Behaviors are Driven by Incentives
Behaviors are driven by incentives. And we have to be honest about incentives. Some are emotional. Some are psychological. Some are driven by society. Some are driven by other people.
But all behaviors are driven by incentives. Either internal or external.
Remember, when you tax a behavior, you get less of that behavior. When you subsidize a behavior, you get more of it. When you give permission for a behavior, people will test whether or not your permission has boundaries. And when you say, either verbally or non-verbally, “Go this far and no further,” well, people will (usually) go that far. And no further.
The reason people in authority don’t care about alignment between incentives and behaviors of the people they rule over is multifaceted, but at the bottom of all those reasons is a basic one: They don’t understand the incentives that drive their own behaviors, desires, and appetites.
And when you don’t understand yourself, you rule over others foolishly, tyrannically, or lackadaisically.
We all have to get radically honest about the incentives that drive our behaviors, no matter how we feel about those incentives. And then we have to vigorously encourage our leaders–those “people in authority” I just mentioned–to express honestly the incentives driving their behaviors.
Anonymous Verification
The marketer and author, Seth Godin, made a point years ago, in either a book of his or on his long-running blog site, that sets the table for my observations today, “No society ever survived anonymous feedback.”
He was right, of course.
And as our national and global public discourse has declined into tribalism, violence, and polarization, calls for identifying people verifiably as people for the purposes of policing online discourse have increased.
The problem with verification of “humans as humans” and not “humans as bots” is not a “free speech” smothering problem.
People are free to speak (or write), but they have never been free from the consequences of such speech or written words. That’s why the 1st Amendment in the US Constitution is followed closely by the 2nd Amendment.
The problem with the verification of “humans as humans” for the purposes of making humans behave in their online communication is that humans have been shaped in their behaviors, communication patterns, and appetites by the Internet, as much as the Internet has been shaped by them. Problems with anonymity were just the tip of the iceberg in human communication and behavioral challenges with this new technology.
I am not opposed to human verification to police toxic commentary on the Internet. But I am opposed to verifying humans as humans as a shortcut to the hard work of mitigating behavior that is as much psychological and spiritual as it is material and emotional.
The problem lies not in the Internet, the trolls, or even the bots, dear Internet Commentator, but in ourselves.
And if we want society to survive, neither anonymity nor verification is going to serve well as cudgels to get humans to behave and communicate more humanely.
The Man Who Was Thursday
Smart people in society used to worry that people in classes lower than theirs would become monsters through osmosis by hanging around people who were already monsters.
Other than self-aware parents, I don’t know of any smart person, in an elite position of power in our society, in my day right now, who worries too much about that kind of influence anymore. Heck, we applaud people who may be of questionable character and give them attention and trust, based on the fact that they might be able to move an algorithm to “influence” some audience member’s behavior.
The lack of worry–and the presence of social applause–might be part of the reason that it appears as though there are more monsters, with larger microphones, around as of late.
Knowing the Path
We can know objective truth, and we can defend it. . We can’t know people’s feelings about objective truth. So, we have a moral responsibility to put those subjective feelings in their appropriate place, and behave sincerely and with principle, while walking out objective truth.
The Water vs. The Rock
Getting rid of distractions is the easy part.
Delete the app on your phone.
Close the door to your office.
“Mute” the notifications on your phone.
Stop answering emails.
Not one of those things is hard. What is hard is committing to not reinstalling the app, opening the door to your office, “unmuting” the notifications on your phone, or answering the emails.
Commitment takes willpower, and the modern world is designed to drain us of that thing. The thing that neuroscientists can’t find in the brain, and that psychologists say doesn’t exist in the mind, but which every algorithm relies on wearing down, one interruption, one notification, one dopamine-driven impulse at a time.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
The rock stops getting eroded by the water first by being moved away from the water source, and then by building up a tougher, thicker layer of sediment.
Unreliable Narrators
Now that we all live in a culture where most (if not many) objective truths have been reduced to subjective feelings, we navigate a globalized environment where we are all a species of unreliable narrators.
Sure, we can “know” people relationally and determine the reliability of their closely-held narratives, but increasingly even that is becoming a problem at the localized level, which is the level most of us still live at.
Another, simpler way of putting this is, we are all liars. And in a world full of liars, the most dangerous and courageous person is the one who insists, despite the conditions surrounding them, that 1). there is objective truth, 2). humans, no matter their background, education, or temperament, can know what that truth is, and 3). that subjective feelings about objective truths represent the beginnings of rebellion against the order of reality itself.
It’s no wonder that unreliable narrators–what we used to call liars–are proliferating faster than we can address their lies. The problem, dear Horatio, lies in us, not in the stars.
Secret Kings and Their Marketing Teams
No one is convinced that the social reformer, regardless of ideological, political, or social position, is advocating for all of the “social reform” they’re advocating for, out of some sense of humane magnanimity.
Just as no one is convinced that the businessman, regardless of commitment to sales, investing, or making profit, is advocating for all of the “capitalism” they’re selling and marketing for, out of some desire to destroy, despoil, or ruin.
However, because creatives tend to be socially minded rather than business-minded, they tend to get the last word in describing, defining, and making the myths that the audience believes about not only their motives, but also the motives of their opposites.
Messing With The Clocks
The original reasons for instituting a time change with the clocks may have been stated as being for farmers and agricultural producers to get more done. . However, in the United States, we have passed through the practical reasons for time changes and now are into the more insidious reasons. . Controlling a population is about more than just about launching marketing or propaganda efforts to change minds. It’s also about changing behaviors that people do.
30 Year Technology Adoption Cycles
The Model T was in production for over 19 years.
Sales of color TV sets took 15 to 20 years to surpass sales of black and white TV sets, which took 10 to 15 years to move from being a luxury product to being a home staple.
Outdoor sanitation (that’s toilets, kids) was still a thing in many rural areas into the 1980s. In the United States.
Full-scale Internet adoption has taken 15 to 20 years and still isn’t complete in many places.
LLM adoption and the adoption of the outputs from LLMs (even the ones that we goggle at right now) will take 15 to 30 years to accomplish full cultural adoption.
Both the AI-Doomer and the AI Accelerationist alike need to slow their roll, hold their horses, and wait for the bubble generated by OpenAI being massively overleveraged to burst and for all of the current frothing at the mouth to come back to earth.
Cringe
The era we live in requires us to separate sincerity from what is commonly referred to as “cringe.”
“Cringe” is the emotional reaction of people whose temperament is oriented toward epistemic cynicism, nihilism, and the despair of the typically, perpetually Very Online doomer.
Sincerity is hard to find when the words people write, the videos they consume, and the images and memes they create become substitutes for emotional engagement with other real people.
Olestra, GLP-1's, Nietzsche, and the Continued Search for a Chemical Solution to Human Nature
Two things occur to me:
1). People in online popular culture no longer talk about “body positivity” now that GLP-1 drugs are readily available and have proven to be somewhat effective. However, I remember the coming and going of Olestra, so I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.
2). There is never going to be a chemical solution to the pile of psychological, emotional, and spiritual factors that cause the differing disorders, pathologies, habits, tendencies, and tics that humans experience as a result of living in a fallen world.
Of course, I am trade-off positive rather than solution positive, because the abyss of human nature is as deep and dark as the abyss Nietzsche rhapsodized about in his various mad warnings.
Absurdity
Sure, the social interactions between people, between people and institutions, and between institutions themselves are absurd.
But pointing out the absurdity doesn’t mean that you’ve solved the problem. It doesn’t even mean you’ve accurately identified the place of trade-off and negotiation. It means you’ve observed like a child, using adult terms to describe your observations, and have decided that serious effort to address absurdity just isn’t in your emotional or intellectual makeup.
Pointing out absurdity is nothing. Presenting the trade-offs as alternatives to absurdity is everything.
Wandering Toward Old Age
“Not all who wander are lost” is one of those classic quotes from a movie you may have failed to watch. It applies in multiple contexts, including the context of aging. Wandering toward old age is the ultimate sign, not only of not being lost, but also a sign of getting ready for what happens next.
Warfare, Terror, Murder & Bloodshed
“…in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock…” - Orson Welles, The Third Man
Amygdalas Running Amoke
The story of technological adoption is a story of change. It’s also a story of amygdalas running amok, forgetting history, appeals to authority, and grifters and hustlers. It always “works out,” and the path of working it out is always hard, bumpy, and unpredictable. We can’t wish that journey away.
Category Errors and Their Discontents
If we are going to rebuild the American project, we all need to do some hard work on thinking about how we think. We’ve got the other categories of thinking pretty well covered (the 4Ws). But how we think always slips past us as humans, revealing our biases, our emotions, and even our deep (or shallow) understanding of human nature. Any social or cultural rebuilding project must start with reconstructing how we think.