User:Three-quarter-ten/Three-quarter-ten's laws

In the scientific sense of that term.

Most of these revolve around biopsychosocial observations and concepts. Thus, they interface, to the extent that my dilettante qualifications allow, with areas like anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and last but not least, neuroscience.

From there you get into economics and political economy to some extent, and, relatedly, management science, military science, and others.

Everything relates to history and historiography, of course.

Eventually you will end up at error detection and correction and accuracy and precision, and industrial engineering and systems engineering (ISE) will have been done, in actuality whether or not in nominality.

And that just goes to show, as do other things, that at root, on the grand scale, everything's about epistemology.

From there you get back to the work of technicians and engineers, which is the core of my Wikipedian content contribution interests. I am many things, as is any human, but in the end I may end up remembered, in a composite sense, as a technician who went around analyzing and fixing the shit that other people fucked up through inattentiveness. I simply paid attention when others wouldn't, couldn't, or didn't. Which is historically coincident with the fact that Wikipedia's editor-in-chief is a rotating quorum of whoever is paying attention.

Number 1: Sociopathy is in reality a class of neurological incompetence.

Corollary 1A

The sociopaths themselves cannot detect this fact, or even believe it when told, owing to the Dunning–Kruger effect.

Corollary 1A.1

Being a dick is a type of incompetence, despite the fact that dicks believe it to be a type of virtue.

Corollary 1A.2

Having integrity is a type of competence, despite the fact that dicks believe it to be a type of defect.

Corollary 1A.3

Dicks hold a multitude of false beliefs.

Corollary 1A.4

Dicks suffer from a cascade of failure wherein their first type of neurological incompetence (lack of empathy and integrity) causes impairment to their wider class of neurological competencies. Thus, being a dick stunts one's intelligence, knowledgeability, and circumspection.

The mechanism by which this happens is something like "missing out on the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts." A dumb analogy off the top of my head is that an airplane with just wings or just an engine cannot leave the ground, but one that has both can fly. I believe that it's often true that when one cannot care about anything but oneself, one lacks the motivation to study or pay attention to other people and their interests and their problems. One feels little motivation to read widely, because one finds so many topics so boring, because they don't seem relevant to oneself, which is the only kind of relevance that registers when one cannot empathize with others (or if one can empathize a tiny bit, with effort, but not very well).

Corollary 1A.4.1

Dick minds lack competence to detect emergence. Their detection of it tends to be stunted and rudimentary, or even absent.

Corollary 1A.5

Don't be a dick. In the event that you aren't capable of avoiding it, act like someone who's not one would act.

Corollary 1A.6

The Wikipedian corollary is called Wikipedia:Don't be a dick.

Corollary 1B

The reason that this neurological defect, sociopathy, is so prevalent among humans is that throughout human evolution it has had a fair degree of natural selection fitness (by placing self-interest above group interest, and ingroup interest above outgroup interest).

Corollary 1C

The reason that this neurological defect, sociopathy, is not invariably ubiquitous among humans is that there are other tendencies that also have a fair degree of natural selection fitness (by placing group interest above self-interest, and supergroup interest above subgroup interest), which have been competing evolutionarily with it for millennia.

Corollary 1D

A restatement of corollaries 1A, 1B, and 1C into one set of alternative words is this:

Sociopathy and empathy are both traits for which natural selection has been sometimes selecting over hundreds of thousands of years, selecting each one under certain environmental circumstances. Neither one has beaten the other yet. Empathy is neurologically more advanced, although to sociopaths it appears an unalloyed weakness. This latter (specious appearance) is because their incompetence blinds them from properly understanding itself.

Corollary 1D.1

"What if E.T. thinks we're evil?"—"The controversy focuses on the idea that E.T. could well decide that we're a threat to interstellar order, and therefore we have to be stopped before we spread." —Boyle, Alan (2011-08-19), "What if E.T. thinks we're evil?", Cosmic log on msnbc.com: "Quantum fluctuations in science, space and society, from quarks to Hubble and Mars. Served up by Alan Boyle, msnbc.com science editor.".

"What if E.T. thinks we're evil?", you ask?

I say, give that little gray bastard a lolly and a gold star. Yup, he guessed it!

Heh heh. It's funny cause it's true, and you know it.

Will we get supplicant auditions, where each of us gets to argue that we're an exception to the rule? Will they bother, or care? "Better safe than sorry, perhaps—just flush the whole specimen, young lab tech—we'll cook up a better batch next week."

But wait, not so fast. I must say that when I read the headline and skimmed the text, my gut reaction was along these lines—

Surprised sociopathic chump: "Gee, do you think E.T. might think we're evil?"

Me: "NO SHIT, SHERLOCK!"

But consider how this relates to the musing about the relationship of true evil to "mere" moral incompetence induced by sociopathic neurological inadequacy. In spite of my first reaction, in which I declared the thing called and told us all to pack up and hit the showers, cause we're done here—one might begin to imagine that maybe E.T. (assuming he's not evil or morally incompetent himself, which is a pretty glib assumption, really, but anyway—) maybe E.T. will find us pitiably incompetent in net effect, rather than evil. If, by the time he comes, we haven't yet managed to cobble together our hearing aids and wheelchair and eyeglasses, maybe he'll stick around and help us finish them out of charity for a poor little bugger of a species!

Corollary 1E

An extension of corollary 1D is this:

People who have never had true personal integrity, due to the neurological limitations of sociopathy, are incapable of understanding why people who do have true personal integrity often consider it absolutely indispensable, that is, something that they cannot bring themselves to abandon even if the insistence brings substantial hardship. The sociopaths are thus predisposed to assuming that the insistence is (or is caused by) a defect, whereas when viewed from within its own system, it is a type of perfection that outranks self-preservation—and possibly even natural selection itself. However, because it relies on natural selection for propagation over generations, it faces a ceiling on its dominance; it is root-bound within a limited pot. Another of its traits is that it is an instance of selection at the group level trumping selection at the individual level for net adaptiveness. This phenomenon is also found in social insects. Although individuals may behave in non-self-preserving (or non-self-maximizing) ways, the group displays adaptive superiority, on a population level. Kin selection; social evolution. One step back for three steps forward beats one step forward in net effect. Which suggests to me that the older, reptilian-brained sociopathy, which can only maximize self-preservation, and even that only in certain ways, faces a long-term decline in favor of the newer neurology, *if* the human species doesn't blow itself away with NBC weapons first.

Corollary 1F

The average human mind, when faced with the choice between (1—a fairly accurate model of reality that recognizes changing parameter values and implies short-term personal sacrifice for long-term greater good) or (2—lying to himself by clinging to a flawed model that tells him what he'd rather hear) will pick 2, even without consciously choosing, which is most of the root cause for why human life on earth sucks more than it ought to.

Corollary 1F.1

Corollary 1B and corollary 1F together have adequate power to explain a lot about suckage in human cognition. There's a particularly potent combination, which can be both poisonous and fertilizing/nourishing, depending on who it's "aimed at" (Them) and who benefits from it (Us). It's this combination of a predilection for Us-vs-Them thinking and a predilection for refusing to believe any part of a substantial (albeit complex) body of evidence when instead it can simply be dismissed as belonging to the "Them" side. It can be a very profitable, comforting, and enjoyable way to think, but it externalizes like crazy and it creates victims (either now or eventually). In fact, it not only creates victims, it requires them; it eventually requires victims, and it eventually requires enemies. An extreme instance produced by such root causes was Nazism, with its perception of a need for Lebensraum and the convenient fact (quite useful for preventing any guilty feelings from developing) that the people (Them) who would require eviction to clear the land for the rightful occupants (Us) were subhuman anyway, so it would not be immoral to evict them nor to administer some technical solutions whereby they would not cause any future trouble—such as "allowing" them to diminish by "natural attrition" (or, as filthy Bolsheviks would call it, working them to death at gunpoint) or a more proactive solution that would obviate the headache and expense of interim, transitional solutions and thus be final. But not all instances of 1B+1F are so extreme as that. Any political±religious worldview that facilely demonizes opposition, conveniently classifies humans into pigeonholed groupings, and facilely dismisses large bodies of evidence has, ipso facto, just raised all the warning flags of being inherently misguided (including being underpinned by neurologic deficiencies), as well as inherently protopredatory even if not yet predatory. Regarding classifying humans into pigeonholed groupings, you may need to extend the concept to include your livestock, so the classification actually covers not just humans (Us) but subhumans (Them) as well. Of course, though, there's a further distinction to be made, a finer difference to be duly appreciated (for we are very smart, and our thinking is quite refined, after all) between "our" subhumans (internal quasi-enemy, do not kill as long as useful and subservient) and "their" subhumans (external enemy, kill ASAP).

A sad thing is that you can't explain to the adherents of such a worldview why it's bad. Why? Because you are one of Them, and your body of evidence is to be dismissed.

Corollary 1F.2

Being an asshole is a form of externalization; it acquires resources for the self, whether material resources, ego-shielding psychological resources, or both, at the expense of others in unfair ways, and in so doing externalizes part of what is each individual's dharmic quota of doing without those resources or, if getting them, then paying the full dharmic price for them. In other words, it offloads one person's dharma onto another without consent, which is against the nature of dharma. And being thus a form of externalization, it is a sibling or cousin element to economic externalization beneath an ontologic parent element. Thus externalization is a hypernym of the two hyponyms being a dick and externality when the latter is meant in its negative sense. Common themes (concepts) of incompetence, rationalization (making excuses), and convenience for the self at others' expense (the latter being one of the connotations of expedience) unite the two. Sibling elements of being a dick as types of externalization and types of incompetence include moral exclusion, objectification, infrahumanization, and dehumanization. Scamming, such as swindling, conning, and fleecing (price gouging), are ontologically related.

This corollary has practical importance because it explicates something that many assholes can't see for themselves and thus provides a sensor or imaging system with which to detect portions of reality obscured within an intellectual scotoma. It might not make the assholes feel bad for it (possibly nothing can, at least for plenty if not all of them), but it will at least force out into the open, where everyone must acknowledge and deal with it (i.e., cannot avoid doing so despite trying), a part of reality that must be duly processed (even if not grokked), and may scatter the illusion (disrupting the autostereographic focus, as it were) that perceives being an asshole as some kind of virtue.

Corollary 1F.3

Following on from #Corollary 1F.2, it is interesting to wonder whether the emergence of advanced taxonomies and ontologies via information science and information technology, coupled with increasingly pervasive connectivity and interlinking, will lower the threshold for falsifiability of scammish pretenses or assertions by one or several orders of magnitude, producing an era in human experience in which it becomes harder to put over on others such things as pseudophilosophy, pseudoscience, and religious or pseudoreligious novelties. Not that one's fellow humans are not still genetically predisposed toward (± willfully) believing such things (all humans are), but just that pulling the con becomes more challenging, more exhausting (leaving the scammer mentally and financially exhausted while left with dubious and sparse returns on the investment). Thus it would be not merely the emerging proliferation of hardware and software—tiny and inexpensive cameras and microphones and insect-size drones, practically limitless processing and memory (via the tail of Moore's law), narrow AI that can detect lying and plagiarism while outdriving a racecar driver, outflying a fighter pilot, and cooking dinner—that would make it hard to get away with shit (see #Corollary 4C: Organizational morality and pseudomorality: monopoly on violence, monopoly on scamming), but also even the applied epistemology itself, the ontology, that makes it harder.

One example that comes to mind is that during the rise of Nazism, the word genocide hadn't even been coined yet. Not that humans around the globe hadn't already been morally excluding, objectifying, subhumanizing, dehumanizing, and butchering each other (each other's ingroups and outgroups) for hundreds of thousands of years by then (sorry to burst your pipe dream bubbles, young and flat earthers), but just that natural languages didn't have a handy schema node, and a name for that node, with which to easily put such things in perspective cognitively. In 1938 you couldn't say to other people that "this Hitler asshole seems likely to go genocidal", because the word didn't exist. Which is not to imply any linguistic relativity—not to say that humans in 1938 were cerebrally incapable of conceiving of racial extinction by violence (see what I did there?) just because the word genocide hadn't been coined yet. And the Rwandan Genocide shows that new instances of lethally idiotic bandwagon criminality can arise anytime (goto "still genetically predisposed" above). But the point is just that today we have schemas and words that apply, so it may be more challenging to culture that sort of bug in today's culture medium than it was in the 1930s. Guess that makes knowledge, IT, and ontology a sort of bacteriostatic or antimicrobial, figuratively. But keep that antibiotic development pipeline well funded, though, because who knows what MDR and XDR bullshit is coming down the pike next. Still, at least that pipeline even exists, which is the point that this corollary is making. It hasn't always, and it's growing larger and more pervasive, one hopes.

Corollary 1G

It is not the retardation of intelligence but rather the retardation of empathy that cripples the average human's cognition. Humans in general are plenty clever enough; their mental incompetence lies not in stupidity but rather in retarded empathy combined with emotional circuits that selectively override reasoning circuits. Most humans are incapable of being logical about things that are against their own emotional interests (of various types), and are talented at being pseudological about them while convincing themselves that they're being logical. Most humans are good at deceiving themselves. Even cleverly so, in a non-self-aware way. This trait has been selected for, fairly strongly although not invariably, by natural selection.

Corollary 1G.1

The dichotomy of psychopath versus nonpsychopath, something like 4%:96%, is not the only relevant factor in the endemic neural-moral incompetence of humans, nor the important one. It's merely analogous to the dichotomy of those with the severest level of intellectual disability versus all the rest of us. Much more important than the latter is the spectrum of weakness, the 5-20-50-20-5 spread, or whatever exactly it may be, of severe intellectual disability through milder disability through normal (not great) through mildly bright through very bright. And the empathy-morality analog of that spectrum is the spread of what kind (or degree) of dicks most people are: the 5-20-50-20-5 spread, or whatever exactly it may be, of psychopath through bully-with-a-vestigial-conscience-that-occasionally-incoherently-pesters through normal (not great) through mildly righteous through consistently-high-in-integrity.

Corollary 1H

It is often said that people are idiots—that humans are stupid. This specious conclusion is on the right track but is incorrect. People are not idiots; they are not unintelligent (on average). Rather, people are neurologically incompetent (on average) on another channel—another dimension of neurology than intelligence itself. It is not the retardation of intelligence but rather the retardation of empathy that cripples the average human's cognition.

Corollary 1I

Once you have detected with middling or better certainty that a particular person is an asshole (dick, bitch, jerk, crook, whatever), you should voluntarily refrain from breeding with that person. This will tend to prevent negative outcomes for you and for the offspring. It will also contribute some small but worthwhile bit toward the evolutionary defeat (natural de-selection) of sociopathy in the human species.

Corollary 1J

There is a relationship between evil and moral incompetence. Some bad behavior among humans that we would like to consider evil is in fact merely morally incompetent, driven by neurological incompetence. The difference is in the exact details of the nature of the culpability. In both cases, the perp is responsible for his or her actions, and for those actions' consequences. However, the nature of the punishment may appropriately vary. This does not mean that bad behavior cannot be punished. It simply means that not all moral incompetence (driven by neurological incompetence) is true evil. The concept of criminal insanity is inextricably related to this line of thought. The idea is that sometimes people commit crimes not because they are evil but because they are insane. Relatedly, sometimes people commit crimes not because they are evil but because they are morally incompetent sociopaths. Nevertheless, just as society is fully justified in locking up and restraining the freedom of criminally insane people, it is also fully justified in locking up and restraining the freedom of sociopathic criminals. Both are incompetent in their own ways, and both need to be in prison. However, it is also simultaneously true that the imprisonment needs to be humane, because inhumane imprisonment is itself a class of sociopathic incompetence, because it is unfair to make people suffer for having faults that they themselves cannot control having, or cannot adequately control having. It is still justifiable, and necessary, to apply involuntary restraint to people who use their freedom to impinge on others' freedoms. It is simply necessary to do it in a competent, fair fashion.

Corollary 1J.1

An extension of corollary 1J is the following analytical breakdown. This is a currently just a work in progress, a thinking aloud, but this is the best place I have to put it right now. (Click "show" to expand, "hide" to collapse)

Under construction

Raw reality (data points), trend reality (best-fit curve, peak-and-valley-laden), and a cognitive model of reality (continuous graph reduced to quantum states). Whenever continuous data is discretized, there is always some amount of discretization error. The goal is to reduce the amount to a negligible level. What constitutes negligibility depends on which part of the elephant you are groping.

How can a difference between evil and "mere" moral incompetence be operationally defined? As with many other aspects of life, there may be a continuous spectrum at work, in reality, that underlies any theory in which the definition is presented as a discontinuous (quantal) jump; but nevertheless the continuous graph contains a steep-gradient transition area between two shallower regions, which allows a quantum model to be superimposed over the continuous reality with close enough matching of the curves that operational success can proceed. In other words, the map is not the territory—the theoretical model is not the reality—the best-fit curve does not actually touch every data point—but it is close enough that it "works", so we provisionally ignore the difference. In terms of accuracy and precision, we say that the model is accurate and precise enough that we consider the difference from nominal to be negligible. Actually, life is jam-packed full of instances of that theme, so it wouldn't be surprising if this were merely one more such instance. But I would just add one caveat: there must be some channel, a backchannel, on which we maintain our awareness of the difference—i.e., that the difference exists—and on which we monitor its status and magnitude over time. The reason why this is important is that parameter values in reality (which is massively multivariate) do shift over time, for multivariate reasons, and the model will not be predicting these changes or accounting for them. Eventually these small environmental changes will build up on each other and render the model no longer adequately valid. Reality's curve will diverge from the model's curve. The operational workaround for this problem is the maintenance of the backchannel where the main channel's validity is monitored and cross-checked. The best analogy is meteorology. No climate modelers have any supercomputer programs that can give accurate weather forecasts out to a range of 6 months. Climate trends, yes ("this year will be hot and dry overall for Fill-in-the-blank-town"), but weather forecasts, no ("it will rain in Fill-in-the-blank-town on the 23rd, not the 25th, and the raingauge reading will be 1.42 cm, not 1.48 cm"). This is because the butterfly effect is so massively multivariate as to challenge past the breaking point any theoretical efforts at predicting system condition details very far out. Anyhow, this is not a digression, epistemology-wise, but it seems like one on the surface. Let's move on.

One operationally precise way to differentiate evil from "mere" moral incompetence is to focus on the sadism quotient of the malice. The essence of garden-variety sociopathy is that the perp tramples others because he doesn't care whether he hurts them. Meanwhile, the essence of true evil, it seems to me at least at the moment, is an added element of sadism: the perp tramples others because he derives pleasure from inflicting harm on them. It is thus a difference between passively not caring (lack of moral attention to the harm) and actively pursuing (definite [im]moral attention to, and pleasure from, the harm).

Related to the above, at least tangentially, is this:

It is interesting to ponder the epistemology of attempts to differentiate between amorality and immorality. Can someone who is completely amoral understand the concept of immorality? (Compare also mens rea.) If he commits a crime, driven by sheer amorality, you can label the crime as immoral, but what you are then saying is that amorality is a class, a subset, of immorality. This is interesting (at least to me, at least at the moment), because it's making some kind of move whose presence I can sense "under the hood", but I'm having trouble laying my finger on it. There's something meta going on there. The absence of something is defined as an instance of its being bad/defective, but one can wonder whether that definition makes sense. "Present but defective" equal to "not present"? In their net effects, sure, certainly true; so if identity is defined by results, then yes, OK (water with no purple dye and water with defective purple dye are both non-purple); but yet one can also argue a position where they're apples and oranges. To give an exaggerated example: severe myocardial infarction and severe sepsis can both easily cause death. Thus it is fair to say, basing identity on results/effects, that they are both "causes of death". But are they "the same thing"? Only if you are not able to differentiate beyond the level of dead-versus-alive. To anyone who has insight into the mechanisms, they are different things. But yes, they both can be labeled as "death-causer". But no, they are not "the same thing" to those who know better.

I think this is dancing around the same concept hashed out in the earlier paragraph. Amorality corresponds to the neurological incompetence of garden-variety sociopathy, while immorality corresponds to the sadism of evil. So I would argue that no, you cannot accurately classify amorality as a class—a subset—of immorality. However, that doesn't mean that the victim of a crime hasn't had an outrage forced upon them. It doesn't mean that punishment can't be meted. Perhaps there's an epistemological linkage at work here where the definitions depend on the mind that's thinking about them, but it's moot anyway, because everyone is well aware of the upshot. The criminally insane cannot see reality through sane eyes, but they do know, they are aware, that the reason why they're locked in a padded room is because they "weren't supposed to" kill that robbery victim back in Reno. They know that their jailers consider it "bad", even if they can't feel any badness about it themselves. Hell, all that is is the deterence aspect of incarceration—nothing new there, in terms of criminological thinking—"I'll refrain from committing crime X not because I have any conscience that tells me it's "bad" but rather merely because I don't want to be imprisoned in consequence."

Corollary 1K

An extension of corollaries 1A through 1J is this:

The human species on planet earth is, so far, an instance of the criminally insane inmates running the asylum.

Corollary 1K.1

Another analogy with some descriptive power is that planet Earth is analogous to a prison farm or, even more aptly, a penal colony. This does not mean that humans were put here by jailer aliens; that's not what I'm trying to say. All I'm saying is that in the prison farm or penal colony environments, what you encounter is a microcosm in which the law of the jungle prevails and all justice is ultimately only street justice with more or less prettied-up refinement (because all justice is administered by subsystems composed of inmates). Interestingly, it is entirely possible to live within this microcosm relatively happily, if you are one of the lucky ones. Therefore, just because you are living in prison doesn't automatically mean that life is horrible for you. If you are both lucky at the right moments and a ruthless dick, you may even enjoy it immensely and live in luxury. Of course, there are other prisoners who have to take it in the shorts to fuel the system. But if you're a dick, this doesn't bother you.

Corollary 1L

An extension of corollary 1K is this:

It is possible that humans could eventually significantly reduce the incidence and prevalence of sociopathy throughout their population. Thus the asylum would be reformed such that its inmates were no longer running it.

Corollary 1M

This is a speculative extension from earlier corollaries. It is more hypothesis than law or corollary. But this is the best place I have for it at the moment.

Human discourse in the public space has a weakness for being lenient on sociopathy. People will often acknowledge its prevalence and annoyingness, but they'll seldom talk seriously about sniffing out specific cases of it and punishing them. They'll even often try to excuse it and change the subject. Now, to be more analytical beyond that starting point: It is true that many people support a law-and-order approach to life that sniffs out specific cases of criminal actions and punishes them. But there seems to be an unwritten acceptance among humans that sub-criminal levels of sociopathy must simply be accepted and never challenged. For example, it is often a standard unwritten rule of human social behavior that the patriarch or matriarch of the family who is a duplicitous, dishonest, psychologically sadistic asshole, behind a mask of grandfatherly or grandmotherly benignity, must never be called out on it by other family members. Probably the main driver of this is that so many people are sociopathic themselves, whether mildly or more so. People would rather not go down a path of "strict accountability for sociopathic leanings", because they would be volunteering themselves and many of their family and friends for corrective discipline. Just because the discipline would be well deserved doesn't mean that sociopaths would consider it acceptable. For sociopaths, it is all about self-interest or ingroup or subgroup interest, at the expense of outgroup or supergroup interest. Plus, just as importantly, there's a tremendous operational problem with the enforcement: in an asylum where the people running the place are themselves insane (a planet full of sociopathic people where many of the people running the place are themselves sociopathic), you can't grant any authority for enforcement against sub-criminal bad behavior, because it is a form of power that will inevitably be abused. In other words: Among humans so far, until people cross a line into criminality, they are free to be as sociopathic as they please, and little can be done to stop them. So far we have never found a way to avoid this that doesn't break down the rule of law and constitutional law. So far we have never found a way to avoid it that doesn't put some rulers or enforcers above the law—which is a total no-go among humans, because they are incompetent to refrain from abusing it, sooner or later; if not in this generation, then in the next, or the next. Thus benevolent dictatorships can be built, if a specific guy is benevolent enough, but they cannot be reliably maintained over generations, because either his son or his grandson or his great-grandson's bodyguard's cousin's roommate will be less competent than that, and will seize the reins and rule with an incompetently iron fist.

From this viewpoint, information technology may turn out to be a great boon for humans. Just as it aids mathematical computation for their brains' puny, inadequate math-computation circuits, so it may also eventually aid "sociopathy accountability" for their brains' puny, inadequate social-justice circuits. In a world of extensive digital networking, with extensive collection, storage, distribution, retrieval, and sharing of information—extensive information gathering and communication—it may become possible to detect dickly behavior (even the latent and disguised kinds) and call it out publicly for social censure in a timely manner. People are willing to ridicule others' bad behavior, as long as they get to pretend to be superior; people are willing to live in a world where bad behavior is exposed and ridiculed, as long as everyone is at risk of exposure and ridicule. "I'm fine with not being able to get away with doing X, as long as no one else is able either." Law and law enforcement are necessary, but they have never succeeded completely in keeping humans from being dicks to each other. But the lack of ability to reliably keep secrets or silence criticism may close most of the gap that law and law enforcement were unable to touch. Perhaps Marge Simpson says it best when she says, "The courts may not work anymore, but as long as everyone is videotaping everyone else, justice will be served." (Cf also Little Brother (e.g., "Little Brother Is Watching".)

From a systems engineering viewpoint, what we're talking about here is using technology plus process revisions and ruleset changes to compensate for a lack or an incompetence. If sight and hearing are good to have, and blindness and deafness are impediments to quality of life, then if one can develop systems that impart or restore vision and hearing to a person who lacks them (anything from simple hearing aids to bionic/cyborgic artificial vision augmentation), one has compensated for a lack, and produced a positive outcome. Analogously, if humans can engineer augmentations to their social systems to compensate for a lack of social competence inherent in their neurologic circuits, then they have compensated for a lack, and produced a positive outcome. In the socialization case, it seems that the solutions must inevitably involve widespread distributed power of detection and correction; they cannot be built on centralized authority, because there is no way to assure the continuous, indefinite presence of central actors who are competent to discharge it correctly. In other words, Big Brother cannot be other than evil; whereas Little Brother is a bastard, too, but at least opposing little brothers cancel each other out. And that may be the best you can do with the human species, given its hyperendemic neurologic incompetence.

From this viewpoint, one can envision a rather endearing, almost cute assessment of the human species: awww, how cute, they were morally inept and nearly helpless, but they utilized their clever-gadget-making circuits to cook up an ingenius set of disability-overcoming appliances. They were a poor little nearsighted, hard-of-hearing, paraplegic athlete, who wasn't able to play football; but they worked hard and got clever and built themselves a wheelchair and a hearing aid and a pair of eyeglasses, and now they are tearing up the field with their carefree athletic antics! Of course, this analogy, like all analogies, is not exact; we are talking about more than mere eyeglasses here. In its depth and scope, it'd be more like an entire neuroelectronic eye–hand coordination augmentation system. But you get the point.

Awww, how cute—their corrective lenses and orthotic appliances restore a modicum of moral and ethical competence to their otherwise inept socialization.

Number 2: When the adequate is unusual, that means that the usual is inadequate.

Corollary 2A

Thus, among humans, neurological inadequacy and incompetence are the norm. Although cleverness abounds (neurological triumph), integrity lacks (neurological shortfall).

Corollary 2B

To many humans, saintly behavior seems amazing, and normal human behavior seems adequate. This is a mistaken interpretation. The reality is that saintly behavior is adequate, and normal human behavior is inadequate. Here, the operational definition of adequacy entails the notion of "good enough to match that which ought to be at minimum." In other words, it is the threshold of acceptability. Saintly behavior is acceptable; normal human behavior is sometimes acceptable but too often unacceptable.

Corollary 2B.1

The connection here with Sturgeon's revelation is interesting, because both sides of the coin are addressed—both are valid, both are important, and both are "the point"—simultaneously. On the one hand, there is the glass-half-empty version of the fact that humans are, ethically because neuropsychologically, to some percentage or other, predominantly crap. (Whereas in Sturgeon's revelation the topic is genres and the value of n is .90, and whereas the value of n may be different here, and may be dynamic—different depending on which lens, or stack of lenses, you view things through—there's still some real and irreducible analogy shining through.) But on the other hand, there is the glass-half-full version, which is in fact just as much the point that Sturgeon was making—no more and no less the point, which is what makes the whole thing so deliciously daotastic. The point is that you can't use the fact that most shit is mostly crap to justify a disdainful dismissal of it. The dismissal is, on those grounds, invalid. Which is OK by me, because I already know the lesson about dismissal anyway.

Corollary 2C

It is the dharma of neurologically competent humans to suffer the psychological pain that is an inextricable part of life on earth among neurologically incompetent humans. The operational definition of neurologically competent humans is that minority of people who are smart AND knowledgeable AND empathetic AND honest AND who have integrity and work ethic. The operational definition of neurologically incompetent humans is that majority of people who have some of the above traits but lack others. The traits are measureable on a continuous spectrum rather than on a discontinuous quantum scale. Which is to say that a particular person may have a degree of a certain trait rather than having it either completely or not at all. However, operationally, it remains true that only a high level of consistency in such a trait, which relates back to integrity, counts as having a competent degree of it. Lesser degrees represent varying degrees of incompetence, from mild to extensive.

Number 3: Something even worse than an ignorant person is an ignorant person who feels entitled to his or her ignorance.

Corollary 3A

There's nothing wrong with lacking knowledge or experience that you haven't had an opportunity to gain yet, as long as you are honest about it and are willing to learn if you're given the chance.

There was a time when computers were only for computery people to worry about, and managers were entitled not to have to know even the simplest bits about how to be an end user of them. Newsflash: that time came and went. It isn't now anymore. Digital illiteracy is no longer a privilege or entitlement; it is only an unfortunate poverty to be prevented and avoided and lamented and corrected. This doesn't mean that everybody has to be a comp sci major or a software developer. But it does mean that you have to know how to visit a website, log in, download a file, save it to a certain folder, rename it according to a filenaming convention, save it as another name, edit it, and upload the result. That's not "computery stuff." It's not "technical". It's the bare fucking minimum to stay employed. It's merely being a pencil user—it's not being a goddamned pencil-making factory. The idea that university-educated people don't understand it or can't handle it is an embarrassment. I don't care how long it's been since you graduated. If you were smart enough to get a college degree, you are smart enough to get your head out of your ass and learn to be an end user. If you choose to refuse to learn even the basics, there is another college graduate looking for a job who is willing and able to oblige. Step out of the way and let them do the job. As the maxim goes, "lead, follow, or get out of the way."

Number 4: Just because some cases of depressive realism are pathologically specious doesn't mean that all cases are.

Corollary 4A

This is analogous to the fact that "just because you're paranoid don't mean they're not after you."

Corollary 4B

The reason that depressive realism is considered depressive is because it's more depressive than normal human cognition. This doesn't necessarily mean that it is factively depressive (in objective reality) so much as it means that normal human cognition is slightly inaccurate by default.

Corollary 4C

The systemic inaccuracies of normal human cognition are explainable via eminently reasonable explanations that are based on evolutionary fitness.

Corollary 4D

The systemic accuracies of some types of abnormal human cognition are also explainable via eminently reasonable explanations that are based on evolutionary fitness.

Corollary 4E

An extension of corollary 4D is this:

The reason depressive realism isn't the norm is that it is at a mild but real relative selection disadvantage compared to the tuning of cognition that is normal. The reason why the latter has turned out to be the normal is that it is at a mild selection advantage. In most historical periods, it usually serves a fitness purpose to humans to have an optimism bias.

Number 5: The more ignorant you are of human thinking and writing generally, the more ideas seem "original" and novel to you.

Corollary 5A

Wikipedians with a penchant for going around deleting content and citing its originality as the deletion reason in their edit summaries are unintentionally plastering their own ignorance up on a billboard for display to everyone who knows better and can see it as plain as day. They are advertising their own dull-wittedness and naivete, which is ironic given that their intention was to make themselves seem superior to others.

To put the thing plainly enough for dolts to catch on: "If you've never heard of snowboarding, that doesn't make snowboarding new, or secret, or obscure; it just shows that you've been living with your head up your ass." Of course, there are limits to this principle. Someone who was born and raised among the working poor in Sri Lanka has a valid excuse for having never heard of snowboarding. It stands to reason if winter sport isn't a field of knowledge that they're intimately familiar with (although even most poor people in tropical regions have heard of snowboarding, I would wager, even if they know little about its details). Nevertheless, any time you haughtily declare a piece of Wikipedia content "original", you are on thin ice (speaking of winter sport).

Corollary 5B

There is nothing new under the sun.

This corollary is recursive (meta), because it is a new citation of an ancient finding. To put it plainly enough for dolts to catch on: The fact that I am noting here that there is nothing new under the sun is not an "original" observation, because the fact that there is nothing new under the sun is itself one of the things under the sun that are not new.

Corollary 5C

Complaints about vocabulary often fall into this category. "That's an awfully Big Word and [I've never seen it before and don't know what it means] OR [I've heard it before but don't know what it means] AND [I am too lazy to paste it into a dictionary search window and press enter] THEREFORE [I insist that you stop using the word]

Corollary 5C.1

The solution to this problem is often simply to link the word to a dictionary entry or encyclopedia entry (in the Wikimedia-projects case, that usually means a Wiktionary or Wikipedia entry). Once again, as seen elsewhere, a crutch to compensate for someone's incompetence.

Corollary 5C.2

I was thinking this morning while eating breakfast about the "can't google Big Words" error. I have experienced instances in which the whiners' peeve was an instance of the fundamental attribution error. Rather than realizing that they simply needed to google a word (in other words, rather than recognizing a mere trivial and changeable instance of ignorance in themselves), they instead assumed that the person who used a Big Word had coined it themselves, or was using it incorrectly, or was overusing it. The thing about the first 2 allegations is that they're wrong. The thing about the third, that is, about allegations of overusing a word, is that some are valid but many others are specious. When a word is apt, it serves better than circumlocution does. If it happens to be apt repeatedly, then that is a function mostly of the topic of discussion, and only slightly of word choice. If your context is an airport, then you may use the word "shuttle" repeatedly. It does not mean you just made up the word "shuttle" yesterday, or that you have a weird obsession with shuttles, or that there are 3 synonyms of shuttle that you should be wasting attention or cognitive bandwidth trying to work into consciously evenly alternated rotation in your speech. Word variety can be maximized via editing, but there is a point beyond which it can't be (and doesn't need to be) idealized.

Number 6, a binary star pair: Human cognition relies heavily on oversimplified modeling; and socioeconomic advantage-seeking relies heavily on specious promotion of it

The two facts seem figuratively to orbit each other like a binary star pair; and both facts are only natural, from various viewpoints, including (not least) evolutionary ones. But regarding the second one, dickliness lies therein. Thus is dickliness highlighted as woven deeply into the human fabric. Which is dispiriting from the viewpoint of containing and reducing it.

The binary relationship comes from two channels of causation which yield the same result:

"failing to X"

and

"trying not to X"

(which equals "trying to cause oneself to fail to X") or

"trying to cause others to fail to X"

... both of which result in

"X not getting done" (which is where the unity lies).

Thus the unity, a state of X not getting done, where X equals adequate cognitive modeling of reality, may exist for several reasons, ...

• ... whether through incompetence (in many cases) or through dickliness (in many other cases).
  • The one thing to keep in mind, as a next step from there, is that much dickliness is itself a form of incompetence (goto various earlier laws and corollaries above), but it is incompetence on a next higher level, beyond technical incompetence and residing at moral incompetence. Thus, the clause above might be restated as ...
• ... whether through simple incompetence (in many cases) or through compound incompetence (in many other cases).
  • ... if "simple incompetence" and "compound incompetence" can be submitted as labels for the two levels of incompetence, basic and moral.

I suppose my objection to humans treating each other badly might be boiled down to "you're not thinking adequately!" or "you're dickishly trying to keep me and others from thinking adequately!"—often enough both simultaneously—neither of which is happily accepted when it is realized that both of which are harmful to peaceful co-prosperity, and both of which are incompetent on one level or another. Note, however, that the chosen adverb, the mot juste, employed above is "adequately"—not "clearly". Make no mistake—dicks think very clearly. They just think very clearly about incomplete, inadequately sampled slices of reality. First one slice, then another—being dickish all along. Considering many slices at once, sewing them together—synthesizing an accurate model of reality—no. No—being good at being a dick does not flow from such kinds of thinking.

Corollary 1: Many arguments between humans stem from failures to cognitively detect, or efforts to cognitively conceal, map-versus-territory differences

Always investigate and analyze reality for instances of map–territory relation—they're all around you. Examples abound in natural-language nomenclature (the names for things, and how they differentiate things from other things), in commerce and government (expectations for the attributes of things—goods, services, justice), and in other aspects of life.

Corollary 2: Many arguments between humans stem from failures to cognitively detect, or efforts to cognitively conceal, blind-men-versus-elephant scope

Always investigate and analyze reality for instances of blind men palpating and discussing elephants—they're all around you.

Corollary 3: Many arguments between humans stem from failures to cognitively detect, or efforts to cognitively conceal, hierarchical-versus-relational differences

It takes relational databases, not hierarchical ones, to accurately describe any significant amount of reality, which is multivariate. Hierarchical models can be shown to model successfully—but only when the scope, the amount of reality they're taking a bite of, is small and selective. When someone thrusts such an instance in your face, step back and look around circumspectly, because that's usually a dick move. One asks oneself, who are the dicks in this picture, and what are the interests that they're pursuing or promoting at the expense of others?

Corollary 3A: Humans think by default using multivalue fields—incompletely atomized data

Things in the neighborhood for me to ponder and anaylze further: pigeonholing, stereotyping—human cognition tends to want a label or a box to immediately put things and people in. Stymying this is the fact that things and people are multivariate. The trouble with recognizing and accepting this is that the stereotyping-, pigeonholing-type thought must be given up—which is resisted greatly, because it obviously leads to neutralization of tools for social or economic (socioeconomic) advantage-seeking; most especially by dicks, for whom such seeking is especially necessary or dear.

Corollary 3B: This is related to intertwingularity

This line of thought is in the same neighborhood as, or connects closely with, intertwingularity, although I hadn't known that until today (2014-02-14), because I had never heard of intertwingularity until today. Apparently Ted Nelson has long been annoyed (since before I was born) with the way people try to force hierarchical schemas on real-life systems that cannot be accurately modeled thus. I wonder if Ted Nelson was excited when Ted Codd first popularized the relational model.

Corollary 4: Business and government tend to be full of pseudoprofessionalism

• Business and government tend to be full of pseudoprofessionalism ... because true professionalism poses two execution problems: (1) it can often be challenging to execute, and (2) it can often be expensive to execute.
  • ... both of which problems promote pseudoprofessionalism as a substitute: the one because the customer's expectation of professionalism can be met with a best effort (a best-though-still-inadequate one) portrayed, in the absence of sufficient resources for independent confirmation, as adequate; and the other because the customer's expectation of professionalism can be met with a cheaper effort portrayed, in the absence of sufficient resources for independent confirmation, as adequate. The former keeps society running and things getting done (poorly) despite a certain inescapable shittiness of existence, among a multitude of people who are trying earnestly and partially failing; the latter keeps expenses down and revenues up, which yields profitability. In fact, the latter competes against true professionalism on cost, because product differentiation cannot be otherwise accomplished (goto "the absence of sufficient resources for independent confirmation"), which means, unfortunately, that company A probably can't afford to be truly professional because doing so would not be competitive against company B. There is an elephant in the room here, which is a large aspect of emperor's-new-clothes-type stalemate or catch-22.

which might be restated as ...

• Business and government tend to be full of pseudoprofessionalism ... for several reasons—whether through incompetence (in many cases) or through dickliness (in many other cases).
  • The one thing to keep in mind, as a next step from there, is that much dickliness is itself a form of incompetence (goto various earlier laws and corollaries above), but it is incompetence on a next higher level, beyond technical incompetence and residing at moral incompetence. Thus, the clause above might be restated as ...

• ... for several reasons—whether through simple incompetence (in many cases) or through compound incompetence (in many other cases).
  • ... if "simple incompetence" and "compound incompetence" can be submitted as labels for the two levels of incompetence, basic and moral.

Corollary 4A: Universities, being training grounds for business and government, probably should teach their students about this, but probably won't start doing so anytime soon

For a time I wondered why universities do not teach their students, in preparing them for their future careers in business and government, that corollary 4 is a fact of life that shapes our world. But now I think I have realized the reason why, which is that professors, teachers, and counselors "are people too", as the saying goes, and in people is where the incompetencies lie. In other words, perhaps one cannot expect insanity to be duly recognized, appreciated, or curricularly incorporated, when inmates are running the asylum. After all, shouldn't one probably expect, in a situation where the emperor has alleged new clothes, that there will be a crowd of people looking on who are maintaining the farce for various reasons ... that many professors, teachers, and counselors, being "people too", could never be expected to teach their students the reality of the hyperendemic pseudoprofessionalism ... because in some cases they themselves don't see or understand it, or its hyperendemic nature, and in other cases they see it but it is not in their own interests—no, quite the opposite, rather, quite against their own interests—to acknowledge it. After all, in the tale of the emperor, many of the silent crowdmembers do not understand that the emperor is actually naked; they just figure that they aren't good enough to see the clothes, but that most others are seeing them. Then there are the others among the crowd, who do understand that the emperor is naked, but who are motivated to keep their mouths shut about it by the fact that if they open their mouths about it, it just looks like they're the ones who aren't competent, although everyone else (supposedly) is.

And after all, why would you ever expect that a pseudoprofessional (noun) would publicly bemoan pseudoprofessionalism?

I just remembered a great xkcd comic that makes a punchline out of the academic discipline that is probably the worst offender on this score of failing to end the charade of pseudoprofessionalism: xkcd 451, "Impostor".

Corollary 4B: Same shit, different century.

So the world reads the news about a sweatshop-style clothing factory whose fire kills a lot of employees, what with all the common-sense safety precautions that weren't being implemented because it would cost some money. And then talks about how senior management always chases to the ends of the Earth for the cheapest labor and does its best to avoid paying for the kind of minimum practices that would ensure basic safety. Hmmm, what century is it? 20th? 21st? Do we think that maybe the supply chain contains some pseudoprofessionalism?

Corollary 4C: Organizational morality and pseudomorality: monopoly on violence, monopoly on scamming

Raw reality (data points), trend reality (best-fit curve, peak-and-valley-laden), and a cognitive model of reality (continuous graph reduced to quantum states). Whenever continuous data is discretized, there is always some amount of discretization error. The goal is to reduce the amount to a negligible level. What constitutes negligibility depends on which part of the elephant you are groping.

It is often said waggishly that government is just a mafia with the blessing of the legal system—or other aphorisms to that effect. The whole monopoly on violence idea. Obviously there's a lot of truth in that. But it's equally obvious to anyone who hasn't taken laissez faire economics Unto Their Bosom as a Holy Religion, with all independent critical thinking lumped into the blasphemy and apostasy realm to be beaten, shot, or exploded, that an analogous relationship exists between legitimate business firms and organized crime firms. The grade-school model is that they are as 1 and 0, but intelligent adults realize that they exist on a continuum with 2 areas of data-point concentration that cause an approximation of 1 and 0 when you stand back and squint at them from a distance. Again, we refer to the figure. What most people cannot allow themselves to think accurately about is how much of "legitimate" business activity wallows on the muddier side of the slippery slope. There's a definite emperor's-new-clothes factor involved. Governments may have a monopoly on "legitimate" violence, but "legitimate" businesses seem equally so to have a monopoly on "legitimate" scamming. Some examples? Well, they include, apparently, just about anyone who makes or operates nuclear power reactors and claims that they always do everything that is humanly practical to ensure safety. They'll sign a sworn statement to that effect, but really all they're saying is "I've done all that stuff past any extent that you will be able to disprove"; in other words, "I deny failing to do any of that stuff to the extent that I judge the denial to be plausible and not falsifiable by you." But that's not what the paper, which is supposed to be a legally and morally and ethically binding document, says. The document says "I did all that stuff. Period." One funny thing (that is, one "funny" thing) is how the rapid advance of information technology has been occasionally pulling the curtain off some of those wizards. It shifts the threshold of plausibility-creation or maintenance in ways that the denier wasn't expecting. Pulling the curtain off, pulling the rug out from under, you name the metaphor. And after all, isn't that the same thing that happens, on the crime end of the business continuum, when security cameras (or even just some passersby with smartphones happening along while taking video and uploading it to YouTube) show up in places where they traditionally didn't exist. You get a few cases, during a certain historical moment, of people getting caught out and surprised before they shift their expectations and know that they have to hide better next time if they want to reestablish the plausibility. For example, it happened in 1957 in a Cleveland bank robbery, when cameras in banks were a brand-new reality. It happened repeatedly in the 2010s as video recording on smart personal devices became newly ubiquitous. One thing I wonder is what happens when you extrapolate that out to the point, perhaps 50 years from now, when many humans—a set, on the whole, chock-full of recalcitrant, recidivist scammers—bitch and moan about how "nobody can get away with anything anymore" because nearly every scammy claim is falsifiable (via IT trail) (for example, here's one icicle from the iceberg). The "nobody can get away with anything anymore" would be generally true, even if the unqualified "no-" and "any-" prefixes are slightly hyperbolic (but then, isn't most bitching-and-moaning)?

So far in human history, for most people, it seems, any amount of scam in life is considered fine as long as no one peeks behind the curtain. I wouldn't mind so much except for how pervasive and pandemic it is, coupled with the fact that at the same time, people tend to be either too dim-witted to see that it's true or too hypocritical not to feverishly pretend that it isn't.