…besides the obvious, of course. Even if I were on friendly terms with many of the people there, there’s a problem I have with OCON, and the general attitude within that culture. And what I’m about to say applies to, like, 80% of the people there. There are notable exceptions, like Lisa or Andy, who kick so much more ass than everyone else there combined.
It’s this fact that when I was at my first conference, I had the feeling that these people were changing the world, or going to. I felt like I was at the hub of something exciting and world-changing. And then, as I attended subsequent conferences and got to know the community better, and as I got to know about the wider world, I was disabused of this notion.
It’s not just the divisiveness and in-fighting, though that’s part of it. The wider problem is… let’s say that all in-fighting was resolved, and the ARI was granted a billion dollars, or anyone at that conference. The fact is they’d… write books, or publish op-eds or, at best, set up more schools and fund more teaching positions at Universities.
My point really is that there’s a lot of intellectually stimulating stuff that goes on in those circles - all kinds of fascinating lectures about all sorts of topics, and they have slowly become more and more about how to actually applying the philosophy in one’s own life. But even then, the ambition is just so small and so limited.
Contrast this to TED, or any number of conferences, where really bright or adventurous people are brought together. And not just to have drinks and pontificate, but to actually arrange new business proposals and new strategies to employ, for how they’re going to change the world.
It’s very much an Underpants Gnome kind of situation, where there’s this expectation that we’ll just understand the philosophy, talk about it to people and then…. something something better culture. There’s rarely any specificity in any of the discussions, any real outcomes that are spoken of. At best you might hear talk of how many more actual Objectivists there are in the world now, but more often you simply hear that there’s a few more papers been published, and a vague hope that somehow this will somehow produce a better culture somehow down the road.
Meanwhile, elsewhere, a group of engineers and entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are meeting to discuss how to terraform the planet and create a sustainable ecosystem where agricultural industries are able to live in harmony with nature and with other industries in the world, improving human flourishing and creating a more beautiful world.
When I ask myself, “Who’s really going to matter, down the road?” I find it hard to get too upset about missing the chance to overhear an overweight 40 year-old wearing a fanny-pack spout off half-assed opinions on epistemology to his friend, before they go to dinner to talk about how many letters they’re totally gonna plan to write to the editor this year maybe if they get the time, after they’ve finished arguing with someone on facebook about how Islam will surely destroy us all.
I’m gonna go hang out with the people doing the actually cool stuff that’s changing the world. Cool? Cool.
These experiments showed how people could be primed to make larger commitments to someone, based on smaller commitments. They weren’t simply convinced that Action X2 was a good action to take on its own - they made that decision because the experimenter convinced them to take Action X1, and by taking Action X1 it set them into a mode of thinking, “I am the sort of person who does Action X”.
In simpler terms: by actively making the decision to do something, it created a certain self-image about them being the kind of person who ought to do similar things, regardless of how they might objectively assess the value of that action. Their desire for consistency in self-image pushed them to value something more than they might otherwise.
Consider a corollary of this. See, these were volitional actions: people agreeing to petitions to do something. What happens in the case of being subjected to violence? What happens when you accept being the victim of violence as the normal part of your life? You self-identify as someone who is coerced every day. You accept that a group of people may threaten you and take a portion of your wealth every single day. How much further can they push the envelope on the basis of this?
It is said that a people is pushed so far, until they cannot take it anymore. This facet of human behaviour might suggest otherwise: small pushes, increased slowly overtime, are pretty much irresistible. By not fighting the smaller intrusions of government into one’s life, one finds it harder to actually put up a fight against the larger intrusions. Being a victim is so natural that one becomes apathetic about the whole thing, and can’t find the will to oppose the greater acts of violence.
And the machine keeps pressing on, regardless.
and you’re hampered by not having any,
the best way to solve the dilemma, you’ll find,
is simply by spinning a penny.
No — not so that chance shall decide the affair
while you’re passively standing there moping;
but the moment the penny is up in the air,
you suddenly know what you’re hoping.
www.phys.ufl.edu/~thorn/grooks.html
On a similar note, from over at Less Wrong: whenever asking if you are really committed to something or not, ask yourself if you’d still want to keep going through with it if everything went wrong, committing yourself to fixing all the problems as they arise. If you’re not willing to do that, you’re probably not committed enough to the project. It’s not that what can go wrong will go wrong (though, some things WILL go wrong, and you have to really force yourself to think of them, because you can be a bit biased against seriously considering what will go wrong), but a commitment means more than idling along through something with minimal effort.
I don’t understand what it is about the idea of a “medium” that people find so confusing; it’s a conceptual space where works that share certain characteristics may occur. Nobody is going to approve of the entire continuum. There’s no shortage of games for the broadest possible audience - there isn’t, and grotesque sums are being made seeking the wide part of the curve. There are also niches, as in any ecology. You can certainly find things you don’t like, but those things aren’t anti-matter; when they come into contact with things you do like, there is no hot flash which obliterates both. This totalizing dialogue, where “everything” and “everyone” is this or that, and here are the teams, and morality is a linear abstraction as opposed to its three dimensional reality is a crock of fucking shit.
The swooning and fainting and so forth about this stuff, the fever, is comical in its preening intensity. There is clearly some kind of competition to determine who is the most scandalized. It reminds me of church, frankly; I don’t do church, either. I have no common cause with perpetually shocked viziers of moral pageantry. Indeed, I think it is fair to say that I am their enemy.
The answer is always more art; the corollary to that is the answer is never less art. If you start to think that less art is the answer, start over. That’s not the side you want to be on. The problem isn’t that people create or enjoy offensive work. The problem is that so many people believe that culture is something other people create, the sole domain of some anonymized other, so they never put their hat in the ring. That even with a computer in your pocket connected to an instantaneous global network, no-one can hear you. When you believe that, really believe it, the devil dances in hell.
Tycho steering his B-52 as he drops a heavy payload of truth bombs, creating a high density truthsplosion.
Many Objectivists would do well to heed the theme of his argument here. It goes beyond art.
Of course real residents of modern high rises are not remotely slaves. Yes landlords can kill residents by cutting off their exit, talk, light, and air. But any landlord that did this would be in a world of trouble, both via losing customers, and via legal punishment. It isn’t just in some libertarian or economist’s fantasy in which market forces keep landlords from enslaving their residents – this is how it actually works in our real world.
Yet, when we look toward our future, and imagine costly techs that could extend life, they keep imagining that such techs would make us slaves of big bad rich firms. For example, see this video on the Singularity, ruined by lawyers:
Came across this and I want to adopt it - though I may be wrong to. I may just be getting caught up in this and getting excited
One of the tactics I want to try about is similar to avoiding sunk costs (whereby you grow attached to an object or plan by way of time and money sunk into it), only it’s being applied to behaviour and thought patterns. We grow attached to certain ideas and ideologies and ways of thinking just because we’ve thought them in the past. And we can be undeservedly attached to them, rationalising away evidence which should otherwise cause us to change our minds.
The tactic is to practice ways of breaking the habit by essentially playing devil’s advocate. Spend time challenging your own beliefs, not just finding reasons to believe the opposite but actually just imagining yourself thinking a contrary belief. Imagining what that feels like, to weaken the layers of time which have strengthened your commitment to that belief, leaving only the actual evidence and good reasoning which founds that belief.
It’s not just about challenging your reasoning or finding reasons you might be wrong - it’s prior to that: it’s about becoming comfortable with the idea that you might be wrong, so that you’re more open then to honestly accepting challenges to your reasoning and evidence.
That said, one has to be careful not to then simply become so comfortable with the idea of the contrary side that one becomes one of these people who is fashionably sceptical about everything, and patronises anyone who doesn’t share their disdain for certainty.
This is really interesting stuff (though I’m open to the idea that it’s not and I’m full of crap).
But Tenbrunsel says that we are frequently blind to the ethics of a situation.
Over the past couple of decades, psychologists have documented many different ways that our minds fail to see what is directly in front of us. They’ve come up with a concept called “bounded ethicality”: That’s the notion that cognitively, our ability to behave ethically is seriously limited, because we don’t always see the ethical big picture.
One small example: the way a decision is framed. “The way that a decision is presented to me,” says Tenbrunsel, “very much changes the way in which I view that decision, and then eventually, the decision it is that I reach.”
Essentially, Tenbrunsel argues, certain cognitive frames make us blind to the fact that we are confronting an ethical problem at all.
Psychology Of Fraud: Why Good People Do Bad Things : NPR
Diana and I could have a field day discussing this.
“Given this disconnect from the income statement, the pricing by balance sheet multiple seems to be a symptom of something deeper. Reasons vary with the seasons, but the company is not perceived to have sustainable growth.”
Fascinating. The collective wisdom of Wall Street is that one of the most successful high-tech companies of all times, with three healthy product lines, strong management, generally happy customers and employees is not perceived to have sustainable growth.
We’ll see.
For many years before the lawsuit, Microsoft had virtually no Washington “presence.” It had a large office in the suburbs, mainly concerned with selling software to the government. Bill Gates resisted the notion that a software company needed to hire a lot of lobbyists and lawyers. He didn’t want anything special from the government, except the freedom to build and sell software. If the government would leave him alone, he would leave the government alone.
At first this was regarded (at least in Washington) as naive. Grown-up companies hire lobbyists. What’s this guy’s problem? Then it was regarded as foolish. This was not a game. There were big issues at stake. Next it came to be seen as arrogant: Who the hell does Microsoft think it is? Does it think it’s too good to do what every other company of its size in the world is doing?
Ultimately, there even was a feeling that, in refusing to play the Washington game, Microsoft was being downright unpatriotic. Look, buddy, there is an American way of doing things, and that American way includes hiring lobbyists, paying lawyers vast sums by the hour, throwing lavish parties for politicians, aides, journalists, and so on. So get with the program.
Try your hardest. No, really. Your actual hardest.
I don’t know about you, but often times I confuse “not being totally lazy” with “trying hard.” If I look back on high school, I realize that what I thought was “trying hard” was actually about 50% of what I was capable of. College required about 70% of my best effort and graduate school called for about 90% (with the occasional bit of 95% in that damn grammar class!)
And I think we all know what trying our hardest feels like, in anything that we’re attempting:
* doing all of the readings (before class!), attending the study session and meeting with your prof if you have questions
* networking with people in the field you want to get into, learning the applicable software, attending workshops and volunteering for big, hard projects that nobody wants to do
* asking your friends if they know anybody they can set you up with, giving internet dating a try, talking to cute strangers and going out with the perfectly nice guy you’re not sure about
I find that when I know that I’ve tried my hardest, that I’ve done absolutely everything within my power to be successful at a given project, whether or not I succeed becomes almost secondary. You can’t do anything else, you’ve given it all you’ve got. There’s nothing to get psyched out about.
Also - when you’ve realllly tried your hardest? You’re pretty likely to succeed, right?
Most of where fear and risk assessment combine are more mundane, but they highlight the hypocrisy in people’s decision-making processes. As a scholar who studies youth culture, parents regularly come up to me and ask what’s the #1 thing that they should do to keep their kids safe. They really want to hear something like “don’t let them on Facebook” or “don’t give them a cell phone.” Their idea of what they should fear is all about new technology. No one is prepared for my response: “Don’t let them get into a car with you.” Invariably, they twist their faces in confusion as I explain that statistically, children are more at-risk in a car than in any other setting they encounter, regardless of who’s driving. To a parent, the car “feels” safe because they feel as though they’re in control. They feel as though they understand the care. Things like the internet do not feel safe because they feel out of control and that they don’t know how these newfangled things operate. Feel is the operative word here; it’s all about perception. Fear is not predicated on risk assessment, but the perception of risk.
[…]
Needless to say, put technology and children into the same sentence and you’ve got a bucket full of fear. Welcome to my world. Online sexual predators. Bullying. Pornography. File-sharing. Sexting. The intersection of youth and technology can pretty universally be described as MORAL PANIC. Moral panics emerge whenever something new happens that disrupts the social order in a way that makes people anxious and afraid. Every new technology has sparked a moral panic. My favorite historical technology moral panic occurred shortly after the sewing machine was invented. Elders worried that women’s purity would be destroyed if women spent all day rubbing their legs up and down together. New genres of content also trigger moral panics. Children’s consumption of comic books triggered mass hysteria. Social media is both a new technology and a new genre of content. No wonder people are panicking.
[…]
Consider the various moral panics that surround young people’s online interactions. The current panic is centered on “cyberbullying.” Every day, I wake up to news reports about the plague of cyberbullying. If you didn’t know the data, you’d be convinced that cyberbullying is spinning out of control. The funny thing is that we have a lot of data on this topic, data dating back for decades. Bullying is not on the rise and it has not risen dramatically with the onset of the internet. When asked about bullying measures, children and teens continue to report that school is the place where the most serious acts of bullying happen, where bullying happens the most frequently, and where they experience the greatest impact. This is not to say that young people aren’t bullied online; they are. But rather, the bulk of the problem actually happens in adult-controlled spaces like schools.
What’s different has to do with visibility. If your son comes home with a black eye, you know something went down. If he comes home grumpy, you might guess. But for the most part, the various encounters that young people have with their peers go unnoticed by adults, even when they have devastating emotional impact. Online, interactions leave traces. Not only do adults bear witness to really horrible fights, but they can also see teasing, taunting, and drama. And, more often then not, they blow the latter out of proportion. I can’t tell you how many calls I get from parents and journalists who are absolutely convinced that there’s an epidemic that must be stopped. Why? The scale of visibility means that fear is magnified.
Don’t wait till you’re sad. Only thinking when you’re sad gives you a skew perspective. Don’t infer that you can think better when you’re sad just because that’s the only time you try to be thoughtful. Sadness often makes it harder to think: you’re farther from happiness, which can make it more difficult to empathize with and understand. Nonethess we often have to think when sad, because something bad may have happened that needs addressing.
Introspect carefully, not constantly. Don’t interrupt your work every 20 minutes to wonder whether it’s your true purpose in life. Respect that question as something that requires concentration, note-taking, and solid blocks of scheduled time. In those times, check over your analysis by trying to confound it, so lingering doubts can be justifiably quieted by remembering how thorough you were.
Re-evaluate on an appropriate time-scale. Try devoting a few days before each semester or work period to look at your life as a whole. At these times you’ll have accumulated experience data from the last period, ripe and ready for analysis. You’ll have more ideas per hour that way, and feel better about it. Before starting something new is also the most natural and opportune time to affirm or change long term goals. Then, barring large unexpecte d opportunities, stick to what you decide until the next period when you’ve gathered enough experience to warrant new reflection.
Too busy to think about life - Less Wrong
Ways to avoid wasted effort in introspection.
