Ad Hominem Absurdities

My colleague was telling me the other day of an instance when Obama came to the UK to give advice. Obama said, "if you leave the EU, you'll be at the back of the line when you come to negotiate trade agreements."

My colleague told me that we didn't like what we heard. Not because of the information we were told: rather, we thought Obama had no right to get involved with British politics.

We didn't see the information. We didn't say, "okay, thanks for the feedback, I'll see how this information fits into what I already know and see if I need to re-assess my decision making." We reacted, saying, "who are you to tell us what to do?"

Obama is part of the other tribe. He's not part of us, therefore he has no authority over us. Him even trying to tell us what to do is an insult to us.

It's the same logic as football fans:  "you're evil because you support x whereas I support y. Don't even try to look at me because, although we both are fiercely passionate about the same thing, you're not part of my group".

Football fans are an example of when you take the Ad Hominem argument to attack groups rather than individuals. But it's the same reaction: they're not part of our tribe, so we attack them based on their lack of association with us rather than what they do.

And when you start seeing how this plays out in groups: when applying it to sales, we might glean an insight into another reason why Trump won. Trump is very good at targeting a market. You'll notice Ivanka Trump has also picked up this ability. Ivanka is always talking about how she's trying to represent womens rights: and although I would like to believe her, this is a a sound business market target as well. By making her 'tribe' women, she's creating a very strong brand for half the population to associate with. And half of the population is a huge market to sell to.

Donald Trump did the same thing. While Hilary was busy alienating all the bigoted/racist people by calling them 'deplorables', Trump recognised that these 'deplorables' still had exactly power to sway the vote as other, more 'upstanding citizens'. By giving some rhetoric that advocated a bigoted mindset, he created a tribe that included all those people. Suddenly his popularity rocketed. These people, plus the people who felt disenfranchised with politicians and their ability to positively impact their lives, were a huge influence for Trump's success. Trump also gets double points for using tribalism as a tool to win popularity, because he gains the racist people's votes by using their hate for other tribes: in the case, Mexicans, by blaming Mexicans for all their shared shortcomings.

Although, at times, watching this kind of behaviour makes me lose a tiny bit of faith in humanity, to isolate myself from it and to say "humans are idiots" would be the highest form of hypocrisy. I would be making the rest of humanity the 'other tribe' and then be carrying out the same behaviour I condemn so much. Sometimes all we can do is to take a big breath, go to sleep, wake up the next day, and try again to work together so that we can move ourselves forwards and create a better future for ourselves.

The Right Tools For The Right Job

I wake up to read an article on Trump this morning.

"It appears to be a recognition that Mr. Trump’s simplistic and angry campaign rhetoric may be much more difficult to accomplish."

We all want simplistic ideas. But we live in a complex world. With complexity comes difficulty. Difficulty brings doubt. And in a complex world, doubt is not a pleasant condition... but certainty is absurd. When will we learn not to be seduced by over-simplistic, certain ideals? When will we learn to become comfortable with a complex system:  when we have to actually research what we're jumping into before truly jumping?

Maybe the discrepancy lies in the scale of the task. Normal, every-day people don't usually have to worry about how to overcome hugely networked, complex tasks. Normal every-day people tend to have to work out whether they should plan their dinner with friends for Friday or for Saturday.

We develop different problem solving tools throughout our lives based on the tasks we face. If all we're doing is planning whether we should have dinner Friday or Saturday, we'll only ever develop the tools to overcome that task. On top of that, the implications at stake with this task aren't that great: say you organise the dinner for Friday. If everyone says they can't make it, you can change the dinner to Saturday. Even if you screw it up... you can just organise it for another weekend. The idea of creating research groups to study the full extent of whether Friday night or Saturday night is better, or to consult all the 'stakeholders involved' about the full implications of each nuance for the choice between Friday and Saturday probably sounds like overkill. And it is.

But when it comes to the direction of a government, we need highly developed tools and processes to overcome highly complex tasks. Millions of people's lives can be affected, and yet it feels like we treat these problems like choosing what night to organise dinner. It's like we're using a sledgehammer and a chisel to change the fillings in someone's teeth.

So now we have two choices. We can choose to equip everyone with the correct tools so that they are able to assess a problem and maintain the democracy we have. This will take people years to achieve: they're essentially learning a new skill. You can't become a piano master overnight. On top of this obstacle is the fact that not all people will want to put in the work to become a 'piano master'.

The other choice is that we can start picking specific people who are equipped with the skills to actually assess a complex problem properly, and assign them responsibility to decide what to do.

Very extreme conclusion: maybe democracy isn't the answer. Maybe it's time to apply a more suitable tool for the job.

Is Technology Pushing People Towards Two Extremes Of Sexual Behaviour?

Technology is great. Never in history have humans been so effortlessly connected with each other as the time we live in now. And this has implications with how we create romantic relationships with others.

On the one hand, this means that we can move our thumbs to swipe right a few times, type in a few messages and find ourselves on a date with a completely new person. Our ability to have sex with strangers has never been greater. This means that technology could be creating a more and more extreme type of sexual behavior: it's creating the super slut variant.

On the other hand, we've never before been so under the microscope from our peers with regards to our self image. We can spend hours engineering the perfect photo to post to our friends: sculpting the narrative of our lives that we want to tell others. This technology can start to make people more and more aware of their image and more anxious to achieve perfection in it. Not a single strand of hair should be out of place. The thing is, though, that sex is a pretty messy activity. In this way - as well as many other ways - sex is quite a personal act: we need to let our guard down and let people past that perfectly manicured image that we've created, to the real life version of ourselves. But when technology is making us more and more anxious about our image, it might be making it harder and harder for people to let their guard down to facilitate sex. Technology could be creating another type of extreme sexual behavior: the perfectionist frigid variant.

So there's my hypothesis. Technology is pushing people towards to extremes of sexual behavior: the super slut type and the perfectionist frigid type. I might delve into some surveys of how many people the population have had sex with over the years. Although finding out a way to isolate how technology affects these numbers from other cultural reasons might be hard.

Is Your Invitee List Half-Attending or Half-Absent?

I've recently noticed a difference in approach between my friends and myself with regards to expectations on friends to come to events.

I'm of the approach that if you don't explicitly say you're coming, you're not coming. But some of my friends are the other way round: they think you're coming unless you explicitly say you're not.

To me, this is a variation of the "glass half-full, glass half-empty" thought experiment. Are your expectations of your friends half-full or half-empty?

Invitee List Half-Absent
I'm very sensitive to whether people want to come to event or not, and I hate the idea of trying to persuade someone to come to something when, to everyone else, it's obvious that that person clearly doesn't want to come. In this way, I'm probably a lot quicker to throw in the towel with trying to have my friends show up for events, and I always create clauses in my invitation so that anyone can back out easily. I often use the line "I want to see people who want to see me" along with this. An example of how this manifests in my communication is the text: "I'm going to be here at 6 PM to see a friend, give me a ring if you can make it, otherwise no worries."  The expectation is they'll not make it, and I don't do the dreaded nagging, and they can actively tell me if they do want to come.

You expect nothing, so that you're not upset if no-one turns up, and you have a baseline from where everything can only get better. It's a bit Nihilistic.


Invitee List Half-Attending
On the flip side is how my friends think about events. They think "why wouldn't everyone want to come to this? We always have fun and we're good friends."  An example of how this manifests itself into communication is, "Guy, when are you coming tonight??" The expectation is that I'm coming, unless I actively tell them I can't.

Maybe it's a sign that my friends are able to create more secure attachments than I am. Although is that mentality an inherently good thing? Yes, a secure attachment sounds inherently better than an insecure one: the word "secure" has associations with positive qualities, but the mindset of how we approach situations has trade-offs for each.


The Same Mentality Used In Trust Models
This also leaks out to how we trust people. The old question to reveal our mindset in this situation is, "do you think trust is earned, or do you think trust is given until proven otherwise?". In this question: 'trust is earned, not given' (glass half-empty: expect nothing unless people show you otherwise) or 'trust is given until shown otherwise' (glass half-full: people are inherently good and can be trusted until shown otherwise). I'm definitely in the 'trust is earned, not given' camp.

So What Does All This Say About Me?
Maybe I have trust issues. Maybe I should allow myself to trust people more. I know that I've been let down by friends and in relationships before: maybe that's affected me more than I realize, and it's changed my mindset to be more cautious and expect less from people. On the flip side, when I think back to all big relationships I've had: I've not really been fucked over, and, even though all past relationships have at some point ended, I've always walked away feeling like they've added something to my life. I've been very lucky with the people I've met. It's just that sometimes things don't work: I can't expect everyone to fall in love with me, and it's been a real shame that sometimes I just haven't felt that spark with others.

Maybe we can allow ourselves to focus on either the negatives or the positive. Consciously, I can focus on the positives and tell myself that I've been lucky with the people I've met. Unconsciously, maybe I've focused on the negatives too much: allowing the times that people have let me down before to affect me more than the countless times they've been there for me.

Either way, I'll definitely continue to consider whether I need to change my mindset. But the first step in solving a problem is recognising a problem. If I decide that this is a problem mindset in the future, I'm already past stage one...

Product Focus or Brand Focus

I've been looking at buying a Ducati recently. I put a few tentative bids down on eBay and I bought a book that describes the development of the bike I've been looking at. I got really engrossed into how they created the bike, how everything they do is derived from two principles: handling and power. How they pretty much build the whole bike around the engine, and the heritage they have with L-twin engines.

And then a weird realisation happened. I realised that I was buying the brand more than I was buying the product. I was buying the story of the bike and the association with Ducati, more than the technical ability of the bike. I had shifted from my product focused philosophy to a brand focused one.

Up until now, I've rarely cared about a brand. I've always judged a product's merits based on it's ability alone - untethered to where it actually came from. And I still think this is the correct approach if you'd like to be rational.

But other people judge a product's merits, less on the actual product, but more on where that product came from. They have "Brand Focus". This isn't necessarily a bad thing - it's not a completely rational thing to do in my opinion - but there is definitely an intangible value about owning a specific brand: a bit like art has intangible value. You can't rationally derive the value from specifications: speed, braking ability, durability etc; rather you start deriving value from how the product makes you feel. And that, in my opinion, is a slippery slope.

Regardless of all that, however, is that Ducatis seem to really maintain their value well.

So, in the end, does it really matter where the value is derived, as long as it's stable and predictable?

Being Upset With Myself

I think we have a lot more control over our emotions than we admit: we can allow ourselves to feel happy or sad, angry or closed off... and this morning, I came into work in a real mood. I decided that I'd allow myself to be moody. I decided not to put the small effort in to smile at anyone, to ruminate on my failures, to focus on the negatives. Why? I feel like I deserve it.

Why do I feel like I deserve to feel upset? Because my progression on the project that I'm currently working on is going a lot slower than I would have liked. I sometimes get the feeling that my colleagues are starting to wonder if I'm actually doing work. And this judgement gets to me all the more, because when I was almost complete (about a week ago), I slacked off for a few days. Now that my head is completely back in the project, more work has come out of the woodwork and I feel like they're justified in thinking that, as well as feeling like I'm chasing a point of where I should have been, had I focused 100%. I'm usually good at not allowing people's judgement of me get to me. However this one did: no insult hurts more, no judgement of our self stings greater, than one laced with truth.

But I've come to realise that being upset with myself is not the best thing to do. My productivity slips even more if I'm not in a good place, and what could have been a lesson to learn - so that I'm more productive next time - just becomes more emotional baggage. I may well deserve to feel bad for being lazy for a few days, but emotional self-flagellation won't help: to allow myself to do that only acts as a feedback loop that exacerbates the problem.

So I have two choices: the first is to continue to ruminate on my failings and punish myself, and the other is to forgive myself and move on. The odd thing is, I feel like 'me' is the hardest person for myself to forgive: I have control over my actions, anything that I do to upset myself is my own making and I should know better.  That's why the decision to forgive myself is all the harder. Sometimes the best thing to do, not only for our mental health, but for our productivity, is to forgive ourselves for not achieving our expectations. After that we pick ourselves up, learn the lesson so that we don't do it again, and move on.