Mind Patches

A non-standard curriculum

2011-06-03T13:40:00.000-07:00

A lack of genetic diversity poses a threat to the survival of a species. If there's a substantial amount of variation in a population, then it's more likely that at least some proportion of its members will be resistant to any given disease, thereby reducing the likelihood that a single epidemic will succeed in wiping out the whole population.

A similar argument can be made for diversity in education. If there's a substantial amount of variation in the way people are educated, then it's more likely that at least some proportion of the population will be able to detect mistakes in policy and so on before they cause damage, thereby reducing the likelihood that a single ideology will succeed in wiping out the civilisation we live in.

This is also the thinking behind diversification of investments. Simultaneously investing in both umbrellas and sunscreen has a way of reducing risk.

Agreeing with Osama Bin Laden

2011-05-02T01:05:00.000-07:00

A vulnerability exists in individuals who equate sympathy with an enemy's grievances as disloyalty. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could use it to minimize resistance to foreign policy decisions that result in injustices.

Shortly after September 11, Osama Bin Laden sat down and wrote a Letter to the American People in which he responded to the question so many Americans were asking at the time - simply, "Why?"

The resulting letter covers a lot of ground from US foreign policy in the middle east to the use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and even Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky, but the central grievance and the one which he used to justify the September 11 attacks concerns the long-standing US support for Israel in the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

Terrorist organisations possess clearly articulated motives and complex philosophical underpinnings, but there is a reluctance to acknowledge them on the part of their enemies. Indeed, expressing any kind of empathy towards suicide bombers is politically unacceptable as Cherie Blair discovered when she was forced to apologise for saying publicly of the Israel-Palestinian issue, "As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up, you are never going to make progress" [source]. The very suggestion that suicide bombers feel their grievances are legitimate is seen as insensitive to their victims or as justifying this kind of violence. Politicians are instead forced to dismiss the motives of such people as if they spring from a well of inherent 'evil' or pure insanity.

But it is clear that the men and women who strap bombs to themselves or who fly planes into buildings believe very strongly in the righteousness of their cause. They are after all, sacrificing their own lives and believe that God will reward them for doing so. Like them, Bin Laden strongly believed he was fighting a noble fight and to refuse to engage in the war of ideas would be to allow his views to go unchecked and infect the minds of others who could follow in his footsteps. Injecting critical thought into this discussion, which is mostly insulated from challenging views, could therefore have a very positive effect. To do otherwise would be negligent.

Another reason politicians have probably been reluctant to discuss the grievances Bin Laden and others have raised is because there are many groups who will find themselves agreeing with at least significant portions of what he has said. Many of the grievances Bin Laden listed in his letter could for instance have come from the mouths of fundamentalist Christians. Bin Laden opposes homosexuality, the separation of church and state, recreational drug use, sexual imagery in the media and the trend towards various other 'unwholesome' attitudes. The concord between Bin Laden and evangelical Christians is the sort of thing that could produce some serious discomfort in America's heartland.

But there is probably no one who is immune from agreeing with at least part of what Bin Laden said, and discussing his grievances is likely to draw attention to facts that the US government would rather not have to debate. Bin Laden for instance took the same stance as the majority of the American people when he lamented that the US government failed to ratify the Kyoto protocol on climate change [source]. He also accused the US of having double standards, citing the weapons of mass destruction possessed by it and its allies, the US support for military coup's to overthrow democratically elected governments, the US granting itself immunity from prosecution under international law, the US violating human rights in Guantanamo Bay, and so on. There is much to agree with here.

Where people strongly disagree with Bin Laden is not so much with the grievances he raised, but in the violent methods he chose to redress them. In particular, his justification for targeting civilians was far from compelling, but he spelled this out in his letter too. His argument was that the United States is a democratic country and hence by electing their government, "the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment and expulsion of the Palestinians." This, he claimed, made them culpable and therefore a legitimate target.

For US citizens to be genuinely responsible for the actions of its government, the choices available to them in elections would have to cover the full spectrum of public opinion on the Palestinian issue. Elsewhere in Bin Laden's letter, he undermines his own position on this by criticising US law as "the law of the rich and wealthy people, who hold sway in their political parties, and fund their election campaigns with their gifts." Indeed, the reality of US politics is that candidates are preselected on the basis of their ability to raise campaign funds and garner support from the media and the wealthy interests who own it and provide its advertising revenue. This means that voters are only given a choice among candidates who possess a narrow range of views. They have a choice, but not a meaningful one, amounting to a choice between Coke and Pepsi (cola or cola).

The Israel-Palestinian issue is one of those areas of policy where there simply aren't any meaningful differences between the policies of Democratic and Republican administrations. Both have consistently maintained high levels of military and economic aid to Israel despite its military and economic superiority in the region, and have repeatedly vetoed UN resolutions that condemn Israeli military action [view a list]. No matter who Americans vote for, that policy remains the same. This is despite a majority of Americans believing that the US should either completely halt or reduce aid to Israel unless Israeli troops withdraw from the Palestinian territories immediately [source] and a majority believing that the veto power possessed by the United States and the four other founding members of the UN Security Council is unfair and should be scrapped [source].

Even if democracy in the US were functioning in the way that Bin Laden naively assumed it does, he could still only ever claim that democratic elections make a majority of civilians culpable. The remainder, he would have to acknowledge, are completely innocent.

The role of religion is often misunderstood in this conflict. The central motivations are about political grievances rather than things like spreading Islam or ridding the world of infidels. To be sure, Bin Laden thought all Americans should convert to Islam, but US support for Israel is the reason he cited for the September 11 attacks. He began and ended his letter with some quotes from the Quran, passages that permit believers to fight in self-defence, that permit believers to fight only in the cause of God, that reassure believers that God will lead them to victory and that believers should rejoice for those who die in God's name because a bounty of rewards await them in the afterlife. This last belief in particular is an enabling condition for the suicide bomber. Without a belief in the rewards awaiting him, he would be very unlikely to choose this particular method to respond to his political grievances. And by believing that God would guide them to victory, Bin Laden was insanely attempting to take on the largest military power in history. It is completely irrational to engage a foe on a dimension in which they reign supreme. The US is weakest when its opponents force it to justify inconsistencies and double standards in its foreign policy. That happens by forcing politicians to address issues rather than by using violence. Indeed, violence is a strategic mistake for at least one other reason too and that is that the current political climate makes anyone with a genuine desire to redress legitimate grievances of the victims of US foreign policy appear to be appeasing terrorism, which simply makes it more difficult for them to do the right thing.

I am declaring myself King

2011-04-30T03:55:00.000-07:00

A vulnerability exists in individuals who take the highly ritualised nature of certain activities as evidence of their legitimacy. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take partial control of an affected mind.

Almost everyone understands literary allusions to things like "crying wolf" and "chicken little", which are very economical in place of lengthy explanations, but I get the impression that the moral behind The Emperor's New Clothes hasn't penetrated anywhere near as deeply into popular thought.

If the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton is anything to go by, the idea that they and other members of the British royal family are in some way more remarkable than other people called 'Bill' and 'Kate' seems very much alive and well, so I've been thinking. I've been thinking that I should declare myself king. All I need is for enough people to go along with the idea, and then I really will be, and in exactly the same sense as the current queen is the queen. If anyone objects that her claim to the throne is more legitimate than mine by virtue of being the eldest, brotherless daughter of King George VI, I will simply reply that "My father also has a name and I am the only one of his sons to be born in July", which is, as far as I can tell, equally significant. Indeed, I am descended from a long line of beings running all the way back to even before the earliest and most noble of eukaryotes. I assume they were noble because none of them ever cut anyone's head off, being as they were single-celled organisms living in a world in which heads hadn't been invented yet.

But I suspect there are one or two stumbling blocks in my path. One is that I'm not terribly interested in tradition purely for its own sake and it seems that reverence toward tradition is essential for keeping everyone from admitting there is no meat in the sandwich. In any event, my monarchy is too new to have any history or established traditions yet. But this can't have been very important for other monarchies in their founding days either. I'm just going to have to claim a divine right. I'll go down to Cash Converters and buy myself a sword and tell people that because I am the true king, I was able to pull it out of a rock in the car park, a rock that only true kings can see, but which complements the existing garden very well. All I need is for a few people to believe me, since any kind of following will lend legitimacy to my project. Imagine Braco the Gazer trying to get people to fork out money to come to his 'gazing' sessions without any testimonials from followers. People might otherwise find it crazy to pay money to sit in an audience and have Braco simply stare at them silently from the stage.

Braco the Gazer

The current heir apparent talks to plants, fantasizes about being a tampon, and thinks different vials of pure water can treat different ailments if the water has different histories. My own approach is not worse.

Another obstacle is that I'm also rather uninterested in demanding that oddly intricate rules of etiquette be followed about when a person can pat me on the shoulder or when they should and shouldn't wear a hat in my presence.

A hatless faux pas at the royal wedding

Without imposing the kind of arbitrary rules that have always prevented battered wives from doing anything right, I will simply have no compelling way of making my subjects feel inadequate in my presence. The rules shouldn't be completely impossible to follow, but any sense to them should be unfathomable to common folk, and the easiest way to make them unfathomable to common folk is to make them unfathomable. Hence, they should be at least as absurd as demanding that my guards wear impractical fluffy bearskin hats that tend to flop over their eyes, for I will know that those of my subjects who are willing to learn the most irrational of my rules are demonstrating that they are committed enough both to expend the great deal of effort that is required to do so, and to completely forgo their own judgement about what constitutes sane behaviour in deference to the unfathomable wisdom of the noble class of people who insist that stomping around in bearskin hats can be justified and on whom I have bestowed titles as recognition of their noble attempts to do so.

Exhibit A (truly one of the funniest videos on youtube):

Wish me luck!

Assignment #53 Give advice to yourself in the past

2010-12-04T14:35:00.000-08:00

In a fertile moment when my mind was casually doing whatever it wanted, I compiled a grand stash of notes (mostly promissory) about things I wanted to say on this blog. I was very enthusiastic about the idea that I could share some information that I myself would have loved to have known much earlier. I can think of at least a couple of occasions where my life certainly would have taken a much gentler turn had I known what I do now. So I could use this blog to give my younger self some advice about the things that would have made a difference, but which didn't in reality because I had to learn them via a much more laborious and at times agonizing route. I figured at least I could turn my sweat and grazed knees into something that could benefit others, not literally my younger self, but people I couldn't readily distinguish from myself in any meaningful way.

Then I completely lost my stash of notes, so was faced with the prospect of reconstructing them or just abandoning the project completely, if I really couldn't find them. How could I lose them? I searched various hard drives, but found nothing. They weren't where they were supposed to be, nor where they weren't supposed to be, so I sidelined it.

Well, it's been nearly two years and this is the first time I've updated this blog beyond the first pair of entries, but until a few days ago, I still hadn't decided whether I should give up on it completely. And then I found them! I found the god damn notes! They weren't even on a hard drive. Never mind. So I'm resuming the project starting today. Bookmark me, etc.

As for what to expect from this blog, it's essentially about avoiding traps in thinking, especially the ones that are deliberately set by others. I dedicate it to you, or me, or something in between.

Using intentional 'mistakes' to increase press coverage

2009-02-03T04:10:00.000-08:00

A vulnerability exists in many critically-minded individuals that allows others to exploit their critical nature to spread propaganda. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take partial control of an affected mind.

The mind patch:
The attacker intentionally makes some kind of mistake or gaffe while delivering a message they want to be distributed widely. Individuals who exhibit excessive pride in their capacity for critical thought enthusiastically point out the error to one another, laughing at the apparent stupidity of the attacker while inadvertently and uncritically spreading the attacker's desired message as part of the story.
It is difficult to detect when this is done intentionally, but if that was the intention of the Bush administration, it worked rather well to focus criticism on Bush's linguistic quirks rather than substantive issues of policy.
A probably unintentional example from British politics involved the then leader of the Liberal Democrat Party, Charles Kennedy who failed to remember a specific detail of his own party's tax policy at a press conference, a failing he blamed on lack of sleep after the birth of his new baby. His embarrassment was widely reported in the media following the incident along with the details that he failed to remember, thus helping to sell the benefits of his party's tax policy to a wider audience.

The mind patch in bus slogan format:

Compromises from extreme positions

2009-01-29T13:54:00.000-08:00

A vulnerability exists in certain people that allows others to walk all over them by convincing them that they are getting a good deal when they're in fact not. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take partial control of an affected mind.

The mind patch:
The patch requires individuals to generalise from their experience of negotiating with street sellers to the way the government negotiates with the public. A street seller will deliberately offer initially inflated prices for their goods only to reduce them so as to give customers the feeling that they are getting a good deal even if the seller never expected to succeed at the initial asking price. A customer may come to believe they are getting a good deal, but the price won't necessarily be any lower than the market value of the goods in question.
The same principle applies when a government is 'selling' what it anticipates will be an unpopular policy. The government can initially present a more extreme version of the policy than the version it intends to implement, then after those who lead opposition to the policy expend a significant amount of effort with protests and other forms of grass roots activism, the government can offer a compromise position, which is secretly the version it intended to implement in the first place. With an offer of compromise, the opposition will feel it has achieved a victory and with an enormous amount of effort expended to get this far, the impetus to fight on for what may be a fairer deal will be weakened beyond what it would have been if the 'compromise' version of the policy had been introduced at the outset.

The mind patch in bus slogan format: