let's THiNK about it

Gambling has grown, as has gambling addiction. With technology improvements driven by behavioral science, gambling is more addictive than ever. While it may be your choice to gamble, the cards are stacked against you, and more gambling addicts commit suicide than any other addiction group.Exactly how do we get addicted, why do we begin gambling in the first place, and if it is a flaw in our society why do we persist in thinking of it as a personal psychological failure? How does our culture’s decree to find your “individual freedom” lead to a circumstance where the only path seems to be death? And perhaps that niggling doubt you have about libertarianism choice and free markets at the heart of the Las Vegas experiment is key to understanding how we got here.We look at Matthew Crawford's "The World Beyond Your Head" and Natasha Dow Schull's "Addiction by Design." 

Our identity is multifaceted, but people love the simplicity and tend to reduce people to a singular trait, which objectifies them. This reduction leads to violence, in part because it allows an "us vs them" narrative. Amartya Sen points out the ramifications in his book "Identity and Violence". To consider it personally, we look at Martin Buber's "I-thou" to show how most of the time we are in an "I-it" relationship to the world, and must "self-surrender" to have an "I-thou" whole relationship, and not objectify others. Ryder closes out with David Foster Wallace's "This Is Water" in which to be a better person we must be attuned and aware, even imaginative. Matthew Crawford counters that unfortunately, even Wallace remains stuck in his had manipulating mental models to relate to the world as a good person. The solution, says Crawford, is to take action in reality by engaging with others and the world. https://www.letusthinkaboutit.com/step-58-identity--violence/0:00 Intro3:56 Part 1: reductive Identity7:38 Part 2: I-it, I-thou11:57 Part 3: Mind Games17:09 Outro 

Step 57: Design facilitates AgencyPart 1: The MouskedoerCrawford tells this story about watching the Mickey Mouse channel, and on the show they have these segments where, say, 4 objects are in a grid, and a river shows up on the screen. Do you use the bridge, the ladder, the hammer, or the banana to cross the river? Did you guess banana? That’s a common mistake. Smart mouses ask for help! Let’s do it on 3, 1,2, 3… it starts with a br and ends with an idge. And if you get all 4 you are declared a “mousekedoer.” Hooray!  In early cartoons, objects such as hammers and nails and springs seem to have an identity and a contrary will of their own: they were somewhat threatening. A Spring will bounce back at you or a rubber band with snap-on your hand or your eye: all tools misbehaved, even clocks would spin backward or slow down to taunt you. Today on the Mickey Mouse show, all problems are solved swiftly with Assurance, if only you ask for help. Even the questions on the little quizzes they prompt make you feel as if you’re solving a problem, but before any frustration can set in one of your four choices automatically fits its designated role, so a bridge will land over stream of water, or a ladder will fall into place, but there is a magical sing-along chant to ask for help and the solution will arrive The contrariness of reality, the hazards, and overcoming have been removed: all solutions are at hand if you submit to asking someone else to take care of it for you. Congratulations, you are a mousekadoer who did nothing. Step 57: Design facilitates AgencyPart 2: design, dials, and free will We have a problem today: part of it goes back to that Cartesian Net Alan Watts was talking about: the grid we throw over the world in order to measure dissect and parse the inter-related complexities of the world. We can also refer to this as the Techno-rational mindset, where we reduce the world into smaller, isolated metrics to try to figure out what’s going on, rather than gauging it holistically. We look for a bolt or o-ring that caused the problem. This is real, and it works, but it also generates more left-brain-centric solutions: limited solutions that cannot account for cascading environmental variables. In short, today, we design out vital feedback. We are pulled out of our environment and our bodily connection to sensory information is impoverished. Adrienne Cussins says we can know how fast we are moving through our sight/body/perception, but we now have an abstraction that tells us: this is the speedometer. When I was first learning to drive, I remember my dad telling me to stop looking at the speedometer, that I could judge how fast I was going just by gauging the rapidity of telephone poles passing, or basically, by looking around. And, bonus, besides just ‘feeling’ your speed it is safer because it keeps you from “chimping” at the dashboard. “chimping” is what photographers call checking every photo on the little LCD screen on your camera.But the speedometer, this additional information about how fast you are going is conveyed in numbers or a dial with numbers. It is an abstract substitution for sensory information. It interferes and pulls you out of sensory reality into an interface. Don’t get me wrong, the abstraction has utility and purpose. Just like the abstract sounds that make up our language, it helps us communicate, and if we leverage this information we have a tool that maximizes utility. What I mean by this is that abstraction is a reductive model, necessarily, but it allows us to communicate in more fixed terms, these agreed-upon terms are a new fulcrum that bypasses the messiness of the subjective, experiential terms… > “really officer? 110? But it only felt like I was going 50” Feelings are subjective and slippery, so abstract measures have utility. But also, reliance on the measurement tends to drift into reliance on the dials. The more complex a machine the more we delegate understanding to gauges, which are reductive mediations for reality: we reduce our understanding of reality for the short-hand of the dial.(This is similar to Goodhart’s law, where we replace the actual thing being measured with the metric we measure it with.) For instance, We now offer “attention assist” for drivers, and “blindspot assist” and auto-parallel parking, and even self-driving. We now “idiot-proof” driving, and yet there seem to be more idiots on the road. Like the guy who was sleeping in the back of his Tesla while it drove him home. This is peculiar… it is as if handing off our situational awareness stems from (is caused by) handing off the steps of mechanical understanding. The less we understand the process between function and dial (reality and abstract notification) the more we are psychologically prepared to hand over perception itself… leaving us alone inside our wonderfully sound-proofed car, inside our wonderfully isolated heads.“Those who present choices to us appear as handmaidens to our own freedom.” Matthew Crawford It is, to paraphrase Cormac McCarthy in the Counselor, as though we think we can move through this world and yet not take part in it, not have it affect us.What a strange ethic, what a strange philosophy.  Step 57: Design facilitates Agency Part 3: VR as MoralityBut, after all, this is the ultimate dream, right? A type of severance? To pass through the world untethered and untouched. To rule the body as a submissive subject, only allowing pleasure, muting pain. And thus, we gravitate towards a dream of Virtual Reality, where the difficulties of reality morph into abstracted difficulties of mind. Perhaps in VR we have a new morality with unpluggable consequences, yet it is completely designed by others: thus our morality in VR is not autonomy, it is not agency or freedom, it is heteronomy, which is our morality defined by an outside other… something alien to us, perhaps a machine. The larger issue here, because don’t forget we are somewhat of a philosophy podcast, is as Crawford says, Our WILL, the human will, is looking for how to guide itself, and when it finds itself governed by the laws of objects, it tends to follow the “object’s desire” as if it is our own. The object outside of us is, as Immanuel Kant says,“an alien interest, and you should not administer to it’s purposes” but instead your will should “manifest it’s own sovereign authority as supreme maker of the law.” Immanuel KantThis is a bit over the top. Crawford points out that for Kant, “to be rational is precisely not to be situated in the world.” ~ and when we cease to engage with difficult objects of the empirical world, the WILL becomes freer in a rational world without restraint, without grounding. And does this not seem like the goal of VR, virtual reality? Kant wanted the will to be outside influence, to be a law unto itself ~ but this also reduces agency, especially in a Newtonian sense: if you remove the will to a separate realm it can have no causal affect in this world. the fantasy of autonomy comes at a price of impotence. Matthew CrawfordStep 57: Design facilitates Agency Part 2: BreatherSo let’s take a breather for a second because that was a lot: to go from speedometers into morality and alien control of our will through objects which rob us of autonomy, yet, also, to remove our will from conditions of the world, like an escape to moral Virtual Reality, isolates our will in an untouchable realm, which also robs us of autonomy and agency. Once again, “you cannot move through this world, yet not take part in it.”So this is a breather, and I wanted to give a shout out to my buddy Eli Walker, who reached out after the last episode. We texted about the body and design, and he mentioned this amazing video where Keith Haring, the artist, walks up to a wall mentally Maps it out and in one shot completes a total mural with no spacing issues. Which is nearly impossible. And, as Eli said, is proven by our inability to even write out a Wi-Fi password on a scrap of paper without having to scrunch the text at the end, much less tackle an entire wall. So when we were talking about embodied cognition: our body’s ability to perceive space is phenomenal, yet we don’t live in a culture that employs this. Instead, we now have apps that measure out rooms for us, yet I know men who can look at a wall and say that’s 19 ft 6 in. and be spot on. I know people who can pick up a screw and say that’s a number 6, 1 5/8 in, can bend conduit pipe without measuring, quilt without patterns, or plow a field in a straight line with no Satellite guidance. We have, over time, through flattened screens, lost our basic orientation through kinetic physicality, which we discussed last time: moving through space is how we perceive, relate, and cognate. And this lead us back into our podcast, where we now design reliance where we once developed skill. Step 57: Design facilitates Agency Part 3: concept prep In the last episode, we discussed the human body as a perception mechanism gathering information and reacting to it rapidly through sort of subroutines that never reach our conscious brain. Like feeling the slip of your bike tire, or feeling the wood about to splinter. Or, even when we walk, the ground is rising, step higher. By moving we find the affordances our environment offers. Unfortunately, some situations have to be learned: you proabably didn’t know your body could map out a whole wall for a mural, and you probably don’t know that a banana peel is slippery to step on until you have seen 37 slapstick cartoons. In the book “the upper half of the motorcycle” Bernt Speigel says “one simply has to know about some situations before Behavior can be adapted on the basis of this knowledge.” This is fascinating: essentially you have to have a concept in order to recognize and attune your body to the unique coalescence of factors that create a situation. For instance, if you are told what black ice looks like, that it looks like pavement and the best solution is do nothing it is counter intuitive, or maybe if you are in a desert and know a mirage looks like an Oasis, you can restrain yourself from punching Noel Gallagher. But if no one tells you a banana peel is slippery you will be unprepared: we need the concept to recognize the situation. ~ And this comes from others, from the community. Once recognized, we adopt a posture that allows us to react, to mirror our forecasting of the situation that may occur. Our body prepares for the possible, and what this does is reduce our reaction time: we don’t want to have to involve the computation of the brain: it is too slow, too taxing. Use the body. Instead we perceive the situational affordance through embodied sense making. This requires attention. Attention, which is distracted and stolen by staring at a speedometer. Or a phone. I keep referring to driving because Crawford does, and it is a good vehicle for the ideas: it is a relatable mid-ground between the self’s agency and larger systems… it embodies the individual will, yet is social, physical, and made possible through complex machinery that amplifies our actions. But concept prep and environmental awareness can also work for craftsmanship: As a matter of design, to reach a skill level of mastery, we want to reduce the cognitive leaping about, the projecting and forecasting of several hypothesises (hypothesi?)… that are interfering. These small mental ramblings are like mosquito bites, stealing your attention. We need to design an environment that sets us up for embodied flow, relieve the mind of it’s anxieties, and reach a zen state, a flow state, as Crawford says, as state of “Alert watchfulness, without meddling” — YET, this does not happen unless you are involved. “involve your ass, your mind will follow.” converse: “free your ass, your mind will wander” But here’s the deal: it takes work and risk and a bit of danger: John Muir, author of ‘how to keep your volkswagon alive’ says “we must have skin in the game” If we drove cars strapped to the front, like an Aztec sacrifice, we would be much more cautious with our driving. Safety design actually alleviates awareness and caution, or circumspection: it reduces the need to attend and negotiate. John MuirWhen people do not have to consider, then “being unaware” they behave recklessly to undermine the very design that is protecting them. Amplify this for each iteration and more safety equals more reckless nonconsideration. This implies it may be impossible to idiot-proof, and even more concerning is idiot-proofing, safety, leads humans to be unable to navigate the world without themselves becoming idiots… we become mousekadoers, unable to tolerate frustration and always asking for help so we can retreat back to the safety of our own minds. And by idiots, Crawford previously defines idiota from the Greek: meaning a private person detached from the implications of how we move through society or the world.To be an idiot is behaving as if we were in private when we are actually in public: To assume your preferences take precedence.Step 57: Design facilitates Agency Part 4: A rebuttal to the rebuttalIs Crawford saying idiot-proofing is encouraging us to behave like idiots? Is he saying that safety features make us less safe? We are, after all, protecting and helping through design. The forethought of engineers saves lives.It is easy to have a knee-jerk reaction to this, and start saying things like “oh you want to remove speedometers from cars? Why don’t we just get rid of speed limits, Mario Andretti? What’s next? Getting rid of the stop signs and right of way?” And interestingly enough, Jeff Speck in “Walkable City” talks about a concept called Naked Streets. The idea is exactly to remove signage and right of way, narrow lanes, and get rid of crosswalks. Where this has been implemented it decreases traffic accidents and the severity of accidents. The “common sense” approach is to widen streets so that people have more visibility, but that only encourages people to speed up since they can see further. We put in stoplights and stop signs, which tell people “you have the right to go now.” And speed limits tend to be reinterpreted to “drive 5 mph faster.”These environmental mediations through abstract symbols, a green light or a red light or a sign with a number, tell you how to behave without the necessity for you to truly address your environment. Someone has predetermined consideration, so you don’t have to. You no longer negotiate with your environment or others: you have the “right of way” and off-load the responsibility of cautiously, attentively, navigating the shared public realm. This lead us (finally) to the concept of design and agency. Human agency is our ability to affect change -to consider a situation, make a choice, and feel the power and responsibility of that decision. Rules and nudges that direct our behavior (through hijacking automatic responses) also rob us of our agency of self-determination. (There is no decision to be made, thus no autonomy.) Over time we trade our agency for legal certitude: a right/wrong binary and social guide based laid out as a cartesian abstraction. Similar to dials that convey reduced information by requiring no attentive negotiation to a complex reality we free our minds to daydream, our hands to twiddle on phones, and a once public ballet of interaction becomes isolated, individual bubbles colliding. So far we have focused on how mediating through design reduces primary sensory input to the human, actually detaching them from the environment and world. Yet there is a kind of design, like “naked streets”, that feels like anti-design: removing the over-designed mediation as a means of reconnection and returning agency to the human. A literal human-centric-design philosophy, where insight bolsters human flourishing, not just parading ergonomic door handles as the lever to freedom.  Step 57: Design facilitates AgencyPart 5: the world without maps the world is it’s own best model We talked last episode about robot design, and how brute-force computation is costly and slow, while physical design and haptic feedback is much more efficient and elegant as a solution. And of course the best models of this come through Evolution and the world itself. Yet here we are talking about how designs mediate reality into an abstraction, a dial that tells us how fast we are going, or a sign it tells us how fast we should be going. These are symbols, and symbols are granted meaning by society, thus grounding them in a universal language, which has great utility. And we now want to create symbols to ground all things. What is fascinating about skipping the symbol and returning to the embodied representations, is as Arthur Glennberg says “embodied representations do not need to be mapped onto the world to become meaningful because they arise from the world.”Arthur Glennberg That is if your body derives information directly from the world we do not need to encode and decode it: it is uniquely instantaneous. We do not need a map of the world when the world is its own best model. indeed the map is not the territory. And reducing the encoding-decoding process to experience the world directly also allows us to learn more rapidly. This is because multiple senses are bound together, coupled, in the learning process. this is called cross-modal binding. Not only do we glean information through multiple senses, sights sounds and feelings and location, but we bind those experiences to a shared commonality – time. These experiences all occur simultaneously, co-occur, and coordinated into a Time locked stream of information. The upshot of this is our brain binds from various senses a coherent sensory pattern of time signatures, this timestamp becomes “the thing in itself” When all of our sensory data is mediated, it is an abstraction, and and when we turn that abstraction into a falsification, such as the sound of a V8 rumbling engine now running through your speakers because the car no longer sounds that way, we have falsely informative information. We are now going to Great Lengths to create the exact opposite of reality as a substitute for reality, pretending to stand in for the truncated reality. And suddenly we’re back into talking about the simulacra, from steps 38 and 39, a false reality that forgot it’s purpose. What is our means to counteract this? On the most simple level, it is to actually do something physical. To move. Not only is Locomotion indispensable to learning, but only self-motion can accomplish this, not VR or flat screens. It also begins to provide true options, not simply choices. Most online environments and even much of our built environment have pre-existing choice architectures, paths already prepared for us, and over time we conflate choosing with doing. We literally think we can only go right or left, who we are as a person is defined by the 4 color choices for our car. “what does that red say about me as a person?” It is so impoverished and limited. And we are back to being good mousekadoers. “if choosing replaces doing for the mouse-clicking mousekedoer, it figures that such a disengage self should be especially pliable to the “choice architectures” to get installed in public spaces.”You do not find yourself merely by choosing, you find yourself by doing. And it is frustrating and painful to encounter the real world that has an objectness and will of its own, unlike the mickey mouse challenges, unlike the models in our heads, but engaging the real world is also real overcoming, and a step closer to genuine self-reliance and a truer form of autonomy. 

IntroToday we continue considering “the world inside of our head” as quite narrow versus “the world of your body”, pulling heavily from Matthew Crawford, but also Iris Murdoch and Iain McGilchrist.We are going to look a bit at the mind/body split that became the “my self is the voices in my head” problem. And hopefully cast some doubt on the intellect as a lone arbiter for decisions, and reintegrate the right brain and body. This is difficult because at our most foundational (linguistic) attitudes we consider the self as the intellect: Alan Watts says we often say “I have a body” when we ought to say “I am a body.”We tend to think the “I”, or “me”, is somehow located in the head: a “little man or woman or homunculus or demon” is watching out of our eyes and giving orders. The body is an extension that reports to and enacts the brain’s commands at will: a type of machine that is controlled from on high. Yet, today, we can contradict this saying that ‘somehow’ the body constitutes the self, and in many ways is more reliable than the little man/woman/demon between our ears who pretends to be in control.Matthew Crawford has shown us that living out of our heads, the ole Descartes dictum “I think therefore I am,” privileges the little man between our ears, who produces mental constructs that we start to identify with. This creates personal identities but is layered on top of deep subliminal cultural ideologies as well. Crawford shows us that our concepts, our mental models, morph easily and allow us to be manipulated. Especially through cultural indoctrination and advertising. (Step 53, Step 54)The problem is “inside of our heads” is the same place we go to do logic-y and math-y things, so going there for answers feels like rationality… it feels like we are making or finding the truth.A caveat: we need more rationality in a lot of areas, and overall it is fantastic (I am pro-rationality), but being truly rational is also realizing we are not always rational. We tend to cloak our non-rationality as rational (and over-indexing on logic), which leads to its own brutally reductive and efficient characteristics that (in many ways) are detrimental to humans. When I talk about “rationality or logic,” I am mostly referring to the cultural tendency to champion what Allan Watts calls the Cartesian net. This is a way of thinking where we throw a net or grid over the world, dividing it up so we can quantify, measure, and abstract the messy reality we encounter. And we do this internally to ourselves to borrow the gravitas, solidity, and cache of seemingly infallible objective truthiness of logic and math and science.“Truth was never high on the agenda for humans.”Yuval Noah HarariStep 56: Embodied PerceptionPart 1: How we got hereThe strength of humans may be our ability to communicate and share knowledge, and the biggest illness we may have is getting locked inside our own thought processes. “I think therefore I am” leaves us alone, thinking, which is how we end up with crazy people. Yet, somewhere along the way objective rationality won and we split the human into parts, categorically speaking, not literally.One split was the rational self and the will (or moral drive).Here’s how it worked: you observed facts (a banana peel on the street), bring the data into yourself, make a determination (if I step on it I will slip), and then act (avoid the banana peel or pick it up so no one else slips on it). The action, observable to all, was your morality on display. (what kind of person are you, you selfish peel dodger?)Notice, nothing of the body in here, except to be observed enacting your virtues? The body is, if anything, not rational and historically maybe even evil, or at least lustful. (And who wouldn’t be with all those banana peels laying around?)But more importantly for today: Notice how this determination of “who you are” parallels a type of scientific method: first, we collect data, then develop a theory, and finally test it with observable reaction.“Philosophy in the past has played the game of science partly because it thought it was science.”Iris MurdochShe said this back in the 60’s and pointed out that philosophy and psychoanalysis are not science, they are broader and about human nature, but they tend to borrow from science some of the security of logic. But, Murdoch says philosophy and psychoanalysis cannot preclude the “inner self” or morality: We are born humans long before we become logical scientists.Step 56: Embodied Perception Part 2: Problem 1In Step 54 we discussed that through fMRI scans scientists can tell that when we “pause to deliberate” before making a decision our brain is only producing electrical chatter: not actual thought. This points to the notion that the decision is made either before we even began deliberation or made in some way not related to the brain. This is either scary or free-ing, but the implications are profound.Fascinatingly enough, in the philosophies of existentialism and surrealism, both acknowledge that when we’re making difficult decisions there seems to be a “void” at the moment of choice, an “emptiness” when it is time to make the decision. Existentialists claim that “emptiness” is a sign of freedom to make a choice, while surrealists say that emptiness means there are no reasons, it is all chance.Iris Murdochsays when we have to make a difficult decision mostly we are enacting the behavior of thinking. We have learned to pause, stroke our beards, squint our eyes, and perhaps look upward with an out-of-focus gaze. We adopt the posture of deliberation, learned by watching others pretend to think.Murdoch says the “deciding” was already done previously: day by day in a piecemeal fashion we assemble who we are and how we will react through little habits and interactions.She says you are “free” – you have freedom- in the small seemingly inconsequential actions of your daily life. But when the big moral choice comes and you enter this strange state of “emptiness”… it seems like your “will” moves of its own accord.Problem 1 is that under stress, big decisions made at the moment, do not really look to rationality: It just happens. The right brain is nowhere to be found. Part 2: Problem 2Iain McGilchrist wrote an amazingly thick book that I purchased and have not yet read called “The Master and the Emissary“. But, I did listen to some podcasts where he talked about the left-brain right-brain split.But, as a caveat, Robert Sapolsky, who wrote the book “Behave,” says the left/right thing is overplayed.The Right-brain is the “master” who let his “emissary,” the Left-brain, do the talking. Now the ‘rational’ LEFT brain begins to think it is in charge. so it talks all the time, and won’t listen to the Right brain. Imagine a pompous King Author shooing off Merlin because he’s in the middle of a real knee-slapper.“not now Merlin… and that’s when he stepped on teh banana peel! haha”Now, the Left side of the brain (which controls the right side of the body) handles math, facts, sequence, logic, and articulates language, even though the right also understands language. The Right side of the brain handles feelings, intuition, and holistic thinking, often seen as creative.How do we know this? There have been experiments, conducted around 1960 by Roger Sperry with humans who had their corpus callosum cut to prevent epileptic seizures. (The Corpus Callosum is the bundle of nerves that connect the Left and Right hemispheres.)For instance, if the Left hand (which is controlled by the Right-brain with feelings and imagination and holistic thinking) is put into a box and the person is told to grab an object. Let’s say the left hand (controlled by the right brain) grabs a hammer… when asked what the Left Hand is holding, the person will say something, like “a banana”… this is the Left side of the brain talking. It controls the speech centers. The left brain pretends to know, to be in control… so it lies.To make this even stranger, the Left hand, with the “hammer” will reach over and start trying to help, to show the other side (show the Left side of the brain) it is holding a banana. But the Left side of the brain will deny its help and continue lying, proclaiming it has been deceived.“Merlin tricked me again!”Problem 2: The left side of your brain lies. This is the logic side, which coincidentally is also the self-deception and confabulation part of the brain.Culturally, through science and philosophy, we have given control to a liar, who is great with focus, logic, and math, but maybe we should restrict his “authority” a little and put some checks and balances in place.Step 56: Embodied Perception Part 3: Embodied PerceptionEmbodied knowledge: the body has its own knowledge that is quicker, and more embedded than rationality.Embodied perception: the body collecting sensory data from your environment by engaging with it, moving through it.Have you ever moved before you knew something was wrong? Did you act without thought? Perhaps you just “felt” something that later turned out to be wise, but at the time you weren’t thinking at all? This can be considered embodied perception. Your body’s autonomic systems, your automatic nervous systems, pick up on cues before your rational mind can process them, and you react without the intervention or judgment of your brain.How far does this perception extend?Matthew Crawford discusses how our brain ceases to differentiate between a tool and our hand, the tool merely becomes an extension of our perception, an extension of our hand. Overtime, through familiarity, our perceptual range can extend, and our environmental range expands to new sensitivities. A primary point Crawford makes is that:“Perceiving is a way of acting. Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us. It is something we do. “Matthew CrawfordThis counters the assumption that the mind interprets perception: the body does it through action and movement, which means we perceive THROUGH the body, and it is filtering knowledge.About a year ago I listened to The Philosopher’s Zone podcast on “Neurophenomenology and Sensemaking”. We aren’t going to cover all of that, but in our techno-rationalized world, we tend to look for the one bolt that caused the problem: it is a reductive and isolationist way of thinking that fails to account for systemic variables and multiple cascading failures and reactions.But your body is built for holistic environmental sensemaking and holds knowledge that often supersedes what your logical brain can tell you. Speaking of Neurophenomenology, Brad Roberts quotes a guy named Claxton, who talks of“the human body as a massive, seething streaming collection of interconnected communicating systems, that binds the muscles, the stomach, the heart, the sensors in the brain so tightly together that no part especially the brain, can be seen as functionally separate from or senior to any other part.”ClaxtonOne of the examples given by Roberts, who has written his PhD thesis on sense making, is the Piper Alpha Oil Rig explosion where 167 people died, and 62 survived. Those who survived reacted to the felt heat and flames and jumped in the ocean, those who perished were insulated from the heat and waited for rescue. Those who perished had an impoverished perception of the environment: their physical sense of direct data was limited.Another example is Cpt Sully Sullenberger, the pilot who saved all those people by crash landing in the Hudson River, was reacting at the moment to an emerging situation, but after years of flying and practicing belly landings he knew the correct glide path: he had already mastered the technical proficiency which allowed him to react instinctually.This is interesting because it “sounds” like rational thinking in hindsight: I have the skills and knowledge, I recognize the situation, make a judgment, and react. YET… Crawford saysat High speeds judgment is not the right word because reaction is too fast, cognitive activity is costly and takes time ~ you literally feel the situation to process the data.To examine how the body computes versus intellectual computation Crawford discusses robot design.A robot has to interact with its environment. The old-fashioned way to do this was to compute all the variables before and during and after movement… it is grossly inefficient, all that computation. And as we know from behavioral economics and evolutionary science, thinking takes a lot of energy and we were designed to run in passive mode as much as possible. Robot Designers are now following an evolutionary (morphological) model. They find that the right design imparts feedback more efficiently than computation.for instance, With a bit of gravity on a downhill slope, a human can walk with virtually zero energy. Each step imparts more information through the movement: it tracks incline through increased or decreased gait, terrain through resistance, etc… Apply this evolutionary design to a robot and the mechanics impart information at low energy and reduced computation.To further underline the importance of locomotion as a means of cogitating or perceiving, Crawford says sight and movement are connected. He has cited some developmental examples with kittens on a merry-go-round. The brunt of it is: We perceive three-dimensionally through movement. Our awareness and cognition are through mapping the environment, gauging what the environment provides, and from there we are afforded possibilities.“When we perceive, we perceive in an idiom of possibilities for movement.”Alva NoeSo, when your motorcycle slips on that ever-present banana peel, you are gyroscopically correcting: it is almost as if the bike is your body. As you move through your environment, perceiving possibilities, you realize you can’t correct the left without hitting oncoming traffic, and your body accounts for this through environmental awareness, without spending time rationally considering it. All of this is to save the ole noggin, which was dumb enough to get onto a motorcycle.Or, on a larger scale, taking into account the possibilities our environment affords, such as knowing the Hudson river is up ahead and being familiar enough with the plane to do a belly landing, allows Cpt Sully Sullenberger to save 155 people.Step 56: Embodied Perception Part 4: RecapWe are casting into doubt the over-reliance on internal logic. Because it is quite messy the way emotions and instinctual behaviors interact with your brain: it’s not purely rational.Once again, we are a seething communication system. So tightly bound, the body and brain are really inseparable. Yet, of course, we keep trying to separate them to make sense of them. Sure, your “I” or identity, your “you”, might be influenced by reason. But at that vital moment, your logical rationality may either choose to take a backseat (disappear and shut up), or when it’s really confused and scared, it might just start lying.We know that philosophy is often pretended to be logical and scientific, and it attempts to ascribe these features to us. And of course, we also like to appeal to rationality as a guide so we are not contradictory or culturally estranged. But maybe we aren’t actually being rational when we attempt rationality.Our societal championing of logic has led us into these cul de sacs of harm. We’re often plagued with bureaucratic inefficiency, the reduction of people into functions, or tools that are abused. Our behavioral economic knowledge is often used for propaganda and manipulation. And of course, if we’re left alone in our heads, constructing stories, we become fragile, and racked with insecurity.We can say that the fault stems from “logic” tainted with capitalism or human urges: we just need more logic to fix it. Thankfully, that is slowly happening, but it is an uphill battle because we have made a society based on efficiency and utility. And there’s very little incentive to study things that cannot be measured and monetized and made useful. Things like movement without action, deliberation without decision, morality and virtue that isn’t for sale.Fortunately, science has progressed and with more sensitive instruments, scientists and neuro-physicists are now investigating these discarded phenomena, such as “the instinct that saves lives” or the “moment of choice.” This draws them back from this edge, this kind of superstitious hocus-pocus area into more valid concepts.However, the research shows that there really isn’t anything that looks like thought on fMRI machines whenever we’re deliberating a big decision, which leads us to reconsider what’s happening at the “moment of choice.”Some options:1. You can declare your will acted of its own accord. This implies that the real you is your unthinking “will” -your inner urges- and it’s enacting your morality or values. But it’s definitely not beholden to reason, because your reason just disappeared during the moment of choice. So this means the real you is irrational.2. Through embodied cognition, your body made the decision. And we can call this an instinct. Once again, this is kind of irrational from a classical understanding of reason, or logic.3. You might take this left brain, right brain discussion, and consider a different conclusion: That a more holistic nonlanguage, part of you is weighing in. The Master might actually be taking over from the Emissary.It’s not that this part cannot be fooled or be wrong. It is, after all, evolutionarily adapted to maybe a savannah and not really a dense urban population where there’s a lot of driving while on cell phones. And of course, they didn’t have a whole lot of banana peels on sidewalks back then.But perhaps we have let the little demon between our ears maybe he’s been doing too much driving. Perhaps we have not actually set ourselves up for mastery and flow, which is bodily and right brain. Let’s consider integrating some other forms of knowledge: use your embodied perception, use your whole self. Sure, keep your reason but supplement it with the rest of your being, expand your cognition through your body, and get to know the right brain version of yourself.This may actually end up expanding who you are and how you relate to the world. And at the same time, it might ground you in a richer reality than your illusory mental models can ever devise.(This is part four of several episodes on “The World Beyond Your Head”) 

Part 1: Jggy wit itI personally do a lot of woodworking, making cabinets or entertainment centers, I'm currently trying to build a window. I have tools that help me, such as a table saw is great, but sometimes there is a finicky cut in a difficult spot and you need a handsaw. The hand saw has a downside to it: I'm not skillful enough or experienced enough to make sure it cuts it a perfect 90° angle while staying parallel to the edge and lined up on my marks. One trick is to clamp another board on the line you're cutting, and use that board as a guide, making sure that you stay 90° perpendicular and you're cutting straight back and forth. This is a very simple version of a "jig." Crawford talks about experts making things easier for themselves by "partially jigging" or "informational restructuring" the environment. So as you're working, you start setting things up around you interacting with your environment, this can be information in the digital space or production in a workshop. Perhaps consider the workflow of a chef in the kitchen. Not only does structuring your environment help you to be better at what you're doing, it reduces cognitive effort, so you're not having to re-solve your problems or waste steps... instead you jig up a workflow, keep your attention on point, and also restrict the freedom of your wandering mind. This is how you build an environment that allows you to get in the Flow State. The dark side is of course slewing into the opposite extreme: we now use "over determined jigs" which replace the skill... and the mind along with it. “Cheap men need expensive jigs; expensive men need only the tools in the toolbox” Matthew Crawford  This is similar to Christopher Schwartz who wrote The Anarchist's Workbench and The Anarchist's Design Book : If it's a choice between buying a jig or learning a skill, learn the skill. The goal is to move between autonomy and the assembly line."Advanced cognition depends crucially on our ability to dissipate reasoning"Matthew Crawford To think complex thoughts we need to unburden our limited capacity brain from having to consider everything, allowing us to use more bandwidth to focus deeply on a specific task. The great achievements of knowledge that came before us and practical wisdom are now embodied in complex structures: the structures of linguistics, politics, society, and institutional constraints. These are huge, complex jigs that are often invisible to us. Yet, we can focus on our daily job or current task because we have outsourced some daily reasoning (mental bandwidth or cognitive load) for some structure and stability. Step 55: Cultural Jigs PART 2: Cultural Jigs Max Weber, the German sociologist who wrote The Protestant Work Ethic, pointed out that there was a change in the way the church perceived wealth. We went from the "camel through the eye of the needle" thing about the difficulty of rich people getting into heaven TO accumulating wealth is a sign of God's favor. The status of your soul was visible in your portfolio, conspicuous wealth was proof of election to God's elite. This ideology ran deep in America, conflating being a good Christian with thrift and freedom. "Be Frugal and be free."Benjamin Franklin Today we have reversed "Be Frugal and be free," not back to "blessed are the poor," but to "be free now, pay it off later." It is now moral, neigh virtuous, to carry debt. "Consumer credit" with a good FICO or "credit score" requires a credit card and a mortgage: proof of debt carried long term. We even have "good debt" now: home mortgages and student loans are encouraged. This is not a moral judgment, but a cultural change over time: we have dismantled the moral cultural norms held previously, and now the "non-thinking lazy individual" is looking for a jig to guide them. Today, they are "nudged" by administrative actions. There is a book called "Nudge" about how policy can be made to make up for lazy human bias. Crawford relates this to “choice architecture,” the policy that structures your available decisions.  For instance, in "Nudge," if you start a new job with a retirement package they find that people are often so lazy or blase that they will not check the box to opt-in, even though it is in their best interest. So, the administration sets it up to auto-enroll you. Then people won't even check a box or make a phone call to opt-out. There is nothing but default behavior.The problem here, as Crawford describes, is one of "character."  Character seems to come from habit, which we have discussed previously as a predictable or reliable pattern of responses developed over time to solve specific problems. habit seems to work from the outside in; from behavior to personality"Matthew Crawford Your behavior is shaped by your environment, through cultural norms, which then form your "character." The circumstances that shape us are often through administrative and cultural nudges. The ramifications are: if you were auto-enrolled in your 401k and you never unenroll, you have never really faced down anything, made a decision, or confronted temptation (should I save for the future or have more money now?) You have only allowed the virtues of the current system to be further stamped into your personality, and you have fallen deeper into the rut in which your stereotypical life is laid out for you. Without the friction of making decisions, we don't develop character, we are developed by external design. Our acquiescence, our inaction, allows our attention and priorities to be managed by others. This is the manipulation by attention pirates we mentioned in the last episode. Living by "default mode" means being adrift on the current, readily swayed and shaped, nudged, or herded into place. The administration says, “relax, we will take care of you” while the corporation, with no accountability to the common good, says “you have been softened up, now let us take advantage of you.”   “Choice architecture will happen. We just need to be aware so we can choose our architect. “ Matthew Crawford Step 55: Cultural Jigs Part 3: How did we get here? In behavioral economics, they do studies in isolated environments to control variables. The tests show on average, we have little skill at practical reasoning. So we outsource it. Living in a "capitalist representative democracy technocracy" (a few of our cultural jigs) we have been habituated to hand over decision power to sciencey specialists, or really anyone. According to behavioral economics, we can't be bothered to think too much about it. Historically, after WWII "the left" started a project of liberation. They busily unmask and discredited “cultural Authority,” which means dismantling our inherited cultural jigs. These jigs, things like churches, family, and trust in government, provided coherence for individuals. This lack of coherence means that individuals are at a loss for how they fit into society. This is exactly the same problem Otto von Bismarck solved in 1871 by applying military bureaucracy to the German state: individuals were running around in packs, terrorizing each other, and upending stability for everyone. For a society to work you need stability, shared goals, and a sense of contribution to those goals. The project of Liberation led to a new unencumbered self. Into this void of meaning (dismantled cultural authority) steps "the right." They offer up the idea of the "rational actor" who is reasoning and maximized profit. A sciencey/economic solution to a cultural problem. Cultural authority's role is to regulate society, as much as to provide a framework for stability, so who regulates this ideal economic, reasoning man? Free markets.As we know from the 1980s free markets deregulate everything. Our increased liberation has de-regulated us. This means we now have to spend more time, energy, attention self-regulating. In this time of the individual as their own authority, you have to have self-discipline. But all solutions are increasingly economic. We can relieve the burden of self-regulation by payment for "cultural jigs." Consider paying an accountant so you can relieve the burden of taxes, which in turn can make you more irresponsible, less self-regulated. By paying them you can avoid going to jail, and if you have enough money they shelter your wealth from taxes, allowing you to get richer while being less responsible. Double this class luxury of outsourcing self-discipline to paying for tutors, chefs, and fitness trainers: we pay for others to nag us, feed us, and make us smarter. Earlier we talked about dismantling cultural authority for liberation. This was done by both "the left" (dissolving cultural, traditional, and parental authority) and the right (de-regulating state authority in favor of markets), yet it seems the "disciplinary functions of our culture" still exist. Crawford says there remains a cultural cost for not having discipline: If you can afford a therapist to help save your marriage, help you raise your kids, and get them into pedigreed schools it passes social capital forward (as well as the financial capital) which allows the next generation to pay for their offspring to regulate their discipline: this ensures a dynastic succession through affording better cultural jigs. In the 50s and 60s, you had Protestant thrift, parental authority, and cultural shaming around gluttony. These were not great models in all respects, but they were available to everyone. The need for discipline around finances, behavior, and consumption has now moved from readily accessible churches, parents, and friends to privately paid life coaches, therapists, and personal trainers. Discipline has been privatized in the space left vacant from the culture wars.Step 55: Cultural Jigs OUTRO: human flourishingCrawford brings up the example of a chef cooking in a kitchen, who gets into a flow state, just chopping and spinning, and handling five tasks at once with impeccable timing. He is savoring his own human excellence, he is a human flourishing within the carefully modeled constraints of the kitchen. He can improvise, he is wholly absorbed and connected to his environment. "Living skillfully requires that some things be settled." Crawford wants to remind us that "the ideal of freedom from external influence doesn't capture all the elements that contribute to an impressive human performance." On a larger level, this episode is questioning the ideal of the “free” individual, pursuing their internal desires, and over-indexing the world inside their head. Crawford is asking us to look at the external conditions that shape our character.  So, our next episode will be looking more at the individual human - what exactly happens when we become skilled because there is a type of freedom in undertaking the discipline to hone your skills. How does our cognition shift when we are skilled? And what exactly is embodied perception or embodied knowledge? 

SHOW NOTES at https://www.letusthinkaboutit.com/step-54-the-world-beyond-your-head-pt-2/0:00 intro2:11 part 1: environmental suppression5:31 part 2: the illusion of the self8:35 part 3: situated self & ecologies of attention11:17 part 4: autonomy  vs heteronomy14:33 part 5: the current cultural narrative19:16 part 6: freedom!21:16 part 7: the ideal self as projection

1: Attention as a cultural problem“Capitalism has gotten hip to the fact that for all our talk of an information economy, but we really have is an attentional economy, if the term economy applies what is scarce and therefore valuable.”Matthew CrawfordCrawford goes further because if capitalist corporations seek our attention, the easy way to get it is to stimulate us: to poke and prod our attention centers. To say fully present and to own our own attention we must apply tremendous effort.“The contents of the stimulation almost becomes irrelevant. Our distractibility seems to indicate that we are agnostic on the question what is worth paying attention to: that is, what to value”Matthew CrawfordWhen you don’t know what to pay attention to (priorities) you don’t know what to value. And when you don’t know what to value -when “all distinctions are leveled”- then “meaning” is reduced to “information”… and our inability to distinguish value is often seen as an individual moral failure.Example: “If you can’t stay in the present moment long enough to watch your kid play soccer what does that say about you as a person?”I would bet most of us have felt this shame or tried to keep our attention addiction secret. Crawford does not rush to condemnation but considers where this behavioral conflict stems from: where does this “nihilism of values” begin?2. Liberation of the IndividualIn [[Step 39: After the orgy, baudrillard]] on the podcast, we discussed Baudrillard’s notion that we have liberated ourselves in our modern society. Hooray! We are free from the bonds of tradition, community, and sexual repression. But what do we do now? Baudrillard says we keep pursuing freedom without understanding: it is simply a behavior that has become untethered from its foundational principles.Crawford also brings up our moment of liberation, but he makes a different point: we have liberated ourselves from social life, liberated ourselves from our parents, the church, and the commons. By dismantling these “tyrannical structures of oppression” we are now liberated individuals, or free, autonomous beings.The consequence and contradiction we encounter are that we also removed the thick and unique links to the community. But part of being an individual is knowing how you fit into society. In dissolving structures the promise is greater freedom and diversity. However, the dissolution of cultural authority, which gave us shape both in participation and rebellion, may have led to a flattening and homogenization of the individual.“Our mental lives converge in a great massification, ironically, under the banner of individual choice”Matthew CrawfordBy discovering that freedom of choice and individuality have been shifted over time to make us more similar and pliant they have become the opposite of their premise. Crawford says “We are isolated in a fog of choices.” Bombarded with advertising, we only see the commercial stories that have stepped into the void after we dismantled the cultural authority.Our liberation from all things left a huge hole. (And yes, many of those systems were toxic and in need of reform.) Yet, once groups are atomized into individuals, there is no longer a collective voice to step into that vast cultural hole. Commerce took over. It is now the cultural authority.Once again, “we are isolated in a fog of choices”: we are stuck in our heads, and when walking down the street we are bombarded, prodded, and needled, by small pleas attempting to consume our attention. This distraction creates low-level anxiety and diffusion of our attention. In response, we learn to protect ourselves, keeping our valuable attention for ourselves. We deny the request for eye contact or a casual wave, because it might pull us out of ourselves and into the world. This world with too many predatory options, and too much risk of transactional manipulation.To keep our autonomy and to remain free, we imprison ourselves: we choose to stay inside… inside our own heads.JUST THE TIPSA small word on freedom from Adlerian psychology. If you were a rock, and if you were a rock tumbling down a hill, and you follow your inborn impulses and desires and inclinations (gravity), letting them take you where they will,  that is not freedom. At the end of tumbling down that hill the rock has become a smooth pebble. Would you say that what remains is the core self, the authentic “I”?“Real freedom is an attitude of pushing up one’s tumbling self From Below”The Courage to be Disliked Most people think freedom is a kind of release: a release from organizations or obligations.  However, that is liberation, not freedom.  Freedom incurs a cost, and in Adlerian psychology, the cost of exercising your freedom is being disliked by others.3. Modern LifeThere is “no basis for us to resist the colonization of Life by hassle.”Matthew CrawfordIn Modern Life the cultural problem goes beyond merely ignoring advertising. We become so distracted we cannot recognize ourselves and have difficulty getting a grip on genuine Joy.Crawford sites an Onion article, where a man is trying to have beers with friends, and as he finally starts to approach genuine joy he remembers the crushing amount of work emails, and then the unresolved issue with his Southwest rapid rewards account. In this state of perpetual distraction, we miss out on joy because of a to-do list capturing our attention.This creates an ETHICAL VOID. Attention is so foundational that without it we lose the ability to prioritize, and thus lose morality, ethics, and philosophy.Just the TipsOn the science of attention and focus Dr. Andrew Huberman shares how focus with your eyes creates a biological response, triggering a signal to the brain area called the Zona Incerta, which can shift our entire brain and body into a mode of focused pursuit.Motivation and drive can be focused by vision.This can happen externally: think of advertisements of food that cause us to pursue food. But we can hijack this biological response and use it. By holding your visual gaze on a single location in front of you, your body will initiate some of the exact neural mechanisms granting alertness enhanced cognition.4. Ethics and the attentional commonsHumans have a survival mechanism; it is an orienting response, you can think of it as “goal-oriented” or “stimulus oriented”. This is called attention.Attention focuses us on threats, like tigers, or rewards, like food or sex. It can also focus our ambition for goal attainment. External stimuli easily hijack this survival mechanism: a tiger leaping at you or television showing a sexy person covered in food equally get your attention. They distract you from internal goals and ambitions.If your survival responses are blunted because you’re constantly being advertised non-essential or frivolous items it is only reasonable that we train ourselves to tune out. However, Crawford brings up that we miss something important if we “tune out.” For instance: At an airport, we put on our noise-canceling earphones and bury our faces in books so that we don’t have to see the TV or hear the chatter. We create a mini pocket of private experience. Yet, what happens to the “public world” when we retreat to a multiplicity of private worlds?In the public world of shared attention, there is 1) a way of knowing yourself through seeing and being seen, and 2) a charged potential, a kind of erotics, that is denied. Instead, attention is turned inward, protected at a mighty cost as we minimize interaction and distraction.This effort generates a low level of persistent annoyance, partly at your impotence against the advertisements and television. You become exhausted, baffled, annoyed, and then you may ask yourself: why am I so angry? We diagnose ourselves as the problem, turning the external problem inward yet again.Out “stimulus orientation” is mercilessly prodded, but no one speaks of the ethics of hijacking attention: no one speaks up for the public. It is only corporations telling stories and showing us pictures.“Man is the animal that makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble the pictures”Iris MurdochIf “we make pictures ourselves, and come to resemble the pictures” what are we shaped into if corporations tell the story and make the pictures? In [[Step 46: Sacred Economics]] we discussed how shared public resources (the commons) were once accessible to all. Yet the commons has been increasingly privatized, taking from the public to generate wealth for private parties or corporations. Our attentional commons, the ability to choose how to use our attention, have become monetized. The “attention economy” has created, as [[Yuval Noah Harari]] calls them, “attention merchants,” which I will call “attention pirates.”Not only is our commons corrupted and dangerous (roving pirates) but our attention is plundered (pillaged) daily. As Crawford says, there is no “public-spirited voice” pushing back against the privatization of attention. There is instead ingrained pro-business forgiveness.We all cope by putting on headphones and averting our faces into phone screens. Once again, as polite individuals, we retreat from public space to private sanctuaries, where other companies plunder our attention.You “pay attention” while advertisers “pay for attention”. If you want your attention back, you have to pay for it.You have to go to the business class lounge for silence at the airport.Online, you have to pay a premium to avoid ads.In privatizing the commons, in this case in privatizing your attention, somebody is taking from your mind for their own gain. Crawford says this is not “creating wealth” as market men like to say: it is a “transfer” of your mental health into their wealth.harrison bergeron by Kurt VonnegutSilence and InequalityGiven that you have to pay for silence to maintain your attention, we should consider the increasing gap between the wealthy and middle-class and poor: those who can pay to keep their attention focused on their business get richer while the rest are further handicapped.Our “right to privacy” should include a right not to be addressed. Regardless of income.Crawford says this does not include face-to-face interactions, human-to-human, seeing and being seen interactions, because that is how we know ourselves in the world. But no one needs to be addressed by or have their attention harvested and data scraped by obscure faceless companies through mechanized means.5. Attention is your ownYou can declare your privacy as your own, but we live in a society surrounded by others. To do more than survive, to thrive, is to swim through the waters of the world. Going all-in on privacy is the equivalent of sitting in a submarine at the bottom of the ocean while there is a party on the surface with floaties and bikinis. But, of course, today you will be hassled by pirates if you attend the party. A person “must know certain things about their surroundings, most obviously the existence of other people and their claims”Iris MurdochMurdoch goes so far as to claim there is a moral imperative to pay attention.When your attention is appropriated in public spaces, someone (some company) is taking advantage by co-opting and subverting the rights of the public space, the rights that we owe to one another. We do owe each other attention and interaction.This is a crucial point Charles Eisenstein in “sacred economics” also brought up: we have become so individualistic and competitive (often only think about ourselves) we do not consider what we owe to one another as a community and Society. We have retreated from the morality of attention.“Something in our soul has a far more violent repugnance for true attention then the flesh has for bodily fatigue. This something is much more closely connected with evil than is the flesh. That is why every time that we really concentrate or attention, we destroy the evil in ourselves.” #quotes #attention #selfcontrol #evilSimone WeilJUST THE TIPSDo you remember “The marshmallow experiment” at Stanford where researchers taunted children with a marshmallow and then left the room? They decided the children who delayed gratification, by not eating the marshmallow right away, had a higher chance of success in life.Upon very detailed viewing, we find that these children didn’t just turn on willpower and delayed gratification. The children who were successful in not eating the marshmallow distracted themselves by playing little games. Instead of staring at the marshmallow yearning for it, they distract themselves by tapping their fingers, humming a song, and looking away from the marshmallow. They shift focus creatively: they self-regulate by distracting themselves.6. ATTENTION IS NOT YOUR OWNThe non-marshmallow-eating kids self-regulate through creative distraction. It is not the true attention Simone Weil speaks of, but it is controlling attention.The implication is if we cannot direct attention “where we will” we are receptive to “where they will”In other words, we are ripe for manipulation. They put the marshmallow in front of us and if we cannot redirect our attention we will eat the sugar they put in front of us. And the more of it we eat, the more alike we all become. Puffy Sugar people.If we only eat the marshmallows, this being the advertising and media news put on our plate and shoved down our throat, there is a homogenization of viewpoints, and we lose uniqueness.“According to the prevailing notion, to be free means to be free to satisfy one’s preferences.”Matthew CrawfordThere’s an insidious little trap here: the conflation of making a choice with freedom.To make a choice is to pursue your preference, which makes you become an autonomous individual. To pursue your preference is a sign of individuality, and is above cultural scrutiny or judgment. Yet, most of our preferences align with market forces (the marshmallows in front of us.) Crawford calls this “standardized appeal.”You feel free because you chose to eat that marshmallow … and all the other marshmallows. And you defend your choice as your individual preference. Yet, this is somehow not freedom, a real choice, or individuality.Crawford says that our critical faculties which we need the most to combat the potent packaging of preference (and the pervasive championing of “the sovereign self as sacred”) are crippled and inhibited by corporations. Especially with big data as the sugar hit.Our temptations lead us into stupidity, and once there we can’t think our way out: we are too distracted by all the sugary marshmallows, and over time we lose the strength to escape because we lose the ability to be rationally critical.

Ryder consumed over 50 books and about 200 podcasts in 2021. Walking through concepts of the origins of bureaucracy and how the protestant work ethic shaped corporations and consumer behavior, he moves into healthcare related to liberty, how to solve many problems on our way to utopia, and a model for transitioning away from capitalism into a nature-based economics.https://www.letusthinkaboutit.com/step-52-best-of-2021-review-by-books/My two favorite books“Moral Mazes” and “The Culture of the New Capitalism“Both of these are sociology books about how the world has changed. They both reference Max Weber, discussing how bureaucracy came out of the military and in America the Protestant work ethic became conflated with capitalism and eventually led to conspicuous consumption and wealth as a signal of virtue: $ = wisdom and salvation.Moral Mazes, by Robert Jackall, focused on the life of middle managers in large corporations, and how the politics needed to survive do not align with the professed values: hard work does not pay off, but appearing to be a tam player while brutally shifting blame and burning through company assets means you are a go-getter, with gumption and grit. Equally, Jackall maps out how middle managers hide behind jargon, because they can’t appear to not know what they are talking about (can’t look weak), which is bad for the company… but also, considering legal repercussions, they learn to use vague, coded language so as to be able to shift positions: never be caught with a strong opinion, while always seeming to decisive with strong opinions.These are the guys/gals who make decisions with their “gut,” which means they keep perpetuating the same behaviors and stereotypes, but are crafty at the optics of appearing fair or sympathetic.Richard Sennett follows up on this offering broader examples of how capitalism effects the working class, the brain-drain on talent for dumb factory labor, and discussing things like why a nurse may stay at her job, despite the terrible hours and mistreatment: people don’t work for jobs, they work in a place where they can make a difference… they need to know where they fit in the world and have relevance.But they go to factories because they need a steady paycheck so they can get a mortgage from the bank, which means a competition to take the best from the labor pool, then put them to work doing mind-numbing labor: companies do not want innovation, they want subservient, blind loyalty from you. But they reserve the right to have no loyalty to the employees. Even the business owners now distance themselves, and hide at the first sign of responsibility and accountability, pushing it off onto subordinates and use technology as a distancing mechanism.All in all, we have come to embody the whole “rational actor” of economic theory, which promotes selfish, transactional relationships rather than community. It rewards sociopathy.Say you are a well-intentioned millennial, then you have been taught not to give voice to discontent: your mental health is more important than job frustration. You simply exit. “Exit over Voice,” as Sennett calls it. Old people argue, which makes them a pain when a company demands unwavering, un-considering loyalty and any question is interpreted as dissent. Institutional memory and wisdom are liabilities, so companies hire those who will just move on without a fight, which means they only get task completion instead of deep consideration from their employees. We all become mercenaries, who scream about politics, but (wisely) are afraid to lose our jobs because survival is not guaranteed in our country.What both books point out is that our society is cutting itself off at it’s own knees, and feeding on them. It is like auto-cannibalism, where to be successful you must take risks, upending the stability that made our nation profitable (successful) in favor of destruction and precarity, just so you can prove “you have what it takes” or are as amoral as the leadership team you aim to join.We burn down the world our great-grandparents built, and we do it behind a gold-plated mask of jargon. Faced with the specter of uselessness, we market and promote meaningless differences as highly important.Philosophy books?Honest to god philosophy: William James and BaudrillardI read a lot of small snippets about philosophers or their viewpoints, but sitting down and actually working through multiple books? Only two authors this year. Though I did read some Deleuze, Nietzsche, Zizek, and Lyotard as well.Reading Pragmatism by William James was great. We can argue about things all day, but he discusses moving beyond ideological or semantic quibbles into a practical reality, not being a slave to your position, but grounding ourselves and carving ourselves. Providing space for spirituality he says, swim up, touch the divine, and get some spiritual energy to direct your path.Coming up with increasingly obtuse theories isn’t helpful. He was really pushing back against monism, or the notion of one fixed universal truth, and equally he wasn’t a fan of the notion that everything could be measured and figured, a type of determinism. He spoke a lot of a middle path, a middle road, a central corridor from which doors into other ideas can branch off, but you needn’t stay cloistered in there.I think Baudrillard would suggest that these philosophies are fooling themselves. He might propose that they wouldn’t even know it. His work on the idea of simulacra and simulation would say we have lost the plot, lost the purpose, we are “a man adrift without a shadow,” and we can only keep simulating achievement.But what if we have not lost the plot, but the story has already been written and we are merely enacting our roles? The memes and ideas of the world are moving us to claim “liberty” and “freedom.” We have none, no direction, so now simulate liberty, acting out of libidinal desire without understanding.The most optimistic?“Utopia for Realists”It is nice when someone spends the time to look at things like Poverty, or Universal Basic Income and says… wait a second, this doesn’t make sense… the world we live in keeps saying “pull yourself up by your own boot straps”… taking a handout is a moral failing, or it is a lack of character to be poor. We need to punch through these moral myths that keep us imprisoned in pain as we end up with deaths of despair and the opioid crisis wiping out those who have been isolated in this competition where everyone loses, even when you win.Rutger Bregman proves multiple times over in “Utopia for Realists” that the government helping and protecting its citizens, (instead of profiteering) would stabilize the population at a lower cost than the current system bears. Which would help business, government, education, and other institutions.Examples provided show Universal Basic Income, eradicating poverty, and making healthcare free you both grant human dignity and “it is cheaper” than the long-term costs of prisons, emergency room visits, rehab clinics, diabetes, police, etc… We should cut the well-fare system, too. No hoops to jump through to prove you are deserving of a handout: just give people cash. The simplest solution works: eradicate poverty not with systems, but with money. The vast majority of people will not take advantage of this, but will better their own lives.The darkest?Our MaladyAs we just mentioned healthcare and human dignity, one of my favorite authors nearly died in 2019 or 2020 because of inept health care systems motivated by money over human concerns. Timothy Snyder’s Our Malady walks through how our inequality as a society leads to needless death, despair, and division. He also discusses the need to fluctuate between solitude and solidarity.As a contemporary historian, his books walk us through how our fragility becomes a breeding ground for corrupt officials and corporations to continue abuse: when your health is at risk (or your family) you are a serf or slave, who can never voice dissent.And so, when our journalism turns into an untrustworthy shit-show, and we rely on social media for news because we can’t trust anything, this is a symptom. If you can’t be honest because you will lose your job, and your insurance, then fear and survival win out over principled moral obligation. This is simply the logic of free-market capitalism’s “rational actors” or “economic agents” fulfilling the shallow logic of the market, eroding trust and long-term stability, opening our nation up for abuse and corruption: making us susceptible to tyranny.The best economic book:Sacred EconomicsCharles Eisenstein does a great job of reorienting us away from the faulty logic of the neoliberal capitalist myth. Pros vs cons… there is a cost to everything, and we need to look at this neoliberal capitalist train and wonder if the engine up ahead, where we can’t see it, has fallen into the ravine and is just dragging the rest of us into a fiery explosion. Is there still time to bail? And what does that look like?Eisenstein maps out 7 steps, an interlocking system to ascend from our self-administered despair, using the bones of capitalism in which we sheltered to grow up… but I am simplifying it into 3 steps.realign money with natural decay (negative interest)alter the way land is used, letting it become the currency backing or capital as a communally shared resource, andletting pre-pollution taxing redirect innovation towards enriching a sustainable commons.The point is, we don’t need more trinkets: we need a planet, a world, that works. We need to stop being selfish children or adolescents. We need to behave like responsible grown ups. Eisenstein brings up 2 great parables, the eleventh round to show how usury and the tragedy of the commons to show how “individual rational actors” destroy communion and solidarity.A key point is that money is not evil, it is a technology. But we let it have unnatural properties and try to apply it to the natural world. We need policy that will realign money with nature, society with people, and make nature our capital that we depend on instead of extracting from.Race?“The Racial Contract” by Charles MillsIt spoke to me in a way White Fragility didn’t. And even the fact that Mills had to couch his arguments and ideas in academic terms to get through to people like me is brought up in the book. Thanks to L for the recommendation on this one.Self Help and Behavior books“Awareness” by Anthony DeMelloBest book maybe ever, but I didn’t podcast on that. I still hold it in too much reverence.I read some self-helpy, achievement books like Atomic Habits and Judson Brewer’s The Craving Mind. Along with more behavioral science books like Noise by Daniel Kahneman. The most career oriented were So Good they can’t ignore you and Range, which fall into a kind of Malcolm Gladwell type of book, but less expansive, more like a field guide to creating an interesting career and life, not getting trapped.But the stand out in this strange field of “make yourself better by having knowledge of knowledge” is How to Take Smart Notes which I highly recommend for anyone who wants to actually make use of their reading, wants to write or publish or podcast.My favorite episode to make:Free guyFree Guy was great because I got to really dig into pop-culture that seems very shallow as a way to discuss pretty profound ideas of desire, identity, and Artificial intelligence as a type of government or state apparatus. We touched on Arendt’s work, action, labor distinctions, where the subject is turned into a cog… but we need differences for change, not similarity… one way to manifest “difference” is through radical repetition, which invokes the transcendence of Nietzsche’s eternal return.Bonus section!!FictionI finally finished David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest this year. hooray. That took like a decade. Worth it, but I now feel like I need a book club or philosophy class to decipher all the depth and strangeness of it.My favorite  was The Overstory. It is long, but really worth it. The book reshapes the flaring human desires and personalities, their companionships, against the backdrop of ultra-long-lived trees under threat.If you are looking for something fun, check out the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. If you want some good fantasy, check out N.K. Jemison’s stuff.A type of ConclusionThrough the podcast these books are tools that I can use to widen my perspective and let me come to a better understanding of how we ended up here. In a type mirroring, having past knowledge also sparks ideas of how we can  escape (or move beyond) the current predicaments we are in.Or not, because humans are messy and things are complicated, but at least with this knowledge we aren’t subjected to basic binaries… we have graduated to advanced binaries. hooray!Doing the show, over the last nearly two years, I feel a little bit better prepared to engage the world, to offer alternatives rather than nod along. Questioning long held assumptions is the podcast goal, and reading is the tool. None of these ideas are my own, they are just cobbled together from the wisdom of others. For the first time in a long time, I feel I am working towards a version of wisdom and richness of life, and I would like to thank you for spending some time with me on this journey. 

The most obvious problem with optimization is "who (or what) are you optimizing into?" First you must know yourself, then have a mission with little goals along the way allowing you to hack productivity. But if you are in a rush to gain career capital for survival or to earn freedom, your mission is likely not your own, thus requiring disciplined willpower to pursue. This opens us to problems with willpower and subjective truth shaped objective relations. More problematically, optimization reduces for efficiency, in which case there may be no space left for the messy ambiguity of the human soul. 0:00 Intro (Recap of the last 3 episodes) 5:03 Bildung, career capital (David Epstein, Cal Newport, Richard Sennett, Robert Jackall) 8:54 the fickle self, marshmallows, and unreliable willpower  (George Ainslie, Daniel Kahneman) 15:58 Just the tips: Zettelkasten (Sonke Ahrens, Niklas Luhmann) 18:23 Stoic vs. Epicurean 22:11 Subject/Object, Over indexing, and ambiguity as human (Simone De Beauvoir, Douglas Rushkoff) 

The Hero Story Perhaps there has always been an effort towards optimization, and it generally looks like technology. When speaking of self optimization, or overcoming , we are speaking of the hero’s journey popularized by Joseph Campbell. Campbell spoke a lot of the parallels of the external journey and the internal journey… the external circumstances gave the individual the opportunity to react and grow.In the 50’s-70’s there was a wave of belief in unlocking human potential through psycho-science-type things like intensive practice hypnosis and subliminal training… or just LSD. Some of these practices were previously used in religious awakening, but we wrapped them up under the guise of science, and then they were abused by programs like MK Ultra.During this time, people thought of the human as a blank slate that could be written, molded or shaped. (optimized?) An example of this is Laszlo Polgar, born in Hungary, and with an idea about raising children, ended up getting married and having his first child in 1969. He and his wife Clara, raised children around the idea that they could create a genius through specific narrow focus. They had three children, the Polgar sisters, who all excelled at chess, reaching amazing heights, and were declared National Treasures. In fiction, chess is too boring, so the blank slates are in the genre of assassin Killers: examples are Kill Bill, Atomic Blonde, or Leon the Professional where they are trained, usually for revenge or duty. On the darker side you have children raised by handlers or governments as weapons, like in John Wick, Black Widow, Hannah, or Kate. So what if instead of being a badass with Kalashnikovs and stilettos you’re a phenom with golf clubs? This is the Tiger Woods story, a history of brutal authoritarian parenting generating mental resiliency and overcoming. A lot of success, but a lot of trauma.Physically, many of us are not capable of such heroic heights: we cannot optimize enough to overcome our genetics, despite how much protein we consume. Enter science to the rescue as the mythical augmented man: Perhaps the Six Million Dollar Man or the darker side of Robocop, more of an automaton cyborg. Talk about efficiency: just turn the man into a machine. We are culturally conditioned to accept this is the way of the future as far back as cartoons like Inspector Gadget: the bumbling doofus with all sorts of extensions and rockets and wheels that both saved the day and naturally lead to slapstick pratfalls.Backtrack: This takes us back to an earlier podcast, step 28, in which I mentioned Henri Bergson, and his summary of what makes something funny, which is “the mechanical encrusted upon the living.”Of course, the real warning: when we lean too heavily into external power, technology, optimization (or even habits and productivity), we cease to be human in a certain way. We trade in the hard path of “overcoming” for the easy path of instant power, and in that substitution, we lose something. Yet, an alternate form optimization technology exists: Arcane Magics. I’m going to suggest, this path of learning the secrets of Arcane magics of habit stacking and personal productivity is the most alluring current path to be super, to achieve your potential. From Fiction to Fact While I have been talking about science through fictional stories, in many ways it has stepped into reality.You want to see something insane: look up clips from the 1920’s Olympics compared to todays Olympics: Over 100 years the science of optimization and dedicated practice works… physically at least… until they turn into that unhinged balance beam killer super model from “The Spy who dumped me.” In America, we seem to live in a society that links success and progress and achievement with wealth and appearance. This is the manifest destiny of self-actualization woven into the Protestant work ethic, capitalist, American Mythos… and technology is often the vehicle and the key.But dedication to science and technology is problematically deterministic and class eugenics can spring up from it, as played out in the movie Gattaca. The secret to tricking an unjust technocracy? Keep secrets, and work harder than everyone else.But in this age of the internet we need to know exactly how: what was his diet? What drugs was he on? Boxers or briefs?And this is the trap we are in today: there are so many paths laid out before us by the millionaires and self-hacking crowds that we have a myriad of paths to successful optimization. Yet when someone, like in Gattaca, has an overpowering, all-consuming goal to be more… or in Kill Bill to kill more… we find their dedication and focus grants results. This can be called “dedicated practice” and myths of a 10,000 hour rule to mastery circulate around it. The beauty of it is that maybe we don’t need neural implants and bionic arms. Maybe the new magics are habit stacks, routines, the mystical arcana of time-blocking and flow state. The only thing left is to find an all-consuming, overpowering desire that we can shape our life around… and that is not so much hero stuff, as a very old question of all of mankind: what is my purpose? What is my mission?  The Superman, the Ubermensch, Nietzsche How can we do an episode on superheroes, and overcoming without at least bringing up Friedrich Nietzsche. He popularized the concept of Übermensch or Overman or Beyondman… now most commonly seen as Superman.(By the way, this concept is affiliated with the Nazi party due to Nietzsche’s sister misusing his texts.)The Overman is really a man of overcoming… and to confuse it with physical power as the Superman warrior is quite superficial. In our society many people appear superhero, overcoming physicality, but staying in vanity. The hero’s journey is ultimately a journey towards self-integration, towards wholeness, and as Jung said “individuation” through the unification of opposites.In Nietzsche’s book thus spoke zarathustra the prophet Zarathustra, who comes down from his mountaintop to share his knowledge with masses is spurned by the people. He attempts to tell them of the Ubermensch, but they reject this hard life of overcoming. All spiteful and disappointed, Zarathustra decides to prophesy the disgusting concept of Last man: a lazy decadent person, born of a civilization incapable of standing up to challenge or hardship, only interested in comfort. The last man takes no risks, preferring security. This is the soft and secure rationalist who has forgotten how to dream and everything the Ubermensch would do appears as illness, or madness.Intentional hardship? Are you crazy? So, how do we push back against the zombie conformity of security that seems so rational? It seems – indeed – to be illogical to try. Isn’t it in our best interest to protect ourselves and stay comfortably in the middle of the herd? Yes, for survival maybe, but what about thriving? What about self-actualization?One way is to find something external to ourselves that is more important, someway we can help: A hero uses the challenge, the tension and hardship, to manifest creativity, to innovate. Are scientists and technologists our superheroes, the innovators or our time? How about the optimizers, the overcomers?  The guys and gals hitting flow state, or testing intermittent fasting: testing, and testing, and suffering, and sharing all this data with us. Are they climbing the mountain and coming back down with the mountain-top insights? Perhaps. But what if their motivation is internet rewards, or just a whole bucket full of hacks? That would be a less than noble goal.Experimentation can happen culturally, too. Can we not appreciate the heroism of the alternate lifestyle?The real challenge, the wisdom handed down to us through some religion, philosophy, and myths is to blend all opposites: overcome and move beyond dualities of good and evil, conscious and unconscious, spiritual and earthly… this is how you become an individual.Most of us are what is called a “dividual”, not undivided, as an “individual.” We are the divided self. Fragmented. We have not overcome or transcended, or as Hegel would say “subsumed.” Sure, we might be fit, we may look like the image of the superhero, but is maintaining appearances more like the act of the lastman? I am not saying they cannot coincide, but the motivation is a vital distinction to understanding conformity and overcoming.What I do know, is we -in our society- are really good at superficial appearances… placing the signifier before the signified.  The point, I think, is that to become a real human, a whole and integrated self, is a harder and a more heroic a journey than scientific shortcutting or following formulas that guarantee results. Sure, science/tech is great and helpful, but it shouldn’t do the overcoming for you: you have to do that. Also, the hero is often portrayed alone, the monk ascending the mountain to find enlightenment or Superman in his Fortress of Solitude after keeping secrets, but you do not have to do this alone. Sure, you will have to work and push back against mindless conformity, but take the journey with others and avoid the solipsistic individuality of the shallow villain.