have been Levi, hard-smoking, rum-swilling drunk, grinning at the screen like a fiend while twanging rock music poured over me. Today, I'm Levi, smoke-free and health-drink-crazed, staring at the screen while under the influence of hard exercise and Dido. And these things change me and change the actions I intend to take in future in fairly notable ways. I am another me, but I'm still me.

Alternate universe Spock... is still Leonard Nimoy.

We can be a thousand different people, and still be ourselves; our closest friends will always know us - and they'll still be our friends. Because what we, as people, learn to value about each other as we move from being acquaintances into being close friends is not the parts of a person created by their trappings, but the parts of a person that shape those trappings into being them again and again, whoever else they may also be today.

Television and movies often fail in that they can't represent this basic thing; in media, all changes to a person go all the way through, because all media character are ultimately pretty shallow entities. We're more solid than that. And that's awesome, too.

Whoever you are tomorrow, I'll meet you there.

Body Wisdom

2011-01-03T06:40:00.000-08:00

An extended quote, from a female and newly-pregnant character in Foucalt's Pendulum. Be told: A bit explicit.

"Pow, archetypes don't exist; the body exists. The belly inside is beautiful, because the baby grows there, because your sweet cock, all bright and jolly, thrusts there, and good, tasty food descends there, and for this reason, the cavern, the grotto, the tunnel are beautiful and important, and the labyrinth too, which is made in the image of our wonderful intestines. When somebody wants to invent something beautiful and important, it has to come from there, because you also come from there the day you were born, because fertility always comes from inside a cavity, where first something rots and then, lo and behold, there's a little man, a date, a baobab."

"And high is better than low because if you have your head down, the blood goes to your head, because feet stink and hair doesn't stink as much, because it's better to climb a tree and pick fruit than end up underground, food for worms, and because you rarely hurt yourself hitting something above - you really have to be in an attic - while you often hurt yourself falling. That's why up is angelic and down is devilish."

"But what I said before, about my belly, is also true, both things are true, down and inside are beautiful, and up and outside are beautiful, and the spirit of Mercury and Manicheanism have nothing to do with it. Fire keeps you warm and cold gives you bronchial pneumonia, especially if you're a scholar four thousand years ago, and therefore fire has mysterious virtues besides it's ability to cook your chicken. But cold preserves that same chicken, and fire, if your touch it, gives you a blister this big; therefore, if you think of something preserved for millennia, like wisdom, you have to think of it on a mountain, up, high (and high is good), but also in a cavern (which is good, too) and in the eternal cold of the Tibetan snows (best of all). And if you want to know why wisdom comes from the Orient and not from the Swiss Alps, it's because the body of your ancestors in the morning, when it woke and there was still darkness, looked to the east hoping the sun would rise and there wouldn't be rain."

"Yes, Mama."

"Yes, indeed, my child. The sun is good because it does the body good, and it has the sense to reappear every day; therefore, what returns is good, not what passes and is done with. The easiest way to return from where you've been without retracing your steps is to walk in a circle. The animal that coils in a circle is the serpent; that's why so many cults and myths of the serpent exist, because it's hard to represent the returning of the sun with the coiling of the hippopotamus. Furthermore, if you have to make a ceremony to invoke the sun, it's best if you move in a circle, because if you go in a straight line, you move away from home, which means the ceremony will have to be kept short. The circle is the most convenient arrangement for any rite, even the fire-eaters in the marketplace know this, because in a circle everyone can see the one who's in the center, whereas if a whole tribe formed a straight line, like a squad of soldiers, the people at the ends wouldn't see. And that's why the circle and rotary motion and cyclic return are fundamental to every cult and every rite.""

(Skipping ahead a bit, past a couple paragraphs of numbers-in-the-body)

"Or, if you like, take the anatomy of your menhir, which your authors are always talking about. Standing up during the day, lying down at night - your thing, too. No, don't tell me what it does at night. The fact is that erect it works and prone it rests. So the vertical position is life, pointing sunward, and obelisks stand as trees stand, while the horizontal position and night are sleep, death. All cultures worship menhirs, monoliths, pyramids, columns, but nobody bows down to balconies and railings. Did you ever hear of an archaic cult of the sacred banister? You see? And another point: if you worship a vertical stone, even if there are a lot of you, you can all see it; but if you worship, instead, a horizontal stone, only those in the front row can see it, and the others start pushing, me too, me too, which is not a fitting sight for a magical ceremony..."

"But rivers..."

"Rivers are worshiped not because they're horizontal, but because there's water in them, and you don't need me to explain to you the relation between water and the body... Anyway, that's how we're put together, all of us, and that's why we work out the same symbols millions of kilometers apart, and naturally they all resemble each other."

On Prometheus

2010-12-12T23:24:00.000-08:00

In myth, Prometheus was a Titan, and humans were his favorites. Because he loved humanity, he stole fire from Zeus, and gave it to men. Zeus punished him by chaining him to a rock and charging an eagle with eating his liver, which would grow back each day (Titan, y'know). Years later, he would be rescued by Heracles.

So, this sneaky bastard comes out of nowhere. He hands us a gift that sets us above all other creatures. Then, the authority comes down and screws him over. And we, the masses of humanity, sat there and let this shit go on for several years, and built temples to Zeus, the guy who was holding out on us?

Man, Prometheus is not the myth I thought it was. Turns out, this is a myth about how we get the leaders we deserve, and not the ones we want.

I want the story where we tell Zeus to shove it, and we go get Prometheus off that rock.

Just, y'know. So you know.

The Violence Inherent In The System

2010-11-02T14:41:00.000-07:00

This is a post about internet forums, based largely on the time I have spent (and continue to spend) on the forums at http://forum.rpg.net. Forums grow, and become well known, based on the nature and quality of their content - and that content is shaped both by culture and by the structure of forums in general. So, a couple of quick, and hopefully obvious points, about forums:

1. A forum thread grows when people have opinions on the topic, prompting them to post. It keeps growing if those people have opinions on each others opinions.

2. People posting opinions would like those opinions to receive attention of some kind or another, or they wouldn't post.

On a forum, a creative 'riff' can happen when people start making stuff in response to stuff made by others - giving us story-making forums. A debate can run along, garnering evidence and depth of argument on all sides (though it will almost never resolve, it may well be explained). An exploration of a topic can lead to experiences posted on all sides, with lots of people asking for more detail from one another. And, of course, a fight can steadily escalating into a match where everyone is throwing burning shit at each other.

These things all happen by means of the two points above; the mechanism is identical.

Now, on a large forum, this process can happen fairly swiftly. In a couple hours, a thread explodes, because there are lots of opinions. Notably, though, fighting can derail any debate, exploration, or creative discussion; if it gats hot, it's likely to stay hot - cool reaction in a fight takes energy. Which means that many of the biggest threads on any large forum are, by nature, going to be fights eventually, and stay that way.

Unless something intervenes, be it an authority, or the community at large.

Marisol Valles Garcia

2010-10-22T12:41:00.000-07:00

Guadalupe, Mexico, is a town of ten thousand people.

This town has not had a chief of police for a full year, because nobody wanted the job. You see, their previous police chiefs kept getting killed. Their mayors tend to die fast, too - pretty much any public official that might stand up against the local drug lords is as good as dead. People stay home nights in Guadalupe.

Marisol Valles Garcia is 20 years old. She's a criminology student. And she's the only one that wanted the job. So, as of yesterday, she is the chief of police in Guadalupe. She has stated that she will not be carrying a weapon in the course of her duties, and though she has what amount to a couple of bodyguards now, they aren't intended to be permanent.

Her intent is to foster community. To network the people of her town, to discuss values with children, to build...

...Well. To rebuild a civic society.

I take my hat off in respect to this woman, now. I am certain that I will need to do so again, one way or another, in future. I hope that it will be in recognition of her change to the fabric, the culture, the nature of her town. I fear that it will be otherwise.

I do not have faith enough for prayer.

If you do, pray for her.

Our Grand Consensus

2010-10-15T09:22:00.000-07:00

People create society through consensus decisions.

There's a decent chance you don't like the sound of that statement at all. After all, you can easily point to power disparities among people, meaning that some people have more or less say. That's not a consensus, right?

But that's the trick. Rich people have status because we want to be rich, we imitate rich people, we respect rich people. Their power spring from consensus. Equally, deviant and despised people have less power because we treat them as such. Here, look at this progression:

Joe is a slightly better hunter than the others in the village.
Joe is known as the best hunter in the village, and is imitated and listened to.
Joe is the Chief Hunter of the village; he leads hunts and instruct the boys.

Now, each step on that line is an obvious progression from the steps before it; you can imagine those items as a timeline, pretty easily.

Notice there is no guarantee in that progression that Joe is a better hunter because of a quality that can be taught or imitated. If Joe is a better hunter despite bad technique because he happens to have far better eyesight, some of his status is misplaced - others should not be imitating his technique (though if being the Chief Hunter means he'll have lots of kids, that might be good for the tribe in the long run). Of course, it's very possible that Joe really does have better technique, and merit wins out after all.

This progression happens in every society, at every level. We have goals, and choose those we wish to associate with, imitate, learn from - often based on their apparent success at those goals. We also choose which qualities we want to avoid - often by looking for those who appear to be failing.

Which is a nice, confusing way to say that whenever get together to achieve their mutual goals, one of the first things they will agree on is inequality. We don't build consensus as equals. When we're operating as equals, it's usually inside some structure designed to treat us as such - the voting booth, for example. And even then, the inequalities that we have helped create and perpetuate from outside the structure leak in and affect us.

When Marx said that people have a "false consciousness" about what's best for them, he was missing the trees for the forest. We often have very good ideas about what's good for us in the very immediate sphere. It's just that it doesn't scale well.

I don't vote for a candidate because they will produce far-reaching policy that will help create economic stability. I vote for him because I want to say that I did so. And I want to say this to people that are much nearer to me than the economy. I might even just want to say it to myself, to reaffirm my identity. I make the decision based on what is best for me, right here, right now.

And that's how we get a social consensus.

Counting Cards

2010-09-29T10:55:00.000-07:00

Probabilities aren't inherently real to the human mind. Frequencies are.

If I pulled out a die, red on four sides and green on two, a fair roller in all aspects, and offered to bet you evenly on the outcomes, the proper response is to always bet on red. It doesn't matter if red has come up ten times in a row, and you're thinking "It's got to change soon; maybe I should bet green" - you should always, always, always bet on red with that die.

But after seeing red ten times, a person (you, me, anyone) will almost always have that thought. Because, uh, probability, right?

Actually.... that's wrong.

We have that impression because we want and expect to see a balanced world. We know, by the definition of the test, that in the long run, the die will roll 1 green side for each 2 red sides. And when it doesn't show up soon, we start anticipating it, twitching ahead of it's arrival, because we anticipate the results showing up with the right frequency. But there's no guarantee that this frequency will show itself without a lot of observation - for preference, many copies of the die, rolled many times.

Probabilities require rational construction - you need to think the numbers through, every time.

That said, as clever monkeys, we can cheat the impulse. And it's something we can get better at. Counting cards, for example, is a set of methods for combining problems of frequency and probability in a game where you will see the full set of results given enough time (assuming the whole deck is gone through).

Personally, I think that we should teach card counting in High School. It'd be helpful to students to understand how this stuff works.

Zen, Science, and a Challenge.

2010-08-15T20:16:00.000-07:00

How can we acquire an unmediated experience of the world, when the being that experiences is, in itself, mediated and constructed?

Zen teaches that the means to this end is to reduce desire, and seek Nirvana, the "blowing out" of certain portions of the self. I've already put up a fun little broken koan about this, linked at the top of the blog (if you haven't read that, go on).

The scientific method aims to refine terms and conceptions, self-correcting through review and comparison with basic information, to build discourses that run parallel to reality. Effectively, this means rebuilding your thinking to match the reality around you. It also means acquiring a huge load of language and expertise for each topic you want to "get".

A few times, I've mentioned the need for better 'folk science' - the need to spread basic rules of judgment that need no special language, but contain a basic, rule-of-thumb reflection of reality. I believe that it's more useful to spread good guidelines than it is to attack misperceptions.

So here's my challenge to you...

The "One Simple Rule" Challenge

Think for a minute about fields of knowledge where you've got some real grip on things. It doesn't matter what field it is. It can be shelf-stocking in stores, the nature of ecosystems, the way that cartoons are made, the hard science of genetics.

Think of one thing that everyone tends to get wrong - a basic fact that is represented dead wrong in discussions, media, and the like. Again, this can be anything. Now, instead of only discussing what's wrong with that perception, try to come up with a one simple rule that expresses the real thing as well as the error.

This can be about wrong word use: "Evolution means this; it doesn't mean that." It can be about procedure "Real soldiers do this; they don't do that".

Post your rule somewhere. In the comments here, on your blog, journal, on facebook, wherever. Give me a link to it if it's outside the comments (again, here, or email me: levi.kornelsen@gmail.com ).

Share your corrections in basic thinking. Show us something you know.

I bloody well dare you.

You think sorcerous thoughts.

2010-08-13T15:40:00.000-07:00

Much magic relies on two principles: The law of similarity and the law of contagion, as described in Fraser's The Golden Bough.

The Law of Similarity states that things which are alike are connected. If you wish to affect a person with magic, then a photograph of that person, a personlike doll, or an effigy of some other sort, is a significant tool. If you want to act on a field, a handful of dirt would help.

The Law of Contagion states that things which were once connected remain connected in some way. So, if you wish to work magic on a person, some of their hair would be of value. If you want to act on a field, a stone from that field would be helpful.

Holy communion is a form of ritual cannibalism, in which wine becomes blood through a magical act rooted in the law of sympathy. The shroud of Turin is holy because of the law of contagion. A classical 'voodoo doll' obeys both principles - a manikin containing bits of the target.

Set aside your ideas on the truth or untruth of magic for the moment, and consider this: Whether or not there's anything going on in magic, these laws represent basic human thinking. Take a quick look at the gestalt principles (Linky), for some fun optical effects. The gestalt principles show some weird tricks in how we frame visual input and turn it into recognizable stuff.

The law of similarity ties into object sorting; we sort objects in reference to each other by defining the things that they have in common. The law of contagion ties into basic activities of all sorts - these objects were part of that stack, that's John's blood and he's sick - stay back!

Some readers will likely look at this as and think "So, magic is a set of cognitive illusions created by rules of thinking, just as optical illusions can be created by rules of perception". And that's fine, but it's also a simplistic read.

Magical thinking (and I do include religious thinking here) is use of cognitive 'cheat codes'. It's possible, by refining and examining your faith, to change your own thinking in ways that are swift and intense. The sharing of magical thinking comes at the mind in a way that bypasses reason.

It's like magic.

Highest Compliments

2010-08-11T11:09:00.000-07:00

As people, we like to talk about our opinions, share ideas, and pass on things that we like. We share symbols, icons, discourse, words, pictures, music, philosophies. We suggest books, review films. These days, we often share media in a much more direct way.

Sharing is often deeply personal. In many cases, what we share represents us - you can find a bit of media that says what you'd like to say, and says it better. You can project an identity, showing others your good taste and the kinds of things you like.

Recently, the concept of memes has been come into being; the idea of infectious ideas that spread from person to person. It's an appealing concept. A large part of the idea is that that concepts can act like living things, using us as a platform for carrying on their existence, and subject to natural selection. Which is pretty interesting-sounding.

It's also utter bullshit. We share naturally; special and virulent ideas are a fun way to talk about it, but the interesting thing is us. Referring to things in a anthropomorphized way? That's also very much us. Information doesn't want to be free; it doesn't have a tendency to spread - we have a tendency to spread it. We pick up language and concepts as tools (and how we love our tools). On a basic level, simple communication, it costs us nothing to hand them about; they can be duplicated without loss.

This drive to share such stuff doesn't come without some problems, once it gets out into the world. The world includes musicians who are already trying to work with a problematic system supposedly set up to repay them for their work. Pharmaceutical companies spend millions on research to get the first pill of a type - but the pills cost pennies afterwards, and can be made by everyone. Our methods in such cases, as well as our laws, have not caught up with out basic tendencies and present technology.

Sharing the thoughts of others remains our highest compliment to their work. But the structures we work in can make that compliment into an offense.

Dying To Be.

2010-08-09T10:24:00.000-07:00

From the Blog Dying To Be Thin:

...........................

What up, skinny bitches?

I've been so sick in the last 36 hours, that there's not much to tell here. Been sleeping, coughing, drinking water, and sleeping. No food since the party. Don't even have the energy to weigh myself. Ugh.

But I wanted to send a shout-out to one of the commenters. anonymous said:
i have been trying to starve myself for AGES but watever happens after 3 days i have to binge!!!! so i end up putting on most of the weight i lost.
tsk, tsk, tsk... This is not a weight-loss plan, honey. This is a lifestyle. What you're doing is crash dieting. If you're serious about weight-loss, you have to find something you can stick with for a lifetime. Set yourself some long-term achievable goals, and then "slow and steady wins the race." Try eating about 1200 calories a day and exercising moderately 3-5 times a week.

At least that's what "the experts" say. To the rest of my skinny-minnies, starve on.

............................................
One commenter wrote:
.............................................

Good advice. Just beginning with starving is asking for a binge. You need to begin restructing at first to understand your body, when it gets hungry, when it craves, what your weaknesses are, etc., then you can build an effective plan, whether it's 1000 cals or 200 a day ... it's all about personalizing it.

.............................................

I care about discourse, and how it shapes the vocabulary and narrative people have. Because with your narrative, you can reshape your conditioning, change your actions, change yourself.

Gandhi starved himself in the service of his beliefs, of the discourse he had bought into.

So did Ana, the writer of the post above. Their circumstances could not have been more different, the contents of their discourses more disparate.

Maslow was a smart guy, with his hierarchy of needs (it's a humor link, but serves the point). But that hierarchy is a base state, not an absolute condition.

Some days, I feel as if I don't believe much of anything. Certainly, not strongly enough to go on a fast like Esther, who fasted for Mordecai and the Jews. Not enough to sue for peace as Gandhi did. Not enough to throw away my health in the pursuit of assumed beauty as Ana did. I suspect that many of those reading this post have felt similarly, from time to time.

The articles of my faith are transparent, invisible. They lie untested, short of silly arguments on the internet.
It means I'm not radical in ways that put me on the line. It's normal, usual, sane, and safe.

It's not very satisfying.

So, yes, I can understand the desire to radicalize. It pushes the things that make you more than a bundle of eating, sleeping, working habits, drives them to the front, makes them visible. It means that the things that you've chosen to be overpower the endless nothing-much.

A Perfect Discourse

2010-08-08T19:40:00.000-07:00

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will be surpassed. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love.

But the greatest of these is love.

-1st Corinthians, Chapter 13.

When all you have is a hammer...

2010-08-07T12:13:00.000-07:00

You have the freedom to make all sorts of choices in the world. However, depending on a lot of different factors, your choices might be more or less impactful on the world. If you're able to magnify the impact of your actions through appropriate devices - social networks, the spending of money, the use of physical tools, and so on - then you have more agency. If tools of varying kinds are unavailable or simply denied to you, then you have less agency.

In economics, physical tools of this sort are capital goods. Money is often just plain called capital. In sociology, the equivalent "stuff" is often termed cultural capital or social capital. In military terms, assets serving this function are force multipliers (which is by far the more easily-understood version, I think).

Marriage is a tool, in this sense. It allows a couple to change the way that people in general and many legal institutions view and treat them, and even the way they view themselves and each other. Denying that tool to gay people is a denial of agency, a statement that "we don't think we should have to treat you like that". It also does preserve that tool in ways that are fairly subtle, but are real - making marriage more inclusive does change the utility of that tool. Whether "preserving the integrity of marriage as a tool" is at the root of most of objections, or just a handy cover story for bigotry, is a whole other topic, though. Divorce law changes have altered the utility of the tool far more significantly.

This blog is such a tool, too. It allows me to spout opinion and have it sit, neatly organised and available to readers. This extends my expressions of opinion across people and time, magnifying their effects. In theory, I could just phone all my readers up and rant at them - but the blog is much more effective.

The specific tools you use to express will as agency also matter, plainly, even if they're both capable of similar things. A blog does not do the same things that a billboard does, even though they both carry messages in the form of words. Ball peen hammers aren't sledgehammers. Civil unions aren't marriages. Work visas aren't citizenships.

This isn't purely a matter of forcefulness, though. Condensing this blog post into a billboard slogan would be pointless, for example; it wouldn't translate well. Different tools have differing levels of force, but each also carries a hefty bias - and that bias can be internalized. People that are well set up for joining protest marches may well feel utterly unable to get their ideas across, if the best tool is lobbying or the creation of a press outlet that the media can treat as credible; everything looks like a reason to march.

Understanding the tools available to us gives us more agency, and more precision in how we apply it. Understanding where tools are denied to others, or available with differing costs, tells us something about the society we share.

"Isms" and Discourse.

2010-08-06T18:52:00.000-07:00

A fast and dirty way to point out discourses is to think of "-Isms". Things like agnosticism, dynamism, legalism... Here's a fun list.

Not all "ism" words fit the category. A neologism, for example, is just a made-up word. No, seriously, that's what neologism means. And not all discourses have an "ism" label. When a discourse gets an "ism" label, and the label becomes popular enough that it doesn't sound stupid anymore, it gets easier to discuss and handle in some ways, and harder in others.

An idea included in "conservativism" might get rejected by liberals because, well, it's conservative, see? That's an easy mental step for the liberal, but it's not necessarily the best way to come at it. Should each idea be judged on it's own merits? Or not?

What just happened there was all about labels. It's easy for the liberal to handle and judge the idea quickly, because it's in a package they oppose. They oppose it because they've accepted a different labelled package, and chosen to identify with it and as it. The liberal in this instance has labelled their own person.

(And yes, this works just as well if you swap the labels.)

It also means that a discourse can be attacked as a total thing - sexism and racism, say. They can be ascribed to people - "You're a racist"!

"Isms" make us faster. They can let us identify where someone is going from only a handful of points. They let us identify our own stances, setting boundaries for "I basically trust information from these sources, but not those". These are features.

"Isms" can also bias us into rejecting good stuff out of hand. They can support us in simplifying others into caricatures. These are bugs.

For the record, I'm a syncretic, engaged in syncretism. I just want to be clear, y'know.

The Fairness Principle

2010-08-06T05:24:00.000-07:00

The Ultimatum Game is a pretty well-tested experiment. I put you and Joe in a room, and give Joe ten one-dollar bills. He is allowed to propose a split of the money with you (and that's all he's allowed to do). You are allowed to accept the split, or reject it. If you accept, that's how you split the money, and you both go home richer. If you reject it, neither of you gets anything. You only play once.

Now, if you're an entirely independent, totally rational economic being, you'll accept any offer that gives you money. It's free money! But that's not what happens in most cultures. Splitting at 50-50 is always accepted. Splits where the 'decider' gets less money are rejected more and more often as the split gets less favorable.

In places where money is a relative oddity - among tribespeoples - this has been tried a couple of times (not enough for any kind of certainty, but still). And there, uneven splits were offered and accepted almost universally.

If that's so, then this isn't an inborn feature of our thinking. It's something we've learned - an absorbed (or consistently individually created) principle that is deeply fundamental. I'm not going to try and codify this principle; plenty of attempts have been made to do so, and they almost all end up showing off the biases of the describer, rather than revealing absolutes. Instead, I'd rather look at what it might mean.

It seems to indicate that people who deal in money, an abstract commodity at the best of times, have at least one gut-level learned response that benefits the social body. It's not in your rational interests to reject money outside of a 'fair' split, but it's in the interests of society for this kind of thing to be going around.

This is in line with some other aspects of cognition - puzzles that ask you to "catch the cheater" are often easier to solve than abstract version of the same puzzle. It's possible that we come into the world wired or disposed for this kind of thinking, and thus pick it up very quickly. It's possible that it's built into social subtext so often that we can't help but catch it, even if it's invisible to us when we do. There are, again, plenty of theories.

What matters, to my eye, is that we can build on responses like this, or tear them down. There's a fairness principle down there, and it can be expanded on and spoken to.

Let's Get High, Dear.

2010-08-05T07:55:00.000-07:00

Imagine that you have two bridges. A solid foot bridge, and a dangerous-feeling suspension bridge. At the far end of each bridge is a member of your preferred sex. A beautiful lady, handsome fellow, as you like. This person flirts with you after you cross, and gives you their number.

Which one do you call?

(As it turns out, you're far more likely to call the one at the end of the suspension bridge. Here's the original study on it.)

Arousal is arousal. Scary movie dates? Not bad. How about jumping out of a plane? Gets some high marks, yep. Romantic behavior can be largely (not entirely, but largely) summed up as: Personal attention, symbols of attraction, and activity that is arousing - physically, nervously, in whatever way. You're under the influence, high on recent experience, and that high can be transferred.

This is all about an error. See, the nervous symptoms of deep emotion are very similar to those of general excitement. So if you get someone excited and present them with a potential emotional source, they're likely to just latch right on, "writing it in"as the cause, possibly even rationalizing the behavior. It's not so much an error when it comes to sex, we think - that's excitement that should cause this kind of bonding. But the kind of excitement that's being served up doesn't matter as much as you'd think.

So, if you take your date on the carnival rides, are you tricking them into maybe liking you more with that rush? Could be. But, then, you're also tricking yourself into liking them more. To some degree, we know this. We want to have a good date, a memorable thing with a nice glow after the fact, in memory. We want to get under the influence.

If you know that falling for this one would be a mistake, go for coffee.

If it'd be the best choice you ever made, do something crazy together.

It Hurts More If You Scream?

2010-08-04T21:22:00.000-07:00

There are pilot projects and studies being done, right now, on attention and pain. The results aren't all the way in yet, but being distracted during ongoing pain reduces the amount of pain experienced. How this works isn't well understood, but it's not just a trick; there's a physiological thing going on here.

Now, this isn't exactly a shocker to most folks. You go see a sick relative to 'take their mind off it'; and it works.

But this has a few implications in terms of people's internal narrative, as well. If you buy into the ideas of "walking it off" and "toughing it out and getting back to work", then you may also be adopting a strategy that reduces pain in the short term. It can also mean that you'll avoid going to see the doctor in the long term, meaning more damage in the long term. It's quite possible, however much it annoys, that meditation and similar practices are working distraction strategies.

This doesn't necessarily mean that it hurts more if you scream; I haven't been able to find any real work on the relationship between pain expression and pain experience. I suspect that it depends on the expression. If you use your misery as a performance to elicit sympathy, this might also be an effective strategy for diverting your attention from the actual pain. Maybe you know someone that you would happily suspect of doing this; it surely does draw up the mental stereotype of the complaining great-aunt.

All of this together means: Getting your own narrative geared well can help you cope with pain. Tough it out, but go to the doctor. Laid up in bed? Try to engage something you can get lost in, and which you can focus on long enough to stay lost for a while.

Chances are, you can already spot the ways you've done these things.

(New thing: ticky box reactions, below. Ticky boxes are love.)

Oddities Of Rewards

2010-08-04T07:48:00.000-07:00

In traditional economic theory, the fastest way to motivate behavior is to provide a money reward. So, in this theory, salary bonuses are a fast way to get people to perform more admirably at work.

And that's true. Except when it's different.

It is absolutely true that offering a cash reward works when the work is rote, systematic, and simple. However, it ceases to be true when the desired work is spontaneous, free-thinking, or creative. If you tell an artist that you'll pay them based on the number of works turned out, you'll often see a lot of work! But it often won't be very good work.

Teachers given salary bonuses to keep student enrolled do keep students enrolled. But grades drop. Don't believe this? Here's a study on it.

Studies on this kind of thing are starting to become common, and they seem to point at the idea that the mental effect of seeking a reward doesn't work well with creativity. Creative behaviour requires a somewhat unfocused approach; money rewards narrow your focus.

The strange thing is that money rewards given to charity don't seem to do the same thing. If I'll donate a dollar to a children's hospital as a reward for you, something different seems to happen; the mental focus doesn't narrow down in the same way. If I give a reward (say, bonus equipment) to the group you work with, it's somewhat different again. It also looks to my reading as if status-based rewards, such as trophies, can go either way depending on how they are framed.

A chain of stores offering a cash bonus to employees for 'great ideas' will often receive suggestions, but quash creative thought - they may be offering the wrong kind of reward to get great ideas. In this case, if there's some satisfaction to be gained from offering those ideas and seeing them implemented, they likely don't want to offer a reward at all. The reward is intrinsic; it's built in to the activity. Giving money to people for solving puzzles doesn't help; solving a puzzle is the the reward for solving it. In fact, giving an money reward for solving puzzles slows progress on those puzzles. This is commonly called the overjustification effect.

Socially, this means that when you're offered the wrong kind of reward (at work, at school, in a game), and you know the intention, you may actually need to fight the effects of the reward to accord with the intention. It sounds outrageous to suggest calling up your boss and saying "Hey, uh, instead of offering bonus money, could you offer us something else?", but it may actually be in your interests to do so. If you're in a position to offer rewards to others, you want to think very closely about the kind of reward you want to put out there.

The Talk We Need

2010-07-30T18:54:00.000-07:00

Human minds are fallible, and prone to making the same mistakes over and over. We're wonderfully adapted to a situation that we don't actually occupy - a situation of small groups, limited resources, short lifespans. It's fairly easy to point of the flaws in the way that we narrate the world, the imbalances in our discourses.

This leads us to assume, in some sense, that our social structures are the problem, leading us into bigotry, economic and environmental shortsightedness, and all manner of other stupidity. But those structures spring naturally from the way we approach the world. We're the problem; these things are just comfort food - fatty, too salty, prone to make us die young, but eminently suited to what we want at some base level.

So, the structures of discourse and dialog we build aren't everything, but they're not nothing, either. Even if we have a tendency to make poor choices, we've built a few discourse that bring us to actions that are contrary to our nature. It's not amazing that there's backbiting and politics in scientific circles; what's amazing is that the process works at all, dragging us into closer contact and comprehension of the objective reality we actually exist in.

The scientific method is an artificial aid to understanding. Like glasses, or any other tool that improves on human capacity.

We need heuristics for modern life that serve that function. We need a folk science that draws us an map that is "accurate enough", and which naturally self-corrects because of the basic stuff that lies at it's foundation. A system in which our hard-won knowledge filters ever outward, simplifying into common language without disconnecting.

I don't know how to build that. I'm not sure anyone does. I think we should try to find out.

Discourse & Credibility

2010-07-30T05:42:00.000-07:00

Following on from the last few posts... An individual person has a streaming narrative, and groups create and share packages of narrative stuff. Those packages are, in many ways, things unto themselves - and there's a great social science term for them. These are discourses.

So, one discourse, as a package of narrative stuff, labels guerrilla fighters as terrorists. A different discourse labels them as freedom fighters. You can absorb and use components of either or both of these discourses into your running narrative, or not.

Some discourses are widely accepted, and form a hefty part of the foundations of society. For example, there are a number of discourses that describe specific labels and roles for men and women. There's a discourse for "breadwinner and housewife", and all the stuff that piles along with those labels, which has plenty of near relatives. These have been accepted long enough that even while they're being attacked and denied, the repercussions of them (wage differences, glass ceilings) live on. Getting them out of the foundations is hard; they're poured right into the bedrock of many institutions, ingrained into the conversation, assumed by the rules, and so on.

That example is especially handy, because any acceptance of it (including a harsh rejection of it) changes who you'll listen to, who has and doesn't have credibility. In much of society, it means that women's ideas about work, money, and many other topics are given less credibility. In groups that are engaged in a deep rejection of it, it can mean that the ideas of men are looked on with suspicion (but only "can", not "does" - there are as almost as many forms of rejection as there are of acceptance). This means that it affects the way that further discourses are handled and absorbed, changing the rules for what can come after.

Biased discourses create unequal access to the shaping and formation of further discourse. This likely isn't a shocking idea to most readers, but it absolutely needs mentioning. And it does reach further than sexism and racism; it also applies to expertise. The "Ivory tower intellectual" and the "Ignorant nobody" are both discourse-based attempts to change the landscape of credibility.

Each branch (or sub-branch) of science, then, is a large and difficult discourse that has subjected itself to regulation. They're difficult because they don't narrate all that well; the easily-narrated versions of each branch are the "folk science" version. They're subject to regulation in that there's a broadly-accepted scientific method, and specific tools in each branch - all in the service of updating the discourse and attempting to make that discourse, when employed in your narrative, a better tool for simulating objective reality.

And, no, this post isn't subject to those methods. Which makes it folk science. Specifically, this is folk sociology.

Sharing Narrative

2010-07-28T21:50:00.000-07:00

When people get together, live together, or communicate in a tight group with one another, they build up a share stockpile of the same stuff that their personal narratives are made of. A tightly-bound group builds a bank of shared experience. They share language. They have inside jokes, references, and the like...

[Pic is just some random campers, snagged off a search]

There's a reason that small-group "getaways" are used for team-building. It's tempting to say that it's even related to the origins of the Honeymoon. Time together and away from others pushes people into shared symbol-sets. We're naturally really good at small-group bonds like this.

Getting an equivalent bond on the larger scale isn't as easy. There's no consistent "American Experience" from which the people of that nation could draw shared bits of their narrative. Where there is stuff that is naturally spread on the large scale in a long-lasting way, it's almost unconscious - that's the stuff that makes up normality.

Often, people are impelled to try and share narrative stuff across a large group much faster. So, pieces that condense this stuff are created - whole complexes of symbols.

[Pic is Rosie the Riveter. Please don't tell me you've never heard of her.]

In addition to images, large-group efforts also include slogans, ideological systems, role labels for people, and more. More recently, these efforts have included narratives of their own - and this is narrative with another definition. Large-group, media, and political narratives are not quite personal, streaming narrative, and they're not quite story. They're the condensed stuff of personal narratives, built to be absorbed into personal narratives.

This does mean that all attempts at creating large-group blocks of shared narrative stuff, including news programming, textbooks, and common-sense rules, are also attempts to change the way you think. It also means, to the potential annoyance of those sharing that stuff, that they're handing you means to say things they never wanted to say.

It also means that people can submerge into those large-group quasi-narratives to some extent, making them real. Rhetorical talking points can become real thinking - this happens at both small and large scales, but at the large scale, it can lead to extreme drifts. If you have trouble believing this, you may want to watch some Glenn Beck. Or maybe not; after all, when you engage such stuff, you can easily incorporate it - that's the whole idea.

Finally, this leads to an odd conception that some forms of expression are best handled at a distance, as if they were toxic waste. Don't engage Mein Kampf too closely, you might start thinking like Hitler. And that's true to a limited extent, but remember that all communication has this effect to a greater or lesser degree.

We can't create a sanitary world of ideas, without the negative uses of this kind of influence. Nobody would be allowed to talk. It's a basic process, and has upsides and downsides at every turning.

The Streaming Narrative

2010-07-27T23:02:00.000-07:00

This is the first of what will likely be several follow-ups to Nature, Nurture, Narrative.

The reference piece for this post is, well, a little different...

So, as you move along in life, you`re engaging a constant stream of mental action, much of it built around defining and redefining the situation, your self and your role, the roles of others relative to you, and objects. This is your narrative.

Now, the reference above (and the term narrative itself) are obviously distorted; we plainly don`t narrate every piece of what we`re thinking and doing to ourselves quite like that. But what we actually do is similar in all the right ways for this to be a sense-making way to discuss it.

A situation arises.

You assess the situation, as it is presented to you through your natural senses and nurtured conditioning, and attach meaning to it by means of your ongoing narrative. These meanings are generally decided by habit (apples are usually food, not thrown weapons), but meanings can be shifted as needed.

The past informs this narrative with habitual meanings, memories of past pains and pleasures, associations of all sorts. The future likewise informs the narrative. We imagine the reactions of others and of objects, as well as of total systems. We can plan around them. And all of this is intimately tied in with goals. Finish the essay, have lunch, win the game, find love, share the big idea, get away with all of it for another day.

Now, some fun ideas that fly out from this...

When you operate entirely off conditioning or reflex, you`re not wholly you. Sometimes this is awful; too much of it, and you feel like your life is robotic. Other times, it can be deeply needed - doing something familiar to relax and hang your brain up for a while.

Your narrative can act as a tool for rationalization just as easily as a tool for comprehension. You can take actions you don`t even understand, justifying them after the fact by describing them differently as you flow along.

If you want to understand someone in more than an imagined fashion, you can`t do it in a pick-apart way. You need to engage their narrative - you might even need to effectively submerge into it. If that`s true, the act of understanding someone fully will almost always be transformative for the person doing the understanding.

Nature, Nurture, Narrative

2010-07-27T10:21:00.000-07:00

Having laid some groundwork in previous posts, I am now about to mangle a whole lot of words, with the hope that I won't completely lose everyone along the way.

...

Your Nature is the sum of your inborn attributes. This can easily be thought of as genetic heritage, although it's being used in a broad enough fashion here that a certain geneticist may decide smash in my brains with a rock. How good are your eyes? How many limbs do you have? Are you male, female, intersex? How tall will you get if you receive poor nutrition, or good? Your nature doesn't provide utterly immutable facts - you can get corrective eye surgery,

Your Nurture is your treatment at the hands of the environment. This includes parentage and upbringing, and reactions to your Nature by others, although it never actually stops happening; formation continues throughout life. It can easily be thought of as your conditioning, in a physical as well as psychological sense (and if you're a psychologist, I apologize for the abuse of terms). Notably, from the perspective of this blog, nurture also provides you with language.

Your Narrative is the process of conversing with and conditioning yourself, and manipulating the environment to make that happen. Even at a very young age, a child can take on a role, re-interpret the world to better suit that role, and manipulate the world to suit. A child take on the role of Superman, decide that you are the villain, and grab a towel to wear as a cape. An adult might decide that he's a badass, interpreting others as wusses from that moment, and get himself a skull tattoo.

Now, there are no clear boundaries on these things. And they aren't objective categories; they're simply a useful way of sorting the world. But they're a tool that fits the purposes here almost perfectly.

Soundbite

2010-07-27T04:13:00.000-07:00

Today, a break from thinking about thinking, and a game...

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What Is This?
Soundbite is a party game for five or more. In this game, one person will be picked as the moderator; their job is to come up with a list of "occurences" - things that politicians might be asked to comment on. All of the other players will be playing as aspiring politicians, and will be asked to make comments on some of those occurences. They will also note who they think did best on each of the rounds of comments that they weren't involved in. Those votes (on who did best) will be tallied to find a winner.

Setting Up

Players should sit about in something roughly resembling a circle. Or square. Whatever.
Players should pick a moderator. The moderator will make up occurences that will be asked about - bank collapses, horrible accidents, heroic rescues, and so on. They will need one for each round (see below).
Each player should take a piece of paper. On it, they should list all the names of the other players (except the moderator).

Gameplay

Play goes in turns. There will be four times as many turns as there are players (not counting the moderator). So, if there are five players, there are twenty rounds.
The moderator will pick two players, who should be side-by-side, to go first, and ask them to stand up.
Once the players have been picked, the moderator will state the occurence: "A school on the north side of town burnt down; arson is suspected".
The players then have a minute to make up their comment on the issue; something that will win them votes.
After the minute is passed, one player will get to speak first, chosen randomly by the moderator (they should use a die or such to make sure they stay random), and then the other. Each player gets to say one sentence; this is the soundbite that will actually get through to voters.
The other players mark on their page who they think did best.
The moderator then asks the standing player on the right (from the moderator's viewpoint) to sit, and the player on the left of the one still standing (again from the moderator's viewpoint) to rise.
These are the two players for the next turn (and next occurence). This repeats each turn, shuffling the action around the room.
When all the players have commented on two occurences, which means you've gone around the room once, they should scramble seats, for the next set of turns - this is effectively the "half-time shuffle".

Ending up

At the end, the moderator adds up the scores, and announces the person who gained the most votes - or, if it's a tie, they say who was tied.

For The Moderator: Fast Occurences

Pick one of the following words and phrases, and then find another that goes well with it, to create an occurence: School, Abortion, Oil Company, Your Daughter (point at one of the two standing politicians), Military, Tax Evasion, Spending, Drug-Fueled Parties, Head Doctor at Mercy Hospital, Shooting, Bomb Threat.

Logical Fallacies, Social Truths.

2010-07-25T15:52:00.001-07:00

If you aren't very familiar with Logical Fallacies, then as a reference for this post, you may want to look over the Top 20 Logical Fallacies, as found on The Skeptic's Guide To The Universe.

(Edited to add: Or, if you prefer a list with bite, here ya go, courtesy of a brainy lass elsewhere on the 'tubes that... may decide to thump me for calling her that.)

Logical fallacies don't follow the rules of logic. But they remain in constant use, and they repeat often enough for these violations to have names. This is because while they may be bad logical arguments, they're fairly solid and sensible social moves. Let's take a look at those:

Establishing Credibility
It's important in any social situation to establish credibility, including the credentials involved in both sides, where the majority lies, and the like. People take cues from both the many and from the experts, and avoid taking social cues from those on the fringe. In terms of a debate that is supposedly objective, establishing credibility leads to the fallacies: Arguments from Authority, Tu Quoque, and Arguments Ad Populi. Questioning the credibility of others can easily lead to Ad Hominems.

Give Heuristics
Heuristics are fast-and-dirty methods of judgement. "Rules of thumb", without the unfortunate history of that phrase. People don't derive the solutions to problems from basic principles most of the time - we cheat. We find fast solutions that work in a variety of situations, or prioritise simple values; we do this because it works in the kind of messy situations we individually find ourselves in. Such fast-and-dirty rules don't scale to larger or smaller situations all that well, of course. And this leads to further logical fallacies: Confusing Association & Causation, Confusing Unexplained with Inexplicable, Inconsistency, and False Dichotomies.

Expression And Emotion
Clarity, the holy grail of communication, is not an easy thing to achieve. To reach it, we commonly use words, gestures, facial expressions, and a whole gamut of other devices. We move from casual speech to emotional speech, we employ colorful and technical jargon. Making communication really work is an expert affair, and almost everyone you will ever meet is an expert of the practice (whether or not they can explain it). Logical argument is stilted and much-reduced communication, and most experts aren't prepped for it. Using the whole range of emotion and colorful expression in logical debate leads to Arguments from Emotion (which aren't listed in the linked article, oddly; they didn't seem to make their top 20), as well as somes kind of Straw Man and Slippery Slope arguments (though not all).

Manage The Framing
Setting and shifting the terms of a discussion is normal. People are often trying to find a way to get others to see things from their perspective. This often involves sharing heuristics, as above, but also include basic values. This, in turn, can easily create False Continuums and False Dichotomies. From a utilitarian viewpoint, some decisions appear binary and some categories of action are easily dismissed as all bad. From a mystical viewpoint, the same kind of quick categorisation can occur, despite sorting the world into entirely different categories.

...So?

The purpose of this isn't just to point to the idea that normal conversation is irrational or wrongheaded. It's also to show that many of the most common ways that we wander from logic and objectivity are, of themselves, sensible in the context of human life. Sometimes such illogical sense is the right choice, when dealing with other people.

By Comparison...

2010-07-25T12:08:00.000-07:00

So, let us imagine that you like candy that is hard, and you like candy that is sweet. And you are at the store to buy candy. There are three types of candy you are considering. Here's a diagram for you:

So, the further something is to the right on the picture, the harder. The higher up it is, the sweeter. So Candy A is fairly sweet, but not very hard. Candy B is very sweet, but also not that hard. Candy C is quite hard, but not all that sweet.

In situations where people are given choices that are arranged like this (unclear metrics, odd clumps, and so on), the majority of them choose Candy B or it's equivalent.

Comparing A and C is tricky.

Comparing B and C is tricky.

But comparing A and B is easier, and B looks better.

If you take A out of the picture, you get a much more even divide, but it takes more time for people to decide. Eliminating edge cases from a clump, and then finding the best in the clump, is a fast way to get a good decision.

But if everyone did this all the time, we'd never see the adoption of really game-changing ideas and technologies. This is a strategy for making incremental improvements, rather than one for leaping off into strangeness.

This bias can be partly managed by spending time developing differing ways to measure and look at the stuff in question. One early adopter might look at the diagram above, and places a straight line from the end of the up-pointing arrow to the end of the right-pointing arrow, looks for the candy that is "above the line", and picks candy C. Another plots out the location of their perfect candy, and measures for the closest. By doing these things, they change the meaning of the picture. Figuring that out does take more effort than most people are ready to spend at any given stop along the supermarket aisle, though.

The bias is also in constant motion; each presenter is looking to draw the picture that favors them, and more and more presenters know about this trick. How many miles per gallon does that car get? It doesn't say? That might be because if the marketers presented the car that way, the picture they'd be pushing is one where they can be clearly spotted as doing badly - or even just seen as running a close second place (uck). It's possible that they measure very well indeed, but the picture doesn't sell. American Apparel has had an exceptional track record on labour rights and comparative payscales, and on keeping their production domestic, but that picture doesn't sell their clothes. The picture that sells their clothes is on their billboard.

So, your friend invites you to go out to the bar with them, and you know that they're going in order to meet new people (in the bar sense, at least). If you note that they've spent extra time primping up to look good, but told you not to worry, then you might well be their for-comparison company. They don't need to be aware of this, of course - the night just goes better with a wingman.

(This post owes a deep finger-point to the book Predictably Irrational, which I have stolen from shamelessly)

(Also: What do women call "women wingmen"? Don't lie to me, ladies have them too.)

Selfcasting

2010-07-24T10:37:00.000-07:00

In some communications, the sender is the message. Their identity, preferences, daily activities, and opinions are given. The pressing question of "which marsupial do they most resemble?" is answered. Potentially, their expertise is used to provide useful information (or misinformation) that comes uniquely from them.

This, then, is selfcasting.

This blog is an example of selfcasting, in which I try to exercise my always-in-development quasi-expertise to look at varying issues out in the world, and come up with interesting opinions to think about. A facebook profile filled with feeds from Twitter and Yelp, where the location, activities, and texted conversations of the user are posted, is also an example of selfcasting. The guy at your office who must show you pictures of his vacation is selfcasting.

Selfcasting is done for a whole host of different reasons. From the viewpoint that this blog is tossing around, one of those reasons is universal: People selfcast to get their ideas and language, their views on the world, out where they can be absorbed and interacted with. We share pieces of our identity, ranging from the deeply-considered to the entirely trivial, into a place where those things can spread and be negotiated. And, yes, we're looking for recognition, status, and acceptance when we selfcast - this isn't some special exception from the basic need for social validation.

Online, selfcasters often track the number of people reading or viewing their content (I use google analytics). We care about the engagement of the audience, in the form of comments and incoming links. Some selfcasters pile in advertising and other such on their blogs, adding a money motive on top of this, but the social motives never go away.

So, in a bald bid to see if folks are engaging here, and to give you an opportunity to put your own stuff out there a little...

Do you selfcast?
Where do you do it?
What parts of your identity or expertise are you showing off?

If you do this online in some personalised location, please do toss in a link (or a whole bunch, if you do it in several places).

Babble Patterns

2010-07-22T23:34:00.000-07:00

We work together in making social decisions on actions, language, and values constantly. It happens at work, with friends, with family, at school, everywhere we go. Those decisions often become part of who we are, sometimes in small ways, sometimes large.

The questions here are... Do we use the right tools to make those decisions? Are we setting up our babble to give us helpful results?

Well, let's look at some of ways we set up those discussions...

Debates
In a debate, differing opinions are displayed and played off each other in a contrasting way. The benefit of a debate is primarily to the audience, rather than to the participants. The audience gains information from each opinion set on display, and can blend the pieces however they like. Debates are best at providing this benefit when they are intended for an audience, when there are clear end-points, agreed ground to cover, and no strong impetus to 'win' by bludgeoning participants or to subvert the process. Good debates are often moderated. Many of the most common forms of debate ignore one or more of these guides. Political debates are often bludgeoning matches where each side actually aims to start a cascade (see below). Common arguments often break all the guides, and produce very little benefit.

Echoes
An echo is an exchange of information where participants focus heavily on saying things that they know, or believe, that they already agree on. Unlike debates, which go sideways fairly regularly, echoes are incredibly easy to shift into, whether or not they're desired. Echoing reaffirms the ideas of the group, but doesn't bring up many, if any, new ideas. Groups whose beliefs are a minority in larger society keep those beliefs solid by echoing; so do groups that wnt to prevent deviation. Religious and political groups spend time echoing. So do persecuted minorities attempting to hang together. So do some corporate policy meetings. Some echoes start cascades; some are intended to.

Cascades
A cascade is a place where, shortly after an issue is raised in a group, one or more early solutions (which might or might not be particularly good) attract adherents, and rapidly become the norm. In business, whenever a new field of product opens up, the goal for companies is to get a cascade running as quickly as possible. Cascades also happen in 'brainstorming sessions' as often as not. When heavy news hits a stock market, people may have different answers as to what that means to various values, creating bubbles and crashes - differing forms of cascade. Cascades are excellent in situations where everyone should be using the same solution, and the group just needs a 'good enough' solution fairly quickly. They're also good when all of the available options are pretty good, and one simply needs to be chosen.
- A fun book that's largely about cascades by a different name is The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. Or just google up "Information cascades"

Aggregators
An aggregator is an artifically-built interaction, meant to unify or rank disparate opinions and produce a definite result. Wikipedia is an aggregator. Voting is an aggregator; most democratic governments are stuructured as whole systems of aggregators. The method Google uses to rank pages in search is an aggregator. Most markets serve this function, and most betting pools. Getting such a device to produce results that clarify, rather than muddle, requires that the opinions aggregated be: Diverse (all opinions in the group should have access), Independent (not heavily influenced by others), and Tabulated (measured, counted, or otherwise put together through some basically impersonal and impartial mechanism).
-A great book on aggregators is The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki; the above paragraph is a terrifically mangled version of some highlights.

...And There Are More.
Each of these is an enormous class, with huge variation and deeply fuzzy boundaries. But there are many more that aren't even touched on here; these are simply the ones that I could quantify enough to have an opinion on.

The Great Granfalloon

2010-07-21T12:04:00.000-07:00

This is partly a follow-up to New Model Radical, and partly a post about group-based social manipulation.

I'm assuming, for this post, that you're using a browser with "tabs", and that you're familiar with Facebook. Hopefully, these are pretty safe assumptions.

Okay. Open this link in a new tab, and then tab back to this post. You'll get a Facebook group entitled "The Great Granfalloon", which was created purely to show off the points in this post. Take a quick look at it; the description of what the group is might amuse you.

Now, imagine each of the following, jumping over to the group and back as you go along....

...You just decided to join The Great Granfalloon, for whatever reason - just to play along, to make an ironic statement, so your friends will wonder what it is and get pulled over here, because you have a friend that already joined it (possibly me), whatever. You've got an extra label, an extra identity to add to your stockpile, however important or unimportant it is to you. Now, this basic 'grouping effect' doesn't require your action to happen - if someone labels you as being "one of theirs" it can bring you onto their side, even though all they did was say a few words. But it works best if you decided to take on the identity.

...You spent the time to read over the oddities given there, and decided to act on them just for the sake of humor. If you decided to do that, you would now be part of an identified in-group, with it's own special vocabulary (the name of the group itself), a unique greeting ("say shibboleth to each other"), and cryptic lore (this post you're reading). You've got more than just a label, now; you have behaviour. You're an insider, others are outsiders.

...You were prompted to invite other people to join the group, and decided to do so (Facebook will help you with this). As you go about selling other people on the group, and on joining it, you're also selling yourself on the group each and every time. You're affirming an identity as a group member. When political parties, religious cults, and charitable organisations get you to go out canvassing or recruiting for them, they aren't just getting you to do some needed work; they're solidifying your loyalty.

...Someone made fun of your membership, and you defended that membership against the attack. Again, you're selling yourself on the group while you do this. A group leader that wants to keep this process rolling can fabricate enemies - and can isolate the group by suggesting that any out-group person might be one. For purposes of The Great Granfalloon, let's say that I told you that our enemies are ninjas. Watch out for those subversive ninjas; they're everywhere. People who make fun of The Great Granfalloon? Ninjas.

...You were exposed to consistent, constant ideas that the leader was especially powerful, attractive, and the like. This is relatively tricky in this particular example, since I basically look like a muppet. So let's go with "really smart", which is probably believable if you squint; I know big words, right? As the leader (and founder!) of The Great Granfalloon, I am really, really smart. Tell other people this; it's less convincing coming from me. Oh, and it'll help you convince yourself, remember.

...You were told to imagine your interactions within the group in a positive way. This is, yet again, a way to get you to sell yourself. And it's hopefully not quite what I've been doing here, since I've been trying to show the negatives. But it may be close enough to make you feel a small twinge of distaste, as if I've been jerking you around. Which is fair.

Okay. Enough of that.

As with almost every single method of social manipulation, all of these things can and do happen entirely naturally, by instinct rather than by design. The difference between a social club and a cult is always a matter of degrees. But without groups of some kind, we can't resolve collective issues. Plus, it's damn lonely. With groups, we're in a position where our own membership can, and to some extent will, change who we are.

Picking your groups is part of managing who you are and who you intend to become. Sometimes, it can be a big part - joining Alchoholics Anonymous is a deliberate choice to try and shape your identity and to be influenced by a group. In some cases, it's a very small part. This is especially true where it comes to facebook groups, which are almost always totally trivial affirmations of some other opinion or identity you've already got, despite my ridiculous example.

(And, yes, I'd be amused as hell if people actually do decide to join up.)

Science And Meaning

2010-07-21T09:03:00.000-07:00

Good science is bloody hard stuff - not only to do, but to attend to.

Much of human experience revolves around judging what things mean. Is this good for me, or bad for me? Do I want this? This kind of judgement is a skill that we are stupendously good at - and it accords perfectly with what we need in life. In some ways, it's crucial to living.

But objective reality doesn't mean things, in any kind of human way. It just is. Science often boils down to heavy arcana - on seeing a mathematical proof of some theorem, our instinctive response is to ask what it means. And if the brilliant insight codified in the numbers is explained in as close to a bias-free fashion as possible, the question remains. What does it mean?

Scientific institutions spend a great deal of time teaching students to speak and think in structures that reduce bias and suspend judgement. These same institutions use peer review to dig for further bias and drive it out. This doesn't work perfectly, and likely never will, because the participants are human. But it does allow participants to maintain a simulation of objective reality that is good enough to give us all a host of marvels.

From time to time, some scientific finding will make headlines - or make it out into the wilds of human society at large. When this happens, the finding itself is almost always heavily distorted. The news is spun by reporters to grab at attention, or adapted by the untrained into "folk science". The components and results of an attempt at objectivity have fallen into the hands of meaning-makers.

I've had an Epidemiologist tell me that he found the expression "viral media" annoying. I live with a lovely lady Ecologist that occasionally wants to throttle uninformed blatherers. I know a Geneticist that has a whole collection of entertaining rants in the vein of "So very, very wrong."

Their objections are accurate and understandable. But this kind of thing is never, ever going to to just "stop happening". We need meaning, we live on spin. Passing snap judgements and making stories out of science is the nature of the beast.

(This post is a reformulation of the earlier "Classically Irrational", which has been junked.)

New Model Radical

2010-07-20T12:08:00.000-07:00

People talk to themselves; they send themselves messages on all sorts of topics. Notably, if you want to get a message across, you must consider...

The source. If you'd like to give your message extra weight, you want to either possess, or seem to possess, practical skill or expertise, general virtue, and a deep love of your audience.
The reasoning. A strong argument is, or at least seems, rational. A sale, with lowered prices, is a rational-appeal argument to buy now instead of later. But if you push a sale at people who would not have bought later (or at all), it merely appears rational; the real rationality departs for both buyer and seller.
The emotion. Specifically, the emotional appeal attached to the message. Heavy emotional appeal can carry a no-source, no-reasoning message easily. Novel messages have emotional appeal even when they're not loaded. Even the use of loaded words (for example - new, quick, easy, improved, now, suddenly, introducing, and amazing).
The circumstances. Messages are not passed on in a vacuum. A personal testimony from a friend over coffee is much more potent than the same testimony from a stranger interrupting your morning over the phone. The intensity of the message, and the likelihood of repetition, are contextual.

Some of that might not be stated all that well, but this is a pretty ancient hat - in greek rhetoric, the first three elements there are called Ethos, Logos, and Pathos. So, not really news. The news is that this same set of components can be used to convince yourself of things.

Extreme political views, deep subcultures, and many other kinds of ideation were once fairly rare to actually run into. But now, with widepread instant media for all niches, it's far easier to find and sample a palette of extreme viewpoints, to the point where they seem usual. It's easier to make yourself into a radical. That's not necessarily a bad thing in every instance; radical feminism certainly needed to exist (it might well still need to exist). But it's also safe to say that it's easier than ever to convince yourself of something that is simply batshit crazy.

Consider...

Sources. You'll need to find sources that you can paint as having practical skill or expertise, general virtue, or a deep love of you. Defend these viciously and unthinkingly; the act of defending them will help you convince yourself of their perfection.
Reasoning. Find a shopping list of arguments that support your desired view. They don't need to make great sense, but they do need to make enough sense that you can skate through them without too much cognitive dissonance. If there's a solid premise, buy that first and use it often; it makes swallowing otherwise ridiculous arguments in the same vein much easier.
Emotion. You should be able to find arguments that provoke fear in you where they are intended to, inspire you where they should, and get the blood racing in all the right ways. Hang on to them. Circumstances, however, are key here...
The circumstances. Try to surround yourself with others (virtually or actually) that idolise the same sources and vilify the same critics. Together, practice your accepted arguments as pat responses, and shop for things that can make you angry or related as a whole group - you'll want to rage together and celebrate together to enforce your radicalisation. If you can't get a group together, isolate yourself, think hard and long about how misunderstood you are, and surround yourself with agreeable authors.

Now, individual bits of the above are normal human behaviour. You can even have a watered-down version of the whole package, and have it be no more that a strong bias. You're going to need to push hard here, but the tools are right in front of you.

You're All In My Head

2010-07-19T07:50:00.000-07:00

When you smile at someone (or a room of someones), one of the things that happens is that their mind, in interpreting that smile, flicks at the muscles that make them smile, too. Part of figuring out the facial expression of someone else lies in "trying it on" in a very small-scale way. This is so automatic, so incredibly fast, that we usually don't even realize it happens.

Equally, when someone talks to you, they're referencing what they imagine you to be like - what words they think or know the two of you share meanings for, what processes in you work like and how to manage them, and so on. Again, this is typically automatic, but a little less so; we can catch ourselves doing it.

It's tempting to say that there's a mini-you living in the heads of those that you know well, an imaginary representative that they constantly carry around. And this meshes well with a lot of colloquialisms; we can groan or giggle in anticipation of what family members might think of this or that, and be right about that anticipated response as often as not.

It's also tempting to say that we pick up on patterns of action, values, and meaning from each other, and just carry those around, assembling such imaginary representatives from spare parts in our minds when the need comes up. That in a moment, seeing you smile, others have the impulse of smiling, and the memories of you, all fly together in their mind.

I suspect that the truth is somewhere in between, containing elements of both, and a whole bunch of other things as well.

Cowboys And Booster Juice

2010-07-18T20:53:00.000-07:00

You aren't likely to see any old-school cowboys at Booster Juice.

Booster Juice is a fairly nice chain that makes health fruit smoothies, and will happily toss in shots of wheatgrass and vitamin add-ons. It is, in a fashion, part of a narrative running around loose in society.

This narrative talks about health, yes. But it also talks about controlling your body. It has pick-me-up drinks and comfort foods. It drinks chamomile tea to go to sleep at night. It knows about prozac, and it certainly knows about viagra.

Cowboys have a whole set of narratives. One of these talks about immutability, toughing it out, walking it off. In it, being changeable and recreated, moment by moment, is weakness. This particular cowboy narative is cousin to the another social narrative that talks about purity and incorruptibility, and thinks of influence as a dirty word.

Booster Juice is perhaps a little too pansy for the cowboy.

I Am My Khakis

2010-07-17T03:03:00.000-07:00

"You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis."

~Fight Club movie, screenplay by Jim Uhls, directed by David Fincher, novel by Chuck Palahniuk

Great movie. Great speech. Total bullshit, though.

You're all of those things and many, many, many more. Your identity is something negotiated, not only between yourself and others, but between you and yourself. Defining my self, I talk to my self, and act on my self internally. If I can't be satisfied by this, I will begin to act externally on components of myself.

From the same film, another quote is "Things you own end up owning you". And that's much closer to being a helpful statement. A potentially better line might run "Everything you own is a tool you use to define your self. What are you making yourself into?"

The Palace Of Memory

2010-07-16T07:37:00.000-07:00

When we are asked to recall information, we don't actually pull it cleanly from memory. If you're in a terrible mood, and I ask you about your childhood, your childhood will be made worse. If you're in a good mood, and I ask the same question, your childhood will be improved.

In some way, this is connected to narratives of thought. Airplanes are less dangerous than cars, but airplane disaster narratives are stronger. Personal recommendations and personal statements (catty blog comments, say) kick the shit out of statistics. Poor little Olga who lost her job matters more than your unemployment numbers.

Narratives seem to work on memory; you can reference the method of loci for a look at this. Personally, I'd be curious if use of a story-metaphor would function as well as a place-metaphor, but the big point here is that metaphor is better suited to human memory than abstraction.

There are several kinds of puzzles that people are generally terrible at in the abstract, but are spectacular at when placed into some kinds of concrete terms. This is sometimes used to point to some kind of biological 'priming' for what we're good at learning. This may even be true in some way, but it's outside my scope here to try and discuss if so, and in what way.

Human memory isn't a database. Not mine, not yours. The question isn't whether this is good or bad, though. It is, as always, how do we embrace and build on our actual nature?

There are no sellouts

2010-07-16T03:03:00.000-07:00

Nobody ever "sells out".

People buy in. They absorb and acculturate, learn new languages, develop new relationships.

A newly-promoted boss on the job, moving from floor to office, develops new sensitivities, new ways of cataloging good work from bad. They acquire a new symbol-set, metrics for good things and bad. This new set draws attention and time, and when used for thinking and expression, it changes the way that they think and speak. They buy in to something else.

In any situation, there are objective truths hovering just outside our actual grasp, perceived truths that make up that grasp, and judgmental truths, the things we hold onto.

When a person shifts from one frame of reference to another, something happens. This objective something can be perceived in a great many ways. On the basis of those perceptions, judgments can and will be made. Some perceptions, and some judgments, will be closer approximations of reality than others.

Now, in your mind, right now, you may be about to argue - based on that same premise - that the perception of selling out is just as valid as the conceit of buying in. It's an instinctive response, and it might be closer to objective truth.

But if you wanted to do so, you would likely need to employ - to think in - the language of the argument itself. You might end up buying in.

Writing it out, this seems strangely like a "gotcha" trick. But it isn't, quite. It's just the nature of the perspective being employed on the blog - a strange ouroborous, eating it's own tail.

Language And Thought

2010-07-15T12:21:00.000-07:00

Each word in a language is a signal, a sign, a symbol that has at least a slim number of attached meanings.

Thought may be possible without language - but not *these* thoughts. We have wrapped the muscles of thinking around bones made from symbols; it is too late to become octopi again, even if we wished for eight lovin` arms and all those suckers.

So, we think by employing symbol sets. Sometimes, we need a whole lot of symbols to express a single idea, and we can create new words to express that when it is needful to do so (individually, then collectively). This gives rise to slang, jargon, and all manner of other such stuff, which melts into our set.

But while we are thinking in a given set, some things are easier to express (and easier to think), while others are harder. Some things are easier to obtain because we know their names.

I know that this feeling in my gut is hunger, and it means I need food. That's a nice sentence. This other feeling in my head is nicotine addiction, and it means I want a cigarette. I don't need to know "hunger" to feed it, but I need names for food to order it in the restaurant; I may need the name to identify it on the shelf in the grocery store, and I need a whole vocabulary to take part in a group pizza-ordering discussion.

I don't know what the twitchy-jumpy feeling in my leg is named, or what I need for it. A cramp, maybe? Some symptom of something? If I knew it's name, I could request information on what helps with that.

This stuff is so very, very basic to how we work that we don't even bother to think about it, and it seems weird to bother babbling about it.

Big Boxes Of Meaning

2010-07-15T10:09:00.000-07:00

A symbol - a word, a brand logo, a name - can be freighted down with any cargo of meaning that we wish. The greater the haulage, though, the more likely that the same version of the symbol, as held in (and helping compose) other minds, will not be the same.

Words can carry a lot of meaning, given that language is a symbol-set expressly designed and evolved (both, in different ways) to perform the function of carrying meaning. Even so, we get confused signals all the time, unclear writing, muddled thinking.

If this is so, then all extended communication will necessarily resemble a strange game of telephone (if you never played this game as a kid, you should).

And if that is likewise so, then what happens when people think and act based on ideas that arrived garbled? Well, they ``get it wrong``, to be sure. But is this also a place where new and valuable things can come into existence? Head office calls up the retail store, and gives the manager instructions. The manager enacts these in good faith, but the words actually used by head office mean something just a little different to that manager. So something odd and unintended happens.

Where`s the creative act that led to this new thing? If it turns out that the manager did something better than what was intended (however rare or common that might be), and it is noted as being better for the intended purpose, where does the credit belong?

If these are the wrong questions to ask in this made-up example, how often are they equally wrong questions to ask in reality?

Free Will Does The Dishes

2010-07-06T13:05:00.000-07:00

Language is the tool that we use to think. Language is composed of symbols, which come from other people, your surroundings, and on and on. If you change your context (the people around you, the place you live, the books you read and shows you watch), you change the ongoing refreshing and readjusting landscape of symbolic stuff around, and change your language.

Which is an incredibly confusing way to say that when you do the dishes, you change not just the way your kitchen looks, but you also change the way you think of your kitchen. Which means that you change the way that you think about your kitchen. Which means that, to some very small degree, you have changed the way that you think.

The context in which you live frames everything you do. Your environment provides options and rewards, provides language and tools for thinking. Knowing this can inspire a kind of weird "I don't really make choices" vibe. But you can make plenty of choices that rewrite that context, molding your own chosen framework for looking at the world.

You can do the dishes.