The Hindsight Factor with Jay Daverth

h/t Rachael Maddow

Image by Fresh Conservative via Flickr

I know many of you have emailed how much you enjoy the 'Teabonics' flickr stream running on the right-hand side of the site, but I think it has run its course.  Besides the fact that it is becoming reptitive, it's also a bit mean-spirited for my taste.  When someone is behaving like a regressive racist, I know how satisfynig it can be to laugh at their public displays of grammatical creativity.  But poking fun does little but enhance our own false sense of superiority while solidifying the in-group/out-group dynamic so antithetical to rationality.  Whatever catharsis we gain by discounting an entire sub-culture over a handful of individuals comes at the expense of progress.

The experience has, however, piqued my interest in the study of cognitive biases, the 'blindspots' in our thinking which cause us to draw false conclusions based on our own preconceptions rather than the available evidence.  Much like logical fallacies, we're all guilty of using self-serving argumentation that does little to address the issue at hand.  This is not only a defining characteristic of  politics in general, but is particularly critical to the underlying sloganeering of modern communications.  The point at which this becomes truly interesting, however, is when it is unintentional - when our conscious mind is literally incapable of seeing past the fallacious shortcuts in our own logical processes.

Naming these biases on an intellectual level can go a long way in helping us to identify them as they occur. In the context of Teabonics, for example, we may consider the notion of a "Fundamental attribution error" as the tendency to over-emphasize personality for observed behaviors at the expense of power of situational influences. The unfavorable vision I may hold of Joe Teabagger personally may certainly bear influence on his decision to paint a Hitler mustache on a picture of Obama, but there are far larger and more consequential socioeconomic injustices that lead to this form of negative expression.  Discounting Joe's concerns (or indeed, the movement at large) based on a particularly egregious form of behavior inhibits my ability to address whatever validity may underlie his anger. 

This is not to say that we must (or even should) passively condone racist or hurtful sloganeering, but rather that we must be cautious not to allow such assaults to close our minds, nor distract us from including all in our shared version of global justice.  To this end, I am replacing the Teabonics block with a new series on cognitive bias.  You should see a new one every time you visit the site and each will be linked to the wiki entry for further information.  In the meantime, you can enjoy this catchy little diddy that Brad Wray, an AP Psychology teacher, put together to enumerate serval types of biases for his students.

This short by Patrick Jean is an 8-bit videogame nostalgia piece meets modern CGI all capped off with a post-apocalyptic catharsis.  Enjoy!

Contrary to the rallying cries of various grammatically-challenged teabaggers, we have never had a functioning democratic society.  If you’re a long-time reader, you may have seen a quote from Chomsky on this page:

Personally, I'm in favor of democracy, which means that the central institutions of society have to be under popular control. Now, under capitalism, we can't have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control.

Image via Wikipedia

Indeed, the internet is the first and only example we’ve had of a truly globalized forum in which all may enjoy equal participation.  The powers-that-be hate this and have tried (will try) everything they can, from firewalls to censorship, to squash it.  Net neutrality – the principle that the equality of all internet traffic is protected by the force of law – has been long-resisted as antithetical to the free-market.  This is, of course, utter hogwash.  It is about far more than whether Comcast can throttle down their competitors bandwidth - at this point the internet underlies so much of our lives that it has become a basic necessity to participating in our global economy.

There is an interesting parallel here with the advent of electricity.  While most of us take for granted the ability to plug in our refrigerator, there was a time when power lines were something that only rich people could use, and even then only for their new-fangled light bulbs.  Back then, there was nobody who could imagine other uses for it – the idea of using this form of fire to clean your clothes or freeze your food was preposterous.  Those who pushed for governmental intervention to ensure equal distribution were decried as socialists.  Much as with the internet, for as indispensable as it has become, we quite literally have no idea what the future will bring.

In this day and age, I would say that it's hard to believe that we're still discussing whether net-neutrality is a good thing, but this is what happens when money becomes intertwined with power and influence:

Oddly, dozens of Democrats (perhaps 70 again) have signed a letter supporting the talking points and agenda of Glenn Beck and one his major corporate sponsors, AT&T. This letter also contradicts the technology agenda of Barack Obama, Obama's Federal Communications Commission, and the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate Commerce Committees that oversee the communications industry. The "congressional" letter is being peddled by cable and phone lobbyists to the staff of Democratic Congressmen who have a history of putting their names on cable and phone industry's debunked talking points, sometimes apparently without understanding their meaning.

This letter, being pushed by Rep Gene Green (D-TX), pertains to whether or not the Internet will remain an open engine of economic and democratic freedom. In D.C., legislators and lobbyists are debating something called "net neutrality," which is a common-sense FCC proposal to keep phone and cable companies from interfering with what you can do online and how you can use the Internet. Without net neutrality, phone and cable companies can limit your online speech and freedom. I think the Daily Show explains the issue best (here (with John Hodgman) and here).

For the time being, I think that the net-neutrality debate may suffer from poor branding - the phrase itself reeks of techno-elitist packaging that makes all but the geeky among us sglaze over.  But however much you may care about the issue itself, you should know by now that the 21st century is the age of the internet.  The series of tubes is not just about watching videos of cats - it is how you talk on the phone, watch TV, do your banking, and participate in our democracy.  It is far too important to allow the so-called 'free' market to destroy it through greed.  We need to start thinking long-term about having alternate sources of bandwidth just like we have alternate sources of fuel.  But in the short-term, we also need to ensure that our fledgling global democracy is not co-opted by those who would destroy it for profit.

With the present structure of cable-TV, is it so hard to imagine the internet's future to be something like this:

Image via Wikipedia

As to be expected , Hawking has a talent for explaining these concepts to those of us who don’t have an IQ equal to the GDP of a large city.  Short version: Time travel is possible, the Large Hadron Collider proves it, but only to the future and it’s gonna take some big, big bucks

Deep underground, in a circular tunnel 16 miles long, is a stream of trillions of tiny particles. When the power is turned on they accelerate from zero to 60,000mph in a fraction of a second. Increase the power and the particles go faster and faster, until they're whizzing around the tunnel 11,000 times a second, which is almost the speed of light. But just like the train, they never quite reach that ultimate speed. They can only get to 99.99 per cent of the limit. When that happens, they too start to travel in time. We know this because of some extremely short-lived particles, called pi-mesons. Ordinarily, they disintegrate after just 25 billionths of a second. But when they are accelerated to near-light speed they last 30 times longer.

It really is that simple. If we want to travel into the future, we just need to go fast. Really fast. And I think the only way we're ever likely to do that is by going into space. The fastest manned vehicle in history was Apollo 10. It reached 25,000mph. But to travel in time we'll have to go more than 2,000 times faster.

The article really is worth a read if you’re into this kind of thing.  One thing I found particularly interesting is the idea that time moves differently depending on the surrounding mass.  For example, the GPS satellite array has to be constantly recalibrated in order to compensate for being further outside the influence of earth’s gravity than those of us on land.  Another implication of this, according to Hawking, is that manned missions to outer systems are more possible than we’d think:

The slowing of time has another benefit. It means we could, in theory, travel extraordinary distances within one lifetime. A trip to the edge of the galaxy would take just 80 years. But the real wonder of our journey is that it reveals just how strange the universe is. It's a universe where time runs at different rates in different places. Where tiny wormholes exist all around us. And where, ultimately, we might use our understanding of physics to become true voyagers through the fourth dimension.

Much like The Forever War, such expeditions would be of little use to those of us back on earth, though maybe our great-great-great-(great-great)-grandchildren can enjoy the extraterrestrial kitsch.  Perhaps a My-Ancestors-Went-To-Andromeda-and-All-I-Got-Was-This-Lousy-T-Shirt?