DECENTRALIZED IDEAS

June 18th, 2020

This episode is dedicated to Sarah Cooper.  She is a comedian who has recently risen to prominence with her lip-syncing videos.  You can connect with Sarah on Twitter with the handle @sarahcpr where you can also see her videos.

“You could have a beer with him.”

This praising phrase within the political arena was first dreamt up by Jon Meachum, speaking about the first George Bush who was then running for President.

There is something comforting and deeply resonate in the notion of being able to have a beer with someone.  There is a sense of comfort and security.  There is the sense that you can let your guard down.  People don’t have a beer together on the battlefield, they do so when things are calm, at peace, when things are safe, and we are surrounded by friends.  It does this more than anything: the simple statement implies that the individual in question shouldn’t be in question at all, that this person is already a friend waiting to be found.

There is a great deal to be said about the boons of civilization that have engineered the circumstance where strangers in many countries can sit down at a bar beside other strangers and let their guard down, have a beer, and enjoy each other’s company.

But what does this say of their ideas?

Even long time friends who regularly share time over a couple cold ones can have long standing disagreements that are never resolved and which are never spoken of.

Fact is, the friendliness, charisma, congeniality, look, voice, and approachability have very little to do with the ideas a person has.  They seem to be correlated, and for much of our personal life, our judgments of these qualities serve as fairly reliable heuristics for navigating people.  The problem is that these are heuristics, they are correlations, there is no link of causation.  Psychopaths can game these heuristics merely by mimicking these qualities.  Unfortunately, we are a species that has sifted within it’s midst the ability to smile at someone when facing them while concealing the knife that will be plunged into their back when they turn.  This isn’t necessarily a cause for cynicism, but merely recourse for a particular variety of caution.

Sarah Cooper has recently risen to prominence as a comedian because of her lip-syncing impersonations of the President of the United States, and the reason why her videos have been so effective is rooted precisely in the topic at hand.

By removing the image of the speaker, the facial expressions, the attire, the setting with podium and somber people surrounding, Sarah puts on naked display the words of the president, bearing in full light exactly what ideas these words convey – or don’t convey.

We can examine the topic with a different thought experiment:  would politicians still get elected if you couldn’t see them, and you couldn’t listen to their voice?  What if politicians were chosen exclusively through their ideas?  What if candidates were only permitted to share their ideas for office in writing?  And people had to read of these ideas in order to figure out who they should vote for?  The feasibility of this as an actual practice is not the point, the point is to ask: would the same people still get elected?  If the answer even has the potential of being anything other than ‘yes’, then we must admit that we are giving people power for reasons that are potentially wholly superficial. 

The equivalent might like abandoning a good sturdy little rowboat while lost in the middle of the sea and swimming toward the mirage of a cruise ship that doesn’t actually exist.

We misguide ourselves by look and feel at the cost of a good future, favoring things that we react well to in the moment.  We misuse our mental systems, often without realizing it.  We rely on the heuristics of the emotional system, when we would be better served to slow down and think carefully about the factors at hand.  A sturdy little rowboat that actually floats is better than the grandest cruise ship we can ever imagine.

A recent phenomenon that has been made possible by the internet is the anonymous brand and persona. Like any development, this poses benefits and risks.  As Renee DiResta has studied and pointed out, there are many ‘anonymous’ accounts run by malicious agents with the aim of misguiding people.

The flipside of this, however, is that many of the traditional gates and gatekeepers for the proliferation of ideas can be circumvented for good reasons.  Less powerful people can now play the same game as people who were once the only permitted players, permitted only because of additional superficial reasons.

Beneath the layers of this issue resides a single question: how do we judge the merits of an idea?

We rarely ask this, and its even more rare that we would ask this question in the moment.  In the moment things are often moving too fast for our thoughtful systems to keep up with, and in lieu of this, we are defaulting to a quicker emotional system that trades thoughtful consideration for processing speed.

The curious proposal of anonymity and the rise of platforms that allow for the sharing of ideas that are divorced from the superficial qualities of their source is to wonder if ideas are better judged without these qualities or not?  We can wonder further and ask: what is the most optimal system for sharing ideas and sussing out their merit?  Perhaps it is easier to make a better decision when situations are shed of attributes that often mislead us: the soft resonance of someone’s voice, or the powerful force of an excellent orator, or the cool collected look of a pundit dismissing a legitimate argument with a playful sneer and a deflecting joke.

A problem of course, concerning the medium through which ideas are shared is that the form determines to a large extent how such things last in memory.  We will remember an image forever, but furrow a brow trying to remember the main argument of a piece of writing.

What’s clear is that beyond all else, we must simply continue the conversation, and wonder about new ways that enable us to communicate more effectively.

DETECTING INEQUITIES

June 17th, 2020

Are you wrong or am I wrong?  The insidious tendrils of this perspective weaves through the structure of so many conversations, turning communication into a competitive game, one of zero-sum that leaves us only with the polar trophies of defeat and victory.

If you are wrong, then I look good by default.  I don’t even have to have a good point.  The juxtaposition next to something worse activates our preference for the lesser of two evils.  In the arena of the public, the greatest evil is the out-group and the risk of association with that ill-fated tribe.  The mere risk of such association will goad us to clamor aboard a fancier looking ship, even if it’s headed for the mythic precipice at edge of the world.

So during conversation, do we pick out places where our companion is wrong?  Or do we try to sense the faults in our own thinking?  The later might seem better, humbler, but it’s still part of the same polar world of competition.

A better framework is to disregard the sources as targets of blame or fault and focus on the action itself: 

Where is the conversation faulting?

Say for example two people have two different understandings of one particular word.  The word is used during conversation.  How does the other react?

Oh, I don’t think you understand the word you just used?

or

Wait, a minute, maybe I don’t understand that word?

or

That word didn’t make sense in the way I usually think about it, why exactly did that happen?

The key feature of this last question is that it addresses the nature of conversation.  This question opens up the possible space of solutions to include the two prior questions, but beyond this, it also creates space for other interpretations that don’t exist within the purview of the first two questions.

The two people talking might be from totally different countries where the specific word has different meanings, meaning that in the case of speaking together, both definitions are correct.  And more importantly, if this were the case, the first two questions that attempt to figure out what’s going on are rendered ineffective and often lead us down unproductive rabbit holes.  Only the third question opens up the perspective on the situation enough to include such a possibility.

Strangely, the widest perspective enables us to zero in on the inequity faster than a more focused point of view. 

So much of learning and understanding is a matter of context, and the size of the context we take into consideration.  We run into trouble when we are too often zoomed-in.  The benefit isn’t in being able to view things from a bird’s eye, zoomed out position, but in the ability to toggle fluidly between narrow specific focus, and a wide, encompassing picture.

Detecting inequities is a matter of how we see the situation more than it is a function of the actual details, because from the right angle, at the right distance, all those key details snap into focus.

NEGATIVE SURPRISE

June 16th, 2020

What is a surprise?  Be it positive or negative, it’s our reaction to something unexpected - it is a violation of expectation.  The nature of surprise, it’s character and valence has almost nothing to do with what actually unfolds.  It has everything to do with what happens beforehand, how we imagine the future, why we imagine it in such a way: we set ourselves up for the way we react to the future, be it a surprise or not.

This imagined future grows from two different roots, and also from both.  The kernel of our vision for the future can be emotional, and it can also spring from a thoughtful place, or naturally some combination.  It’s most probably always a combination. 

But how well integrated is that combination?

When surprise does come our way, is our reaction characterized by emotion or by a thoughtful updating of our ideas regarding what’s going on and how things work?

What does it mean when we experience deep disappointment about the way something has turned out but at the same time the situation makes sense, as though the result is typical.  This can be shrugged off as cynicism, but it also illuminates an important decoupling between what we think about a situation and how we feel about it.  Hard truths are often so because our emotions are not aligned with what we know – the collision and the discrepancy that we experience within is the difficult part.

Another cynical truism that arises around these concepts is that in order to avoid disappointment, the key is to have low expectations, or none at all.  The implication is always that hope is foolish, and dashed expectations are always born of this hope.  This combination is asymmetrical in a way that does not benefit us in anyway: we are set up to simultaneously experience dashed hopes and a reinforcement of our cynical understanding of how things work.  With such views, we are constantly set up for negative surprise.

But what about the inverse?  What about outcomes that make sense but don’t disappoint because they make sense, and are therefore predictable, and outcomes that present pleasant surprises because the result diverges from our expectations – the way we understand the world.  A first question might be: is such a view based on negative expectations?  Isn’t this a cynical view of the world?  Perhaps, but the surprise is that if the cynic were to actually take their own advice, then the asymmetry inverts, and we are left with only upside: either our understanding of the world is further supported, or we are pleasantly surprised with something good.  The cynic masquerades as a sort of masochistic, hopeless romantic, pretending to bet perpetually on the underdog odds.  But such a cynic and wannabe romantic never actually inhabits the role of that underdog.  The underdog is sober about the chances, but endeavors forward regardless….

and why?

because the real underdog realizes the possibility of being

delightfully wrong.

BIRTH OF A QUESTION

June 15th, 2020

Where do questions come from?

It’s without a doubt that the very notion of a question arises very early in our development, as evidenced by the interminable string of why’s, what’s, and how’s that come from children.  Many of these questions are more requests for information from adults.  Why does the sun rise?  How old is Grammy?  What is an accountant?  Children realize very quickly that there is a whole universe of information that adults have, a universe that they wish to learn and understand.

What’s fascinating is that animals don’t pose questions.  Certainly a dog or a cat can notify you of their hunger, and animals can likewise be unsure about whether someone or something is a friend or a foe, but other than these instances that might be like pre-questions, there is only one instance where an animal has ever asked a question.  It was bird, a parrot named Alex.  Apes have been taught sign language, but even though such primates are perfectly capable of answering questions that they have an answer for, they never use the capacity to seek more information from a human.  The parrot named Alex, however, apparently looked in a mirror and asked the question “what color?”.  The parrot was told the color “grey” 6 times in a row, and apparently learned that the color of its own plumage was grey.

Other than this one solitary instance of curiosity, there is no record of query among animals.

Returning to the notion of a pre-question, we’ve all been party to the instance when an animal is unsure about another creature, for example when we try to coax a timid animal to eat from our hand.  The squirrel may approach and then skitter away, and then come closer and closer.  We must wonder: is this a question about safety being asked over and over, or is the animal responding to fluctuating levels of comfort, hunger and a sense of danger, all of which are being toggled by cues in the environment.

Dogs also seem to have an ability to tilt their head to the side, so as to convey confusion.  Perhaps there is the kernel of question buried in this gesture, or perhaps it is an evolutionary adaptation, one used to provoke a change in the human who is witnessing the gesture.  Hard to say.

What’s clear is that human curiosity is orders of magnitude beyond what animals exhibit.  Our use of the question, from the very start as infants extends far beyond the realms of hunger, safety and danger.  Our brains spend a tremendous amount of energy investigating things that are of no obvious nor immediate relation to our needs.

What’s perhaps most fascinating here is how indeterminate that answer to the original question is: where do questions come from?

The resolution here is not at all obvious, and answers like curiosity, or wonder are fairly unsatisfying.  They are just proxies: where does curiosity come from?  Or wonder?

Does it have something to do with the size of our imagination?  And our ability to imagine the presence of something we don’t know?  How do we as a species look at the world and somehow implicitly suspect that there’s something more to it than immediately meets the eye?

This episode draws heavily from Episode 390: Question about the Question

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: OMPHALOS

June 14th, 2020

The air seemed suffused with the light of the sun.  It was hot, and even in the shade it felt as though it pushed into the skin.  Lucilius put forearm to forehead to wipe the sweat away from his stinging eyes.  He tilted his head toward each shoulder, stretching against the strain of backpack straps that had burrowed into his skin beneath the thin shirt he wore.  The next town couldn’t be much farther, he knew, remembering again the short distance he’d seen on the map some miles back.  He pushed on, trying to keep in the shade of trees on the shoulder of the path.  He watched the way unbend to the slow loping rhythm of his pace, until it finally pierced with more light and came to an end opening up upon a meticulous grassy lawn.

He barely noticed the ornate stone building buffeted by the lawn as he looked out from the high ground upon the beautiful town below.  And there, in the middle of the lawn was a fountain, a small pool in stone, adorned in the center with an island from which arose a statue of a symbol Lucilius had often seen.  He was still new to the country and had yet to really learn the ways of it’s people.  But in that moment, he was simply hot, and thirsty. 

He tramped over to the fountain and painfully eased the heavy backpack from his shoulders and set it down.  Then he knelt and cupped water from the fountain and brought it to his face and drank deeply.  He brought water to his lips again and again, and when he finally breathed a sigh of relief, he bent down and splashed water on his face, bringing the water up to his sore neck, and letting it run through his hair until he had cooled.

He sat back, feeling like himself again, and looked out over the beautiful town.  He slipped his feet from their flip-flops and swung them out, realizing it was a perfect reach across the little bit of water to the stone sculpture in the center.  He crossed his feet and rested a heel in a nook of the symbol and laid back on the grass, and within moments he was asleep.

He awoke with a start to the sound of yelling.  He blinked the bleary view from his eyes and looked to find a man in long dark robes bustling towards him, an angry man shouting in a language Lucilius could not understand.  The man’s eyes were wide with fury as he descended upon Lucilius.

“What?” Lucilius tried to ask.  But the man only shouted more.  “What?”  Lucilius asked again, flustered with the man’s alarm.

The robed man paused a moment, struck with the word Lucilius had said, hearing the language Lucilius spoke.

“How dare you,” the man said.

“What? what’s wrong?”  Lucilius said.

The man gestured at Lucilius’ feet still hitched up on the statue.  Lucilius followed his gesture, but slowly shook his head, confused. 

“What’s the matter?” Lucilius asked again.

“This statue is holy!  And you, you have your filthy feet all over it.  Move them at once.”

Lucilius looked at his feet, and the statue where they rested.  Then he looked around at the surrounding grass, the wide lawn, bordered by forest and on the other side where it ran to the temple.  He looked back at the disturbed man.

“Where is a place that I might put them that isn’t holy?”  Lucilius asked.

The holy man’s eye’s widened, mistaking Lucilius’ question for insolence.

“How dare you!” the holy man said, and with the words he leaned over the water, grabbed Lucilius’ dirty feet and yanked them away from the statue.  But as he crouched to place them in the grass, the holy man suddenly noticed a small beetle crawling up a blade of grass.  It’s shell radiated a brilliant blue like polished metal, and the holy man stood up again, not wanting to crush the beetle with Lucilius’ feet since the creature was deemed holy in his tradition.  He moved them further on, but now the holy man could see the individual blades of grass, the clear blood beaded at the clipped tips, freshly trimmed, their rich color soaking in the sun and the deadened pieces mingling down into the soil, to dry and rot and again through that sacred process of death transforming life, become again dirt and holy ground. 

Finally the holy man looked at the feet that he held in his own hands.  The holy man could see how sore the feet he held were, how far they must have come, in sacred duty to this young man, honoring his travel, and now how dirty they were.

Slowly, the holy man knelt down on both knees, placing Lucilius’ feet just upon the stone edge of the fountain.  And then the holy man cupped some water and brought it up and poured it over Lucilius’ feet.  He brought more water from the fountain, and rinsed the dirt away, and then he took a cloth folded in his rope belt, a cloth that was retained for holy service, and with it he wiped Lucilius’ feet dry.