Tools for tracking motives in thought and conversation; tools for reading between the lines with greater comprehension, a word of the week service that translates cutting-edge insights from the life and social sciences for application to everyday life produced by Jeremy Sherman Ph.D., M.P.P. a guy who wonders a lot, researches the origins and nature of doubt, ambiguity, purpose, life, significance and the fundamental patterns that drive our decisions. Sherman also writes a blog for Psychology Today called "Ambigamy: Insights for the deeply romantic and deeply skeptical." http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com en-us Copyright 2008 Sun, 26 May 2013 07:09:12 EST Sun, 26 May 2013 07:09:12 EST http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com (Jeremy Sherman) mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com For reading between the lines with greater comprehension Latest insights from the life and social sciences translated and applied to your everyday life. Advanced social savvy made simple. Tools for tracking motives in thought and conversation. Pragmatics, evolution, psychology, social psychology, economics, politics, environmentalism, ecology, sociology, semiotics, complexity, emergence, philosophy, cybernetics, decision theory--all the good stuff distilled into simple, disarmingly honest, real-world tools for making better decisions and feeling better about the decisions you make. Jeremy Sherman mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=510 What is with him? How can he believe such garbage? It's so bad it's not even wrong. It's worse than wrong! Sometimes I think he's just clueless. He simply can't see the truth. But then other times I get this whiff of the devious and think he can see the truth just fine but refuses to. For self... Podcasts Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:14:30 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No What is with him? How can he believe such garbage? It's so bad it's not even wrong. It's worse than wrong! Sometimes I think he's just clueless. He simply can't see the truth. But then other tim What is with him? How can he believe such garbage? It's so bad it's not even wrong. It's worse than wrong! Sometimes I think he's just clueless. He simply can't see the truth. But then other times I get this whiff of the devious and think he can see the truth just fine but refuses to. For selfish reasons. To get what he wants, he's pretending he can't see. It's all a con. He's manipulating me. But then I feel bad for assuming the worst. Maybe he’s neither clueless nor lying. He’s just loyal elsewhere. To keep the people in his world happy he’s forced to believe that stuff. You know how it is. To keep your job, to maintain harmony with your spouse you have to believe certain things. It’s not even a conscious decision. You just fall into falsehoods to keep the peace.  It’s not enough to claim to believe those things, because the people you’re around a lot, they’ll see it on your face. To be consistently and reliably diplomatic and tactful with the folks around him, he believes what he has to. You only believe what you can afford to believe. And sure, maybe the same is true for me. Maybe my social pressures distort my reality too.  For all I know, he’s more realistic than I am.  Who am I to say what’s true. Except for one little fact, which is that what he believes is total bullshit, and like I say, sometimes I think he’s just screwing with me. With a con artist, being empathetic is pathetic.  I should defend the truth against his lies, fight him, get right up in his face. Though of course, not if he’s just clueless.  I mean what are you going to do?  Chew some guy out for not knowing better when it’s simply beyond him to understand?  That’s tacky. Clueless, Lying, Loyal? Most psychological dilemmas are, at core a choice between three mutually exclusive options.  Something feels wrong, and you’ve got three ways to interpret what it is.  Your three interpretations each point to a different response and the responses are at odds with each other. Take a partner’s persistently and distractingly annoying habit of picking his teeth. You have three options: 1. Accommodating it requires that you learn to ignore the problem. You maintain your commitment to the partnership by getting over your annoyance. 2. Fighting it requires that you stay vigilant, paying attention to the annoyance and letting your partner know it bugs you. You maintain your commitment to the partnership by making it meet your standards. 3. Leaving it requires not working to sustain the partnership.  You don’t have to change; your partner doesn’t have to change. You just go your separate ways. These three response options go by different names in different contexts: Fight, flight and fear: In response to a predator, an organism fights for dominance, escapes interaction, or displaying fear demonstrates accommodation. Exit, voice and loyalty: In politics, a frustrated citizen can leave the country, voice his opposition or, out of loyalty accommodate the frustration. Win, lose or draw in games; Innocent, guilty and nolo contendere in law; dominance, subordination and disengagement in game theory--we choose one or another of these forks depending on how we interpret the source of the problem. We also have names for the three core interpretations. For example, when there’s a problem between you and me, I can interpret the problem’s origin as in you, in me or in us. If I decide that the problem originates in you, I’ll fight you. If I decide I’m the problem I’ll accommodate you. If I decide the problem originates in us, and our bad chemistry, I’ll suggest that we go our separate ways. Call it the “Youmeus Point,” the point when a problem arises and you wonder “Is it you, is it me or is it us?” And actually there are two Youmeus points, two interpretation q 00:08:28 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=509 That's the fourth time she's done it and this time you're not going to let it pass. Carefully, diplomatically you tell her that she has got to stop insulting you in front of your friends. It's getting weird. If she has complaints and criticisms, you want her to talk with you about them frankly and p... Podcasts Thu, 10 Nov 2011 17:14:14 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No That's the fourth time she's done it and this time you're not going to let it pass. Carefully, diplomatically you tell her that she has got to stop insulting you in front of your friends. It's getting That's the fourth time she's done it and this time you're not going to let it pass. Carefully, diplomatically you tell her that she has got to stop insulting you in front of your friends. It's getting weird. If she has complaints and criticisms, you want her to talk with you about them frankly and privately, rather than attacking you indirectly and publicly. She listens and then pleasantly, earnestly, as if trying to reassure you, says, “It is not my intent to insult and attack you.  I would never want to do that.” There. Satisfied? I didn’t think so.  Or try these: Your child has a C- minus average, but when you confront him, he most earnestly whines, “But I really want to get good grades!” Your husband won’t share the housework but when you ask him to help more he says, “I mean to help.  I would never want you to feel our relationship was unfair.” It’s as if to say, “My intentions are good.  Don’t they count for everything?”  It’s as if to say “I’m a good listener, I’m being agreeable, and I’m on the same page with you. So shut-up because you’re wrong about me. You’re intuitions are unfounded.” And it’s a natural response we’re all capable of giving, indeed, given how minds work, a response we’re naturally inclined toward giving. We humans are the world’s first fully bi-mundial species. We live in two worlds, the real and the imagined.  The real is what confronts us physically through our senses--both physical feedback (the brick wall you bump into), and feedback from other people (the C-). Imagination is a new-fangled ability made possible by our capacity for language, our ability to construct mental word-pictures. Imagination makes us humans preternaturally ambitious, visionary, innovative, entrepreneurial, proactive, delusional, woo-woo, clueless, dangerous, and out of touch. It’s what made Steve Jobs so visionary, and that pompous jerk you know such a total pain in the butt. Our bi-mundiality is a big, risky evolutionary experiment, and its outcome is very much up in the air.  It’s the source of both what could ruin us (climate chaos, economic folly) and save us (new energy technologies, better economic modeling). When we bi-mundials are confronted by discouraging real-world evidence, our first inclination is to retreat into our imaginations.  When someone says, “You’re doing harm,” it’s as if we close our eyes to get a second opinion from ourselves about ourselves. And the likeliest second opinion amounts to: “Yeah, sorry, I just checked with myself.  I asked myself point blank whether I want to do harm, and nope, you’re wrong.  I aspire to be a good person. My intentions are positive. I looked right at myself and that’s not me. I even checked with myself twice. And I agree with me.” We naturally or deliberately overlook the complex tensions between our often-conflicting desires.  Your partner genuinely wants to have been nice to you, but that doesn’t always trump her desire to one-up you. You child wants to have gotten good grades, but that doesn’t always trump his desire to watch a lot of TV.  Your husband wants to have helped, but that doesn’t always trump his desire to hang out on the Internet. One common manifestation of our bi-mundiality is what I call “speaking in the aspirational tense.” We say what we hope will become true as though it’s already true. For example, an hour ago I threw out my pack of cigarettes, and now I proudly declare, “I quit smoking!” I really mean that I aspire to quit smoking but I say it as though I’m stating established fact.   I say, “I hate cigarettes” as though that’s my only feeling about them. I ignore my other feelings about them, hoping they’ll go away. The aspirational tense plays out as wishes touted as realities. It’s als 00:08:22 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=508 "The secret to a stable relationship like ours," she said proudly," is give and take, a real 50/50 balance." I should look at her while she's talking to me, but I'm sneaking peeks at him, checking for a reaction. I know the couple well and you would have to cook the books pretty creatively to ca... Podcasts Tue, 01 Nov 2011 23:19:52 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No "The secret to a stable relationship like ours," she said proudly," is give and take, a real 50/50 balance." I should look at her while she's talking to me, but I'm sneaking peeks at him, checking "The secret to a stable relationship like ours," she said proudly," is give and take, a real 50/50 balance." I should look at her while she's talking to me, but I'm sneaking peeks at him, checking for a reaction. I know the couple well and you would have to cook the books pretty creatively to call their relationship 50/50. My guess is closer to 90/10. In our circles she's notorious for her demands and expectations. She takes up a lot of space which he supplies with nary a flinch. How does that work? My guess is that it's a 50/50 balance around a 90/10 set point. In other words, they're still negotiating a little give and take, but it's between say, 87/13, and 93/7. He doesn't flinch because he's not wondering about the set point. He's not wondering because the variation around the set point feels easy and balanced, sloshing gently and reliably around even a set point as skewed as theirs'. How are set points negotiated? Let's start by noticing the continuum between business and friend relationships. In business we audit who owes what. In friendship we try not to audit. Love is ideally way over on the friendship side of the continuum, so far over into ignoring who owes what that it's unsafe to love just anyone. You better pick your lover carefully or you'll end up failing to audit a joint account you share with an embezzler. To get to where we can ignore who owes what therefore takes a paradoxical blend of auditing and not auditing, carefully keeping track of who owes what so you can get to where you can afford to ignore who owes what. We'll call this the Auditor's Paradox: It takes auditing to stop auditing. To get safely to a set point where you can say, "who's counting?" you have to count who owes what. Keeping track of who owes what has a lot in common with double-entry bookkeeping. Each partner holds and maintains an intuited ledger; a ledger that registers what each gets and gives with each other. When negotiating set points, partners audit, discussing discrepancies as they arise. For example, when a partner says, "You don't appreciate what I did for you last week," it's the equivalent to "What I did for you last week is recorded in my ledger as accounts receivable, but you don't seem to have it recorded in your ledger as accounts payable." We mark and audit our transactions using the conventional terms of etiquette. For example terms like "please" "thank you," and "sorry" all mean, "I'm registering this transaction as establishing a debt to you, something I will add to my accounts payable, and you can add to your accounts receivable." These terms say, "I hereby acknowledge that I am receiving something from you." They're like receipts. How about invoices? When you say, "Well...OK, here you go," as you grant a favor, it can be like invoicing, like saying "In giving this favor, I'm recording in my accounts receivable a debt you now owe me." But what if instead you say, "not a problem," "no worries" or "don't mention it" as you grant a favor? Those don't sound like invoices. Taken literally they mean something more like "I'm not keeping track of the favor I just granted. You need not register it in your accounts payable, because I'm not registering it in my accounts receivable." What's up with that? Auditing is toxic buzz-kill to friendship and especially to love. Imagine billing your friends for the Thanksgiving dinner you provide them, or giving your partner an itemized list of the expenses you've incurred in your relationship. But given the Auditor's Paradox, auditing is also necessary. We shouldn't pair with someone who systematically cooks the books in his or her favor, so we have to audit some. But we also shouldn't stay with someone who is constantly auditing, so we try to offset auditing's buzz-kill by bestowing romantically lavish acts of kindness, acts that seem t 00:06:11 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=507 Maybe they just didn't hear you. Or maybe they heard you just fine and have decided that you're an idiot, not even worth responding to. Maybe they got your message but are simply too busy to respond. Maybe they're just quietly thinking it over and still haven't decided. Maybe they're so apologet... Podcasts Tue, 25 Oct 2011 21:40:14 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Maybe they just didn't hear you. Or maybe they heard you just fine and have decided that you're an idiot, not even worth responding to. Maybe they got your message but are simply too busy to respo Maybe they just didn't hear you. Or maybe they heard you just fine and have decided that you're an idiot, not even worth responding to. Maybe they got your message but are simply too busy to respond. Maybe they're just quietly thinking it over and still haven't decided. Maybe they're so apologetic that they don't know what to say.  Maybe they're just having fun leaving you dangling. Whatever it is, it has been longer than you expected.  The silence is deafening. What does it mean? Maybe you should resend your message. After all, if they didn’t hear you, they’ll be glad you resent it. But if they’re just busy or quietly thinking it over, then your pestering them could turn them against you. And if they think you’re an idiot, maybe it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie. Or maybe, if they’ve decided you’re an idiot you should defend yourself. If they’re going to be that disrespectful, let them know what you really think. But again, what if they never got the message in the first place, or they’re busy or just thinking it over, or are just feeling bad.  If that’s the situation, then giving them a piece of your mind will prove that you’re an idiot. Lincoln said, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.” That probably applies to responding to silence too. Better to just wait.  They’re probably just busy, right?  Be patient… Wait… Maybe forever. Wait for people who probably think you’re such an idiot that they don’t need to respond. Or just ask them, maybe.  Ask them what’s up. They won’t mind.  Unless they think you’re a pest.  A needy pest over-anxious and supplicating: “Did you get my message?  What did you think?  I desperately need to know what you think.” This is infuriating. Even if they are busy, it’s clear they don’t respect you. What’s worse, their silence is like a shell game.  Whatever you do, you’ll reveal what you think their silence means and then—switcheroo--they can just change their explanation. You can say “You’re not speaking to me because you think I’m an idiot, right?” and even if that’s exactly why, they can always say, “My aren’t you paranoid. Actually, we’ve just been really busy.” Or you can say “You’ve been too busy to respond, right?” and even if that’s their story they can switch it, saying “My aren’t you paranoid.  Actually we were thinking about it.” Their shell game is as bad as “I’m thinking of a number between one and ten.” Whatever you guess, they can claim they were thinking of a different number. What’s worse still, no matter how crazy their silence drives you, they’re unassailable.  They can always say “What? We didn’t do or say anything!” Silence pleads innocence whether it’s innocent or not. Bob Monkhouse says “Silence is not only golden; it is seldom misquoted.” That’s cute but it’s absolutely wrong. There’s probably no communication more misquoted than silence. It’s very hard to know what it says. ----- Silence is a window into a fundamental misunderstanding in semiotics, the study of signs. In general and even in academic research, we assume that a sign is a thing. We say, “A green light means go,” as though the meaning was in the light itself. But if signs are things, are all things signs? How do we know which things are signs and which things aren’t?  And what about silence?  It’s not a thing. How can the absence of a thing be a sign? And yet it is. The absence of a tax form on April 15 is a sign to the IRS.  The absence of the supper you were expecting can be a very big sign served up to you by your soon-to-be ex-partner. We live in an era that people will look back upon as misguidedly thingish.  We’re sailing on the successes of a 350-year campaign to exp 00:09:08 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=506 After I left the world's largest hippie commune but before I cut off my long hair, it occurred to me that the two central tenets of our hippie beliefs were on a collision course with each other. We were talking out both sides of our mouths, saying opposite, irreconcilable things. On the one hand we... Podcasts Mon, 05 Sep 2011 20:24:00 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No After I left the world's largest hippie commune but before I cut off my long hair, it occurred to me that the two central tenets of our hippie beliefs were on a collision course with each other. We we After I left the world's largest hippie commune but before I cut off my long hair, it occurred to me that the two central tenets of our hippie beliefs were on a collision course with each other. We were talking out both sides of our mouths, saying opposite, irreconcilable things. On the one hand we were saying, "We are all one on this spaceship earth and must act together to save it." On the other we were saying “If it feels good do it.” For the most part, we we’re oblivious to the clash. Like the cat fancier who collects all the adorable strays without noticing the catfights escalating, most people collect any and all ideas that move them without noticing where they are at odds with each other. When the Youngblood’s sang “Come on people now, everybody get together,” we’d say “Yeah, right on.” When the Isley’s sang, “It’s your thang, do what you wanna do…” we’d say, “Yeah, right on.” To the extent we did think about how to weave together our collective and individualistic principles, to patronizingly and paradoxically teach the world to sing in perfect harmony a song of freedom, we had two basic theories: 1. Doing what’s good for the collective is really everybody’s thang: Take meat for instance. Spaceship earth couldn’t really handle all of us wanting to eat a lot of meat. It’s not in the collective interest for you to want meat, but the good news is that in your heart of potentially clogged hearts you don’t really want to eat meat anyway. Sure you might think you want a Big Mac, but you don’t really. No, you really lust for tofu. 2. That doing our various individual things would create a harmonious melting pot collective future: You could get this impression from our festivals (still can, for example this week at Burning Man). At Woodstock, for instance where the Republican farmer who leased the land marveled before the crowd that “a half million young people can get together and have three days of fun and music and have nothing but fun and music, and I God Bless You for it!” The secret was three days. Yes, for a brief time the melting pot is harmonious, but having lived on the commune where we attempted to extend indefinitely our union in liberty it became more difficult. Lately I’ve been reading Republican scholars explain the conservative tradition. Its legs, they all agree are three: 1. Commitment to traditional values, 2. Commitment to individual liberty, and 3. Opposition to communism. Growing up I mostly associated Republicanism with anti-communism. With the Soviet’s demise and China’s embrace of capitalism, we heard less about communism for a time. These days, the anti-communist leg of Conservatism’s tripod has re-extended itself as fierce opposition to socialism. The conservatives I know use the USSR as the exemplar of socialism's failure but modern socialism is actually a mixed economy, a style with more mixed success than the USSR, which professed communism, but was actually a totalitarian dictatorship (which historically come in lots of flavors--capitalist, Islamic, communist, Christian). The other two legs of the conservative tripod—liberty and traditional values are wobbling in relation to each other these days as conservatives advocate a libertarian theocracy, a government that gets out of our way but also bans gay marriage. According to New York Times/CBS New surveys, in 14 months the number of Americans who have an unfavorable opinion of the Tea Party has risen from 18 to 40 percent. Today, the Tea Party ranks lower than any of the 23 other groups they asked about — lower than both Republicans and Democrats, and is even less popular than much maligned groups like “atheists” and “Muslims.” Interestingly, one group that approaches it in unpopularity is the Christian Right. Commenting on the 00:09:41 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=505 Do you watch movies and TV, read fiction, follow politics or like good gossip? If you do, then chances are you're a lifelong student of Villainology, the study of what makes bad guys bad and mean people suck. Criminology is something else, the study of people who break laws. A lot of the world's wo... Podcasts Tue, 30 Aug 2011 22:42:09 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Do you watch movies and TV, read fiction, follow politics or like good gossip? If you do, then chances are you're a lifelong student of Villainology, the study of what makes bad guys bad and mean peop Do you watch movies and TV, read fiction, follow politics or like good gossip? If you do, then chances are you're a lifelong student of Villainology, the study of what makes bad guys bad and mean people suck. Criminology is something else, the study of people who break laws. A lot of the world's worst villains climb to positions of power without breaking the law. We start our children into Villainology young with easy detection tests, bad guys who look mean in their black hats and warty furrowed brows. With as much time as we story-lovers spend in the company of bad guys, it's a fair bet we're all looking for clues to detecting villains before they do us harm, budding tyrants in the home, at work or in society at large. So really, how can we tell who's a budding tyrant? It matters since we have to nip them in the bud before their tyranny takes hold. These days there are lots of people in politics crying "Tyranny!" Who should you believe? Some say beware the Socialists, Christian Fundamentalists, Communists, Conservatives, Muslims or Libertarians, but you can't tell budding tyrants by their affiliations. Historically, tyranny has made itself at home in every political, religious, and philosophical movement. At its heart tyranny is a lack of conscience, and here we can distinguish three forms. First, there are psychopaths who have an organic absence of conscience. They test as having no affect for example when seeing images of gruesome cruelty that would make anyone else's heart jump. Second, there's sociopathy, an extraordinary absence of conscience in one context because conscience is committed elsewhere. The family celebrating the death of their suicide bomber son and his hundreds of victims may seem, like psychopaths to show a complete lack of conscience, but they would insist that they don't care about the lives lost because they are so conscientious about serving other communities and God. Unlike psychopathy, sociopathy is not a permanent condition but a behavior, one that can only be ascribed relative to some social norm. For example our side's soldier is trained to show no conscience toward the enemy combatants he kills. To us, he's not a sociopath; he's a hero. The enemy's soldiers are sociopaths because, by our social norms his supposed higher purposes do not justify his lack of conscience toward us. And then there's the third form, normal, everyday conscience allocation. Conscience, if it's more than lip service is expensive. To show conscientious consideration to others means exerting yourself on their behalf. You have finite powers of exertion, and therefore have to subordinate and prioritize whether consciously or unconsciously, where you expend conscientious care. This is why "Do onto others what you would have them do onto you," while a lovely sentiment, is impossible to put into full practice. You can't help disappoint others, doing to them what you wouldn't have done onto you. And visa versa. Bosses let us go, partners dump us, friends turn us down, children fail to fulfill our hopes. Sometimes it really hurts. Why would they do such a thing? Most of the time, bless their souls, because they are being conscientious elsewhere, allocating their finite and expensive conscientiousness as they see fit, disappointing though it may be to us. "Ah," you might counter, "But that's just disappointment. That's not the same thing as cruelty, which is what the Golden Rule is really talking about," to which I'd say "Exactly. Thank you for taking this where we need to go." To tell who's a budding tyrant in politics but also at home and at work, we need to be able to tell who's a psychopath, who's acting sociopathically and who's just doing normal, everyday conscience allocation. Psychopaths know how to frame their exclusively self-serving agendas as serving some higher cause. When they're going 00:09:31 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=504 If you want a simple but accurate explanation for why civilizations sometimes veer toward evil, here's a theory worth considering: Psychopaths are overrepresented in positions of power and they make sociopaths out of large numbers of us. Robert Hare, psychology's most famous expert on psychopaths... Podcasts Tue, 19 Jul 2011 21:14:29 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No If you want a simple but accurate explanation for why civilizations sometimes veer toward evil, here's a theory worth considering: Psychopaths are overrepresented in positions of power and they make s If you want a simple but accurate explanation for why civilizations sometimes veer toward evil, here's a theory worth considering: Psychopaths are overrepresented in positions of power and they make sociopaths out of large numbers of us. Robert Hare, psychology's most famous expert on psychopaths distinguishes psychopaths from sociopaths as follows. Psychopaths are without conscience and incapable of empathy, guilt, or loyalty to anyone but themselves … Sociopathy is not a formal psychiatric condition. It refers to patterns of attitudes and behaviors that are considered antisocial and criminal by society at large, but are seen as normal or necessary by the subculture or social environment in which they developed. After WWII, many people suspected that there might be something about the German temperament that made them so willing to comply with Hitler’s orders to hurt fellow humans. In one of psychology’s most famous experiments Stanley Milgram demonstrated that most of us, regardless of race, religion, gender or nationality will readily comply with an authority figure’s instructions to hurt fellow humans. In Milgram’s experiment a man in a white lab coat instructed subjects to administer what they believed to be successively intense electrical shocks to another person. Coaxed only by such statements as “Please continue,” and “The experiment requires that you continue,” 65% of subjects inflicted the maximum 450-volt shock and none of the remaining 35% insisted the experiment be terminated or left the room to check the health of the victim without requesting permission to leave. All right, so it’s not just the Germans. More generally then, what would make any of us sociopathically deferential to a Hitler-like psychopath? Are we all subconsciously sadistic? No, we’re subconsciously bovine. We become herd animals and follow the leader. Once we have determined that someone is in a position of moral leadership, we shift from moral autonomy to moral deference. We don’t shirk responsibility so much as surrender it to a higher power and it’s understandable that we would. A true moral leader deserves our allegiance and support. Aligning with moral leadership lends our leverage to his or her righteous cause. Think of where we would be today without the allied soldiers’ deference to moral leadership in WWII. We survived Hitler because the Greatest Generation sacrificed their moral autonomy to true moral leaders. Theirs was not to wonder why; theirs was just to do or die. The problem isn’t in our deference to moral leaders but in how lousy we are at determining who is a moral leader. Hitler wasn’t one and yet masses of people thought that he was. Our deference explains why psychopaths are over-represented in positions of power. By their nature psychopaths have no conscience and will fight as dirty as they can get away with fighting. This gives them an enormous edge in competition. Just think how your fortunes would rise in any game if you could cheat and your opponent couldn’t. A psychopath’s fortunes would rise in game play too but not nearly so much as they rise in politics. In games the line between fair and unfair play is well defined so it’s easy to spot cheaters. In politics the line is fuzzier which makes it harder to spot cheaters, easier to cheat, and easier for the psychopath to defend himself by pleading ignorance and self-defense saying, “I don’t think I crossed the line and anyway I think my opponent crossed it so, if I got close to the line it was merely in self defense.” Also, clearly the object in games is to win and therefore deferring like a herd animal to a moral leader would be absurd. You probably haven’t done that since you were cowed at seven into teaming up with your big brother to beat your little brother at Monopoly. As 00:10:17 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=503 In economist Ha-Joon Chang's wonderful book, "23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism," the first of the 23 things is that there are no absolutely free markets. Think about it. If freeing up markets were always the solution, then wouldn't we allow the purchase of slaves, hiring of eight ye... Podcasts Thu, 30 Jun 2011 21:31:34 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No In economist Ha-Joon Chang's wonderful book, "23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism," the first of the 23 things is that there are no absolutely free markets. Think about it. If freeing up In economist Ha-Joon Chang's wonderful book, "23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism," the first of the 23 things is that there are no absolutely free markets. Think about it. If freeing up markets were always the solution, then wouldn't we allow the purchase of slaves, hiring of eight year olds, and immigration of anyone who wanted to work here at any price? No free market purist can or would advocate these things. So where do they draw the line? Wherever they want. And then they pretend there is no line. They claim to be purists. No fine-line—to every question the answer is always completely free markets. But they never really mean it. Like all of us they have to draw fine lines between for example leaving things to markets and regulating things like child labor. When they say free, they mean freer and certainly not across the board. They mean freer on whatever they happen to want freer. Moral relativism has a bad reputation these days. I think immoral relativism is worse, the immorality of relativism dressed up in absolute purity’s clothing: Bible interpreters who claim to be literalists, self-proclaimed “originalists” whose supposedly literal read of the Constitution is as much an interpretation as anyone else’s, conservatives who demand a return to the only true and pure values while cherry-picking the values they value, and liberals too who pretend they believe in the pure principle of love when they, like the rest of us are picking and choosing. Advocating a self-serving position in the name of absolute purity is the putrefaction of democratic discourse. And blindness to one’s own biases is no excuse so long as you’re out there accusing everyone else of being biased. Here’s how to be an immoral relativist: 1. Paint a bull’s eye that pinpoints your own biased opinion as the center point, the goal, the ideal, the pure non-divergent position. 2. Forget that you did this. 3. Point to the bull’s eye you’ve painted and shout at people, “Can’t you see? Isn’t it obvious that the pure unadulterated, unbiased absolute center, the balanced, fair and perfect position, is right here at the center of this objectively crafted bull’s eye?! The technique goes way back. Try this from Plato’s dialogues: Socrates. And what is piety, and what is impiety? Euthyphro. Piety is doing as I am doing… Socrates. …I would rather hear from you a more precise answer, which you have not as yet given, my friend, to the question, What is "piety"? When asked, you only replied, Doing as you do... Euthyphro. And what I said was true, Socrates. Socrates. No doubt, Euthyphro; but you would admit that there are many other pious acts? Euthyphro. There are. Socrates. Remember that I did not ask you to give me two or three examples of piety, but to explain the general idea which makes all pious things to be pious… Euthyphro tries to answer Socrates but eventually gives up, unable to balance competing pieties. Balancing is harder than leaning, as any gym rat will tell you. It takes more energy to lift free weights than machine weights. With machine weights you lean and push. With free weighs you balance and push, which is harder. Easiest of all is leaning into Euthyphro’s “doing what I’m doing” and calling it pure piety, scorning others for tainting things by trying to find balance weighing relative merits. In my lifetime there has never been more of this immoral relativism in public discourse than there is now. It is a worrying sign. 00:07:27 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=502 My ex-partner is a sociopath. No really. I hope you believe me. But then I also hope you doubt me too. A sociopath has little or no conscience, and "the little" in that definition is a very big problem. How little is little enough to warrant the diagnosis of sociopathy? Conscience is expensi... Podcasts Wed, 15 Jun 2011 17:21:01 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No My ex-partner is a sociopath. No really. I hope you believe me. But then I also hope you doubt me too. A sociopath has little or no conscience, and "the little" in that definition is a very big p My ex-partner is a sociopath. No really. I hope you believe me. But then I also hope you doubt me too. A sociopath has little or no conscience, and "the little" in that definition is a very big problem. How little is little enough to warrant the diagnosis of sociopathy? Conscience is expensive. To be entirely conscientious would be impossible for any of us, manifesting as constant effort on behalf of others and constant guilt, shame, and remorse for not being able to do enough. We all therefore allocate our finite conscientiousness, usually with lots for our closest loved ones and less or none for the people far away. Having too little conscience is measured relative to circumstances. “How can people be so callous?” says an upper class American when reading about middle-class people in Bombay who ignore thousands of beggars a day. In contrast, that American living in a gated community, providing generously to her family and wealthy neighbors demonstrates ample conscience for her circumstances. The more strife; the more compassion is called for. If the economy collapses and the climate crisis causes orders of magnitude more “acts of God,” do we all become instant sociopaths for showing too little compassion relative to the growing desperation that surrounds us? And then there’s the question of where we allocate our conscientious effort and empathy. Hotel Heiress Leona Helmsley left $12 million to her pet dog. Many would say she was a sociopath. Yet she did show more than a little conscience in her concern for her dog’s well being. When we diagnose the people who hurt, jilted or “used” us, calling them narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths, or just cold-hearted, maybe we’re really just disappointed that they turned their conscientiousness away from us. Are people uncaring when they don’t care for us as much as they care for someone nhhhhew? There’s a vulgar riddle at men’s expense that speaks to disciplining our diagnoses: Q: What’s the difference between a b**tch and a w**re? A: A w**re will have sex with anyone but a b**tch will have sex with anyone but you. To which I’d add: Q: What’s the difference between a sociopath and a frustrating ex? A: A sociopath doesn’t care about anyone and a frustrating ex- doesn’t care about you. And further: Q: What’s the difference between a narcissist and a frustrating ex? A: A narcissist loves himself more than anyone and a frustrating ex- loves himself more than he loves you. These highlight one of the reasons that many frustrated ex-partners diagnose their former intimates in such clinically severe terms. But another reason is that some people really are narcissists and sociopaths and with them, not calling a spade a spade is the most dangerous thing you can do. “Should I trust here?” is about the hardest question we ever face. What we do when we trust and don’t trust are exact opposites so you can’t really hedge. The only thing worse that not trusting the trustworthy, is trusting the untrustworthy. With most people we can go case by case. We might trust our good friends mostly but perhaps not on everything. Think of a sociopath as someone who can send convincing signals to trust always when in fact he or she can never ever be trusted—a con artist with no potential for remorse--very scary, very important to recognize before he or she plays your heartstrings and cuts out your heart. For a fine, thought-proving and entertaining book on the benefits and costs of diagnosing and misdiagnosing psychopaths (a term synonymous with sociopaths), read the current NYT best seller “The Psychopath Test” by Jon Ranson. For a masterpiece of psychological reasoning and deep analysis of the challenge of dealing with sociopaths, read Martha Stout’s “The Sociopath Next Door.” Here are three 00:13:49 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=501 I'm entitled to do what you, in my same circumstances would not be entitled to do--that's a double standard. Being civilized means trying to constrain the natural human tendency toward such double standards. The tendency toward double standards doesn't originate with humans. It is as old as life... Podcasts Tue, 07 Jun 2011 17:50:03 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No I'm entitled to do what you, in my same circumstances would not be entitled to do--that's a double standard. Being civilized means trying to constrain the natural human tendency toward such double sta I'm entitled to do what you, in my same circumstances would not be entitled to do--that's a double standard. Being civilized means trying to constrain the natural human tendency toward such double standards. The tendency toward double standards doesn't originate with humans. It is as old as life itself. All organisms demonstrate autonomous agency. A bird, unlike a rock, looks out for herself and hers. A tree without even a nervous system competes for sunlight. We humans have got life’s autonomous agency plus nervous systems, a major double standard augmenter. We really feel our personal pain, much more so than we feel the pain of others. We are compelled by the neuron’s persuasive and convincing power to look out for ourselves, at the expense of others. Add to this another double-standard augmenter. Language the inventive power to give voice to our individual desires and to rationalize them. Language reliably grants me an explanation, however specious for why I personally deserve what you, in my situation would not deserve. “Ah, but don’t you see,” I say “if you were in my circumstances it would be completely different…” And then I invent a reason why it would be. Civilization’s great inventions have been constraints on double standards. “Rule by law” for example is a double standard diminisher, moving us away from “rule by man” whereby a lord, supposedly chosen by God gets to impose his double standards. That all of us are in theory “equal under the law” is a significant check on our natural selfishness and double standards. “Rule by law” also moves us away from a variation on “rule by man” whereby a Lord in Heaven defined by some Great Man of Faith exercises that man’s double standard. A pope saying “God says that I’m exceptional,” for example. Double standard exceptionalism starts at home with “I demand more,” but really takes off when extended to a tribal “We demand more.” For example, “God loves us,” instead of merely “God loves me.” Is extending our double standards to an “exclusive we” a double standard augmenter or diminisher? One the one hand charity begins at home, so extending the standard to our next of kin and tribal neighbors is exactly how you would expect the diminishment of double standards to start. Rule of Law, that great double standard diminisher grow by gradual extention ,first for example in the Magna Carta from kings to nobles. On the other hand, extending the double standard from “I demand more” to “We demand more” is probably more of a double standard enhancer than diminisher. The delimited altruism of the extended double standard liberates me to promote my double standard without fear that I’m being selfish. To the outside world the tribe member says, “Yes I’m claiming I deserve more than you do, but notice how selfless I am in also claiming my family and tribe members deserve more than you deserve.” Historically the extended double standard “We demand more” idea has unleashed both the great movements--national independence, civil rights, women’s rights, workers rights--and the horrible movements—national exceptionalism, racial supremacy, tribal bullying and bigotry of all sorts. Righteous indignation on behalf of “us” feels righteous because in some cases it is, for example when beating back the encroachment of exceptionalists who succeeded in imposing their extended double-standard and crowding others out, the way men did with women for millennia, and Nazis did with Jews and then Jews do with Palestinians today Women, Jews and Palestinians in their time of oppression are righteous for demanding more for their tribe. Their oppressors in their time think they are being righteous when demanding more for their tribe. But they’re wrong. It is the added power of extended dou 00:10:39 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=500 "The conviction persists -- though history shows it to be a hallucination -- that all the questions that the human mind has asked are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives that the questions themselves present. But in fact intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer aban... Podcasts Fri, 27 May 2011 15:18:06 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No "The conviction persists -- though history shows it to be a hallucination -- that all the questions that the human mind has asked are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives that t "The conviction persists -- though history shows it to be a hallucination -- that all the questions that the human mind has asked are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives that the questions themselves present. But in fact intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them; we get over them." John Dewey in The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy Tell me, are you a Homoousian or a Homoiousian? Don't know the terms? In the second century heads rolled over the difference between these two camps. Intellectual culture was all steamed up about whether Jesus was made of the same substance as God or a different one, and the two factions, violent in their conviction went by these two names whose near-indistinguishability reflect the kind of "same difference" indifference most of us have about the question today. Intellectual culture has, as Dewey suggested, gotten over the question of whether Jesus and God are made of the same substance. Since I'm asking you questions, here's another: How long ago did you stop feeding your pet kangaroo moon rocks? Intellectual culture gets stuck on questions that contain false assumptions so hidden it takes us a while to even notice that we're making them. We get over these questions when the false assumptions become as glaring as mine that you have both a pet kangaroo and access to a sufficient quantity of moon rocks to feed him. It can take years, centuries or even millennia to spot the false assumptions. When there's a question we churn over for a very long time without headway, searching for hidden false assumptions is a good bet for how to get over the stalemate. Intellectual culture has been stuck for millennia on the question of whether we have Free Will or are deterministically constrained to behave the way we do. We go back and forth on it, factions emphatic in their arguments pro and con but gaining no ground. I won't recount the whole debate here. I'll refresh your mind though, with this cute, pro-determinism limerick: There was a young man who said "damn." For it certainly seems that I am A creature that moves In immutable grooves I'm not even a bus; I'm a tram. A new field of scientific research called "emergent dynamics" has exposed our hidden false assumptions about Free Will, which I'll try to distill for you here. We assume that Free Will is exercised by a little guy, an agent, a homunculus, a soul, an independent, invisible action-figure who operates the physical world's heavy equipment, exerting acts of entirely unconstrained "Will" that move matter, sometimes even mountains. Our image of this free agent is basically, God's mini-me. God, we intuit is an independent, invisible and indivisible agent who can move mountains, independent of the mountains moving Him. God is not a tram; he's a bus, free to steer where He pleases. The Free Will question is about whether we are like that, exerting independent, un-constrained "Will" on the world. The implicit metaphor for both God or Free Will's source is really a soul, an independent point of origin for "Willed" behavior. When we think about a point of origin for willed behavior, especially an invisible one like God or a soul, we think of it as a point really, not necessarily tiny, but certainly indivisible and solid with no parts and nothing moving around inside it. The Greek word for such things is "atom." Like the one-dimensional points you learned about in geometry, atoms are useful fictions, but they're decidedly fictions. Physicists gave up on atoms a while ago. Even in the physical sciences, we don't fine anything solid, not comprised of parts in dynamical (meaning moving) relationship with each other. It's not that quarks are the new indivisible atoms. They too 00:11:56 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=499 Between optimism and pessimism, optimism has a better reputation. 'Tis better to be optimistic than pessimistic, or so says conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom is wrong. Buy into it at your own peril because, if you don't watch out people will manipulate and bully you with the supposed but f... Podcasts Wed, 18 May 2011 16:58:11 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Between optimism and pessimism, optimism has a better reputation. 'Tis better to be optimistic than pessimistic, or so says conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom is wrong. Buy into it at your ow Between optimism and pessimism, optimism has a better reputation. 'Tis better to be optimistic than pessimistic, or so says conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom is wrong. Buy into it at your own peril because, if you don't watch out people will manipulate and bully you with the supposed but fake virtue of optimism. It's not that it's better to be pessimistic but that optimism and pessimism are two sides of the same coin. To be optimistic about one alternative is to be relatively pessimistic about other alternatives. “This plan will work,” means at minimum, “We don’t need another plan” but more likely means “The other plans are less likely to succeed.” Optimism and pessimism are as inseparable as inhaling and exhaling. They’re “reflexively antagonistic” the way to tighten your bicep you must loosen your triceps, and visa versa. In debate you’re opponent who is optimistic about his plan is, by definition pessimistic about yours. Don’t let him claim the high moral ground by saying that since he likes his plan, he’s an optimist. Don’t buy the currently popular malarkey about the power of positive thinking. Being positive about one thing is being negative about alternatives by comparison. Positivity isn’t a virtue it’s a focalizer, a way of saying “I’m prefer this; not that.” You can’t prefer everything any more than you can inhale everything. We have finite focus. To focus here means not to focus there. Positivity is a necessity, but then so is inhaling. That doesn’t mean you should or can inhale all day. The question is not whether to be positive but what to be positive about. When optimistic bullies say, “Well, at least I’m being optimistic.” They add insult to injury. Not only are they optimistic about their preferred plan (in comparison to yours which relatively speaking, they’re pessimistic about), they also discredit your planning skills by calling you “pessimistic.” Since optimism and pessimism are two sides of the same coin, there are ways to bully through pessimism too. Since on the optimism/pessimism spectrum, optimism has the virtue-monopoly, pessimistic bullies can’t retaliate by calling their opponents “optimistic.” But that doesn’t mean pessimists are without recourse. They can add insult to injury too by evoking the various sins associated with optimism, accusing you of being over-optimistic, unrealistic, engaged in magical thinking, and living in Lala land.” We treat “optimist” and “pessimist” as though they were descriptive labels applied neutrally, like calling that tall thing with the leaves a “tree.” They’re not descriptive, they’re opinions in disguise, opinions about who’s right and wrong, made unfairly strong by the moral weight the terms “optimist” and “pessimist” carry. Optimism and pessimism are relative concepts in two senses. One sense is that they’re merely subjective assessments relative to someone else’s. If I think a plan has a better chance of success than you do, I’m an optimist but only relative to you. Someone else might think the plan has vastly better chances of success than I do which would make me a pessimist, relatively speaking. Optimism and pessimism are relative concepts in another way also. If I think a plan has a great chance of succeeding, I’m implying “relative to other plans.” So who’s right about the plans, the optimist or the pessimist? Those terms tell you nothing about which plan will actually succeed. There’s a simple way to neutralize the power of optimistic and pessimistic bullying: Don’t ever accept the use of those terms without them being followed by “…about X.” The statements “I’m optimistic” or “I’m an optimist” don’t make sense really. They’re open-ended, like saying “I throw…” They sh 00:07:27 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=498 All adages are seeds of wisdom, eggs we fertilize by bringing our attention to them, causing them to start subdividing into a range of complementary and conflicting perspectives about matters fundamental. We fertilize them by cracking through the shells that hold them together. Opened, their parts... Podcasts Thu, 21 Apr 2011 17:16:00 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No All adages are seeds of wisdom, eggs we fertilize by bringing our attention to them, causing them to start subdividing into a range of complementary and conflicting perspectives about matters fundamen All adages are seeds of wisdom, eggs we fertilize by bringing our attention to them, causing them to start subdividing into a range of complementary and conflicting perspectives about matters fundamental. We fertilize them by cracking through the shells that hold them together. Opened, their parts can be played with. We can slot alternative words in, find ways to make them say the opposite. Crack open a saying and reverse the pieces, you usually get something interesting. A save in time stitches nine. Can't see the trees for the forest. Take psychologist Abraham Maslow's adage "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Why a hammer? Abraham Kaplan's slightly earlier version of Maslow's point goes "I call it the law of the instrument, and it may be formulated as follows: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding." A hammer isn't just any tool. It's good for nailing things together and breaking things apart. By millions of years, it is the oldest tool in our tool kit. For a long time all of us only had a hammer. If all you have is a hammer, everything might also look like something to pulverize, to smash into tiny inconsequential pieces. Hammers tend to be big, over-sized for some jobs. We have other metaphors for overkill, for bringing too big a tool to the task. Making a mountain out of a molehill, for example. A bull in a china shop. And yet sometimes we bring tools too small for the task too, making a molehill out of a mountain, a china-shop clerk at a bull stampede, or more familiarly bringing a knife to a gunfight. One might make the mistake of bringing a gun to a knife-fight too. Of course you don't want to overthink this stuff. That would be making a mountain out of molehill. Right wing populists like Donald Trump and transcendental spiritualist like Eckhart Tolle think that people like me over-think things. Sometimes they imply that we over-think for devious reasons. The right-wingers think folks like me make a big deal out of global warming because we want to impose socialist control over society. Tolle would say our greedy manipulative egos make us intellectualize. But the anti-intellectuals also imply that we intellectualizers are just victims of the law of instrument. If all you've got is this ability to analyze things to death then everything needs to be analyzed to death. I hang out with academics and I think there's something to Trump and Tolles' perspective. I know some who seem to fit the description, knowing more and more about less and less, overworking some ridiculously inconsequential piece of theory because they can or perhaps because they can only, since intellect is their only tool. You've got to know how far to think something. There will be disagreement among us about what has been over-thought, but most of us would agree that over-analysis is possible. Analysis paralysis happens--overkill, bringing too much analytical gun-power to something best handled with a simple slice of the knife. Sometimes you've got to stop deciding and simply decide. Still, not every bit of analysis that bores or frustrates us is over-analysis. Most of us prefer simplicity. If your only tool is a gut-desire to simplify, everything looks really simple. If all you have is dismissive rhetoric, every topic is an issue to dismiss rhetorically. If you're only tool is hand-waving, every issue will be dismissed with the wave of a hand. Sometimes over-simplification is deviously motivated, but a lot of the time it's just evidence of too little available intellectual fire-power. Limited capacity for debate, deliberation and reconsideration means a limited range of issues one can consider difficult to address. If all you have is a fly-swatter every issue looks like a fly, a nuisance to be swatted away. We should keep th 00:07:27 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=497 A pinhead is a person so small-minded his shoulders taper up to either a pin's head or even narrower, a pinpoint. We apply the epithet like an X marking the spot, pinpointing anyone we think is an idiot. I'm on a never-ending quest for objective definitions of wisdom and conversely, stupidity. B... Podcasts Fri, 08 Apr 2011 21:28:29 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No A pinhead is a person so small-minded his shoulders taper up to either a pin's head or even narrower, a pinpoint. We apply the epithet like an X marking the spot, pinpointing anyone we think is an id A pinhead is a person so small-minded his shoulders taper up to either a pin's head or even narrower, a pinpoint. We apply the epithet like an X marking the spot, pinpointing anyone we think is an idiot. I'm on a never-ending quest for objective definitions of wisdom and conversely, stupidity. By objective, I mean something beyond thinking a butthead is just anyone I butt heads with. This quest has practical implications in that much of the misery humans impose on each other stems from over-confident, under-analyzed name-calling, for example calling anyone I butt heads with a butthead. And then bombing them. Here I want to explore an alternative definition of pinhead, not as having a head like a pin but heading for a pin. When you head toward a goal, aim for a target, or pursue some end, are you pinpointing or narrowing in on it? “Same difference,” you might say, but no, there’s actually a pretty big difference rich in implications about everything from love, religion and politics to the natural history of goal-seeking behavior. Let’s say you’re goal is to find your iPhone, misplaced in the house somewhere. You had it yesterday. You can just picture it, your iPhone crying, “Find me please!” You’re looking for a single pinpointed thing. But what if you’re looking for a decent cup of coffee? You don’t want tea or milk and you reject that cup of coffee you forgot and left in the microwave yesterday. Other than that, within a narrowed range any cup of coffee will do. Pinpointing implies that you have a positive ideal in mind. Narrowing implies rejection of everything that falls outside of a narrow range. Some goals feel like pinpoints, those supposedly one-dimensional things we learned about in elementary school geometry class. Other goals contain whole ranges of acceptable options, known mostly by rejecting unacceptable options. Searching for your one true iPhone, your bull’s eye goal is that single pinpoint in the center of the target. Searching for a decent cup of coffee your bull’s eye is anything that doesn’t fall outside the biggish circle in the middle the target. Suppose your goal is to find a home in a new town. You stick a pushpin into your map to mark the spot. But what is the spot? Is it the big red top of the pushpin, or is it the impossibly infinitesimal point? Say your goal is to find Mr. or Ms. Right, the partner of your dreams. Is this partner a pinpoint or a narrowed range? Do you have a perfect vision of your partner in your mind’s eye, a soul mate who, like your iPhone cries, “Find me please”? Do you go around checking people against this perfect vision until you find the one exact match? Or is your Mr. or Ms. Right anyone from a narrowed range of possibilities, who, like a decent cup of coffee is found by rejecting all of the Mr. or Ms. Wrongs until you’re left with Mr. or Ms. Right-enough? The evolutionary psychologist Randy Nesse notes that it won’t do to declare to your partner, “Baby, you’re like a total seven out of ten and probably the best I can get. So I’m right here with you until, like maybe an eight comes along.” Because relationship is so high-stakes, intense, intimate, competitive, and risky, we need to be more reassuring than that, saying and even believing a very pinpointed interpretation, at the extreme something like “Baby, you are my one and only soul mate. Before we met I dreamed about you, the only person who could ever satisfy me. In my dreams I saw you crying “Find me please.” I knew someday I would find you and until I did, I keep looking, accepting no substitute.” You’ll find such pinpoint exclusivity in the pursuit not just of monogamy but monotheism. In both, high stakes and intense competition escalates us toward the pinpoint interpretation of goal seeking. A religious leader isn’t goin 00:12:45 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=496 I both envy and loathe the self-certain. I envy them their peace of mind. I loathe their bullying. Increasingly, I see debate as doubting matches, opponents casting doubt on each other's opinions. The self-certain are master doubt-casters impervious to doubts cast their way. A mighty fortress is ... Podcasts Wed, 30 Mar 2011 17:14:01 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No I both envy and loathe the self-certain. I envy them their peace of mind. I loathe their bullying. Increasingly, I see debate as doubting matches, opponents casting doubt on each other's opinions. I both envy and loathe the self-certain. I envy them their peace of mind. I loathe their bullying. Increasingly, I see debate as doubting matches, opponents casting doubt on each other's opinions. The self-certain are master doubt-casters impervious to doubts cast their way. A mighty fortress is their opinion even when their opinion is dumb or ultimately deadly. I don’t just loathe their bullying. I loathe the peril they put us in, luring the weak-minded to their side in throngs, dominating by self-serving force, not reason, and marching us in an unwavering line, unresponsive to new evidence or changing circumstances and therefore inevitably in a direction where stupidity lies. My loathing wins out.  I will not master their lick. I will fight them, which means learning how to dominate the indomitable.  They’re hard to dominate even when you’re self-certain.  I aim to dominate with one hand tied up behind my back.  It’s back there holding my anxiety, something the self-certain jettisoned long ago. Anxiety is a sense that something’s amiss. It’s an alarm sounding to say, “pay attention here, you might be headed in the wrong direction.”  Anxiety is the emotional flavor of doubt. Losing it is the most immediate, palpable and self-satisfying benefit of self-certainty.  No doubt? No anxiety. When you wonder whether you’re going in the wrong direction, you generally lose a little steam.  You waver. You await further guidance with a receptive ear and a discerning mind.  You don’t know that you’re headed in the wrong direction.  Maybe you’re headed in the right direction.  But anyway you open up a little, softening enough to visit the possibility that it’s time to redirect. The self-certain don’t just sense your anxiety as an opening, a vulnerability they can exploit, and they don’t just take it as a sign that they will inevitably win the debate.  They take it as a vindication of their position, a reality check that proves they’re right about the world.  If you’re anxious, then their foregone conclusion that they possess absolute truth is verified. As if it were ever in doubt. I sure could use that other hand tied up behind my back.  But I can’t jettison the anxiety.  I need it. It has re-steered me right more than a few times. So how can you dominate the indomitable when you’ve resigned yourself to carry receptivity’s baggage, a parcel they’re not carrying. How does a self-doubting David beat a self-certain Goliath? How do win when they’re stoked on self-certainty’s steroids? My latest guess is that, with practice you can become familiar enough with self-doubt and anxiety that you hold them nimbly and un-distractedly.  I’ve long thought that it pays to study doubt, to understand how it works and to gain “pattern-fluency” in the generic forms it takes  (See Wonderings of the World below). A benefit is that, when your doubt is exposed in debate it’s no surprise to you.  You don’t flinch with a sudden surge of anxiety about your anxiety. You can stick with the topic under debate, persisting in what you’re insisting on. If they call attention to your doubt, you simply say or imply something like, “Of course I have doubts about my position, as any respectable thinker would.  They fit the standard mold and for you I’ll list them (do this briskly but calmly).  Now that said, I still place my full weight behind my position. The fact that you don’t doubt your position is not evidence that you’re right, just that you’re not much of a thinker.  Thinkers doubt. They’re brave enough to withstand the anxiety that doubt engenders.  I suspect you gave that up long ago.  Don’t have much of a stomach for anxiety, do you?” You’re still unlikely to win them over. In fact you’re unlikely to get the airspace to give them 00:07:27 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=495 Qaddafi is a sociopath, a man impervious to any sense of self-doubt. His kind are all too common in positions of power. Sociopathocracy--government by sociopath is so common, the argument that the war in Iraq was a priority because it got rid of one such sociopath makes little sense. Yes the world i... Podcasts Mon, 21 Mar 2011 23:50:49 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Qaddafi is a sociopath, a man impervious to any sense of self-doubt. His kind are all too common in positions of power. Sociopathocracy--government by sociopath is so common, the argument that the war Qaddafi is a sociopath, a man impervious to any sense of self-doubt. His kind are all too common in positions of power. Sociopathocracy--government by sociopath is so common, the argument that the war in Iraq was a priority because it got rid of one such sociopath makes little sense. Yes the world is better off without Saddam, but for every deposed tyrant there are dozens more. Supposedly three percent of males and one percent of females are sociopaths. Among leaders the percentage is much higher. It makes you wonder what puts them in power. Information theory, the science that provides us such useful concepts as signal to noise ratio, gigabytes and bandwidth also provides insights into the prevalence of sociopathocracy. The key insight is in what's called "redundancy." You're at a large party with people talking all around you. You're in conversation with one person but the signal to noise ratio is low, meaning his voice, the signal, is quiet relative to the ambient conversational noise. Someone loud laughs in the background drowning out your conversational partner so you ask him to repeat what he said. You have to do that a lot actually. Claude Shannon the genius mathematician and engineer for Bell labs who founded information theory showed how redundancy-repeating the message-- compensates for noise. He imagined a channel in which information is sent at a steady rate. Noise in the channel, for example static on a phone line, means that bits of information get drowned out. But if you send the same information again, chances are different bits will be drowned out and you'll be able to piece together the information. Shannon noted however that the more message redundancy is required the less new information can be sent. Conversation at that party is less informative because you waste so much time repeating yourselves. Shannon was thinking about communication in which the listener is eager to hear correctly what the speaker is eager to convey correctly, but of course not all conversation is like that. Sometimes the listener would like to hear something else. At a party you might be done listening to a boring, repetitive guy but can't get away because he's filling your ears with stuff he's eager to say but you are not eager to hear. Or imagine that you're at a group strategy meeting and one guy is dominating, insisting over and over that he has the answers. Dissenting opinions aren't heard because the dominant opinion fills the information channel. The more redundancy; the less information, but also the less variety of information. Hitler's PR man Joseph Goebbels said "The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly -- it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over." Repeating himself he said "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." A lack of self-doubt is, by definition a lack of variety. It's like drowning out dissenting opinions in one's own head with a redundant belief. Conviction, faith and confidence are contagious for all sorts of psychological reasons. We envy, are attracted to, and find charismatic the passionately insistent. Conversely, we surrender to them sometimes, as anyone with demanding children knows. You start to seek reasons why it's OK to give in to them just to get a little peace. Shouting matches and other conflicts are really doubting-matches. We argue by casting doubt on each other's opinions. Redundancy is how we dominate in doubting matches, and sociopaths can out-redundant non-sociopaths, hands down. The insistent fill our ears until we can't hear ourselves or anyone else think a dissenting thought. Sociopaths repeat reasons why their opponents should doubt themselves and so, in doubting matches, self-doubters always lose. I 00:08:48 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=494 Let me tell you how spiritual paths should work from beginning to end. I know it's bold of me to claim to know, but I'm taking my cue from the many spiritual teachers out there who speak with just this kind of audacious authority. You ask the average Joe or Jo on the street, "Is it best to be in... Podcasts Fri, 11 Mar 2011 23:03:17 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Let me tell you how spiritual paths should work from beginning to end. I know it's bold of me to claim to know, but I'm taking my cue from the many spiritual teachers out there who speak with just th Let me tell you how spiritual paths should work from beginning to end. I know it's bold of me to claim to know, but I'm taking my cue from the many spiritual teachers out there who speak with just this kind of audacious authority. You ask the average Joe or Jo on the street, "Is it best to be invested in things, to really care, to really commit--or is it best to be divested, to let go, to be really detached?” and they’ll say, “Well, of course, it depends.” The average Joe and Jo know that there’s no universal answer to this question. What’s funny though is that you can hornswoggle Joe and Jo with rhetoric that implies that it doesn’t depend, that you should always commit or conversely always let go. Accuse them of being “attached” or “clingy,” “addicted” or any other pejorative that denotes investment, and you’ll get them all tangled in shame, foolishly wondering why they can’t comply with the universal law that you should always be divested. Conversely, accuse them of being “uncaring,” “insensitive” “cutting and running” or any other pejorative that denotes divestment and you can get them all tangled up in shame, foolishly wondering why they can’t comply with the universal law that you should always be invested. It’s sad. People who feel really ashamed for failing to live by either one of these ridiculous, opposite, supposedly universal laws can go find a spiritual teacher who will teach them how to live by it. One Joe tells a Jo that she was too uncaring. Ashamed for not caring she finds a teacher who claims to be able to teach her the power of faith, commitment, and investment. Another Jo tells a Joe that he was way too attached. Ashamed for not being flexible, he goes off to a teacher who claims to be able to teach him the power of non-attachment, acceptance and divestment. These seekers want the peace of mind that comes from finally complying with the recipe, the universal law that one should always be invested. Or conversely always divested. But there’s a problem. The teachings themselves, these supposedly pure truths are each self-contradictory. The recipe for investment says, “Surrender into faith. Let go into holding on,” and the recipe for divestment says “Commit yourself to flexibility. Hold on to letting go.” So Joe and Jo go back to their respective teachers and say, “There seems to be a mistake. The teaching contradicts itself.” And the teacher, with a twinkle in his or her eye says “No mistake. You just haven’t solved the deep, ancient, esoteric mystery yet. There’s nothing wrong with the teaching. Stick with it and someday you’ll Transcend and Discover The Secret.” “But how can you hold on and let go at the same time?” “There’s a way. You just haven’t found it yet.” So Joe and Jo go away and try to get it right. They practice Luther’s surrender to faith, or the Tao’s “doing not doing.” And they kick themselves for getting it wrong. Some never get it. They spend their whole lives trying to meet the standard, to achieve this perfect non-contradictory state where they are both completely committed and completely detached simultaneously always. And others never get it. They strive but do not achieve that perfect balance where they’re never out of bounds, over- or under-invested, never invested where divestment is called for, and never divested where investment is called for. And still others never get it. They decide that The Transcendent state is where there are no standards. Cling; let go, invest; divest, who cares? It’s all good. It doesn’t matter. In the cosmic scheme, the enlightened just laugh a wise spiritual laugh at the folly of trying to live by standards. But some Joes and Jos struggle on, looking at investment and divestment from every possible ang 00:11:02 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=493 I've been concerned about climate crisis for decades, doubly concerned because I've been unable to find any action likely to make a big difference. Every little bit we can do, seems to add up to not nearly enough, because most of what we can do runs against political and economic currents and I have... Podcasts Thu, 03 Mar 2011 22:42:06 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No I've been concerned about climate crisis for decades, doubly concerned because I've been unable to find any action likely to make a big difference. Every little bit we can do, seems to add up to not n I've been concerned about climate crisis for decades, doubly concerned because I've been unable to find any action likely to make a big difference. Every little bit we can do, seems to add up to not nearly enough, because most of what we can do runs against political and economic currents and I haven't been able to find an art-of-the-possible way to align political and economic currents with what the climate requires. Recently I think I've found something that could align all currents. It is by no means a shoe-in but at least possible. It originates in the work of Peter Barnes. He called it the Sky Trust and then Capitalism 3.0. I'm re-framing it here as The Green Tea Party. Here's its mini-manifesto. I invite you to join my fledgling Green Tea Party Facebook group. JOIN THE GREEN TEA PARTY AND PUT MONEY IN YOUR POCKET The Tea Party is right about government. It no longer represents our best interests. The greens are right about business, which doesn’t represent our best interests either. Corporations fund, lobby, and control our politicians, leaving us citizens with a raw deal. If the family farm was killed by agribiz, our national family is being killed by Goverbiz, the unholy alliance of government and corporations. It’s naïve to believe either government or corporations will save us. Some of us hope that people will come to their senses and take back government, but realistically, the scale is tipped against ordinary citizens because corporations own the government. But there is a way to rebalance the scale. Collectively, we citizens own our nation’s public assets, for example our airwaves, rivers, and the sky above us. Naively, we trusted government to manage these assets for us, but instead they give them away free to corporations without compensating us. The Green TEA Party demands compensation to you and me for the private use of our shared assets. We call for the establishment of not-for-profit trusts to manage our shared assets, governed by trustees accountable to us and shielded from political and corporate influence. The Alaska Permanent Fund, which pays Alaska’s citizens an annual dividend from the sale of publicly owned oil, is an example. The Green TEA Party proposes to make polluting corporations pay for using our air, water and soil, and to share the proceeds equally among all of us. This will not only reduce pollution; it will provide economic security to American families, without expanding the size of government. Imagine, for example, a National Sky Trust established to manage our atmosphere in our long-term best interest. Every year it auctions to oil, coal and gas companies the right to dump polluting gases into the sky. Then it turns around and electronically transfers equal shares of the revenue into our bank accounts and debit cards. The results: cleaner air and extra income for all. In a real free market, corporations pay for what they use and therefore make responsible choices. If they have to pay to pollute, they’ll pollute less. And if we share the revenue, we’ll all benefit. This is a solution that works for everyone: liberals and libertarians, conservatives and conservationists, supporters of democracy and of capitalism. Spread the word: Make corporations pay to pollute and put money in your own pocket. Money that’s rightfully yours because you co-own our public assets. Join the Green TEA Party today. They’re Everyone’s Assets "Like" the Green Tea Party Facebook group. Download a free copy of Peter Barnes' book, Capitalism 3.0. Download a free copy of Capitalism 3.0 audiobook. 00:07:26 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=491 What does confidence in our opinions indicate about the likelihood that our opinions are correct? Think of confidence as a delectable treat, a cookie rewarded when you have worked hard, or stolen from the cookie jar when you haven't. If you only reward yourself with the satisfying treat for do... Podcasts Fri, 04 Feb 2011 19:42:22 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No What does confidence in our opinions indicate about the likelihood that our opinions are correct? Think of confidence as a delectable treat, a cookie rewarded when you have worked hard, or stolen f What does confidence in our opinions indicate about the likelihood that our opinions are correct? Think of confidence as a delectable treat, a cookie rewarded when you have worked hard, or stolen from the cookie jar when you haven't. If you only reward yourself with the satisfying treat for doing careful investigation and interpretation, then the more confident you are, the more likely that you're correct. By this "confident-means-true" interpretation, when we say "I really believe that the meeting is on Thursday" the "I really believe" means "It must be true," as in "I did the necessary work to investigate it and thereby earned my confidence." But we can grant ourselves confidence, that delectable treat really any time we want it, subject only to our appetites and limited only by indigestion we might or might not experience when over-indulging in treats we didn't work to earn. So the "confident-means-false" interpretation suggests that the more confident you are, the more you have substituted confidence for thoughtfulness, and more closed-minded, bigoted, wrong-headed, stubborn, pigheaded, blind and ignorant you are. Confidence, which implies both "likely to be right" and "likely to be wrong," is therefore a "contranym," a word that means two opposite things, a word like "clip" which means both "fasten" and "detach." And how do we use this contranym in a sentence? Quite often as a double standard, sentencing others as closed-minded for their confidence while treating ours as a sign that we know what is true. Or to put it in a limerick: Why, is your sureness a sign that you're certainly right, and yet mine is a sign I'm closed-minded biased, and blinded Shouldn't the standards align? 00:03:06 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=489 "Ok, from now on I won't be angry at you about that." "I swear from here on out, I'll be more appreciative." "Trust me, starting now I'll stop being irritated all the time." In my experience, an increase in such pledges to feel a certain way "from now on" is a sure sign that a partnership i... Podcasts Sun, 14 Nov 2010 00:44:50 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No "Ok, from now on I won't be angry at you about that." "I swear from here on out, I'll be more appreciative." "Trust me, starting now I'll stop being irritated all the time." In my experience, "Ok, from now on I won't be angry at you about that." "I swear from here on out, I'll be more appreciative." "Trust me, starting now I'll stop being irritated all the time." In my experience, an increase in such pledges to feel a certain way "from now on" is a sure sign that a partnership is on the rocks. Such pledges are attempts to manually override intuition, and there's only so much hope for overriding intuition. The problem with manual overrides is that they require chronic, 24/7 will power, and will power isn't up to the task. Let me explain with an obvious example first: If my gut intuition is to eat Oreos and I have a pack lying around, I might be able to override my gut early and maybe even often. And still, those Oreos will be gone in no time. The Oreos beckon relentlessly: "Eat me C’mon eat me Oh do eat me Please You know you want to Come on!" Will power responds intermittently: "No...Absolutely not...Definitely no...OK one, but no more...Well, actually just one more, but then that's it for sure...Except OK, one more..." and the Oreos win. Compared to my gut, my will power is a weakling. By extension, in relationship if something is irritating me, then pledging to conscript will power to override my irritation is just not that promising. You can override all the gut impulses some of the time, but not all of the gut impulses all of the time. You may wonder if the gut impulse to eat Oreos has anything to do with intuition. Some of us define intuition as our higher self, the almighty gut that knows the right thing to do all the time. By this definition, if I eat too many Oreo's it's because I'm ignoring my intuition, which knows better. I have friends who claim that the only time they make mistakes is when they ignore their intuition. I don't think that's a realistic or practical definition of intuition. Sure, with selective recollection you can attribute all successes to listening to your gut and all failures to ignoring it, but really our guts, sixths senses or intuitions are a bit more unruly than that. Intuition is best defined as the source of our natural or spontaneous responses. They're not God or God given sources of genius and perfection. Still I don't mean to disparage them either. They're actually admirably keen in their modest wisdom, honed by trial and error in the school of hard knocks--eons of biological evolution, centuries of cultural evolution, and decades of personal learning from direct and vicarious experience. Still, as any student of human folly knows, there's room for improvement. Malcolm Gladwell is one such student of human folly, though you wouldn't necessarily know it judging his big book by its cover: Blink: The power of thinking by not thinking is an exploration of intuition. I suspect that a lot of people bought it because it promised to affirm their sense that their intuitions were God-smart. Their intuition told them that the word "power" in the subtitle was synonymous with genius, and Gladwell does indeed start the book with stories in which gut-sense proved right. By book's end though, it's clear that intuition's test scores are mixed. Power in the title refers to tenacity. Intuition rules. I respect intuition’s modest wisdom and its formidable tenacity. I think there are only two basic ways to reliably control a bad intuition. One is to steer clear of whatever triggers it. I don't bring Oreos into the house, and to some extent I steer clear of things that persistently irritate or anger me. The other is a slower process, not manually overriding intuition but retraining it with convincing evidence. The part of instinct I can retrain we sometimes call second nature. In other words, we can teach intuition-that old dog of ours--new tricks. Retraining intuition is what clinical psychology has been mostly about all along, from addiction management to me 00:06:19 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=487 Friends and I gave a ride to a hitchhiking teen last week. The conversation was difficult because we couldn't hear her. Between our aging ears, the rumble of the car and her nearly inaudible mumbles, her ideas just weren't getting through. She had to say everything twice or more. I remember mum... Podcasts Sun, 31 Oct 2010 22:16:46 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Friends and I gave a ride to a hitchhiking teen last week. The conversation was difficult because we couldn't hear her. Between our aging ears, the rumble of the car and her nearly inaudible mumbles, Friends and I gave a ride to a hitchhiking teen last week. The conversation was difficult because we couldn't hear her. Between our aging ears, the rumble of the car and her nearly inaudible mumbles, her ideas just weren't getting through. She had to say everything twice or more. I remember mumbling inaudibly at her age. It was how I coped with my fundamental uncertainty. I anticipated myself saying something stupid I'd want to retract. Once your foot is in your mouth though, there’s no getting it out gracefully so I’d speak half-heartedly and half-vocally. People would ask me to repeat myself. The mumbled, inaudible first pass was like a rehearsal, a half-inflated trial balloon floated low and wavery in the strong gusts of adult conversation. Tentativeness is a teen’s right of passage and mumbling is but one of a few strategies for coping with it. Another is to overcome it with brazen, dogmatic, self-certainty as in the teen who compensates for tentativeness by declaring as absolute fact that his parents are loser-idiots. Still another strategy is irony: Put what you say in quotation marks as though it were said by someone else. That way, if what you say turns out to be stupid you can disclaim it. Really, you were just making fun of people who say things like that. Sometime in the last decade irony peaked, was criticized as corrupting a generation of youth, and then fell into disrepute as a trendy, hip, too-easy formula for hovering cynically above and outside reality. Irony was seen as a sub-species of sarcasm, saying the exact opposite of what you really mean, for example saying “My, isn’t this nice!” when you mean it’s awful. With irony, defined this way, you play-act as though you’re some other dork who would say “My, isn’t this nice!” when it’s obvious that, to hip people like you, it’s not nice at all. Irony was seen as a sign of the next generation’s exceptional lack of self-discipline. Why can’t they speak forthrightly the way we do? As such, the criticism was our generation’s contribution to a traditional campaign of frustration with the young, a campaign that goes back at least as far as Plato (429-327 B.C.E.) who is quoted as saying, "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.” This is a hard campaign for baby boomers like me to pull off convincingly. In all of history, my generation will go down as the pinnacle of slouchiness. In the service of irresistible convenience we burned roughly half the fossil fuel accumulated over eons. Comparatively, ours was a time of extraordinary freedom and opportunity. Many of us floated trial vocational balloons, decided against them and managed to launch successful second and even third careers, a sign of the extraordinary opportunities we had. We worry for our ambitiously artsy children because we know their opportunities are slimmer than ours. We fear they won’t get a second chance the way we did. Yes, they’ve joined us at the party, enjoying the unprecedented party favors of our fossil fuel and resource rich post-war economy. But we know. We’ll be leaving the party just as the fuel and economy are spent. They’ll be left to clean up after us. They know too, and are confused by their more limited ambiguous options. From this perspective irony or any coping strategy teens might adopt is a natural and appropriate response. Think of how much uncertainty my hitchhiker has to cope with. It’s a hard time to know what to do. Not for some, of course. These days we’re seeing the surge of that other coping strategy, the brazen, absolute, dogmatic self-certainty in fundamentalists of all stripes from Tea Party activists to Hard-line Muslims. The fundamentalists claim to have been provoked to it by 00:09:05 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=485 Life is like getting on a boat that is about to sink. D.T. Suzuki "The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity--designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final des... Podcasts Mon, 27 Sep 2010 17:53:22 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Life is like getting on a boat that is about to sink. D.T. Suzuki "The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity--designed la Life is like getting on a boat that is about to sink. D.T. Suzuki "The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity--designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man." Ernest Becker. We are mirror mortals, the first known species with the capacity to imagine the full arc of life and to know in definitive detail that we die.  We get on the boat; we row with great enthusiasm knowing that no matter our destiny, our real destiny is the inky deep.  We invest in our journey, conscious that we must eventually divest. And it isn't just the one death.  Getting on a boat that is about to sink is a fractal experience played out in the arc of minutes, hours, years, eras, epochs and millennia. Every day something dies.  You lose your glasses, your friend snubs you, you realize that the thing that thrilled you yesterday isn’t great after all.  Over the months, too, the people and joys come and go.  Then each of us dies.  Our families die.  Our civilizations fall.  Our species.  The universe itself is terminal. Everything we embrace as exciting and new comes with its time-release aging, decay, and breakdown.  When you buy a pet dog you buy a pet dog’s death. None of this would matter if we never got on the boat.  But here we are. We care. When we fall in love, investing, it’s like a taste of heaven—joy eternal. When we break up, divesting of each other, it’s a little taste of hell—dissolution eternal. The deeper you go in the more it hurts to come out. Whether we choose to divest or divestment is thrust upon us, there it is, the inevitable, looming no matter where we go. This view of life fits with disconcerting snugness.  Because we throw our lot in with the garden, we grieve when we’re cast out of it.  Because we accelerate into what enthuses us, our brakes squeal and our wheels shudder when we are forced to stop.  Union is sweet, disunion is sour.  Yes, no one gets out alive, but also no one gets out without great grief and loss, and here we are, knowing we’ll be evicted eventually. And what can we do about it? I’ve had a hard time with the word “Spiritual.”  Powerful but ill-defined words make me wary.  Since I can’t find much consensus about what it means, I feel at liberty to offer my own definition.  Spirituality is one’s overall strategy for coping with the challenge of investing, knowing that one must eventually divest.  Spirituality is a kind of preparation, a pre-grieving. Defined this way, I see three main spiritual paths, each with myriad variations, but still ultimately just three: Make One Eternal Investment: Build a pillar of belief to hold onto, one thing from which one never divests for all eternity, something that can’t be credibly challenged or tested and proved wanting, something that explains why people leave and people die and why there has to be so much pain and disappointment and letting go, a belief perhaps that explains how it will all make sense by and by or will be made equitable in the world beyond, a belief that makes the world beyond—the eternal realm--one’s primary focus, aiming us toward its purpose ever after and toward the happily ever after that we expect to come from serving its purpose ever after. 2.     Let Go Into Thin slices: Since letting go is the hard part, make a practice of divesting.  Practice divesting by being present in every instant. Excise memory (of what's lost) or projection (to what's in store). Be here now, quieting the hungry ghosts of intellect and conception.  Become one with nature which doesn’t think, theorize, speculate or foresee, but just is.  Return to animal simplicity. In pain, simply say “ouch.” In pleasure simply say “ah.”  Don’t general 00:10:35 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=483 Folks, we face a problem I'm wondering if you're willing to think about with me. It's a real challenge, a challenge to morality posed by recent revelations in logic. It turns out we're living in a world that doesn't seem to offer a final logical authority, no highest possible perspective from whi... Podcasts Wed, 22 Sep 2010 23:57:37 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Folks, we face a problem I'm wondering if you're willing to think about with me. It's a real challenge, a challenge to morality posed by recent revelations in logic. It turns out we're living in a Folks, we face a problem I'm wondering if you're willing to think about with me. It's a real challenge, a challenge to morality posed by recent revelations in logic. It turns out we're living in a world that doesn't seem to offer a final logical authority, no highest possible perspective from which we can discriminate between right and wrong on all lower levels.  Regardless the standard we might claim is the most all encompassing and ultimate, someone can come along and claim an even more encompassing and ultimate standard. And even if they're wrong there's no way to prove they are without claiming a higher standard that they can again claim to trump with a still higher standard. It leaves us all at risk of being swept up into escalating games of oneupsmanship or, reversing the metaphor, it makes us all prone to falling into bottomless pits, arguing about the proper depth at which to find bedrock foundations of morality that don’t exist or if they do, we can’t agree on them. For every declaration that “X is moral” the declaration can itself be challenged. We crave something solid to rest our assumptions upon, but that something doesn’t exist. We can pretend it exists but it doesn’t. We can surround ourselves with people who believe it exists where we say it does, but it doesn’t.  We know it doesn’t exist, because other people say, “Ah but don’t you see, you’re missing something crucial--a higher principle; a deeper truth that proves you’re wrong.” Of course, the hell with them, right? Except that they’re saying the hell with us.  So where does that get us? This is a particular kind of one-upmanship.  It’s not just “I’m better than you.”  It’s, “I’m better because I’ve got a bigger perspective, a higher overview.  I’m taking more into consideration than you are.” Uplevelsmanship is claiming to be holier than thou by being highly-er than thou. It’s an escalation in power by escalating in perspective.  It’s an arms race in which the build-up is in ladder rungs to look down from critically. I won’t burden you with the logic here. (I have plenty of articles at my site describing the logic, for example here.) Instead I’ll provide some intuitive examples of the general logical problem: 1. You probably know what it’s like to feel regret for not having taken something into consideration: “Ah, if only I had factored in THAT. That changes everything.”  Such regret is a reason to take more into consideration, but can you ever take everything into consideration? If not, where should you draw the line?  How much due diligence is really due?  It depends on the situation. The higher the stakes the more one should take into account, but only up to a point.  Even on the highest stake decisions, you can’t take everything into account. There’s still a chance that you’ll have missed something that changes everything. This is why leaders capable of decisiveness have to be comfortable with ambiguity, the ability to place big bets, knowing as they do it, that they may be missing something that changes everything. 2. I want to hire an investment advisor. I meet a few and I notice that I’m having a hard time figuring out who’s best.  So I decide to hire someone to guide me about which investment adviser to hire.  But even that’s not an easy decision. So I decide I should hire an advisor to advise me on which advisor to advise me on which adviser to hire. But then how do I know who to hire for that? 3. I remember it to this day--the time my parents disagreed about what I should do.  Until that time they had always agreed with each other and I just had to follow their unified advice.  Suddenly, to defer to one was to defy the other.  I had to decide between them.  I asked my friends what I should do. Trouble was some friends said I shoul 00:10:27 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=481 IMHO: In my humble opinion--what's the deal with that? What do we ever say that isn't our humble opinion? And yet when we declare "It's raining" do we really mean "I think it's raining" or is raining a fact, and therefore not a matter of humble opinion? In the acronym IMHO, the H is redundant. IM... Podcasts Thu, 16 Sep 2010 19:07:47 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No IMHO: In my humble opinion--what's the deal with that? What do we ever say that isn't our humble opinion? And yet when we declare "It's raining" do we really mean "I think it's raining" or is raining IMHO: In my humble opinion--what's the deal with that? What do we ever say that isn't our humble opinion? And yet when we declare "It's raining" do we really mean "I think it's raining" or is raining a fact, and therefore not a matter of humble opinion? In the acronym IMHO, the H is redundant. IMO is already humbled, revealing awareness of one's role as an interpreter of evidence, as if to say, "The opinions expressed here are those of the expressor and may not be those of reality itself, the expressor's ultimate employer. And even "In my opinion" is redundant since the evidence that a statement is your opinion is implied by the way it emanates from your pie hole.  You've probably been in one of these exchanges before. A: It’s not a good idea. B: Well, that’s your opinion. A: Of course, it’s my opinion! I’m saying that in my opinion it’s not a good idea! If “in my opinion” is implicit, why would we ever make it explicit?  One reason would be signal receptivity to alternative perspectives.  It can signal that, “this is a conversation, not an argument or a fight.” A:  What did you think of the movie last night? B:  In my opinion it wasn’t very good. A: Ah, well in my opinion it wasn’t bad. I have yet to meet a signal that couldn’t, in some contexts mean the opposite of its literal meaning. A showy signal of accommodation and receptivity can be a way of saying “you’re so aggressive I have to walk on eggshells not to upset you.”  IMHO can signal “I’m the humble one here; you’re the arrogant one.”  I sometimes use IMAO (In my arrogant opinion) to confuse this effect. And notice also that declaring oneself humble is a fairly arrogant act.  In Numbers, one of the five books of Moses (supposedly written by Moses), verse 12:3 reads, “Now Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth.”  Not arrogant, perhaps if it was dictated to Moses by God, or at least no more arrogant than saying “People say I’m really humble.” Many common phrases have a suspiciously arrogant-sounding self-reported humility. “Excuse me” is a command.  “With all due respect,” implies a claim that amounts to “I’m an authority on how much respect is due to you, and trust me, I know I’m showing you your full due.” Perhaps more accurately we should say “With all due respect, I’ll leave it to you to decide whether I’m showing you due respect when I say…”. One of the cockiest conversationalists I’ve ever met, would pepper her unsolicited advising and pontificating with the caveat, “I reserve the right to be wrong,” as though everything she said would be so compelling we might forget her potential fallibility. Any time we graciously remind and assure people that they are entitled to an alternative perspective, we run the risk of sounding like they don’t. A:  Feel free to disagree with me. B:  (Sarcastically) Why thank you, that is so kind!  I was waiting for your permission. When we preface something with IMHO does that mean everything said before it was not IMHO?  When we say, “Well, frankly speaking” does that mean everything before it wasn’t frank?  When we say, “You look great!” does that mean that you didn’t before? In sum, when is a signal a reminder of an ongoing state and when is it the announcement of the start of a new state. Another possible use of IMHO is to distinguish opinion from fact. When I say, “It’s raining,” I’m stating a fact.  When I say, “It looks dreary outside,” that’s an opinion.  But if it were as straightforward as that, we wouldn’t need to distinguish explicitly. We would all know the difference between fact and opinion.  Epistemologists--those who study the difference between fact and opinion have not come to agreement on the diffe 00:09:55 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=479 I'm grateful for Terry Jones' Koran-burning intolerance. Right wing rhetoric has escalated to the point where more is better, crossing the line into detachment from reality that should still be recognizable to most Americans as proto-fascism, a self-confirming, untestable ideological faith that dema... Podcasts Sat, 11 Sep 2010 21:24:45 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No I'm grateful for Terry Jones' Koran-burning intolerance. Right wing rhetoric has escalated to the point where more is better, crossing the line into detachment from reality that should still be recogn I'm grateful for Terry Jones' Koran-burning intolerance. Right wing rhetoric has escalated to the point where more is better, crossing the line into detachment from reality that should still be recognizable to most Americans as proto-fascism, a self-confirming, untestable ideological faith that demands that reality goes along with it. Terry Jones is an embarrassment the movement that spawned him. So out of touch, he believed that burning Koran's would win over moderate Muslims, and yet his style is on only inches from that which the Right is leaning into so enthusiastically these days, the rhetoric of crusaders or jihadists. Back in the 60's the CIA would seed peace rallies with hippie-clothed agents acting crazy and violent and ruining the rallies’ reputations. Jones’ is the Right’s own crazy—no need for CIA operatives. And there will be more like him, and there’s still hope that mainstream America will respond with a backlash of civility. Inconsistent with many of my progressive friends though, I agree with Jones about one thing. Jones’ believes we must fight back against Militant Muslim intolerance and violence. He believes as I do that sometimes you have to fight fire with fire, intolerance with intolerance. There’s a tendency among us civil-minded people to believe that one should never exercise intolerance since intolerance is always bad. I operate on the fundamental moral principle that since intolerance is bad, one should be intolerant of intolerance. I know that’s paradoxical, and forces me to admit to the hypocrisy of sometimes being intolerant because I hate intolerance, but that’s why I consider it fundamental. Since the principle can’t be acted upon simplistically, it confronts me with the real and difficult question: Under what circumstances is intolerance appropriate, acceptable and unacceptable? – a question some of my nicer progressive friends sidestep. The saying goes, “Don’t fight with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.” The pig in question is any bully—a person who fights dirty, imposing incivility, deaf to negotiation or reason. There are three basic pieces of advice about bullies. Depending on who you had for parents your probably heard at least one of these. 1. Ignore him. He’s only doing it for attention. When you ignore bullies, they always go away. 2. Be nice to him. He probably just has low self-esteem. If you’re nice to bullies they always stop bullying. 3. Beat the crap out of him. That’s the only way to get a bully to stop. If you fight them, bullies end up scared of you. If you don’t win, at least they’ll respect you. Either way, if you fight them they always leave you alone. Now that we’re adults we can take the bad news: No one strategy always works to stop a bully, and sometimes none of them work. If Stalin, the world’s biggest bully sent you to Siberia as he did tens of millions of others, it wouldn’t have mattered if you ignored him, were nice to him, or fought him. We owe it to the unsung victims of such bullies not to pretend there’s a surefire recipe for getting bullies to stop, that these victims just failed to employ. We owe them the respect and honor of recognizing how hard it is to know what to do about a bully. Still, say some, getting the bully to leave us alone, isn’t the most important thing. It’s more important to live a moral life. A bully is intolerant but you don’t have to stoop to that. When Newt Gingrich argued that we shouldn’t let a Muslim YMCA be built near the World Trade Center’s ground zero, because, "There are no churches or synagogues in all of Saudi Arabia. In fact no Christian or Jew can even enter Mecca,” many countered that that’s no reason for us to be intolerant. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, therefore we shouldn’t fight the pi 00:11:37 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=477 As I've mentioned I'm trying to put my finger on what makes me and others intuit that there are two different psychological sub-cultures of humans. Red vs. Blue, Conservative vs. Liberal, Right vs. Left, religious vs. secular--maybe these divisions are symptomatic of the underlying difference, but t... Podcasts Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:33:54 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No As I've mentioned I'm trying to put my finger on what makes me and others intuit that there are two different psychological sub-cultures of humans. Red vs. Blue, Conservative vs. Liberal, Right vs. Le As I've mentioned I'm trying to put my finger on what makes me and others intuit that there are two different psychological sub-cultures of humans. Red vs. Blue, Conservative vs. Liberal, Right vs. Left, religious vs. secular--maybe these divisions are symptomatic of the underlying difference, but they don't seem to get to the bottom of it. I obviously believe I belong to one of these two psychological sub-cultures, and am naturally inclined to think my sub-culture is superior. To counter my chauvinism, I’m looking for an objective way to distinguish the two sub-cultures, some characteristic about which representatives of both sub-cultures would say,  “You’re damn right that’s how I am, and proud of it.” In other words it’s not going to be the usual self-congratulatory “Liberals are more loving,” or “Conservatives are more patriotic.”  The other day I saw a vegan restaurant called “Loving Hut.” Something about the signage implied that love was a defining characteristic of liberal vegetarians.  I see the connection.  Not eating animals is more loving to the animals than eating them. But for the first time I read the connection as a conservative carnivore would: “What, you think you liberals have a corner on love? Just because your lifestyle is loving of someone, it doesn’t mean my lifestyle isn’t loving.  I love my family enough to make sure they get great animal protein.” For the first time I noticed that liberals do what conservatives do.  When conservatives claim the mantel of “patriotism,” arguing, for example that being pro-Iraq-war is patriotic, they imply that patriotism is their distinguishing characteristic, and we liberals don’t buy it.  The distinguishing feature I’m looking for would not be one of these self-congratulatory distinctions.  It would be one we’d all buy, saying, “fair enough, that really is the distinction between our two approaches.” I suspect the distinction is around a trait I’m calling meta-confidence. There’s your interpretation, story, or belief, then there’s your confidence in your interpretation, story or belief, and then there’s your confidence in your confidence--your meta-confidence. “Meta” has come to mean “recursively about” so a meta-blog is a blog about blogging. Meta-confidence is your confidence about your confidence. How sure are you that London is the capital of England?  That’s your confidence level.  If you’re 100% sure that London is the capital of England, how sure are you that it really is?  I mean, can you ever be 100% sure of something and it still not be the case? I’m exploring the possibility is that if your answer is “No.  If I’m sure I’m sure, then it’s true,” then you’re a member of one of the sub-cultures, and if your answer is, “Yes. Being sure I’m sure about something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true,” then you are a member of the other sub-culture. The capital of England is not the point.  Nor is the point that some people are more confident than others.  Confidence is the source of focus, attention and effort for all of us.  If every day you flip-flop about whether you should pursue the career you’re in, you won’t be in it very long.  Any of us can reach 100% confidence in an interpretation, story or belief. These day’s I’m high on confidence about my choices.  I think I’m on the right path. Last year at this time my confidence was way down (see mid-mid-life crisis) and I’m much more productive this year by the standards I’m confident in.  I’ll go further. I hold the theories I hold with extremely high confidence. I just don’t’ hold my confidence in them with high confidence. Though my confidence is approaching 100% my meta-confidence can’t, won’t and shouldn’t ever approach that. The distinction I’m exploring 00:09:49 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=475 "You believe them? Are you out of your mind?! How can you not see through their lies?! It's so obvious your leaders are manipulative. And you just don't get it, do you?" Conservative friends have said that to me about my respect for likes of Obama, Reid, and Boxer, and I've said that to them abou... Podcasts Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:22:50 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No "You believe them? Are you out of your mind?! How can you not see through their lies?! It's so obvious your leaders are manipulative. And you just don't get it, do you?" Conservative friends have s "You believe them? Are you out of your mind?! How can you not see through their lies?! It's so obvious your leaders are manipulative. And you just don't get it, do you?" Conservative friends have said that to me about my respect for likes of Obama, Reid, and Boxer, and I've said that to them about their respect for Palin, Beck, and McCain. As America becomes increasingly partisan, I sometimes wonder if we’re not just two separate species.  What distinguishes species is an inability to make children. We’re sort of like that.  It’s hard for us to make brainchildren with each other. I do know partisan couples-- a liberal married to a conservative with kids between them. They can cross breed, just not on political issues.  Our government is like that now. The prospects for bipartisan legislation these days are about as good as the prospects for Israeli/Palestinian peace accords in the past few decades. In evolution the most common source of speciation is allopatry, or geographic separation.  Communities of organisms that don’t co-mingle will tend to drift genetically in different directions and when they’re brought back together they can’t mate. Asian and African elephants were one species that split, migrated, and then adapted to different environments. Now they can’t produce offspring together. There’s cultural allopatry too. I grew up in an almost exclusively liberal intellectual enclave, and here I am a liberal intellectual having trouble interbreeding culturally with conservative anti-intellectuals. If you’ll pardon a cosmic parallel, a variation on allopatry makes the universe go round. Literally.  The reason there’s usable energy to make planets or your washing machine orbit is that things that were once unified (before the big bang) became separate for long enough that when they come back together they don’t just re-unite, they bounce off each other from different angles and at different speeds. The difference is what’s called energy. In general, time apart creates fresh, divergent often, conflicting angles of re-entry.  The technical definition of work has to do with the way contact between two formerly independent things forces both off of their natural or “spontaneous” trajectories.  This explains some of what makes Glenn Beck rub me the wrong way.  Obviously he’s been somewhere else. And sometimes I’m grateful to be rubbed the wrong way, like when a friend brings me a fresh perspective on things. Sometimes diversity is the spice of life.  It’s great to be rubbed the wrong way the right way. Vive la difference that in the long run I’m grateful for, and as for the rest--the differences that rub me wrong the wrong way, the Glenn Becks of the world-- I wish they’d go away. This is one of the most horrifying consequences of human leverage.  In our newly interconnected world, it’s harder to just live and let live.  Our different beliefs have consequences for each other.  Beck and his leveraged effects won’t leave me alone. I’m proud to be a liberal intellectual, but that’s not probably saying much.  That my parents and my former self would be proud of and agree with my current self is about as affirming of my grasp of the truth as advertising is a credible endorsement of a corporation’s products.  I agree with myself. So what?  For the most part, who doesn’t? As George Bernard Shaw said “Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.”  I’m an intellectual patriot.  I believe my ideas are superior because I was born into them. Most of us don’t fall too far from the tree. You could call it your “inheristance,” the stance you inherited from your place and people of origin. I know people who made an all-out effort to fall as far from the tree of their intellectua 00:08:37 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=473 I still have it, the sign my father, an innovative CEO of a large corporation had printed for use at executive meetings. In a 1960s font on yellowed cardboard it reads: What are we talking about? He designed it out of frustration with agenda drift. As a meeting conversation would overheat, sid... Podcasts Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:24:44 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No I still have it, the sign my father, an innovative CEO of a large corporation had printed for use at executive meetings. In a 1960s font on yellowed cardboard it reads: What are we talking about? I still have it, the sign my father, an innovative CEO of a large corporation had printed for use at executive meetings. In a 1960s font on yellowed cardboard it reads: What are we talking about? He designed it out of frustration with agenda drift. As a meeting conversation would overheat, sidetracked on some trivial matter, my dad would silently lift the sign off his lap. What are we talking about? He was asking people to step out of their stances within a conversation to notice what the conversation was about and then to compare it to other alternative conversations including whatever was really on the agenda.  The sign was as if to say, "Notice the tree you’re barking up.  If you step back to see the tree, you’ll notice that you’ve lost sight of the forest. If you see the forest, maybe you’ll reprioritize. Maybe the tree you’re barking up is the wrong tree.” I’m sure you can relate to my father’s frustration.  Your agenda item finally gets the floor and some klutz inadvertently boots it into the dusty corner with an over-earnest “Yes, but what about my (petty) concern?” The meeting attendees follow his “concern” like Dug the dog after a squirrel in the movie “Up” and forget it--they’re never coming back to your priority topic. I feel that frustration these days about how climate legislation got tabled and now all we can talk about is the immorality of allowing a Muslim YMCA to open between the Dunkin Donuts, off-track betting parlor and sex clubs two blocks from the former World Trade Center. The more meeting participants; the harder it is to keep the conversation on track. At present the nation’s conversation has the attention discipline of a two-year-old with ADD on LSD wandering the strip in Las Vegas. And you also know what its like to be seen as that klutz, because you’ve been in meetings where the agenda gets within inches of a real high-priority issue, and you do what you can to boot the conversation to what really counts even if others think yours is a petty concern. I feel like that kind of klutz sometimes writing these columns, which are slightly offset from conventional conversation. People complain. They don’t understand why, for example, I always go for the big picture. In my defense, I could counter that these complainers “can’t see the forest for the trees,” as though the big picture perspective is simply and always better. As I argued last week, it isn’t. Sometimes the details are what really count. But as I also argued last week, the big picture on the relationship between big and small pictures is really worth a visit, so that’s what we’re talking about this week, back to hierarchy, the relationship between forest and trees and what’s really involved there. Shifts between bigger and smaller pictures explain an enormous amount of what goes on in our lives--our victories and defeats, what makes us savvy or stupid, insightful or frustrating.  The ability to zoom the lens of one’s attention to the right level of analysis is one of the greatest gifts one can have. For lack of a conventional term, I’ve called it “rung-running skill” the ability to deftly move up and down the rungs of the ladder overlooking your circumstances, to see it from up high and down low, depending on what the situation calls for. We intuit that perspectives are nested in some kind of hierarchy from small too large, but where do nested hierarchies come from?  Simplifying, there are three sources. There’s nature itself. For example, nature produced you, and you are undeniably hierarchical, what with your cells making up your organs making up your body, etc. Second, words.  Our capacity to represent things symbolically frees us to make hierarchy, chiefly by applying symbols to themselves. I can talk about talking, write about writing, think a 00:12:52 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=471 We all know what's meant by "can't see the forest for the trees." It's a great turn of phrase reminding us not to lose scope and to keep the big picture in mind. But what are scope and the big picture anyway? The phrase "forest for trees" is especially apt because it originates in forestry and... Podcasts Tue, 17 Aug 2010 18:03:20 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No We all know what's meant by "can't see the forest for the trees." It's a great turn of phrase reminding us not to lose scope and to keep the big picture in mind. But what are scope and the big pict We all know what's meant by "can't see the forest for the trees." It's a great turn of phrase reminding us not to lose scope and to keep the big picture in mind. But what are scope and the big picture anyway? The phrase "forest for trees" is especially apt because it originates in forestry and therefore biology.  Within biology patterns of hierarchy from small picture to big picture are plainly in play.  It's not just a figment of our imaginations.  Atoms make up molecules, which make up cells, which make up organs, which make up bodies, which make up populations, which make up ecologies. There are scope issues from small picture to big in our everyday lives too.  In thinking about where you’ll vacation, you might take into consideration what you want, what you and your partner want, what your family wants, and if you have been invited to a family reunion what your extended family wants. In thinking about politics, there’s what you, your community, county, state, country and planet want.   In business there’s likewise the costs and benefits for you, your team, your division, your company, your industry, your economy, and the global economy.  In caring for your environment, there’s what protects your home, your street, your state, your country, and the globe. With these examples we see that there aren’t really just two levels--trees and forests. It’s not a duplex, it’s a multi-leveled complex. We teach children to deal with the complexity through songs like “The green grass grows all around.”  Remember?  “There’s a leaf on the twig on the branch on the limb on the tree in the hole…” Taking into account the many levels we could as easily say, “Can’t see the limb for the branches” or “Can’t see the branch for the twigs.”  Instead our intuitions pick out just two levels, call them “trees” and “forest” and argue that the broader of the two is the most relevant.  We use the saying as a way to focus or constrain attention. It’s a way of saying “you’re paying attention to the wrong picture. The big picture is the right picture.” Is the bigger picture always the right perspective?  Some of humanities’ most spectacular failures resulted from ignoring some crucial small-picture detail.  We have sayings to warn against not seeing the trees for the forest too, and these are also ways to focus or constrain attention as if to say “You’re paying attention to the wrong picture. The smaller picture is the right picture.” Concentrate where the rubber hits the road. A stitch in time saves nine. The devil is in the details. Or: For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the battle was lost. For want of a battle the kingdom was lost. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail. So it’s not so simple.  Sometimes we do worse by not seeing forest for trees, and sometimes we do better.  Sometimes we do worse by not seeing the trees for the forest and sometimes we do better.  And that’s just two levels.  With more levels it becomes much more complicated to figure out where to focus. The problem is even one step more complex than that because there are levels on different questions.  Take, for example a decision about whether to have children. Notice the levels issues on the “who, what, where, why, when” and “how” of that question: Who:  Whose preferences matter to the decision—mine, my partnership’s, my family’s, the world’s population? What:  What factors matter to the decision—money, career, love, hobbies, religion, the economy, the environment? Where:  How big an area should I factor into the decision—my own home, my community, the country, the world? Why:  In explaining my decision, how deep into r 00:08:35 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=469 Last week I launched but didn't complete an attack on moral principles, arguing that they tend to make us dumber, not smarter. I focused on words I've called "synantonyms" elsewhere. Synantonyms are two words that describe the same behavior, but prescribe opposite responses to the behavior. I ... Podcasts Sat, 07 Aug 2010 20:43:17 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Last week I launched but didn't complete an attack on moral principles, arguing that they tend to make us dumber, not smarter. I focused on words I've called "synantonyms" elsewhere. Synantonyms Last week I launched but didn't complete an attack on moral principles, arguing that they tend to make us dumber, not smarter. I focused on words I've called "synantonyms" elsewhere. Synantonyms are two words that describe the same behavior, but prescribe opposite responses to the behavior. I used "clingy" and "committed" as examples. They both describe perseverance, and yet clingy makes it sound bad and committed makes it sound good. Descriptively they’re synonyms; prescriptively they're antonyms. That's why a call them synantonyms. Here are some other synantonyms: Judgmental (bad) and discernment (good) Spineless (bad) vs. flexible (good) Pigheaded (bad) vs steadfast (good) Co-dependent (bad) vs. supportive (good) Addicted (bad) vs. dedicated (good) In denial (bad) vs. Hopeful (good) Pessimistic (bad) vs. optimistic (good) Unrealistic (bad) vs. Ambitious (good) Greedy (bad) vs. Saving for a rainy day (good) Uncaring (bad) vs. Focusing elsewhere (good) Such terms are treated as the meat of morality. I’m arguing that they mask ambiguities at the heart of the human moral dilemma. Our greatest moral challenge is just what you would expect from a creature like us with strong emotions but modest powers to reason about a complex world: When our emotions get strong, we find whatever reasons we need in order to make virtues out of our preferences. We turn, “I don’t like it” into “It’s morally wrong.” We turn “I want it” into “Morality demands that I should have it.” We rationalize too easily for our own long-term good. We pray, “God, grant me one good reason why I’m right,” and He generally grants it. Think about the people you find difficult. Chances are you don’t trust the reasons they give you for what they advocate. You think they rationalize and make up self-serving excuses and reasons, claiming they are being rational when they’re being impulsive. I think this tendency to rationalize is the most serious challenge facing us today. Now that human power has such far-reaching consequences, our margin of error is rapidly shrinking. Even unfettered, reason and science would have a hard time saving us from the trouble we’re in. We really need to find ways to constrain our natural tendency to bend reason and our interpretation of reality to our personal preferences. The harder things get the more emotional we’ll get and the more inclined we’ll be to bend reason. People don’t tend to get more rational in crises, but less. I think about the climate crisis and the lengths people are willing to go to ignore evidence. Environmentalist Rob Watson says, “Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics. That’s all she is. You cannot sweet-talk her. You cannot spin her. You cannot tell her that the oil companies say climate change is a hoax.” The good news is that almost everyone who denies the climate crisis at this late stage is going to get their comeuppance within their lifetimes. The bad news is how. In the hands of rationalizing beings like us, synantonyms—these morally heavy-handed, yet ill-defined words--are dangerous. Synantonyms smuggle a subjective prescription into a supposedly objective description. 180-degree finger pointing: Where I have been hypocritical Let’s turn the tables 180 degrees here and scrutinize my arguments for a change. Isn’t it hypocritical of me to argue for a moral principle that moral principles are bad? In last week’s article I said, “I never met a moral principle I could trust,” in effect “moral principles are bad.” And yet how would I describe my argument if not as a moral principle? Didn’t I trust it? I could say, “Ah, but mine was not a moral principle (since they are bad). I was simply offering a guideline or a suggestion (which are good).” Wouldn’t that be doing exactl 00:10:39 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=467 Moral* principles do more harm than good. We apply them self-servingly and selectively. They operate at the wrong level of abstraction, distracting us from the right level. I'm deeply committed to morality but I've never met a moral principle I could trust. I can illustrate this best by example.... Podcasts Wed, 28 Jul 2010 16:35:43 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Moral* principles do more harm than good. We apply them self-servingly and selectively. They operate at the wrong level of abstraction, distracting us from the right level. I'm deeply committed to mo Moral* principles do more harm than good. We apply them self-servingly and selectively. They operate at the wrong level of abstraction, distracting us from the right level. I'm deeply committed to morality but I've never met a moral principle I could trust. I can illustrate this best by example. Consider these two moral principles: Don’t cling. Show commitment. What's the difference between clinging and commitment? From what I can tell, they are indistinguishable except that clinging is bad and should never occur and commitment is good and should always occur. Clinging and commitment both describe a preference for keeping something (a law, a policy, a belief, a system, a relationship, a habit etc.) the same rather than changing it. So far I've never found any way to objectively distinguish between an act of clinging and an act of commitment. I’m open to the possibility that I’m missing something so please challenge me: We’d need some litmus test by which observing a preference for keeping something the same, one could reliably sort out the bad (clinging) from the good (commitment). A Buddhist friend suggested that the difference is that clinging is desperate and commitment isn’t. This proposed litmus test pivots on the intensity (desperateness) of desire for something to stay the same, where the more intense, the more clingy, and the more bad, and the less intense, the less clingy, and the more good. The way to kick the tires on a litmus test is by looking for counter-examples. If they come readily it can’t be a reliable litmus test. Think of the parents who desperately want to save their child from a tyrannical government’s death squad. The parents’ desperation feels neither clingy nor bad. The powerful tyrants on the other hand, could intend to kill the child while experiencing a state of calm resolve, no desperation, but not a virtuous “commitment” to the assassination either. The desperation litmus test for distinguishing clinging from commitment doesn’t hold up. The distinctions we draw between clinging and commitment are based on subjective assessments. When we believe that keeping something is bad or will turn out bad, we call it clinging (or any of a number of other pejorative terms—attachment, stubbornness, pigheadedness, etc.) and when we believe that keeping something is good or will turn out good, we call it commitment (or any of a number of other terms with positive connotations—sticking to principle, steadfastness, tradition, etc.). Though in practice, clinging and staying committed amount to the same thing, their connotations are absolute opposites. Since clinging is supposedly always bad and showing commitment is supposedly always good, together they amount to the self-contradictory statement that you should never and always keep things the same. You’ve been in a partnership a long time but lately it’s not feeling good anymore. You wonder whether you should stay in the partnership. One friend says, “Leave. Trying to make it work is just clinging to the past.” Another friend says, “Stay. Just demonstrate commitment.” Both friends imply that they’re reading the situation objectively in a way that dictates a morally principled response. The word “just,” as in “just clinging” or “just demonstrate commitment.” is a powerful word. It means, “ignore all other possibilities.” “Just” implies that the decision is a no-brainer, a decision as easy to make as “should I call this spade a spade?” When I want you to let go of something I can say “don’t cling.” When I want you to hold onto to something, I can say, “stay committed.” I can convincingly cloak my subjective opinion in the garb of objectivity. I can give my confidence levels (my assessment of the probability that I’m right about something) a hi 00:11:16 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=465 "I need a workable solution to this problem and I need it now. It has got to be realistic but it also has to spell relief and spell it soon." That's the subtext for all sorts of human endeavor from finishing that project that already has you underpaid, over-budget and behind schedule, to coming u... Podcasts Thu, 22 Jul 2010 23:42:45 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No "I need a workable solution to this problem and I need it now. It has got to be realistic but it also has to spell relief and spell it soon." That's the subtext for all sorts of human endeavor from "I need a workable solution to this problem and I need it now. It has got to be realistic but it also has to spell relief and spell it soon." That's the subtext for all sorts of human endeavor from finishing that project that already has you underpaid, over-budget and behind schedule, to coming up with the best approach to addressing global warming: We need it right, and we need it right now. Just today, a friend said to me, "Yes, I would like your help thinking this project through, but on one condition. I'm already well along. I can't really afford to rethink it from scratch." I know the feeling well. I get it, for example when I notice, with aversion that an article I've written under deadline has a flaw that would require revisions I'd rather not have to make. So we cut corners. At the gym, I see people counting reps without employing good form. I read articles by other writers who, it seems to me, didn't follow their ideas all the way out. "All the way out" is part of the problem. It's much easier to measure quantity of articles than quantity of thought. But quantifiability isn't the only issue. Expediency is driven by an emotional aversion to the disappointment of facing unexpected hard work. I've written about "speed-reading our critics," reading a review or critical report with eyes that dance gingerly over the feedback like feet hoping across hot coals. All feedback--suggestions for improving things, ideas about more that could be done--feels like an obstacle thrown in your path, like you were rolling downhill toward your goal and suddenly there's a hill you hadn't counted on. I know this feeling most palpably as a sensation I've had when exercising. I'm doing push ups; a friend happens to be watching. I count 38 with a goal of 50 and my friend who has been counting silently says "36." My count is off his by two-two unexpected push ups more to do. There's this surge of overwhelm that runs through my body as I adjust my expectations. The overwhelm leads instantly to questions about my friend's intent. Is that his real count or is he taunting me? Judging only by that taxing sensation, the feedback feels like a put-down. His grin reminds me of the prankster's glee as he looks through the glass door he refuses to unlock when I need to come inside out of the rain. Straining, face down on the floor I look up at him. He's humiliating me on purpose. "I didn't count two of those reps," he says. "They weren't good form." We construct, "Nickel and Paradigms," lightweight, over-simplistic models of how systems work. A lot of our philosophical and spiritual theories seem to qualify as nickel and paradigms--hopefully-good-enough theories that often aren't. Where they don't match reality, we fudge or call it an exception to the rule without further refining our paradigms to include rules for when to expect these exceptions to the rules. We want to have become experts on how things work but that doesn't mean we necessarily want to do what it takes to become those experts. We want to be experts but since becoming one takes much more work than simulating the impression that we're experts, we often take the latter route. We are furious about corporate corner-cutting--BP on the Gulf, the banks, the auto companies. We have an analytical model of such expedience: Some people are just too greedy, too much in a hurry, and their problems always eventually come home to roost. That analytical model is itself a nickel and paradigm. Our analysis of the problem of expedience is itself too expedient. It's not just that some people are expedient; it's at least in part that thoroughness and productivity sometimes work at common purpose and sometimes at cross-purposes. For all of us--not just the greedy few--sometimes an emphasis on immediate productivity trumps thoroughness. And sometimes the lack of thoroughness 00:07:17 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=463 It started out well. You and a friend were talking about a topic of interest to you both, sharing your opinions, listening and collaborating on thinking things through. But something went wrong; you don't know exactly what. Now you're arguing, the tension is thick and the stakes are high. He thin... Podcasts Sat, 10 Jul 2010 22:21:06 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No It started out well. You and a friend were talking about a topic of interest to you both, sharing your opinions, listening and collaborating on thinking things through. But something went wrong; you It started out well. You and a friend were talking about a topic of interest to you both, sharing your opinions, listening and collaborating on thinking things through. But something went wrong; you don't know exactly what. Now you're arguing, the tension is thick and the stakes are high. He thinks you turned it into a power struggle over who's right and--well, frankly you think he did. What exactly happened? Simplifying a lot, try picturing thinking as travel through a maze comprised of branching options. Throughout your life you’ve been walking down corridors coming to intersections and choosing consciously and unconsciously the paths you’ll take. At a fork in the maze a question presents itself. For a while you wonder what to choose, but then you decide, taking one branch or another and the question is behind you. Picture conversation as relating to someone else within the maze. Sometimes you’re conversing over the walls, talking to people who made different choices at the forks and ended up somewhere else: Dana: Hey over there. Ryan: Hi. Dana: I see you became Mormon. Ryan: Yes, I took the religious fork, tried a few options and ended up here. Dana: Cool. What’s it like? Ryan: Pretty satisfying so far. Nice people, great rituals, a sense of purpose. And you? You’re an atheist, right? Dana: Yep, I bypassed the whole religious branch. Ryan: What’s it like down that path? Dana: It’s good. You don’t get the purpose delivered, you have to roll your own, but that suits me fine. Ryan: Cool. Well happy trails. Dana: You too. I wish you the best. I’ll call this Shoptalk. It’s like a conversation between two car lovers comparing notes on their rides without feeling a need to agree that they should have the same cars or tastes. There’s a warmth and respect even at a distance within the maze. You could call it “agreeing to disagree,” but that emphasizes the disagreement. The warmth comes from appreciating that we each get a life and a quest through this maze. We start out in different places and see different parts of the maze. It’s fun to watch other lives and appreciate the varied paths we take. With Shoptalk it’s all good, like running into someone you met on the train to Rome now that you’re in Paris. Dana: Hey, there you are again! Ryan: Zo we meet again my leetle French friend! Dana: I got here Tuesday. You? Ryan: Just today. I stopped in Florence. Dana: There’s great pizza at that place over there on the square. And I loved the Musee D’Orsay. Ryan: I’m only here a day and I’m planning to relax and just hit the Louvre. Dana: Cool, well have a great trip. No pressure to agree on the D’Orsay. It’s sharing notes--not even comparing notes. There’s another kind of conversation I’ll call Affinity and Beyond. You meet someone in the maze, someone who, by whatever paths has ended up in the same corridor as you, facing the same forks and choices: Pat: Hi. Nice to find you here. Casey: You too. Are you doing well? Pat: Yeah, my path seems good so far. And you? Casey: Happy to be here too. So what are you thinking about these options we face? Pat: That is the question, isn’t it? Interested in exploring a little together? Casey: Sure. I’d love some company. I’m leaning toward Path A here. Pat: I’ve thought about that one. We could try it together. My intuitions lead me to think it’s Path B. Casey: Great. We’ll try one and then the other and see which we like best. Pat: I’m really glad we can do this together. Nice to get a second pair of eyes on it and nice also to have your company. Casey: I agree. This will be fun. In this kind of conversation you meet on common ground with common goals and a common quest. The affinities are strong 00:13:41 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=461 Last week I wrote critiquing a vaguely-held but nonetheless influential counter-culture faith in win-win solutions solving everything. Today I want to talk about its equivalent in economics and hint at a parallel between new-age niceness and Tea Party libertarianism that will be the subject of a lat... Podcasts Wed, 07 Jul 2010 17:51:23 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Last week I wrote critiquing a vaguely-held but nonetheless influential counter-culture faith in win-win solutions solving everything. Today I want to talk about its equivalent in economics and hint a Last week I wrote critiquing a vaguely-held but nonetheless influential counter-culture faith in win-win solutions solving everything. Today I want to talk about its equivalent in economics and hint at a parallel between new-age niceness and Tea Party libertarianism that will be the subject of a later article. Free-market capitalism is a system that generates win-wins until there are no more win-wins to be had, until a market reaches what's called Pareto-optimality, a state in which there is "no more room for a deal," no more transactions that would be seen by both parties as to their advantage. Beyond Pareto-optimality any transaction that would be to one party's advantage would be to another party's disadvantage-in other words, a win-lose. A market is deemed "efficient" when there are no constraints that would hinder reaching this state of maximum win-win fulfillment. A regulated market that restricts the sale of certain unsafe products is called "inefficient." From this free-market perspective, if there's one party that wants to sell heroin, and there's another party that wants to party and is willing to part with money for that heroin, there's room for a win-win deal and it's inefficient to constrain the parties by preventing the transaction. Except for libertarians (free-market extremists), economists are quick to point out that efficiency isn't everything. Society has goals that can't be met by exclusive reliance on win-wins. Though there's a win-win deal in that heroin sale, it's a loss to society overall. Likewise, though the destitute can't pay for food and therefore can't engage in a win-win with the food vendor, society prefers not to have the destitute die of starvation. The incompatibilities between market efficiency and society's goals are called "market imperfections." Governments step in discouraging some activities (heroin sales between consenting adults) and encouraging others (food sales to the destitute) to actually create market inefficiencies that compensate for market imperfections. Governments, in effect, put their thumbs on the scales, discouraging some win-wins and encouraging some win-loses. They have a number of tools at their disposal for doing so. Laws banning the sale of heroin, taxes discouraging the sale of tobacco, laws forcing the sale of medical services to the poor, subsidies like food stamps that give the destitute the wherewithal to purchase food when otherwise they couldn't. One way to think about this is that there aren't really any two party deals. There are always three parties: the two who do the business deal and society. What we really want is win-win-wins, where everyone is happy. There are lots of those. We buy products from folks who want to sell them and society benefits overall. But since not all deals are win-win-win someone has to make sacrifices. I pay taxes--a loss to me--but a win to society. Companies selling dangerous products lose sales because of taxes on their products (sin taxes they're called), a loss to them but again a win to society. I dream of solving everything with win-win-win solutions but in practice there have to be some losses. Another way to think about it is that society is, in part, you and me, representing our better judgment. I want to do deals that benefit me today, but my better judgment doesn't want me to do deals today that hurt me tomorrow even if they'd be wins for me today. So I win when society wins, or rather my better judgment wins even though my immediate preferences lose. In passing I'll note that this is a compromise to the Golden Rule. What I'd have done unto me is that I could win always and following the Golden Rule I wish the same for you. But sometimes we lose anyway. To make the Golden Rule work we have to break the Golden rule sometimes. I call this the Golden Paradox. Government, at its best, can serve as th 00:11:25 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=459 What changed my mind was the gun under my 15-year-old son's bed. Loaded. Our son--who we raised on a commune where we believed that love was the way and that everyone could and would realize it if they were only educated in the dharma (spiritual teachings). He traded a prized possession of mine f... Podcasts Sun, 27 Jun 2010 22:52:41 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No What changed my mind was the gun under my 15-year-old son's bed. Loaded. Our son--who we raised on a commune where we believed that love was the way and that everyone could and would realize it if the What changed my mind was the gun under my 15-year-old son's bed. Loaded. Our son--who we raised on a commune where we believed that love was the way and that everyone could and would realize it if they were only educated in the dharma (spiritual teachings). He traded a prized possession of mine for that gun. When I confiscated it, he got right up in my face and yelled, "Give it back. I paid good money for that!" That's when we decided to hire the private police escorts to climb through his bedroom window at six AM and take him to a treatment center in Idaho. I already had plans to fly a few days later to a spiritual workshop led by Ram Dass, whom I had studied with for years. He began the workshop with a story I had heard many times before, Aikido master Terry Dobson's account of a time he nearly took down a thug on a subway. Just as Dobson was about to subdue the thug by force an old Japanese man in a kimono interrupted, distracting the thug with a cheerful account of how he and his old wife enjoyed tea in their garden together observing their persimmon tree. I reprint the story below. If you haven't read it, I recommend it. Dobson's Aikido teacher had taught that Aikido was the art of reconciliation. "Whoever has the mind to fight has broken his connection with the universe. If you try to dominate people, you are already defeated. " Dobson had always tried to follow that guidance, but only when he saw the little old Japanese man melt the thug's heart did he recognize that "the essence of Aikido is love." This time, having just packed my gun-toting 15-year old off to Idaho by police escort, I found the story hard to swallow. During a break I asked Ram Dass how it applied to my situation. Ram Dass said that the story doesn't mean that you should give everyone everything always. It meant that you should never put anyone out of your heart even though you may have to put him out of your living room. To my mind, that was a fine distinction, probably too fine to make with reliable clarity. Was my son in my heart when I put him out of my living room? My son certainly didn't think so, but then what did he know? But then if I discount his perspective, where's the love in that? But then, he was profoundly unreliable, so maybe the only question was whether I felt that I was banishing him with love in my heart. But then what about people who believe in their hearts that they're banishing you in a loving way when they aren't? What about when a sadist says "it hurts me more than it hurts you"? I mean, lots of questions. The story that had always warmed my heart now seemed slippery. The way I had always heard it, it implied that there was always a win-win option and so you never had to put anyone out of your living room. Statements like "Whoever has the mind to fight has broken his connection with the universe. If you try to dominate people, you are already defeated" seem to condemn me for forcibly evicting my son. Now I was scrutinizing these words more closely than before. What does "having a mind to fight," even mean? And just what are the consequences of breaking one's connection the universe? Does the universe have no fight in it? Had the soldiers who defeated Hitler's armies broken their connection with the universe? If not, did they somehow not have a mind to fight even as they shot and bombed their way through Europe? The story started to sound like gibberish, like nonsense on stilts. The thug's fists unclench as he listens to the old Japanese man's cheerful account about his persimmon tree back home. The thug says, "Yeah, I love persimmons too." Attending that same Ram Dass workshop was a high-ranking DC political insider. I overheard him whisper to his friend an alternative thug-response to the old man's story: "Yeah, well I hate persimmons. Pow!" He had to whisper because in the cozy, warm, smarmy context of 00:15:14 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=457 He just insulted you and you feel your blood pressure rise. For a minute, as your body floods with resentment, your chance of staying calm is slim. You take a deep breath. Turning away expressionless, you muster all the spiritual benevolence you can, and for once you don't counter-attack. You say so... Podcasts Tue, 15 Jun 2010 19:26:56 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No He just insulted you and you feel your blood pressure rise. For a minute, as your body floods with resentment, your chance of staying calm is slim. You take a deep breath. Turning away expressionless, He just insulted you and you feel your blood pressure rise. For a minute, as your body floods with resentment, your chance of staying calm is slim. You take a deep breath. Turning away expressionless, you muster all the spiritual benevolence you can, and for once you don't counter-attack. You say something impressively forgiving and dignified. Do you mean it? Maybe not, but it works. He, braced for a fight, is thrown off balance, and suddenly you feel less threatened, safer in who you are and where you stand. Now, staying calm and forgiving in the encounter gets easier. Resisting that initial pull toward retaliation was hard. At first you were wobbly, but then it becomes effortless. From wobbly to stable--it's the ten-minute equivalent of learning to ride a bicycle. Scenarios like these are important to Cognitive Therapy. They demonstrate that your emotions aren't fixed facts; they're flexible. It's all in how you interpret your situation. Tell a different story and you'll automatically generate a different emotional response. Positive Psychology likewise advocates ways to limber up emotional response. It agrees with Cognitive Therapy; you can change your story to change your emotions. But you can also change your behavior to change your emotions. You can jump start emotions, fake it ‘til you make it, behave differently, and people will respond differently. If you play the calm one in a conflict, an opponent's response often makes it increasingly easy to continue to play the calm one. About this fluidity of interpretation and emotion, there has accumulated a bit of oversimplifying conventional wisdom: In any situation you have complete control and flexibility in how you respond. No matter what's going on, you can choose whether to be angry or calm, resentful or forgiving-it's all up to you. I'll call this the Total Control Theory of emotions. This theory usually comes bundled with an incriminating assumption that there's an obvious right way to be. If you have complete control over whether you're resentful or forgiving, and if forgiveness is the obvious right thing to feel, then, if you're resentful instead of forgiving, you've failed. I don't believe there is an obvious right way to feel. Sure, by word choice, one can give the false impression that there is, but there isn't. Should you be resentful (a negative sounding thing) or forgiving (a positive sounding thing) makes it sound obvious how you should feel. But if you reframe the same situation as a choice between upholding high standards (a positive sounding thing) and failing to respond to substandard behavior (a negative sounding thing) suddenly, it's not so obvious what is the right way to feel. Unlike the Positive Psychologists, I don't believe positivity is always the answer. If you want a thorough exploration of positivity's downside, try Brightsided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, by Barbara Ehrenreich. Still, we most often hear the "total control" theory of emotions accompanied by advocacy of a particular position: "Stop feeling X, and you can. It is within your power to do so." The Secret is another example. It argues for a supposedly appropriate positive attitude but it also assumes that you have a lot of choice about what you feel. Total Control Theory could also be called the jukebox theory of emotion. You get to pick the tune. And clearly, to some extent you do, or else in the scenario above you couldn't turn a low probability of calm into a high probability of calm. Competing with the Total Control Theory there is another bit of conventional wisdom about emotional control that is also quite prevalent. We could call this the No Control Theory: You feel what you feel and there's nothing you or anyone can do about it. No Control Theory doesn't seem to have proponents who advocate it explicitly. R 00:08:26 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=455 Conflict is like a high-strung game of hot potato in which what you're shoving back and forth at each other is self-doubt. In conflict, we don't agree about something and, whether by necessity or sheer doggedness, we can't simply agree to disagree. Something has got to give, preferably our oppone... Podcasts Mon, 07 Jun 2010 22:32:32 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Conflict is like a high-strung game of hot potato in which what you're shoving back and forth at each other is self-doubt. In conflict, we don't agree about something and, whether by necessity or s Conflict is like a high-strung game of hot potato in which what you're shoving back and forth at each other is self-doubt. In conflict, we don't agree about something and, whether by necessity or sheer doggedness, we can't simply agree to disagree. Something has got to give, preferably our opponent's insistence, and so we go at each other trying to erode each other's confidence, questioning each other's plans, interpretations, motives, character, and intelligence-anything to get that stinging doubt out of our hands and into our opponent's. It's a vicious cycle, a doubting-match, as we and our opponents pass the doubt potato ever more aggressively. Naturally there are some standard doubt-deflecting rhetorical moves we can make. I've started to catalog them and list eighteen of them below. By rhetorical I mean they're generic, or content-independent. One can apply them to deflect self-doubt no matter what topic is on the table or what position you take on that topic. Many are meta-moves, ways to act as though you're above the fight, even while continuing to fight. They're the equivalent of saying "I'm done playing," just as you shove the potato into your opponent's hand. They tend have a moral tone, like saying "One shouldn't try to win at hot potato," just as you pass the self-doubt to your opponent, the double-down, doubt-inflicting equivalent of "only losers like you care about winning and losing and, oh, by the way, haha, you lose." Though you might think I don't have a lot of respect for these techniques, in two ways I actually do. First, they are quite formidable. I respect them in that if I were to name the one aspect of human nature most likely to cause our failure as a species (taking down a great many other species with us) it would be our alacrity and fluency at employing these and other techniques for deflecting self-doubt, setting off self-certainty wars. And the second way I respect them I'll save for after the list. Here it is with links to related articles: "But My Intentions Are Good. Don't They Count For Everything?" When criticized for our actions we can change the subject to our intentions, which are un-measurable, and unassailable, and, if not connected to our actions, irrelevant. Nicessism: Imply a moral imperative that one should never say anything disappointing and thereby treat all criticism, constructive or otherwise as a moral violation. "Your Challenge Hurt, Therefore You Must Have Delivered It Wrong." Claim receptivity, but only to those challenges well delivered by one's unattainably high standards. Smugging: Calmly refuse to budge and then when one's challenger gets frustrated change the subject to his hotheaded reaction. This will make him more hotheaded making it easy to call even more attention to his reaction. Youjustifications and Onetruesations: Deny all but one ignominious motive behind a challenger's criticism. For example "You're just trying to put me down." Reciprocally, explain your own behavior as being singly and virtuously motivated. For example, "Look, I was only trying to help." Exempt By Contempt: Claim that since you find a trait disgusting, you must not have that trait. For example: "Me selfish?! Impossible! I hate selfish people!" "How Dare You Compare Me To..." If challenged for behaving as badly as some known manipulators, rather than considering the comparison on its merits, act as though there could be no parallel because there's some assumed world of difference between the behaviors of good people like you, and bad people like them. Litmus Paper Tiger: Profess loudly and actively to holding an absolute moral standard, then ignore it and do anything you like. Selective Literalism: Attack others for their tone, but when you talk, deny tone has anything to do with it. For example, saying, "Look, I merely said..." Freedom of Speech As Subte 00:10:18 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=453 About a year ago I wrote an article seeking a non-subjective definition for butthead, an alternative to the subjective definition as anyone with whom I butt heads. This is a central research question for me, which translates to lofty yet practical conundrums about the alternative to buttheadedne... Podcasts Mon, 24 May 2010 22:09:24 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No About a year ago I wrote an article seeking a non-subjective definition for butthead, an alternative to the subjective definition as anyone with whom I butt heads. This is a central research questio About a year ago I wrote an article seeking a non-subjective definition for butthead, an alternative to the subjective definition as anyone with whom I butt heads. This is a central research question for me, which translates to lofty yet practical conundrums about the alternative to buttheadedness: What is wisdom? What is rationality? And the great existential question: Now that we are forced to admit that there are inescapable differences of opinion about what God or the universe expect of us, how do we figure out who's right in any argument? If you've followed my articles, you'll know that I have particular people with whom I butt heads--Sarah Palin or the latest reincarnation of the right wing (I've called them the "Always Right" wing) for example. Readers who don't have my reaction to these targets challenge me to be more specific about what makes them buttheads. It's a great question, consistent with my quest for an objective definition of butthead, and I'll attempt to answer their question here broadly and in my next article to give some examples. I have a new definition of wisdom and rationality I'm trying out: The ability to actively embody alternative perspectives on a controversial or ambiguous situation, to conscientiously select the perspective to operate from, and to maintain the capacity to actively embody the alternative perspectives even after having selected. Let me unpack this: Actively embody: In practice this translates as the capacity to mirror alternative perspectives. Mirroring is the act of giving full, convincing voice to a perspective independent of whether you subscribe to it. It's like the lawyer's skill for making a case for any argument. A skillful lawyer could, on a dime switch to her opponent's argument, making a strong and compelling case against herself. Mirroring is the best test of empathy I know, the capacity to put yourself in another person's shoes, or to take on another person's perspective, not just giving it lip service, but actively embodying it. Perspective: A "take" on a situation. It could be some particular person's take (for example your opponent's in an argument) but it could also just be any alternative interpretation, story, explanation, or description of what's going on, and as a consequence, what to do about it. Select the perspective to operate from: This is the focus of most definitions of rationality and wisdom: The ability to choose the best alternative perspective. It's skillful "shopping" among perspectives, skillful "bet placing" on how to read a situation. My new definition of wisdom and rationality includes this central issue but shifts to include a focus on how to keep the alternatives in mind, as implied in the oft-quoted (at least by me) from F. Scott Fitzgerald: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." Still retaining the ability to function means that you chose a perspective from which to operate even as you keep alternatives in mind. Alternative perspectives on a controversial or ambiguous situation: One can't see all possible alternative perspectives, and one can't always tell what's a controversial or ambiguous situation. Therefore, there will always be errors about which perspectives to keep in mind and which situations call for wise attention. Still, research into groupthink shows that decisions improve when even just one alternative perspective is given voice. Alternative perspectives generate doubt, so what I'm suggesting here all boils down to a question about doubt-management. To act with focus and productivity, we need to get doubt out of the way, but to act appropriately, producing what will prove to have been the right thing to produce and not the wrong thing 00:06:37 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=451 Many subscribers didn't get the animation I created as last week's article: Here it is. I'm a practicing jazz musician--practicing because I'm nowhere near as good as I want to be. I didn't start out interested in jazz and getting good, I was interested in rock and getting girls. Rock didn't nece... Podcasts Mon, 10 May 2010 00:10:45 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Many subscribers didn't get the animation I created as last week's article: Here it is. I'm a practicing jazz musician--practicing because I'm nowhere near as good as I want to be. I didn't start o Many subscribers didn't get the animation I created as last week's article: Here it is. I'm a practicing jazz musician--practicing because I'm nowhere near as good as I want to be. I didn't start out interested in jazz and getting good, I was interested in rock and getting girls. Rock didn't necessarily take a lot of practice. During my teens I was satisfied playing the same simple riffs over and over through my flatteringly loud bass equipment. My father, a classical oboist and pianist called my electric bass a toy. Earlier he had me play bassoon which had eight keys for the right thumb alone and required making your own reeds with a micrometer-very fussy. He was right. Comparatively speaking, the bass was a toy. Musical equipment just gets easier and easier. Now you don't even have to know any simple riffs to sound like a virtuoso. With electronic keyboards you can rest a finger on any key and a whole band pumps out a steady glorious sound. DJ's claim to be musicians. In the old days people who said, "Yeah, I play music; I play the record player," were kidding. Compared to an electric bass, these new instruments are toys.* Musicians debate what easy access to easier instruments will do to musicianship. We hope these easy instruments won't set a new low standard for musical achievement. We hope instead they'll be like gateway drugs. That's what the flatteringly loud bass equipment did for me. It affirmed me early on, whispering, "You're a pro, you're really doing this," in my ear while I closed my eyes, kicked back my head and wailed away for hours on those same simple riffs. But like a gateway drug it eventually lead me to the harder stuff like bebop and altered dominant scales. Of course for some, the flattering new equipment doesn't have the gateway effect. They're easily impressed by their prowess. They get complacent and don't bother to learn anything more sophisticated, not that there's any reason they should have to. After all, life is short. We should all be so lucky as to experience the pinnacles of human achievement, even if only by simulation. Fake musical instruments, virtual reality games, movies, fiction, even pornography--are we going to begrudge the talentless a chance to pretend to have talent, the timid a vicarious experience of fictional heroism, the homely a chance to experience sex with attractive people? Mahayana Buddhism emerged in India around four hundred years after Buddha lived. The word Mahayana means "great vehicle" in several senses, but the key sense comes from the allegory that justified the pivotal Mahayana update on Buddhas' teachings: A father's house is burning down and his two children are in it. He wants them to run out of the house but they don't see why they should. He entices them out with the promise of little toy wagons, a different one for each child. Excited, the children rush out to their father and the presents but when they arrive their father admits that he didn't have the two little wagons really. He has something better instead, one large wagon, a great vehicle that would carry them both. The traditional interpretation is that the little wagons the father promised were the earlier schools of Buddhist thought to be replaced by Mahayana Buddhism, the great vehicle that would carry all people. Though these earlier schools couldn't take you to nirvana they are to be appreciated for motivating people to take the first step toward Buddhism. They did not deliver as promised but they demonstrated the earlier teacher's "skillful means," which from what I've read sounds like a euphemism for the seductive skill of leading people toward virtue, in effect, selling good gateway drugs, drugs that will eventually lead people into addictions to truly worthy commitments. As with the easier musical instruments that led me eventually to dig deeper into music, the fabled 00:09:46 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=447 Reading eclectically is like reading tealeaves. With both you learn something from the randomly juxtaposed constellation of leaves you throw down. These days I seem to be leafing through books on change what works and what doesn't work to motivate it. There was Barbara Ehrenreich's Brightside... Podcasts Mon, 12 Apr 2010 22:50:23 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Reading eclectically is like reading tealeaves. With both you learn something from the randomly juxtaposed constellation of leaves you throw down. These days I seem to be leafing through books on Reading eclectically is like reading tealeaves. With both you learn something from the randomly juxtaposed constellation of leaves you throw down. These days I seem to be leafing through books on change what works and what doesn't work to motivate it. There was Barbara Ehrenreich's Brightsided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, a book after my own naturally curmudgeonly heart. It is a glorious expose' of ways in which the power of positive thinking can make us passive, oblivious, docile and dangerously myopic. Read it for a fascinating history of how the U.S., which started so dour and puritanical, became the positive thinking capital of the world. The pivot point was Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science. From Christian Science to The Secret, both with their preposterous idea that you can change anything—cure cancer or make multi-millions--if you just put your positive mind to it. Ehrenreich counsels that to bring about real change we have to analyze and identify what’s really wrong. Then there was Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath, a book after my own progressivist heart. It argues in favor of positive thinking as a way to compensate for our naturally curmudgeonly hearts. Negativity hinders. You can’t bring about change by analyzing and identifying what’s wrong. Instead, you must identify and build on successes and set passion-fueled positive yet concrete goals. Both books are quite convincing. They tease out my ambivalence about positivity and negativity—carrots and sticks--in producing change, a dilemma after my own inconsistency-probing heart. In between, I’ve been reading a 34-year-old book called Double Bind: The Foundation of the communicational approach to the family. This book is a retrospective on 20 years of research into a 1956 concept developed by Gregory Bateson, one of my mentors. Bateson hypothesized that schizophrenia might develop in children who are repeatedly subjected to inconsistent parental messages of a particular kind he called the double bind. A double bind is a double message and a bind that keeps you from saying it is a double message. It’s a three-way, no-win situation that amounts to you’re damned if you do; you’re damned if you don’t, and you’re damned also if notice that you’re damned either way. In other words, “By jerking you around, I’ll make you feel powerless and if you try to escape my jerking, I’ll make you feel even more powerless.” Bateson came to his hypothesis through case-study evidence and through an abiding fascination with the logic of paradoxes (a fascination I share). The case studies included situations like this: A young man who had fairly well recovered from an acute schizophrenic episode was visited in the hospital by his mother. He was glad to see her and impulsively put his arm around her shoulders whereupon she stiffened. He withdrew his arm and she asked, “Don’t you love me any more? He then blushed, and she said, “Dear, you must not be so easily embarrassed and afraid of your feelings.” The patient was able to stay with her only a few minutes more and following her departure he assaulted an aide and was put in the tubs. Bateson identified the double bind’s three necessary and sufficient conditions: 1. The individual is involved in an intense relationship; that is, a relationship in which he feels it is vitally important that he discriminate accurately what sort of message is being communicated so that he may respond appropriately. 2. And, the individual is caught in a situation in which the other person in the relationship is expressing two orders of message and each of these denies the other. 3. And, the individual is unable to comment on the messages being expressed to correct his discrimination of what order 00:11:46 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=445 An enthusiastic reader wrote to ask me questions about what makes me tick, "Are you trying to make people think? To make them think a certain way? Do you just enjoy the writing?" All of the above, but on the second question, yes I am a man with a mission. I am a missionary. I'm trying to put a le... Podcasts Wed, 07 Apr 2010 02:56:08 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No An enthusiastic reader wrote to ask me questions about what makes me tick, "Are you trying to make people think? To make them think a certain way? Do you just enjoy the writing?" All of the above, An enthusiastic reader wrote to ask me questions about what makes me tick, "Are you trying to make people think? To make them think a certain way? Do you just enjoy the writing?" All of the above, but on the second question, yes I am a man with a mission. I am a missionary. I'm trying to put a leash on those Godawful narrow-minded right wing, Sarah Palin, Tea Partying, manipulative tricks we all use, me included. Before my current missionary work, I was your basic idealistic left wing activist moving from issue to issue looking for leverage. I lived for six years on The Farm, the world’s largest hippie commune whose mission statement was “We’re out to save the world.” I ran water development projects for villages in Guatemala. I researched and wrote for Food First and Ashoka Foundation, Fecundity Fund and GBS Foundation. I co-founded 20/20 Vision, a D.C. based peace/environmental organization that lasted for 28 years. I ran the public affairs department for The Body Shop International, invited by its legendary environmentalist founder, Anita Roddick to help “radicalize the company.” I designed political campaigns for Ben and Jerry’s. I was on a mission. Throughout my 20-year first career as an activist, I had a sense that progressivism would just keep on progressing. Sure there would be bumps in the road, but the overwhelming trend would be toward less dogma and more pragmatism, less fear-mongering and more freedom, less waste and more efficient resource management. In my naiveté, I thought the US was free and clear from the lure of fascism, and I didn’t foresee the Republican Party becoming the sneering, ranting know-it-all crazy uncle who won’t stop bullying folks into submission at the family dinner. I didn’t foresee that while he ranted, rallying the nation’s natural-born ranters to his side, the family’s goose would be cooked. In the 80’s there were a few big causes. Now there are so many it is hard to know where to the leverage is. But I know where. I’m a man with a mission at home and abroad, a mission that pertains as much to our daily personal interactions as our global negotiations, a mission to curb a tendency not just in Republicans, but in all of us. Of all the problems we face, here’s the biggest: We humans tend to translate "ouch" into "you're bad," "I want" into "you owe me," "I'm uncomfortable" into "It's all your fault,” “I’m disappointed” into “You’re evil.” In hundreds of ways, specific and vague, forceful and gentle we instantly, automatically, sanctimoniously, self-servingly, and selectively summon moral principles to support our personal preferences. There’s no reason to expect us to be any different. We’re all born as babies and babies have to whine to get attention. For newborns, crying is survival. And there’s no reason to assume that, just by growing up into our meager human power of reason, whining would disappear. We are what you’d get when you cross strong feelings with modest powers of abstract reasoning. You’d get abstract reasoning tripping all over itself in a desperate lurch to support our strong feelings. The Republican Party didn’t start out as the “Always Right” Wing. Buried in the party’s history are a few laudably well-reasoned and substantive principles. Chief among them was a strong commitment to the rational design of a well functioning Republic, a hierarchical hybrid form of government in which individuals, states and the country as a whole share power. Ironically, Edmund Burke, the father of conservativism was on a mission like mine. In reaction to the excesses of the French Revolution he argued that abstract ideas and political theories are dangerously likely to be ill-conceived and self-serving and therefore rarely better guides to the design of governments than the weather-tested syste 00:10:45 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=443 The older we get the harder it is to start new lasting romantic relationships. I can explain it by way of an old joke, a fundamental principle, and a new parable. An old joke: A little girl, sitting on her grandpa's lap asked "Did God make me?" "Yes," said her grandpa. "And did God make you ... Podcasts Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:23:24 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No The older we get the harder it is to start new lasting romantic relationships. I can explain it by way of an old joke, a fundamental principle, and a new parable. An old joke: A little girl, sit The older we get the harder it is to start new lasting romantic relationships. I can explain it by way of an old joke, a fundamental principle, and a new parable. An old joke: A little girl, sitting on her grandpa's lap asked "Did God make me?" "Yes," said her grandpa. "And did God make you too?" she asked. "Yes," said her Grandpa. She reflected and said, "He's getting better isn't he?" A fundamental principle: In living systems, attachments and dependencies grow. The longer you’ve lived in your community the harder it is to leave.  The longer a creature has been domesticated the harder it is to be released into the wild, the longer you’ve had a cell phone, the harder it is to do without it, the longer you've had a habit, the harder it is to break, and the longer you have been married the more complex your divorce settlement is likely to be. The challenge to long term relationships is not finding the raison d’etre (the function, the reason to be or stay) but the raison d’entre (the reason to enter in the first place). A new parable: God was experimenting.  She had made many fine creatures. Her first were fully programmed at birth.  They were like robots.  She made large numbers of them because, being preprogrammed, they couldn’t adapt.  If they wandered into an environment where their programmed behavior didn’t work, they would die. As long as there were lots of them though, that wasn’t a problem. Her next creatures could learn by trial and error. If they had a close call with something deadly they could learn to avoid that danger in the future.  They could only learn from close calls--near death, not real death experiences--but that made them a lot more adaptable to changes in their environments.   These did well. God was getting better, and more daring too. God decided to see what would happen if he made one with hindsight, foresight and sidesight, the ability to imagine back into the past, forward into the future and really anything on any side, and from any side. It wasn’t just that they could imagine anything. They could sew all of their imaginings together into one big overview of God’s works, really a glimpse of what God herself saw.  This overview would make the creature highly adaptive, able to anticipate danger not just from near death experiences but from weaving all sorts of twos and twos together. For the second time ever--God being the first time--there was a creature that could ask and answer the question “what’s this all about?” The trouble was that there was plenty of danger, behind, in front and on all sides. Being able to see so much at once is not for the faint of heart. God could handle it but that’s because she was above it.  She was the one who set up the game of life this way originally, with things falling apart, and life resisting falling apart but only for a while, a competition in which each creature is both an individual trying to survive in a dangerous environment and the dangerous environment to other creatures. These new ones were creatures who could remember terrible things that had happened to them.  They could foresee their own deaths. They could see threats on every side of them.  It made them anxious, clingy, quirky and even a little more dangerous than the other creatures. It’s true, God’s new breed were better at adapting. They were good at figuring out what was dangerous and steering clear. Indeed, so clear, that they weren’t very good at mating. Their foresight enabled them to anticipate trouble with their fellow anxious quirky creatures. Their hindsight made them remember dating troubles past.  Instinctively they were drawn to each other, but then their imaginings made them shy away. So God started playing around with the variables.  She invented some painkilling, bliss-wakening drugs that would fi 00:07:51 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=442 My life is so completely cushy that I can afford to visit distressing thoughts and scenarios. I can watch a movie like Slumdog Millionaire and feel empathy from my safe vantage point. I can even find the ending a little hokey. I'm betting that it wouldn't be so easy if I were suffering more. Peopl... Podcasts Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:04:45 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No My life is so completely cushy that I can afford to visit distressing thoughts and scenarios. I can watch a movie like Slumdog Millionaire and feel empathy from my safe vantage point. I can even find My life is so completely cushy that I can afford to visit distressing thoughts and scenarios. I can watch a movie like Slumdog Millionaire and feel empathy from my safe vantage point. I can even find the ending a little hokey. I'm betting that it wouldn't be so easy if I were suffering more. People with stressful lives would tend to find the beginning more painful and the ending more compelling. When grieving the end of my marriage, I suddenly lost my appetite for bravely honest movies about divorce. I was getting enough of a reality check from reality, thank you. For some folks the grief and stress never ends. I am also keenly interested in the scientific pursuit of ever more accurate stories about how things work. I don’t think I would have nearly the appetite for accuracy if I needed to counter a more miserable existence with more comforting, reassuring, affirming stories. The lure of wishful thinking is, in part a function of what you’re up against. The more pain you’re in, the more wishful thinking you’ll naturally want and need. For those of us with relatively cushy lives then, it’s no good telling those with difficult lives that they ought to face reality. In this often cruel and always unfair world everyone deserves to tell whatever stories give them comfort enough to get by. We could call it The Right to Believe. It’s also no good to have wishful thinking imposed on the scientific pursuit of accurate stories. We could call it The Need to Know. People should be free to believe whatever wishful stories get them through the night, but science should be free to pursue whatever accurate stories will get us through the crises. Climate change, extinctions, epidemics, cancer—the conflict between the right to believe and the need to know isn’t some intellectual debate, it’s a hot war, so let me word it more directly: From science to belief: We honor your right to believe whatever comforts you, but get it the hell out of the way of science, because even unimpeded, science can hardly keep up, and only if it keeps up will it save our children, even your children, oh wishful thinker. From belief to science: You scientists caused most of those crises in the first place and how dare you say your method gets at truth better than other methods? Why are you qualified to make that claim? Because you’ve decided you’re right? Do you know how many wishful thinkers say exactly the same thing? What makes you think science is so special that we all have to get out of your way? As pretentious as it sounds, science can make special claims. The universe either complies with or defies our beliefs. Reality pushes back. As Aldous Huxley said, “facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” The universe simply complies more with scientific accounts. Imagine parallel annual reports from two human ventures, one for science and one for, say, religion. Or imagine centennial or millennial reports. No matter what period you measure, science’s report would be vastly thicker. No matter what opinions we might hold on the subject, our intuitions recognize that science is winning the accuracy game. So no, it’s not just like any other way of believing. Even the people who claim that science and wishful thinking are indistinguishable intuit this. Their argument undermines itself and reveals deference to science. They are trying to make a compelling objective case that there is no way to make a compelling objective case. This backhanded, reluctant deference to science is understandable. We may grumble about sciences’ pretentiousness, especially when science disappoints our wishful thinking, but at least tacit deference to science is all-pervasive and not arbitrary. When religious fundamentalists need results, they rely on doctors and engineers rather than faith healers or prayers. 00:08:21 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=440 "Every life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first -- the story of our quest for sexual love -- is well known and well charted. Its vagaries form the staple of music and literature; it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second -- the story of our quest for love from ... Podcasts Fri, 15 Jan 2010 00:16:51 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No "Every life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first -- the story of our quest for sexual love -- is well known and well charted. Its vagaries form the staple of music and lit "Every life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first -- the story of our quest for sexual love -- is well known and well charted. Its vagaries form the staple of music and literature; it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second -- the story of our quest for love from the world -- is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls, or else the drive for status is interpreted in an economic sense alone. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important, or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here, too." Alain de Botton "Status Anxiety." To be loved by the world--what could that mean? I think it's a sense of inner and outer harmony, relief from dissonance within yourself and dissonance between yourself and the outside world. It's a sense that you can both be yourself and be successful by the world's standards. Being loved by the world doesn't have to mean being adored by the world, but still somehow affirmed, or as the biologist Stuart Kauffman put it, a feeling that you are "at home in the universe." This affirmation is not just the thought or realization, "Hey, I'm at home." It's a feeling. I'd go so far as to say it's the feeling of being well adapted--surmisal of the fittest--a sense, even a false one, that you fit your circumstances. In that respect it's a direct extension of what organisms have been evolving toward for over 3.5 billion years. Still, surmisal of the fittest is not just about biological fitness despite what evolutionary psychologists tend to imply. No, it's surmisal of the fittest by whatever standards of fitness have emotional resonance for us these days, not all of which are directly or indirectly in the service of biological reproductive success. Think of how much human behavior is driven by a desire to feel like you're a good person on the side of righteousness, a person with integrity fighting for greater integrity in the world around. That feeling may have nothing to do with having children who survive and reproduce. It can be uncorrelated to the biological urge and can even work at cross-purposes to it, for example in a suicide bomber who dies childless feeling that he has acted with supreme integrity in perfect service of what is truest in the universe. Feeling fitted has both the inner and outer quality--integrated within and integrated with your outside circumstances. The inner feeling is relief from dissonance or doubt, a sense that who you are--your preferences, intentions, and values hold together with simple clarity. This internal consistency is what in the world of the intellect is called coherence. But with feelings it's not necessarily a drive to have a coherent intellect. The coherence that makes us feel loved by the world is just the gut's satisfied feeling of relief when ambivalence, confusion and inner conflict has lifted. Indeed, emotional coherence might be achieved at the expense of intellectual coherence. For example George Bush who many of us found intellectually incoherent felt that he was a man of exceptional integrity. And indeed for most of us, most of the time the feeling of being right takes priority over actually being right. Emotional coherence often trumps intellectual coherence. The feeling of freedom from conflict with your outer circumstances is like what in the world of the intellect we call correspondence. Correspondence is having your theories match sense data and experiential evidence. If I said "eggs don't break when you drop them from second story windows," you would say that lacks correspondence to the audiovisual sense data that comes with the splatting crunching sight and sound of eggs dropped from windows. Again thoug 00:10:32 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=438 Life is sweet; life is dangerous. You have to be positive; you have to be careful. Love makes the world go round; people are scary. I'm an ambigamist not just about embracing a partner but every aspect of life. I watch myself and everyone I know wrestle with the tension between open and close... Podcasts Sun, 03 Jan 2010 21:50:14 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No Life is sweet; life is dangerous. You have to be positive; you have to be careful. Love makes the world go round; people are scary. I'm an ambigamist not just about embracing a partner but ever Life is sweet; life is dangerous. You have to be positive; you have to be careful. Love makes the world go round; people are scary. I'm an ambigamist not just about embracing a partner but every aspect of life. I watch myself and everyone I know wrestle with the tension between open and closed, romance and skepticism, faith and reason, confidence and doubt, tenderness and protectiveness, hope and fear, transcendence and realism, generosity and caution, friendship and business. I don't see any way out of it. I think this kind of tension is the truest fundamental, a fundamental that, alas, isn't a groove you can slide and cozy your way into, but a groove that's a rickety rope bridge we weave as we walk it. How can it not be? Ours is to enjoy life with death in full view. The tension plays out in every arena and at every scale or scope, from how we cope with keeping a spring in our step as we stumble over the day's little obstacles to how we enjoy the world we've created even as it becomes clear that it is creating terrifying climate change. How do you enjoy life when you know the risks? Through a mixture of liberating pleasure and compromising caution. So no, my column isn't just about romantic partnership. But still, that kind of love is a great and practical place to explore this tension. "To love that well, that thou must leave ere long" as Shakespeare put it. Courtship is a microcosm in which we experience a particularly vivid version of the open/closed question that all of life addresses. To survive, organisms' bodies have to answer correctly such questions as Should I join this? Should I stay with this? Should I be open to this? Can I trust this? Am I safe here? And these too, on a different scale are the questions we deal with in courtship. The paradox of life is that it consists of independent individuals that, to survive have to be open, sacrificing some of their individuality. From the simplest single cell organism to the most complex society, sustainability depends on having the right semi-permeable membrane, one that lets in what is good and keeps out what is bad, joins the right partnerships and not the wrong ones. That's what all of life seeks, through some combination of trial and error, biological mechanism, instinct, responsiveness, emotion and in us--the very rarest of cases--through conscious cognitive choice. Lately I've noticed that there are really two types of ambigamists and that I much prefer the company of one of them--the ironic ambigamist--so much so that I'll describe the other as bipolar. Both ironic and bipolar ambigamists oscillate between open and closed, romance and skepticism. But ironic ambigamists never forget that the tension between those two is the truest fundamental. No matter how open or closed they feel in any moment they know and embrace the opposite condition. They own both their openness and closed-ness, even while they're feeling more one way than the other. For ironic ambigamists, the dream partner is someone with whom they can merge their ambivalence. Their partnership is one in which each partner winkingly recognizes that the other is an appropriately skeptical individual, even while both parties do what they can to keep the romance, or at minimum the appearance of safe, certain, romance strong and alive. They joke about life on that edge between being one thing and two, a couple and individuals. They give each other room to breath and forgive each other the disconnects when one is closed and the other is open. In other words they respect the inescapable give and take of partnership. In contrast, bipolar ambigamists, when feeling open can't remember feeling closed, and when feeling closed, can't remember feeling open. So yes they oscillate like any ambigamist, but no, they don't take responsibility for it. If you're feeling romanti 00:09:33 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=436 The podcast is back. Click the buttons above to have this article read or sped-read to you. My writing drives some people crazy because I make big jumps from one topic to another. One minute I'm talking romance, the next I'm talking the origins of life. I aim to edit for smooth transitions but t... Podcasts Sat, 26 Dec 2009 23:54:39 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No The podcast is back. Click the buttons above to have this article read or sped-read to you. My writing drives some people crazy because I make big jumps from one topic to another. One minute I'm ta The podcast is back. Click the buttons above to have this article read or sped-read to you. My writing drives some people crazy because I make big jumps from one topic to another. One minute I'm talking romance, the next I'm talking the origins of life. I aim to edit for smooth transitions but there's a bigger problem than prose styling. I've invested decades in research that trains my mind to follow abstract patterns. I'm doing what the anthropologist Gregory Bateson described as solving for patterns. The details become background; the abstract patterns become foreground. In this article for example, I'll make a connection between love, unemployment, genetics and our changing attitudes about God. Some readers will think I'm comparing apples to oranges to shoelaces but there is method to my madness or at least my colleagues and I think so. You decide for yourself. Abstraction has a bad reputation. I remember once early in this work I described it to a real estate developer friend. He said "sounds very abstract" and I assumed he was being critical. He said no, he meant it positively because "there's nothing so practical as a good abstraction." Pursuit of practical abstractions has a long history. Take the 2,500 year old Tao Te Ching, which Alan Watts once described as an attempt "to know the patterns, structures, and trends of human and natural affairs so well that one uses the least amount of energy dealing with them." In other words, if you recognize patterns with greater accuracy, you make fewer mistakes, which frees you to enjoy life more. Solving for pattern is itself enjoyable. Familiarity with the abstract patterns can make your life more like art, a microcosm for the cosmic. Art exposes the abstract patterns that show up across arenas. Think of the way we savor the calligraphy of music or the metaphors in poetry and fiction. They satisfy a natural human desire for what I'll call pattern sensuality. As a pattern sensualist cultivating pattern fluency, I get to read my life like good fiction. No matter whether I'm winning or losing, hurting or happy, I'm always harvesting abstract insights into the patterns and structures of human and natural affairs. A friend claims I saved her career once by drawing cosmic parallels. She's an intellectual property lawyer and about ten years ago was thinking about quitting because the work was so dry and soulless. I laid out the ways her work addressed one of the meatiest toughest judgment calls in all of life, the question of when to be open. I drew parallels between her work and central themes in evolutionary biology, romance, politics, friendship and warfare. The conversation inspired her. She thanks me to this day. Indeed, here's a Christmas gift offer from me to you. If you find yourself feeling flat about your career, I'd do the same for you. Just respond here with a short description of your work and I'll write you back something about its relevance to profound abstract patterns. I've long wanted to write a series of books on the meaning of life as revealed through different career paths. Accounting as a source of general wisdom--that sort of thing. Still, I don't let my friend's gratitude go to my head. That's because of the pattern I want to talk about today. My cosmic re-description of her law work may have helped her stick with it for a few months at most, but I've watched her over the years and her commitment is less about the meaning of her work than the immediate incentive structure built into her daily interactions. People expect things of her that she succesfully delivers. She is like a reciprocating engine. She produces; clients demand more; she produces; clients demand more. She may occasionally wake up to doubts about her work, but by the time she gets to work, she's just in it. As with all of us her self-motivation is less a p 00:11:44 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=435 The podcast is back. Click the buttons above to have this article read or speedread to you. Meg, a single woman in San Francisco had her habits and routines. She did yoga after work pretty much every day. Some nights she got together with friends; other nights she stayed home and watched DVDs or ... Podcasts Wed, 16 Dec 2009 03:51:14 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No The podcast is back. Click the buttons above to have this article read or speedread to you. Meg, a single woman in San Francisco had her habits and routines. She did yoga after work pretty much eve The podcast is back. Click the buttons above to have this article read or speedread to you. Meg, a single woman in San Francisco had her habits and routines. She did yoga after work pretty much every day. Some nights she got together with friends; other nights she stayed home and watched DVDs or read. Her friends introduced her to Mark, a single guy from Oakland about ten miles away. Like Meg he enjoyed spending some nights out, but he insisted on practicing guitar every night. They dated and time together felt good.  They liked being out as a couple among friends.  They liked cuddling at one or the other’s apartment watching DVDs or reading.  When one was feeling down the other was usually up so they balanced each other’s spirits nicely. Each felt stronger with the other. Now they’ve been together about four years. Mark moved into Meg’s place and now pays half the rent. They have a new dog, Beano. They never wonder whether they belong together, but of course there are incompatibilities.  Meg likes Mark’s guitar playing, but sometimes they stay home so he can practice when she would rather go out. Mark is glad Meg is so fit but sort of wishes she didn’t insist on going to yoga after work because it means he has to come home right away to walk Beano.  “Love takes work,” Mark says, “but it’s worth it.” Freud said “Love and work…work and love, that's all there is…love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.” The pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles said that love and strife were the primary moving factors not just for humans but also for the whole universe. I’m single again and dating, thinking about what it takes to make a couple. And I’m also still part of a research team working on the emergence of life from non-life (the field is simply called “emergence.”). Between these two activities I find myself agreeing with Freud and Empedocles.   Love and work are the cornerstones of humanness but they’re universal too.  If you’ll work with me, I think I can explain the connection. Things, living and otherwise have their habits, the behaviors they spontaneously produce. A billiard ball on a table will just keep sitting there.  A ball rolling down an incline will keep rolling.  As singles, Meg does yoga after work; Mark practices guitar at night. Those are their habits independent of new outside influences. In Meg and Mark’s case we’d say they do those things because they love them. In our emergence research we’re calling this “orthograde” behavior.  Ortho- means straight and -grade means incline. It’s what things are inclined to do if they do what is normal or “straight” for them.  Orthograde behavior is spontaneous or internally-generated behavior. Things with different spontaneous habits or orthogrades come into contact.  The rolling ball hits the stationary ball. Meg and Mark meet and move in with each other. In interaction the balls change each other’s behavior.  The formerly-stationary ball moves; the rolling ball’s path changes.  Likewise, when Meg and Mark move in together, they change each other’s behavior too.  Behavior under a new influence is called “non-spontaneous.”  It’s not that it’s un-natural.  After all, interaction is natural.  But it’s non-spontaneous with respect to what the balls or people did before interaction. We emergentists call the interaction between two orthogrades a “contragrade.” Contra-, of course means against. Contragrade interactions change behavior. In fact, that’s the physical science definition of work. Work shifts behavior from spontaneous to non-spontaneous, from what things would do on their own to what they do under each other’s influences. If, one morning you noticed that your parked car had a new dent in it, you would not think that the car had 00:10:35 http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/ http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/good-chemistry-valentines-reflections-on-a-bad-but-convenient-metaphor/?file=429 The podcast is back. Click the buttons above to have this article read or spedread to you. A Holiday gift for someone thoughtful in your life? Consider the New York Times Best-selling graphic novel Logicomix. It's a beautiful story about the death of the 2,400-year-old dream of creating a system... Podcasts Mon, 07 Dec 2009 17:49:08 EST mindreadersdictionary@gmail.com No The podcast is back. Click the buttons above to have this article read or spedread to you. A Holiday gift for someone thoughtful in your life? Consider the New York Times Best-selling graphic nove The podcast is back. Click the buttons above to have this article read or spedread to you. A Holiday gift for someone thoughtful in your life? Consider the New York Times Best-selling graphic novel Logicomix. It's a beautiful story about the death of the 2,400-year-old dream of creating a system of logic that wasn’t founded on the shaky ground of intuitive assumptions. The central character is Bertrand Russell. Though he failed, his Herculean effort did contribute to the invention of the computer. It also led to mathematician Kurt Godel’s major revelation: It wasn’t just Bertie’s logic system that failed. No matter how they’re built, any and all systems of logic will be built on shaky unprovable intuitions. In other words, it is possible to build great sturdy towers of thought, but they’ll all have loose foundations. The philosopher Richard Rorty applies this to everyday life. If some smart alec responded to every assertion you made by asking “yes, but why?”, within the limits of your patience you could reason your way to answers: Why do you work? Because that’s how I earn a living. Why do you earn a living? Because that’s how I pay for the things I need and want. And why do you pay for the things you need and want? Because it’s good to have them. And why is it good to have them? ... At some point you would be unable to explain. Your response would be tautological, in other words circular, where the answer is just a restatement of the question: “It’s good because it’s good!” Rorty calls this your “final vocabulary.” At the edge of your powers of explanation, you’ve got no logical traction. What you say is unfounded and yet final. All you can say is, “It just is.” With Godel’s discovery of logic’s limits, a final vocabulary isn’t optional. We all have one. Every great scientific theory has one. Our thoughts and conversations are thus like explorations around an expanse of blacktop surrounded on all sides by sand. We have traction up to the edge, but if we go over our wheels spin. In this context, a debate can become like a game of chicken, with two people trying to drive each other off the edge. The smart alec asks question after question until you fall onto your final vocabulary. She can then say, “Look at you. You’re a joke. You believe things without a strong foundation. You’re making assumptions!” Socrates is remembered as a humble, inquiring man but he famously confronted self-certain Athenians with their own final vocabularies. By question alone he drove his fellow citizens into the sand. A few of his students became infamous smart alecs. By imitating Socrates, they made others look dumber and themselves look smarter. Two ended up with so much confidence in their own assumptions they became tyrants. Socrates himself meant well. He believed that with more inquiry comes more careful thought. Inquiry is how you build out the blacktop to where you have traction everywhere in all directions. When I say that the dream of building a system of logic not founded on shaky ground is 2,400 year-old, I’m dating it to Socrates. And now that dream is dead. But the smart alec isn’t. Plenty of people still use what I’ll call the ad laxus (against the looseness) fallacy: It’s the smart alec’s fallacious assumption that because she can drive you into your own traction-less final vocabulary, her own reasoning must be solid. You’ve got to watch out for that. Don’t let anyone take you down saying, “You don’t know that for sure.” No one knows anything for sure. And as with all fallacies, this one has an opposite: Just because nothing can be known for sure, it doesn’t necessarily mean your assumptions are as good as hers. In my next article I’ll suggest a way of thinking about how to evaluate ideas 00:06:55