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About Tyson

Love writing all kinds of stuff including fiction, non-fiction, editorials, etc. But writing software is the only writing I do for love AND money!

Any Fool Can Do It

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SurvivorOn October 9th, 1989, I watched an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation entitled “The Survivors” that made quite an impression on me. In it, Captain Picard and his crew encounter an elderly couple living in an unnatural oasis on a devastated planet. It turns out that the wife is a phantasm, an unknowing replica of the actual wife, now long dead. She was conjured by her husband Kevin, a godlike being who was devoted to her before her death and who has remained so centuries after.

By the way, Kevin was played by the iconic character actor John Anderson (see here). You probably don’t know his name, but if you watched any television from the early 50’s to the early 90’s, you cannot fail to recognize his distinctively Lincoln-esque countenance and voice.

Anyway, at the end Kevin reveals his shameful secret. When the planet he was living on with his wife was attacked by hostile aliens called the Husnock, he tried his best to use his powers to trick or dissuade them. Those efforts failed. Refusing to take any life, even those of the deplorable Husnocks, Kevin stood passively by as they devastated his planet and killed his wife along with the rest of her people.

The anguish of this loss caused him to lose control of himself, releasing a momentary outburst of uncontrolled rage. As Kevin told it:

“I went insane. My hatred exploded, and in an instant of grief, I destroyed the Husnock. I didn’t kill just one Husnock, or a hundred, or a thousand. I killed them all. All Husnock everywhere.”

What touched me was not merely the poignant tale of grief and loss and shame and regret. What touched me was what was implied by the story. What touched me was what else the story of Kevin teaches us.

Take note that Kevin was essentially a god. Unlike Thanos, Kevin didn’t need to expend all the power of the Infinity Gauntlet. It only required one stray thought for Kevin to selectively exterminate billions of lives. He was that powerful.

So after watching this episode, I asked myself the logical question. Given all that power, and given Kevin’s deep love and mourning for his wife, why didn’t he simply think her back into existence? Why didn’t he bring back all her people and restore her planet? In fact, given his deep regret, why didn’t he bring back the Husnock and direct them along a better path? Of course he would have… if he could.

The only answer is, he couldn’t.

So the truth, the revelation, the epiphany for the viewer must be that any fool can destroy. Tearing down is easy. It can be done with one errant thought. But even an omnipotent god cannot easily create. Even one as powerful as Kevin cannot in a million years ever recreate what he can mindlessly destroy in an instant.

We humans are certainly not gods, but in this regard we are the same as Kevin. We can easily, even unthinkingly, break a dish, crush a rose, tear someone down, shoot a gun, dash a hope, take a life, smash a historical relic, burn a building, bomb a city, nuke a country, even devastate a planet. Any fool can destroy. But it is immensely difficult, even impossible, to create or restore any of those things.

And what makes us immeasurably worse than Kevin is when we take pride and joy in destroying. When we believe that destroying makes us powerful. It does not. Any fool can destroy. Fools destroy because it makes them feel powerful.

However, it takes real strength and true genius to create.

This applies not only to physical things but to ideas. Any fool can knock down ideas. Any fool can pick them apart and tear them to pieces.  It takes an exceptional person to conceive new ideas and to build on the ideas of others rather than take delight in crushing them.

And this applies to ideas like Democracy as well as to our institutions. It required generations of strong and wise people to create our democratic ideals and institutions. But it only takes a few short years for a weak-minded and craven fool like Donald Trump to mindlessly tear them all irretrievably asunder. Feeling power and even pride in the “dismantling of the administrative state” – without building something stronger and better upon it – is the work of fools.

And we have no shortage of fools.

Why Advocates Fear Success

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LettingGoWe often see it in parents. Parents expend much of their lives raising their children. More than raising them, passionately advocating for them at every stage. They have built a home around them. They have expended much of their wealth to help them grow. Their emotions and their self-identity are wrapped up in their role as parents. They have done everything possible to help their children to succeed. Yet, allowing them to actually succeed, to fly from the nest and diminish their own role as parents, can be those parents’ most difficult challenge.

Similarly, success is the most fervent hope of advocates, yet it can be the most difficult thing for them to accept. Letting go is often difficult not only for advocates, but even more difficult for advocacy organizations and for an entire advocacy movement. You became impassioned, you rallied, you worked much of your life, your built institutions, you fought many battles, maybe even bled, to advance your cause. It’s understandable that it can be hard to let go. Particularly hard when your advocacy is not only your passion, but all you know how to do. Even harder when your financial livelihood and the financial livelihood of so many others depends upon the continued necessity of those advocacy institutions you have built.

The result is that many advocacy groups have a very difficult time dealing with success or an evolving social situation that has made them increasingly irrelevant. Even when 99% of their mission has been achieved, or when far more important issues arise, they still insist they need more funding, more effort, more time, more dedication, because there is just so much yet to be done. They begin to minimize their own accomplishments and exaggerate the remaining problems, so as to justify their continued relevancy as activists.

All movements go through a life cycle, and retirement is not easy for any of them. But I’m not going to name names. I’ll leave that to you to consider. I will say that I myself have long been passionately active in the atheist movement. However, as greater acceptance of atheists has been achieved (although very far from sufficient), as Trump has emerged as an existential threat to Democracy in America, and as climate change has emerged as an existential threat to the planet, I gradually let go of atheism as my primary issue. It wasn’t easy. I did go through a stage where I insisted that atheism was still a vital cause because religion is so much a foundational issue enabling all these other problems. But even that argument, while valid, sounds clingy and desperate to me now compared to so many other immediate threats, like healthcare.

Speaking of healthcare, I do feel compelled to point out one specific case in point, Culinary Union Local 226 in Nevada. They strongly oppose Bernie Sanders because of his proposed Universal Healthcare Plan (see here). They have reportedly gone so far and to pressure and intimidate members who support Sanders.

By the light being shone in this article, it should be easy to see why they would so vehemently oppose Sanders. Let’s face it, while Unions advocate for their members on a wide range of issues, healthcare is their clear raison d’être. Since healthcare in America is so prohibitively expensive, and since while other abuses still exist these are no longer the days of Upton Sinclair, people are driven to unions largely for assistance with healthcare. If Sanders were to eliminate healthcare as a major problem, those unions would lose their major point of leverage. They would no longer be desperately needed by members to advocate for their healthcare.

In my opinion, Culinary Union Local 226 and others are not unlike parents who would rather undermine a daughter’s impending marriage than allow her to leave their nest for a better life. Even if you accept their argument that they are only advocating as best as they can for their members, they are shortsighted because their current “gold” healthcare plan is always at risk. Of course, from their perspective, the risk of losing it is why their members need to continue to support and fund them. And from a more principled perspective, their “we got ours” attitude is simply unconscionable for the good of our nation overall.

 

The Great White Suburban False Hope

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CollinsSenator Susan Collins has long been looked to as a rational, ethical, and principled moderate who surely would be willing to vote against her own party on issues of conscious. In fact, she has worked very hard to cultivate this image.

However after many years of encouraging platitudes from Susan Collins, and pundits predicting her near certain defection, she has almost always fallen in line with the Republican majority. Finally, her moderate facade has become too difficult to perpetuate with a straight face. Because of her long record of disingenuous and cowardly behavior, GQ Magazine published an article that asked whether Susan Collins is not actually more dangerous that Mitch McConnell (see here).

Part of the reason that Collins has gotten away with playing both sides for so long is because she is associated with the “white suburban woman” image. It is easy for us to assume that as a woman, mother, and grandmother she would never vote against the long term habitability of the planet, against a woman’s right to choose, against working families, or support sending our sons and daughters into needless wars. Surely as a white suburban woman she could never condone the actions of a disgusting, repulsive male thug in the White House. Yet she votes against the assumed interests and sensibilities of white suburban women, over and over and over again.

When one considers our profoundly unsatisfying “hope-disappointment” relationship with Susan Collins, one should also consider that this unsatisfying relationship is merely one instance of a far wider and more pervasive “hope-disappointment” dynamic with white suburban women in general.

Over the last couple decades, pundits and advocates in the media keep pointing to white suburban women as our firewall, our great hope. We keep hearing how, just like Susan Collins, they will surely rise up on this next issue. On this next vote, they will be outraged and mobilized. The Republicans have surely taken their hateful agenda a bridge too far for white suburban women!

But the reality is that, like Susan Collins in particular, white suburban women in general almost always fail to vote they way we thought they would. Apparently they are never really as outraged and mobilized as the pundits assume they are, as the activists hope they are, or as the women themselves claim to be.

Yet, despite a long history of Lucy and the Football, we kick it every time and fall on our asses every time. If you google “white suburban women vote” even now, you will find a ton of articles about how “this time” white suburban women are outraged, they’re energized, they’re mobilized, they’ve had enough!

But Vogue published a more fact-based analysis (see here). The authors recount the long history of white suburban women and their voting against their own apparent self-interest. In my personal experience I know a woman who voted for Bush for a second term, even though he had sent her two boys away to fight in a contrived war. Her rationale was “yes he did, but now we need someone strong in the White House to bring them home safely.”

The Vogue article stresses that despite their long history of disappointment, we should not and can not give up on white suburban women to do the right thing. Nor should we disparage them as moral failures or hold them to unrealistic expectations while we neglect to expect more from white suburban men.

But at the same time, fool me once… fool me twice. We should stop expecting Susan Collins to vote with the Progressives, and we should likewise not believe claims that white suburban women will save us. While some advocates might like to make it so by claiming it is so, it may be that a false sense of complacency that white suburban women will save us, is self-defeating.

We need to keep appealing to the best impulses of Susan Collins and all white suburban women. But we should also put aside unrealistic stereotypes, assumptions, and wishful thinking. Undue faith in white suburban women, like our undue faith in Susan Collins, will only benefit our adversaries.

 

A Case Study in Awful Op-Eds

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BrooksA while back I wrote a blog article that rebutted the fallacious rantings by Rand Paul against Democratic Socialism (see here). Now I feel compelled to rise to the defense of Democratic Socialism once again. This time, in response to equally fallacious rantings by David Brooks.

In his recent New York Times article entitled “I Was Once a Socialist. Then I Saw How It Worked,” (see here) opinion columnist David Brooks repackages many of the same manipulations that Rand Paul employed in his campaign to make us fear Democratic Socialism.  The article is frankly terribly written. But rather than simply refute point by point, I’d like to use it to illustrate fallacious, manipulative techniques more generally.

“Inherited Credibility” Largely discount the “New York Times” banner at the top of the article. Yes, the NYT (or any major news outlet) publishes lots of great articles and are worthy of respect. However they publish so many articles that much of it is mediocre and some is downright terrible. Rely upon information from a reliable sources, but don’t let inherited credibility outweigh your objective analysis of any particular article.

“Argument by Authority” Similarly, largely discount the name of the well-known and highly-respected author. This is another form of arguing by authority. Yes, certainly we should give some respect to the opinions of authors who have credentials and a solid reputation. But we all can name endless numbers of pundits who are well-known and highly sought after for their opinions, but who nevertheless have completely lunatic ideas about a lot of things. This is a particularly true when experts in one thing are assumed to be experts in everything. Well-published op-ed authors in particular are pressured to produce a LOT of articles, often on things they know very little about, and with very little oversight or review. Rather than be overly cowed by a pundit because of their name, consider that they might be totally out of their depth or completely misguided in certain areas.

“Appeal to Revelation” David Brooks starts out his article with a rather obvious manipulation. He asserts that he used to be a Socialist, but has since learned the error of his ways. The benign interpretation of this is that he is merely trying to establish his credentials to discuss this topic. But it also serves to manipulate through an appeal to personal revelation. That is, you should believe me because I “saw the light.” But lots of people toss aside rational positions and adopt irrational or even crazy positions later in life. Don’t be overly swayed by the manipulative argument that “I once saw things like you but I got smarter.”

“Misrepresent Your Opponent” Brooks then misrepresents the position of those he is attacking. He claims that Bernie Sanders is not talking about “good” socialism. He does not support this assertion with any fact, but later in his article starts talking about “socialist planned economies” so as to associate that with Democratic Socialism. Again, at this point however, he does not cite even one policy that Bernie Sanders supports that could be fairly described as moving toward a “socialist planned economy.”

“Don’t Bother with Supporting Evidence” Next Brooks touts all of the accomplishments of Capitalism, without of course acknowledging its inherent problems. He claims that economies are simply “too complicated” for Socialist controls, without ever offering a shred of logic to support that claim. Finally, he cites historical benefits of Capitalism, without questioning whether we can reasonably hope to sustain an economy that continues along that same trajectory.

“Hijack Your Opponent’s Strengths” Brooks continues by then making the same fallacious argument that Rand Paul makes. He equates Democratic Socialism to the aberrant socialism of China and Russia. And then he goes on to pull into his “good Capitalist” camp the very countries like Finland and Denmark that Democratic Socialists actually aspire to emulate. He cites statistics of the Democratic Socialist accomplishments of some countries and attempts to claim that those are actually accomplishments of Capitalism.

“Create Your Own Celebrity Endorsements” Brooks next takes time to associate his position with secondary authorities including Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. Sure, it is reasonable to cite greatly respected figures who may endorse your view, but we have to remain vigilant for attempts to cherry-pick endorsements from historical figures, which is what I believe Brooks is trying to do here.

“Appeal To Emotion” Some people – like me – argue that Capitalism is like a religion to many American thinkers – like Brooks and Paul – who very adroitly rationalize their faith with pseudo-economic arguments. In fact, in this article Brooks points out that Capitalism is not a religion, but then he goes on at length to characterize it as having many of the emotional benefits of a religion. Again, a lot of appeal to emotion in this article, but very little appeal to reason and facts.

“More of the Same” To the extent that he acknowledges that Capitalism has problems, he insists that the way to fix them is more Capitalism. If you’re dying of lead poisoning, due perhaps to the very lead gasoline that served you so well in the past, the solution is not more lead and again, Brooks make no attempt to support his claims.

“Kitchen Sink Arguments” Red lights should go off when an author, like Brooks in this article, rambles on and on in a very disjointed manner, throwing everything in that he can think of. This usually reflects a weak position. Just because you cannot make sense of what he is saying doesn’t mean he must therefore be really, really smart.

I could go on and on about what absolutely terrible writing this is and how absolutely misleading the arguments are. But I hope this analysis gives you at least some things to look for when considering articles like this in the future. We must always exercise healthy skepticism, particularly when under the thrall of “big name” authors in “big name” publications.

Champion of Nonsense

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RandFrom climate change deniers to religious believers, there is certainly no shortage of intellectuals championing nonsense in the public sphere. But today let’s focus on the Champion of Libertarianism, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Libertarianism is an extremist version of barely restrained Capitalism. While it may sound reasonable and appealing when presented by a faux-intellectual like Paul, it falls apart completely under the slightest scrutiny, just as it did when Rachel Maddow probed just below the surface of Paul’s position on privatized lunch counters (see here).

For a Libertarian zealot like Paul, Socialism is his most horrifying nightmare. It is therefore unsurprising that in response to increasing public support for Socialist policies, Rand Paul wasted no time in publishing a book denouncing it (The Case Against Socialism).

In making his “case against Socialism” Rand Paul focuses mainly on historical bogeymen by raising the long-dead specters of Stalin and Mao Zedong. In a television interview just the other day, he was asked what Millennials in particular who support Socialism don’t get. Paul replied that they don’t get that Socialism means that the government owns all means of production and that it has been a disaster in every country in which it has been tried. He went on to once again invoke the horrors of Stalin and Mao Zedong.

Here’s what Paul doesn’t get or does not wish to acknowledge. Supporters of Democratic Socialism are not advocating those extreme forms of Socialism. They are not advocating that the government seize all private enterprise. And further, there is no reason to think that such Socialist extremism is inevitable, likely, or even possible in America.

Paul’s entire premise against Socialism is based on an obviously specious argument. It claims that Democratic Socialism is evil because something else called Socialism was evil. It’s the reverse of the logical fallacy used by gun zealots who claim that since revolutionary era guns were protected, modern guns should be protected.

Consider this analogy to understand what Paul is doing here. It is like he is railing against tablets. Tablets, he says, are evil. They waste paper and the spiral binding can cause cuts. We did away with tablets long ago and these Millennials who support them simply do not understand how dangerous they are. But no, they are talking about electronic tablets, not spiral notebooks. And similarly they are talking about Democratic Socialism, as practiced in Norway and Finland, not what was once called Socialism in China or Russia.

If we reflected the same disingenuous form of argument back against Paul, we would say that what Paul doesn’t understand is that Anarchy has been tried and it has always been a disaster. Of course, Paul is not talking about total anarchy when he talks about modern Libertarianism. And likewise no one supporting Democratic Socialism today is talking about the form of socialism attempted by Stalin or Mao Zedong (see here).

Further, when Paul claims that Socialism has always been a disaster, he fails completely to recognize that modern Socialist countries are at on the top of every measure of health and happiness (see here). Nor does he happen to mention that virtually every country that has adopted the more Libertarian economic policies of Milton Friedman has suffered direct human and economic calamity on a massive scale. This was excruciatingly documented in Naomi Klein’s landmark book (The Shock Doctrine).

So no Rand Paul. Sorry, but it is not the supporters of Democratic Socialism that don’t understand history. You are the one who is either delusional in your blind rationalization of Libertarianism, disingenuous in your rabid fear-mongering of Democratic Socialism, or most likely both.

Thank you Greta

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gretaIn this blog installment, I defer to 16 year old Greta Thunberg. Her words at the United Nations were arguably the most powerful and important words ever spoken on this planet. I shamefully accept her condemnation as part of those generations that selfishly did far too little too late to avert or even mitigate an undeniable impending climate change cataclysm.

I can only hope that should we somehow manage to avoid a total collapse of our planetary ecosystem, future generations will point to her speech as having sparked the turning point away from the abject collective folly of humanity.

Please watch Greta and really listen to her. If you have already seen it, watch it again and listen even harder.

Greta Speaking at the UN

Don’t Believe your Eyes

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eyesToday I wanted to talk about perceptions. Not our feelings, but what we actually see, feel, smell, hear, and taste. That is, the “objective” inputs that drive our feelings. Should we really “only believe our eyes?”

I think not.

In my book (see here) I talk about how we should be skeptical of our own memories and perceptions. Our memories are not recordings. They are docudrama recreations drawing upon various stock footage to put together a satisfying re-imagining. We remember going to the beach as a child. But in “recalling” details of that experience, we draw upon fragments from various sources to fill it in. The “slant” of that recreation is strongly dependent upon our current attitudes and biases. Our re-imagined, and often very distorted memory then reinforces what we believe to be a “vivid” recollection next time we recall it. Over time our “clear” memory can drift farther and farther from reality like a memory version of the “phone game.”

I contend that our brains work similarly with regard to our senses. We don’t see what we think we see. Our perceptions are filtered through our complex neural networks. It is a matched, filtered, processed, censored, and often highly biased version that we actually see, hear, or feel.

We know that our subconscious both filters out much of the information it receives, and adds in additional information as needed to create a sensible perception. I always favor a neural network model of brain function. As it relates to perception, our neural network receives a set of sensory data. It matches that data against known patterns and picks the closest match. It then presents our consciousness with a picture – not of the original data – but of that best-fit match. It leaves out “extraneous” information and may add in missing information to complete that expected picture. That is, we do not actually see, hear, smell, or taste a thing directly. We see, hear, smell, or taste a satisfying recreation that our network presents to us.

This should not be controversial, because we experience it all the time. Based on sparse information, we “see” fine detail in a low resolution computer icon that objectively is not there. We fail to see the gorilla inserted into the background because it is out of place. We are certain we see a witch or a vase in a silhouette, depending on our bias or our expectations at that moment.

But though this should be evident, we still do not take this imprecision seriously enough in evaluating the objectivity of our own memories or perceptions. We still mostly put near-absolute faith in our memories, and are generally even more certain of our perceptions. We believe that what we perceive is absolutely objective. Clearly, it is not.

In essence, what we believe we objectively recall, see, hear, or touch is not the thing itself, but a massaged recreation of our neural network match. The version we perceive can often be wrong in very important ways. Our perceptions are only as reliable as our neural networks. And some neural networks can be more compromised than others. We can recall or even perceive radically crazy things if our neural network has been trained to do so. I campaign against belief-based thinking of all sort because it seriously compromises these critical neural networks in crazy ways.

Even more unrecognized are the ways that this phenomenon is largely ignored as it impacts scientific research. Scientists often give far too much credence to reports of perceptions, often in extremely subtle ways.

As a simple illustration, consider how we often mock wine connoisseurs who claim to taste differences in wines but cannot pick these out in blinded studies. However, consider the confounding impact of their (and our) neural networks in even this simple case. When experiencing a wine, all the associated data is fed into the drinker’s neural network. It makes a match and then presents that match to the consciousness. Therefore, if the network does not “see” one critical factor, say color, it matches to white, not red, and presents and entirely different taste pattern the the drinker, ignoring some “extraneous” flavors and adding some other “missing” ones.

These same kinds of neural network matching errors can, and I have to assume often do, confound even more rigorous scientific studies. And they are further confounded by the fact that these mismatches are typically temporary. With every new set of data, our neural networks adjust themselves, the weightings change, to yield different results. The effect of a drug or placebo, for example, may change over time. If scientists see this, they typically look exclusively for other physiological causes. But it may be a neural network correction.

That is why I always admonish my readers to stick with inputs that will strengthen your neural networks toward sound objectivity rather than allow them to be weighted toward the rationalization of, and perception of, beliefs and nonsense. But since none of us can ever have perfect networks, or even know how accurate ours performs in any given match, we all need a healthy amount of skepticism, even with regard to our own memories and perceptions.

I further urge scientists to at least consider the impact of neural network pre-processing on your studies, and to develop methodologies to explicitly detect and correct for such biases.

 

The Night the Starship Crashed

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bandDuring the 70’s and 80’s I attended hundreds of rock concerts and saw most every famous and not-so-famous band that toured throughout those decades. Most were really fun, some were memorable even, but only one stands out as truly epic. Even now, over 40 years later, I recall the event vividly and thought I should memorialize it here before it is completely lost from human memory.

It was 1975 when a friend and I went to see Jefferson Starship in concert at the sports arena in Milwaukee. Starship (see here) was still popular enough at that time to pack such a large venue. As the crowds were slowly meandering in and taking their seats, the preliminary band began to play. Of course audiences are conditioned to largely ignore these startup bands, but this band could not be ignored. It didn’t take long for the chattering to die down and for people to hurry to their seats.

Only few songs in, people began to stand, dance, and clap uncontrollably. The lead singer was a stunning girl with long-black hair whose voice thundered like the gods. Next to her was a quiet blonde with equally long hair masterfully plucking her guitar with cool confidence.  A young guy was handling his lead guitar with the bravado of a superstar, swinging his arm across the strings with wild abandon. Bass and drums were equally well-manned with boundless energy.

It was probably three quarters of the way through their stunning performance, that I fumbled through my pockets to find my ticket stub. I had to know who this band was. Squinting to find a name on the torn paper under sporadic flashes of colored light, I finally caught one word. It said simply “Heart.”

Yes, the largely unknown prelim band was none other than Heart (see here) introducing new songs from Dreamboat Annie (see here) that would soon be blasting non-stop from transistor radios and car speakers all across the nation.

When their set ended, the crowd was on their feet roaring with excitement. I have never seen a preliminary band, even in a major double-bill, work an audience into such a frenzy. The applause continued on long after they stepped off stage with people begging for an encore, even though no opening band would ever do that.

The story doesn’t end there. After a long wait, Starship finally came out. Their performance was tired and unenthusiastic. The audience, especially after being pumped up by Heart, needed far more then they could offer. People started to tune out and talk among themselves. Their response died down to scattered pity-applause.

At one point, some bored and impatient people started calling out “White Rabbit, White Rabbit” which was one of their biggest early hits. Rather than take the opportunity to reclaim their audience, lead singer Grace Slick sneeringly told the crowds “we don’t want to do that old shit anymore.”

With that, the audience had enough of their Starship ride. Almost as one they joined in a defiant new chant. “Heart, Heart, Heart” they demanded, over and over, “Heart, Heart, Heart.” It was a crushing rebuke of the legendary Starship and an unprecedented anointment of the young breakout band. I don’t know how long after that night Heart continued to open for them, but I cannot imagine how that magnitude of upstaging could be tolerated by Starship.

That was the epic night that the Starship crashed and burned in Milwaukee, and a shining new star took their place in the music cosmos.

Heart, we’re still Crazy on You.

 

Sucks to be Tom Friedman

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FriedmanIt must suck to be Tom Friedman right now.

Mr. Friedman is clearly wigging out, and I think I understand why. He recently wrote an NYT Op Ed in which he railed against the extremist positions of the current Democrat candidates (see here).  In it, he grossly misrepresented their positions in ways that surely he knows rise to the level of outright lies and he resorted to wildly exaggerated “end of the world” ravings about the dangers they pose.

But think of it from his perspective. Thomas Friedman has made a huge name for himself as a leading champion of radical centrism (see here). So for him, the current times are an existential threat. For him, it must be viscerally tribal. That was apparent when he appeared on Lawrence O’Donnell to discuss his article. He seemed panicked and frustrated and angry and defensive. In short, he seemed to be speaking from a place not of intellectual authority, but of gut-level lash-out emotion.

I suspect he is in this berserker frenzy because his radical centrist worldview, his tribe, is under serious attack for perhaps the first time in his long occupation of the middle ground. He has seen Donald Trump defy his radical centrist prescription for success on the Right and winning. He also sees the Progressive Left winning a lot of hearts and minds with their left-of-center ambitions. He sees that Joe Biden, the current flag-bearer of radical centrism, may not win the day. And most of all, he fears deep down that radical centrism is no longer a tenable position, suggesting that maybe it never was.

If non-centrist newcomers and their “radical” ideas continue to take hold and show success, that threatens the very foundations of radical centrism. The success of a progressive agenda would undermine a lifetime of preaching for moderation. He cannot allow his entire career, his very faith in radical centrism, to collapse around him.

So he lashes out.

And it is not just Tom Friedman, but also the many newscasters and pundits and politicians who are emotionally married to the radical middle. They cannot allow the Progressive Left to ascend. So they dismiss Elizabeth Warren as too ambitious, they call the Squad naive, and they label Bernie Sanders as a Socialist at every opportunity. They rush in quickly to defend Capitalism and all the tenants of centrism including incremental change and pragmatism and realism.

In his famous letter from the Birmingham jail, Martin Luther King identified “well-meaning moderates” as the most frustrating obstacles to meaningful change (see here). Similarly today, we still have a huge number of radical centrists like Tom Friedman who insist that it is too early, that we are asking too much, and that we should just be patient. They use any manipulation to make you feel afraid of any course other than radical moderation.

Unfortunately the planet Earth will not show us any further patience. Fortunately, more and more leaders are stepping up and refusing to defer to the evangelists of radical centrism like Thomas Friedman. More and more refuse to accept the artificial limits these “pragmatists” impose on what dreams we are allowed to dream and what bold new solutions we are allowed to embrace.

Personally, I hold no animus toward Thomas Friedman or all those passionate devotees of the radical middle, but I hope their worldview is discredited and crumbles beneath their feet. If not, the best we can hope for is too little too late.

 

Humans are Inexplicable

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brainWhether it be in science or business or politics or popular culture, we expend an inordinate amount of time and effort trying to figure out why people do whatever people are doing. We seem to have more analysts than actors, all desperately trying to explain what motivates people, either by asking them directly or by making inferences about them. For the most part, this is not merely a colossal waste of time and effort and money in itself, but it stimulates even greater wastes of time and effort and money chasing wildly incomplete or erroneous conclusions about why we do what we do.

Asking people why they did what they did, or why they are doing what they are doing, or why they are going to do what they are going to do, generally yields useless and misleading information. It is not clear that people actually have distinct reasons they can recognize let alone articulate. It is quite likely in fact that most of the decisions we make are made unconsciously based upon a myriad of complex neural network associations. These associations need not be rational. These connections don’t need to be internally consistent to each other or related to the actual outcome in any way. But in our post-rationalizations and post-analyses we impose some logic to our decisions to make them feel sensible. Therefore, the reasons we come up with are almost completely made-up at every level to sound rational or at least sane to ourselves and to those we are communicating to.

The truth is, we can’t usually hope to understand our own incredibly complex neural networks, let alone the neural networks of others. Yes, sometimes we can identify a strong neural network association driving a behavior, but most determinative associations are far too diffuse across a huge number of seemingly unrelated associations.

The situation gets infinitely worse when we are trying to analyze and explain group behaviors. Most of our shared group behaviors emerge from the weak-interactions between all of our individual neural networks. The complexity of these interactions is virtually unfathomable. The challenge of understanding why a group does what it does collectively, let alone figuring out how to influence their behavior, is fantastic.

If you ask a bird why it is flying in a complex swirling pattern along with a million other birds, it will probably give you some reason, like “we are looking for food,” but in fact it is probably largely unaware that it is even flying in any particular pattern at all.

So why point all this out? Do we give up? Does this imply that a rational civilization is impossible, that all introspection or external analysis is folly?

Quite the contrary, we must continue to struggle to understand ourselves and truly appreciating our complexity is part of that effort. To do so we must abandon the constraints of logic that we impose upon our individual and group rationalizations and appreciate that we are driven by neural networks that are susceptible to all manner of illogical programming. We must take any self-reporting with the same skepticism we would to the statement “I am perfectly sane.” We should be careful of imposing our own flawed rationality upon the flawed rationality of others. Analysts should not assume undue rationality in explaining behaviors. And finally, we must appreciate that group behaviors can have little or no apparent relationship to any of the wants, needs, or expressed opinions of those individuals within that group.

In advanced AI neural networks, we humans cannot hope to understand why the computer has made a decision. Its decision is based upon far too many subtle factors for humans to recognize or articulate. But if all of the facts programmed in to the computer are accurate, we can probably trust the judgement of the computer.

Similarly with humans, it may be that our naive approach of asking or inferring reasons for feelings and behaviors and then trying to respond to each of those rationales is incredibly ineffective. It may be that the only thing that would truly improve individual and thus emergent thinking are more sanely programmed neural networks, ones that are not fundamentally flawed so as to comfortably rationalize religious and other specious thinking at the most basic level (see here). We must focus on basic fact-based thinking in our educational system and in our culture on the assumption that more logically and factually-trained human neural networks will yield more rational and effective individual and emergent behaviors.