How to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 14: You Have Almost No Understanding of What is Going On.

Chapter 14: You Have Almost No Understanding of What is Going On.

Hello again, hypothetical newborn baby!  I'm here to teach you some of the many Life Lessons I was forced to learn the hard way.  Here are all fourteen lessons in one easy link. 

Let's start off by noting that at this point in your life your parents, your crib, your blanket . . . and me, of course are your entire universe. That's all you've got in front of you, yet you are feeling like there is nothing else that could be worthwhile and there is nothing at all outside of your bedroom door.

Let me tell you about my situation. My toe is hurting.  Nothing major, but it's red and throbbing. When I think about my hurting toe, that thought gets quite big in my consciousness. It almost seems like my throbbing toe is the only thing in the universe.

Here's another example: When I'm thinking about a lawsuit while walking to court through the downtown area, I'm barely aware of anything other than what I'm going to tell the judge when I arrive. I'm not noticing any other people or any cars or that new restaurant going up even though those thing are right in front of me as I walk. Isn’t it weird how our ability to attend to things is so incredibly limited?

Using a technique called conversation shadowing, psychologists Broadbent and Treisman demonstrated that one’s ability to absorb multiple simultaneous conversations is severely limited. Attention is bottlenecked at the site of working memory  during perception. In 1956, George Miller pointed, “[T]he span of absolute judgment and the span of immediate memory impose severe limitations on the amount of information that we are able to receive, process and remember.” George A. Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information." Given that humans have such tiny attentional windows, it is surprising the extent to which we take it for granted that we share the same world. The real world is laughingly beyond our capacity to fathom without rampant simplification. Just because we can say the phrase "the world" doesn't mean we can comprehend more than a trillionth of it at any particular moment.

This is one of the downsides to having a human body. We are incredibly limited in what we can attend to at each moment. That's Part One of a two-part whammy that affects us human animals every hour of every day. This attentional limitation in attention interacts with an equally important phenomenon that I have long thought of as the “illusion of fullness." I'm referring to this: it seems like whatever we are currently seeing or pondering, it's somehow enough for us to feel well-informed when the stream of information we are getting is almost nothing at all.

Morgan House wrote the following in “Ideas that Changed my Life”:

Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works. People believe what they’ve seen happen exponentially more than what they read about has happened to other people, if they read about other people at all. We’re all biased to our own personal history. Everyone. If you’ve lived through hyperinflation, or a 50% bear market, or were born to rich parents, or have been discriminated against, you both understand something that people who haven’t experienced those things never will, but you’ll also likely overestimate the prevalence of those things happening again, or happening to other people.
It's like we see the world through fish-eye lenses. The things that are in front of us look very big, indeed. Yet the things that are not directly in front of us are barely visible or not visible at all. Our perceptual machinery make us (and I’m writing this in a non-judgmental way) extremely self-centered. We are condemned to make severely overconfident and skewed generalizations and to engage in a lifelong adventure of sense-making based on not-nearly-enough awareness about the billion ring circus into which we have been plopped. Each of us is only one out of 8 billion people. You are almost nothing at all in the scheme of things and you are experiencing only the tiniest speck of what is going on, yet it feels like you are sitting in the front row VIP seat to the most important event in the universe.

It takes conscious effort to know what is happening outside of ourselves. This makes it easy to cast ourselves as the heroes of our own story, justifying our routine of putting half of our conscious horsepower to work doing PR, in-person or on Facebook, tooting to everyone who will listen that we are saving the planet by switching to LED bulbs or whatever.

Skip this paragraph if want to continue being the hero of your own story. Human cognitive machinery massively distorts our sense of morality. With very little effort, we can cause any troublesome moral issue to vanish simply by not paying attention to it. In many cases we develop (sometimes consciously at first) deeply ingrained habits of not paying attention to certain aspects of the world, making our immorality conveniently unconscious. Here's a common habit among people who are financially comfortable: Not-thinking that on here on our planet, a child starves to death every 5 seconds. If you have habituated yourself to not-think about this horrible and undeniable fact, it is quite easy to blow a large sums of money in clear conscience on things like haircuts for your poodle, vacations in far-flung places and steady streams of meals at high-priced restaurants. If this troublesome thought ever bubbles up into consciousness, we scrub away all traces of inchoate guilt by reminding ourselves that everyone else we know is behaves much like us and then we run off to purchase some new porch furniture for our vacation home, thus pushing thoughts of child starvation off the tiny stage of attention. If by some chance we experience the prickly thought we are hypocritical, immoral and selfish because we purposely don't think about starving children, we can take care of that troublesome thought too by thinking about something else. We can fix most of our most disturbing thoughts merely by thinking about something else.

[More . . . ]

Continue ReadingHow to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 14: You Have Almost No Understanding of What is Going On.

The Motte and Bailey Approach to Preaching Critical Race Theory (CRT)

The Motte and Bailey tactic used by CRT apologists is described by The Woke Temple on Twitter:

Also on Twitter, I spotted another description by Moe Lastman:

It’s a textbook motte-and-Bailey.

No one is opposing “ideas”, they are opposing the pedagogy which is founded in CRT that teaches white children to be ashamed of the color of their skin and black children to feel like they are powerless victims.

Continue ReadingThe Motte and Bailey Approach to Preaching Critical Race Theory (CRT)

The Under-Appreciated Thin Veneer of Civilization

I recommend this high-energy thoughtful and challenging conversation between Jordan Peterson and Bari Weiss. Do I need to say that I don't agree with everything mentioned during this long conversation? These days, apparently so. There is so much that is honest and good about this open-ended exchange, where these two strong personalities challenge each other and (contrary to the current U.S. zeitgeist) appreciate each other for these challenges.

Here is one of my favorite parts. Those who are steeped in Wokeness so often want to tear everything down, every aspect of the system, all institutions, assuming that there is something good on the other side that will simply organically bloom. This approach is reminding me of fundamentalist libertarianism and fundamentalist conservatives: many of whom believe that great things will simply happen if we just get government out of the way. As though our institutions, which we have crafted over decades and centuries, are not doing Herculaneum work to (imperfectly) set up curbs and guard rails to give us necessary structure to allow human flourishing. I see our (imperfect and always evolving) institutions much like I see traffic laws. Sometimes these institutions seem arbitrary, but they serve to allow people to interact with each other, often in helpful ways that is captured by the definition of "institution" offered by economist Doug North: “humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction." For North, Institutions not bounded by brick and mortar (or by particular people), but by two kinds of constraints: formal and informal. Together, these constraints comprise what John Drobak and North call “the rules of the game.”

[From Julio Faundez, “Douglas North’s Theory of Institutions: Lessons for Law and Development,” Hague Journal on the Rule of Law, October 2016, 8(2), p 373.]

We need a set of basic laws in order to move to the next step, to better things, sometimes to almost-magic seeming levels of complexity. Institutions allow this, but destroyed institutions invite (actually, demand) socio-economic collapse. Society's basic rules (promulgated through our institutions) also remind me of the axioms of geometry. Why assume the truth of axioms? Because if you don't, we can't do geometry!

The tear-it down Woke mentality does not offer any meaningful vision of what is on the other side of tearing it down. There is no real-work path being offered to get from the chaos they preach to anything worth having. These youngsters, many of them from a coddled generation, offer no specifics, only cheap-signaling promises that things will somehow be better. For background on this rather sharp accusation of "coddling," see here, here, here, here and here. Today's young adults have not suffered like many people from prior generations who have seen social-economic collapse. They haven't suffered like many first generation immigrants to the U.S., most of whom are not buying Woke ideology, not for one second. The empty of promises of Woke ideologists remind me of the promises of religious fundamentalists who promise "heaven. The realist in me fills in these empty promises of Woke advocates with things like CHAZ/CHOP (see here, for example) and Evergreen State College. Until I see specifics that convince me otherwise, these two things exemplify the Woke end game.

That is the context for the following excerpt. I have edited only for false starts and to tidy up. The content has not been changed:

Jordan Peterson There is a concern for the dispossessed, and that's what gives the radicals the moral high ground so often. "We're concerned for the dispossessed, aren't you?" It's like, "Well, yes, as a matter of fact, we are." The wielders of these ideas start out with a moral advantage, but the evidence seems to suggest that the very systems they're attempting to tear down are, in fact, the best antidote to the problems that they're laying out. So then the question pops up again: So if that's the case, why the hell is there so much force behind these ideas? What's driving them? And it's associated with that laughter at the thought of violent bloody revolution,

Bari Weiss Because we're so removed from violent bloody revolution. That's why. It's a luxury to flirt with these ideas. Let's just take an example, I'm not wearing long sleeves. You could see my collarbone, I could walk down the street here with my wife and go get a falafel at the end of the street and not be stoned to death. Okay, that's the reality. That's a miracle.

Jordan Peterson That is that's what divides people is whether or not they know that's a miracle.

Bari Weiss Yes. And if you are so removed from the truth of that miracle, and from gratitude for everyone and every idea, every piece of scaffolding that allows for that to be that my reality, then you will have the foolishness. But it's really the luxury in the decadence to flirt with ideas about doing away with it. I am so curious about why certain people feel in their bones, how thin the veneer of civilization is and why other people are so nonchalant about it. I feel like it's a logical question, but I don't know it. v Jordan Peterson I don't know either. When I was in graduate school, I was obsessed with the finitude of life and with mortality and death. I mean, I wake up every morning and think there's no time. Get to it now! I had friends who I would say were more well-adjusted than me. That's certainly part of it. Like they were more emotionally stable, technically speaking, less prone to depression and anxiety. So that's part of that. It was that those ideas never entered the theater of their imagination. Right? They just weren't a set of existential problems for them. For me, it's always been Paramount.

Continue ReadingThe Under-Appreciated Thin Veneer of Civilization