Eternally Moving Goalpost : I

------------------------------------ Prologue ------------------------------------
I stood atop a bunch of clouds. Not kidding. Everywhere I looked, it was white and puffy. Streams of swirling mist shimmered in the air, 'As if the clouds were knit by the wind, a Temple for Aeolus himself', I thought. It is a mystery how some part of me can keep on taking the reality in and process it, rather well, while the rest of me jibes at the reality, constantly, and makes things messy. Certainly was a fine mess, this one. 'Alone in, umm.. a quiet theater built in white fluffs, fluffs which also fly in and out of on drafts of air through flutes and nebular windows within, yes, more clouds. Peaceful place.' Didn't ring any bells.

No sounds at all, I realized. No whoosh in the wind, far removed from buzzing machines, and further away from chattering men the buzzing machines, `live now` from their stone edifices, `always on` around their world. That is what silence is in a two-penny city hole.'
I couldn't even see how the spot was lit. Bright, like the clouds each had a sun in their belly somewhere, a thousand orbs bathing the scenery in translucent white. The clouds moved and the shadows danced. 'So full of life..' It was just, there. I was just 'there'. Like magic.

After a while, struck by rising panic, I stepped out of my reverie to find facts. Some real effort towards finding where 'this' was was expected of me. The last scene I could recall - solid bars. Hard metal, cylindrical, meant business. Great allies against, the 'no tresspassing' cabin was quite a blast. was a plain and simple house party. Far along on the march to morning. Few men down. That wasn't here anymore although the flighty alcohol rushed like a phoenix in my head. Not in the belly though. My body didn't feel intoxicated. However, I tried flexing an eyebrow. A quick test for motor function. Failed. As if my brain pulled at a huge whale floating in the vast ocean, barely responding to my will. No response. 'How had I even moved so far?'

The rising tension broke, thankfully, as a delicate note sounded in my ears. The audible twang hung in the air for a while. Then, it got fainter, yet still there. Then another. I turned to look behind me. No one. 'A distant sound positively.' One more. There. My squinted eyes settled on a golden snowflake sparkling on white. The light was playing games with me. I remember seeing a mirage, last fishing trip. Almost froze talking a selfie. This wasn't the same, though.'
Two more, played at a small gap. And eerily quiet again.

For lack of a better plan, I started walking towards it. 'Going peculiarly well', I felt. I had been on a streak lately. At the party, no one had talked about the stupid president. Good people. Learnt seven words for a butterfly and a number. "We so delightedly speak if only we could listen so too." she had said, "So many voices out there, wanting to be heard, waiting to be loved, always afraid if another will drown it, corrupt it." Today, I found out I had the key and the lock, both.
The lock - Emote, a machine intelligence that understands and simulates human emotion. As human and more. The key - frames. Just a drunk remark from a lovely stranger and suddenly your billion dollar venture is no longer a pipe-dream. The plan was to break back, make it big, sell out, kiss goodbye. I looked around. Pit-stop?

Even here, even now, habitual fear of the unknown hadn't overwhelmed me. A trail of sparkling tears marked my path as I trode on. Fragile psyche is such a pain sometimes. Needs to be appeased. Clouds helped. Gradually the wind eased, not pushing my face-in anymore. It came in waves. I went straight. Apparently drifted to left some. A harp stood slightly shy of one-o-clock, a mile away maybe, maybe a hundred meters, hard to tell. No, two harps.

Thinking too much is a disastrous habit. I talk from experience. My mind divides into sub-processes that then think their own share of thoughts. True story. A part of me, the Goalkeeper, was debating whether to check 'lucid dreaming' off the bucket list. This assumption may be found debatable since I had no control over the lucidity. 'Totally a dream though', I thought. Sometimes, a state of mind recurs often enough to make a name for itself, an identified part of the whole. Quite like frames.' I hope to write a book on this too, someday. Plenty parts of my own. The Critique, for example, was having a ball - everything was open to debate. And the Tourist repeatedly regretted not having a camera, then justified it since the landscape was so decorously monotonous. 'It would be overexposed.'

'What, if not a dream? What if my mind's pleasure circuits had rusted from disuse and got fried from an overdose of Dopamine?' I thought. 'Then this is heaven?' the Optimist ventured. The color scheme and firelessness were definitely a plus. Cuddly softness makes it so hard to critically judge a place. 'Am I dead?... That's it? Lorem ipsum dolor...'
Meanwhile, as I carried on mentating, deeply routed survival skill struck the proverbial ground with full force and started to crawl through the shadows. Proverbial, because I had just realized that mists surrounded me, blocking any direct view of the clouds below me. I hadn't seen the ground at all. It felt like paddling through mud with your hands and knees. Atleast no grit in my mouth and nothing bit me on the eyelid either.

I had traveled a few blocks. Didn't even break a sweat. There was sweat alright, my forehead was drenched, I believe, only got my word for it. Perspiration was internal. As I walked towards the golden anomaly, the panic at being dead kept beating at the edge of my awareness. Beating hard, like drumming with baseball bats. Luckily, I get distracted easily too. 'This place is like the set for 70s feel-good commercials. Heavenly Loops or some other breakfast cereal. Even the angels look bored.' I thought. The lack of catchy jingles did bother me a lot just then. Life should have a background music. Distracting me isn't difficult at all, even I can do it.

'Angels?', I thought. Looking around, it took about a quarter turn back towards the harps. 'Harps?', I thought again. Rather confusing. The rest of the infinitesimally changed scenery also registered, each cloud overriding the spot of an older cloud in my blurry vision. I focused on the harps. Apparently, the endless white vista was marked only by two jumbo-size golden Harpischords flying around with little wings of their own. Behind them floated the angels, two of them, hardly even visible. My own doubts on my sanity aside, no facks were given. Angels obviously, wings, white, human figure, aura, etc. I still couldn't see any features on the angels, but their eyes, there somewhere in the canopy of fog, were focused right below their floating feet. I kept looking there as I walked, didn't see much until the semiconscious trudge had brought me far enough to see the sky blue strip glint through the edges of what was a hole in the clouds. Must be an edge. 'A hole in the clouds?' The stupid spacial connection of cloud with sky playing with my head again. 'So annoying', I thought.

The gravity hit me then. I realized I couldn't be standing on clouds, in the sky. Silly idea. Yet, I wasn't falling. These were definitely clouds. I couldn't see land so I had just assumed it. The angels were floating. But they had huge wings. The facking harps also had wings. 'They are still far and we can't risk the cumulonimbus floor's fancy of a trip over to Africa, a one-way ticket to Kilimanjaro.' said the Joker. 'Seriously? Not the time.' I thought and croaked "****, please save me, aghhh...", or something along those lines. I wasn't shouting. At all. Nuh uh. And I quickened the pace only so slightly. '... And angels?' They were peering at me now. Close enough, harmless enough. In the end, I'm glad Survivor won over the rest of useless me. They were even pretty.
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... wait for it ...

My Two Cents

The recent events have riled me up. With time, the situation has been aggravated to the level of a revolution. With so many loud voices, it is difficult to hear anything. We are seeing our basic freedoms stripped away one by one. The helplessness is crushing. In an effort to vent the frustration and to make a positive contribution, I'll convey my inference of the situation, followed by some ideas on creating a better world for all.

 

How did we get here?

Superficially, it was a year of bad decision making. Now we are trying to correct this while others who disagree fight us with words, and their authority. But why does this keep happening? Is left the only one right? That, I don't concur with. Instead, I think it is a systemic issue, unlikely to go away with the more popular methods, like protests.

Capitalism by itself promotes individual interest. Competition is good. Using resources at your disposal to generate more resources for oneself is expected. Time is money. Capitalism is based in the principals of equal opportunity and free market. But, it promotes inequality. In a capitalist state, if there are less opportunities than people then it stands to reason that qualified members should try to create a story favorable to them. 

For example, comparing 'no typing skill' vs 'typing skills' for an office clerk is easy since one pertains to the job requirements. On the other hand, 'typing skills and purple eyes' and 'typing skills' should be the same in the context. Yet, if enough participants believe the story the additional point becomes necessary. Moreover, humans are naturally disposed towards making decisions based on the spurious additional information. Look at Dan Ariely's work for more on this - how we are predictably irrational.

  

The same agents that form the Capitalist society have an incentive to change the rules if they stand to lose by them. Hacking the system by using authority for unfair advantage yields advantage in an initially fair setting. If there is also a first mover advantage (I think there is), this become quite akin to a national prisoner's dilemma played out over generations. Historically, rulers modifying rules has been a classical strategy to retain authority - hence the resources. Lobbying and political power both serve the same purpose.

Don't be fooled though. This goes the other way too, where the oppressed present their own version that may be equally . Which brings me to Evidence Bias. We tend to form coherent narratives considering only the information available to us. As functional creatures that evolved over billions of years, we needed to make a lot of decisions based on limited information. This is flawed though. We are mostly unable to take into account that 'what you see is not all there is!!" 

Consider - "Dude, Biden is such a dick. Just passed by without saying hi."

Then consider this side - "Oh man, Barack didn't even look at me. He must be busy."

Bad example? Maybe. It had to be relatable. Another would be how everyone in a group project thinks they did the most work. We are seeing this happen everywhere. Fear of immigrants, fear of religion, fear of oppression, all of them. Fear and anxiety are easy to spread. Which makes sense. If there is really something to be afraid of, you'll be better off being afraid and protecting yourself, instead of other strategies like experimenting or talking with your bane. Alas! we use the same strategies against other humans. Human evolution is a bloody history of recurrent wars and one-up-manship. And without a well-thought out plan, I see it difficult to synchronize independent players to act in common interest.

Where do we go now?

Instinctively, inactivity has always seemed wrong. The urgency to keep moving, to not falter, is the driving force in my life. Yet, looking at the results from the past, one would rarely find successful leaders with makeshift plans. Big gears can be turned dexterously with a lot of small ones working in-tandem. We prefer quick and dirty - not kidding. Which is why I am learning patience, and repeatedly falling short. Quite curious though, when we focus on something - a hobby, a song, a concept, etc, we start seeing it superimposed over our myriad surroundings. It'd be there in the news, your colleagues start talking about it, facebook ads start popping up. Suddenly, there is a flood where there was nothing. 

To me, it appears this phenomena combines Priming Effect and Evidence Bias. Priming effect can be defined as the correlation between your mental model of entities. The widely regarded Hebbian Theory - "Neurons that wire together, fire together" - seems to explain it. The concepts and stereotypes can get fixed in our heads without our knowledge or intention. So, thinking about old age can make you slow, on average. And if you hate old people or the concept of old age, you might actually become faster. This happens without notice, as experimentally tested. This translates into a bias towards our own beliefs.

This inherent gullibility is debilitating. And it seems like a bad idea to wait when things are falling apart incredibly fast. But running around emphatically without a map is hardly optimal, if a solution at all. We may have stopped and asked ourselves how did we get here, but did we try to find the facts. Not alternative facts. Not selective information that fits our beliefs. The ground truth. I, personally, would prefer to understand better. 

I see a systemic collision between ideas. The left and right have alienated each other, digressing into a constant undercurrent of patronizing and vilification. This culture of 'us' and 'them', the inherited segregation just changes colors. Without an underlying unifying structure, a for-profit setup keep capital gains on a pedestal. The narrative of fairness is wild among liberals while conservatives see it as an intrusion on their rights. Based on experience, such narratives would merge and come to an understanding only with intention from either side. A mutual letting down of guards.

As we have trained our hunter gatherer brains to live in a brick and polymer forest with millions of others, we can also learn to widen our horizons further. We need to learn about ourselves. Conflicts, rallies, hate speech, all seem to divide. But there have to be winners and losers in wars. The next generations need counsel to watch for our pitfalls, so that they understand the world better than we do. They'll have problems of their own, most of them unimaginable to me right now. They'll need skills to handle those - earth swiveling towards uninhabitable, lack of resources, managing expectations in face of momentous challenges. 

Conclusions

Some example of patience should have been evident. However, not to my surprise, I find more examples of snappy retorts and last laugh wannabes, and hardly any otherwise. I find the tendency to want the punchline yet grumble on a retort concisely covers quite prevalent. This isn't just a time to fight. Our systems need the human element back. Not necessarily humans though, but the empathy. An extension of 'us'. First to the humans. All humans. This is important. I airness and reciprocity principles taught through guided experiences in empathy. I need to emphasize that this isn't a new idea. I'm borrowing ideas like 'Vasudev Kutumbakam' - 'All world is a family.' But we have the option to take it further. Can we call the whole planet 'us'?

I try to avoid giving out opinions. By announcing our opinion, we take a stance. The act of speaking itself changes the state of the world. You are putting it out there. Sharing it on social network carries a responsibility towards the people whom it affects. This makes us responsible to clarify the point we made. This, I believe, is the only way an equal society can function. Usual conversations don't include detailed notes about bullet points and it is easy to shatter closely held beliefs. Most people don't like that. Like the saying, "The trouble with good advice is that it usually interferes with our plans." 

I want to add more but that would dilute the point. Let's just end it with the following thought - "I'll take responsibility for the act of writing this blog. You must take responsibility for getting your facts right. We must learn because we are all flawed. We must learn that it is ok to be flawed. However, it's not acceptable to be act thoughtlessly and claim innocence. I'd suggest being humble too, as Aldous Huxley did - "If you can't accept fallibility, you can't learn anything."

Disclaimer - Content here is based on concepts and ideas accumulated over some years, liable to be wrong despite the efforts otherwise. Think for yourself.

tl;dr 

Don't be an asshole. Communicate. Verify what you believe. Think for yourself. Baby Steps.