Social Science – KNOMO CHOICIUS

I came from behind. Did you?

This is a “Ghost Pipe” plant! It seems unbelievably cool, and I am really amazed to have found several clumps on my property this past summer. That way, I did not have to feel bad about taking one back to the house, for science!

I come from behind. I imagine that many people might think that. David Levy quotes Barry Switzer having said “Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.” What proportion of our characteristics must be underdogs before we have a legitimate claim to having come from behind? For that matter, what scheme would be available to define the basic characteristics of any human?

I will try out my Thinking Skills to address this issue.

Hmm, would this ghost pipe be considered to have come from behind? As a plant, with no chlorophyll, that seems like it COULD be a disadvantage….

I found this “Ghost Pipe” or “Indian Pipe” while on a mushroom hunt. This is classified as a plant, but has no chlorophyll. It gets its nutrients from fungi in the soil.

A human is a certain type of animal that evolved on the planet, called Earth by its English speaking inhabitants. For the last 5,000 years at least, by the accounts of the social scientists, at least those finding themselves clinging to conventional wisdom, most humans live in fairly strongly hierarchical societies. I’m not talking a village chief, or even a multi-village “Big Man.” I’m talking multi-level with multi being definitely more than three. Three levels of society goes back to what some anthropologists consider the original human social hierarchy of Alpha and Shaman versus the men, women, and children. Of course it was always more complicated than that. But, we have to start somewhere. So does than mean that everyone but the Alpha and Shaman are coming from “behind”? Or are the men still in the top half? In matriarchal societies, would that mean the women were on top? So, thinking about it in this new way, I guess most people DO come from behind.

My ex always got very aggravated when someone would imply that he was part of “the people.” The people were uneducated, shallow, and boring. All characteristics that he most certainly did not apply to himself. Boring was definitely the biggest sin. at least in his book.

A week or so later, the white was staring to discolor to brown and black, and the open shape of the flower was starting to pinch into a seed pod. Eventually, it turned completely dark brown and black, and head dried and shrunk. I took the head back out to the swampy area where I found it, and sprinked the seeds on the ground.

So now we are moving from our place in the basic social hierarchy as the source of defining who we are / where we come from, to the realm of learned or/and chosen behavior. Behavior, as we all know, starts in the mind. I don’t think I have ever seen “entertaining and boring” as poles of a foundational system of categorizing people. But that brings us perhaps to something akin to either the Myers-Briggs personality typing program, or the Enneagram, or astrology of the Eastern or Western types.

The most promising on short reflection seems to be Myers-Briggs, where we could say that extroverts are ahead, or at least out front, and introverts are behind. Going on extroverted people being more likely to be regularly entertaining. Maybe I err, in using my exe’s system. But I will keep going on this premise for now. So going back to the main story line, most personality type statistics indicate that the extroverts are a bigger group than the introverts. So where’s the cut off for being behind? Do only the top 75% (or whatever the statistics say) of extroverts belong in “the ahead,” and the bottom 25% of extroverts have a legitimate claim to coming from behind?

Of course in today’s economy, a big chunk of what determines if you are coming from behind, or not, has to do with your financial resources. Sadly, the very few are on the very pinnacle, and the rest of us are not. So, by basic statistics, it seems that a lot of us might well have a legitimate claim to be coming from behind.

Do we get to combine the less “desirable” traits to claim greater disadvantage? Certainly this discussion is happening today.

Hmm. I am going to have to think about this….

Well, since I mentioned a mushroom hunt above, I will include this scanning electron microscope image of a spore from what I am quite confident was a Green Quilted Russula. They are edible, when fresh. Now t that I am confident I know how to identify them, the next time I find one, I will overcome my “Green Eggs and Ham” “yuck factor,” and cook some up. They are reputed to be very good eating!

What do YOU think???

Spiritually Attached to India

“She won’t like it here,” the good professor wrote. “Westerners never do. There’s no room service, and the food in the cafeteria is all South Indian style.”

“She’s spiritually attached to India. She speaks fluent Hindi. This isn’t her first trip. She’ll be fine.”

My soon to be friend Shankar nailed it. I had never thought about it in exactly those words though. I’m spiritually attached to India. It would be my third trip to the subcontinent. The fluent Hindi was a bit of an exaggeration. I had pretty darn good tourist Hindi, maybe a thousand words. Grammatical mistakes in most of my sentences, but I was usually understood, then corrected, proving that they understood what I was trying to say. (My most used sentence on the hair-raising ride on the 1.5 lane wide roads on the sides of the “foothills” of the Himalayas, was -after correction- Nicche na dekko!!- “Don’t look down!”

sometimes followed by “But Look Down- it’s beautiful!”)

Shankar was correct, but he humored the professor, and asked me if I agreed that the accommodation planned, without room service, would be ok. I assured him that it would, and was very happy to have this new idea of spiritual attachment, and to have had someone who never met me in person realize it was true. I can’t really explain it; maybe I had a past life or three in India.

Really, my main concern about hotels in Asia is that the mattresses are so hard. Difficult on my arthritic joints. But I had resolved to just take extra pain killer, when I needed it. This was my bucket trip. I was acting on my desire to teach a failure analysis class in India, before the onset of my ultimate, inevitable deterioration. The mattress at the University guesthouse was unlikely to be harder, I reasoned, than the one at the rural Christian monastery where I was going to be spending the first week and a half in India on the upcoming trip. And the food was unlikely to be more difficult to enjoy than what the monks and nuns ate. And anyway, I had just returned from Japan, where I became convinced that the more expensive the hotel, the harder the mattress.

If I really hated sambar, rasaam, and idly, I probably wouldn’t go to south India. But I had learned to eat, if not love, the first two items, spicy soups, back in the mid 1970’s, when my South Indian ex-boyfriend moved to a town near my parents, who really liked him more than any other boyfriend I had before or after, and proceeded to teach my mother how to do South Indian cooking. I learned to more or less enjoy idly, a somewhat bland lentil flour based sponge, used to sop up the sambar, on my first trip to India, where they served it at the Hindu monastery (ashram) that hosted the meditation retreat that I was attending in 2001.

So I just had to deal with the reality of the hospitality that my hosts, for what was becoming a four day speaking tour in Chennai, were able to provide. I had offered to teach a two day seminar, give a dinner talk to my fellow members of our international engineering society, and a lecture to the engineering students at the local university. I ended up also giving a longer version of the dinner talk at two private companies, and another presentation to some eleventh graders, entitled “Is a Career in Materials Engineering Right for Me?” I wasn’t charging a speaking or teaching fee, but I thought it was reasonable to ask them to cover my expenses for the four days that I’d be visiting them. They agreed, but were concerned about the budget. It all worked out. I was back to normal food after buying myself four days of temptations at the Radisson Blu buffets.

Back home after a month in India, I feel more spiritually attached to the people and place than ever. After twenty years of trying to get traction exploring new ideas of how engineers can embrace critical and creative thinking, or what I’ve started to call “cultivating clarity,” I am lucky to have developed a small group of local, American people, who appreciate my creative approach to critical thinking. But each of the two Indian companies that invited me to the give the “Thinking Skill Optimization” talk had 85+ people attend. And they participated. And their managers thanked me in unique ways that allowed me to see that they were also paying attention. My new friend Prasad told me “You have gotten pretty close to giving a method for developing intuition.”

Yes, that’s right. And it was very interesting to me that someone who lives in the land of the longest lasting collective consciousness, the very source of intuition, understood that to be a major part of my approach. Of course many engineers would not be attracted to a class on developing their intuition, and even if they were, I imagine they’d have a hard time convincing their bosses to cover the costs to attend. It sure is useful to have a way to calibrate intuition though. When effective, it’s a lot faster and easier than calculations and analysis.

Thinking about it further, I am just realizing how unusual it was that both managers attended the training with their employees. How often does that happen in the USA? Most American managers think that the only thing they need to know how to do is balance a budget.

I think there is more to the success of the contribution of Indian industry to the global economy than low wages.

The Problem with the Two Party System

Sometime in my youth, I remember expressing happiness to my dad that my preferred political party had won the presidency, after a long drought. Unfortunately, the new president was having trouble finding well known, experienced, skilled, proven Democrats to fill the leadership roles in the Cabinet, and beyond. My father, long interested in government, to the extent of reading multiple histories of the Romans, ranted about the incompetence of the new president, and the general failure to fill many of the positions, due to the refusal of Congress to approve his nominees, thus proving his general incompetence to be president.

Is Now The Time to Expand Our Two Party System?

That’s the problem with election cycles in the two party system that we Americans love so much. We’re proud of the fact that we have only two major parties. We avoid that messy coalition building that other democracies have to to through. We let the people choose, and then let the chosen person / party govern. At least that’s been the theory. The winning party claims a mandate based on the electoral college “landslide,” even if the popular vote went the other way. The winner then gets to fill the leadership roles in agriculture, the military, education, finance, drug policy, and all the other aspects of modern life.

But experience builds on experience.

As an engineer, age late 50’s, suddenly my clients are asking new types of questions. I would not have been able to answer these questions even a few years ago. Or maybe the questions have always been there, but I’m able to hear them now. Hard to say. A few times in the recent past, the answers have popped into my mind almost as soon as they are asked, and anticipated side concerns also seem to articulate themselves in the compost of the confusion of the questioner.

When only Democrats get to fill top positions for 8 or 12 years, Republicans don’t gain the skills required to lead. When only Republicans get to fill top positions for 8 or 12 years, Democrats don’t gain the skills required to lead. When Republicans, who by definition think multi-level hierarchy is the natural and best state for humanity, are in charge for long stretches of time, the sprouts of true egalitarian democracy are killed, pre-emergence.

Empowerment is the Key!

I heard an African-American community leader calmly insisting, correctly in my opinion, that money for White-led organizations helping African-Americans was wasted. African-Americans, he kept insisting, have to be empowered to solve problems by themselves. That means the role of the white cultural matrix must be to try to weed out the systematic discrimination that keeps African-Americans dis-empowered.

Empowerment is related to the SELF.

It does not mean power OVER others.

What are the major, current and actionable sources of this dis-empowerment? I’ll leave that question for all of us to meditate on.

Only by solving problems can we learn to solve problems.

This happens at many simultaneous levels: individual, community wide, city wide, state wide, nation wide, and world wide, and over many generations. It takes a long un-interupted time for the poisonous preconceptions carried in every culture to be weeded out in the “market-place of ideas.” These poisonous ideas are left from earlier times, were created in different circumstances, by well meaning people. But the only constant is change. And as change accelerates in the accelerated mingling of different groups in modern times, we need to move toward a system where people of all cultures and political persuasions have un-interupted chances to develop their leadership skills.

You may wish to view this Wikipedia article on other problems associated with the type of voting we have, which is not necessarily confined to two party systems. Thanks to the person who called this article to my attention.

Wrong about Worms!

The worm, surprised by the sudden appearance of daylight, quickly retreated into its tunnel.

“Do worms have eyes?” asked Danny.

“Hmm, good question. I don’t think so.”

“Either did I. Maybe they can sense light though. Or maybe it simply felt the air move. Or maybe it was resting against the bottom of the flower pot when you picked it up.”

I had recruited Danny to help me clean up the yard, his young skeleton being more flexible than mine, and his muscles stronger.

“It’s hard to say what a worm knows!” Danny pointed out.

“Well, it’s easy to find some verbiage about worms. But saying something meaningful and truthful requires mental wrestling,” I reminded my young neighbor.

“Worms do not have vertebrae!” retorted Danny. “That did not require too much wrestling.”

I nodded, happy to hear this entity of tender years producing such a pithy aphorism, and replied to him.

“We do have vertebrae, but we are still subject to the winds of fate. Our vertebrae help us stand straight, but we can’t avoid making some wrong turns in life.”

“Yeah,” mumbled Danny. “I’m still calculating the worth of that last explosion of wrath I indulged in.”

My eyes involuntarily sought the exit to the wormhole. I knew the feeling. We had met in the advanced anger management class. Our warped personalities were both on the mend. We were cultivating our minds. Tired of having to wriggle away from the complicated conditions we had created for ourselves, we were learning new habits. We were learning how to un-braid the strands of our troubled lives. We were learning to unwrap the layers of weird circumstances that had trapped us in inner turmoil. We were learning that prose is preferable to fists. Versatility is what we can learn from the worm.

Your face is wreathed in smiles,” noted Danny.

“Versatility is what we can learn from the worm,” I cheerfully replied.

“Right!” said Danny. No damn vertebrae to get in the way.”

MUSE

Our homework assignment in writing group was to randomly pick a word from the dictionary and write something about it or with it. I usually don’t do the homework. Most of the others in the group are retired and have more time. This time, I was inspired to write something though, but “WREATHE” (the verb) just did not give me much to go on. So I turned to the “Indo-European Root” dictionary at the back of the American Heritage Dictionary that I got a few years back. Word origins are very interesting. I read and underlined the entire Indo-European and Semetic root word appendices when the book arrived.

“Wreathe” comes from the root word “wer” of which there are three unrelated versions. (They’d sound different in the original Indo-European language, but all are represented as “wer” in modern American English. Wreathe comes from “wer” #2.) This version of “wer” has to do with turning and wrapping. It’s amazing how so few root words have generated so many individual expressions of nuance in the last 5000 years or so.

The highlighted words are all derivatives from “wer” #2. Of course some of the derivations in this dictionary are (IMHO) wrong. It’s tough work and the professionals tend sometimes to ignore the obvious in favor of the obscure. Sovereign, for example, (meaning self rule) obviously comes from whatever roots generated “swa” (self) and “raj” (as in “raja, king, also like reign!) but they have a different take.

Self Evident Truth About Distracted Driving

Earlier this week, the topic of discussion on NPR’s “On Point” radio show was the scourge of distracted driving. There are people working on smart technologies to stop people from doing tasks that require too much attention when they are moving at high velocity. There are apps that track high cognitive activities such as browsing and texting. These apps would be the equivalent of a “breathalyzer,” and cops could ask to see your device if you were stopped for a traffic violation. Supposedly our legal system would let people off the hook if the passenger stated under oath that they were the one using the device, not the driver. Just as social pressure has been used to greatly reduce the acceptability and frequency of drunk driving, social pressure is being used to bring awareness of the dangers of distracted driving.

The main danger is often said to be the driver taking eyes off of the road. Usually the eyes are linked to using the device while it’s in the hands. Hands are surely linked to the brain. But there have been studies showing that hands free driving is still distracted driving, and causes just as many accidents.

We See with our BRAINS

We have to remember, or realize, that we see with our BRAINS as much as we see with our eyes. The largest part of our brain is devoted to visual processing. While some people are undoubtedly better at multi-tasking than others, most of us over-rate our abilities in this area. See http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0054402 which includes the following

Ophir et al. [8] found that persons who frequently multi-task ….may be those who are the least cognitively equipped to effectively carry out multiple tasks simultaneously.

When we’re talking on the phone, it is not like talking with someone riding in the vehicle with us. It might be more like having a crying baby or a bunch of rowdy kids with us. The person at the other end of the line, the crying baby, the misbehaving kids, do not quiet themselves to allow you, the driver, to pay attention to the road when the situation demands. The person at the other end of the line, the crying baby, the misbehaving kids, are unaware that it would be safer for all if they were quiet, to allow the driver to pay attention to rapidly changing circumstances. In the case of the person at the other end of the line, they entangle the driver in their local “thought field,” (see this related article on shared consciousness), which is usually related to something other than the road conditions.

This realization came to me some years ago, when almost everyone believed that hands free cell phone use while driving meant safe cell phone use. That was well before the advent of smart phones. I had a client who had told me he thought that there should be two levels of drivers licenses. One for regular people, and one for those who had demonstrated that they could read while driving. He was a smart guy overall, and the above referenced work at the University of Utah leads us to believe that there could be test to allow the competent multi-taskers to be certified. But I still do not think I like the idea. A lot can happen in the blink of an eye when traveling at high speed.

Despite this, I’m also not a fan of driverless vehicles.

When is someone going to show that this emperor has no clothes?

We can’t keep our credit cards, bank accounts, medical information, social security numbers secure. We can’t keep our computers free of viruses and malware. How are we going to prevent hackers from creating giant accidents?

I guess we’ll “just have to get used to those giant “accidents,” as we are having to “get used to” attacks by terrorists and the neglected mentally ill.

Update October 30, 2016

The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration is taking action after the entrepreneur had tee shirts printed bragging about how rich they were going to get.

Hallelujah. Greedy, hubris drenched capitalist gets his come-uppance!

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/nhtsa-urges-u-self-driving-startup-delay-sale-133708559.html

Ode to Rollo May

A long time ago, at least in some frame of reference, I walked out of the front door of my parents’ home. Bereft of hope, I had not yet read Rollo May’s “Man’s Search for Himself.” Could I have known then what I now know, it might have been slightly easier. Doubt though, and the anxiety that accompanies it, are the shadows of the man or woman on the conscious path to becoming truly alive. Every day, I now know, that I miss the opportunity to make my own choices, that day is a chance lost to become my true self.

Fortunately, many friends and guides have supported even my most meager efforts. Good fortune is easier to see in hindsight. Having had to live through the doubt and anxiety was not fun at the time. I am now, however, very grateful to Rollo May for refusing to sing a lullaby. Justice for the courageous is not assured in the mundane world. Kindness to self is a difficult path to learn to tread. Looking at the fact that the hardest thing a human ever does is using rebellion creatively against parents, the stand-in for God, (or is God the stand-in for parents?) can only bring both hope and fear.

May I, writing as though I’ve risen to May’s challenge, actually gain the strength and courage to do so. Never, never will I totally give up, not even from the grave. Oh, I know the temptation to rest is compelling. Perhaps a few centuries of riding with the wave-forms of consciousness will suffice. Queen of Swords in this life, perhaps I’ll manage to become an Empress in the next. Really though, the specific mask of my temporary personality is irrelevant. Security is an illusion to anyone inhabiting a body. Time equalizes all, though. Universal consciousness is the only reality, the only frame of reference that can dispense with boundary conditions.

Verily, I am grateful to Dr. May for helping me see truth, helping me to see my own strength, as much as it has been developed to date. Why it took so long for me to comprehend that I really am, as Joseph Campbell teaches, the hero of my own story, is now clearer. X-rays, though penetrating to matter, would not have helped me to recognize the stages on the spiritual path sooner.

You might not be able to grasp the import of this acrostic, especially if you have never studied mythology, ancient history, philosophy and psychology. Zeno reminds that there is always another step on the path to half way to heaven.

The Cost of Defending Wealth

Defending wealth is expensive. Very expensive.

Think about it.

It’s self evident truth.

But remember, self evident truth is not available to the casual observer!

Only those who learn to see past what the conventional wisdom says are able to glean self evident truth. The whole idea of self evident truth is that you see it for yourself. It’s a shock when you see it. Things that don’t shock are not worthy of the category of self-evident truth.

One of the problems of understanding the ideas of self evident truth is that there are many different kinds of truth. To me, the original self evident truth to which I was introduced, that all men are created equal, is really not self-evident when I look at the world. Or if we were created equal, the equality rapidly evaporates.

But back to the original topic. It is currently self evident to me that protection of concentrated wealth is what our tax money goes to. Those who own little property of value to others are not the ones who need the police and courts to keep their property safe. Rich people don’t go to jail very often. Much more money is spent on sending poor people to jail. Poor people are sent to jail to protect the rich from the behaviors of the poor. Specifically, the behaviors of the poor that the rich see as undesirable, or a threat to their wealth.

Even if there is no direct threat to the property of the wealthy, keeping a lot of poor people under threat of incarceration helps to keep them distracted from ideas of working for social justice. I know from personal experience how I felt when I was threatened with jail time for a trumped up charge. I was eventually able to plea bargain down to my actual deed. And I have more resources and property than most.

Even if people of little property tend to be less educated, and may make personal mistakes, their mistakes are unlikely to cause the expensive problems our society faces, such as war, and the costly need to defend our borders. Rich people don’t go to war very often either. They send those of less means to defend their way of life. The cost of war is such a high number, I can’t fathom it without study. Check out the link.

Those who own lots of property are the ones who need protection from the jealousy of those who have less, whether internal to our national borders, or external.

The concept of personal property, and the desire to pass personal property on, at death, to heirs, has many consequences. Most of us never think about those consequences.

Even though we Americans think of our country as a democracy, we’re a republic. The whole idea of the (wealthy) founding fathers in creating a republic was to protect their wealth and privilege from the royalty. They gave more rights to the propertied men who had the means to run for office. The idea of the republic was not to give full rights to those the founders considered beneath them in the social hierarchy. Those who had not yet proven themselves worthy of consideration, because they had not amassed adequate wealth to join the powerful.

The results of the intentions of the founding fathers are with us still, even as we have given non-felonious citizens a full vote, regardless of skin color. (Note that it is the individual states that decide whether felons can or can’t vote, not the Constitution!)

What is the cost of the prison system? Our epidemic of incarceration costs us taxpayers $63.4 billion a year. Much of this is keeping drug offenders locked away, because as a society we have decided that is a more acceptable answer than rehabilitating the offenders, who have often had restricted opportunities at making a reasonable life for themselves according to the conventional recipe for the American Dream.

Poor people are also not the ones who wish to keep the minimum wages depressed by forcing the poor to compete against themselves. John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath” is an eloquent explanation of how property owners work to keep wages down.