Outstanding

I ran into an acquaintance who was having a bout of self-doubt, and during our conversation, something occurred to me, but as is always the way of things, I wasn't really able to sort out my thoughts until after our talk was finished. Still it struck me as useful, and so I'm noting it here, as a way of saving it for later:

The problem, or danger, if you will, with one's Inner Critic aren't the lies it tells about the self, but the lies it tells about others. Imposter Syndrome tells you not only that you're a fraud, but that you're the only fraud; it hides other people's work, efforts and failures from you. And this is endemic to our society; I've lost count of the number of times that someone has publicly remarked that they felt alone in something, only to recall someone else making the same remark a year, a month or a even couple of days previously. It's a negative form of feeling special.

And perhaps that the thing about a need to feel special and unique; it doesn't always matter how one arrives at that status. Being especially bad makes one just as unique as being especially good. Being alone in one's faults sets one apart just as well as being alone in one's strengths.

One Week Left

A week from today will be the 4th of July, and 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It's supposed to be a big deal.

But it will, of course, be just another day in the grand scheme of things, and even in the life of the nation. Especially given that so many people have fundamental disagreements of what, if anything, there is to celebrate.

Abraham Lincoln famously said that "A House divided against itself cannot stand," but the United States has always been divided, often in multiple ways, and it's still here. The Trump Administration may not be doing much to bring the nation together (unsurprising, given how few people seem to genuinely want such an outcome), but even they are unlikely to bring the whole enterprise down around everyone's heads.

And so life will go on. As it has for all of the years before. Because change is expensive, and very few people feel flush enough to pay what it asks. And so they don't volunteer. And when change has to happen, the costs are passed along until they find someone with no choice but to cough up. And because the perception of scarcity is perhaps the biggest threat to self-governance, the American version of representative and participatory government seems to be at risk, even as it's grown to encompass a vast number of people that, in 1776, were not considered to have the requisite powers of reason to be allowed to have a say in things.

The trade-offs that would need to be made to improve things are straightforward, but also easier said than done, because someone's going to have to be the first person to extend a hand, even though there's a very real chance that it will be cut off, because one should never give a villain an even break. And sometimes, this comes across as a society that dearly loves to have villains.

As I've grown older, I've come to the conclusion that there's no such thing as deserves. The world is as it is, and there is no way in which it ought to be different. If one wants it to change, then one's task is to effectuate that change, either on one's own, or with a group of the like-minded. But, of course, there's more to it than that, because someone will have to pay the price for those changes, and if that feels more like a sacrifice (or theft) than an investment, there will be resistance. And to the degree that such resistance is taken to be the proof of one's correctness, it's cultivated. And so there will be grievance and resentment on what should be a nationwide celebration.

Because the United States of America is made up of people, just like everywhere else is. Perhaps there needs to be a greater recognition of that. That would also be something to celebrate.

Unsolicited

Now that it's graduation season again, I've pulled together some of the things that I've learned about life from having lived it for the past few decades. I don't know that anyone will find them useful, but here they are, anyway.

• Enjoying what you do is important, because you're going to need to put in a lot of hours to be exceptional at it. It's hard to excel at something you hate doing. Drudgery and chores are rarely paths to greatness.
• The fact that something doesn't feel like work when you're doing it doesn't make it valueless or trivial.
• "Do what you love" isn't advice, it's a sound bite. Cultivate your interests as broadly as you can manage; that will make it easier to find something within them that other people need doing. That intersection is important.
• The best way to learn a skill is to tackle a problem that's 1) important to you to solve and 2) requires the skill in question. 
• Be careful about fighting with people (physically or otherwise), because the costs can be high even when you "win."
• Whenever someone is doing something that doesn't make any sense to you, set out to learn what they're being graded on, and who is doing the grading.
• At Some Point, Everybody's New (ASPEN). Don't be afraid to be the new person and don't make others afraid of it, either.
• You will never be perfect. You can play whack-a-mole with your weaknesses for the rest of life, and still not fix them all. Unless you literally have no other choice, always play to your strong suit(s).
• Partner with other people, so that they help make up for your shortcomings, and you help make up for theirs.
• Learn from the mistakes of others; you'll never live long enough to make them all yourself.
• When conversing with someone, you're speaking from your assumptions, experiences and outlook. But they're listening from theirs, and everything you tell them will be filtered through that. And, just as importantly, vice versa.
• When you see a chance to connect with someone over something, make time to take it, especially if you've had a difficult relationship with them in the past.
• Understand what's important to you; what you are willing to make time for, and what you have to make time from.
• The job of an influencer is to sell a lifestyle; not the work it takes to attain it.
• Common sense requires common experience.
• Don't look for reasons to take things personally.
• People will line up around the block to tell you how terrible you are; they need neither your help nor your competition.
• When people are confident in you, trust that they have good reason to be, and then work to prove them right.

Mystery

Some things are just going to be mysteries. But I also know that I’ll always want to know, that I’ll always want everything to fit together nicely and neatly into a workable pattern that explains everything. And perhaps not coincidentally, tells me that I really see things as they are.

Imagine, If You Will...

Somewhere, in the past 12 years, that changed. The desire to know, the desire for things to fit together and, perhaps more importantly, the desire to understand that I see things as they really are, went away. I've become comfortable with the yawning chasms that dot my worldview; so much so that if I hadn't written in this blog that I hadn't, I would never have recalled it. (Which, honestly, is one of the things about writing it; it provides insight into my past self that memory alone is not up to the task of.)

I am reminded of the fact that I am poor at predicting the future, even when it pertains directly to myself. But I am also reminded of the impermanence of personality, and perhaps even the self. Back in 2014, I clearly had no inkling that my need to know and understand would change. I don't recall having been working to alter it at the time. But it has, in fact, shifted. I'm much more at peace with the idea that there will be mysteries in the world, and I've come to believe that it's hard to ever claim one knows anything while also being unwilling to be wrong. I think that I've become more comfortable with believing in general, and the understanding that I believe as I do not because it is demonstrably correct, but because it works well enough for me that I can get by on a day-to-day basis.

If I'm still around, and writing this, in 2038 (given the way my family has worked, that's very much up in the air as of now), perhaps I'll see further change in myself. Or whomever I am then.

Motion

It's one thing to say: "The one constant in all of my dysfunctional relationships is me," but yet another to understand what that actually means for one's life.

Especially when one has, like I do, an internalized locus of control, because that means that looking back on those relationships, and why their dysfunctional, leads to the self. And one of the other traits that tends to go along with an internal locus of control is a certain lack of self-forgiveness.

Being the agent of the dysfunctions of one's life means not being the person one wanted to be, or, perhaps more acutely, feels one should have been. And this is where I think that the internal locus of control can be a difficult thing to manage, it lends itself to judging the self by the immediate snapshot of one's life, and the comparison of that to a counterfactual, either created by other's lives or an idealized version of one's own. Neither of which are useful guides.

For me, personally (which is weird, given my general dislike of writing about myself), I've developed a tendency to accuse my past self of errors in judgment, even as I work to really internalizing the idea that the choices I made, even when they didn't work out as I intended, were the best ones I could have made with the information that I had at the time. And maybe that's the stumbling block. I'm starting to think that it smuggles in an implicit criticism, even when my explicit goal is to avoid being self-critical.

And maybe that's because self-criticism is easy. It can be painful at times, but it doesn't really ask much of a person other than to take a look at some version of themselves and find them wanting. And it feels like a step on a path to change, even though there's no reason why the two are related. But self-acceptance doesn't mean accepting stasis, even if such a thing were possible. I'm starting to find that this is a more difficult lesson than it's given credit for.

Countdown

It's taken as a given that economic trade produces "winners and losers." But in a nation like the United States, where social trust is low and individualism is high, this seems like a recipe for long-term instability, as populism rises on both the Left and the Right.

While the desire of economic winners to keep their gains is understandable, what's less clear is why they expect the losers to simply accept that they're going to be left behind. I suspect that part of it is that low social trust tends to manifest itself as a belief that others are incompetent. Why worry about the impacts on other people, when one is convinced that those other people are easily distracted away from problems or not brave enough to start a conflict?

But I'd be willing to bet that a commitment to the Just World Hypothesis is also at work. People tend to be unwilling to see their own benefits as having been gained by past injustices, and there is also a tendency to believe that other people also understand the current situation as just, and accusations of prior bad acts to be made in bad faith. And I think that this worldview, which supposes that people know that they deserve to be in the place they are in, pushes back against ideas that a more equitable balancing of economic forces should be considered.

Given how much people view the current wave of automation as being disrespectful of them, it remains to be seen if it will create tangible benefits that mollify the public before a general anger boils over into a reaction that sets the technology back, at least here in the United States. These competing clocks are invisible, at least to me, and so I have no real sense of which one may be ticking faster than the other.

Mirror Image

The question that the widespread adoption of generative automation by business will raise is not "What will be the effects on productivity?" Rather, I think it will be, "What will be the effects on demand, especially demand for human labor?" I can imagine a worst-case scenario in which automation, especially autonomous automation, creates a world in which access to raw materials becomes paramount. If doesn't matter, for instance, if people own a robot that can cook for them if they have nothing of value to trade for food.

I suspect, as with so many other things, that these sorts of problems will not crop up unexpectedly so much as it will turn out that people were expecting "someone else" to take care of the problem, preferably in a manner that wouldn't cost them anything. And when it turns out that "someone else" was actually "no one else," emergency measures, none of them really to anyone's liking, will wind up being enacted.

What strikes me as a slowly building panic over the disruptions to the job market in the technology sector, both current and expected in the future, speaks to this. While it's not hard to find techno-optimists who will loudly proclaim that "genuine human interaction" will suddenly become highly valuable in a highly automated society, they tend to be short on explanations as to how a large segment of the current workforce will come to be employed this way. And the people who see not only their jobs going away, but their future prospects for supporting themselves, remain unconvinced.

Cultivating new lines of work that would be expensive to impossible for even genuine "artificial general intelligence" to carry out would seem to be a priority, but such cultivation will, in the short term at least, be unprofitable... which is why no-one's currently turning their resources to it; the expected return on that investment is pretty much non-existent. And while there are people who will look to government to solve the problem, the resources are going to have to come from somewhere, and decades of nurturing a distrust of government efficacy and a dislike of taxation are likely to result in quite a bit of time spent in looking for someone to extract the resources from who have resources to take, yet lack the political voice to block their taking.

In the end, finding a social solution has to be more important to the majority of people than searching for personal ones. But stereotypical American individualism, to say nothing of social division, actively works against that. The saying that "Whenever you say, 'Someone should do something,' remember that Someone stands in front of you whenever you look in the mirror," applies here as much as to anything else, however. And if I don't think that "someone else" will start working on the problem, perhaps I should start educating myself on what that work entails.

Right Virtues

The Atlantic is a subscription-only site now, as far as I can tell, and so it's been a while since I've read anything there. Realizing that, I went to the bookstore to pick up a physical copy of the January issue, so I could see what they were up to (other than those stories they released as podcasts) these days.

On page 18 was a column by David Brooks: Bring Back the Neocons. I suspected I knew what I was going to find, but I still like Mr. Brooks' writing, so I dove in.

According to Mr. Brooks, the second lesson of neoconservatisim is: "The most important values in a democratic society are the pedestrian bourgeois virtues. Aristocratic societies may do better at inspiring heroism, genius, love of honor. But democratic societies rely on showing up on time, working hard, being there for your neighbor, listening with curiosity, respecting traditions." Okay, let's say for a moment that I buy into that. My question for Mr. Brooks (and a variation on the question I nearly always have for Mr. Brooks) became: If democratic societies rely on these "pedestrian bourgeois virtues," why aren't they worth rewarding?

Many cultural commentators seem to be allergic to economics, if for no other reason than economics says that it's not enough to simply make something into some sort of moral imperative. If you want more of something, pay for it. I know I've said this before, but I find it bears repeating: If people are no longer doing something that one finds it's important for people to be doing, ask: "why." People stopped "showing up on time, working hard, being there for your neighbor, listening with curiosity [and] respecting traditions," because those things stopped being reliable ways to take care of oneself and one's family. For the person for whom showing up on time and working hard simply made them a chump, or the person for whom listening with curiosity simply made them confused, or the person for whom respecting traditions simply lead to a feeling of going through empty motions, it makes sense for them to find other ways to interact with the world.

The end of a widespread embrace of "the common bourgeois virtues: hard work, thrift, self-reliance, self-discipline, respect for tradition, and an intense focus on education," can be laid at the feet of one or both of two factors: they didn't pay off, and people could get by without them. Accordingly, bringing them back isn't simply going to be a matter of telling people that they're in a moral and spiritual crisis, and so they need to rededicate themselves to the values of the same people who brought us the Iraq War. They're going to have to be clear and direct solutions to people's problems. And in modern society, they aren't.

Mr. Brooks notes that Donald Trump "is a genius at cultural warfare." I'm not sure I agree with that, if for no other reason than it doesn't take a genius to go to people who are hurting and resentful and saying to them "if you allow me to mistreat the people who you feel are responsible for your problems, I will fix your problems." It's not like that's some sort of political innovation. It's a well-worn playbook by this point.

Mr. Brooks relates that the neconservatives were the children of immigrants who escaped poverty by apply themselves to the "common bourgeois virtues." But many, many, more people than the parents of Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and Jeane Kirkpatrick were industrious and traditional, and many of their children watched them fail. Virtue by itself has never been enough; if a society isn't ready, willing or able to reward people for the virtues it claims to honor, people will gravitate towards the ones that honor is shown.

Pugilism

It occurred to me today that I've never been injured in a fight that I was smart, or cowardly, enough to walk away from. Heck, I'll own not being the bravest person you'll ever meet. Pain and I don't get along.

But I do think that there's something to be said for really asking oneself if a fight, physical or otherwise, is really worth it before getting stuck in. Mainly, because no matter how the brawl, or shouting match, comes out, it's always a lot easier to lose than to win. Both sides are much more likely to look like fools than to come out looking like champions. Especially when the point of the fight is to be seen fighting. "At least I fought," has never struck me as a particularly good justification for a fight, but I understand that I may be in the minority on that. But for me, a fight is only worthwhile when there's something more tangible to show for it than simply having been in a fight.

That is, for the most part, a side effect of the conclusion that there are better things to be done with the energy spent fighting. (Or even protesting, for that matter.) The world we have now is a side effect of myriad individual choices, often made with no real consideration of what others were doing. The world can change in much the same way.

But I think that for many people, fighting feels less costly. Someone can pick a fight, and call attention to themselves, and be lauded for being on the side of Right and Justice without having to pay much else. And maybe that's why people fight so often; the individual ROI is better than I give is credit for.

Vision

All too often the truth is often secondary to what people want to hear and what they want to enjoy getting worked up about, whether it's in a sexual or righteous way. Information finds its level and its target.

Yoz Grahame. Comment on "Banning blogging, 'Toothing, and Yoz." Many2Many, 5 April 2005

Back in the day when Windows still had screensavers, I started collecting quotes to use in mine. The above was one of them. A little more than twenty years later, it still feels relevant. Mainly, I suspect, because it's actually a fairly timeless observation.

This strikes me as one of those things that people believe about one another. In the post that Mr. Grahame was commenting on, one of the primary points concerned fact-checking, and the fact that many people tend to pursue it vigorously when presented with information that they disagree with (and thus, want to see falsified), and pass on it when something aligns with their tastes, interests or prejudices. But Clay Shirky, who authored the post wasn't just speaking about "people," he was also speaking about his readers, and calling them to task for being willing to believe things they really should have second guessed.

When I read Mr. Grahame's quote, I replace "people" and "they" with "I," and ask myself: What do I want to hear? What do I want to enjoy getting worked up about? What may be both the upside and the downside of this blog is that it's nearly two decades of pointers to precisely those things. I want to hear that the world is complicated place, and simple-sounding solutions are doomed to failure, if not making things worse than they were when they started. I'm too old, I suspect, to enjoy becoming worked up about anything these days, but I will argue that the United States is a fractured collection of mutually hostile (yet well-meaning) groups to anyone who will listen.

In other words, were it up to me, I would have it all figured out. Just like everyone else. Because it makes me feel perceptive and intelligent. But in reality, I am likely neither of those things, at least, not any more so than anyone else. Otherwise, I'd be better at predicting the future than I am, and would be comfortably retired by now, what with all of the money I would have made on the stock market and selling my best-selling book(s).

In the end, I know that I don't know. The world is, in my understanding, a very complicated place, and I can only see the small part of it that unfolds directly around me. Everything else, I take on trust in one source or another. And that tends to lead to very distorted views of things.

Background

It's a difficult thing to examine something that one cannot see. Accordingly, I understand the challenge of attempting to take a close look at my blind spots. Technically, blind spots are not absolutely invisible, the real problem tends to be if they're at the point where they're visible in one's field of view, one has bigger problems.

Recently, I've found myself wondering what my "blind spot" is, in the sense of things that affirm the way I look at the world, such that I'm prepared to simply take them at face value. I suspect that it has something to do with complexity; I tend to be more accepting of stories in which people are doing something that makes sense for them, but has consequences for others, than I am of stories in which people are straightforwardly good or evil. The thing about such stories, I'm finding, is that they're unfalsifiable, for the most part. Even when they aren't anonymized, I simply have no way of looking into someone's brain and understanding what they're thinking. Accordingly, there's a lot of assumptions involved.

And the assumptions I make about the world are, generally speaking, true. The same as they are for everyone else, even when my assumptions and someone else's assumptions are mutually exclusive. And this is due to that same unfalsifiability. If I assume good intent, and someone else assumes bad intent, the "proof" of either of our assumptions tends to be our own readings of the reality of the situation. The same readings, it turns out, that created the assumptions in the first place.

Which is really just a long-winded way of explaining, at least to myself, why I think that my own blind spots would be difficult for me to see; they're born of how I see the world, and blend into it. Which is what makes separating them enough to actually examine them in detail difficult. 

Retread

Assuming he ever gets his act together with them, one of President Trump's stated goals with imposing unilateral worldwide tariffs is to incentivize a renewal of manufacturing in the United States, something with most people who aren't hyped on manufacturing jobs think is a fool's errand. Accordingly, there has been a decent amount of questioning in the media over just why so many Americans come across as nostalgic for "Made in America."

I would expect it's for the same reason why so many left-leaning journalists and pundits seemed to pin their hopes on the idea that Trump voters would come to their senses and withdraw their support in favor of more old-school establishment Republicans: People understand what the past looks like, and they believe that all that needs to happen to get back there is winding back some number of changes that occurred after a given point in time.

A past, even a misremembered one, is therefore a known quantity, and so seems to carry less uncertainty and risk than charting a new path. And since everyone I've encountered who wants to wind back the clock appears to have forgotten just why things changed in the first place, there's a sense that back in the day, things just worked, and so there's no reason to not go back to doing things that way.

In my experience, the more people seem to feel that they need something to work, the more confident they are that it will work, regardless of evidence to the contrary. Such is the nature of faith.

Still Going

So I went over to Lake Forest Park this morning, to check in on the protestors. They showed up promptly at 11am and started waving their signs and placards.

The small group of regulars who hang out on this corner every Saturday, rain or shine, for an hour have become something of a fixture, to the point that they're a reliable way of knowing if noon has arrived or not.

One of them told me that last week, with all of the anti-Trump protests, that there were about one hundred people present. Which I'd actually heard about. The whole reason I'd come by today was to see how many of them were going to stick around.

Because your typical lefty protest/drum circle can always drum up a good number of people. Occupy Seattle was proof of that. But what makes this bunch interesting is that they always show up. There's a core of the group who is always there. And it's not the young people who come to the marches and chants. It's the older people who understand what they're actually doing: sharing a message, rather than saving the world.

Think What You Will

In the aftermath of the blowup between President Trump and President Zelensky (I never know if it should be one "y" or two) the competing partisan narratives are lining up to do battle. Pointlessly, in my opinion, as no matter what happens, few, if any, minds will be changed.

People believe the things they do because those beliefs work for them. Those beliefs don't have to work for, or even be intelligible to, anyone else. If someone's understanding of what went down today is directly a function of whether their preferred party is in charge, it's not that they succumbed to willful delusion, it's that it helps make the world an understandable place, where the effects that they're interested in directly flow from the causes they pay attention to. But more importantly, it's not any different for the person who follows the fundamentals and sees the cause and effect that way.

About the only thing that a genuine understanding of causes and effects brings is an ability to predict the future with reasonable accuracy when given enough information. And most people don't do that. And they don't care that they can't. Because so few other people care. If people can make one inaccurate prediction after another, yet still show up on the news because they're good for a catchy soundbite, people are going to understand that there aren't really any consequences for getting things wrong. And so they believe those things that bring them comfort, or pleasure, or whatever other feelings they're chasing at the moment.

I tend to be of the opinion that there's nothing wrong with that, but, well, that's because it works for me... I don't see most people's beliefs as being relevant to my day-to-day life, and that gives me a certain amount of leeway to allow people to believe whatever they want to. After all, I might have problems in life, but the various things that people believe that I find to be bizarre are not among them. I've learned that I don't have to care, and that gives me the freedom to allow people to think as they will.

But I understand that this is only a contingent fact, it could have been different, and at some point in the future it might well be. But for now, it's a certain level of freedom from anxiety about what people think. So I'm going to enjoy it, while it lasts.

To Speak the Truth

There's a panhandler's trick in tourist traps that goes something like this: A person approaches a tourist and displays a large number of banknotes from around the world. Conspicuously absent are any notes from places like the European Union, the United States, Great Britain, et cetera (a.k.a., the big drivers of tourism). The person tells the tourist that they're attempting to collect notes from around the world, but are missing some.

Because of course they could find someone from Botswana to pitch in, but the tourist is literally the first person from the First World the panhandler has ever met.

To me, this is clever, if bordering on dishonest, panhandling. But for other people, it's a scam, working under the definition that "Any time someone lies to get money out of you, it's a scam." To me, it overstates the issue, as it means that most people's kids are risking fraud charges on a regular basis, but I get it. And I understand that it's a fairly common viewpoint; many people don't like being lied to and especially dislike parting with money on the basis of a lie.

But now to the point... If dishonesty for money = scam, is withholding the truth out of fear of losing a bonus a form of fraud? I get what this graphic is saying, and what the person whose LinkedIn post I snagged it from was getting at, but I think that this points to one of the problems that runs through life, the Universe and everything... The tendency to seek ways of making broken systems less damaging, rather than less broken.

A sense of powerlessness and being financially straited that makes dishonesty seem like the best choice is corrosive. The original post that I saw was making the case that businesses lose valuable ideas when people fear consequences for stating the facts as they see them. But it also teaches and reinforces the idea that there's no value to being honest about things.

Back in the day, I had a little poster in my office that read: "Tact is the fine art of dealing with people who are too good to hear the truth from you." My boss at the time didn't care for it, but I stood by it, having come to the (somewhat self-serving) realization that once people had power, the truth was what they decided it was. But what I was really calling out, looking back on it, was my own inability to present to things to people in a way that worked for them, rather than just for me. And to be sure, I think I'm still bad at that. And so I indulge in fraud now and again, telling people what I think they want to hear from me, rather than what I actually think the truth of the matter is, because I understand my financial well-being to be tied to their satisfaction, rather than to them having an accurate view of the world around them. Because they, not unlike myself, really, don't need to have a particularly accurate view of most of the world in order to get by. The price of unfailingly accurate information is not one that I have to pay, and so, for the most part, I don't. And so I don't expect anyone else to, either. In that sense, I go through the world, asking people to lie to me, and promising money in return. Am I worse than other people in that regard? I would certainly hope so, but I know that it's not a hope worth holding on to.

Joe Average

There's been a lot made of the fact that the most people believe that they are "above average" drivers. Depending on whom one asks, the number ranges from 80 to 92% of people surveyed. It's become something of a joke at the public's expense. When it came up in conversation, a few days ago, there was an attempt to demonstrate the effect by asking everyone if they felt that they were an above average driver. People's discomfort was palpable; people didn't want to be the sort of overestimate their own abilities, yet they didn't want to admit to poor driving skills, either.

When the instigator of all this asked me, if I was an above average driver, something occurred to me, and I said: "I hope not."

The problem with the average in the United States is that it's consistently viewed as mediocre, at best. Given this, the average drive is presumed to be a rolling public safety crisis. But if that were true, automobile accidents would a lot more common than they are. On average, people tend to rack up one collision claim every 17 years or so. Which is a pretty good amount of time. But it's worth pointing out that this doesn't mean they were driving poorly, or driving at all, at the time. My old station wagon was in two collisions in the 19 years that I owned it. The first was when the person behind me took their foot off the brake at a stop light and ran into the rear of my car, and the second was a person who struck my car in a parking lot, then fled the scene (but, it turns out, not before bystanders took down his license plate). So that's two for me, but neither of them point to my being at fault. In fact, I managed to put more than 250,000 miles on my car, without ever being in a serious accident. So, I reasoned, if most drivers were better at it than I was, that likely meant that the roads were pretty safe. And what could be wrong with that?

And I started to think, more broadly, that the social tendency to not only see oneself as exceptional, but that being exceptional was a minimal standard to be considered worth anything, isn't helpful. It casts the average person as being objectively poor at nearly everything. They're "weak, fragile, vulnerable and kind of stupid," and incompetent on top of it. And not casting oneself as exceptional is buying into that characterization of oneself. But if one views oneself as a constant, and says: You know, I'm not half bad at this," then the average can be better. It still might not be something to aspire to, in the grand scheme of things, but it's not an admission of mediocrity. Maybe the world would be a somewhat better place if people thought better of one another in this way.

No Worries

We're choosing to spend more and more time with ourselves, more and more time, year after year, without feeling that special, important biological cue to be around other people. And that, I think, is something to be quite worried about.
Derek Thompson

I would like to think that this is the evolution of language in action. That "worry" is gradually shifting from, as Merriam-Webster puts it "to feel or experience concern or anxiety" to "work to make a change in a situation." Because worry, in and of itself, doesn't help anything. Taking action does. But maybe we aren't. Perhaps when journalists ask if people should be worried, and someone says "yes," everyone involved thinks that they're doing people a favor by adding just that much more concern or anxiety to the world.

If that's the case, it would be a shame. In Mr. Thompson's case, choosing to spend more time with other people, and less in solitary pursuits, is not particularly difficult to accomplish. It's uncomfortable for some, but most Americans could likely get away with it. It might even lead to some larger, and welcome, changes in the society at large. So why not just say "do it?"

To be sure, I have no idea. Maybe Mr. Thompson doesn't consider himself qualified to tell other people what to do. (Although I suspect that this isn't the case, from what I've heard of his podcast, Plain English.) Perhaps it's more likely that he understands that, isolating or not, people enjoy what they're currently doing. But that's simply speculation on my part, given that I'm not a mind reader. In any event, I do expect that a more active way of speaking about perceived problems would help. Sometimes, there aren't ready solutions to things. (Not that worry helps in those cases, either.) But when there are, having people go for it seems a better course of action than counseling concern.

Who Knows

The easiest way to prove a hypothesis is to present it to people who already believe its truth.

This is a more difficult thing for me to remember than it should be, I think. It's easy for me to be skeptical of those things that strike me as completely wonky or suspiciously convenient. But those are not the things that I need to be actively skeptical of; I'm already inclined to not take them at face value. Instead, the things that seem just "right enough" are the ones that need to spend some time investigating, before taking them to be true.

The tricky part of this, outside of simply finding the time that would be required to do all the research, is understanding myself to not have a sufficient grasp of the world around me to understand what is and is not rational to subscribe to a belief in. To be sure, I'm not convinced that this is a reasonable way to go about things, even given my general level of skepticism. Expecting the unexpected is more difficult than is let on, and so understanding that the fact that my view of the world has turned out to be fairly workable thus far doesn't mean that it will continue to be so takes more effort than I commonly plan for. And the payoff is limited. The reason why people are capable of such a diversity of beliefs about the world is that most of them make no difference; the ones that do, there tends to be broad agreement on precisely because of the impact that it makes. Most of the random things that people present to me that turn out to be false when I research them are completely unimportant. My life would not be materially different if I had been instead inclined to take them at face value.

And I suspect that this is the biggest obstacle in anyone's search for truths about the world; most of them are simply unimportant, and this means that they lack any sort of feedback mechanism.

Untruth and Nothing But the Truth

If honesty were such a great policy, I would wonder why we don't see more of it, except for the fact that I understand that most people, and that includes myself, don't know honesty on sight. Instead, what many people, and again, I include myself in this, recognize is what aligns with the world as they understand it to be, as it works for them and how they would like it to be. And to the degree that those things are often considered to be self-evident, things that contradict them are often seen as deliberate falsehoods. Because how could anyone understand things any differently?

In this sense, the problem isn't that people lie. It's the idea of Truth; either as it is, or as it should be.

I don't recall when it was, but some time ago, I let go of the idea that I could actually understand the truth of things. It started when my father, who was wiser than I gave him credit for, told me that the definition of "Obvious" was: "Something so crystal-clear that you're the only person who sees it." And that sparked the realization that part of everything I see is, well, me. I am the filter through which I see the world, and so I am going to see things differently than literally everyone else on the planet. For a long time, I likened this to the difficulty that two people have in seeing the exact same view of the world, because in order to do so, they would each have to inhabit the precise same physical space. Now, while that example still seems apt, it also seems inadequate to the task at hand.

I'm poor at Internet "Authenticity" because I don't naturally seek to reinforce the worldviews of the people around me. I don't know that I'm openly contrarian so much as my outlook on life tends to be just that much out-of-step with the people I normally hang around with; apparently without regard to what their outlooks are.

I've come to lack an idea of Truth, because I lack confidence in the trustworthiness of my own senses. And the universality of my experiences. That leads me to an understanding of why I find things to be true that disconnects them from the way they may actually be. I don't know whether that's a good thing or not.

To Speak, or Not to Speak

I started listening to the Misinformation and the Three Languages of Politics (with Arnold Kling) episode of EconTalk. I made it about a third of the way through, and then gave up. Not because I had a problem with Professor Kling's notions that giving one entity the power to censor others is dangerous, or the idea that the antidote to bad speech is more speech, but because the discussion between Professor Kling and Professor Roberts seemed to go out of its way to avoid the real question that lies at the heart of things like "misinformation" and "censorship": Who is empowered to decide what is harmful?

It was already a given that some speech should be punishable, because it was harmful: Professor Roberts called out threats of violence early on. And in the wake of this, the idea that Holocaust denial, for instance, was effectively harmless was assumed, but never examined.

And while I understand the idea that thee is no harm done to anyone by the simple fact that someone claims that the killings of some six million Jewish people and another six million others didn't actually happen, there are nations in Europe that have decided otherwise. So rather than simply condemn them for being overly censorious in a misguided attempt to protect the hypersensitive, I think that a discussion of the various metrics have for determining whether, and when, people are harmed by speech was in order.

Because no matter which decision a government comes to, someone is going to be unhappy. Either someone feels that their free speech rights are being trampled (or they aren't being given a right that they should have) or someone's going to conclude that harms to them have been trivialized.

And the body that decides between these incompatible interests is not the censor, but whomever decides what it is the censor can sanction people for.