Category Archives: Psychological Musings

Sanity and other people

Americana, Psychological Musings

I don’t believe it’s possible to have a disembodied intelligence without a physical connection to reality. Everything we think, everything in our thought processes is built around being in touch with reality. Even the word “touch”…Rodney Brooks, former director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, founder and former Chief Technical Officer of iRobot and co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of Rethink Robotics. 

I first heard of Rodney Brooks in 1997 when I saw him in Errol Morris’s Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. In it, Brooks talks about making simple, cheap, insect-like, robots with closed circuitry that didn’t work on paper (it was ten years ago that I saw the movie and I am technically way over my head so I may have misremembered some of this). The robots kept falling down and bumping into walls but as they did they started self-correcting; soon they were walking and not bumping into walls. Their learning was shaped by an external reality.  

We humans, Homo sapiens, are social animals and we are shaped by our social environment as well as our physical environment. Not just growing up but as grown-ups. Hermits aren’t hermits because they are weird, they become weird because they have no social environment to bump into to keep them reasonable. People who live alone, like the uni-bomber, become strange; if they started strange, they become stranger living alone; isolated. Because dictators are usually behind a wall of courtesans, in a very real way, they are also alone which, I think, is why so many of them spiral into increasingly extreme behavior. They are alone because nobody is pushing back everybody is unctuously agreeing.

I think this isolation, surrounded by toadies and fixers, is the way Trump ran his business and, increasingly, the Trump Presidency. Extrapolating, this is the problem with the closed feedback loop of Facebook. Only hearing our side of the story makes us crazy.  

Michelle Wolf and the loss of irony (and humor)

Americana, Psychological Musings

Dang, I thought I posted this when it was current, but, anyhow…

Last night’s program was meant to offer a unifying message about our common commitment to a vigorous and free press while honoring civility, great reporting, scholarship winners, not to divide people. Unfortunately, the entertainer’s monologue was not in the spirit of the mission. The complaint by The White House Correspondents’ Association’s president, Margaret Talev who, apparently, has no idea what a “vigorous and free press” means. A press that is afraid of dividing people by telling the truth seems to me to be too close to a press that self-censors the truth because it might offend somebody in power

Margaret Talev was reacting to Michelle Wolf’s comedy act at the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Dinner, where the press and the people they are supposed to be covering, get together. I thought her act was just OK, but, to be fair to her, I read that this is a very hard crowd to play; it’s in a big space, everybody is formally dressed to impress not laugh, and, with round tables, half the people in the room are facing the wrong way to start with. The big damper, however, is that the room is full of very important people who are sucking-up to each other and they don’t like being made fun of. Trump stayed away which just shows that he is not as stupid as some people think. 

A tree in memory and dying three times

Around home, Psychological Musings

We have a lovely dogwood in our backyard and while it seems young because it is so spindly, Michele got it eighteen years ago to memorize her father’s death. It blooms every year, reminding us, each spring, of Michele’s father, Kurt Heath. Kurt was born Kurt Hoenigsberg and he escaped Europe to the United States as Europe was falling into the Nazi abyss in 1939. Actually, the escaping started when his family escaped Romanian pogroms under Premier Ion Brătianu by moving to Germany, about the beginning of the last century. Then, as Hitler came into power, they escaped Germany to France. It was a time of fear and loss that I can’t even begin to imagine and it left Kurt a difficult man, especially for his three kids. Having a tree that blooms so brightly, even on cold overcast days, seems like a great way to remember him.  

I was listening to a radio program a week or so ago and the program was touting several short essays on death. The only one I remember was an essay – a paragraph, really – on how we really have three deaths, rather than only one. The first time we die is when our heart stops beating, we all know that one, it is the date and time on the Death Certificate. We die a second time when we are put in the ground. The third death, which takes place in the future, is the death that most moved me. The third death, the last death, takes place when our name is said for the last time. When nobody remembers us, when we have disappeared into the flow of history, then we have ceased to exist.  

To answer the President’s question

Americana, Psychological Musings

“Why Are We Having All These People From Shithole Countries Come Here?” President Donald Trump

First of all, even though it was in-artfully said, it is a legitimate question. I’m going to define shithole country as any country tourists don’t want to go to. As an example, I don’t know anybody who went to Nigeria and stayed in a hotel in the capital, Abuja, on vacation. Abuja is a pretty fair-sized city of 2,440,000  and I bet it is interesting as hell. However, for the sake of this conversion,  I’m going to call Nigeria, a shithole country by the arbitrary definition that it is not a tourist destination. I mean, nobody is going to call France a shithole country (except when they didn’t want to put troops into Iraq, but they were a shithole country then because they were hard to boss around not because nobody wants to go there). So I’m going with  Nigeria. 

As I understand Trump’s question, If we don’t want to go to Nigeria, why do we want Nigerians to come here? Well, there are already about 275,000 Nigerians that have come here and a fair question is How are they doing? Nigerians, it turns out, are a hugely successful immigrant community, as are other African immigrants. According to Bloomberg, Nigerian immigrants “have a median household income well above the American average, and above the average of many white and Asian groups, such as those of Dutch or Korean descent.” Dutch or Korean success is a pretty high bar, but Nigerians are well-educated people – who value education – whose education level is way above our National average. A high proportion are Doctors and Engineers and this is a community that adds more to the country than their less educated European immigrant brethren. 

And, if you take longer to look at it than Trump obviously took, educated, ambitious, people are more likely to leave shithole countries because these countries are usually more violent and have more limited opportunities, than, say, Belgium. To answer Trump’s question, we should invite people in from shithole countries because they are the people who will Make America great again.

 

A thought on the way to cardiac rehab

Psychological Musings

I go to a cardiac rehab class at 8:30 in the morning, three times a week. I started when I had my aorta valve replaced by a new one, manufactured out of cow parts, and I have been going pretty much ever since. When I was working, I went to the 7:00 AM class but now I go to the 8:30 class. Anyway, I hit the only traffic light on my drive at about 8:15 and, except for the lull during the Christmas season, I always have to wait at the light. This morning, waiting for the light to change, maybe ten cars in front of me, a jogger was also waiting; standing by the side of the road in the shadow of a row of trees, under an already dark and brooding sky. I could barely see her but I was surprised she was wearing pants with huge legs, what we used to call palazzo pants in the 60s, and I could just barely make out her ponytail. Then the light changed and the cars started slowly moving forward and, as I got closer, the pants got thinner until they became regular jeans. Then I saw that it was a him not a her, and he didn’t have a ponytail. 

As I drove by the guy, I realized he wasn’t even a jogger, just a guy waiting for the light to change. It got me thinking about pattern recognition and our ability to see patterns, sometimes patterns that aren’t even there. We are hardwired to see patterns, all animals are. One of the easiest patterns to read are faces – two eyes over a nose and mouth hole – which are so easy to read that even computers and dumb animals can do it. As an aside, sheep are hardwired to run away from canine faces (think wolf for canine). Shepard dogs round up and control sheep by giving them the eye, essentially showing the sheep their eyes above a nose, to move sheep away from them. However, shepherds don’t want sheep guard dogs – think Old English Sheepdog or Komondor – to spook the sheep, they don’t want the sheep running away from their guard dogs, so they bred the guard dogs to have their eyes covered with hair thus thwarting the sheeps’ pattern recognition system. End aside. 

With just a little information, a shadowy figure by the side of the road, I saw a woman jogger with palazzo pants and she even had a ponytail. But most of the heavy lifting was done by my mind, filling in the blanks. It got me thinking about how often I must do that in other, non-visual, areas. What first came to mind was reading a snippet about Trump and then filling in the missing parts with parts that match my preconceived ideas. This is what makes political “dog whistles” work; Reagan says “inner city Welfare Queen driving a Cadilac” and our pattern recognition takes over from there.