Kind of like the corruption of the Elves into Orcs in LOTR, the idea of charging the air with yet more EM pollution and calling it "Qi" makes a sick mockery of the real thing.
And there's a frickin' pyramid with an eye ball on the dollar bill.
We're being laughed at even as we are mutilated and enslaved.
Wow. That's a brand of madness a degree above normal on the stalker index. It seems my first impression was incorrect. She DID have a socio-political agenda. But being an agenda I cannot relate to, I don't know whether to feel pleased or alarmed by the revelation.
A little from column A and a little from column B.
I know a cop or two, and they're generally good people at heart, but they're also a little naive. One of them confessed to not understanding that being high on pot makes one feel good. I was pretty astonished by this. The conversation was a revelation on both our parts.
I don't know what the laws are in her community, but harassment and general vengeful behavior is usually frowned upon. After a certain point, "spirit of the law" versus "letter of the law" comes into play. Let the judge sort it out. It sounds like a call for restraining orders and hand smacks all around since, frankly, the whole thing seems a little sordid and immature on both sides of the fence.
Lesson the tale: "Don't let the little head do the thinking" with a dash of, "Hell hath no fury. .."
After doing some looking around, it strikes me that the woman is an obsessive stalker with a personal grudge against (and past inter-personal involvement) with a police force.
This doesn't have any of the hallmarks of the typical corrupt police arrest story. It looks rather like a badge groupie generated some kind of love/sex related drama and when things got too hot for the object/s of her passion, found herself on the wrong side of some story. When she started to make noise and become embarrassing, all of her various 'friends' on the force probably rejected her, taking the side of their co-worker because of the strong code of brotherhood among police. So now she's feeling personally jilted, bitter and enraged and is trying to take revenge on an entire police division. It sounds like she is serving a selfish personal agenda rather than striving toward any kind of high-minded socio-political goal.
But that's just my take on the situation. It may be totally unfair, but until I see some information to the contrary, that's the theory I'm going with. When it comes to these things, the tiresome reality in hand is very often the result of predictable sex and self-preservation based emotional responses.
We are constantly justifying our actions, and see ourselves as the righteous hero of our own personal story.
Speak for yourself.
Evil is a useful albeit misleading word. I break 'evil' behavior down differently. I see two forces at work and four types of people.
The two forces are Fear and Wishfulness.
And the four people are. . .
1. Those who are courageous but who indulge in lying to themselves rather than abiding by objective reality. Such people are bloody dangerous.
2. Those who are courageous but who do NOT indulge in lying to themselves. These are the powerful people in the world. We need more of them.
Then you have the fearful ones. . .
3. Those who are perpetually afraid of the world and who indulge in lying to themselves. These are the sulky, manipulative, nasty little guilt-trippy perma-victims who have no trouble using and abusing others while claiming that they are the ones being hurt. Yuck.
--4. Those who are afraid of the world but who abide by reality. Life can be pretty overwhelming sometimes, and it's easy to get scared. These are the plodding slaves. Possibilities end where fear begins.
Of course there are gradations between those four poles, and people can slide around on the plane, taking on or shedding one or another of the four qualities.
People who indulge in lying to themselves are dangerous; I avoid them whenever I can. Telling yourself lies is far, far easier than trying to deal with truth. You can never trust a person who has gotten into the habit of lying to themselves; due to any vague change in the wind they are entirely capable of deciding that they are no longer your friend but that you are their mortal enemy and they will stab you in the back quite energetically without ever checking in with reality to see if they are correct to be attacking you. The change in the wind nearly always comes as a result of a bruised ego. I try to maintain huge buffers between myself and such people, and when I am forced into a position where that is not possible, I keep my eyes peeled for any changes and act quick to sooth their little egos and make them think I am their best friend until I can put some serious distance between myself and their toxic lives. They're like walking, talking cognitive dissonance grenades looking for a place to go off. Dangerous proto-humans. Sadly, I'm describing a sizable quantity of the population.
Easy. I don't think the following game plan has changed much in the last ten years. . .
When building a tower PC, simply buy whatever fell off the cutting edge six months ago. It'll be a bargain compared to today's new hotness, (which fits your budget), and if it's been long enough for you to no longer know the game, then whatever you end up getting will make your last computer feel like a broken down turtle.
The local police force, the tax collectors and government committees don't all share the same resources. And the super-secret-brotherhood-of-evil in charge of them all doesn't play well with others, so the really high tech stuff is kept up at levels where people are actually quite pleased when somebody decides to bomb a building. At that level, they are more interested in how aware you are and how capable you are of "infecting" others with awareness. Awareness = Choice, and often people choose to stop being slaves. If the controllers consider you a threat to their plans, then it's at that point where you can assume any and all encryption techniques you might be using are useless.
After all. . , anything on our computers that we might want to keep secret had to get onto our computers. --Either we had to download it and review it on screens or with headphones, or we had to key it in ourselves. All of which, if one is under observation, means that nothing put on that computer was secret to begin with since it was sniffed and observed at the source. Do we really think that the super-paranoid controllers are willing to wait around for periods of time during which information they don't know about is able to exist? No way! The whole point of mind-control is that they never lose control for even a moment. That means most of the thoughts one might have were put there by them in the first place, while any new thoughts over which they do not exert control are strictly observed the instant they pop into existence. But the local police department doesn't have that technology at their disposal. They don't have satellites or endless server farms dedicated to calculating which of your Facebook friends you are most likely to fall in love with and through which they can manipulate you should they so desire.
This current story is all about the low-level grunts (police and government and the secret services), and their attempts to impose authoritarian will over the public. They're too thick to realize that they are simply pawns in a meta game designed to create a certain mood, or vibration resonance frequency of fear and loathing in society which serves other purposes they have no inkling even exist.
Voting is pointless. Writing your representative is pointless. The system is simply a facade for the MIC.
To solve the problem we need to do more than play with the user interface tools provided by the system itself. This can be done by examining the problem from the ground up. The solutions are out there and they can work, but trusting in the likes of Diebold is not on the to-do list.
I tend to think that to call oneself a "consumer" is the result of a stupendous and multi-generational maneuver of marketing which reduces the human to the status of a mindless eating machine with no other virtues or qualities of significant value. Sadly, for the most part, this is an accurate state of affairs, but I choose to deviate from that model. I refuse to see my purpose in the world as being simply to desire and work relentlessly towards the acquisition of the colorful array of material goods presented to me by Walmart.
Life, I have discovered, is much, much bigger and far more fulfilling than that. Consequently, I have found endless ways to exist both comfortably and happily without the need to make or spend very much money at all. In this regard, I am a very bad consumer, however I strive to excel in the art of being a person. I have many more hours in the day than most to do with as I please, allowing me to explore the world to my satisfaction in countless fascinating ways. Further, I put my energies to good use; many people consider me a significant asset in their lives.
As I see it, those who accept the mantle of 'consumer' also accept by definition, a very narrow form of existence, --one which serves the world of corporations and governments and not of people and communities.
There's always going to be an argument which makes a manipulative and self-serving action sound benign and cheerful. I remember watching a news piece about one of the top McDonald's CEO types heading over to Russia to try to establish the golden arches there. In a candid shot, he described McDonald's as a sort of angelic entity whose mission was to bring hungry children meat, bread and milk. I wondered if he had really convinced himself of that horseshit or if it was just a face he put on for others.
It's all about spin. The problem is that when profit is the primary motivator, then you cannot ever trust a seemingly friendly face put forth by a company. They don't want to be your friend. They want you to think that they are your friend in order that you might feel comfortable in giving them your trust, money, time and energy.
Now, if the Netflix guys are actually motivated not by profit, but by an over-riding love of film and the desire to share film with the world, then it's a whole different story. You do see this sometimes. I've known several owners of private shops who really love what they sell, but when you scale things up past a certain number of employees, even a founding love takes a back seat to the corporate need to grow profit share and absorb wealth. It's almost like a company only has a single soul which is shared by every participant in the company and thus gets stretched thin.
There's nothing at all wrong with studying how the human automatic processes work, but "Psychology for Prizes" does have a very Neil Stephenson feel to it.
The public eagerly jumping for the chance to teach corporate bodies how to better advertise to them seems a little preposterous. In a world where everybody's objective is openness and self-study for the betterment of humankind, this sort of thing would be laudable, but here it's a bald-faced attempt to fine-tune manipulation techniques.
What would be cool would be if Netflix, upon offering you a suggestion, would also explain what reasoning they used to offer that suggestion to you. Open-source advertising. If every billboard had an explanation of the psychology behind it, we could learn much more about ourselves. The amount of free will that we use every day versus automatic behavior can only increase when the illusion of free will is broken down and examined.
No offense, but this is starting to sound pretty stupid. You may have a point that the masses are stupid, but it doesn't immediately invalidate anything they believe.
When dealing in generalizations, it is common courtesy to not assume unintended absolutes. The word 'anything' falls well beyond the scope of what I think the "Stupid Masses" believe.
Actually, that's the only way to lose. As stacked as the game is, it's still possible for small, independent startups to win.
Define 'Win' and get back to me. You'll soon learn that we're both right except that, (in this case), your definition probably is included in my generalized list of what the "Stupid Masses" believe. No offense.
What he's done is to use a lot of University-Speak to explain why things are funny. I can do that in one line:
"Funny is when two perceptions of reality disagree." --Every single case of 'funny' I've ever seen boils down to this rule. Which I came up with myself. Please feel free to share it.:-)
But why funny things cause our muscles to auto-react by bouncing around inside us, causing our diaphragms and vocal muscles to emit those weird expulsions of chortle and giggle. . , and why it feels so awesome. . , that he hasn't explained. And neither can I at the moment, (though I remain optimistic that one day I'll figure it out, or more likely, read somebody who has).
At a moment of social discomfort or tension, the weaker individual(s) will fake a laugh to signal that he is not a threat and does not want trouble. I.e. this signals that he is not in an agressive state.
The key word here is, "Fake".
Real laughter is an altogether different phenomenon. What you are referring to, I think, is a form of Game-Theory, in this case using false reactions or the calculated application of otherwise natural reactions (like telling a funny joke which belittles whatever social group you choose to plug into the joke formula) in an effort to obtain a desired result.
Laughter itself remains a bit of a puzzle. I've figured out WHY things are funny, but the reason laughter creates that weird set of diaphragm auto-reactions and why it feels good. . . I've only ever read one theory which goes some distance to explain it, but it had to go pretty far afield to do so and even then I remain unsatisfied.
I mean, no existing company wants to build a better, cheaper mousetrap. The point is, the free market is supposed to reward a company that does, and punish (through competition) those who don't adapt.
I don't know if it is the case with the poster's company, but I know it is becoming very common that even ideas you come up with in your own time are considered to be the property of whatever company you happen to work for. The argument would run, "Well, he wouldn't have come up with the idea of the single part lancet if he hadn't been exposed to the 15 part lancet which we manufacture, therefore, we own the patent on his invention by default."
Disney is a showcase example of this sort of rule. As are most Universities. And it is exactly because of this kind of practice which results in idea suppression that the "Anything Goes, No Regulation" idea of the Free Market is total bunk. Allowing behemoth companies the freedom to suppress the masses is anti-competitive. --Competition will NOT eventually cause stupid ideas to fail and good ideas to succeed; it is entirely possible to rule with an iron fist for long periods of time. Look at the richest families on the planet. They have been that way for hundereds of years, and not because they deserve to be, but rather because they won the game a long time ago and they still own Boardwalk and Parkplace and they aren't selling. It's like being forced to continue to play Monopoly by borrowing money from the winner at interest and having to do real work in order to pay it down. Slavery.
A little bit of regulation can prevent centuries long lock-downs of the human mind and spirit. --Which is exactly why we will never get real and honest regulation.
The elites love the idea of the "Free Market". --It provides them with the license to continue in corrupt and abusive practices. And so they sell it like crazy to the masses, and the masses, having had their brains softened up through years of toxic food, over-long work days, stupid schooling and plenty of TV, are now too numb to realize they are being manipulated.
Of course, the world is not entirely locked down. There is still a little bit of wiggle room, but even that is a tightly controlled commodity. The only way to win is to stop playing the game. But that's hard to do, isn't it? There's a war on right now to prevent people from growing and sharing their own food.
Enron was awful for a short period and now they're gone. By contrast, millions of people have to put up with Microsoft every time they sit down at a computer. Is a terrible but relatively brief period of agony (like breaking a tooth), worse than a persistent, dull pain, (like having a lower-back problem)?
If there wasn't regularly occurring due cause for anger with MS, then it would have petered out long ago.
Human trafficking is terrible, but that doesn't suddenly make it morally okay (or even legal in some cases) to act like a selfish dick. "So I royally screwed you over, but it's not like I'm selling children, so chill out. Obviously YOU are the one with the problem!"
Typical sociopathic reasoning.
I suspect that working at Microsoft involves having to do some clever rational gymnastics in order to not feel bad about yourself. Either that, or there's something a little 'off' about you. Yuck. Now picture what it must feel like to be in an auditorium in Redmond; A room filled with hundreds of people in a state of active denial and/or selfishness is sure to be a weird thing to experience. Sounds kinda messed up to me.
Psychotics are people who have hallucinations, but are convinced that what they are seeing/hearing is real - like Nash, the "Beautiful Mind" guy. Psychopaths are the consciousless manipulators.
If were going to judge people by their brains and whatnot rather than just their actions, why stop at using it as evidence? Why not preemptively imprison or euthanize people with "defective" brain types, or force them to undergo "corrective" surgery? While were at it, why just sociopaths? Why not identify revolutionary or disobedient brain types and "fix" those as well?
Because that would be stupid. It's the sort of thing a psychopath would suggest.
I don't think slippery slopes would work quite the same away with psychotic behavior removed from the equation.
The interesting thing is that when this particular type of brain damage is recognized and socially adjusted for, human systems will be a lot less likely to leap into the most stupid behavior sets imaginable. We might, (oh my!), end up with leaders of nations and industry who are not charming villains.
Why is this considered an abnormality? It very well may be an evolutionary advantage.
It's not even for the psychotic. Psychopaths establish systems which self-destruct as a (no so) long term result of their behavior. The short term result is personal 'winning' in hierarchical power systems and the morphing of the system to reward continued psychotic behavior, but eventual self-destruction is the end result. This is the world of the forever war on terrorists and the collapsing economy; the world of Bush and sadly, the world of Obama who I would also like very much to see tested.
Viruses have a great evolutionary advantage, but they damage and sometimes kill the host and thus they become targeted by our defense systems. I have no problem with this. Just because lions have an evolutionary advantage does not mean that the zebras should bow down their heads for slaughter. And lions are a lot better than psychotics. --The psychotic would be the zebra who takes charge of the herd through fear-based manipulation and charisma, deliberately directs the herd into badlands and then dies along with the rest of them.
The human evolutionary advantage gave us the ability to learn and adapt. When we can easily identify psychopaths, we can deal with them.
Like people in other Western nations, 95% of Canadians have no idea how to live in the wild, or even without a grocery store close by. Which is one of the reasons why that wilderness is mostly empty.
Sadly, I'd say that it's closer to 98%. But that's still about a half million people, more than enough to burn a nation to the ground. --And about quarter of the remaining 98% are just sleepers who might wake up if things get too hot too fast, which is why the government works so hard to keep them asleep and to step lightly.
The rest of the population is comprised of retarded bog creatures; I can honestly understand why the elite feel no compassion when making them into slaves. They're wonderfully useful machines used for moving wealth from the world into your pockets and they're altogether too stupid to realize they're being used in this way; they eat up the manipulations as though manna were falling from heaven, and they even vote for the very people who despise and use them.
It's sometimes hard to care about them at all, but then one realizes that they are stupid exactly because the Powers That Be have worked to keep them in the dark. Humans could be amazing if they weren't enslaved.
If you have difficulty believing that 0.08% of the population are criminals then you should start wondering why almost 0.8% of the population of the USA, and 0.15% of the population of the UK, is in prison.
Who creates the conditions under which desperation arises, and who defines what it means to be a 'criminal'?
Are we to believe that humans in America are just naturally 'meaner' people than those in other first-world nations, or is the system to blame?
Any rational person who thinks through this question thoroughly will come to the conclusion that the system is at fault and 'creates' so-called criminals as a means of wealth creation (from direct profit for private incarceration facilities to the maintenance of general conditions of slavery through generational class warfare). So when the system then turns around and demands MORE powers to inflict pain, misery and loss of liberty upon the population, it should be obvious that this demand is not based on a fair assessment of the situation or on any moral high-ground. But we can expect that from the state; it is psychotic and evil. You, however, have the option of informing yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
Kind of like the corruption of the Elves into Orcs in LOTR, the idea of charging the air with yet more EM pollution and calling it "Qi" makes a sick mockery of the real thing.
And there's a frickin' pyramid with an eye ball on the dollar bill.
We're being laughed at even as we are mutilated and enslaved.
Cue the conceited, ill-informed rationalizations.
-FL
Wow. That's a brand of madness a degree above normal on the stalker index. It seems my first impression was incorrect. She DID have a socio-political agenda. But being an agenda I cannot relate to, I don't know whether to feel pleased or alarmed by the revelation.
A little from column A and a little from column B.
I know a cop or two, and they're generally good people at heart, but they're also a little naive. One of them confessed to not understanding that being high on pot makes one feel good. I was pretty astonished by this. The conversation was a revelation on both our parts.
-FL
I don't know what the laws are in her community, but harassment and general vengeful behavior is usually frowned upon. After a certain point, "spirit of the law" versus "letter of the law" comes into play. Let the judge sort it out. It sounds like a call for restraining orders and hand smacks all around since, frankly, the whole thing seems a little sordid and immature on both sides of the fence.
Lesson the tale: "Don't let the little head do the thinking" with a dash of, "Hell hath no fury. . ."
-FL
After doing some looking around, it strikes me that the woman is an obsessive stalker with a personal grudge against (and past inter-personal involvement) with a police force.
This doesn't have any of the hallmarks of the typical corrupt police arrest story. It looks rather like a badge groupie generated some kind of love/sex related drama and when things got too hot for the object/s of her passion, found herself on the wrong side of some story. When she started to make noise and become embarrassing, all of her various 'friends' on the force probably rejected her, taking the side of their co-worker because of the strong code of brotherhood among police. So now she's feeling personally jilted, bitter and enraged and is trying to take revenge on an entire police division. It sounds like she is serving a selfish personal agenda rather than striving toward any kind of high-minded socio-political goal.
But that's just my take on the situation. It may be totally unfair, but until I see some information to the contrary, that's the theory I'm going with. When it comes to these things, the tiresome reality in hand is very often the result of predictable sex and self-preservation based emotional responses.
-FL
We are constantly justifying our actions, and see ourselves as the righteous hero of our own personal story.
Speak for yourself.
Evil is a useful albeit misleading word. I break 'evil' behavior down differently. I see two forces at work and four types of people.
The two forces are Fear and Wishfulness.
And the four people are. . .
1. Those who are courageous but who indulge in lying to themselves rather than abiding by objective reality. Such people are bloody dangerous.
2. Those who are courageous but who do NOT indulge in lying to themselves. These are the powerful people in the world. We need more of them.
Then you have the fearful ones. . .
3. Those who are perpetually afraid of the world and who indulge in lying to themselves. These are the sulky, manipulative, nasty little guilt-trippy perma-victims who have no trouble using and abusing others while claiming that they are the ones being hurt. Yuck.
--4. Those who are afraid of the world but who abide by reality. Life can be pretty overwhelming sometimes, and it's easy to get scared. These are the plodding slaves. Possibilities end where fear begins.
Of course there are gradations between those four poles, and people can slide around on the plane, taking on or shedding one or another of the four qualities.
People who indulge in lying to themselves are dangerous; I avoid them whenever I can. Telling yourself lies is far, far easier than trying to deal with truth. You can never trust a person who has gotten into the habit of lying to themselves; due to any vague change in the wind they are entirely capable of deciding that they are no longer your friend but that you are their mortal enemy and they will stab you in the back quite energetically without ever checking in with reality to see if they are correct to be attacking you. The change in the wind nearly always comes as a result of a bruised ego. I try to maintain huge buffers between myself and such people, and when I am forced into a position where that is not possible, I keep my eyes peeled for any changes and act quick to sooth their little egos and make them think I am their best friend until I can put some serious distance between myself and their toxic lives. They're like walking, talking cognitive dissonance grenades looking for a place to go off. Dangerous proto-humans. Sadly, I'm describing a sizable quantity of the population.
-FL
Easy. I don't think the following game plan has changed much in the last ten years. . .
When building a tower PC, simply buy whatever fell off the cutting edge six months ago. It'll be a bargain compared to today's new hotness, (which fits your budget), and if it's been long enough for you to no longer know the game, then whatever you end up getting will make your last computer feel like a broken down turtle.
-FL
Is this another one of those loopy events predicted in the Shadowrun timeline?
If it is, please just let me sleep for another twenty minutes before telling me. Much appreciated.
-FL
Different levels are at work.
The local police force, the tax collectors and government committees don't all share the same resources. And the super-secret-brotherhood-of-evil in charge of them all doesn't play well with others, so the really high tech stuff is kept up at levels where people are actually quite pleased when somebody decides to bomb a building. At that level, they are more interested in how aware you are and how capable you are of "infecting" others with awareness. Awareness = Choice, and often people choose to stop being slaves. If the controllers consider you a threat to their plans, then it's at that point where you can assume any and all encryption techniques you might be using are useless.
After all. . , anything on our computers that we might want to keep secret had to get onto our computers. --Either we had to download it and review it on screens or with headphones, or we had to key it in ourselves. All of which, if one is under observation, means that nothing put on that computer was secret to begin with since it was sniffed and observed at the source. Do we really think that the super-paranoid controllers are willing to wait around for periods of time during which information they don't know about is able to exist? No way! The whole point of mind-control is that they never lose control for even a moment. That means most of the thoughts one might have were put there by them in the first place, while any new thoughts over which they do not exert control are strictly observed the instant they pop into existence. But the local police department doesn't have that technology at their disposal. They don't have satellites or endless server farms dedicated to calculating which of your Facebook friends you are most likely to fall in love with and through which they can manipulate you should they so desire.
This current story is all about the low-level grunts (police and government and the secret services), and their attempts to impose authoritarian will over the public. They're too thick to realize that they are simply pawns in a meta game designed to create a certain mood, or vibration resonance frequency of fear and loathing in society which serves other purposes they have no inkling even exist.
-FL
I think the ritual is necessary in the same way a regular shaking of the shoulder is necessary to keep one from nodding off.
Keep in mind as well, that the flow of readers here exist at all points on the learning curve.
Nice summary, btw.
-FL
Are you serious?
Voting is pointless. Writing your representative is pointless. The system is simply a facade for the MIC.
To solve the problem we need to do more than play with the user interface tools provided by the system itself. This can be done by examining the problem from the ground up. The solutions are out there and they can work, but trusting in the likes of Diebold is not on the to-do list.
-FL
Definitions again. Allow me to clarify. . .
I tend to think that to call oneself a "consumer" is the result of a stupendous and multi-generational maneuver of marketing which reduces the human to the status of a mindless eating machine with no other virtues or qualities of significant value. Sadly, for the most part, this is an accurate state of affairs, but I choose to deviate from that model. I refuse to see my purpose in the world as being simply to desire and work relentlessly towards the acquisition of the colorful array of material goods presented to me by Walmart.
Life, I have discovered, is much, much bigger and far more fulfilling than that. Consequently, I have found endless ways to exist both comfortably and happily without the need to make or spend very much money at all. In this regard, I am a very bad consumer, however I strive to excel in the art of being a person. I have many more hours in the day than most to do with as I please, allowing me to explore the world to my satisfaction in countless fascinating ways. Further, I put my energies to good use; many people consider me a significant asset in their lives.
As I see it, those who accept the mantle of 'consumer' also accept by definition, a very narrow form of existence, --one which serves the world of corporations and governments and not of people and communities.
-FL
I'm a consumer.
Yeah? I'm a person.
-FL
There's always going to be an argument which makes a manipulative and self-serving action sound benign and cheerful. I remember watching a news piece about one of the top McDonald's CEO types heading over to Russia to try to establish the golden arches there. In a candid shot, he described McDonald's as a sort of angelic entity whose mission was to bring hungry children meat, bread and milk. I wondered if he had really convinced himself of that horseshit or if it was just a face he put on for others.
It's all about spin. The problem is that when profit is the primary motivator, then you cannot ever trust a seemingly friendly face put forth by a company. They don't want to be your friend. They want you to think that they are your friend in order that you might feel comfortable in giving them your trust, money, time and energy.
Now, if the Netflix guys are actually motivated not by profit, but by an over-riding love of film and the desire to share film with the world, then it's a whole different story. You do see this sometimes. I've known several owners of private shops who really love what they sell, but when you scale things up past a certain number of employees, even a founding love takes a back seat to the corporate need to grow profit share and absorb wealth. It's almost like a company only has a single soul which is shared by every participant in the company and thus gets stretched thin.
-FL
There's nothing at all wrong with studying how the human automatic processes work, but "Psychology for Prizes" does have a very Neil Stephenson feel to it.
The public eagerly jumping for the chance to teach corporate bodies how to better advertise to them seems a little preposterous. In a world where everybody's objective is openness and self-study for the betterment of humankind, this sort of thing would be laudable, but here it's a bald-faced attempt to fine-tune manipulation techniques.
What would be cool would be if Netflix, upon offering you a suggestion, would also explain what reasoning they used to offer that suggestion to you. Open-source advertising. If every billboard had an explanation of the psychology behind it, we could learn much more about ourselves. The amount of free will that we use every day versus automatic behavior can only increase when the illusion of free will is broken down and examined.
-FL
No offense, but this is starting to sound pretty stupid. You may have a point that the masses are stupid, but it doesn't immediately invalidate anything they believe.
When dealing in generalizations, it is common courtesy to not assume unintended absolutes. The word 'anything' falls well beyond the scope of what I think the "Stupid Masses" believe.
Actually, that's the only way to lose.
As stacked as the game is, it's still possible for small, independent startups to win.
Define 'Win' and get back to me. You'll soon learn that we're both right except that, (in this case), your definition probably is included in my generalized list of what the "Stupid Masses" believe. No offense.
-FL
Nope.
What he's done is to use a lot of University-Speak to explain why things are funny. I can do that in one line:
"Funny is when two perceptions of reality disagree." --Every single case of 'funny' I've ever seen boils down to this rule. Which I came up with myself. Please feel free to share it. :-)
But why funny things cause our muscles to auto-react by bouncing around inside us, causing our diaphragms and vocal muscles to emit those weird expulsions of chortle and giggle. . , and why it feels so awesome. . , that he hasn't explained. And neither can I at the moment, (though I remain optimistic that one day I'll figure it out, or more likely, read somebody who has).
-FL
At a moment of social discomfort or tension, the weaker individual(s) will fake a laugh to signal that he is not a threat and does not want trouble. I.e. this signals that he is not in an agressive state.
The key word here is, "Fake".
Real laughter is an altogether different phenomenon. What you are referring to, I think, is a form of Game-Theory, in this case using false reactions or the calculated application of otherwise natural reactions (like telling a funny joke which belittles whatever social group you choose to plug into the joke formula) in an effort to obtain a desired result.
Laughter itself remains a bit of a puzzle. I've figured out WHY things are funny, but the reason laughter creates that weird set of diaphragm auto-reactions and why it feels good. . . I've only ever read one theory which goes some distance to explain it, but it had to go pretty far afield to do so and even then I remain unsatisfied.
-FL
I mean, no existing company wants to build a better, cheaper mousetrap. The point is, the free market is supposed to reward a company that does, and punish (through competition) those who don't adapt.
I don't know if it is the case with the poster's company, but I know it is becoming very common that even ideas you come up with in your own time are considered to be the property of whatever company you happen to work for. The argument would run, "Well, he wouldn't have come up with the idea of the single part lancet if he hadn't been exposed to the 15 part lancet which we manufacture, therefore, we own the patent on his invention by default."
Disney is a showcase example of this sort of rule. As are most Universities. And it is exactly because of this kind of practice which results in idea suppression that the "Anything Goes, No Regulation" idea of the Free Market is total bunk. Allowing behemoth companies the freedom to suppress the masses is anti-competitive. --Competition will NOT eventually cause stupid ideas to fail and good ideas to succeed; it is entirely possible to rule with an iron fist for long periods of time. Look at the richest families on the planet. They have been that way for hundereds of years, and not because they deserve to be, but rather because they won the game a long time ago and they still own Boardwalk and Parkplace and they aren't selling. It's like being forced to continue to play Monopoly by borrowing money from the winner at interest and having to do real work in order to pay it down. Slavery.
A little bit of regulation can prevent centuries long lock-downs of the human mind and spirit. --Which is exactly why we will never get real and honest regulation.
The elites love the idea of the "Free Market". --It provides them with the license to continue in corrupt and abusive practices. And so they sell it like crazy to the masses, and the masses, having had their brains softened up through years of toxic food, over-long work days, stupid schooling and plenty of TV, are now too numb to realize they are being manipulated.
Of course, the world is not entirely locked down. There is still a little bit of wiggle room, but even that is a tightly controlled commodity. The only way to win is to stop playing the game. But that's hard to do, isn't it? There's a war on right now to prevent people from growing and sharing their own food.
-FL
Enron was awful for a short period and now they're gone. By contrast, millions of people have to put up with Microsoft every time they sit down at a computer. Is a terrible but relatively brief period of agony (like breaking a tooth), worse than a persistent, dull pain, (like having a lower-back problem)?
If there wasn't regularly occurring due cause for anger with MS, then it would have petered out long ago.
Human trafficking is terrible, but that doesn't suddenly make it morally okay (or even legal in some cases) to act like a selfish dick. "So I royally screwed you over, but it's not like I'm selling children, so chill out. Obviously YOU are the one with the problem!"
Typical sociopathic reasoning.
I suspect that working at Microsoft involves having to do some clever rational gymnastics in order to not feel bad about yourself. Either that, or there's something a little 'off' about you. Yuck. Now picture what it must feel like to be in an auditorium in Redmond; A room filled with hundreds of people in a state of active denial and/or selfishness is sure to be a weird thing to experience. Sounds kinda messed up to me.
-FL
Psychotics are people who have hallucinations, but are convinced that what they are seeing/hearing is real - like Nash, the "Beautiful Mind" guy. Psychopaths are the consciousless manipulators.
No connection between the two.
Egad. That's right. Thank-you for the correction.
-FL
If were going to judge people by their brains and whatnot rather than just their actions, why stop at using it as evidence? Why not preemptively imprison or euthanize people with "defective" brain types, or force them to undergo "corrective" surgery? While were at it, why just sociopaths? Why not identify revolutionary or disobedient brain types and "fix" those as well?
Because that would be stupid. It's the sort of thing a psychopath would suggest.
I don't think slippery slopes would work quite the same away with psychotic behavior removed from the equation.
The interesting thing is that when this particular type of brain damage is recognized and socially adjusted for, human systems will be a lot less likely to leap into the most stupid behavior sets imaginable. We might, (oh my!), end up with leaders of nations and industry who are not charming villains.
-FL
Why is this considered an abnormality? It very well may be an evolutionary advantage.
It's not even for the psychotic. Psychopaths establish systems which self-destruct as a (no so) long term result of their behavior. The short term result is personal 'winning' in hierarchical power systems and the morphing of the system to reward continued psychotic behavior, but eventual self-destruction is the end result. This is the world of the forever war on terrorists and the collapsing economy; the world of Bush and sadly, the world of Obama who I would also like very much to see tested.
Viruses have a great evolutionary advantage, but they damage and sometimes kill the host and thus they become targeted by our defense systems. I have no problem with this. Just because lions have an evolutionary advantage does not mean that the zebras should bow down their heads for slaughter. And lions are a lot better than psychotics. --The psychotic would be the zebra who takes charge of the herd through fear-based manipulation and charisma, deliberately directs the herd into badlands and then dies along with the rest of them.
The human evolutionary advantage gave us the ability to learn and adapt. When we can easily identify psychopaths, we can deal with them.
-FL
Like people in other Western nations, 95% of Canadians have no idea how to live in the wild, or even without a grocery store close by. Which is one of the reasons why that wilderness is mostly empty.
Sadly, I'd say that it's closer to 98%. But that's still about a half million people, more than enough to burn a nation to the ground. --And about quarter of the remaining 98% are just sleepers who might wake up if things get too hot too fast, which is why the government works so hard to keep them asleep and to step lightly.
The rest of the population is comprised of retarded bog creatures; I can honestly understand why the elite feel no compassion when making them into slaves. They're wonderfully useful machines used for moving wealth from the world into your pockets and they're altogether too stupid to realize they're being used in this way; they eat up the manipulations as though manna were falling from heaven, and they even vote for the very people who despise and use them.
It's sometimes hard to care about them at all, but then one realizes that they are stupid exactly because the Powers That Be have worked to keep them in the dark. Humans could be amazing if they weren't enslaved.
Defeat the slavers, emancipate the Light.
-FL
If you have difficulty believing that 0.08% of the population are criminals then you should start wondering why almost 0.8% of the population of the USA, and 0.15% of the population of the UK, is in prison.
Who creates the conditions under which desperation arises, and who defines what it means to be a 'criminal'?
Are we to believe that humans in America are just naturally 'meaner' people than those in other first-world nations, or is the system to blame?
Any rational person who thinks through this question thoroughly will come to the conclusion that the system is at fault and 'creates' so-called criminals as a means of wealth creation (from direct profit for private incarceration facilities to the maintenance of general conditions of slavery through generational class warfare). So when the system then turns around and demands MORE powers to inflict pain, misery and loss of liberty upon the population, it should be obvious that this demand is not based on a fair assessment of the situation or on any moral high-ground. But we can expect that from the state; it is psychotic and evil. You, however, have the option of informing yourself.
-FL
Hunters are not survivalists.
You're talking definitions. I meant 'Hunter' in the sense used by Castaneda. I certainly wasn't thinking of armed hosers in orange hats.
Definition games are boring.
-FL