gebloom.com https://gebloom.com/ en Thu, 29 Feb 2024 15:03:15 -0800 Inferences https://gebloom.com/2024/02/29/inferences.html Thu, 29 Feb 2024 12:03:08 -0800 http://gebloom.micro.blog/2024/02/29/inferences.html <p><em>The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.</em><br /> —<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman?wprov=sfti1">Richard Feynman</a></p> <p>Sid Meier, a famous computer game designer,<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> once explained that, because of his development experience, when he plays a computer game, he can&rsquo;t help but see the algorithms—the underlying software processes that create the action. Experts in a domain can envision the below-the-surface complexity of how determinants form the system in action, as when your doctor presses a stethoscope to your chest and translates the heartbeat to the status of your cardiovascular system. Domain experts don&rsquo;t have Superman&rsquo;s x-ray vision, but they make do with training and experience.</p> <p>A computer game, as Sid Meier might explain, is assembled with data and with formulas to define the relationships among the data. An animation layer acts as public relations for the hidden software processes. With either a game controller or a keyboard and mouse, the game player interacts with the animation layer and, if the player isn’t the all-knowing Sid Meier, suspends disbelief to regard the continuous animated updates as a simulated world.</p> <p>The corporate strategist, costumed in dull business attire, rather than the gamer’s hoodie, is using the spreadsheet on the screen, which is also assembled with data and with formulas to define the relationships among the data, to engage in imaginary play similar to that of the gamer. But unlike game players, corporate strategists interact with their imaginary worlds directly by modifying the data and formulas. These strategists call their spreadsheets &ldquo;projections&rdquo; to make them sound businesslike and rational but they’re just stories, with numbers as the characters and the formulas to define the relationships among the characters. A possible plot might be, &ldquo;What if we buy another company to incorporate their product or their intellectual property?” Or, “What if we reduce the price of our widget to expand our potential market?” The spreadsheet and game are distinct approaches to a similar goal: to play in a fantasy world without the risks found in the concrete world.<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup></p> <p>The spreadsheet creates a simulation that you explicitly manipulate (by changing data and formulas in the cells) to look at possible outcomes. The game, in contrast, is a pre-made simulation, in which through <em>the manipulation of the interface,</em> you experiment with possible outcomes that are implicit in the design of the data and formulas.</p> <p>In short, with a spreadsheet, you explore and experiment by changing the <em>parts</em> from <em>within</em> the skin of the virtual world. In a game, you explore and experiment by changing the <em>whole</em> from <em>outside</em> the skin of the virtual world.</p> <p>The parts and wholes of spreadsheets and games belong to abstraction, but it works similarly in the concrete world. An engineer designs the parts of a car, then the parts are assembled to test how the whole performs on the road. A football coach selects, conditions, and trains players, plugs them into defined positions, and tests how the whole performs on game days.</p> <h3 id="inference-in-research">Inference in research</h3> <p>What the spreadsheet and the game have in common is there are no counterparts for viewing human behavior. Neither the view from inside (studying the <em>parts</em> of the nervous system) nor the view from the outside (observing and experimenting with behavior) expose the determinants of human behavior. No one has lived inside another’s mind. Research in human behavior depends on <a href="https://gebloom.com/2024/02/20/skinners-folly.html#fnref:2">cognitive interpretation</a>, which disregards the level of inference that&rsquo;s required to call the results, “conclusions.”</p> <section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes"> <hr> <ol> <li id="fn:1" role="doc-endnote"> <p>Meier is best known for the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_(series)?wprov=sfti1#">Civilization</a> series, but he has designed or supervised the design of many games.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:2" role="doc-endnote"> <p>I got this idea from the great computer scientist, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay?wprov=sfti1">Alan Kay</a>, who while lesser known, had a stronger hand in inventing computers as we use them than Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. He termed the personal computer a fantasy amplifier and the spreadsheet a fantasy world.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> </ol> </section> Skinner's Folly https://gebloom.com/2024/02/20/skinners-folly.html Tue, 20 Feb 2024 15:56:12 -0800 http://gebloom.micro.blog/2024/02/20/skinners-folly.html <p><em>…the physicist himself, who describes all this, is, in his own account, himself constructed of it. He is, in short, made of a conglomeration of the very particulars he describes, no more, no less, bound together by and obeying such general laws as he himself has managed to find and to record.</em><br /> —<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._Spencer-Brown?wprov=sfti1#Personal_life_and_death">G. Spencer-Brown</a>, from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_Form?wprov=sfti1#">Laws of Form</a></p> <p>B.F. Skinner&rsquo;s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behaviorism?wprov=sfti1#Behavior_therapy">behaviorism</a> is now an over-the-hill band playing oldies at state fairs, but in the sixties, his theories climbed to the top of the charts of academic psychology.<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> In place of personality theories, such as those from Freud and Jung where inner drives explain behavior, Skinner believed that all human behavior was shaped by reinforcement from behavioral conditioning. Influences were external, not internal.</p> <p>Skinner&rsquo;s premise and that of the behavioralists that preceded him, that we can&rsquo;t see inside the mind of another, can&rsquo;t be denied. Theories of personality are, (as I keep insisting) <a href="https://gebloom.com/all-realites-are/#its-all-just-stories">just stories</a>, maybe closer to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_So_Stories?wprov=sfti1">just-so stories</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudyard_Kipling?wprov=sfti1">Rudyard Kipling&rsquo;s</a> famous fictional explanations for how characteristics of specific animals came to be. In theories of human behavior, the stories are in the mind of the theorists, not of their subjects. Freud, Jung, and other famous personality theorists were writing &ldquo;dear diary&rdquo; and calling their entries, science.<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup></p> <p>If a contemporary of Skinner&rsquo;s was brave enough to point out that his behavioral-modification theory was just another personality theory, perhaps Skinner wouldn&rsquo;t have promoted <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden_Two?wprov=sfti1#">his</a> socially engineered <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden_Two?wprov=sfti1#">utopia</a>.</p> <p>Skinner was right that we can&rsquo;t see inside another. If you look inside a brain, you see neurons and connections among the neurons, but the complexity of how that translates to human thought is elusive, and despite future strides in understanding, will always be elusive because of the paradox that the (scientist&rsquo;s) mind is studying the (subject&rsquo;s) mind, with all the limitations inherent in cognitive filters (neurological plus psychological filters equals cognition).<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">3</a></sup></p> <p>The scientific study of how we think is akin to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno's_paradoxes?wprov=sfti1#Paradoxes_of_motion">Zeno&rsquo;s Paradox of Motion</a>, which is explained simply: no matter how fast you run, each moment you can get only halfway closer to the finish line, and no matter how close that gets you to the finish line, each moment you can still get only halfway closer to the finish line, and so on…</p> <p>From <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno's_paradoxes?wprov=sfti1#Paradoxes_of_motion">Wikipedia</a>:</p> <p><img src="https://gebloom.com/uploads/2024/18392771-505f-456f-b067-53a24dc62325.png" alt=""></p> <p>The paradox of neurobiology is that even as we get closer to understanding neurobiology, because a mind is studying the mind, we’ll never get to the finish line. Your neural and psychological cognitive filters don’t get suspended when you receive your research grant. No matter how much science jargon you sprinkle over your thoughts, you can never think or observe outside your story.</p> <hr> <p>My theme in the following series of essays is that our inferences about each other are harmful, and the way to get beyond harmful inferences is to expand our behavioral repertoire.</p> <section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes"> <hr> <ol> <li id="fn:1" role="doc-endnote"> <p>Skinner&rsquo;s influence influence was swept away by sophisticated theories of language acquisition and by the cognitive revolution in psychology.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:2" role="doc-endnote"> <p>I&rsquo;m not discounting the ideas of Freud Jung, and other famous personality theorists, just their certitude. More annoying, their followers are more strident than the founders.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:3" role="doc-endnote"> <p>My preferred sources for these ideas are <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humberto_Maturana?wprov=sfti1#">Humberto Maturana</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Varela?wprov=sfti1#">Francisco Varela</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Bateson?wprov=sfti1#">Gregory Bateson</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Catherine_Bateson?wprov=sfti1#">Mary Catherine Bateson</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_von_Foerster?wprov=sfti1#Doomsday_equation">Heinz Von Forester</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._Spencer-Brown?wprov=sfti1">G. Spencer-Brown</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Pask?wprov=sfti1#Cybernetics">Gordon Pask</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_H._Pribram?wprov=sfti1">Karl Pribram</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Armitage_Miller?wprov=sfti1#">George Miller</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Ross_Ashby?wprov=sfti1#">Ross Ashby</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mead?wprov=sfti1#">Margaret Mead</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Watzlawick">Paul Watzlawick</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener?wprov=sfti1">Norbert Wiener</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Craik?wprov=sfti1">Kenneth Craik</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_G%C3%B6del?wprov=sfti1#">Kurt Gödel</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Hofstadter?wprov=sfti1">Douglas Hofstadter</a>. <br /><br />It pains me to realize, except for Hofstadter, all of the above are now dead. Apparently, I&rsquo;m old. <br /><br />There are religious practices, such as Buddhism and Taoism that explicitly embrace our cognitive limitations. As empiricism (evidence collected through sensory experience) is the underpinning for the scientific method, most scientists don’t give cognitive limitations consideration. Scientists who do haven’t given up on a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurophenomenology">scientific solution</a> to the paradox. I regard the scientific solution as wishful thinking from brilliant people who should know better.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> </ol> </section> Message to gebloom.com readers https://gebloom.com/2024/02/19/message-to-gebloomcom.html Mon, 19 Feb 2024 16:25:15 -0800 http://gebloom.micro.blog/2024/02/19/message-to-gebloomcom.html <p>I’m going to experiment with far shorter essays. I usually write short pieces and then figure out how to put the pieces together to make a longer, coherent essay. But why should I work to make these ideas fit when I can offload that to readers?</p> <p>The shorter pieces also will allow me to simultaneously post to an ActvityPub-compatible site, such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(social_network)?wprov=sfti1">Mastodon</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(social_network)?wprov=sfti1">Threads</a>. If you don’t know what that means, you needn’t care. My ActvityPub ID is</p> <p><a href="https://micro.blog/gebloom@gebloom.com">@gebloom@gebloom.com</a></p> <p>I’m sending out posts as a newsletter again (as well as posting to gebloom.com) to make it easier to unsubscribe or subscribe.</p> Hard Fun https://gebloom.com/2024/01/10/hard-fun.html Wed, 10 Jan 2024 13:03:01 -0800 http://gebloom.micro.blog/2024/01/10/hard-fun.html <p><em>The phrase &ldquo;pleasure of writing&rdquo; makes me pause. At this very moment, writing is not altogether pleasurable. The ticking of the clock telling me that the deadline is coming close frustrates me. I am stinging from the pain of having to throw out a whole paragraph because &ldquo;it wasn&rsquo;t going to work&rdquo; even though it had a phrase with which I had fallen in love. So maybe &ldquo;pleasure&rdquo; isn&rsquo;t quite the right word. Nor is &ldquo;fun.&rdquo; We need a better word for it and maybe that first grader in San Jose provided the best one. We are talking here about a special kind of fun &hellip; &ldquo;hard fun.&quot;</em><br />—Seymour Papert (founder of the AI, MIT lab and researcher in cognition)</p> <p>A girl is growing up in a rural American town in the middle of the twentieth century. She hits her teens and begins to notice that some of her classmates are wearing cooler dresses than can be found in the local department store or the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears?wprov=sfti1#Mail_order">Sears Catalog</a>. She asks around and learns these girls are sewing their own dresses.</p> <p>While the girls started on mother’s machine, most eventually save for or receive a gift of the trendy model that is simpler and cheaper, and they send away for catalogs of sewing patterns and cotton and wool fabrics. The girls begin to share patterns and catalogs and start a school club to talk about their hobby.</p> <p>The local sewing enthusiasts discover a national club that’s sponsored by the manufacturer of the now ubiquitous machine. The club creates contests for best-sewn products and for sewing patterns invented by the girls. As amateur pattern design takes off, budding entrepreneurs launch commercial journals targeted to the hobbyists.</p> <p>Manufacturers notice the personal sewing boom and launch both more expensive and cheaper machines, but they sell poorly because the sewing hobby is identified with the machine that launched the boom. While this low-to-medium priced machine eventually breaks down, they&rsquo;re simple to fix and third-party businesses jump in to create fix-it manuals and spare parts. The sewing machines are kept alive well past the time the engineers who developed them would have guessed. Newer, more expensive machines are undoubtedly superior—more sophisticated, more robust—and eventually become favorites of those who start their own pattern-design business, but the masses stay loyal to their first machines because they alone retain the most important element—the community of creativity.</p> <p>The oldest and geekiest of readers might realize that the hobbyist sewing boom I describe is a parable of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II?wprov=sfti1#External_links">Apple II</a> computer and the community that formed around it. (I know nothing about sewing.) First issued in 1977, Apple continued the model until late 1993, nearly a decade after the far more sophisticated Apple Macintosh, its intended replacement, was introduced and a dozen years after the more expensive and business-oriented IBM PC, the ancestor of the modern Windows computer, was released.</p> <p>Why did the Apple II persist despite its inferior engineering and its own company’s attempts to lay it to rest in favor of the Mac? Because the Apple II became the foundation for the greatest modern example of creating a community of creativity and a community of learning. Let me summarize the points made in the sewing example: while the technology came from the top, the manufacturers,<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> the community came from the bottom, the enthusiastic Apple II users. As they went on to design games and design business and home software, many of these early users became the driving force of modern personal computing. The hobby also hatched journalists, publishers, hardware add-on designers, and authors of how-to books and journals.<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup></p> <h3 id="meow">Meow</h3> <p>My son and his younger sister were homeschooled,<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">3</a></sup> but when they hit ages eleven and seven, the “homeschool resource center” run by the school system opened.<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">4</a></sup> Our daughter, at the time our socially interested child, engaged enthusiastically in learning Spanish and American Sign Language and more enthusiastically in the musical theatre class.</p> <p>Musical theatre became fashionable in the 90s, even hatching hit TV shows and movies. High schools had sponsored competitions, and parents of means got involved by supplementing the costs of production.</p> <p>At the homeschool resource center, aside from the contracted theatre instructor, the kids were on their own. When they decided to put on the then-famous musical, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cats_(musical)?wprov=sfti1">Cats</a>, they knew their involvement would have to go beyond rehearsing and performing. They constructed the sets and the complex feline costumes (no doubt sewed on the machines from the parable above). Not only did they pull it off, they became finalists in the school musical competition chosen by Seattle’s professional Fifth Avenue Theatre, going against schools with professionally made sets and costumes. The homeschoolers didn’t win, but they carried the satisfaction that the performance was all their doing.</p> <h3 id="my-communities">My communities</h3> <p>I’m an introvert, not part of a religious community, rarely felt a kinship with fellow counselors, and know no one who shares my intellectual interests. My idea of a tribe is rooting for the Seahawks. Since I began at age forty-eight, any community engagement I’ve had has been in a martial arts dojo.</p> <p>I believe a good martial arts dojo can be a model for a learning community, and all it takes to create one are instructors (the sensei) who have devotion to their art and care for their students. I’ve been lucky to find that three times.</p> <p>Why a martial arts dojo? First, while the instructor says <em>do it like this,</em> any instructor with ten minutes of experience means do it like this according to your physical and mental ability; they don’t expect every student to move with equal grace. Second, martial arts sensei like to <em>tell</em> as much as the next teacher, but as they’re teaching a kinesthetic skill, their focus is on <em>show,</em> that is, modeling, which is more effective for all instruction. Third, while there is competition—explicit ranking, and in sport martial arts, organized competition—the tacit if not always explicit message is you’re competing against only yourself. In other words, you’re training to be better than you were the day before. Fourth, martial arts creates a we’ve-got-each-other’s-back camaraderie. Despite what you believe from TV and movie dramas, the most dangerous aspect of a well-run martial arts school is the car trip to the dojo. Still, even if restrained, martial arts is physical combat, so there’s always potential for injury. And you can learn only if you consistently face what my Aikido sensei called a “sincere attack.” That potential for causing injury and for assisting others to learn makes you aware of your responsibility to your fellow students. Aware students help others and don’t hurt others.</p> <p>Last, martial arts tacitly gives responsibility for students to understand and fill the holes in their learning. While instructors can point to problems, I reach back to the <a href="https://gebloom.com/all-realites-are/">limitations of human communication and cognition</a> to point out there’s no way instruction can be fielded completely. I think that’s a good thing. Individual understanding evolves art and skill.</p> <h3 id="hard-fun">Hard fun</h3> <p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=Seymour%20Papert">Seymour Papert</a> was the cofounder at MIT of the first official artificial intelligence (AI) lab. Unlike the modern tech-bro culture, which is absorbed with self-interest, early AI culture was dedicated to learning, inventing, and sharing. To that end, Papert studied with the pioneering cognitive psychologist, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=Jean%20Piaget">Jean Piaget</a>, for five years because he wished to contribute to the education of young children. He and fellow computer scientists designed a children’s version of the dominant AI computer language, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)?wprov=sfti1#">Logo</a>, and its accompanying “object to think with,” a turtle-shaped tethered mechanical robot that Logo could control.</p> <p>The goal was to start a child as young as six to use turtle graphics to learn geometry. To begin, they’d walk the child through the steps the mechanical turtle would take to draw a square:</p> <p>forward 10 (paces)<br />right 90 (degrees)<br />forward 10<br />right 90<br />forward 10<br />right 90<br />forward 10<br />right 90</p> <p>The child would then type on the computer keyboard to give the same instructions to the mechanical turtle. The child was introduced to abstraction, the domain of math.</p> <p><img src="https://gebloom.com/uploads/2024/2a730fc6-8490-41c4-88fe-e92c56d0a3d7.jpeg" alt=""></p> <p>With the invention of personal computers, a version of Logo with virtual turtles that drew lines on the screen soon made their way to the Apple II and later personal computers.<sup id="fnref:5"><a href="#fn:5" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">5</a></sup></p> <p>Using Logo, young children were among the first to experience computer graphics, but soon advanced graphics would make their way to video and computer games.<sup id="fnref:6"><a href="#fn:6" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">6</a></sup> Papert never had children, but he spent significant time with his nieces and nephews and watched them play video games on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_console?wprov=sfti1">consoles</a>, which were introduced after he created Logo. He realized, if you look past the surface of cute animation, the games are difficult puzzles, and he was impressed that <em>the reward for beating a level was a more difficult level.</em> Papert concluded that the attraction of these games was not because they were frivolous fun, as we old folks may have believed, but “hard fun,” intellectual challenges that exceeded the dull lessons of the classroom.<sup id="fnref:7"><a href="#fn:7" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">7</a></sup> <sup id="fnref:8"><a href="#fn:8" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">8</a></sup></p> <p>Seymour Papert was prescient. While there was a time the rightful descendant of the Apple II learning community was amateur web site development, that has become too complex for hobbyists. Games have become increasingly difficult as well but are still accessible to the determined, and users turn to forums, wikis (a Wikipedia for a single game), messaging platforms, and YouTube and other video channels, to gather playing advice. The most ambitious add their own content to games (called “modding”)—harder hard fun.</p> <p>I’ve described various forms of learning communities and there are countless others: book clubs, writing groups, music jams, collecting, rock climbing, fan fiction, pet interests, role-playing, and many I’ve never heard of. What they have in common is the pursuit of hard fun, participation from members of various levels of competence, and sharing and mentoring. Contrast that with an increasingly common community, the tribe.</p> <h3 id="learning-communities-versus-tribalism">Learning communities versus tribalism</h3> <p>What largely separates learning communities from those defined by ethnicity, politics, religion, nationality, and the like is that the identity within the learning community is earned and the dominant part of that earning is what you give away as a mentor. Learning communities are also inclusive: anyone who shares the interest is welcome. Contrast with communities that are based solely on my tribe is better than your tribe or my tribe hates your tribe. Which community would you prefer to be part of, a community based on hard feelings or a community based on hard fun?</p> <section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes"> <hr> <ol> <li id="fn:1" role="doc-endnote"> <p>Unlike the sewing machine, the Apple II began (in the form of the Apple I) as a pure hobbyist invention by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak?wprov=sfti1#">Steve Wozniak</a>.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:2" role="doc-endnote"> <p>Unfortunately, unlike the mythical sewing hobby, which could even save money when the girls made their clothes, the Apple II, initially, was expensive (I couldn’t afford one) and got its initial sales boost from businesses because it had the first personal <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc?wprov=sfti1#">computer spreadsheet</a>. Cheaper computers that came along to fill the low-price gap became primarily game machines because they didn’t have the creative community of the Apple II. Ideally, bottom-up passions would come at bottom-up prices, that is, not become another path for socio-economic divide.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:3" role="doc-endnote"> <p>I use the term “homeschool” for convenience; home-mentored is more accurate. We required a minimum of book learning, pointed out various activities they might like, and otherwise left them alone. Our son did the so-called required work. Our daughter required that we leave her alone.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:4" role="doc-endnote"> <p>The school district created the resource center so they could count the users as regular students for which they got funded.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:5" role="doc-endnote"> <p>My sole reason for buying my first computer (at the age of 37) was its potential as a learning device for children and adults. I was not even aware of word processors or spreadsheets. My chief interest in computers is still as a learning device.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:6" role="doc-endnote"> <p>Often used interchangeably, video games are played on dedicated game consoles, such as the Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch. Computer games are played on general purpose computers, such as the Windows PC or Apple Macintosh.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:7" role="doc-endnote"> <p>I had a similar experience: During the educational software boom in the late 80s and early 90s, I published a journal where I wrote lengthy reviews comparing the software in each category, for example, math or biology. Out of dozens of programs, I found two that were worth using. I took a look at games and discovered they were far better learning environments than “educational software.” Fortunately, educational software is dead.&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:8" role="doc-endnote"> <p>Those who don’t play games may believe most gamers are still ten-year–old boys. On the contrary, children who grew up with games are still playing them decades later, so the average age of a gamer is mid-thirties. And though they tend to play different genres, the percentage of females who play games is equal to that of males.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> </ol> </section> Communication and Its Discontents, Part 1, Coupling https://gebloom.com/2023/11/02/communication-and-its.html Thu, 02 Nov 2023 14:21:42 -0800 http://gebloom.micro.blog/2023/11/02/communication-and-its.html <p>Despite how unappealing it would be to the average person, there’s an advantage to earning your living doing colonoscopies: other than in politics and social media, assholes don’t talk. Another choice for healthcare professionals who wish to avoid conversation is dentistry. It’s hard to talk with instruments camping in your oral opinion factory. But once in a while, bedside manner and all that, your dentist will ask a question, and they’ll pretend to listen for moments before they cram another instrument in your mouth. My new Portland dentist had that moment and asked the classic, “What do you do?”</p> <p>“I’m retired; I was a marriage counselor.”</p> <p>“What’s the secret to a lasting marriage?”</p> <p>“Most marriage counselors will say, ‘communication and understanding,’ but that’s bullshit. It’s acceptance.”</p> <p>The dentist shoves an instrument into my mouth.</p> <p>The dentist’s assistant seems to like my answer (but he’s about twelve years old and unmarried): “Yeah, compassion.”</p> <p>Good try, but by acceptance, I mean neither compassion nor how it may sound, resignation. I mean, it’s the only way long-term relationships—any long-term relationship—can sustain.</p> <p>As I’ve stated previously, communication, as <em>most understand it,</em> is either biologically impossible (as professed by neuroscientist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humberto_Maturana">Humberto Maturana</a> and those influenced by his work) or psychologically and cognitively unreliable (as supported by numerous theories in psychology and cognition). In either case, this means <em>it’s the receiver, not the sender who determines the meaning of a message.</em> Yet, since the sixties, better communication has been the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Grail">Holy Grail</a> of reducing conflict between spouses, parents and their children, business associates, and more currently, the polarized extremes in modern domestic politics.</p> <h3 id="how-communication-became-the-solution-to-conflict">How communication became <em>the</em> solution to conflict</h3> <p>In the first half of the twentieth century, pioneering psychotherapist Sigmund Freud and his followers focused on treating emotional problems that (he believed) stemmed from cultural sexual repression during the Victorian era. In Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, neuroses developed from internal conflicts—animal instincts (the id) versus culture (the super-ego) in an intra-psychic <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_wrestling_match_types#Cages">cage match</a>, with the ego as the referee.</p> <p>Several cultural changes shrunk Freud’s influence: the birth control pill and subsequent relaxation of cultural sexual repression; the leap in both propaganda used in war, and in advertising, that led to the study of communication to deceive;<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> the evolution of marriage; and psychotherapy moving from a focus on individuals in internal conflict to individuals in relational conflict.</p> <p>If the fifties in America was the “silent generation,” the sixties was the generation that would not stop expressing itself. Articles about psychology and relationships escaped from magazines targeted at women to newspapers and magazines meant for all. A new magazine, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology_Today">Psychology Today</a>, dispensed relationships research in popular language.</p> <p>Interest in communication began to generate scientific research. The social scientist Gregory Bateson attended the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macy_conferences">40s–50s Macy conferences</a> on cybernetics (“control and communication in the animal and machine”) and related fields—subjects previously tied to either the interests of war or to basic brain research.</p> <p>After the conferences, Bateson received a grant to study communication. A trained anthropologist, Bateson hired researchers for his team to study the utterances of schizophrenics in the Veterans Hospital of Palo Alto. When Bateson’s grant ended after ten years, he went on to study communication elsewhere, but his team and consultants stayed in Palo Alto to found the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Research_Institute">Mental Research Institute</a> (MRI), and MRI became the most influential and prestigious center to train therapists to deal with relationship issues. With books, conferences, and trainings, their ideas spread internationally, and the problem of communication among family members became the central theme of psychotherapy. In retrospect, this change in emphasis in psychotherapy was inevitable. In Western cultures, marriage had evolved from practical alliances of tribal, national, or household to romantic, and eventually, to best friend. Marriages, once dictatorships, became partnerships, and partnerships need agreements, (largely implicit in marriage), and agreements need communication.</p> <p>As if marriage didn’t have enough cultural responsibility—its stated and unstated rules and regulations for the right kind of coupling—in modern Western culture, marriage has become a prototype for all types of relationships, even business. We’re supposed to relate to everyone as if we’re raising children together.</p> <h3 id="if-not-communication-what">If not communication, what?</h3> <p>My <a href="https://gebloom.com/all-realites-are/">articles</a> have laid down my belief that because all realities are local to individuals, all incoming signals to our mind must get past border crossing agents so suspicious that little intended meaning is allowed through. Even your most devoted listener isn’t going to understand you. The good news is, regardless, some of us get along well enough to be friends, relatives on good terms, and intimate companions. The bad news is we believe we should get the good stuff in relationships without the conflicts, and that if we only communicated better, we’d understand each other better, and the conflicts could be tossed into the recycling bin and remanufactured into fluffy stuffed animals and Disney animated movies.</p> <h3 id="marriage-counseling2">Marriage counseling<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup></h3> <p>It’s common wisdom that generals are always fighting the last war. Nowhere was this better illustrated than when the Polish Calvary—that’s right, soldiers riding horses—attempted to beat back Hitler’s tanks in 1939.<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">3</a></sup> Not many years after the end of World War II, pioneering marriage and family therapists were still riding their theories designed to treat individuals into the mire of marriage and family therapy. Previously, because adult relationship problems were viewed as the manifestation of neuroses based in childhood,<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">4</a></sup> a couple asking for marital help would have been referred to separate individual psychotherapists. Marriage counseling was primarily the domain of the church minister. That era was not far in the rearview mirror when I began my graduate internship in family therapy. I was at best on <a href="https://gebloom.com/all-realites-are/#compare-and-contrast-part-1-the-good-internship">my own</a>, or worse, doing battle with my <a href="https://gebloom.com/all-realites-are/#compare-and-contrast-part-2-the-less-good-internship">supervisors</a>.</p> <p>My first experience in private practice (that is, working under my own license) was with a man and a woman, unmarried but living together. I don’t recall much about the counseling other than the sessions were directionless. My lack of training in marriage counseling meant I had no agenda. The three of us talked and after several months, the members of the couple felt resolved, set a wedding date, and we ended the sessions.</p> <p>The expression goes, fish don’t know they live in water. They also don’t know when their water is polluted and that their health is deteriorating. To couples living in discontent, the discontent pollutes everything in their relationship, conscious or not. By talking together, it’s not hard to remind those who love each other but are going through a bad patch that they still love each other. Any reasonably competent counselor can tip the conversation towards bringing out what got them together in the first place. Eventually, they’re swimming in the reminder of what they like in each other.</p> <h3 id="gettin-some-education">Gettin’ some education</h3> <p>Over the next few years, I read nearly every book that came out about marriage and family therapy. I experimented with the ideas, implemented some well and some badly, retained the ones that worked and discarded the ones that didn’t. You’d think after my book knowledge and later experience, I’d speak with authority on how couple counseling works and doesn’t work. Limited authority, anyway. But I don’t. I do, however, have some ideas about how couples work, or don’t, and who benefits from couple counseling and who doesn’t (at least with an unexceptional marriage counselor as I am)<sup id="fnref:5"><a href="#fn:5" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">5</a></sup>.</p> <p><em>The following is likely to be disbelieved by many if not most marriage counselors. They can write their own articles.</em></p> <p>I note three types of couples who make it to counseling. <sup id="fnref:6"><a href="#fn:6" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">6</a></sup> The first two come with one or both of them immunized against success in marriage counseling. First, when one of the members has already left the marriage but is coming to sessions to demonstrate that he or she tried. I find it cruel to extend these sessions beyond when the soon-to-be-left partner realizes that he or she is the only one trying to better their relationship. Second, when the members of the couple don’t like each other (let alone love each other) but don’t want to be alone. They are the type of couple most likely to end the sessions, quickly. If they stayed, they’d have to face that they don’t want to be together. Last, the couple who love each other but encounter problems when they must adapt to change, typically around job, money, children, and their living situation.</p> <p>I believe it is nearly impossible for a counselor to have success extending a marriage with the first two types of couples, and the futility of the process is quickly discovered.<sup id="fnref:7"><a href="#fn:7" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">7</a></sup> On the other hand, it takes practiced incompetence to not help the third type of couple.</p> <p>Whether consciously or subconsciously, experts can’t observe behavior in their domain of expertise without getting drawn in. What I observe is that couples who’ve managed to stay together for decades are not particularly good at listening to or understanding each other, and I can&rsquo;t assign the success I had in marriage counseling to improvement in what we refer to as communication.</p> <h3 id="doc-martin">Doc Martin</h3> <p>(<em>Spoiler alerts ahead</em>) What I believe creates a lasting coupling is best illustrated by the TV series, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doc_Martin?wprov=sfti1#">Doc Martin</a>. Martin Ellingham is a noted London surgeon who moves to a small fishing village to work as a general practitioner. During the series' ten seasons, his personality ranges from brusque and aloof to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome?wprov=sfti1#">Asberger’s</a><sup id="fnref:8"><a href="#fn:8" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">8</a></sup>. (Either the show’s writers don’t know the difference or I don’t.) On the other hand, he’s a brilliant physician who becomes full-on heroic and caring during medical emergencies.</p> <p>Into the seasons, despite Martin’s best efforts to subvert his happiness and his romance with his wife-to-be, Louisa, marriage and child come to the couple, but not for long as Martin continues to be Martin. His insensitivities grate on Louisa, and she becomes fed up and leaves him. Martin and Louisa make a final attempt to rescue their marriage with sessions with a so-called expert psychotherapist, but the counseling fails miserably.<sup id="fnref:9"><a href="#fn:9" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">9</a></sup></p> <p>(<em>Spoiler alerts ahead, really!</em>) The last episode of the seventh Doc Martin season has the most illustrative moment of what defines a successful coupling. Martin and Louisa, are currently separated. Martin is held under gunpoint on a rural farm because a patient’s wife demands Martin come up with a miraculous cure for her terminally ill husband. After the bumbling sheriff fails, Louisa rescues Martin. In the final scene, they’re sitting and talking on a hilltop on the farm. Louisa realizes she wants to be with Martin <em>regardless</em> of his insensitivities.</p> <h3 id="acceptance">Acceptance</h3> <p><em>You don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone.</em> —Joni Mitchell</p> <p>Louisa apparently concludes that (in my words) coupling is not about communication and understanding; it’s about acceptance, acceptance of differences, and even differences in how love and caring are expressed. Because our cognitive system can’t grasp another’s version of reality, no matter how much we care for that person, we can’t communicate; we can’t understand. What we can do is accept the differences between ourselves and others.</p> <p>In sessions with couples, I believe the counselor’s main role is to maintain harmony but leave the lyrics to the couple.<sup id="fnref:10"><a href="#fn:10" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">10</a></sup> In the case of the marriage counseling described above, I did not observe increased communication or increased understanding between the partners. I observed a process—being together in words and body language that created acceptance.</p> <blockquote> <p>(Groom’s name), do you take (Bride’s name) to be your wedded wife, to live together in marriage? Do you promise to love her, comfort her, honor and keep her for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and health, and forsaking all others, be faithful only to her, for as long as you both shall live?</p> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>Do you take this person you found on the Tinder dating app to be your wedded spouse, to live together in marriage (in a four-bedroom house and three-car garage)? Do you promise to love this person, comfort this person, honor and keep this person for better or worse, for richer or poorer, (but define “poorer”) in sickness and health (as long as we meditate together), and forsaking all others, be faithful only to each other (except we each get a free one), until you realize <em>you don’t get <strong>just the parts you like</strong> about your spouse?</em></p> </blockquote> <p>The first version is the traditional marriage vow from the groom side’s from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Common_Prayer?wprov=sfti1#">Book of Common Prayer</a>. The second version is from the book <em>How to Do Your Own Divorce or Find the Right Lawyer.</em><sup id="fnref:11"><a href="#fn:11" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">11</a></sup> The second version is because those Disney movies you watched as a kid never show the after-the-wedding Prince throwing his dirty underwear on the floor and spending the weekend drinking beer and watching TV.</p> <p>The difference between the two vows: in the second one, you’re unhappy that you don’t get <em>just the parts you like</em> about your spouse. In the first, you’re making a vow of acceptance. Five centuries ago, someone had coupling right.</p> <section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes"> <hr> <ol> <li id="fn:1" role="doc-endnote"> <p>Propaganda was a big part of pre-World War II and WWII itself and was major ammunition in the Cold War between the Western allies and the Soviet Union block. Advertising took off, care of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays">Edward Bernays</a> who exploited his knowledge of subconscious processes, thanks to his Uncle Sigmund Freud (his mother was Freud’s sister).&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:2" role="doc-endnote"> <p>I use “marriage” as shorthand for any category of intimate couples.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:3" role="doc-endnote"> <p>Despite the myth, the Polish Calvary did not attack the tanks with swords, but they might as well have.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:4" role="doc-endnote"> <p>While that may be true, it doesn’t mean that a marital rift will be healed from dealing with individual issues.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:5" role="doc-endnote"> <p>My comfort zone is one-on-one. Marriage and family therapy is conducting and refereeing. I don’t like conducting or refereeing.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:6" role="doc-endnote"> <p>I’m not referring to troubled couples who don’t come to counseling. For various reasons, usually trust-related from their history, many individuals have one foot out the door during the entire relationship.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:7" role="doc-endnote"> <p>The main clues for one or both not being interested in making the marriage work are either petty arguments (with me or their partner) about the details of homework I assign or failing to do the homework at all. &ldquo;When we were about to start the homework, the phone range.&rdquo;&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:8" role="doc-endnote"> <p>Asperger’s Syndrome is out of use in favor of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_spectrum?wprov=sfti1#">Autism</a>, which is a category too broad without going into clinical detail.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:9" role="doc-endnote"> <p>I wrote <a href="https://gebloom.com/2023/10/27/the-psychotherapy-of.html">my version</a> of what should have happened. Nevertheless, the failure of the counseling was necessary for the plot.&#160;<a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:10" role="doc-endnote"> <p>How the harmony is maintained depends on the approach of each therapist. I’m not teaching couple counseling here.&#160;<a href="#fnref:10" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:11" role="doc-endnote"> <p>There are similar books, but I invented that one.# Communication and Its Discontents, Part 1, Coupling&#160;<a href="#fnref:11" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> </ol> </section> Mastery https://gebloom.com/2023/10/13/mastery.html Fri, 13 Oct 2023 17:56:54 -0800 http://gebloom.micro.blog/2023/10/13/mastery.html <p><em>Can I move? I’m better when I move.</em></p> <p>—<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butch_Cassidy_and_the_Sundance_Kid?wprov=sfti1">The Sundance Kid</a></p> <p>Last year, my wife and I moved from Edmonds, Washington to Portland, Oregon to help with our newborn grandchild. At least that’s the explanation I put out. The real reason? I was scared to go out at night in Edmonds. I was afraid I’d run into the notorious gangs of dentists, lawyers, accountants, and the most chilling of all, the “lords of Edmonds mean streets,” the financial advisors. How else can I explain my continued practice in martial arts that I took up at age forty-eight? Yet, even with martial arts training,<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> I was still intimidated by the ravenous hoards pushing their way to an eighty-dollar filet mignon. Hence: to Portland.</p> <p>In truth, statistically, the most dangerous thing in my life would become the drive to the dojo, but after watching a documentary on the grace of Aikido,<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup> I wanted some of that. Unlike the Sundance Kid, I’m not better when I move, but I wished to become better when I move. Seven years in Aikido ended when the dojo closed. Two years in karate ended when my daughter could drive herself to the dojo. For the last fifteen years, my wife and I have pursued the more gentle-on-the body art of Tai Chi.</p> <h3 id="speed-thrills">Speed thrills</h3> <p>“Oh, my-my, what a sensation”</p> <p>—the Beach Boys</p> <p>In a nearby Portland park, we initiated our then ten-month-old granddaughter into a new sensation. Nana (Joan) sits Nova on her lap, arranges the infant’s extremities for safety, and wheeee down the park slide. The one-second adventure is Nova’s first thrill of speed.</p> <p>At my age of ten (years, not months), we visited the relatives we left behind in Chicago. My family took our first ride on a commercial jet. The acceleration on takeoff was so thrilling that for years I anticipated another jet ride for just those seconds.</p> <p>As thrilling as those rides are for Nova and were for me, it’s more fun when you’re the driver not the passenger, that is, when you get to control the speed that gives you thrills, such as when I learned to ski (badly), and when I pretended I was a race-car driver in the sports cars I owned in my early adulthood.</p> <p>In infancy, our caretakers tend to our needs and fulfill our desires. But they fulfill our desires only as they see fit. Nova’s smile informs us that she likes the ride down the slide. Her kicking and screaming as we put her back in her stroller informs us she’s displeased that she has no control over when the sliding fun ends.</p> <p>When Nova gets a little older, she’ll get to go down the slide by herself, and she’ll get to speed down the sidewalk on her trike. The older she gets, the more control she’ll have over speed and other sensuous thrills. Perhaps, she’ll take up a team sport such as soccer or an individual sport such as her big brother’s rock climbing or her mother’s martial arts.</p> <h3 id="calvin-and-hobbs">Calvin and Hobbs</h3> <p>When our kids were ready for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapter_book?wprov=sfti1">chapter books</a>, Joan and I created our own bedtime-story habits. I read our son adult books and his younger sister, young-adult books. Joan read our daughter newspaper comics and our son, from Calvin and Hobbs books.<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">3</a></sup></p> <p>One day, we found Adam sitting on the couch reading through a <em>Calvin and Hobbs</em> book on his own. He had realized he had learned to read by following the words in the book. Could he read, or did he just memorize the words in the one book? The answer came when he picked up the nearest novel in sight and began to read <em>Jurassic Park.</em></p> <p>The yearning for “mastery,” and by that, I mean attaining and maintaining a skill that brings independence<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">4</a></sup> starts at the breast (or substitute)—the umbilical cord has been severed, and I’m hungry—and lasts throughout life.</p> <p>We associate learning with school, and school with children, and we associate learning with practical needs such as reading. But most learning has no obvious utility, and we could go about our lives just fine without. To pay the bills, we could learn law or plumbing and spend the rest of our time watching Netflix. If I cared to acquire only practical knowledge, I’d forget training in Tai Chi and study the manual that came with our new computer disguised as a washing machine.<sup id="fnref:5"><a href="#fn:5" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">5</a></sup></p> <p>But there’s no difference between baby Nova and me. She didn’t recently learn to walk because she foresaw soccer in her future, and I don’t train in martial arts for self-defense or for the health advantages promoted in the Harvard Medical Journal. We both pursue mastery for its own sake because we’re humans and that’s how our species evolved.</p> <section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes"> <hr> <ol> <li id="fn:1" role="doc-endnote"> <p>Despite the years of training, I’m not good at martial arts, but I think I could hold my own against the older accountants and financial advisors.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:2" role="doc-endnote"> <p>I saw the documentary seventeen years before I started to train in Aikido but my intention persisted.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:3" role="doc-endnote"> <p>When she learned to read, our daughter read the Calvin and Hobbs books on her own.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:4" role="doc-endnote"> <p>Mastery is used in two ways: <em>competence,</em> which is how I’m using it, and <em>excellence.</em>&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:5" role="doc-endnote"> <p>Seriously, I doubt a Google engineer could understand the Miele manual.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> </ol> </section> Learning-Introduction https://gebloom.com/2023/10/13/learningintroduction.html Fri, 13 Oct 2023 17:55:20 -0800 http://gebloom.micro.blog/2023/10/13/learningintroduction.html <p>On a flight, seated behind a teenage girl, a novelist was having a get-off-my-lawn moment. With the click sound enabled, the girl tapped away on her iPhone. Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap… The nonstop cadence of the taps meant she could not be texting back and forth with friends. As the girl tapped away the entire flight, the novelist’s irritation dissolved into admiration and, finally, revelation. The girl was writing a novel.</p> <p>I enjoy reading about how authors write and their opinions on the correct creative process. There’s no end of advice on <em>how it should be done,</em> which varies from “write every single day at the same time in a quiet space set up for only writing” to “write when the baby’s napping” or “take advantage of when you&rsquo;re standing in line at Starbucks.” Or, if you&rsquo;re on a jet at cruising altitude, stuffed into a tiny seat with no leg room, thumb tap on your iPhone.</p> <h3 id="outlines-and-notecards">Outlines and Notecards</h3> <p><em>In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.</em></p> <p>—Mark Twain</p> <p>I have a hunch my “dumbbell English” <sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> class teachers felt the same way about me as Twain felt about the Parisians. Two attempts to pass a remedial English class at my community college resulted in grade <em>F.</em></p> <p>The goal of the class was to teach essay writing. We were instructed to begin our essay by making an outline and to take notes from our research on lined notecards. To produce the essay, we were to create an outline on which our notes would be distributed and transformed into prose. Voila (I know one more French word than Mark Twain did)—your essay.</p> <p>Does anyone write this way? When I attempted an outline, I lasted as long as I would in the ring against Mike Tyson in his prime (or even on his deathbed). In retrospect, I believe most students created the outline after they wrote their essays, but at the time, I blamed myself for my failure.</p> <p>Long motivated to become a licensed counselor, but aware of my academic deficits, I negotiated an academic path so I had to produce just two essays to get a master’s in clinical psychology. My undergrad degree was in applied art (which I’m terrible at), and my master’s was ninety-percent counseling internships with the “classroom” devoted to supervision. The downside? My writing woes plagued me well beyond those remedial English classes. My insecurities about writing contributed to my failure to complete my PhD.</p> <p>My academic days ended long ago. In the meantime, computers and word processors came along to minimize my deficiencies in organizing and maximize my enjoyment of thinking on a screen and illustrating those thoughts with wordplay.</p> <p><em>I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.</em><br> —Flannery O’Connor</p> <p><em>When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come. I don’t choose what kind of story it is or what’s going to happen.</em></p> <p>—Haruki Murakami</p> <p>So much for the expert writing advice to “have a plan.” My teachers’ instructions on how to write an essay presumed there was one best way (or, perhaps, just one way, as we were given no alternatives) to approach a writing project. And these instructions assumed that my brain works the same as theirs. There has to be a better way to nurture the abilities of a varied group of learners. Flannery O’Connor wrote before there were word processors, but some of us need more help.</p> <section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes"> <hr> <ol> <li id="fn:1" role="doc-endnote"> <p>Those classes were colloquially known as “dumbbell English,” and I failed my first two attempts. Four years later, at a different community college, I finally passed English 1A, so I could enter my junior college year.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> </ol> </section> The Psychotherapy of Doc Martin, by Dr. Rachel Timoney https://gebloom.com/2018/10/27/the-psychotherapy-of.html Sat, 27 Oct 2018 13:30:00 -0800 http://gebloom.micro.blog/2018/10/27/the-psychotherapy-of.html <p><em>(This is a form of fan fiction, intended solely for educational purposes, that combines events from the Doc Martin TV show, Season 7, with stuff I make up.)</em></p> <p>Dr. Rachel Timoney was looking forward to her first session with the eminent Dr. Martin Ellingham. She didn’t know much about him, apart from he was rumored to have abruptly resigned his prestigious position as head of vascular medicine at Imperial College, London. Chance would bring them together for an initial psychotherapy session. Dr. Ellingham (Doc Martin, to the locals) had taken a position in Portwenn, an isolated fishing village on the Celtic Sea. And she was spending a few months in Portwenn, writing and seeing a few patients.</p> <p>Rachel Timoney was once considered a prodigy in her field. Nine years ago, at age 23, she was granted a doctorate in psychotherapeutic theory. Her research had gained a moderate bit of fame, even getting into a few newspapers at the time. Even she knew that being highly regarded as a psychotherapy expert at age 23 would be beyond stupid. Mathematicians do breakthrough work at 23. Physicists do breakthrough work at 23. Even those in the arts do breakthrough work at 23. Counselors do not do breakthrough work at 23. There are certain things you can learn through experience, only, and if anything, those gifted in academia have typically sacrificed life experiences to excel in studies. There’s an age between infancy and senility that someone can become a good therapist, and it ain’t 23.</p> <p>In the years following receiving her doctorate, Timoney has worked on living up to her reputation. She’s done well, but from what she knew of him, she believed that having Dr. Martin Ellingham in therapy would be a novel challenge. It proved to be that.</p> <h3 id="doc-martin">Doc Martin</h3> <p>Seconds after he sits for their initial session, Martin informs Timoney that he expects she’d diagnose him as having attachment disorder. (Timoney notes silently that Martin describes himself as if he were a third party.) Martin explains that he was “an unwanted, unloved child” and gives a brief account of his upbringing by his cold and self-centered parents. (Later, Timoney would recount to her mentor that if Harry Potter had Doc Martin’s parents, rather than sacrifice their lives for his, they would have swapped him to Voldemort for a MacDonald’s breakfast coupon.)</p> <p>Martin makes it clear that he is aware of his interpersonal shortcomings. In discussing his marital difficulties, he accepts the entire blame. Responding to Martin’s depiction of his life, Timoney comments that he is as blunt with himself as he is with others. Martin had never considered that and feels his body relax into the thought.</p> <p>At the close of the session, Timoney suggests that it’s rare that one member of a couple is the sole source of conflict and asks that his wife Louisa come for an appointment.</p> <h3 id="louisa">Louisa</h3> <p>Dr. Timoney learns from their session that Louisa is an accomplished, articulate Portwenn schoolteacher. What Louisa is not, is eager to be in the session. She makes cracks about Timoney’s youth, implying that Timoney is inexperienced and naïve. Louisa contends that her marital problems are entirely due to Martin’s deficits in sensitivity, and that he should (as the English say) get them sorted without her involvement.</p> <p>Responding to Dr. Timoney’s questions, Louisa states that her parents were “fine, normal as you like,” moments later adding that her mother abandoned the family when she was 12, but “I didn’t really need a mother by then.” And, by the way, her father “spent some time in prison” when she was a young child. After listening to herself describe her childhood as <em>normal as you like,</em> with reluctance, Louisa agrees to attend couple counseling.</p> <h3 id="initial-sessions">Initial sessions</h3> <p>In Martin and Louisa’s first couples session, Louisa begins with an account of their relationship. Louisa describes their awkward courtship: boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy marries girl, girl has baby, boy loses girl. If it were a TV show, Louisa explains, it’d be the usual get-them-to-watch-the-next-season stuff. But it’s not a TV show.<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> Martin and Louisa don’t stay apart because of contrivances. They don’t miss a reconciliation because one of them is seen hugging an attractive stranger who turns out to be a sibling, while viewers yell explanations at the TV screen. Their problem is straightforward and never-changing. As much as Louisa wants to be with Martin, she’s constantly frustrated by his interpersonal limitations.</p> <h3 id="experiments">Experiments</h3> <p>As Timoney has learned through her training, struggling couples often have repetitive interactional patterns that result in seemingly irresolvable conflicts. Commonly used interventions or experiments (as she prefers to think of them) can be used successfully with many couples. For example, have them experiment with a small (but designed to interrupt) behavioral change in the middle of a pattern of conflict. Or, if one or both members of the couple believes that conflict is bad, and have no way to deal with anger and resentment other than to withdraw (after all, avoiding conflict worked for their parents, right up to the divorce), the therapist can design a practice for successful conflict resolution.</p> <p>As we shall see, commonly used interventions don’t work for everyone. And they do not for Martin and Louisa. Their pasts have left Martin with a limited repertoire of behavior and Louisa with small boundaries of trust. Their situation calls for a specialist, not a general practitioner. Timoney attempts three homework experiments that fail:</p> <p>(1) Homework: Timoney has figured that Martin and Louisa have problems with physical intimacy, they are told to hug three times a day, while stating something nice about each other.</p> <p>Failure: While it’s true that Martin is not a toucher, he does like holding Louisa. In this case, the not touching was an effect, not a cause of their psychological distance, and the homework just creates additional awkwardness. To add to the awkwardness, Louisa never thinks of anything positive to say to Martin.</p> <p>(2) Homework: Because Martin is a control freak (affirmed by both Martin and Louisa), they are told to have an outing in which Louisa is in total charge. In theory, this will help balance their relationship.</p> <p>Failure: Louisa decides on a picnic to the beach, where Martin is uncomfortable with the random elements of a beach and a picnic, but sets out to give Louisa a <em>normal</em> family outing. The outing is eventually interrupted by a medical emergency that Martin must attend to.</p> <p>(3) Homework: Martin and Louisa did not have a typical courtship, that is, they didn’t date. Timoney suggests some conventional courtship outings. Martin and Louisa plan a restaurant date.</p> <p>Failure: In just minutes spent at the restaurant (because of yet another medical emergency that requires Martin), Martin and Louisa experience the whole of their relationship awkwardness.</p> <p>There’s a smorgasbord of reasons why these homework assignments were doomed. Leave room for dessert:</p> <p>First, two of the assignments were exercises to get Martin and Louisa to engage more. That’s more, not better. More, not different. There wasn’t anything in these exercises that would help them engage better.</p> <p>Second, each assignment was bound to make Martin feel even more awkward and more vulnerable. Martin’s increased awkwardness exacerbated the very things that Louisa finds unattractive in her husband. That is not a recipe to increase intimacy.</p> <p>Third, characterizing Martin as a control freak is simplistic. He’s compulsive — habitual and tidy, beyond what most consider practical. But he’s not trying to control the behavior of others; he’s trying to control his environment in which other humans happen to be present. Being habitual and tidy is a common adaptation for those who have dealt with psychologically chaotic circumstances, especially in childhood. Even more significant, as Martin desperately wants to be with Louisa, she has the most meaningful control, control over his happiness. Martin is in control of nothing beyond his medical practice; he’s the most psychologically fragile person in Portwenn.</p> <p>Fourth, Timoney misses an opportunity (which I’ll explain below) to cast Martin in a more positive light, which could have contributed to a major improvement in their relationship.</p> <p>In Timoney’s mind, if her tried-and-true conflict-resolution schemes don’t work, it can’t be her fault. She salves her shrinking-ego (pun intended) through the time-tested technique of blaming her clients. After Martin and Louisa inform Timoney that they won’t be returning, she tells them that they’re “one of the most challenging cases I have ever come across.”</p> <h3 id="dr-timoney-gets-a-mulligan-in-golf-a-do-over">Dr. Timoney gets a Mulligan (in golf, a do-over)</h3> <p>(Up to this point, I was following the TV script. The rest is my contribution.) After Martin and Louisa decide to end counseling, Rachel Timoney feels relief, guilt, and regret — relief that she won’t have to watch herself struggle with her work, guilt that she feels that way, and regret that she did not help her clients. Timoney decides to confer with her old professor. Sure, he’s past his prime. He babbles too much, repeats himself, but now and then, he still conjures some inventive advice.<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup> But before she calls him, Timoney has a WTF moment. She knows what he’d say. Instead of calling her professor, Timoney contacts Martin and Louisa, apologizes for her last remarks, and states that she has some fresh ideas. Surprised by the apology, they agree to give counseling another try.</p> <p>Anticipating the call to her professor, the conversation Timoney had with herself exposed that her interventions reeked of <em>this worked in the past, so why be creative?</em> She was being lazy: the experiments were designed with the relationship in mind, but not with the people in the relationship in mind. While couple counseling can counter interactional patterns that lead to relationship problems, that doesn’t mean you can ignore the distinctiveness that individuals bring to relationships.</p> <h3 id="couples-therapy-its-not-just-for-couples-anymore">Couples Therapy: it’s not just for couples anymore</h3> <p>Timoney notes that Louisa was right; she should have started with Martin. But not because he’s the one who needs to get his problems sorted. Despite the notoriety that Timoney got for her research, she forgot to implement her own hard-won knowledge. What her research yielded<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">3</a></sup> is that, when engaging in couple counseling, confronting a resistant client is rowing upstream.</p> <p>Due to the influences of substance-abuse treatment and early family therapy, confronting clients became fashionable in the 1970s. When parents brought a child for treatment, they were told that the child’s behavior was usually a symptom of a dysfunctional marriage and poor parenting. A child client became labeled as the <em>identified patient;</em> the real patient, the parents were told, was the dysfunctional family, with the unspoken (and sometimes spoken) message that the parents were at fault. While confrontation made for dramatic teaching videos — therapist as action hero — the approach too often chased away the clients.<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">4</a></sup> After all, if the clients were willing to face their own problems, there wouldn’t have been all those identified-patient children in the first place.</p> <p>Given the above, Timoney decides that the best course is to hold off on working directly with the relationship. As both Martin and Louisa feel that the major relationship problems lie with Martin, to avoid needless friction, Timoney opts for <em>one-person couple therapy,</em> the other leg of Timoney’s research.</p> <p>Timoney (as have many before her) found that a change in one member of a couple can have a profound and positive effect on the relationship. Timoney knew that therapists have been practicing one-person couples therapy for decades, but have been intimidated against stating so by the family therapy mafia, who define family therapy by who comes to the session. That’s silly and never should have happened. Many family therapists apparently never moved past Piaget’s concrete-operational stage of development: once family therapy moved from the psychodynamic model to systems theory, it should have been obvious that if the client lives in a family, all therapy is family therapy.</p> <h3 id="therapy-with-martin">Therapy with Martin</h3> <p>In discussing goals with Martin, he agrees that he would like to become more comfortable — <em>fluid</em> is the word agreed on — in his interactions with Louisa and with his infant son. He wants to make sure that he doesn’t recreate the relationships his parents had with him and with each other.</p> <p>The experiments with Martin commence:</p> <p>If you live in a cosmopolitan area where men commonly wear business suits, or you have watched episodes of Mad Men, you’ll notice that the men always unbutton their jackets when they sit and button them when they stand. A well-tailored suit jacket has no give, so a buttoned jacket pulls at the waist when the wearer is seated. Timoney jots this in her memory because it provides an inroad into a subtle experiment.</p> <p>From the time he rises to when he retires for the night, Martin dresses precisely the same, in a suit with the top two buttons fastened on his three-button jacket. And you’ll observe that he <em>never</em> unfastens his suit jacket buttons, even when building a sandcastle with his son on the beach. A change in dress will give Martin the experience that nothing catastrophic will happen if he changes one habit.</p> <p>In order, over several weeks:</p> <p>To help Martin have the experience of overcoming a compulsive habit: (1) Timoney asks Martin to unbutton his jacket whenever he sits. (2) Next, she has him leave his jacket unbuttoned all day. (3) Last, she asks Martin to buy and wear casual clothes on his non-office days (presumably, the weekend). While change in one habit may seem trivial, the experience of that change can be a dramatic confidence builder.</p> <p>To help Martin expand his repertoire of interpersonal responses and range of affect, Timoney exploits Martin’s desire for an enhanced relationship with his son: As stated, above, it’s obvious that Martin wishes to be involved with his son’s upbringing in a manner that sharply contrasts with how he (Martin) was raised. But he needs instruction and encouragement. While Martin gladly holds and bathes James, he does not exchange facial or noise expressions. We can assume that Martin’s deficit is a result of being neglected in infancy, that no facial expression mirroring took place between Martin and his parents.</p> <p>(1) Timoney asks Martin to exchange facial and noise expressions with James. As James has learned to smile from his mother, Martin has the opportunity to both initiate and respond. (2) Rather than exchange hugs (as above), Timoney asks that Martin and Louisa trade smiles. (3) Timoney asks Martin to progressively expand his gestures of relationship beyond his son and wife. First, smile at his aunt (the one other person for whom he has affection), then his receptionist, then patients. This mildest demonstration of affect can teach him to better interact with others.</p> <h3 id="marital-grad-school">Marital grad school</h3> <p>After the above experiments, Timoney asks Martin and Louisa to come in together, once more. The experiments yielded a larger shift in their relationship than expected. To Timoney’s surprise, Louisa discloses that when she first met Martin, he was more outgoing and considerate. While never the life of the party, he was sensitive and generous to many in Portwenn and is acting that way again.<sup id="fnref:5"><a href="#fn:5" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">5</a></sup> Timoney realizes that she had made an assumption that Martin had always been this inhibited in his mood, sensitivity, and affect. Not learning otherwise was a rookie mistake.</p> <p>Many couples have trouble in their relationship because they had no models of a good marriage. As both Martin and Louisa had parents with poor marriages, this could describe the experiences of both. However, some react the opposite of what you’d expect. Rather than stay away from marriage because they experienced poor models, they idealize what a good marriage would be like. Timoney asks each of them what a <em>normal</em> marriage is like. After some discussion, both admit that, while they have fantasies of a normal marriage, they guess that no such thing exists. Timoney states that fantasies of the extreme, positive or negative, usually get in the way.</p> <p>Wrapping up: In their solo session, Timoney had suggested to Louisa that, given her background of abandonment by her parents, she (purposely) married someone who would leave her. As we find out, Louisa believes the exact opposite, that Martin is the most dependable and loyal man she’d ever meet. Given her background of abandonment, it’s easy to see that she picked Martin, not because he would leave her, but because he wouldn’t. If in early sessions, Timoney had made a better effort to bring this to light, it could have changed the context of their marital relationship. If every time Louisa glances at Martin and sees not someone who has a limited range of sensitivity and affect, but someone who loves her without reservation and will always be there for her and their children, Louisa’s entire attitude towards their marriage could shift.<sup id="fnref:6"><a href="#fn:6" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">6</a></sup></p> <p>In the final session, Dr. Timoney, Louisa, and Martin discuss the wide variety of successful marriages. They conclude that Louisa chose Martin for his loyalty, and Martin chose Louisa because he saw in her that he could get the warmth and connection he desired.</p> <section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes"> <hr> <ol> <li id="fn:1" role="doc-endnote"> <p>Well, yeah, it is.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:2" role="doc-endnote"> <p>A counselor friend guessed I was modeling the old professor after myself. She was right.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:3" role="doc-endnote"> <pre><code>I'm making this up. The specifics of Timoney's research were never brought up in the TV show. </code></pre> &#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></li> <li id="fn:4" role="doc-endnote"> <p>Reminds me of the old joke: the operation was a success, but the patient died.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:5" role="doc-endnote"> <p>In early episodes, Martin comes off as a fish out of water, like Dr. Joel Fleischman from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern%5C_Exposure?wprov=sfsi1">Northern Exposure</a>. In later seasons, he comes off as a fish swimming in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome?wprov=sfsi1">Aspergers</a> tank.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:6" role="doc-endnote"> <p>This change in point of view is a cornerstone of approaches influenced by the famous hypnotherapist, Milton Erickson, and in various cognitive-behavior approaches.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> </ol> </section> Privacy — an essential habit of democracy https://gebloom.com/2017/11/20/privacy-an-essential.html Mon, 20 Nov 2017 09:51:00 -0800 http://gebloom.micro.blog/2017/11/20/privacy-an-essential.html <p>Bria Bloom recently posted an <a href="https://www.self-directed.org/tp/children-not-your-property/">essay</a> of her witnessing an interaction between a mother and the mother’s (about) ten year-old-daughter. The mother is playing with her daughter’s hair, treating it as if it belonged to a doll, while ignoring her daughter’s repeated requests to stop. The daughter and mother both persist, until her mother finally stops and calls her daughter a brat.</p> <p>If you stop reading Bria’s essay at this point (because Facebook beckons), you’d probably think nothing of the incident — children and parents will be children and parents. But if you read further, Bria makes an unexpected connection: the insistent (pardon) manhandling of the daughter, despite her protests, is inadvertently <em>training</em> the daughter to accept that her body is not her own, that without consent, she should allow her body to be invaded by another’s behavior.</p> <p>Bria’s interpretation startled me. When the above “training” is practiced by a sexual predator, it’s called something really creepy, “<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_grooming">grooming</a>,” getting a child used to accepting physical invasion — sexual invasion.</p> <h3 id="the-grooming-of-americans">The Grooming of Americans</h3> <p>Without a huge conceptual jump, we can see this sort of grooming taking place with our constitutional democracy.<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> Compare Bria’s remarks, further on:</p> <blockquote> <p>This behavior can be especially dangerous when thinking about our society’s absence of a strong culture of consent&hellip;</p> </blockquote> <p>with a phrase from the second paragraph of the United States Declaration of Independence:</p> <blockquote> <p>Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed&hellip;</p> </blockquote> <h3 id="the-us-constitution-is-just-a-goddamned-piece-of-paper">“The U.S. Constitution is just a goddamned piece of paper!”</h3> <p>The above is attributed to then President George W. Bush, who supposedly uttered it in a meeting with Republican Members of Congress who were concerned about portions of the Patriot Act. It’s unlikely that Bush ever said <a href="https://www.factcheck.org/2007/12/bush-the-constitution-a-goddamned-piece-of-paper/">that</a>, but he would have been right. The Constitution <em>is</em> just a goddamned piece of paper. Democracy is not what’s on a piece of paper, democracy is a habit of behaving in a manner that expects that as citizens, we have rights, specifically, as designated in the Bill of Rights. Our democracy is in danger, because we are treating our government as if it’s not run by our public servants, but by our rulers. <em>We are absent a strong culture of consent.</em></p> <h3 id="how-weve-been-groomed-to-give-up-consent">How we’ve been groomed to give up consent</h3> <p>What Bria’s essay implies is that changing someone’s behavior, for better or worse, nearly always comes from repetition. So it is with grooming by unwanted invasive behavior.</p> <h4 id="what-happened-to-consent-of-the-governed-stories-happenedhttpswwwschneiercomessaysarchives200509terrorists_dont_do_mhtml">What happened to consent of the governed? (<a href="https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2005/09/terrorists_dont_do_m.html">stories happened</a>)</h4> <p>The easy answer is that we (as citizens) are ready to suspend constitutional rights, quickly and passively, when we’re afraid, which usually occurs in time of war. Obvious examples include the <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Americans">internment</a> of American citizens of Japanese decent, during World War II; the tactics of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy?wprov=sfti1">Senator Joseph McCarthy</a> and the House Un-American Activities Committee during the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War?wprov=sfti1">Cold War</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare?wprov=sfti1">red scare</a>; <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone?wprov=sfti1">free speech zones</a> during political protests; and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp?wprov=sfti1https://maps.apple.com/?ll=19.902222,-75.098889&amp;q=Guantanamo%20Bay%20detention%20camp&amp;_ext=EiQp4J8QCfjmM0AxNx8RMlTGUsA54J8QCfjmM0BBNx8RMlTGUsA=">Guantanamo Bay detention camp</a> during the never-ending so-called war on terror.</p> <p>As the only animal that has a linguistic form of language, and language being the tool of abstraction (communicating about other than what’s in front of us), we primarily think and learn in the form of stories. Want to lose an election? Campaign on policies. Want to win an election? Campaign on anecdotes. Want charitable contributions following a natural disaster or to stop a war? Forget statistics about thousands who’ve died or are suffering, show an injured child. Want to raise money for your state’s government? Forget publishing the cost of keeping a licensing office open on Saturday, show a lottery winner’s new mansion. Finally, you want to run roughshod over the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution?wprov=sfti1">Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution</a>? Make a single event that occurred 16 years ago and counting your nation’s dominant story.<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup> Nevermind that <a href="https://www.vox.com/2015/11/23/9765718/domestic-terrorism-threat">homegrown terrorists</a> are more common. Nevermind that, while 3000 were killed in the 9/11 attack, since, over 500,000 in the United States were killed in auto accidents. Nevermind that if you want to create worrisome but more effective stories around issues for Americans to change our way of life, consider our causal response to flu season, which should be considered <a href="%5Bhttps://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/01/09/deaths-and-hospitalizations-rise-flu-season-hits-full-swing/1017898001/%5D">dangerous enough</a> for quarantines, but sick adults still go to work and sick children still go to school; consider <a href="%5Bhttp://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/oct/05/viral-image/fact-checking-comparison-gun-deaths-and-terrorism-/%5D">gun-related deaths</a>; consider <a href="%5Bhttps://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climatechange-road-deaths/climate-change-might-be-cause-of-record-u-s-road-deaths-study-idUSKCN1BB377%5D">climate change</a>. There are countless perils in our daily lives that are far more common and deadly than the scary, but statistically small, events that make the news such as <a href="https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/sharks-attack-fear-science-psychology-spd/">shark attacks</a>, <a href="http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm">plane crashes</a>, <a href="%5Bhttps://weather.com/storms/severe/news/lightning-deaths-by-state-2005-2014%5D">lightening strikes</a>, and yes, terrorists attacks.</p> <p>The repetition of the 9/11 story is told implicitly at airports, train stations, and border crossings, as a rationale to treat the entire populace as a herd of suspects, and those that fit a racial profile, even more so. This story is told in the form of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_theater?wprov=sfti1">security theater</a>, a term coined to identify measures that create the illusion of enhanced security, but have either no effect or have a negative effect of saving lives.</p> <h4 id="the-costs-of-security-theater">The Costs of Security Theater</h4> <p>Some examples of the cost of security theater. From <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_theater?wprov=sfti1">Wikipedia</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>In 2007, the researchers studied the specific effects of a change to security practices instituted by the TSA in late 2002. They concluded that this change reduced the number of air travelers by 6%, and estimated that consequently, 129 more people died in car accidents in the fourth quarter of 2002. Extrapolating this rate of fatalities, New York Times contributor Nate Silver remarked that this is equivalent to &ldquo;four fully loaded Boeing 737s crashing each year.&rdquo;</p> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>The 2007 Cornell study also noted that strict airport security hurts the airline industry; it was estimated that the 6% reduction in the number of passengers in the fourth quarter of 2002 cost the industry $1.1 billion in lost business.</p> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>A 2010 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found that the TSA&rsquo;s $900 million Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) program, a behavioral-detection program introduced in 2007 that is aimed at detecting terrorists, had detected no terrorists and failed to detect at least 16 people who had traveled through airports where the program was in use and were later involved in terrorism cases.</p> </blockquote> <p>The Ineffectiveness of Security Theater</p> <blockquote> <p>&hellip;TSA agents <a href="https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/06/airport-security-astoundingly-expensive-and-95-percent-ineffective/394778/">failed to detect a threat in 67 out of 70 recent trials</a>. Posing as passengers, U.S. Department of Homeland Security “Red Teams” were able to carry weapons and fake explosives (“simulant” threats) through security checkpoints without any trouble. Former TSA Administrator James Loy, who led the agency in its first year, called the leaked results an “abominable failure.”</p> </blockquote> <h3 id="government--corporations--a-tag-team-of-grooming-us-to-give-up-consent">Government &amp; Corporations — a tag team of grooming us to give up consent</h3> <p>That most of us don’t often travel by jet or train, or cross the border, is irrelevant. The 9/11 story is told less directly but more consistently throughout our daily lives, through a partnership between our government and corporations such as Facebook, Google,<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">3</a></sup> and Verizon. It’s told as a means of grooming the populace to accept ongoing invasiveness into our private business, beliefs, and behavior. Whether or not some or all of it is intentional does not matter; the effect is the same.</p> <p>On the intentional side, the NSA and CIA partially <a href="https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance/">funded</a> the Google search engine. Congress gave communications companies such as Verizon and AT&amp;T <a href="https://www.alternet.org/story/65248/bush_and_the_phone_companies:_partners_in_crime">retroactive immunity</a> for granting the NSA the means to, without a warrant, wiretap all U.S. phone calls for three months. The U.S. government continues to renew laws that extend their reach into our private lives. And they are currently attempting to create regulations that would require, though our most <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602201/security-experts-agree-the-nsa-was-hacked/">secretive surveillance agencies can’t keep their own data secure</a>, large tech companies to install backdoors (access) into major data platforms in the cloud. If you thought the Equifax <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equifax?wprov=sfti1">data breach</a> was fun, wait until the Russians get a hold of our personal records on DropBox, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (which the <a href="https://docs.aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/latest/UserGuide/whatis.html">U.S. Government is going to use</a>), Google Cloud, and Apple’s iCloud.</p> <p>On the unintentional side, Google and Facebook, along with numerous smaller entities (<a href="https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/03/the_600_compani.html">Paypal shares your data with 600 companies</a>), have groomed billions of us to be indifferent to constant surveillance, an indifference government agencies increasingly exploit. We shrug at Congress voting retroactive immunity for Verizon and AT&amp;T for selling us out by allowing our entire citizenry to be wiretapped without a warrant. We shrug at the Director of National Intelligence <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clapper?wprov=sfti1">lying</a> to Congress about it. We shrug at the rubber stamp FISA court who, between 1995 and 2015, <a href="https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-spy-court-didnt-reject-a-single-secret-government-demand-for-data/">approved 38,365 FISA warrants while rejecting 12</a>. In a country where a minority segment of the population goes apeshit over <em>any perceived</em> encroachment of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, not many <a href="https://medium.com/@davepell/the-only-privacy-policy-that-matters-2f488d5646f6">give any shit</a> over the constant encroachments of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.</p> <h3 id="our-future">Our Future</h3> <p>I recall not many years ago reading that, while we’re all familiar with the FBI and the CIA, our <em>really</em> secretive spy agency was the National Security Agency (NSA). In my former naivety, I was shocked to learn of this, ultra-secretive, U.S. intelligence agency. As it turns out, the U.S. Government has not three, but <a href="http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-17-intelligence-agencies-20170112-story.html">seventeen intelligence agencies</a>, many of whom operate without the need for warrants to, at least, passively spy on American citizens. Do you believe that any of these agencies will shut done because of overlap and/or irrelevance? The use-by date on their package may have long faded, but don’t expect them to notice the sour smell of their efforts. They will find “important work,” and as intelligence agencies, some of that work will likely include domestic spying.</p> <h4 id="a-new-story-in-the-horror-genre">A new story in the horror genre</h4> <p>Every <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Bourne">Jason Bourne</a> movie contains one or more scenes that demonstrate, if the enforcement agencies want to find you, they will. But those movies are old;<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">4</a></sup> they show surveillance by means of security cameras, cell phone records, and wire taps. Since we’re not disillusioned spies on the run, no one is going to make a similar effort to track us, but they won’t have to if we adopt the surveillance model of China. While I think the facial recognition that unlocks my iPhone X is cool, the Chinese intelligence community thinks that facial recognition to monitor every move of its citizens is cooler.</p> <p>On the <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pNf4-d6fDoY">video</a>, a Chinese official explains:</p> <blockquote> <p>We can match every face with an ID card, and trace all your movements back one week in time. We can match your face with your car and match you with your relatives and the people you’re in touch with. With enough cameras, we know who you frequently meet.</p> </blockquote> <p>The watchful eyes of those 17 intelligence agencies, the invasiveness of Facebook, Google, and others to learn what’s in our heads, who we’re in touch with, where we go, and what we buy grooms us to accept increasing surveillance until the Chinese model will arrive (if we’re not already <a href="http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-farivar-surveillance-tech-20180502-story.html">there</a>) like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog?wprov=sfti1">gently-boiled frog in a pot</a>.</p> <h3 id="privacy-is-the-cornerstone-of-democracy">Privacy is the cornerstone of democracy</h3> <p><em>If you didn’t have something to hide, you wouldn’t mind being watched.</em></p> <p>Heard that lately? Perhaps, more than once? The premise of that argument is, even if you haven’t broken a law, the state expects to have authority over your private behavior. Unstated is that the authority stems from a concern that you might, in the future, break a law, and under authoritarian government control, that can mean just speaking out against their authority. Since anyone might do anything in the future, that argument can grant the state’s right to unlimited surveillance of its citizens. What should be shocking, but gets a big yawn from most, is that’s the situation we’re now in.</p> <p>From computer security expert <a href="https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2006/05/the_eternal_value_of.html">Bruce Schneier</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>Too many wrongly characterize the debate as &ldquo;security versus privacy.&rdquo; The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that&rsquo;s why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.</p> </blockquote> <h4 id="the-nra-is-smart-the-gop-is-smart-apple-is-stupid-democrats-are-stupid">The NRA is smart, the GOP is smart; Apple is stupid, Democrats are stupid</h4> <p>When the National Rife Association (NRA) uses (what many believe are) extreme measures to defend their interpretation of the Second Amendment to the Constitution, liberals whine a little, while the NRA gets relentless support from nearly every Republican office holder. Though the NRA claims they’re upholding constitutional gun rights for gun owners, the NRA is really a gun <em>sellers’</em> organization. Gun manufacturers tout the Second Amendment so they can continue to make large profits.</p> <p>When Apple makes relatively mild statements about protecting the privacy of their users, they neglect to mention the Fourth Amendment, and they get criticized by Democratic politicians as well as members of the GOP, for interfering with security (theater). Apple also gets criticized by tech pundits and Apple users, because Apple’s privacy statements are a “self-serving” marketing gambit.<sup id="fnref:5"><a href="#fn:5" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">5</a></sup> Let me repeat that: The NRAs support of the Second Amendment, primarily a gun-sellers organization, is not self-serving, it’s patriotic. Apple’s indirect support of the Fourth Amendment, because they might benefit from customer buy-in, is not patriotic, it’s self-serving. It’s a mystery why Democrats aren’t all-in behind the NRA. Assault weapons would far more efficient for their perpetual circular firing squad.</p> <p>If gun manufacturers can give suitcases full of campaign contributions to support their interests, Apple should be giving suitcases full of campaign contributions to support theirs. They should be giving money to organizations who defend privacy rights, such as the ACLU and their geek counterpart, the <a href="https://www.eff.org">Electronic Frontier Foundation</a> (EFF). If the ACLU, the EFF, and the politicians who actively support our rights to privacy are to be successful, they need the kind of financial, vocal, and habitual support that the NRA gets for gun rights and the ACLU gets for free speech rights.</p> <h3 id="why-privacy-is-the-most-important-habit-of-democracy">Why privacy is the most important habit of democracy</h3> <p>First, it’s one that almost uniquely <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/05/29/what-americans-think-about-nsa-surveillance-national-security-and-privacy/">crosses</a> the polar politics that have become the norm. Members of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_Select_Committee_on_Intelligence?wprov=sfti1">Senate intelligence Committee</a>, Senators Richard Burr and Diane Feinstein, typically vote opposite on social and economic issues but are two of the strongest proponents of domestic surveillance. Senators Rand Paul and Ron Wyden typically vote opposite on social and economic issues but are two of the strongest critics of domestic surveillance. <a href="http://www.globalstrategygroup.com/2013/08/opinions-on-government-surveillance-its-not-only-about-partisan-hypocrisy/">Polls</a> show that a majority of self-identified Republicans support surveillance when a Republican President is in office and are against it when a Democrat is President. The inverse is true for self-identified Democrats. In other words, neither liberals nor conservatives trust the government to surveil for just the good of the country. The protections of the Fourth Amendment is the only issue that roughly half the population from each political affiliation agrees with.<sup id="fnref:6"><a href="#fn:6" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">6</a></sup></p> <p>Second, As Glenn Greenwald<sup id="fnref:7"><a href="#fn:7" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">7</a></sup> states in his <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matters/up-next#t-913172">Ted Talk</a> and in his book, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Place_to_Hide_(Greenwald_book)?wprov=sfti1">No Place to Hide</a>, surveillance turns non-conformists into people who learn to suppress non-conformist thoughts. This doesn’t just interfere with political opposition to the norm, but chips away at all creative thinking, including art, and novelty in business:</p> <blockquote> <p>&hellip;it is in the realm of privacy where creativity, dissent, and challenges to orthodoxy germinate. A society in which everyone knows they can be watched by the state—where the private realm is effectively eliminated—is one in which those attributes are lost, at both the societal and the individual level.</p> </blockquote> <p>Third, surveillance mechanisms, such as computer keystroke monitors (used in many corporations) and employee movement monitors (used in Walmart and Amazon warehouses) not only turns employees into robotic workers, it makes robots their de facto bosses. This demeans them as humans, as thinking individuals. A constant psychological attack on your identity does not create citizens, it creates resentful people looking for scapegoats — looking for victims who have even less control over their lives.<sup id="fnref:8"><a href="#fn:8" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">8</a></sup></p> <p>Some might argue that working a traditional assembly line is no different than my above examples of working in a surveilled warehouse environment. Not in my experience. For a time, I worked on an assembly line that churned out computer wafers that got cut into chips. Twelve-hour graveyard shifts — it sounds like a most tedious job, but weirdly, I enjoyed it. When I started, I worked the computer wafer polishing machine (a kind of fine sanding machine). I had to stick the heavy round metal plates that held the chips onto the rotating lid above my head, then close the lid over the polisher. Though I was often half asleep, it was a great workout that I got paid for.</p> <p>What I enjoyed was working with others in getting the job done. In the minutes I had during polishing runs, if all was going well with my six machines, I’d help others on the line with their work. It was good while it lasted. The low-level managers apparently had little to do, so they designed a motivational procedure. We were given forms to track our work, designed to monitor each station’s contribution, in speed and quality. We’d be graded and in competion with each other. Kind of silly since our success was primarily dependent on the ability of the machines. Our contributions stemmed from helping each other, a contribution that was rendered self-defeating now that we were being surveilled, if indirectly, with the tracking forms.</p> <p>Is Jeff Bezos the efficiency genius he thinks he is? In the Amazon warehouse you’re not even supposed to talk to co-workers because it slows you down. That’s how you turn humans into robots. I don’t doubt that these warehouse workers are more efficient for a time, but how long do they stay there? How much time is lost in training new workers? What’s the cost of surveillance?</p> <h4 id="checks-and-balances-indeed-our-democracy-is-structurally-vulnerable">Checks and balances, indeed, our democracy is structurally vulnerable</h4> <p>Our three branches of government were designed to provide the famous checks and balances. Great in theory — but, who knew? — our government is comprised of people not institutions. Today, we live in a country where, often, a <em>single individual</em> decides what the Bill of Rights and its amendments mean, what individual rights the Constitution protects. The interpreter of individual protections is the lone duty of the Supreme Court, a body of nine, which has morphed from a theoretical separation of powers to two political factions and one swing vote. With a lifetime appointment, as the owner of the swing vote, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Kennedy?wprov=sfti1">Anthony Kennedy</a> is often the most influential American. Let me repeat that: all of our so-called guaranteed individual rights are often retained at the opinion (and they are opinions, otherwise, all votes would be unanimous) of a single 82-year-old white male.</p> <p>So one person, appointed by a partisan president (as are all Supreme Court Justices) has been the deciding vote in extremely important influences on our culture: abortion, gay rights (including the right to marry), lethal injection, guns, and the election of George W.Bush in 2000.</p> <p>From <a href="%5Bhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony%5C_Kennedy:%5D">Wikipedia</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>On the Roberts Court, Kennedy often decides the outcome of a case. In the 2008–2009 term, he was in the majority 92 percent of the time. In the 23 decisions in which the justices split 5-to-4, Kennedy was in the majority in all but five. Of those 23 decisions, 16 were strictly along ideological lines, and Kennedy joined the conservative wing of the court 11 times; the liberals, 5.</p> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>In the 2010–2011 term, 16 cases were decided by a 5–4 vote, and Kennedy joined the majority in 14 of the decisions.</p> </blockquote> <p>My point isn’t about Justice Kennedy. That he has so much influence on American culture is an accident of time and place. My point is that the words residing on our most important document means only what nine people, and often one person, says it means at a point in history. Because a president with particular beliefs, and a Senate with particular beliefs, select those nine people, and since citizens elect the president and Senate, the rights of citizens depend on the attitudes of citizens.</p> <h4 id="authoritarianism-is-a-language-habit">Authoritarianism is a language habit</h4> <p>Before George Orwell made <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak?wprov=sfti1">Newspeak</a> the symbol of thought control in his famous novel, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four?wprov=sfti1">Nineteen-Eighty-Four</a>, our first president, George Washington understood how democracy can be undone by language habits.</p> <p>From <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington#CITEREFUnger2013">Wikipedia</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>He was aware that everything he did set a precedent, and he attended carefully to the pomp and ceremony of office, making sure that the titles and trappings were suitably republican and never emulated European royal courts. To that end, he preferred the title &ldquo;Mr. President&rdquo; to the more majestic names proposed by the Senate.</p> </blockquote> <p>The rest of us don’t appear sufficiently wary of the trappings of monarchy. I find it odd that not only is our current president called, Mr. President, but all living former presidents (along with other former office holders) are. That level of life-long respect seems out of place in a democracy. If you’re not convinced, think about this: as long as he lives, Donald Trump will be called Mr. President.</p> <p>Worse is the habit of referring to the president as Commander-in-Chief. The president is Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, a title that’s relevant for only brief periods during his term, and a title never relevant without ”of the Armed Forces,” and a term never true as regards to the hundreds of millions of us not in the military.</p> <p>Worst of all from a perspective of promoting authoritarian leadership, is when the president, or any elected official, is referred to as “CEO.” The country, states, cities<sup id="fnref:9"><a href="#fn:9" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">9</a></sup> are not businesses, and elected officials are not our bosses, they are our public servants.</p> <p>How we use language influences how we think and how we create stories about ourselves, our culture, our country.</p> <h3 id="how-change-happens">How change happens</h3> <p>Recently, I listened to a <a href="https://overcast.fm/+Js2SWtya8">podcast</a> by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preet_Bharara?wprov=sfti1">Preet Bharara</a>, interviewing <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeh_Johnson?wprov=sfti1">Jeh Johnson</a>. Bharara served as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 2009 to 2017. Johnson was General Counsel for the Department of Defense from 2009 to 2012 and followed that with a term as head of Homeland Security. Johnson oversaw the repeal of the U.S. military service’s official policy of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_ask,_don't_tell?wprov=sfti1">”don’t ask don’t tell,”</a> which prohibited discrimination against gays in the service, while (in a <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ivRKfwmgrHY">pay no attention to the man behind the curtain</a> gambit) disallowed being openly gay. Johnson believes that the repeal of don’t ask don’t tell, which marked the acceptance of gays in the most conservative institution in the U.S., the Armed Forces, led to the cultural normalization of homosexuality, and subsequently, to the trend towards marriage equality laws.</p> <p>The above lesson, supposedly, is that cultural leadership matters, but did the military lead or follow? What’s missing from the above explanation is what led to the tolerance that <em>precluded</em> that of the U.S. military. What made that institution more tolerant? Again, from the above podcast: Bharara and Johnson concurred that some of the arguments against the integration of black and white soldiers were similar to the arguments against the integration of gays into the military, arguments that proved false. But there had to be lessons that preceded ethnic integration.<sup id="fnref:10"><a href="#fn:10" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">10</a></sup> There is no starting place for change, and there’s no red X that marks a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tipping_Point?wprov=sfti1">the tipping point</a>, a specific change that breaks the logjam. Changes beget changes, which keeps the change begetting going. Some changes are bigger than others.</p> <p>Biological evolution moves in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeorhesis?wprov=sfti1">homeorhetic</a> trajectories, funneling change along a new path. Likely, cultural evolution moves similarly, funneling down a path. Did washing machines make way for feminism? The pill? World War II (where women took over traditional men’s jobs). <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feminine_Mystique?wprov=sfti1">Betty Friedan</a>? How about all of those events, and many more, made way for feminism. Similar cultural evolution has occurred with marriage equality laws and the legalization of marijuana — events in my youth, I would have thought impossible.</p> <p>Looking back to democracy, no single event made way for democratic nations. The Magna Carta, supposedly the document on which the U.S. Constitution was modeled, went through 550 years of evolution before the U.S. Constitution was written.</p> <h4 id="its-on-us">It’s on us</h4> <p>Many concerned with the movement towards an authoritarian government, and with creeping surveillance, are hoping for government solutions. That’d be nice, but authoritarian politicians aren’t the ones to stem the flow towards authoritarianism, and few politicians have the courage to take a stand against security theater, lest they be blamed for any future incidence of terrorism.</p> <p>So, should we give up? Only if we believe that politicians lead. I don’t. Politicians seldom lead anything; they follow public sentiment. Their talent lies mostly in jumping in front of the parade. Because half the population are women, politicians contend with women’s rights. Because each of us has a gay relative or friend, we’re moving to marriage equality. Because, illegal or not, so many consume marijuana in some form, we have a legalization movement. Even this guy is on board, literally on a board of directors. From the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/04/11/john-boehner-was-a-longtime-opponent-of-marijuana-reform-heres-what-changed-his-mind/">Washington Post</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>John A. Boehner, the former Republican speaker of the House who once said he was “unalterably opposed” to decriminalizing marijuana laws, has joined a board of directors for a cannabis company with an eye on rolling back federal regulations.</p> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>The former Ohio congressman has been appointed to the board of advisers of Acreage Holdings, invoking the need for veterans to access the drug legally to explain his change of heart, Boehner said in a statement Wednesday. The company grows and sells legal weed and operates in 11 states.</p> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>Boehner’s acceptance of marijuana tracks with evolving beliefs about the drug and its uses among Americans and even Republican lawmakers, Erik Altieri, executive director for the Washington-based marijuana advocacy group NORML, told The Washington Post.</p> </blockquote> <p>It’s fruitless to wait for a political lone wolf or two to save democracy. It’s up to us as individuals to maintain democracy, and I believe the most important individual action we can take is to discourage both government and corporate surveillance — without which authoritarian governments can’t maintain their hold. That means, take small actions and inform others of your actions, because most people are far more <a href="https://overcast.fm/+Ht-ERZHMo">willing to take action</a> when they know they’re not alone. So it’s not enough to take action, you must inform others that you are.</p> <p>As the above examples illustrate, cultural evolution influences what our politicians support, who gets elected, who gets appointed to the courts, and even how the courts interpret laws. It’s on us.</p> <h4 id="what-to-do">What to do</h4> <p>No one is going to be successfully nagged to #deleteFacebook and switch their search engine to DuckDuckGo. If you haven’t yet, you’ll probably make that decision if and when there’s a mass exit. And I can count on my law degrees (none) how many I expect to stop carrying their smart phone. While fewer than I had hoped, there are ways to minimize the surveillance. I’ll be suggesting the best Internet privacy-oriented apps and practices. Sign up, below, to be notified.</p> <h3 id="bibliography-aside-from-the-links">Bibliography (aside from the links)</h3> <p><a href="http://www.powells.com/book/-9780393352177"><em>Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World</em></a>, Bruce Schneier</p> <p><a href="http://www.powells.com/book/-9780143110378"><em>The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technologies That Will Shape Our Future</em></a>, Kevin Kelly</p> <p><a href="http://www.powells.com/book/-9781627790734"><em>No Place to Hide</em></a>, Glenn Greenwald</p> <p><a href="http://www.powells.com/book/-9780316380522"><em>The Art of Invisibility</em></a>, Kevin Mitnick</p> <p><a href="http://www.powells.com/book/-9780804190114"><em>On Tyranny</em></a>, Timothy Snyder</p> <p><a href="https://www.takecontrolbooks.com/online-privacy"><em>Take Control of Your Online Privacy</em></a>, Joe Kissell</p> <p><a href="Post-Privacy%20and%20Democracy%20by%20Patrick%20Heldhttps://itunes.apple.com/us/book/post-privacy-and-democracy/id591564842?mt=11"><em>Post Privacy and Democracy</em></a>, Patrick Held (For some reason, this is only available as an Apple iBook.)</p> <p><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/nsa-surveillance-may-be-legal--but-its-unconstitutional/2013/06/21/b9ddec20-d44d-11e2-a73e-826d299ff459_story.html?noredirect=on&amp;utm_term=.4380e5163d16">NSA surveillance may be legal — but it’s unconstitutional</a> Laura K. Donohue</p> <section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes"> <hr> <ol> <li id="fn:1" role="doc-endnote"> <p>Sticklers will point out that, technically, the USA is a Republic.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:2" role="doc-endnote"> <p>Not that we don’t have competing stories, such as the populist story on which Donald Trump won the election — immigrants and unfair trade are running our economy and culture.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:3" role="doc-endnote"> <p>The Google corporation is now Alphabet, but I’m going to stick with its popular name.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:4" role="doc-endnote"> <p>I’m told that there are most recent movies that depict modern surveillance capabilities.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:5" role="doc-endnote"> <p>Because Apple makes most of their money from selling devices, unlike Google and Facebook,, Apple doesn’t need to make all their money off user data.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:6" role="doc-endnote"> <p>To me, that this poll is three years old, makes it more reliable, because it’s not about whether or not one supports Trump.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:7" role="doc-endnote"> <p>Greenwald takes bizarre political turns in every few years. I advocate his views on only surveillance .&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:8" role="doc-endnote"> <p>The advice: If you don’t like this job, get another one, ignores the realities of the employment environment.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:9" role="doc-endnote"> <p>our Mayor of Edmonds, population 40,000, sometimes gets called “CEO.”&#160;<a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:10" role="doc-endnote"> <p>I don’t use the term “race,” because it’s a cultural not scientific term.&#160;<a href="#fnref:10" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> </ol> </section>