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Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2016 7:50 am
by IlliniDave
7Wannabe5 wrote:
IllinDave said: My only point is something like sitting alone, quietly, almost meditatively in the Zen sense, next to a river is very simple behavior. It does not require warring quadrants of maturity and gender or anything like that.
I applied a psychological model because in addition to mentioning the act of sitting by the river in communion with nature, you used the word "melancholy" to describe your state and the word "hid" to describe your behavior. Prior to Freud, one of the cures commonly prescribed for depression was "novel sights involving nature." For instance, a doctor might tell a patient to spend time at a zoo observing the animals. So, given the context of feeling "melancholy" and desire to "hide", it is difficult to not interpret ...
Oddly, I find it very easy not to do such interpretation, which is sort of back to where I dipped my toe into this thread (someday I'll learn). It's not so much a matter of searching for the way forward in the name of reinvention as it is refraining from fitting everything into a construct that reinvention would leave behind. Sort of a twist on the old 'do not seek the truth, just drop your opinions' proverb.

Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2016 8:37 am
by BRUTE
7Wannabe5 wrote:The reason why I suggested the exercise in adherence to the rules of strict Perma-culture Locavore Frugality is that I have found attempting to adhere to these rules extremely challenging and revealing. [..] Nomads generally travel with domesticated animals in pursuit of pasture or following wild animals in pursuit of pasture. A person traveling around and out-sourcing food is not a Nomad, and in a way that is roughly analogous to how a tofu hotdog is more like a cheez puff than a soybean.
brute doesn't doubt that adding strong restrictions to his diet will make it more challenging. he's not sure what would be revealed except technical details like "brute doesn't like stepping in cow poo".

good point about the nomads. in that sense, "digital nomads" are really more like traveling salesmen, often without the sales. brute's idol is Ryan Bingham from the movie Up in the Air. business class samurai.
7Wannabe5 wrote:IMO, self-driving cars will just be a short-lived intermediary technology that will naturally lead to a sort of modular train system where most people will just own or lease or pay to occupy private passive motor-less cars in the chain.
yea, apparently Uber's whole business model won't be profitable until they get to self-driving cars. until then, it's just a giant market share ponzi scheme.

for 99% of car usage, renting/leasing is just fine. the only reason most humans even own cars is because the logistics of getting the empty car to the humans in need of travel required an additional human. after that it's just a distribution problem, which the internet has long solved (matching available cars to customers).

then there's the 1% of drives that are joyrides. maybe these will go the way of horse riding.

Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2016 10:43 am
by jacob
Ego wrote: Kids born today will probably never drive a car. Self driving cars will make the route between home and the grocery store as mysterious as the route between JFK and LAX. The system hiccups and they will have no idea how to get home. If we apply this phenomenon to just about everything we do, what level of learned-helplessness and learned-ignorance/stupidity will we see in the future.

So, knowing this is on the horizon (already here) how do we deal with it? I avoid digital maps because I don't want to lose the ability to navigate. But there is a cost to doing so. I stopped to ask directions in LA recently and the guy looked at me as if I were an idiot. In order to maintain our autonomy will we have to become Luddites?
Luddite-wise, the key is to resist the algorithms. Personally, this can be done by deleting cookies, blocking tracking (ublock, ghostery, random agent spoofer), and reading a wide selection of sources. In particular, getting away from the filter-bubble (in which news algos present you articles while trying to get you to Like and Share them) helps, Reading books is a huge differentiator (60% of Americans haven't read a single book in the past year---and admitting to this is not shameful at all).

The problem with this is that only focusing on your own skills in that regard tends to isolate you. It's all fine to be crossfit but one still has to live in a society where sidewalks and bicycles are being replaced with roads because everybody else chooses an unfit lifestyle that requires and demands that one drives a car. Similarly, Luddism isn't unless one wants to attempt to live completely outside a society despite that it increasingly looks and feels like Idiocracy. The problem is that the perception is mutual. The guy thinks you're an idiot because you aren't navigating by smart-phone. You aren't talking his language (<- choices, way of thinking, lifestyle, product consumption, ... ) thus resulting in this problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCIo4MCO-_U ...

The facts/contextual frameworks acquired by reading/thinking won't work/translate when interacting with a society where facts are disregarded; where a fun "infopgraphic" is expected to be at hand so that people don't need to study/think (busy busy lifestyles, you know); and important questions are settled by "style".

The problem here is that living in an Idiocratic world effectively demands that one balances two different frameworks at the same time. First one has to understand and be able to use the correct framework along with objective facts. However, it is no longer enough or even encouraged to just communicate that understanding. Instead one has to translate it and communicate it in some kind of fun and personable style that "folks" can relate to. Of course that language is vastly inferior when it comes to dealing with an accurate/precise reality or almost any level of complexity (anything that involves combining more than two different conceptual ideas). In addition, the added complication adds another cost to a zero-sum problem of "what should one spend their time on". "Stupid" does exact a toll in the form of the inefficiency of making inferior or, well, stupid decisions.

Maybe if techmology finds a way to directly read the emotional impact that certain words or styles have on people in an idiocratic world, it's possible for algorithms to actually handle the low levels of complexity that needs to be communicated to the average person in such a world. Not because algos are getting smarter, but because people's behavior are getting tuned down to the simpler level of complexity that algos are capable of handling. I think we're somewhat heading there (maybe the ultra-democratic feedback system leads to a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy). It's already clear how TV has settled on a few recipes or scripts for making series and newscasts that have been proven to be functional. Popular nonfiction books also have a formula: They're edited for a 6th grade reading level with bigger than average fonts (compare to a book from 25 years ago or a modern monolog) and only contain a few original thoughts lest too many readers complain that the text is too small, that nobody uses words like "thus", or that there's too much information in the book. The current election shows how democracy works when brazen disregard for facts becomes the norm.

Facebook is a good example of a first step in terms of influencing the pursuit of a dumbed down intellect with their introduction of 5 or 6 different "reactions". It used to be that people could just "like" or "ignore". Now people can "happy, sad, laugh, ... " Shining by its absence is the much requested "dislike" or "this is retarded" reaction. Effectively, and in a very big brotherly or newsspeaky way, people aren't allowed to talk "or react" in a way that questions the underlying foundation of the system which is essentially about generating advertising dollars. But I digress. My point is that one can use these reactions to tie consumer reactions to product words and thus start controlling people's reactions (filter bubble) algorithmically. IOW, you no longer need somebody with a brain to understand or relate to newsfeed consumers. They've successfully trained an algorithm to serve them just the right concentration of puppy dogs and political memes which they take in passively or at most "react" to thus propagating the system.

Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2016 3:01 pm
by J_
@Jacob@Ego: Are those looks in the future so pessimistic? Ar'nt you both too fond of your understanding how society works?
Look what kind of President and first Lady there are now... gifted people with knowledge and talent to be a guide in the USA.
America can survive a reign with unqualified persons as president, I think. I see your point of the bad influence of media.
But is angst not overtaking your prophecies?

Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Posted: Thu Oct 06, 2016 6:48 am
by 7Wannabe5
IlliniDave said: Oddly, I find it very easy not to do such interpretation, which is sort of back to where I dipped my toe into this thread (someday I'll learn). It's not so much a matter of searching for the way forward in the name of reinvention as it is refraining from fitting everything into a construct that reinvention would leave behind. Sort of a twist on the old 'do not seek the truth, just drop your opinions' proverb.
Hmmm...well, my punk response would be something along the lines of "Buddhism-schmuddhism", and I would note that it has been my observation that there was no shortage of Be-MWs to be found in the parking lot of the center for the convocation of the "Be-ers not do-ers" in the affluent community where I previously resided. My take on affluent Buddhists is not exactly like my take on Evangelical preachers who speak of hell and fornication, yet fondle 14 year old boys in highway stop restrooms. It is more like my take on me when I accept a compliment about looking like I don't wear make-up and do not choose to reveal the artifice involved in attempting the appearance of no artifice.

My less punk response would start with the observation that I think what you are communicating is that "searching for the way forward in the name of reinvention" is a form of "striving", and I agree. However, it is my current take that it is not the case that all striving causes misery. There is one kind of striving that is "just pimping" or "counting coup" or "status/security seeking", and that flavor of striving does cause misery. There is another kind of striving that is something like "engaging in purpose towards fulfillment" or "following your passion" or "finding your flow" that leads to joy. So, it would be my particular belief that if the name you are attaching to the internal force that is driving you towards "searching for the way forward in the name of reinvention" is anything like "anxiety" or "need to control the future" then that is bad striving, but if the name you are attaching to the internal force that is driving you towards "searching for the way forward in the name of reinvention" is anything like "curiosity" or "wonder about the future" then that is good striving.

Anyways, as the artistic white boy who found himself parked in a trailer in the complex region next to a sharp boundary line rapped, "snap back to reality, oh there goes gravity." The funny thing is that it is likely that at the same time you were sitting by the river observing the falling leaves, I was wondering around a park amusing myself while my BF ran around a track by using my new plant identification ap to put a name (construct) on to some trees and shrubs.

Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Posted: Thu Oct 06, 2016 7:20 am
by IlliniDave
7Wannabe5 wrote: I think what you are communicating is that "searching for the way forward in the name of reinvention" is a form of "striving", and I agree. However, it is my current take that it is not the case that all striving causes misery.
Close, I think. Maybe more like the key skill for reinventing is possibly the ability to simply lower resistance to change. Humans are inherently adaptable, but tend to get weighed down by past cause-effect observations.

I don't think striving is bad or necessarily causes misery or whatever, but it does create tension between where a person is, and where they think they want to be. Some people thrive on that tension 24-7-365, others do better if the tension is relaxed periodically.

Correct, I am not a Buddhist, nor do I play one on TV. I'm an affluent westerner who on many levels is a striver, planner, and steeped in habit/tradition. My only defense for having the audacity to think some of the things I do is that I can so why not!

Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Posted: Thu Oct 06, 2016 10:32 am
by BRUTE
7Wannabe5 wrote:snap back to reality, oh there goes gravity.
arms spaghetti
7Wannabe5 wrote:So, it would be my particular belief that if the name you are attaching to the internal force that is driving you towards "searching for the way forward in the name of reinvention" is anything like "anxiety" or "need to control the future" then that is bad striving, but if the name you are attaching to the internal force that is driving you towards "searching for the way forward in the name of reinvention" is anything like "curiosity" or "wonder about the future" then that is good striving.
so the quality of striving is purely subjective, and even just depends on how an individual frames things?

Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Posted: Thu Oct 06, 2016 5:39 pm
by Ego
jacob wrote:The problem here is that living in an Idiocratic world effectively demands that one balances two different frameworks at the same time. First one has to understand and be able to use the correct framework along with objective facts. However, it is no longer enough or even encouraged to just communicate that understanding. Instead one has to translate it and communicate it in some kind of fun and personable style that "folks" can relate to.
Four frameworks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/opini ... gence.html

As the psychologist Keith Stanovich and others observed, even the Kahneman and Tversky data show that some people are highly rational. In other words, there are individual differences in rationality, even if we all face cognitive challenges in being rational. So who are these more rational people? Presumably, the more intelligent people, right?

Wrong. In a series of studies, Professor Stanovich and colleagues had large samples of subjects (usually several hundred) complete judgment tests like the Linda problem, as well as an I.Q. test. The major finding was that irrationality — or what Professor Stanovich called “dysrationalia” — correlates relatively weakly with I.Q. A person with a high I.Q. is about as likely to suffer from dysrationalia as a person with a low I.Q.

jacob wrote: Maybe if techmology finds a way to directly read the emotional impact that certain words or styles have on people in an idiocratic world, it's possible for algorithms to actually handle the low levels of complexity that needs to be communicated to the average person in such a world. Not because algos are getting smarter, but because people's behavior are getting tuned down to the simpler level of complexity that algos are capable of handling.
From the same story:

In the interactive games, following each simulation, a review gave the subjects instruction on specific decision-making biases and individualized feedback on their performance. Immediately after watching the video or receiving the computer training, and then again after two months, the subjects took a different version of the decision-making test.

Professor Morewedge and colleagues found that the computer training led to statistically large and enduring decreases in decision-making bias. In other words, the subjects were considerably less biased after training, even after two months. The decreases were larger for the subjects who received the computer training than for those who received the video training (though decreases were also sizable for the latter group). While there is scant evidence that any sort of “brain training” has any real-world impact on intelligence, it may well be possible to train people to be more rational in their decision making.



This is what worries me. If we can train people to be more rational then the inverse is also true. There are deep pockets motivated to create a less rational populace. Here is the roadmap.

Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Posted: Thu Oct 06, 2016 6:26 pm
by jacob
@Ego - Also add information. There are three factors. (Or more)

I think of IQ primarily as a combination of bandwidth and speed. A person with higher intelligence is able to think faster and more importantly, he's able to think about more things/variables at the same time and thus able to hold/ponder more complicated ideas in his head. This is why one person with an IQ of 150 is able to beat a group of 15 persons with an IQ of 100 when it comes to solutions of complex problems.

The second factor is the ability to reason. Call it critical thinking. A subject which for obvious reason isn't taught in the educational system. This is of course nothing new. Here's Schopenhauer from 1831 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Being_Right ... and the interest in subverting the reasoning process probably goes back to the time when reason became the "respected" way of making decisions (Plato?). The ability to reason is the operating system of the brain. A great OS on an average brain beats an average OS on great brain.

The third is a framework without which it's easy to miss important aspects or be complete fooled by the lack of theoretical context. That's another way of saying that without knowledge, information becomes meaningless, because it's hard to establish truth. The framework is the software running on the OS. Also, here, a great piece of software running on an average OS is better than an average piece running on a great OS.

Algorithms is what's being substituted in for reason. The trust of experts is being replaced by trust in the computer. It's long been possible to hire an expert who would be willing to use their intelligence to justify whatever you wanted them to. Making an algorithm do that is even cheaper.

With information, the internet makes it extremely easy to spread disinformation. There is for some strange reason still a supreme belief in the written word---that if something is written down, it's probably true. If one adds the information dimension to the rhetorical tricks listed by Schopenhauer, we get agnotology. This is culturally constructed ignorance. The internet more than anything (and aided by search engines) really really speeds up that process. People used to have to crack open a book and read somewhat before they could begin to opine. Now it takes less than 5 minutes to construct an ignorant paragraph ... and the more intelligent the person is, the better he is able to string together various pieces of ignorance together in a way that sounds convincing to anyone lacking reason+framework. In particular, if the person possesses both IQ+reason and only lacks framework, it gets even harder.

I don't think we're that far from a point where 75% of facebook or twitter debates could be taken over by algos that scan other fb or twitter comments and strings together random samples in a way that's semi-grammatical (i.e. at least as grammatical as the average user). There are already some bots out there doing just that.

I'd like to hope that at the very least, thinking will split into two. An internet that's free but ignorant and full of trash that's either wrong or irrelevant---largely governed by algorithmic remixes of information with no way of knowing whether it's right or wrong (but nobody cares because all that matters is whether it's entertaining. And an internet that's expensive, because it's the complete opposite. Yet, maybe not.

Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Posted: Fri Oct 07, 2016 11:46 am
by cmonkey
jacob wrote:I'd like to hope that at the very least, thinking will split into two. An internet that's free but ignorant and full of trash that's either wrong or irrelevant---largely governed by algorithmic remixes of information with no way of knowing whether it's right or wrong (but nobody cares because all that matters is whether it's entertaining. And an internet that's expensive, because it's the complete opposite. Yet, maybe not.

I was under the impression we already had this split occuring - ERE forums and.......everything else. :D

Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Posted: Fri Oct 07, 2016 5:53 pm
by BRUTE
jacob wrote:An internet that's free but ignorant and full of trash that's either wrong or irrelevant---largely governed by algorithmic remixes of information with no way of knowing whether it's right or wrong (but nobody cares because all that matters is whether it's entertaining.
it's called social media

Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Posted: Fri Oct 07, 2016 6:37 pm
by steveo73
BRUTE wrote:
jacob wrote:An internet that's free but ignorant and full of trash that's either wrong or irrelevant---largely governed by algorithmic remixes of information with no way of knowing whether it's right or wrong (but nobody cares because all that matters is whether it's entertaining.
it's called social media
This is funny and true.

Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2016 7:47 am
by jacob
While funny, I think that was a bit flippant. My point was, what happens when the web becomes "100% social media" widely adopting the norms and methods of social media. This means no more single standing websites (they will be social); no more news reporting (it will be algorithmically combined tweets); no forums (it will be a newsfeed that either limits thoughts to 140 characters or wants you to convert ideas that are longer then 3 sentences into a note); no search engines (because if it's important somebody will "share" it in the feed).

In very relevant news, we now have algorithmically supported fact checking.
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-n ... re-2016-10

You know how it's already the case that some believe they've "done their research" if they spent 5 minutes on google (this is an act of learned helplessness or adopted ignorance) but much worse: they also think that most others operate under the same standard (this is stupid and destructive). Now I wonder whether some will believe that any statement is true as long as nothing weird pops up when they click on the "Full Fact" link.

Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2016 8:44 am
by cmonkey
I would term that the 'unthinking' web, and also claim that the unthinking web is basically already here since most web traffic these days serves no purpose other than to entertain or argue in no beneficial manner. Adding algorithmic support doesn't really change that much other than moving more toward "hyper unthinking". You'd need some sort 'smart algorithm' that is trying to fight off the unthinking force. This forum ( and several others ) are still part of the 'thinking' web in that at least some form of intelligence, civility and humility remain. The stack exchange sites also do a decent job of trying to maintain this.

In my eyes the split has already occurred and is just widening. Perhaps I've got the wrong image in my mind.

Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2016 8:48 am
by jacob
@cmonkey - I'm stealing that term.

Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2016 5:54 pm
by steveo73
I don't see that extreme approach happening or maybe better put that extreme approach being the only option. I use the Internet a lot but I don't use social media (assuming we classify forums like this as not social media).

I'll use You Tube as an example. There are lots of serious videos on You Tube as well as a lot of crap. There will always though be the demand for more serious entertainment.

Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2016 8:41 pm
by enigmaT120
I do classify this forum and many others I'm on as social media. Why wouldn't we?

Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2016 9:23 pm
by BRUTE
cause it's not shit

Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Posted: Sat Oct 15, 2016 2:46 am
by steveo73
enigmaT120 wrote:I do classify this forum and many others I'm on as social media. Why wouldn't we?
I agree that you can do this but for me personally I classify social media as facebook, twitter & things like Tumblr.

Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Posted: Sat Oct 15, 2016 7:35 pm
by enigmaT120
I'm not on any of those. Is this antisocial media?