Every now and then someone from the adult world stirs themselves to study kids, and finds out what we all knew: adults and children live in different realities.

You know how at this blog we always talk about multiple factors being considered at one time, as if it were an essential cognitive tool? Check this:

1. Kids are clueless in certain ways
2. Adults are oblivious to certain things they must endure
3. Kids are aware in ways adults are not
4. Adult experience brings an awareness kids cannot have.

All four are true — at the same time — which doesn’t invalidate either experience, but points us to where we should look.

A surprising number of teenagers — nearly 15 percent — think they’re going to die young, leading many to drug use, suicide attempts and other unsafe behavior, new research suggests.

The study, based on a survey of more than 20,000 kids, challenges conventional wisdom that says teens engage in risky behavior because they think they’re invulnerable to harm. Instead, a sizable number of teens may take chances “because they feel hopeless and figure that not much is at stake,” said study author Dr. Iris Borowsky, a researcher at the University of Minnesota.

AP

Well, no kidding.

Our species cannot decide whether global warming will kill us or not happen at all.

Our species is tolerant of its criminals, parasites, etc. but never fails to go out of its way to bash down the one who rises above the crowd.

Our culture is garbage. Madonna, Michael Jackson? You’re kidding, right.

Our leaders are whores and the voters are even dumber whores who are content to be led with lies, because they cannot face difficult or complex truths.

Our media is full of fears, our leaders control us with fears, and worst of all, everyone around us appears oblivious to long-standing problems in our society — environment, racial conflict, crime, corruption — because these aren’t polite to mention.

Humanity has slipped into its own world, a world ruled by social devices and the avoidance of conflict, and as a result, cannot face reality.

At all.

Kids see this, because it’s new to them and they’re very afraid of these adult things they see coming down the pipe.

Adults survive by making polite commentary and ignoring problems, even though they have to know that eventually this mess will blow up in their faces… or in someone’s face, at least, because in fifty years these adults will be dead or on their way, and at that point, why should they care? (Obviously I disagree.)

So on to the next shocker:

American adults from young to old disagree increasingly today on social values ranging from religion to relationships, creating the largest generation gap since divisions 40 years ago over Vietnam, civil rights and women’s liberation.

A survey being released Monday by the Pew Research Center highlights a widening age divide after last November’s election, when 18- to 29-year-olds voted for Democrat Barack Obama by a 2-to-1 ratio.

Almost eight in 10 people believe there is a major difference in the point of view of younger people and older people today, according to the independent public opinion research group. That is the highest spread since 1969, when about 74 percent reported major differences in an era of generational conflicts over the Vietnam War and civil and women’s rights. In contrast, just 60 percent in 1979 saw a generation gap.

AP

Remember how above I said all four factors were true at one? Kids are clueless about life and adults are oblivious to some things kids see, but kids are also inexperienced, where adult experience can be useful.

One of the biggest confusions we have is that kids are really good at spotting the elephant in the room, but their solutions are amateurish. Inexperienced, they tend to defend the individual, because they interpret the world personally. “It’s trying to get me,” they think, because they’ve been raised at the center of their own universe by their parents, and now they’re having to adapt to the fact the world doesn’t care. It just does what it does, and if you get snared, oh well!

So now adults and kids not only exist in two different realities, but are heading toward different polarized political views, one of which is liberal and one of which is reactionary.

And all these confused people vote.

The “problem” with humanity, if you want it in a nutshell, is that we can choose what to believe and we can choose to ignore a necessary activity for a fun one.

While we might expect that behavior from orangutans and chimpanzees, our closest relatives, we also see it all the time in humanity.

As Matt Thomas says in his classic article, “Why free software usability tends to suck”:

Volunteers hack on stuff which they are interested in, which usually means stuff which they are going to use themselves. Because they are hackers, they are power users, so the interface design ends up too complicated for most people to use.

The converse also applies. Many of the little details which improve the interface — like focusing the appropriate control when a window is opened, or fine-tuning error messages so that they are both helpful and grammatical — are not exciting or satisfying to work on, so they get fixed slowly (if at all).

MPT (archived)

Translated from his somewhat delicate reference: people only do what they find fun.

Of course, this is a powerful motivational tool, if we can make things fun. But some just aren’t going to be. Our current means of controlling that is an economic system where some get to live the life divine and do the fun stuff, and others don’t have to. Mostly, it sorts them by competence, so it works better than the option, which is state assigned jobs and uniform rewards (raw socialism).

But there are still tasks that need doing, if we want our tools and technologies to be top notch.

It’s about completion: any job undertaken needs to be completed in whole, including interface and the difficult task of long-term design, including ancillary effects.

Even more than “fun,” we have a problem in that we can choose — using our big brains — to deny ideas or evidence that we find displeasing. Witness:

I was in Calcutta when the cyclone struck East Bengal in November 1970. Early dispatches spoke of 15,000 dead, but the estimates rapidly escalated to 2,000,000 and then dropped back to 500,000. A nice round number: it will do as well as any, for we will never know. The nameless ones who died, “unimportant” people far beyond the fringes of the social power structure, left no trace of their existence. Pakistani parents repaired the population loss in just 40 days, and the world turned its attention to other matters.1

What killed those unfortunate people? The cyclone, newspapers said. But one can just as logically say that overpopulation killed them. The Gangetic Delta is barely above sea level. Every year several thousand people are killed in quite ordinary storms. If Pakistan were not overcrowded, no sane man would bring his family to such a place. Ecologically speaking, a delta belongs to the river and the sea; man obtrudes there at his peril.

In the web of life every event has many antecedents. Only by an arbitrary decision can we designate a single antecedent as “cause.” Our choice is biased — biased to protect our egos against the onslaught of unwelcome truths. As T.S. Eliot put it in Burnt Norton:

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

Were we to identify overpopulation as the cause of a half-million deaths, we would threaten ourselves with a question to which we do not know the answer: How can we control population without recourse to repugnant measures? Fearfully we close our minds to an inventory of possibilities. Instead, we say that a cyclone caused the deaths, thus relieving ourselves of responsibility for this and future catastrophes. “Fate” is so comforting.

Every year we list tuberculosis, leprosy, enteric diseases, or animal parasites as the “cause of death” of millions of people. It is well known that malnutrition is an important antecedent of death in all these categories; and that malnutrition is connected with overpopulation. But overpopulation is not called the cause of death. We cannot bear the thought.

Garrett Hardin Society

What is the result of our ignoring the cause/effect relationships in reality? We pick effects that are comforting to our notion of personality as being in control of its world, and then we declare those important and the rest not.

The resulting focus on the “thing-in-itself,” or viewing objects as the causes of their roles in a larger context, allows us to deal harshly with immediate problems but completely ignore anything with a long-term consequence.

As Rowan Hooper wrote in an excellent article called “Is Earth set to go silent in the next hundred years?”:

But in his conclusion [Rees] got into truly cosmic realms, by offering his answer to a question he is often asked: Does astronomy offer any special extra perspective on our terrestrial lives?

Astronomers can set our home planet in a vast cosmic context: a backdrop of millions of galaxies, each containing billions of planets.

And we know that every atom in our body was forged in an ancient star somewhere in the Milky way. We are literally the ashes of long-dead stars – the nuclear waste from the fuel that makes stars shine. To understand ourselves, we must understand the atoms we’re made of – but we must also understand the stars that made those atoms.

But there’s something else that astronomers can offer: an awareness of an immense future. The stupendous timespans of the evolutionary past are now part of common culture. We’re the outcome of more than four billion years of evolution. But most people still perceive humans as the culmination of the evolutionary tree. That hardly seems credible to me as an astronomer.

Our Sun’s less than half way through its life. Darwinian evolution surely hasn’t run its course. Any creatures witnessing the Sun’s demise 6 billion years hence won’t be human – they’ll be as different from us as we are from a bug. Posthuman evolution – here on Earth and far beyond, organic or silicon-based – could be as prolonged as the Darwinian evolution that’s led to us – and even more wonderful.

Rees ended by taking the viewpoint of an alien that had been watching our planet. It would, he said, have seen carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rising “anomalously fast, due to burning of fossil fuels”.

Will these hypothetical watching aliens see the Earth go silent in the next hundred years?

This brings us back to the question: what is the human dilemma that keeps us from seeing and acting on these problems?

As Hardin points out, we tend to pick and choose about where we attribute cause. It’s much easier to blame the hurricane, which was the immediate prior act, than the situation which made the hurricane able to wipe out many. Similarly, it’s easy to finger government, a vast conspiracy (if you’re a leftist, it’s racist white male capitalists; if you’re a rightist, it’s anti-white socialists) controlling society, the rich, the poor, etc.

Could it be humanity’s epitaph will be six billion voices chanting in unison, in every language, “It’s not my fault”?

Could it be the solution to our problems is one that we’ve overlooked because it’s so obvious — to stop being polite about truth, to insist on it, and to insist on a design-level look at cause and effect?

That will offend many — but we presume is a lesser fate than extinguishing ourselves.

This blog endorses a kind of primal realism that many people call conservatism, although it has nothing to do with the conservatism of today. It’s more like conservationism. One of its basic ideas is that our problems are not external (type of government, economics, politics) but internal, in that most people are unable to discipline their inner monkey and so end up as forces of chaotic destruction.

“As people age, they often realize that many of their youthful decisions, which seemed so correct at the time, were not such great ideas afterall.”

I haven’t noticed this. I have noticed that people tend to rationalize their behavior. Unfortunately people (personality-wise) change very little with age. So an impulsive ten year old will likely grow into an impulsive forty year old. And depressive people will remain depressive and honest people will remain deviant.

People will make excuses for their behavior if they get caught, and they will make excuses for their hypocrisy either way. There isn’t much altruism in people. People only find religion after they’ve been condemned to death. If they manage to break out of jail they tend to lose that religion.

Slashdot:unlametheweak

I liked the statement this brave fellow made, even if he made it so quietly he stands little chance of the lynch mob figuring out how hard he’s got their number.

People act through justifications. Justification means you do something, and then invent another reason why you should have done it. It wasn’t the reason why you did it. But it’s the reason you offer to others.

Justification is inherent to knowing how to manipulate others. You can use it before you act, even. “I’m going to take this cocaine and look at this child porn to keep them out of the hands of our children…think of the children!”

We use justification because as individuals, we assume we deserve everything we can get our little hands on. We haven’t progressed from an anarchist hunter-gatherer stage to having some conception of civilization, in which anarchy is destructive.

Because we assume we are right, we assume the world should adapt to us, so we pedantically explain in its tokens of moral righteousness why we should be doing what we’re doing. And if others criticize us, we take it personally and attack them personally, because they attacked our assumption of being right, justified, and entitled.

Until humanity gets over this bad psychology, everything we doom will be tinged in ruin.

The Dunning-Kruger effect states that incompetent people are also incompetent in assessing their own performance. Therefore, less competent people think their performance is competent, while smarter people focus on their own flaws.

It explains, among other things, how in a society that places too much value on image, idiots and insane people are able to get ahead by overestimating their value and getting fools to agree with them.

The essence of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than knowledge.” Studies have shown that the most incompetent individuals are the ones that are most convinced of their competence. At work this translates into lots of incompetent people who think they are superstars. And what is worse is that if you have a manager that doesn’t closely supervise work, he or she may judge
performance based on outward appearances using information like the confidence with which these incompetent blockheads speak.

An important corollary of this effect is that the most competent people often underestimate their competence. This is a result of how you frame knowledge. The more you know, the more you focus on what you don’t know. For instance, people who can name 15 of the 50 state capitals tend to think “I know 15.” People who know 45 of the 50 state capitals tend to think “I don’t know 5.”

Business Pundit

Dunning and Kruger, two researchers at Cornell University, described their findings in a paper entitled Unskilled and Unaware Of It: How Difficulties In Recognising Ones Own Incompetence Lead To Inflated Self-Assessments in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Their conclusions can be summarized this way:

1. incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill,
2. incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others,
3. incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy,
4. if they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.

Translation: without leadership at the top of the curve who is willing to call people on their incompetence, the incompetents will appear competent to other incompetents and be advanced, possibly even to the presidency.

This causes a mathematical problem for democracies since most people are not particularly competent at leadership, government or logical argument, meaning they are both unable to assess the best leadership choices and sure that they’re right.

That tendency could go a long way toward explaining why many successful societies have relied on strong leaders who had no problem beating down the incompetent with force.

Fantastic, brave and thought-provoking article from David Mitchell at the Guardian:

Sacrificing our rights and freedoms, or the use of them, for the greater good is much called for at the moment. There’s pressure to recycle, pay higher taxes, not travel on planes, avoid products manufactured by enslaved children, stop borrowing money we can’t pay back, stop lending money to people who won’t pay it back and abstain from tuna. And psychologically we couldn’t be worse prepared.

For decades, our society has trumpeted liberty and its use, choice, self-expression, global travel and all forms of spending as inalienable rights. But only as the environment and economy teeter are we gradually becoming aware that with the power such liberties give us comes the responsibility to deal with the consequences.

…

But any self-sacrifice feels to us westerners like tyranny. We’re not ready for it. Our evolution into apex individualists has superbly attuned us to injustices against us while atrophying our awareness of the vastly greater number that work in our favour. It’s not our fault, it’s how we were raised.

Our fear of being encroached upon has made us forget that there are few freedoms that can be fully exercised without impinging on someone else’s. The freedom to stab has long since been subordinated to the freedom not to be stabbed. But we still have the freedom not to recycle and to borrow or lend money recklessly, regardless of others’ freedom to live on a habitable planet and in a functional economy. We’ve hugely prioritised our rights over our duties because it’s only the former that tyrants try to take away.

The Guardian

This blog has long covered the major problem of social reality, which is where people band together and create a consensual reality-image in order to protect themselves from anything they don’t want to do. This very negative thinking at its core is defensive, and knows what it hates but not what it loves.

It also makes us easy to manipulate: tell us that something is “not-free” and we are “free,” and we’re automatically against it, banded together into a lynch mob that doesn’t care about the details.

But “rights,” itself, as a paradigm, may be a bad design. It’s not a goal, but it is a surrogate for a goal. Instead of “do the right thing,” we have the mandate to “protect our inalienable right to do nothing we don’t want to do,” which makes us into brats who avoid doing the right thing because then we lose some of that freedom.

There’s another insidious problem which we see here:

The latest session of the United Nations Human Rights Council, which ended this past week in Geneva, was marked by a series of attempts to weaken the body.

Diplomats and non-governmental organisations have expressed concern over efforts by some states, including Cuba, China and Brazil, to muzzle independent reporting.

For many observers, a point of no return was reached during a special Council session on Sri Lanka in late May. The Sri Lankan government was able to impose the principle of non-interference in order to refuse an on-the-spot independent investigation.

SwissInfo

“Rights” confers an implied right to dominate to whatever individual, group or political body is promising more rights. This is post-WWII logic that the UK and USA used to justify much of what they did in defeating the Germans and Japanese, and later, what they had to do to keep the Soviets at bay. Us=good got replaced by us=free; we had more rights, they had no rights, so we had a moral imperative to destroy them.

But the problem of rights as a concept is that it empowers selfishness.

In developing nations, this is more poignant than in the West. If you’re trying to get everyone to work together, build an infrastructure, get educated and update your technology — because organization of society, an end to corruption and technology define passage toward the first world — people demanding their right to not cooperate become a problem.

And many of these people were the same ones who benefitted from primal kleptocracy, which is the order we see in most of the world today, where corrupt warlords rule not for the good of their people but for their own lifestyle. It’s natural, in a sense: if the people around you are too disorganized to build an infrastructure, you might as well exploit them and get it for yourself. But it perpetuates itself.

In the same way, in the West, the rights of individuals have trumped positive changes in countless instances. We don’t want anyone to tell us where we can or can’t live, who we can or can’t marry, what we can or can’t do, what we can or can’t ingest, and so on. But that leads to a universal monoculture of anti-culture, where there are no shared values because any value imposed causes someone to send up a shriek about their rights.

As David Mitchell points out, this is culminating in a legacy of disaster. Our society is neurotic, alcoholic and hooked on pills, sexually miserably, unable to form families, politically corrupt in that genteel way that nothing gets done but everyone still takes full pay, filled with unproductive and mindless jobs, hampered by regulations, endlessly frustrating to anyone halfway intelligent, and so on. That’s the kingdom of rights.

This blog has suggested in the past a simpler course of action: instead of asking reality to adapt to us, we should adapt to reality, which is a series of patterns created by natural forces. These natural forces do not limit themselves to material, but reflect degrees of organization; for example, a social group can experience entropy just as matter does and just as ideas do when transmitted multiple times. That’s reality, and it’s something that requires careful study to understand.

But we’re not even trying. We’ve created a kingdom of brats who just want to do what they think they want to do, and even if the results make them miserable, they’re still going to persist. It’s good to see this illusion of rights slowly unraveling.