Irrational Focus

A very simple way to look at many of our world's problems is in terms of 'control'. There are plenty of people out there that want to control others. Some people allow this, but often many do not. When control issue arise, both sides feel justifed in their agenda, both put significant effort into the brewing conflict. Sometimes control issues are justified. We live in large collective groups for which we need to abide by a common set of principle and rules. This benefits all of us, but not everyone realizes it. So we'll always need to have people in a controlling position to enforce the rules and deal with those who go against them. It is easy to understand that for an issue like 'murder' this is a very good thing.  Sometimes control issues are are problematic. Some people think that things would get better if they personally had even more control. If they could just control the little things, keep all of the people in line, then our world would be a happier pla...

I feel guilty. It's been years since I last ranted about the irrational nature of our modern world, yet some readers desperately hang on waiting for a post. I wish I could say that in the interim we've managed to fix the world, correct the injustices and become a rational global society so there is nothing left to write about, but that's pretty much the opposite of what has happened. Rather, bad economics saw us slip a little farther down the notch of insanity, while most of us tried to hide from the madness. As a species we seem to pride ourselves as being "intelligent" but then we go off and do the stupidest things. We may know more than our ancestors, but we seem incapable of applying that knowledge collectively to better our lives, our planet or even ourselves. We keep buying into that next vile of cheap snake oil in the hopes that "this time it really will cure us" without every really considering that our problems are always caused by 'buying s...

There are two types of problems we face as a species: a) natural and b) control. Natural problems are a competition between us and a rather unstable planet. Gradually we've have started small, but over time we have learned to tame larger and larger problems. This trend will continue. Control is by far our most significant problem. Basically as a part of cooperation, we cede control of our actions to other. But as a result of competition, there is a never ending supply of people who want more control. And so, most problems can be framed in terms of who is trying to control whom, and why. Most conflicts result from a rejection of that controlling effort. Because the duality of cooperation and competition define our relationships, we're perpetually fated to repeat the same struggles. We need cooperation to survive, but we rely on competition to excel. Without initial cooperation, there is no basis for competition (there must always be a game to play), but in order to increas...

Much has been lost in our modern world. Our societies have exploded with wanton complexity, cloaking our actions in a veil of confusion. As we stumble about, it is important that we reoriented ourselves back to a saner version of morality. Without this, we so easily lose sight of what is truly important in our brief but tumultuous existence. It’s hard to say what makes a person ‘good’. There are still many good people out there, and they cover a broad spectrum of attitudes and behaviors. Bad however isn’t too hard to define. Pretty much every bad person that ever lived, lived a life of self-obsession. They are, it always seems, the center of their own universe. They come in all shapes and sizes, but their selfishness, self-absorption and self-centeredness lump them together into a rather obvious pile. Bad people are bad because they mostly choose themselves over others. That choice, although rooted in our instinct for self preservation, pits their actions against their p...

A meritocracy sounds like a great idea. After all, it supposedly lets the best people rise to the top, the ones that have the most merit. Unfortunately, it seems to rarely work that way. Merit ideally comes from what people have actually done, their contributions in a specific area. But the visibility of merit comes from self-promotion. That is, if you do a lot of work, but nobody notices, then it is unlikely to be recognized. As such, to get a lot of merit one has to make sure their peers are aware of their contributions. This naturally favors extroverted people, those that like interacting with others. Introverts on the other hand, are more likely to keep their heads down and just quietly contribute in the background. In time, the personality bias would work itself out. That is, the strength of the contributions would over shadow the self-promotion. Well, except that there are many ways to ‘game the system’. The most obvious and most common is for extroverts to take c...

Complexity is an odd beast. As it grows it encompasses more and more stuff, eating it up like a ravenous dinosaur. And it’s all these little tidbits -- things that vary -- that combine to become the real underlying problem. If you don’t understand these ‘variables’ then you can’t truly tame the complexity; bend it towards your goals. But our species has always had a problem in dealing with too many things at once. We can take only a few select issues into account; we can’t fathom the whole picture. We do not see the beast for what it has become and as such we simply focus on a leg, or a tail, or some other part in seclusion from the whole. We narrow down our vision, while convincing ourselves that we can see the whole thing. But we can’t. When you seek to change a complex multi-variable system -- particularly one that is massive, ugly and hugely chaotic -- simply fiddling with a small piece of it will always generate unpredictable results. That’s OK if you’re expecting i...

A while back I asked one of my frequent readers -- Mark Miller -- if he had any suggestions for possible posts. His reply was: The only topic suggestion I can think of right now is how universities at the undergraduate level are focusing more on career training, and are getting away from their core mission to cultivate "good sense, sobriety of thought, reasonableness, candor, self-command, and steadiness of view,” and, “[the] force, the steadiness, the comprehensiveness and the versatility of intellect,” which would enable people to enter “with comparative ease into any subject of thought” and take up “with aptitude any science or profession.” It’s a good issue for me to discuss right now since I’ve been delving into various works of cognitive sciences. My recent set of inquiries has been driven by a reoccurring interest in how our intelligence relates back to mathematics and computer science. The three all share some fundamental properties, but that is probably...