Metacognition

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Metacognition is the experience of thinking about your thinking. If you say, I can barely put two thoughts together, better get some coffee, that’s metacognition. If you meditate and learn how to hear your thoughts and quiet them down, that’s a more sophisticated form of metacognition.

I had a metacognitive experience the other day in my acting class. The point of this acting class approach is to focus entirely on your partner — it’s about them. Blame them, love them, attack them, persuade them… In other words, it’s not about your feelings. Feelings happen, because we’re human and will just have feelings; can’t avoid that. So why focus on them? Instead, what are you doing, what’s your action? And whatever your action is in that moment, it’s about your partner. So, I’ve been working on that approach (wish I had discovered that in my 20s instead of the Method angle, which is all about your feelings; quite seductive for a young sensitive person).

The scene I was working on was a quiet one, just a conversation. In the quiet and calm, I became aware of a little engine in my consciousness that was continually scanning the people around me and adjusting my appearance, behavior, voice, stance, expression, to maximize social acceptance. Once I noticed that, I could quiet it down. Remarkable!

When I brought this up in class, my teacher said, Right, you don’t need that, you never need that. Which surprised me… this little engine has been running in my consciousness continually since… forever. It’s a lifelong habit, and probably was for my parents as well. But it’s unnecessary and actually detrimental to me as an actor.

Noticing this little independent engine in my not-quite-subconscious reminded me of the great book by Marvin Minsky, Society of Mind, in which he posits that our mind is made up of hundreds (probably not thousands or dozens) of agents, each with a simple job. Combined we end up with our vaunted consciousness of which we are so proud.

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Construction project lesson learned: Budget vs Spend

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Here’s one: Say you don’t want to spend more than $X; call it the Spend. How do you determine your Budget? My mistake was thinking the Spend equals the Budget.

I know, those of you who have been there before are laughing at me, and I deserve it.

Obviously (to some, and to me, now, but sadly not to me, then), your project will go over budget. By how much is a gamble, but let’s say 20%. In that case, your Spend = Budget + 20%. If you really want to cap your spending as best you can, your Budget should be about 83% of what you want your Spend to be. That way, your Spend = (83% of Spend) + 20%.

So if I really, really don’t want to spend more than about $100,000 on a project, my budget should be about $83,000. That way, with overages, additional bits and pieces that you didn’t think of, and just things costing more than you had anticipated, your Spend may end up where you wanted it. Your project may end up being a bit more modest than you had hoped when you first thought of it, though.

Lesson learned.

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Guignol for Good or Evil

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When I was working in Lyon in 2017/18, an old love of Guignol was re-awakened. I saw Guignol shows when I was a little child in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. And in the 5th grade, my teacher, the beloved Mme Benzaken, gave me a book about Guignol. It had puppet show scripts and instructions for making the puppets and theaters. I have long since lost that book and still look for it whenever and wherever I can. (Handsome reward if you tell me where to get one!)

In Lyon, I went with my wife to a traditional Guignol theater and saw as old-fashioned a show as I could find. In other words, not a show about how Guignol saves Christmas from a hacker who scrambles Santa’s GPS… yes, they do that. No shade, but not for me. I’ll bet the kids love it, and that’s what matters, after all.

Guignol was born in the French Revolution and I think embodies its spirit as well as anything. He’s a working man — a weaver in the silk mills of Lyon — and a prankster who scorns the aristocrats. Guignol and his gang — his best friend Gnafron, a red-faced, blue-chinned alcoholic with a crushed top hat; his girlfriend Madelon; and the rest of the supporting cast — are beloved characters in France in general and Lyon in particular.

In Lyon, I encountered the below small poster stuck all over the bottle recycling bin.

I took the picture and thought, Fun! I wonder what that website is. Clearly, I didn’t look carefully at his angry expression, and wasn’t familiar with “Lyon le Melhor!” which, it turns out, is the war cry of the city. It translates as “Lyon is the best!” or We’re #1!

It turned out that the website was for a nativist, anti-immigrant group, and the image is a threat. This made me very unhappy. A perhaps ironic (not sure if that’s exactly right, I wasn’t an English major, but it’s nearby) sidenote is that when we went to the Guignol show, there was a mom with her little boy. Not so strange, but the mom was Islamic and wearing a chic black hijab, and looked hilariously like Guignol in his traditional hat.

I much prefer the Guignol below:

The motto, “A tous et pour tous,” means “To all and for all,” and is much more what I expect from a puppet of the people.

I was pleased to just discover now that the website on the mean little anti-immigrant poster is now available… Maybe I’ll buy it? [Note: it is now almost 2025 and I haven’t. I’ll check again… Oops, just checked on whois, and it is not available. *sigh*]

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You can’t say anything anymore!

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Oh, sure you can.

Here are the gripes, and here are my responses.

You can’t say anything anymore! It may feel that way because you’re not the only one talking. You can say whatever you want, whenever you want, but a thousand people may respond to you and tell you what a jerk you are. So, the gripe is really, “You can’t say anything anymore without people yelling at you.” That, I’m afraid, may be true. So the complaint about “not being able to say anything” is more a complaint about power structures. Other people are yelling at you, which means you have less power than you might like. No wonder it’s upsetting!

Note of course, that people who say “you can’t say anything anymore” have just said the thing they claim they are forbidden to say. So it’s incoherent. But if they were to tell the whole truth, they’d say, “I can’t say anything anymore and have people like me,” which would sound like the childish whining it is.

They won’t let me talk on that stage, so they don’t believe in free speech! Sure they do. It’s been said ad nauseum, but people still don’t get it. You can’t say whatever you want wherever you want, whenever you want, but you can say it somewhere, and that’s all either the 1st Amendment and our custom of free speech guarantee. You can’t come to my house and tell my family about your anti-vax convictions, or about how the election was rigged. I and my family have something to say about what goes on in our property. If you believe in the sanctity of private property, you would respect that. Even the 1st Amendment has time, place, and manner restrictions. In a mayor’s town hall meeting, you can say whatever you want, but if you yell, take too much time, or use rude language, you will be ejected. As with many things, this seems perfectly reasonable when it applies to other people, but a horrific limitation of Freedom when it applies to you.

Again, this is about power. The griper is objecting to their perceived loss of power when, in fact, it is an increase in the power of others.

The issue of privately owned channels, like Twitter, which can ban people for a variety of reasons, is bothersome, because it seems like a public “town square”, when in fact it is a private enterprise. The illusion of public ownership comes from its being free and ubiquitous; it looks like a commons.

Citizens who advocate for the shrinkage of government now have to contend with the loss of rights that are only guaranteed under the government’s aegis. Hoisted by their own petard.

They refuse to debate me, they must be afraid of my ideas! Well, that’s a very flattering explanation, but there are other possibilities. People might not want to debate you because they don’t like you; maybe you’re unpleasant. Or, you don’t mean “debate” in the sense of a structured, timed event with referees and controls, but an argument, which people may, understandably, prefer to avoid. Or, even if you do mean a formal debate, there might be a sense that you want to use the debate forum as a means to deliver self-serving speeches and gotchas, regardless of what your debate opponent says. Debates that reveal actual ideas and arguments are wonderful things, but ever since the Evolution vs Creation debates, they have evolved (irony!) into simply a platform to confer respectability on ideas that do not otherwise merit it, by putting them on a level field with ideas that have scientific or institutional credibility. And why should anyone grant you that platform? Host your own debate, you want a debate so badly.

So, the uncomfortable conclusion is that you have plenty of freedom, as much as ever, but others do too. Could you move over? You’re taking up the whole bench.

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The Power of Hyperbole

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I used to listen to Sam Harris’s podcast. I had admired his atheism books, at the time when teaching evolution in schools was a whole thing, and he, along with Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett were the 4 Horsemen of the New Atheism.

His podcast was interesting, until, I speculate, he interviewed Charles Murray. He was then accused of being, if not a White Supremacist himself, at least in league with them or at the very least, one of their Useful Idiots. In any event, after that, whenever he had a woman on, he would, kind of whinily, ask whether she thought he was a White Supremacist… he wasn’t, right? How could anyone think that! It became a little sad.

Around that time, he became quite alarmed at the rise of what we now call Cancel Culture, and bemoaned that when he tweeted something a lot of people didn’t like, he’d get a lot of very negative responses (Is it being “ratioed”? Not sure about the term…). He called this a Twitter Mob, and said it was like “public defenestration.”

As I was driving to or from work and heard this, my first thought was, no it’s not. It’s nothing like public defenestration. Okay, it’s public, but you survive a Twitter flame war. You walk away. He used other comparisons, too: guillotining, lynching. And… no. It’s not like being guillotined, because that KILLS YOU. Having people call you a douchebag, unpleasant as it certainly must be, doesn’t kill you.

I became disenchanted with him, unsubscribed from the podcast.

He was using a rhetorical technique called hyperbole. Exaggeration for effect. Except, it’s also a lie. If he had said, I was so upset I wanted to die, that might be hyperbolic but still true. But using defenestration is a bit unfair to people who have been publicly defenestrated. What would they say? Wow, that was terrible; just like being the target of mean tweets. Doubt it.

During the pandemic, we have seen similar hyperbole on the part of those who don’t want to wear masks or get vaccinated, but still want to visit stores and restaurants. For them, it’s either like slavery or like the holocaust. Like that rather dim lady who sold yellow stars with “vaccinated” on them.

I never meet people like that, here in West LA, but when I read about them, I suppose they have to use hyperbole, because if they didn’t, they’d seem like idiots. If they carried signs that read, I don’t like wearing masks, they’re uncomfortable and make me sweat! Or I don’t want to get vaccinated, because my tribal affiliation makes that a difficult choice! that would be honest, but they wouldn’t seem quite as heroic.

If I ever meet one of these people, and my family is not around, I would go up to them and say, I understand you’re upset, but whatever the thing is like, it’s not like slavery or the holocaust. Rather, it’s like something you don’t want to do for reasons that have more to do with tribalism than anything else. Put that on your sign.

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The Perfectly Good Business (PGB)

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There is such a thing as a Perfectly Good Business. It provides a Perfectly Good profit for its owners, a Perfectly Good living for its workers, a Perfectly Good product for its customers at a Perfectly Good price. It is a Perfectly Good neighbor to its community.

Obviously, the people running this PGB are total suckers. If a private equity (PE) firm sees such a business, you’d have one of those sequences from old cartoons where the PGB suddenly looks like a lollipop or a T-bone steak. Or maybe a pigeon.

I mean, if they’re providing a Perfectly Good living to its workers, clearly too much is going toward labor and those workers need to make less. If they’re unionized, the anti-union arsenal needs to be brought into play to crush the union.

If they’re providing a Perfectly Good product, there is money that can be squeezed out there. Can’t we reduce the quality? Why should it be Perfectly Good? Can’t it be made crummy, but spend some more on IP lawyers and marketing to mask that?

And, worst of all, if it’s a Perfectly Good member of its community, there’s certainly money to be made there. Why can’t it dump its waste into the groundwater, if that would save some money? After all, the people around are too poor to sue if they get cancer, and our lawyers can always twist the statistics to hide the cluster.

And all that money that comes from impoverishing the workers and denying their bargaining power, from reducing quality, from being a bad neighbor, all that new wealth and profit can go to some douchebag on Sutton Place who was clever enough to see this opening.

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Lies and Belief

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Lies are quick and easy, truth is slow and laborious. Lies are fun and sticky and quick, truth is complicated, counterintuitive and boring.

What is a lie? What is belief?

I think we know why people have the feeling we call “belief” — either a statement conforms to what we already believe (confirmation bias), or believing it somehow profits us (motivated thinking); we tend to believe things that are easier to remember (availability bias and the illusion-of-truth effect); we believe statements by people who resemble us (need citation); we trust and believe people whose names are easier to pronounce (need citation). We believe thing that create adherence to a group to which we belong. None of these have anything to do with a belief being what eggheads call “true.”

True, sometimes we believe statements after checking them against other statements that have passed a gantlet of tests. That’s much of science and scholarship. Nobody can know everything, so one relies on a body of credentialed individuals and an accepted body of knowledge; and we might know enough to judge whether a bit of knowledge is crazy or believable, even if we don’t understand all the details. But this is a niche definition of belief, mostly used for academics. I was going to say, for “business and academics,” since you’d think that business decisions would be driven by concern for adherence to what we like to call “facts,” but my speculation is that this is a sometime thing.

There is a belief about business that, due to the profit motive, everyone is somehow on peak performance and efficiencies are optimized. But the point isn’t to maximize to an ideal degree, but to surpass competitors. And anyone who thinks there’s not a ton of loafing and goldbricking in successful companies hasn’t worked for one. Even, maybe especially, in the C-Suite.

But anyway. There are flavors of “belief”, so when Don Jr says things about the “Democrat governor of Texas”, many people will believe that and repeat it. How many I don’t know. Would be interesting/horrifying to find out.

The power of the lie is that it is quickly made with little effort. Liars will apply a heuristic evolutionary algorithm, which is just fancy talk for come up with many lies, one after the other, with no concern for consistency, and some of them will die on the ground where they fall, and others will sprout and reproduce, like Dawkins’ memes or mustard seeds. If you only get one in a hundred or one in a thousand to take off, they are so cheap to do that this can be a successful tactic.

Telling the truth can be complicated and counter-intuitive and take energy. Telling a lie is instant and easy. See the old cliché, A lie goes around the world before the truth can put its boots on.

Just as there are people with an uncanny ability to remember and tell jokes or to tell stories in an entertaining, memorable way, there are those who are better at lying than others. Look at #45 — here is a compendium — and the various flavors of lie. Simple statements of exaggerated numbers, when few people know the real numbers. Or memorable fables of strong men weeping tears of gratitude. Compare that with Don Jr’s ham-fisted lie about the “democrat governor of Texas”.

What about the most recent Big Lie about Biden shutting off power to Texas? Where did that originate? How many people believe it? What would be actually involved in doing that?

But maybe you don’t need to be a good liar any more. Just a liar.

There is an element of religion in this acceptance of lies, as there is in the Qanon phenomenon. If you go to a religious service, and the leader of the congregation makes a statement about, say, the sea parting, it would be a serious breach of protocol to raise your hand and ask, Really? How do you know that? When the congregation is supposed to “repeat after me,” they just do; to do otherwise would be hideously disrespectful.

When I was little, my parents would send me to a friend’s house (the Kemps, if you must know) for Seders. I remember, during the ritual, asking if the story of the Exodus actually happened and everyone stopped and looked down as if I had farted. They kindly explained to me that that was not the kind of question one should ask. The question of “truth” was a rude question. Being a polite and cowardly little boy, I knew when it was time to shut up. But I didn’t understand why I had been rude for many years.

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So, what does the religious right want? I mean, that it doesn’t already have…

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Listening the the 538 Politics Podcast, the recent episode, What Could the GOP’s Future Look Like? Very interesting, quite right-leaning panel. One of them (I think Henry Olson) said that the clear center of the Republican Party included religious people who wanted to fight for a country where they did not feel cast out into the wilderness. They want to express their beliefs openly and in public. I paraphrase, I don’t have a transcript.

My first thought was, who’s stopping them? Anyone who wants to pray can pray, they want to tell everyone their beliefs, they can. They already have that. I suppose what they don’t have is the reaction to that that they might prefer, which is of course approbation. Not everybody will react and think, What a good person — they’re a fervent Christian, so they must be good and I’ll listen to what they have to say and (if I can get over my inner wickedness) maybe even be persuaded.

So they’re not getting the reaction they want. This is a fairly common whinge on the right (though not exclusively), where they say, What about my freedom of speech, as they’re speaking freely. What they mean is they don’t like the reaction they get to their speech, which, I emphasize, they are doing freely. The speaking I mean.

Another component is they want to feel differently. That I can’t help with. They want a country in which they feel differently… more in charge, perhaps? I would say they’re too in charge as it is. But I think that the sentiment that they want to feel less cast out is code for, they want to be more in charge and inspire subservience, if not fear, on the part of others.

I can see how a tribe held together by a belief in their ultimate victory in an eternal sphere, in which their Big Boss (God) defines morality by burning it into the very fabric of the universe, so that all those who believe differently then they are, by definition, to one degree or another, immoral. And what kind of world would it be, I ask you, if the moral did not try to impose their beliefs, by force if necessary, on the immoral? This is not a new stance. We’ve seen something like this since the dawn of religion, or with the dawn of cities, which is where this unitary punishing God took shape as a necessary adaptation to get groups greater than 150 to cooperate.

And it was a successful invention! The partisans of these religions took over in a Big Way.

So, when someone complains about not having something, and you give them the thing, and they still complain, something else is going on.

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New Gear!

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I updated my tablet, from a Galaxy Tab S2 to the S5e. The S2 I bought in December 2017 when I was working in Lyon, France, and my prior Android tablet, a Dell Venue, just gave up the ghost. The S2 worked well, until the battery finally died in March 2020. I replaced the battery, which turned out to be surprisingly easy. Opening up the S2 ended up being not that hard, and the battery is right there. It was taped in, but came out vey easily. The aftermarket battery was not as long-lasting as the original, and just about now, eleven months later, is going the way of the earlier one — lots of annoying spontaneous restarts, when the device is telling me there’s 25% left.

I had been wanting a larger tablet anyway. Black Friday came and went and I didn’t see anything cheap enough. Eventually, on eBay I saw that US Cellular was getting rid of pre-owned tablets. I got one that they classified as Excellent condition, and it really is flawless.

Around that time, my newly-minted son-in-law gave me a carry pouch with the Curaleaf logo. It just fits the tablet, along with a second pocket for additional gear. I felt I needed a little keyboard… and got a Plugable keyboard. I love Plugable products, and this is just as solid and well-made as their other products. It comes in a little case that also serves as a tablet stand. Elegant! It is just on the edge of fitting in the pouch, but does (and obviates the need for a dedicated tablet stand). So I have room for a cleaning cloth and my Google Buds.

I’m on the keyboard right now. Sweet setup. Now if only I could go to Alanna’s Coffee and sit there typing… Maybe soon. My 65th birthday is May 11, and with any luck I’ll have an appointment for a vacccine on May 12.

Stay safe!

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Deepfake Mythology

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Yes, impeachment has become cheap. I think the Clinton impeachment set the tone. Mind you, he was a cretin, but still.

There’s an interesting trend in science fiction having to do with super-intelligence… in humans, not machines. The template was a wonderful novella (or novelette, no idea, not looking it up) called Understand. Highly recommended. His approach became the standard for movies like Limitless.

The premise is there’s a drug which increases the dendritic density of the brain. Blah blah blah. The end result is hyperintelligence.

In some of these stories, they end up running for office. Maybe that’s what we need. Someone who can play five moves ahead of everyone in the country.

But until then, anti-trust on FB. Break up the social media universe into many small bits. I believe that government needs a balance of anti-trust and regulation. You can have either one very heavily and the other light, or you can do both. I think that’s what it needs. It’s bad to do neither.

Also some kind of thought given to algorithm control. Same problem with facial recognition or any of those algorithmically driven businesses. One approach is to deny proprietary rights, like patents (I’m sure I’m using the words wrong) to algorithms. If they were totally open, we could break them apart and look inside… or pay someone to, anyway. We have as little insight into algorithms as we do into biology, which is why both of those things are lousy areas for Free Markets. You can’t have a free market if the thing being marketed is incomprehensible.

That’s why Hayek needed to come up with a Wisdom of Crowds philosophy. He knew that markets fail when the buyer is ignorant. So he figured out how the buyer wasn’t ignorant… in the aggregate.

Of course, I’m not an aggregate, I’m just me, so I’m fucked when shopping for medical care. Or algorithms.

Even if one buys the Wisdom of Crowds argument, which is perfectly good for things of which people have some understanding, like how many jelly beans are in that jar, it is also true that Crowds are cretinous. They can adopt a falsehood as quickly and easily as anything else. In fact, what a Crowd believes has more to do with how “sticky” the narrative is than with how “true” it is. Boring truths but exciting lies, is what drives the world.

Due to FB’s recent changes in its algorithm, someone can put out some crazy shit, get 10k followers or likes or whatever, right away. If they just did it for kicks and didn’t really believe it before, they believe it now. And they evangelize. Stickiest ideas win.

[Side Note: I believe Qanon started this way, by evolutionary algorithms. Plug in a few thousand notions into FB in robotically generated accounts, they get tried out and stickier ones proliferate. Less sticky one die out and are never heard of again. It’s like a deepfake mythology. If there’s a takeway from this whole email, it’s those words.]

As you know, our memories are faulty. We believe things that didn’t happen, remember things that we never saw. Our mind is a fucking mess, but perfectly functional on a day to day level.

You can’t sell a political platform on a premise of, You don’t know how to think right, people are taking advantage of that, we want to protect you. That would just be insulting.
So we need a government that is, to a degree, paternalistic, much like Behavioral Economics was, sort of. When Medicare Part D was set up, under Bush II, it gave citizens a choice of plans. It was totally clear which plans were better for whom, but we were given choices. Which choice would be first on the list? It’s well known that people preferentially pick the top choice. It would have been easy and fair and right to put the best choice first, but let people pick another one. Instead, the Bush II administration decided they should make it random. So, picking the way people are known to pick, most people would pick the wrong program for themselves. They couldn’t possibly be “educated consumers” unless they had medical degrees. And “experts”, those foul creatures, were not allowed to help; they were thwarted. It’s just not fair.

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