Tag: society

Parking Lots & Cultural Stans

~ cafebedouin

“The twin gods of Smooth Traffic and Ample Parking have turned our downtowns into places that are easy to get to, but not worth arriving at.” The quote is from urban designer Jeff Speck. It’s hard to think of a pithier one to describe the parking pandemic blighting America’s city centers — except perhaps the title of a Bloomberg article on the same topic: “Parking has eaten America’s cities”.

-Frank Jacobs, “These maps provide graphic evidence of how parking lots ‘eat’ U.S. cities.” bigthink.com. March 26, 2023

The major idea in this article is that there is often an inverse relationship between accessibility and interestingness. The more space you have to accommodate cars, the less space you have to accommodate people.

Open question: Is this inverse relationship also true in a space that is designed to accommodate people? Does a stadium that accommodates 100,000 people fundamentally different than one that accommodates 10,000? Are both fundamentally different from a venue that caters to 1,000? If so, is there a function based on orders of magnitude in play?

My sense is that the larger the group of people, the more likely pockets of sameness develop, which we might describe as a sub-culture. But, to have a sub-culture, you also need a dominant culture. We could probably use the Dunbar number as a reference point.

In any group, where each individual can know every other individual, there is a culture than defines interactions between individuals. This culture probably starts in groups as small as two. How two people relate will effect the dynamics of a third that enters a social circle? Each additional N people added to the group will tend to reenforce a particular dynamic. As the group enlarges, different dynamics can arise from different sub-groups.

But, my guess is that there is a share of voice issue that comes into play, where groups of the same sizes, say stadiums with 10,000 people are going to tend to look a certain way. Other factors, say a particular type of sporting event, will have its own norms that will influence these dynamics, but the size, by itself, is a part of these dynamics.

As size increases, the share of voice of average view and attitudes gives more sway to an average point of view, like a bell curve. With more people, there is more tail. But, there’s a whole lot more gravity in the center of the distribution.

This probably has a lot of explanatory power at different scales. For example, when you enable a mass medium for communication that is the Internet and infrastructure like translation tools, you are increasing your scale to global levels. This creates a global, Internet culture, but it also makes possible the creation of sub-cultures and new identities that wouldn’t be supported at a smaller scale.

If we think of this mainstream culture as a kind of parking lot, then it makes sense that people would be largely dissatisfied with it, and seek out alternatives. Yet, the critical mess will still sit at 1/3 and make much of the surrounding culture that it enables less interesting because it creates incentives to join these communities and it reduces the number of connections between individuals. Network nodes move from individuals to their stans, and each stan is a kind of parking lot creating the same kind of drag as the main culture.

This a just a brief sketch, but you get the idea.

Spielen Macht Frei (Play Sets You Free)

~ cafebedouin

“The Prussian model seeks to create a population for whom work, no matter how mind-numbing or back-breaking, is the only hope. That’s why they try to inspire us with the promise of a freedom that will never come. When we keep play alive in our own lives, in the lives of our children, even if it is just in the nooks and crannies, we are creating real hope for freedom. If you are reading this, you are probably one of those people keeping play alive. In this world, play is the one thing that can give us genuine hope. It is the only path to freedom. And that is why play is the greatest threat to the status quo.It’s play, not work, that will set us free.”

Teacher Tom, “Play Is The Greatest Threat To The Status Quo.””. teachertomsblog.blogspot.com. December 22, 2022

This morning, I was reading someone talk about how consistency is the key to great work. Before joining family and friends for Christmas Eve or Christmas, one should get a little work done. When I read it, it sounded convincing.

Shortly after, I read this piece from Teacher Tom. Its an interesting contrast. In our culture, value is a function of work. How do we contribute to society? And, our contribution is, for most, determined materially. In crass terms, it’s the hourly rate where we exchange our time for money. That’s our value.

But, it is useful to be reminded that there are other values. As one section describes it:

Yunkaporta points out that the word “work” does not even exist in many Indigenous languages. Indeed, the “work” his people did do prior to colonization was confined to a couple hours a day and was comprised of things many of us now do as a break from work like gardening, cooking, hunting, hiking, camping, tinkering, and fishing. They spent the rest of their time building relationships, making art, dancing, playing games (almost always cooperative), telling stories, and making music. Indeed, they spent their time doing the very things that our youngest children do when left alone to be whatever they want to be — not when they grow up, but right now. Play, not work, sets us free.”

-ibid.

Indigenous people, or even people not part of our post-capitalist society or that live on its margins, viewed value through the lens of being someone who was enjoyable to spend time around. What would our lives be like if this were the organizing principle of society?

On one level, this seems like it would make our focus on extrovertism even more pronounced. It would amp up the performance aspect of society. But, it also makes me think that extrovertism and introvertism might be a kind of filter failure, where our society and the people who were are acquainted with has grown so large that it passes a certain threshold where people stop trying to participate in that society.

If you lived in a society or 100 people or less, where people knew and cared for one another on some fundamental level. Wouldn’t this change our society, where we knew that there was this base layer of caring and knowing that serves as a kind of bedrock on which play rests? Doesn’t it require a certain level of negotiation to move to the kind of intimacy that play requires with complete strangers, particularly in a world where all but the smallest children have been wounded by others?

What would it take to live in a world where play was of primary value? I’ve suggested smaller group sizes. But, what can we do, right where we are, to make this a more important value?

Filter Failure & Critical Ignoring

~ cafebedouin

“As important as the ability to think critically continues to be, we argue that it is insufficient to borrow the tools developed for offline environments and apply them to the digital world. When the world comes to people filtered through digital devices, there is no longer a need to decide what information to seek. Instead, the relentless stream of information has turned human attention into a scarce resource to be seized and exploited by advertisers and content providers. Investing effortful and conscious critical thinking in sources that should have been ignored in the first place means that one’s attention has already been expropriated (Caulfield, 2018). Digital literacy and critical thinking should therefore include a focus on the competence of critical ignoring: choosing what to ignore, learning how to resist low-quality and misleading but cognitively attractive information, and deciding where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities.”

-Anastasia Kozyreva, et al. “Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens.” Current Directions in Psychological Science. Volume 0. 10.1177/09637214221121570

One of the red flags of conversation is that you have to give “both sides” consideration. Or, the person you are talking with suggests that you need to do more research in the topic, particularly if it is along the lines of their argument.

Here’s a radical idea. Arguments have to earn their place at the table. All opinions are not equally valuable, and if you want consideration, you have to do the work and not tell the people you are trying to convince to do the work for you. If your perspective is anti-vaccination, Earth is flat, etc., don’t be surprised when you are ignored.

I don’t have to care about your pet issue, particularly when it is objectively wrong. Even if you are right, about your religion, politics or conspiracy theory de jure, you aren’t entitled to anyone’s attention. You earn attention by caring about people, not ideas.

Or, to make an analogy, you are not entitled to sex with someone, just because you are lonely. What is true of the body is also true of the mind. Congress is based on consensus.

What You Feed Grows

~ cafebedouin

What you feed grows. Don’t like something you see on the Internet or in your life? Ignore it. Responding is rewarding the behavior, which means you’ll see more of it. Getting no response drives people that want attention to do something else. Give your attention to what you want more of.

Accept, Reframe, Or Reject

~ cafebedouin

“EVERYONE GETS SHITTY FEEDBACK sometimes. There are a variety of reasons for this, starting with the fact that giving feedback is difficult and most people are terrifically bad at it. But even those who have developed strong feedback skills will still sometimes do it poorly, because the attention and care required to do it well are so often in short supply; or because the systems we occupy do not incentivize the effort. All of this means that shitty feedback is out there, and while we can and should work to prevent it, we also need mechanisms for dealing with it when it happens.

A lot has been written about how to avoid giving bad feedback, but I want to tackle the flip side: what do you do with feedback that sucks?

-Mandy Brown, “Accept, Reframe, Reject.” aworkinglibrary.com. November 1, 2022

This is a variation of the truth that there are always three actions available to us for any circumstance. We can accept it. We can change it. Or, we can leave it. I’d argue that the vast majority of criticism from others is a commentary on their own issues. It often has little to no relevance to the person being commented upon. So, almost everything either needs to be reframed or rejected. The crucial question is: what can I learn from this criticism?

This piece talks about the first action. I think the most important point is to not defend yourself. It is rare that this is necessary, and it is often our first reaction. You can simply say, “Thanks for sharing your point of view. I’ll be sure to give it some thought.” You’ve not accepted that their criticism is valid. But, you have accepted that they have expressed their point of view. You have heard it. You are considering it. This is all most people want: to be heard and consideration.

Of course, there are situations where you have to do something different, such as the supervisor at work example she uses. But, even there a simple: “I’ll do better,” will often suffice.

Politeness costs nothing. Listening to people costs nothing. These can be effective avenues for getting feedback on our behavior from the outside world. But, it’s rare for a person to know us well enough to give feedback that can simply be accepted. This is true of even people that know us well. We all have different values and ways of looking at the world, and we need to reframe input to make it valuable in light of our idiosyncrasies. Feedback, particularly the unsolicited kind, almost never does that.

Also, people that you don’t know rarely give feedback worth considering. They are commenting without context, which is generally worthless.

Warmth: Charisma & Commitment

~ cafebedouin ~ 2 Comments

I’ve been thinking a bit about stolzyblog‘s comment on Coin of My Realm: Meaning post from a few days ago. Let me quote the exchange entirely:

“SB: Warmth. It’s what is missing from Robin Hansen’s “insight”. And the interesting thing about this is it seems (from watching some of his interviews) that he does not know this. All his knowledge has kept this region dark to him.

CB: I tend to focus on ideas over people too. Warmth is really caring more about people, that they have value beyond what they offer you. Sometimes it takes people that live in their heads a long time to learn that lesson, using by finding someone that loves them beyond their ideas. But, some never find it. You make a really good point here.

SB: True, and a nice realization (about what warmth is). I have noticed something else too, though. Ideas and concepts can also be delivered or communicated with warmth. Some speakers accomplish this. But many do not… their information is sprayed forth coldly and analytically, sometimes even like a kind of psychic weaponization, if you know what I mean.”

I started to think that there were two dimensions in play. On one dimension, it matters how something is communicated. I tend to be blunt and not as diplomatic as other people might like, and my wife is often saying to me: “You can say that, but you have to say it nicely.” What she means by nicely is that I need to say it in a way that leaves more room for the fact that I could be wrong and the other person right and that even if I am saying something critical, I still like and respect them as a person. Saying something like, “That’s a bad idea and you are a bad person for thinking it,” doesn’t do that.

I saw a tweet recently that shed some light on why this is important, focused on small talk:

So, we are spending 20% of our time in social interactions, and the primary purpose of these interactions are not sharing ideas but serving as testimony that we like one another well enough to spend the time together. What we discuss is mostly irrelevant.

But, “social commitment” implies something more. It’s not just being a “fair-weather friend” who is pleasant to spend time with, but it also implies that, to some degree, a relationship that can be relied upon in difficult times.

If we want to think of the question in terms of relationship archetypes, you might parse it as:

  • Ideal: pleasant to spend time with and can be relied upon
  • Fair-weather: pleasant to spend time with but with limited reliability
  • Difficult friends: not pleasant to spend time with but reliable

The key here is that the thresholds of what constitutes reliability are a sliding scale. Every relationship has limits and what people need from them vary a great deal from individual to individual. For example, someone may be an introvert who, when they want companionship, want it limited to a few friends. Others want to be the life of a party, which means being at a party with more than a few friends.

Context also matters. When experiencing grief, even the life of the party doesn’t want to be at a party. Part of being reliable is being able to context switch, and be in the mode appropriate for the moment.

There’s also the problem that our capabilities change over time. A person with dementia is often both unpleasant and reliable. But, how we are with them also reveals something about the kind of person we are, when we interact with them. So, these relationships are important, not only to the person with the illness, but because it holds up a mirror to our character and reveals facets of ourselves we may not have been aware. Chances are those will be deficiencies, a lack of reliability we were not aware of or limits which we didn’t know we had.

Beyond the personal, it also reveals something about other types. For example, sociopaths are fair-weather friends. They want reliable relationships but don’t offer reliability themselves. Difficult friends want to be liked and to like the people around them, but they don’t show these qualities to others.

Warmth, broadly speaking, might be how we respond to these gaps. Can we be pleasant to the unpleasant? Can we be reliable to the unreliable? Where are our limits? And, are they more or less than some perceived norm?

Batshit Times

~ cafebedouin

“At BATSHIT TIMES, we showcase artists, activists, and scientists challenging contemporary society’s geopolitical, technocratic, hypersurveilled, megacybernetwork nightmare.

We critique the chaos, dissimulation, and fragmentation of our times through visual projects, films, essays, and articles on emerging experimental art forms and science practices.

Currently on the third issue. The first issue is available as a free PDF download.

A Cyclic Theory Of Subcultures

~ cafebedouin

“During Involution phase, many counterelites are trying to slice off adherents and resources at the same time. Some people even become meta-counter-elites, complaining that the counterelites themselves have strayed from the true principles, etc. The actual elites realize their status is also precarious, and some of them side with the counterelites in order to get a new base, bringing the conflicts to the highest levels. The overall tone of the movement becomes darker. Ordinary rank-and-file members hear so much criticism of the movement that it’s hard for them to stay optimistic about it. They stop talking about it as The Amazing Movement That Will Change Everything, and become defensive: “I’m not, like, one of those members of the movement, I just sort of think some of their ideas make sense sometimes.”

-Scott Alexander, “A Cyclic Theory Of Subcultures.” Astral Codex Ten. August 9, 2022
  • Phase One: Pre-Cycle, niche
  • Phase Two: Growth, moving to mainstream
  • Phase Three: Involution, complexity, sub-groups, elements shrink
  • Phase Four: Post-Cycle, established institutions, final form or return to Phase One

See also  Giambattista Vico‘s La Scienza Nuova which posits a civilization cycle and is described in Wikipedia as follows:

“Relying on a complex etymology, Vico argues in the Scienza Nuova that civilization develops in a recurring cycle (ricorso) of three ages: the divine, the heroic, and the human. Each age exhibits distinct political and social features and can be characterized by master tropes or figures of language. The giganti of the divine age rely on metaphor to compare, and thus comprehend, human and natural phenomena. In the heroic age, metonymy and synecdoche support the development of feudal or monarchic institutions embodied by idealized figures. The final age is characterized by popular democracy and reflection via irony; in this epoch, the rise of rationality leads to barbarie della reflessione or barbarism of reflection, and civilization descends once more into the poetic era. Taken together, the recurring cycle of three ages – common to every nation – constitutes for Vico a storia ideale eterna or ideal eternal history. Therefore, it can be said that all history is the history of the rise and fall of civilizations, for which Vico provides evidence (up until, and including the Graeco-Roman historians).”

Pretty straight-forward parallels, with the post-cycle indicating a frozen state where institutions persist for some period before descending back into Phase One or dissolution.

Let Go With Grace

~ cafebedouin

“Once you accept that as a fundamental boundary on your capacity as a manager, it’s going to set you free. Free from centering on the self-serving anguish over what you could have done differently, and on to the acceptance that these outcomes are inevitable when dealing with the opaque potential of strangers.

The redeeming realization is that this is a great, big world. The human pieces that don’t fit into your puzzle will complete someone else’s. And in fact, if you refuse to let go of a piece that doesn’t fit on your end, you’re keeping someone else from making theirs. Besides, nobody wants to be the piece that doesn’t fit.

So learn to let go with grace. You’re not here to save anyone. It’s an illusion of grandeur to believe that you can.”

-David Heinemeier Hansson, “I can’t save you, nobody can.” world.hey.com. August 5, 2022

This reminded me of a conversation with a neighbor I had several years ago. They were trying to get involved in the lives of heroin addicts in order to “save” them. I said it was a mistake. It’s a rare circumstance where you can “save” anyone. Moreover, the most likely outcome is that they would negatively impact her, not the other way around.

There are acute situations, where an intervention at a key moment, might change the outcome. They happen. But, they are rare.

But more than 99% of the time, people interesting in “saving” others are not focused on these moments because they have a different agenda. They feel broken and in saving others they are trying to save themselves. Or, more generally, if others can be saved, perhaps they can be saved. And much of that time, they doom themselves because they are busy trying to solve someone else’s problems rather than working on their own.

But, of course, that also sounds selfish. You don’t want to save others? You only want to save yourself.

The reality is that I can only control what I do. The key point is that we are interconnected. We cannot solve only our problems. But, we cannot solve the world’s problems. Nor can we solve the problems of a large group. Our effective influence is a few people, who we have enough interaction with to see those rare moments when an opportunity opens. We need to prepare ourselves to meet that moment, which means working on our own shit and keeping good relationships with people – building our relationships – so we trust one another when the storm hits. The reality is that trust often isn’t fully cemented until after the storm, when you rose to an occasion and you could have left.

But, the only way to get there is to spend the time and do the work. Even then, it may not be enough. It won’t be enough if you are with other people that aren’t spending the time and doing the work. I guess the net on that is make sure you choose your relationships wisely.