Skip to main content

Random Thoughts - 10

Friendship is a bond whose strength is measured in trust.

-------------------------

Modern policy and justification.  When one side advocates some policy which works out poorly, there is never an admission is was wrong, or flawed, or anything.  The most common excuses are these: we didn’t go far enough; we didn’t spend enough; we didn’t message enough. The policy, however, is right!

The policy belief is paramount.  Some sort of decision commitment is involved, having little to do with outcomes.  Belief, you may agree, is a lot easier a sell than logic or evidence. It closes doors; it relaxes intellectual demand; it commands single-mindedness of thought.  We seem to have left behind the rational age of Voltaire, Laplace, and Newton, and entered into another universe where truth is decided beforehand.

Huxley said it best as paraphrased in, “We live in a brave new world.”

The ability to accept that a solution or method fails is essential for progress, personal, political, national, and even global. Said inability spells eventual disaster.

-------------------------

Cool CEOs.  Gotta luv ‘em. Their dress in a (clean) T-shirt and blue jeans, today’s cool garb.  Truly sexist, this is, as you hardly see women CEOs giving annual reports wile prancing about in T-shirts and jeans. Women are still more circumspect in their corporate presentations. They wish to look good, and wear designer dresses to accentuate their position. 

It started with Steve Jobs. Since then many have been conditioned to believe that dressing ultra casual signals (a) competence or (b) disrespect of the status quo or (3) discontent with “the suit.”  Lately, some combine the T-shirt with a sport coat.  We see the same with the Ted lectures. Dressy!  Are we impressed?  

If anyone appeared for an executive job interview clad in blue-jeans and a T, the job offer would not happen. You gotta be a CEO or billionaire to get away with such dress, to be super-cool, perhaps to convince supplicants or shareholders you are intellectually superior. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Accepting Fake Information

Every day, we are all bombarded with information, especially on news channels.  One group claims it's false; another calls it the truth. How can we know when to accept it or alternatively how can we know it's false? There are several factors which influence acceptance of fake or false information. Here are the big four.  Some just don’t have the knowledge to discern fact/truth from fiction/fact/false*. Some fake information is cleverly disguised and simply appears to be correct. Some fake information is accepted because the person wants to believe it. Some fake information is accepted because there is no other information to the contrary. However, the acceptance of  information  of any kind become a kind of  truth , and this is a well studied topic. In the link below is an essay on “The Truth About Truth.” This shows simply that what is your point of view, different types of information are generally accepted, fake or not.   https://www.linkedin.com/posts/g-donald-allen-420b03

Your Brain Within Your Brain

  Your Bicameral Brain by Don Allen Have you ever gone to another room to get something, but when you got there you forgot what you were after? Have you ever experienced a flash of insight, but when you went to look it up online, you couldn’t even remember the keyword? You think you forgot it completely. How can it happen so fast? You worry your memory is failing. Are you merely absent-minded? You try to be amused. But maybe you didn’t forget.   Just maybe that flash of insight, clear and present for an instant, was never given in the verbal form, but another type of intelligence you possess, that you use, and that communicates only to you. We are trained to live in a verbal world, where words matter most. Aside from emotions, we are unable to conjure up other, nonverbal, forms of intelligence we primitively, pre-verbally, possess but don’t know how to use. Alas, we live in a world of words, stewing in the alphabet, sleeping under pages of paragraphs, almost ignoring one of

Is Artificial Intelligence Conscious?

  Is Artificial Intelligence Conscious? I truly like the study of consciousness, though it is safe to say no one really knows what it is. Some philosophers has avoided the problem by claiming consciousness simply doesn’t exist. It's the ultimate escape clause. However, the "therefore, it does not exist" argument also applies to "truth", "God", and even "reality" all quite beyond a consensus description for at least three millennia. For each issue or problem defying description or understanding, simply escape the problem by claiming it doesn’t exist. Problem solved or problem avoided? Alternately, as Daniel Dennett explains consciousness as an account of the various calculations occurring in the brain at close to the same time. However, he goes on to say that consciousness is so insignificant, especially compared to our exalted notions of it, that it might as well not exist [1] . Oh, well. Getting back to consciousness, most of us have view