Shoegazing with Spectacles

For all that I make a big effort to expand and refine my perspective, and try to keep ego at bay as a conflict of interest, in the end I don't know whether I overvalue or undervalue my own observations. It feels like both. And ultimately, value tends to be subjective, so both answers could be valid.

Accuracy isn't everything: I could spend my whole life accurately copying out the 1s and 0s of a reality TV episode by hand. Even with perfect accuracy, that would be a waste of a life (in my opinion, but come on). Accuracy isn't everything, and a big chunk of value is subjective. But lots of value is transferable.

This is probably too much navel-gazing for most people. And it's exactly where I think, "Is there a point to the thought? Could it lead anywhere useful, actionable?" It feels like an unsolvable maze. A dead end.

You can ask other people, listen to feedback. You have to. But other people are in the same quandary. Accuracy can be very costly, difficult to attain and difficult to verify after that. Value is certainly subjective but there's enough overlap that we can start to believe some value is real, isn't just in our heads. So we make some effort at accuracy where we perceive it's valuable, through our own instincts and reasons and the feedback we hear and the money and other material rewards available. It's all a patchwork.

But because it's complicated, there are many places we can go wrong. We often won't even know it. When the problem is difficult enough, you don't even know whether you're solving it or not. You're in the dark and in the silence, not only for your shot, but also for most or all the time after.

I told you this was getting too omphaloskeptic (a fun word for "navel-gazing") for most people. Sometimes the worst answer in the world is "It's complicated, it depends," even though that's the best answer we can give.

I'm talking about what the Serenity Prayer talks about, "and the wisdom to know the difference." We do wisdom a disservice, and ourselves and our fellows, when we portray wisdom as easier and simpler than it really is. Wisdom is not equally available to all at all times. False identicality is a misuse of equality. If we conclude that political equality implies we all have the same strengths and weaknesses, the same a priori capacities exactly, then we run logic backwards into that brick wall at high speed. We cannot ordain that every individual is in wisdom identical. We cannot treat everyone as if they begin at the same beginning and only deviate by their own fully informed choices, or else by the malicious and unfair incursions of others. That is inaccurate and its "value" is a slow-acting poison, a loose thread unravelling the fabric.

We do not begin the same, we are not the same in the middle, and we do not end the same. We are only the same, apparently, before conception and after death. Never while we experience are we the same as anyone else.

We have enormous amounts in common. And I don't mean to try to isolate anyone from our senses of unity and shared humanity. But I hope you already knew I wasn't dismissing any of that. I was simply pointing out the obvious, because it's relevant.

We are often similar but never the same. The pieces that are identical - individual highly conserved genes for example - diverge enormously, still, once in context. The same string of nucleotides means something else in a different cell, or in a cell that's in a different mood. Multiply that by tens of thousands, millions, billions of pieces, or trillions or more, depending on what building blocks you use and how close two need to be to be called "same."

The best we can do is apply all our senses and improve them as well as we can.

> 2

I've always been a huge fan of the idea of dialectic - two opposites that can't agree, but there's some deeper truth neither is quite getting that explains the confusion. The yin-yang is one representation. It's also called thesis + antithesis = synthesis.

We live in a field day for dialectic.

It's important to recognize that dialectic doesn't mean that in every opposition, the synthesis lies directly in the middle. That would be called the middle-ground fallacy, bothsidesism, or false balance.

One way I remind myself of this is, I say, "There are MORE THAN two sides to every story." When you recognize that, and keep it in mind, you're less likely to fall for either pole or some mythical happy land where all claims are equally true and false.

In the US political spectrum, I avoided identifying as a Democrat specifically until I really felt I had no choice. But I've never called myself an Independent. Independents seem to fall for the middle-ground fallacy a lot. I'll never forget those well-meaning, respectable people on the eve of the 2016 election, in town halls, responsibly asking questions at the mic, reading from their note cards. They couldn't decide who would be better for our country, and they were going to ask just the right questions to find out.

They were all massively deluded, I'm afraid. They had fallen for bothsidesism.

But anyway. People make mistakes. They weren't trying to be confused. They just were.

It's my natural inclination to gently pull people, including myself, away from poles - not all extremes under the supposition that all extremes are wrong, but just in general by pointing out what hasn't been said, yet is surely relevant. The simpler the better. Often this takes the form of a "maybe." Maybes are very important, because if you are closed to maybes, you become inflexible.

I've learned to choose my timing better, and I've learned that if it doesn't feel natural to say something, it probably won't feel natural to hear it. Sometimes you still press on, sometimes you wait. Sometimes you find better words. Sometimes you only have one chance to affect someone, but if they feel you yanking them around, they will become resistant, or even more resistant than before. Often a person hears you better if you say something once and they know where you stand, but you don't lecture or chide. These are my personal findings, anyway, mixed with research I've read and the opinions of people who know about this stuff.

After all, at work it's my job to affect people. I'm supposed to change people's minds. But it isn't an agenda. They're supposed to walk out knowing and understanding more, and feeling less stuck.

My philosophy here clashes with progressive notions about ostracizing what we don't like, in an effort to fight it or control it. And my stance on that is actually very simple. Each person can choose who or what to ostracize or boycott. Personally, I like to remember that if I refuse to talk to someone, that person goes right on existing no less than before. It rarely sends much of a message. We think it does. But still, there are times when that message can work.

In my opinion, silence says nothing. All it does is amplify what's around it. So if you go silent, you amplify whatever you said most recently, and whatever you might say after the silence. The silence itself, however much we might like to believe in its eloquence, says nothing on its own. To believe silence speaks volumes is otherwise known as passive aggression. To believe silence is consent is, at the extreme, rape.

We need to fight for justice. It doesn't establish itself. It doesn't just grow in the soil with sunlight and water. But let's not forget the importance of sunlight and water and soil and growth. We spend too much time refusing to understand people who cause problems, because we believe that understanding, compassion, empathy - in short, humanization - ends up promoting evil. This is not actually true. If we stand around and watch evil happen and do nothing, then we are implicitly promoting it, in a sense. That would be condoning. At the same time, all of us are limited. We can't help but condone most of the world's problems, if we are honest with ourselves. We know there are a great many problems, and we are not solving all of them, or even most of them.

What I would like to see is more of a focus on science. What does science say about what will help the problems we face? In the area of social justice, I usually see very little in the way of citing research. And I'm sure that's partly because a lot more research needs to be done. But more research will be done if we take more interest in it. Then there will be more demand for research, and, eventually, by various routes, less demand for prisons. We all believe that loudly condemning what we don't like shakes the baddies down and shows them we mean business. Policing basic, necessary standards is critical. But this symbolic show of force that everyone believes in, this moral fire and brimstone, only goes so far, and can even backfire. It does not actually solve the problems we believe that, if we are only loud and insistent enough, it will solve.

Solving a problem without understanding it is called "luck."

Fully understand a problem and it melts.

That's dialectic.

A Balloon of Gaskets

Republicans these days have a simple, common-sense view of regulation. For Republicans, regulations mean "do" or "do not," and like any sensible person who loves freedom, they infer that too many of those means too little freedom and prosperity.

But there are many kinds of regulation. Your brain, for example, is a regulator.

"Do" and "do not" may appear to restrict freedom while increasing it. Forbidding smoking on airplanes increases net freedom. And if the cravings become unpleasant enough that some smokers quit smoking, then this has lengthened lives and healthspans, which increases freedom. Of course, you are free to smoke, addict yourself, and limit your own freedom as you see fit. But you are not free to limit other people's freedom while limiting your own. When you smoke on an airplane, you make a choice for everyone on the plane without asking them. And so forbidding smoking "for" other people on an airplane (people who did not choose to smoke, nor would they) increases net freedom, without any doubt in the matter.

At the most basic level, once you get past "do" and "do not," the simplest kind of regulation is actually a thermostat. The principle of the thermostat is what allows your body and mind to operate so beautifully. Our genes are, yes, often "do" or "do not" signals, but also often thermostats. Homeostasis, a fundamental principle of life, is another way of talking about the thermostat - albeit many, interconnected. And so it's both sensible and revealing to look at every brain as a large, highly evolved tangle of electrochemical thermostats embodying regulations. Without those regulations, you would not exist to call yourself free.

So draw your own conclusions about how much you want to remove regulations and treat them as automatically a problem.

The drive to keep legal regulations concise and intuitive is a solid one (people cannot intentionally follow rules they do not know, remember, or understand), but it should really attend to individuals before it attends to businesses. Businesses can fail and reform without loss of individual life. No individual comes back from the grave. Protect individuals well, and you also protect business. Protect businesses in a way that seems well at first, and you may end up undermining individuals and businesses both.

Sensation Firewall

There is at least one long-standing theme in my thinking about social change. Usually people like to assign responsibility for social patterns. We give ownership of responsibility for the Department of Education to one person. Then when things go wrong, we know who to blame. If they themselves can isolate the blame to one person under them, they fire the person and everyone moves on.

I'm not saying this paradigm never works. It often works. It's a component of meritocracy. But there is an interesting, permanent shortfall. By focusing on individuals, we keep overlooking the systems.

To some extent, holding one person to account for a system failure is a way to appease anger without making the larger concessions of fixing the system.

Hate is a normal enough human emotion which I define as "anger + disgust, justified or rationalized so it gets stuck." To my knowledge everyone has the first experience, anger + disgust; the second step, applying reason to cling to it, is optional. For me, it's also inadvisable - it's misery and seems to cloud judgment.

So yes, we choose and we are responsible. Leaders take that on more than most. Existentialism gives a great, simple answer here: whatever you do, that's what you did. You're fooling yourself to think otherwise. It's the one aspect of morality that is up for no debate at all.

Let's get back to social change. It's social. And it's change.

For that, I suggest "anger + disgust" is normal and often drives constructive awareness and action. But that is not healthy as a permanent condition, and I think we do have choice in it. And while I don't think we should command each other how to feel, it is totally fine to share how we feel, and make suggestions. My policy? In the end, for clarity and humanity if possible, hate the game, not the player. And then don't even hate the game. Go and fix it. Or at least suggest ways it can be fixed, and talk about ways it can be fixed.

We don't do this enough. We assume the key systems can't be altered. I don't understand why... except that I think we are a little too preoccupied with the model of one individual owning an institution's responsibility.