MEMBER MONDAY

Whence comes laughter? At one end is the low-level patter of chuckles that serves as a conversation lubricant, more of a tic to maintain engagement than a response to something truly funny. Then there’s the de-escalation laughter, that nervous giggle used to relieve tension, reduce stress, or otherwise break awkwardness.

Next is the power laughter, a way to subtly demonstrate dominance or superiority at another’s expense. Such is the staple of late-night or staged comedy, applied to promote a cause or otherwise push an agenda, humor employed as a smart bomb to penetrate the psyche – delivered with the smile of a dog about ready to bite.

Beyond those somewhat cynical applications of humor is the type cited in the discussion piece (click, What's This, A Door?) where “the joy that life attacks me with is unbearable and leads to gasping hysterical laughter.” The humor is genuine and has no agenda beyond revealing otherwise-hidden truths…

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A question we once pondered as a thought experiment is now moving beyond the realm of the purely hypothetical. Our focus piece (click: Encounters With Reality) makes reference to that famous “experience machine” thought experiment we addressed in an earlier session (MM 3/4/24 The (Pleasure) Experience Machine) as it frames the issue in terms of whether and, if so, why we prefer real-life experience over that served up by means of “mediating technologies.”

The matter becomes more and more relevant as underlying technology becomes advanced to the point that reality and its simulation becomes increasingly indistinguishable. While we are not (yet) at the stage of that direct neuralink brain implant to shortcut experiential input, the technology is rapidly advancing to the point it can augment, enhance, or otherwise replicate the sensory perception e.g. the Google Art Project can now serves as an art gallery that is now far and away superior to anything available to the everyday humanoid.

The time is nearing that the attainment of pleasure may be had as a virtual experience. If so, would you avail yourself of it? Enter the so-called Experience Machine, a means by which you could enter a world of your absolute choosing — think in terms of your looks, your talents, your achievements, your loving partner. Anything. Best of all, you wouldn’t even comprehend that it was a simulation…

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Soon after O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murder in 1995 in the so-called trial of the century, he wrote a book titled If I Did It that all but confirmed his guilt, if only in the public’s imagination.

Spot another mea culpa as we take on the subject of A.I. generally and Chat GPT particularly as it swallows human consciousness itself. No, you luddite, A.I. is just a tool, another advance in the march of civilization, like Gutenberg's printing press. Some had actually dismissed it as a novelty when we first took on the subject a couple of years ago, just a month after Chat GPT’s introduction (click: MM 12/19/22 Chat GPT).

Shame on anyone who knowingly takes credit for what is essentially mechanical plagiarism, as authentic as one of those anthropomorphic sex dolls (though not speaking from personal experience, mind you). Life curdles into irony when writing, once described as thought on fire, is produced via algorithms with simple bare prompts e.g. “context, tonal goals, even persona.”

Our focus article is a report from ground zero with this account by a Yale professor of creative writing about the way such tools are reshaping how we think, learn, and write (click: This Is What AI Is Doing To Students). Creative writing, for crying out loud…

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Your life is the story. The hero is you. It’s the same for each of us and might explain everything from the way it makes your world more comprehensible to why it’s virtually impossible to persuade someone via direct debate. Facts mean nothing until you can insert yourself into another’s hero story (click: Everyone's The Hero Of Their Own Story).

There is a reference in the linked article to the work of Robert Kegan, who developed a theoretical psychological framework to assess one’s perception of reality as essentially a construct, developed in stages over a lifetime. In other words, a story. The frail human psychology simply isn’t built for consistent re-examination of the narrative. So much for the illusion of free will.

This theory of human behavior assumes most people are well-meaning but stuck in a “hero’s mindset” which centers on the self that might offer an explanation for the futility of usual political debate often little more than the dialogue of the deaf. If your goal is to change someone’s mind then you should be operating in the conversation as if you’re talking to the hero of the story, who is basically good but has been misled.

Even the smartest amongst us may still be the subject of wholesale indoctrination. The most well-meaning hero can still be fooled by the false narrative…

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One term for it is attachment i.e. those things that you choose to be the object of your attention, of what you worship. If it's to money and things, you will never have enough. If it's to body and beauty and sexual allure, you will die a million deaths as you age. If it's to power, you will feel weak and afraid. If it's to intellect, you will end up feeling a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

We’d previously discussed the foregoing through the lens of that well-known commencement address by David Foster Wallace in terms of the way the things we worship create our own Sisyphean existence in which we are eaten alive MM 8/27/18 Get Over Thyself.

Or, framed more as a theological meditation, we might share in the observations of that 13th-century Italian priest and philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas who spoke of the four idols – financial wealth, power, pleasure, and fame – in terms of the way their pursuit ultimately deprive us from achieving ultimate spiritual enlightenment (or, God)…

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People’s Park, a 2.8 acre parcel to the east of Telegraph Avenue at the University of California, was ground zero for the radical political activism in the late 1960s. Mario Savio and a band of other students led the first mass act of civil disobedience on an American college campus when they defied the establishment’s development plans and declared the site a community park.

Confrontation and its aftermath: demolition bulldozers; arrests; “Bloody Thursday”; the Free Speech Movement; and the rise of governor “clean up the mess at Berkeley” Ronald Reagan. Depending on who you ask, the site was either a cesspool of filth, drugs, and crime or the beacon of enlightenment. But no matter as the area was eventually fenced in by a 17-foot high wall of shipping containers to await construction of student housing pending resolution of legal issues. A six-inch hole in the ground filled with soil and a surrounding granite ring memorialized the space by certifying the soil and the air space above it to be beyond the jurisdiction of any entity. Thus endeth this social convulsion of the 60’s.

Or maybe not. About the same time and on the other coast, a political framework was being devised to bring about significant systemic change by means of the radical idea of creating crises. The work of two sociologist (socialist) professors at Columbia – Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Pivens – was initially published in 1966 centered on the idea to overload the public welfare systems to the point of collapse, leading to political crisis. While the initial goal was to usher in the idea of broad-based universal income, the so-called Cloward-Piven strategy became a blueprint for progressive reform by leveraging the collective power of marginalized groups as a catalyst for socio economic restructuring (Cloward Pivens, The Nation)…

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Forty-some years ago, a friend and I were the sole guests on a walking safari in Kenya. There we were, led through the Rift Valley by a Masai tribesman in traditional garb, complete with spear, and an Egyptian guide armed with a .357 magnum rifle to back up the man with the spear. A small crew in the background was there to haul the equipment, set up camp, prepare meals (served on a linen tablecloth), and provide us with washcloths every afternoon as we approached each new campsite – just a couple of Bwanna in the midst of MMBA (Miles and Miles of Bloody Africa).

The purpose here, though, is not so much to recount that trip as it is to introduce a long-form essay (click Africa) for the way it captured the magic, mystery and feel of the “dark continent” more profoundly than did my own up-close-and-personal experience. That focus piece will take your breath away (as do so many of Lance Morrow’s other pieces) as it helps frame our discussion about African wildlife by posing and answering the question of what might be lost if the wild animals of Africa were to vanish from the face of the earth.

Joining us as lead participant, and at the invitation of club member and African wildlife conservationist Tommi Wolfe, is a former park ranger of a noted African game reserve whose professional life has been dedicated to avoiding such a fate. Tom Coetzee now represents Wildlife Protection Solutions (WPS), a global non-profit for the conservation of endangered species by deploying advanced technology. You may be amazed by the way the most advanced modern technology now watches over these creatures of the primal garden…

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Could it happen here? The prospect of fascism hangs over the nation like a bad smell as in the sometimes-heard “the hallmark of an authoritarian regime is the road to tyranny.” Corresponding sentiments include ultranationalism, anti-intellectualism, right-wing populism, dictatorship, cult of personality and totalitarianism, all of which might be conflated into that all-purpose shorthand epithet . . . . you know, Hitler-esque.

Let us thus go to ground zero in order to parse what the term even means with our focus article by a German history professor, who presumably knows something about the subject (click: Post-Fascism). He suggests the term has become “vague and worn out by polemical overuse” and maintains that while the ideologies espoused by the likes of Donald Trump and Giorgia Meloni carry some overtones of historical fascism, they lack certain key elements, such as strong welfare state or an emphasis on uniformed paramilitaries. He puts forth a new term, Post-Fascism, to distinguish today from that parade-of-horribles of the Nazi era – that “speck of bird shit in German history.”

Do you buy it? We had taken took a hard look at this question seven years ago as we discussed what was probably the most dramatic transformation of the twentieth century – Germany’s rise from a functioning (though weak) democracy into an authoritarian state – from the perspective of the people who had experienced it at the time (MM 7/16/18 Could It Happen Here?). Yet, sometimes the biggest sweeps of history are largely invisible to those experiencing them at the time. We will discuss whether or not we find comfort in the assertion that this path is not “the style of Americans…

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Those of us in the cheap seats have tried to avert our gaze from that spectacle known as the Trump-Musk bromance cage fight. The featured rants came across as a kind of verbal fanaticism: words got fired up; they went on a crusade; worse, they went public. Rants should be transient; these were not.

Each party seems to have been taken over by that little terrorist in the skull and, as they say, when elephants fight the grass gets trampled. At first glance, the primary winner from this whole public meltdown was Team Schadenfreude.

But there’s another way to look at it. Perhaps this has served as a kind of catalyst. After all, the smart money had from the start placed long odds on the long-term survival of this alpha-alpha partnership. From Musk’s perspective, this is the thanks he gets for going all-in on a selfless drive to rationalize the size of an out-of-control federal government. He worked for free. He sacrificed so much in his ridiculously overachieving life . . . . and, for crying out loud, he enabled that whole Trump victory in the first place. All for naught as the BBB turned it all into a joke. Yes, for crying out loud.

From the Trump perspective . . . . well, he’s Trump. It’s not nice to mess with mother nature…

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Gateway books. Gateway to what? Maybe gateway to serious work like Finnegans Wake, the subject of a book club discussion in Venice, California starting in 1995 and ending in October 2023 after 28 years of analyzing literary allusions, word play, and obscure references only to find find – surprise! – that the book itself doesn’t actually end but loops back to the beginning, heralding an endless cycle (click: Finnegans Wake Book Club). Note to self: devote the next decade of MMs to discussing Ulysses.

Okay, that’s not fair. Our focus piece (click: Gateway Books) by an English professor is very approachable as it centers on the 38 responses to a tweet survey asking the same questions we might discuss about how we may have been shaped by such books in our earlier years: when and how we were exposed to these authors; whether and how they may have shaped our identity; when and why we stopped reading reading them; and how reading these authors at a fairly early age shaped our subsequent intellectual development.

The term gateway would appear to be speaking as much to the sensitivities of the respondents as it does to the underlying works. With a predominant male sampling, the inclusion on the list of Catcher In The Rye with its theme of adolescent alienation is unsurprising as are the other works tapping into the “white middlebrow canon” depicting the anti-war movement and cynicism in general like Catch-22, Slaughterhouse Five, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Just reading these titles is a walk down memory lane in the way they once served to bind “us” (meaning all those other otherwise-alienated youths)…

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The term existential is sometimes applied in a casual way to punctuate a number of outstanding threats e.g. global warming, AI, a virus, the national debt. Yes, indeed, many such concerns carry the label existential.

Then there is Existential. We will address the one topic truly worthy of such a superlative tag, a threat we have lived with (and have thus far survived) for some eighty years. The subject, of course, is the terrible swift sword of a nuclear exchange. The focus article for what could be the most sobering MM discussion yet is (click) Mushroom Cloud Over Manhattan.

The described fact pattern is entirely plausible. The details of the scenario may be graphic but are not gratuitous. The matter-of-factness in the telling actually understates the horror. In any event, the point of our discussion is more philosophical in nature…

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Americans may bristle at this Machiavelli notion of power dynamics. After all, we were taught to speak up, to market ourselves, to be seen, to be heard. Studies suggest Americans become noticeably uncomfortable after seven seconds of silence.

That discomfort, it turns out, can be a powerful tool. Silence, or at least mindful selective disclosure, holds unique psychological power in a world of noise. Say less. Observe more. Speak with purpose. Let others chase attention. You’re here to win. So it goes in the world of negotiation (short clip: Shut Up And Win).

Machiavelli five hundred years ago tapped into the danger of oversharing. Unguarded speech creates commitments and often reveals a thought process to be exploited. It ultimately erodes mystique and authority. One becomes . . . ordinary. Better to be feared than loved, he maintained…

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We once discussed the dilemma known as the tragedy of the commons (MM 6/11/18 Tragedy Of The Commons), a concept so straightforward as to be almost self-evident i.e. it refers to the exploitation of any limited resource by individual parties in furtherance of maximizing their individual self-interests which collectively serves to deplete or even exhaust said resource to the detriment of all.

The most basic illustration of the phenomenon is to imagine a pond with a finite number of fish from which a number of fishermen each seeks to maximize their respective catches. The tragedy comes with the inevitable exhaustion of the fish stock as it ultimately destroys the resource for all (the commons). Replace fish in a pond with most other finite resources and the concept holds e.g. overgrazing, deforestation, traffic congestion, air and water pollution.

And, as our focus piece suggests, another resource ripe for such tragedy is the pool of human creativity (click: In The Age of AI We Must Protect Human Creativity As A Natural Resource)…

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