Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone’s Head
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I personally wouldn't go that far as calling a person "sick" for being extremely altruistic but it is generally well-known that gifts/free things are never really "free".
For a sociological view on gifts/altruism not being genuinely "free" there's Marcel Mauss's classic "The Gift" [1], while from personal experience I can tell that I used to be taught by both my peasant Eastern-European grand-mothers to never accept free stuff from our neighbors (like going to eat at their place or something similar), the reasoning being that those neighbors would most certainly want something in return at some point in the future.
In a similar vein there's this Seinfeld season 3 episode called "The Pen" [2], where Jerry accepts a "free" pen as a gift from one of his parents' neighbors and, obviously, that turns out not to have been the best idea.
Although for some definition of altruism, this could always be argued to be true, I think this misses some nuances.
If you give to charity (say with motivation being a relief from guilt or a feeling of social duty), I think most people would consider that an altruistic action. In that situation, you have no real expectation of future return, so I would say the gift was "free".
Or similarly, when you care for a dying relative, there is often no expectation of benefit other than from the act of giving itself.
In doing so you may inadvertently "program" your children/younger relatives to also take care of you once you get older, by the power of example. There's of course nothing wrong with that, because that's how human society has worked for millennia until very recently (when we've started outsourcing elderly care outside of the close circle of relatives), I just wanted to point out that there are a lot of costs and benefits "hidden" in humans' social interactions which are not easily identifiable by the modern eye.
I agree that there's plenty of side-benefits, but I think the distinction between "business" and "altruism" is that altruism happens when people don't calculate those side benefits explicitly. Of course, we're talking about a spectrum here, not binary thresholds.
Isn't this essentially antisocial advice? That is: society is literally built out of these types of exchanges. I help you in your need, you help me in my need later. I do something nice for you, you do something nice for someone else, someone-{n}-else does something nice for me.
Gifts stop being gifts when strings get attached explicitly.
It's already very difficult to get out of that stupid "Secret Santa gift" tradition that has encompassed most of the world's corporate offices, i.e. gifts that almost nobody really cares for, which are not given with "strings" attached, but you'd have to be a very brave individual to say to your office colleagues "hey, this year I'm not going to play this Secret Santa game".
You can sort of also see this in action in the FOSS world. Most of the FOSS code doesn't have anything in its license on the lines of "you should not criticize the makers of this free software" but, nevertheless, I have met lots of cases (and it has happened to me, too) of FOSS users being reprimanded by the code's creators for daring to say that some things don't work as they should, with replies such as "it's free code! If you care so much about it why don't you contribute back?".
I think it's because a lot of people see this as an externally imposed custom, the kind of "teambuilding" bullshit in which you technically don't have to participate, but will earn negative social points if you don't. I dislike Secret Santa too. I have no problem buying someone a gift just because I like them, but being forced to do that by external circumstances feels just wrong.
BTW. this applies to Christmas as well. I don't think I've ever seen or heard of a more "joyful holiday" which so many people secretly hate. It's that one time of the year where cultural norms force everyone to pretend to be super-nice to each other.
Those are some observations, but I don't have any clarified opinion on whether customs like these are net good or bad. But they seem to turn into strings for many.
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RE FOSS and reprimands, a lot of this feels like an issue of temper and personal manners - which many don't have[0]. Also, FOSS creates a peculiar type of self-imposed burden on creators. You're not just giving a piece of software away, you start to feel responsible for maintaining and troubleshooting it. If you don't have time or will for that, you'll fall behind, and as issues start to pile up, you can start to feel bad about yourself. I regularly feel bad about a bunch of outstanding tickets I have on a small animated cat for Emacs, a joke project I made 8 years ago. I can easily imagine how overwhelmed people can start lashing out, when a ticket description or a comment pushes them over the edge. It takes some self-reflection and maturity to recognize that most of the problem here is self-imposed.
Human psychology is weird.
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[0] - In "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living", Dale Carnegie makes an observation that expecting gratitude is a fool's errand, and if you predispose your gift-giving on expectations of gratitude, you'll be unhappy.
People might think, "oh, you just do it for the Good Person Status Points it gives you when you mention it", or that, "you just do it to make yourself feel good". The second one may be partially true, but the first one I don't care about at all and I highly doubt anyone has ever cared or even remembered, though I do like to mention it to encourage others to give.
I really just think I was blessed to be born with this brain and in this certain predicament where I have extra money, and I should be giving some of that back to the less fortunate, on principle.
https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Drowning-Impossible-Idealis...
I have read that the unibomber, before he started bombing, was subjected to an experiment under the mk-ultra program. The experiment was psycological cross-examination. Ted was taken into a room and asked about certain things, things that were probably very important to him — fundamental beliefs that perhaps he didn’t even realize were fundamental to his psychology. Then, with all of that established, he was cross-examined and inconsistencies in those beliefs were brought to his attention or in some way de-stabilized. It was after this that his descent into insanity began which ultimately resulted in the bombings. This concept of “getting inside your head” is much more important than it is given credit for — completely untapped and unexplored as far as I can tell. I really wish I could understand it. But I can’t really find much when I google around for it. Nobody seems to talk or think about this online. Not in the way I do which is viewing it as an exploit in the human mind.
Check out the fiction novel Lexicon and or Snow Crash. They explore language in interesting ways.
Waterboarding in Guantanamo Bay[0] is a principal example of how these exploits have been explored and later implemented. The tools were "developed" somewhere, tested, "perfected", defined, and then later implemented by training people to execute the methods and then the later execution of those methods.
The problem with these "psychological operations", as they're called, is that they don't take into account the ill-effects we've seen in time immemorial.
Let's say, for example, you've been tortured for 'x' days. How long before you 'break' and just admit to crimes you've never committed or implicate innocent people - all just to get the torture to stop?
"...but that wouldn't happen. People would never point the finger at other innocent people." Oh, yeah? See: The Salem Witch Trials and McCarthyism as principal examples. (I'm assuming that you're American, at least, and - as such - you'd already be familiar with how those played-out.)
In normal parlance, this has been grouped into two seperate notions: Pychological Operations[1] and Psychological Warfare[2].
MKUltra[3] was, itself, specifically about mind-control, in order to obtain information and/or confessions.
So, you're definitely not the only one interested in it or in talking about it; however, it's entirely plausible that having an interest in this is something that lands us on yet another list... Yay. =[
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp#...
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_operations_(Unit...
Nitpick: The Boston area was basically settled by the Christian Taliban (they were kicked out of England for being too fundamentalist) so when it comes to human rights and treating people with dignity they were behind the times (to put it charitably). The witch trails of the 1690s are roughly analogous to the local warlord having a few minor criminals shot in order to send the message that everyone needs to get their shit together and quit fighting among themselves. You saw that kind of stuff a lot in the middle ages where some lord might have a family cut down without due process because they had some grievance and refused to pay tax/tribute. The Salem witch trials only made it into the history books because the rest of the world had long since moved on from that sort of thing.
Obviously that sort of stuff isn't compatible with modern values but that's just how society (in the Boston area at least) worked back then.
To start, they were kicked out of England for being protestant, not "too fundamentalist". The schism between the Church of England and everybody else (e.g. Scottish Presbyterians) was a longstanding source of conflict (partially because the church considered itself the arm of the state, and tithes as taxes. Non-Anglicans didn't want to pay these). And, in fact, many Puritans came back (or sent support) when Oliver Cromwell seized control. It's certainly true that the Puritans didn't come seeking religious freedom, but the ability to combine their religion and government).
They were a strongly egalitarian and highly educated culture, featuring near-universal literacy both among men and women. They had a strong dedication to economic equality -- one town distributed equal-sized plots of land to it's settlers.
They had harsh laws about adultery, which were enforced against men and women relatively equally. They also had laws against "novelties" (i.e. anything new) and wasting time, so don't think this is a defense of their modernity. But it's only vaguely accurate to describe them and "the taliban" as alike. They are both cultures with deep religious drives, but those drives are different and expressed very differently.
> It's certainly true that the Puritans didn't come seeking religious freedom, but the ability to combine their religion and government.
> They are both cultures with deep religious drives, but those drives are different and expressed very differently.
My comparison to the Taliban was more about the harsh way they ran their communities than their specific religious belief and social structure The puritan settled areas were highly superstitious and authoritarian communities where there is perceived (religious) justification for very harsh punishment on anyone who violates the community norms. The strictness with which the puritans ran their communities was far in excess of the norm for the time (which is why the witch trials were a big deal). In that way they're like the Taliban.
It's hard to make comparisons to the current US social/political landscape without pissing everyone off. The puritans pretty much planted the seed of authoritarianism in the US and we're still fighting off that legacy today.
>They were a strongly egalitarian and highly educated culture, featuring near-universal literacy both among men and women. They had a strong dedication to economic equality -- one town distributed equal-sized plots of land to it's settlers.
It's a shame that 400yr later those aren't the traits that stuck around in our culture.
Of course the behavior/opinion changes they are after are somewhat limited and not too bad, and the effectiveness debatable, but they are trying hard. And machine learning is already in use.
When did Medium gain these huge annoying banners that can't be dismissed at the top and bottom of the page?
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I tend to read at larger than 100% font and these banners take up a disproportionate amount of space. At 125% zoom these banners together seem to take up about a third of the total vertical reading space.
If this B.S. has to be there for some reason, why not it put on the side of the page which is otherwise unused whitespace? Sigh. Or why not put it at the end of the article? If people really like Conversations with Tyler, and want to read more, then they've presumably read to the bottom of the page.