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In which humans continue to try to understand complex systems by projecting them onto a single axis.

• tgv 2y ago
  You have a point, but you know where it originates: we all want to know if A is better than B. This article adds a bit to existing models by not only estimating the values of the As and Bs, but also of the structure of the competition. But you're right: it remains superficial.
  • MrMcCall 2y ago
    Bingo! That's where the ego lives and breathes and exerts its influence. And our ego is a direct descendent or our underlying mammalian brains who work hard to grok hierarchies and develop strategies to ascend within, with or without regard to the competition. To be truly human is to transcend that inheritance by consciously levelling up to the realization we are all just human beings (at various levels of development and skill) and that compassion is the most important cohesive force in every human group, including our entire human race!
    • MichaelZuo 2y ago
      Wouldn’t roughly half the population always be below average in ‘compassion’,’realization’, etc…?
      • MrMcCall 2y ago
        The averages vary from culture to culture and are different as the gradients change over time, sometimes up and sometimes down. The important point is that every person has a conscience (however much they choose to ignore its suggestions) and our cultures [we are a sum of many cultures, from the large (country, religion, ethnicity, ...) to the small (neighborhood, school, family, ...)] each exert a force towards vice or towards virtue, for any of the 19 pairs. We are the only creatures who can self-evolve, but we all have the free will to self-evolve in any direction we choose. This explains how WWII Germany, Japan, and others created their oppressive terror movements. Compassion is the highest ideal, but its opposite, selfishness, is endemic to our lower, mammalian (and still lower reptilian) processing centers of the brain, and the current direction our planet is moving is due to our worldwide complacence with moral ignorance.
        • MichaelZuo 2y ago
          But as things improve, the bar gets pushed up? So in relative terms it hasn’t improved.
          • MrMcCall 2y ago
            Sure, but as Thomas Kuhn states (I only read the first chapter or so), there are critical levels whereby breakthroughs occur. It's also in Gleick's Chaos, IIRC. What matters is that compassion becomes even slightly more operant in the ideals, attitudes, and behaviors of a population. That will decrease strife and increase happiness via the selfless service to others' happiness that true compassion entails. We are social beings, and the effects on even the most unthinking, inertia-based folks would yield positive results, even if it's simply due to their just wanting to fit in. Still better, though, is when they have a real breakthrough and realize how a compassionate, service-oriented life actually makes them happier. The source of happiness operates at the most sublime level of the universe -- the human-only level -- where the karmic effects due to our treatment of others are dominant. Yes, we need Maslow's needs to be met and all that, but once we reach a relatively pain-free state, karma rules (though pain can have its own karmic source, which can be either beneficial or punitive).
            • MichaelZuo 2y ago
              Desires also accumulate… and they can also have ‘critical levels’?
              • MrMcCall 2y ago
                Certainly. That's where honest introspection and humility must be utilized to develop a more positively moral moral compass, and then use it to choose our desires very carefully. Self-evolution can go in any direction we choose with our free will, and both paths -- the light of compassion and the darkness of selfishness -- contain momentous decisions that will change our journey's octave in the direction in which we travel. The third possibility is to instead defer such learning and choose to not commit to either positive or negative. Such people remain 'confused by confusion', being sometimes virtuous, sometimes vice-eous, as per how the wind blows upon their life. Those momentous decisions will change their perspective from there out, but "there's still time to change the road you're on"; it just becomes less likely as we traverse either tail of the bell curve of human spiritual potential. As such, the wicked tend to become more so, more confident in their path through the resulting delusions borne of their having chosen selfishness over selflessness, lies over truth, hatred over love, etc. Like the infospace of our computer networks, there are also malicious actors acting upon our psyche to deflect us from our happiness, right within our headspace and heartspace. Converse to the dark path, the person who enters the door that leads to the Path of Love experiences such a joy in the transformations that commence that it is unlikely for that person to reenter the ignorance of their previous life from before crossing that threshold. It is not that our intrinsic negative gravity via human weakness suddenly ceases resisting our efforts to improve; it a slog, for sure, filled with moments that build humility, which is as necessary a tool on the spiritual path as it is on the journey to becoming one of Dunning-Kruger's true experts. Along the way, as well, we regularly gain karma from the relentless slings and arrows of the committed narcisists, whose "master" demands not just their continued ignorance of the benefits and possibility of Love, but to actively deny or even fight it, lest they be swayed by our loving kindness, wisdom, inner peace, and happiness. That is why the "woke" are such a threat to the evil-minded buffoons of the world.
• TeMPOraL 2y ago
  The problem isn't the projecting. The problem is treating a projection as if it was the thing itself, or its One True Representation, instead of merely a facet that should be considered together with many other projections along different axes.