Turn off the lights … close your eyes … turn it up …

That Sounds Smart (Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought).

How do you tell if what someone is saying is smart? Most people’s first instinct is to think that things they can’t understand must be smart. After all, to say such things they must have learned them and aren’t people who have learned more about something generally smarter than people who haven’t? Thus the common phenomena of people trusting jargon-laden statements.

One problem with this method is simply that jargon can be faked. It’s not too hard to make up a bunch of longish words that sound complicated. And if you don’t understand them, you’ll have a hard time telling whether they’re real or made up.

But the more serious problem is that this method is exactly backwards. Smart people actually say things that are very simple and easy to understand. And the smarter they are, the more clear what they say is. It’s stupid people who say things that are hard to understand.

Part of this is because stupid people say things that aren’t true, things that aren’t true don’t make sense, and things that don’t make sense are hard to understand. But you can also look at it from the other end: if you genuinely understand something — really, truly understand it — then it doesn’t seem complicated and you can explain it rather simply.

But the larger consequence is that if you’re smart the world doesn’t seem very complicated. This might seem obvious, but the obvious thought is rather different. The obvious thought is: The world doesn’t seem complicated to smart people. But this isn’t what smart people actually think. They think the world isn’t complicated, period.

This is because when they try to explain part of the world they understand to someone, they explain it clearly, and, as a result, that person now understands it. This is proof that it’s not just uncomplicated for them, it’s uncomplicated for everyone.

But, I suspect, for most people the world is a strange and mysterious place, governed by principles they do not understand, which affect them severely but cannot be controlled, only coped with as best as possible. This is certainly how most people regard their computers.

By contrast, when I listen to smart people some part of the world I only dimly understood or never considered becomes immediately clear. Even if I don’t agree, I never have any trouble understanding. Listening to them, is like breathing pure oxygen and I cannot get enough.

This means the tradeoff between being expert and being popular doesn’t actually exist. People who truly understand their subject should have no trouble writing for a popular audience. And, in fact, their writing will probably better than that of the professional popularizers.

A good example of this was the early days of the blog Freakonomics. It had two writers, a successful economist and a popular journalist. The two had worked together on the bestselling book of the same name, with the general assumption that it was the journalist who had made the economist’s work clear. But reading their individual posts on the blog, you could see it was the reverse: the economist was a much clearer writer than the journalist.

Another result is that you find the really smart things in unexpected and undervalued places. Smart writing won’t be in formal and difficult-to-understand journal articles, but in the profanity-laced angry rants you’ll find on someone’s blog. That’s where the smart people are, even if everybody else just thinks they’re dumb.

Alrighty then …

Understanding what the Dunning-Kruger effect actually is:

The findings reported by Kruger and Dunning are often interpreted to suggest that the less competent people are, the more competent they think they are.

Unfortunately, Kruger and Dunning never actually provided any support for this type of just-world view; their studies categorically didn’t show that incompetent people are more confident or arrogant than competent people.

Rather, it’s that incompetent people think they’re much better than they actually are. But they typically still don’t think they’re quite as good as people who, you know, actually are good.

Via: Big Contrarian → Their knowledge about their knowledge..

Many linguists, including Noam Chomsky, contend that language in the sense we ordinary think of it, in the sense that people in Germany speak German, is a historical or social or political notion, rather than a scientific one. For example, German and Dutch are much closer to one another than various dialects of Chinese are. But the rough, commonsense divisions between languages will suffice for our purposes.

There are around 5000 languages in use today, and each is quite different from many of the others. Differences are especially pronounced between languages of different families, e.g., between Indo-European languages like English and Hindi and Ancient Greek, on the one hand, and non-Indo-European languages like Hopi and Chinese and Swahili, on the other.

Many thinkers have urged that large differences in language lead to large differences in experience and thought. They hold that each language embodies a worldview, with quite different languages embodying quite different views, so that speakers of different languages think about the world in quite different ways. This view is sometimes called the Whorf-hypothesis or the , after the linguists who made if famous. But the label linguistic relativity, which is more common today, has the advantage that makes it easier to separate the hypothesis from the details of Whorf’s views, which are an endless subject of exegetical dispute (Gumperz and Levinson, 1996, contains a sampling of recent literature on the hypothesis).

The suggestion that different languages carve the world up in different ways, and that as a result their speakers think about it differently has a certain appeal. But questions about the extent and kind of impact that language has on thought are empirical questions that can only be settled by empirical investigation. And although linguistic relativism is perhaps the most popular version of descriptive relativism, the conviction and passion of partisans on both sides of the issue far outrun the available evidence. As usual in discussions of relativism, it is important to resist all-or-none thinking. The key question is whether there are interesting and defensible versions of linguistic relativism between those that are trivially true (the Babylonians didn’t have a counterpart of the word ‘telephone’, so they didn’t think about telephones) and those that are dramatic but almost certainly false (those who speak different languages see the world in completely different ways).

Source and more at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/supplement2.html

Greg said on Wed, 07/07/2010 – 3:50pm (link)

Corporations are part of life in 2010. Your car is corporate. Your clothes are corporate. Your computer is corporate. Your phone is corporate. Your bike is corporate. Your shoes are corporate. Your house is made of corporate wood. Your activist spray-paint is corporate. And the drugs to keep you from feeling depressed from your own anarchist mind are corporate. Better get used to your place in the space/time continuum because it’s where you are.

Levi’s is trying to incorporate into the community by adapting and providing something useful & interesting & artistic. Is there business and branding motives behind it – sure – we live in a capitalist city and country. But no one complains when a mom & pop shop puts up a trashy store that gives nothing back to the community – why? What’s the difference? Trash is okay as long as it’s local? They’re local employees at Levi’s. They’re local managers at Levi’s. Hell, they’re even a local headquarters that started in San Francisco. So are we to vandalize any Valencia street company that actually grows beyond Valencia st.

Get a fucking mind and start truly thinking for yourself. Enjoy life and stop putting everything down as “bad,” just because it’s different. Because once you hate irrationally there’s no difference between nut job right wingers and nut job left wingers. I love living in the mission, but I hate when there’s a “mission” behind it.

Relation between Time, Mind and Consciousness

Abstract

With clocks one measures duration, speed and numerical order of material change, and not time. With eyes one can perceive in the universe only material change that runs into physical space. One cannot perceive time as a physical reality into which material change runs. Material change runs into physical space only, and not in time.

Time is not a fundamental physical reality like matter, energy and physical space. Time exists only when we measure it; time is a mind model into which one experience irreversible stream of material change that runs into space. Mind is creating time; consciousness has ability to watch time as a mind model. Time is a model of the mind, mind is temporal; consciousness is atemporal.

Introduction

Human conviction that with clocks one measures time cannot be proved by an experiment, as time cannot be observed by senses (sight). Human senses confirm that with clocks one measures duration, speed and numerical order of material changes that run into physical space. The smallest unit of duration and numerical order of material changes is Planck time, the largest is light year. Material changes itself have no duration, they only a have numerical order. A scientist gives material changes duration by measuring them with clocks; time is an epiphenomenon of the measured duration of material change. Time does not run into universe on its own.

Universe is an atemporal phenomenon (1,2,3). One has to distinguish between motion and time. Motion of material objects happens in space only, and time is a scientific tool that allows us to experience motion in the linear sense “past-present-future”. One has to be aware that “past-present-future” are human inventions, that there is no time in the universe as weexperience it. With our senses we can observe only motion in space. This motion we are experiencing in time is a mind model.

Albert Einstein was right by saying: »Space and time are modes by which we think, not conditions under which we live«. Time — the time that we know through clocks and calendars — was invented http://www.britannica.com/clockworks/article.html

Ernst Mach was right by saying: »It is utterly beyond our power to measure the changes of things by time. Quite the contrary, time is an abstraction at which we arrive by means of the changes of things«. http://www- gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/HistTopics/Time_2.html

Special of Relativity enriched with the time as an observer effect

The idea of Atemporal Universe is upgrading the Theory of Relativity in a sense that space-time is merely a mathematical model used in science to describe material change running into physical space that itself is atemporal. Time does not run into space on its own. Material change runs into atemporal space.

In the Theory of Relativity the forth coordinate X4 = c x i x t is called the “time coordinate”, whereas c is light speed, i is an imaginary number and t is the number representing duration of material change.

The time coordinate allows us to experience an irreversible stream of material changes that runs into atemporal space in a linear perspective, namely into “space-time” that is a mathematical model only and, it does not exist as a physical reality.

In the Theory of Relativity it is not time that is relative but the speed of material change; in a faster inertial system the speed of material change is lower than in a slower inertial system. In physical space with stronger gravity the speed of material change is lower than in physical space with a weaker gravity field.

This new understanding of time resolves the problem of twins: a brother in a high-speed spaceship is getting older slower than his brother on Earth, but both are getting older in an atemporal physical space. The brother living on the Moon is getting older faster than his brother on Earth because gravity is stronger on Earth.

Contradictory, hypothetical travel into past is possible according to the Theory of Relativity but out of question according to the theory of atemporal space. No one can travel through space-time, as space-time is merely a mathematical model. One can travel into atemporal physical space only.

Atemporal space and the General Theory of Relativity

In General Theory of Relativity 3-dimensional objects exist in a 4- dimensional space. Gravity force is the result of a curvature of this 4- dimensional space. As space is atemporal, one can see the gravity force as a non-propagating force working directly into space and indirectly between material objects.

According to the Loop Quantum Gravity, space has a granular structure; it is made out of quanta of space. A curvature of atemporal space is the result of its quantum structure. Gravity force as the result of a curvature of space is a non-propagating force; it works directly between quanta of space in a 4- dimensional atemporal space and indirectly between 3-dimensional material objects. 3-dimensional material objects are somehow captured inside a 4-dimensional atemporal space.

Claus Kiefer discusses that in quantum gravity there is no time as a fundamental physical reality (4).

Carlo Rovelli discusses that science has to develop a model of the world where time will not be a fundamental physical reality (5).

Atemporal Space and the Einstein-Podolski-Rosen experiment

The Einstein-Podolski-Rosen experiment confirms the idea of atemporal space according to which material change runs into space only and not into time. In the EPR experiment atemporal space is the direct information medium between elementary particles. There is no information signal traveling into time between particles. Atemporal space is the “immediate information medium” between elementary particles (6).

Zeno Arrow Paradox

Zeno argued that the flight of an arrow is an example of motion. At any moment in time, the arrow either is where it is or it is where it is not. If it moves where it is, then it must be standing still, and if it moves where it is not, then it can’t be there; thus, it cannot move.

According to atemporal space, the answer for ZENO paradox is: The arrow does not move in time, it moves in space only, which is atemporal. Humans experience atemporal space as present moment.

In atemporal space there is always NOW, while past, present and future are products of the human mind. Time is an observer effect.

Relation between Time, Mind and Consciousness

With eyes we perceive irreversible stream of material change that runs into atemporal space. Mind elaborates perception of material change into model of linear time, than we experience it.

material change – eyes – mind elaboration in time – experience (7)

Consciousness has ability to watch, to witness this process. You take a pendulum and watch it. You will perceive pendulum moving in space only and not in time. Close your eyes and you will see image of pendulum moving also in space only and not in time. Material pendulum and image of pendulum move into same atemporal space. Material objects and mind objects move into same atemporal space.

Mind is describing their motion with the model of linear time.

Consciousness is watching motion of material and motion of mind objects in atemporal space. Consciousness itself is atemporal. Consciousness is aware of time as a mind model.

Conclusions

With clocks one measures numerical order of the stream of irreversible material change that runs into atemporal universe. Material change X transforms into material change X+1, X+1 transforms into X+2 and so on. Numerical order of material change that one measures with clocks is a physical quantity independent of measurement. The stream of material change has no duration on its own; one gives it a sense of duration by measuring it with clocks and experiencing them into mind model of time.

Duration of material change is a “man made” physical quantity. There is no past and future in the universe, both exist only in the human mind. Time is an observer effect. Time exists only when we measures it. Humanity does not exist in time, time exists in humanity. Universe is an atemporal phenomenon, consciousness is an atemporal phenomenon, mind is a temporal phenomenon.

References:

1. Sorli A., Sorli K. (2005) From Space-time to A-Temporal Physical Space, Frontier Perspectives, Vol. 14, Num. 1. http://www.temple.edu/cfs/articles.html

2. Fiscaletti D., Sorli A. (2005). Toward an a-temporal interpretation of quantum potential. Frontier Perspectives, Vol. 14, Num. 2. http://www.temple.edu/cfs/articles.html

3. Fiscaletti D., Sorli A. (2006). Toward a new interpretation of subatomic particles and their motion inside a-temporal physical space. Frontier Perspectives, Volume 15, Num 2 http://www.temple.edu/cfs/articles.html

4. Claus Kiefer (2008), Does Time Exist in Quantum Gravity? http://fqxi.org/data/essay- contest-files/Kiefer_fqx.pdf

5. Carlo Rovelli (2008) Forget Time http://fqxi.org/data/essay-contest- files/Rovelli_Time.pdf

6. Fiscaletti D. Sorli A.S. (2008) NON-LOCALITY AND THE SYMMETRYZED QUANTUM POTENTIAL , Physics Essays, December 2008, Vol. 21, No. 4 http://www.physicsessays.com/

7. Sorli A., Sorli I. (2005). Consciousness As A Research Tool Into Space And Time, Electronic Journal of Theoretical Physics, Vol. 2, Num. 6 http://www.ejtp.com

SOURCE: http://www.wbabin.net/sorli/sorli12.pdf

There is a very famous poem written by the third patriarch of Zen, Seng-ts’an, called the Hsin-Hsin Ming, which translates as Verses in Faith Mind. In this poem Seng-ts’an writes these lines: “Do not seek the truth; only cease to cherish opinions.”  This is a reversal of the way most people go about trying to realize absolute truth. Most people seek truth, but Seng-ts’an is saying not to seek truth. This sounds very strange indeed. How will you find truth if you don’t seek it? How will you find happiness if you do not seek it? How will you find God if you do not seek God?  Everyone seems to be seeking something. In spirituality seeking is highly honored and respected, and here comes Seng-ts’an saying not to seek.

The reason Seng-ts’an is saying not to seek is because truth, or reality, is not something objective. Truth is not something “out there.” It is not something you will find as an object of perception or as a temporal experience. Reality is neither inside of you nor outside of you. Both “outside” and “inside” are not getting to the point. They both miss the mark because outside and inside are conceptual constructs with no inherent reality. They are simply abstract points of reference. Even words like “you,” or “me,” or “I,” are nothing more than conceptual points of reference existing only in the mind. Such concepts may have a practical value in daily life, but when assumed to be true they distort perception and create a virtual reality, or what in the East is called the world of samsara.

Seng-ts’an was a wily old Zen master. He viewed things through the eye of enlightenment and was intimately aware of how the conditioned mind fools itself into false pursuits and blind alleys. He knew that seeking truth, or reality, is as silly as a dog thinking that it must chase its tail in order to attain its tail. The dog already has full possession of its tail from the very beginning. Besides, once the dog grasps his tail, he will have to let go of it in order to function. So even if you were to find the truth through grasping, you will have to let it go at some point in order to function. But even so, any truth that is attained through grasping is not the real truth because such a truth would be an object and therefore not real to begin with.

In order to seek, you must first have an idea, ideal, or an image, what it is you are seeking. That idea may not even be very conscious or clear but it must be there in order for you to seek. Being an idea it cannot be real. That’s why Seng-ts’an says “only cease to cherish opinions.” By opinions he means ideas, ideals, beliefs, and images, as well as personal opinions. This sounds easy but it is rarely as easy as it seems. Seng-ts’an is not saying you should never have a thought in your head, he is saying not to cherish the thoughts in your head. To cherish implies an emotional attachment and holding on to. When you cherish something, you place value on it because you think that it is real or because it defines who you think you are. This cherishing of thoughts and opinions is what the false self thrives on. It is what the false self is made of. When you realize that none of your ideas about truth are real, it is quite a shock to your system. It is an unexpected blow to the seeker and the seeking.

The task of any useful spiritual practice is therefore to dismantle cherishing the thoughts, opinions, and ideas that make up the false self, the self that is seeking. This is the true task of both meditation and inquiry. Through meditation we can come to see that the only thing that makes us suffer is our own mind. Sitting quietly reveals the mind to be nothing but conditioned thinking spontaneously arising within awareness. Through cherishing this thinking, through taking it to be real and relevant, we create internal images of self and others and the world. Then we live in these images as if they were real. To be caught within these images is to live in an illusory virtual reality.

Through observing the illusory nature of thought without resisting it, we can begin to question and inquire into the underlying belief structures that support it. These belief structures are what form our emotional attachments to the false self and the world our minds create.

This is why I sometimes ask people, “Are you ready to lose your world?” Because true awakening will not fit into the world as you imagine it or the self you imagine yourself to be. Reality is not something that you integrate into your personal view of things. Reality is life without your distorting stories, ideas, and beliefs. It is perfect unity free of all reference points, with nowhere to stand and nothing to grab hold of. It has never been spoken, never been written, never been imagined. It is not hidden, but in plain view. Cease to cherish opinions and it stands before your very eyes.

© Adyashanti 2007

Adyashanti.org Writings.

The story goes like this: Sometime in the 1940s, Enrico Fermi was talking about the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence with some other physicists. They were impressed that life had evolved quickly and progressively on Earth. They figured our galaxy holds about 100 billion stars, and that an intelligent, exponentially-reproducing species could colonize the galaxy in just a few million years. They reasoned that extraterrestrial intelligence should be common by now. Fermi listened patiently, then asked, simply, “So, where is everybody?” That is, if extraterrestrial intelligence is common, why haven’t we met any bright aliens yet? This conundrum became known as Fermi’s Paradox.

Since then, the Paradox has become ever more baffling. Paleontology has shown that organic life evolved quickly after the Earth’s surface cooled and became life-hospitable. Given simple life forms, evolution shows progressive trends toward larger bodies, brains, and social complexity. Evolutionary psychology has revealed several credible paths from simpler social minds to human-level creative intelligence. So evolving intelligence seems likely, given a propitious habitat—and astronomers think such habitats are common. Moreover, at least 150 extrasolar planets have been identified in the last few years, suggesting that life-hospitable planets orbit most stars. Yet 40 years of intensive searching for extraterrestrial intelligence have yielded nothing: no radio signals, no credible spacecraft sightings, no close encounters of any kind.

It looks, then, as if we can answer Fermi in two ways. Perhaps our current science over-estimates the likelihood of extraterrestrial intelligence evolving. Or, perhaps evolved technical intelligence has some deep tendency to be self-limiting, even self-exterminating. After Hiroshima, some suggested that any aliens bright enough to make colonizing space ships would be bright enough to make thermonuclear bombs, and would use them on each other sooner or later. Maybe extraterrestrial intelligence always blows itself up. Indeed, Fermi’s Paradox became, for a while, a cautionary tale about Cold War geopolitics.

I suggest a different, even darker solution to the Paradox. Basically, I think the aliens don’t blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot. They become like a self-stimulating rat, pressing a bar to deliver electricity to its brain’s ventral tegmental area, which stimulates its nucleus accumbens to release dopamine, which feels…ever so good.

The fundamental problem is that an evolved mind must pay attention to indirect cues of biological fitness, rather than tracking fitness itself. This was a key insight of evolutionary psychology in the early 1990s; although evolution favors brains that tend to maximize fitness (as measured by numbers of great-grandkids), no brain has capacity enough to do so under every possible circumstance. Evolution simply could never have anticipated the novel environments, such as modern society, that our social primate would come to inhabit. That would be a computationally intractable problem, even for the new IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer that runs 280 trillion operations per second. Even long-term weather prediction is easy when compared to fitness prediction. As a result, brains must evolve short-cuts: fitness-promoting tricks, cons, recipes and heuristics that work, on average, under ancestrally normal conditions.

The result is that we don’t seek reproductive success directly; we seek tasty foods that have tended to promote survival, and luscious mates who have tended to produce bright, healthy babies. The modern result? Fast food and pornography. Technology is fairly good at controlling external reality to promote real biological fitness, but it’s even better at delivering fake fitness—subjective cues of survival and reproduction without the real-world effects. Having real friends is so much more effort than watching Friends. Actually colonizing the galaxy would be so much harder than pretending to have done it when filming Star Wars or Serenity. The business of humanity has become entertainment, and entertainment is the business of feeding fake fitness cues to our brains.

Fitness-faking technology tends to evolve much faster than our psychological resistance to it. With the invention of the printing press, people read more and have fewer kids. (Only a few curmudgeons lament this.) With the invention of Xbox 360, people would rather play a high-resolution virtual ape in Peter Jackson’s King Kong than be a perfect-resolution real human. Teens today must find their way through a carnival of addictively fitness-faking entertainment products: iPods, DVDs, TiVo, Sirius Satellite Radio, Motorola cellphones, the Spice channel, EverQuest, instant messaging, MDMA, BC bud. The traditional staples of physical, mental and social development—athletics, homework, dating—are neglected. The few young people with the self-control to pursue the meritocratic path often get distracted at the last minute. Take, for example, the MIT graduates who apply to do computer game design for Electronics Arts, rather than rocket science for NASA.

Around 1900, most inventions concerned physical reality: cars, airplanes, Zeppelins, electric lights, vacuum cleaners, air conditioners, bras, zippers. In 2005, most inventions concern virtual entertainment—the top 10 patent-recipients were IBM, Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Matsushita, Samsung, Micron Technology, Intel, Hitachi, Toshiba and Fujitsu—not Boeing, Toyota or Victoria’s Secret. We have already shifted from a reality economy to a virtual economy, from physics to psychology as the value-driver and resource-allocator. We are already disappearing up our own brainstems. Our neurons over-stimulate each other, promiscuously, as our sperm and eggs decay, unused. Freud’s pleasure principle triumphs over the reality principle. Today we narrow-cast human-interest stories to each other, rather than broadcasting messages of universal peace and progress to other star systems.

Maybe the bright aliens did the same. I suspect that a certain period of fitness-faking narcissism is inevitable after any intelligent life evolves. This is the Great Temptation for any technological species—to shape their subjective reality to provide the cues of survival and reproductive success without the substance. Most bright alien species probably go extinct gradually, allocating more time and resources to their pleasures, and less to their children. They eventually die out when the game behind all games—the Game of Life—says “Game Over; you are out of lives and you forgot to reproduce.”

Heritable variation in personality might allow some lineages to resist the Great Temptation and last longer. Some individuals and families may start with an “irrational” Luddite abhorrence of entertainment technology, and they may evolve ever more self-control, conscientiousness and pragmatism. They will evolve a horror of virtual entertainment, psychoactive drugs and contraception. They will stress the values of hard work, delayed gratifica tion, child-rearing and environmental stewardship. They will combine the family values of the religious right with the sustainability values of the Greenpeace left. Their concerns about the Game of Life will baffle the political pollsters who only understand the rhetoric of status and power, individual and society, rights and duties, good and evil, us and them.

This, too, may be happening already. Christian and Muslim fundamentalists and anti-consumerism activists already understand exactly what the Great Temptation is, and how to avoid it. They insulate themselves from our creative-class dreamworlds and our EverQuest economics. They wait patiently for our fitness-faking narcissism to go extinct. Those practical-minded breeders will inherit the Earth as like-minded aliens may have inherited a few other planets. When they finally achieve contact, it will not be a meeting of novel-readers and game-players. It will be a meeting of dead-serious super-parents who congratulate each other on surviving not just the Bomb, but the Xbox.

Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM.

Brian: Look, you’ve got it all wrong! You don’t need to follow me, you don’t need to follow anybody! You’ve got to think for yourselves! You’re all individuals!
The Crowd (in unison): Yes! We’re all individuals!
Brian:  You’re all different!
The Crowd (in unison): Yes, we are all different!
Man in Crowd: I’m not.           (The Life of Brian)

“People care what others think about them. In fact they usually care a lot, more than they care to admit. Since caring less is considered admirable in our society, people often say and signal that they care less than others care. But I think it is misleading to talk in terms of conformists, who care lots what others think, versus individualists, who care less.

It sees to me that while people do vary in conformity, this variation is less in how much folks care about others’ evaluations, and more about which others they care about. “Conformists” tend to care about a common standard status audience – a usual mix of people weighted by a standard status. “Non-conformists,” in contrast, “march to the beat of a different drummer” by caring about non-standard status audiences.

For example, as an adolescent I seem to have deeply internalized the idea of great scientists/visionaries as heroes. I long judged my efforts by their standards – what would increase the chance that I would become such a person, or be approved by one. Marching to the beat of this unusual status audience drummer often led me to “non-conform” by doing things that less impressed folks around me. But I very definitely wanted to impress someone.

This seems to be the case with most interesting “non-conformists” I know.   They are human, and surely care deeply about the opinions of others. But their special care for the opinions of particular others often leads them to disapproval by ordinary others. Sometimes you can’t please everyone, and must choose whom to please. It seems to me that the main difference between folks is that “non-conformists” try to please less standard audiences.  Viva la difference.”

Overcoming Bias : Non-Conformists Conform.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Carve

“The phrase “spiral of silence” actually refers to how people tend to remain silent when they feel that their views are in the minority. The model is based on three premises: 1) people have a “quasi-statistical organ,” a sixth-sense if you will, which allows them to know the prevailing public opinion, even without access to polls, 2) people have a fear of isolation and know what behaviors will increase their likelihood of being socially isolated, and 3) people are reticent to express their minority views, primarily out of fear of being isolated.

The closer a person believes the opinion held is similar to the prevailing public opinion, the more they are willing to openly disclose that opinion in public. Then, if public sentiment changes, the person will recognize that the opinion is less in favor and will be less willing to express that opinion publicly. As the perceived distance between public opinion and a person’s personal opinion grows, the more unlikely the person is to express their opinion.”

http://www.utwente.nl/cw/theorieenoverzicht/Theory clusters/Mass Media/spiral_of_silence.doc/index.html

“This secret is no farther than merely being in the moment, you just have to be receptive to what is firmly and always has been in place. That you are not separate from the whole, that you are nothing in particular but you are all that is. You go beyond any concept and because of this, how could you reside only through the minds intellect. You are not those qualities, that you have been lead to believe, they are just mere by products of the personality. So let the personality play it’s game, it is all in good fun, but you need not be attached to that as your identity. You are at a much larger (or smaller) scale then that. This is why it’s so hard to put what you are in words… because the Truth does not take opposition into account because there is no opposition, there never was. Duality is an appearance, a phenomenal experience of the human being, but all experiences are like dreams, so watch the dream as if you were the sky and the dream were the cloud passing by. Do not try and hold the cloud in place and do not be sad that the cloud will move on, it is it’s nature to float on. See that it is you that you are looking for, seeking, and then seeking will drop away. See that you are not to be tied down, that you are the sky to the cloud, not the cloud to the sky.”

“You are Being, appearing as Human” – Adyashanti

via: http://liberatedself.wordpress.com/2009/12/12/poem-on-silence-adyashanti/

“This image was created as part of the Global Consciousness Project (GPC) data. It was process with algorithms created for EEG biofeedback purposes by the company BrainPaint. It is a time-lapse film of 8 minutes of data. From 1:45-3:30 minutes into the video, it is just one minute of date explored from multiple perspectives. For more information on the GPC go to noosphere.princeton.edu.”

http://globalbrainpaint.com/

These guys creep me out … still, it is interesting.

“BrainPaint is the creation and dream of Bill Scott. He first developed the software in 2005 to use it in his private practice and at the exclusive Moonview Sanctuary.

Bill began receiving requests for his software, especially from practitioners who were new to EEG biofeedback and did not want to invest the considerable time and resources it historically took to begin a neurofeedback practice.

In 2007, after BrainPaint had been used in a couple of clinical settings for two years a company was formed to make BrainPaint available to practitioners in the form of a turnkey system. We incorporated features based on Bill’s experience teaching over 3,000 practitioners globally on traditional neurofeedback systems. We eliminated most of the barriers to enter the field and the reasons for attrition among new practitioners.

Emphasis was placed on a low price point so that new practitioners can afford to test the waters. We also removed the significant learning curve in choosing appropriate and effective protocols to run sessions and assess progress. We have come as close as we could to integrating confidence in our automated turnkey system as we have incorporated over 15 years of clinical and research experience into BrainPaint.

We are committed to continually improving the efficacy and ease of use of our EEG biofeedback system to support new practitioners, seasoned practitioners and the home users they supervise. We are also dedicated to the field of EEG biofeedback with our globally expanding knowledge base from BrainPaint practitioners around the world.”

http://ekarine.org/wp-admin/pub/NGT.pdf

“Online, users can become gatekeepers, and are no longer simply being gatekept for – so gatekeeping power has shifted to some extent; additionally, gatekeeping is no longer a solid state, but is becoming a much more dynamic phenomenon where we’re sometimes gatekeeping ourselves, sometimes receiving the results of gatekeeping processes.

Gatekeeping theory was developed by Kurt Lewin in the 1940s, observing food habits in families (and seeing housewives as gatekeepers at that time); this was later applied in a major way to the editors in news publications, who control what information is selected for publication from all the daily events. Other applications are the management of technology (what new technologies reach a larger range of users) and information science (already starting to look at the role of communities as gatekeepers).

Gatekeeping theories can now be found in a very large range of fields (from information science to sociology, from management to public affairs), and Karine has examined top publications in eight such fields for occurrences of gatekeeping and related terms in recent years. There are some common themes which emerge from this – gatekeeping practices in various contexts, for example (access, dissemination, linking, editorial, protection, preservation of culture, facilitation, change agent).

Cross-disciplinary themes are about the gatekeeping process itself (how does it work in specific instances), differences in new and old technological frameworks, identity, influence, practical factors, and normative considerations. But what is missing here is a real interdisciplinary vocabulary, a consideration of the ‘gated’ (the people for whom the gatekeeping process is performed), the dynamics of gatekeeping, the notion of communities as compound gatekeepers, and our own self-regulation as gatekeepers.

There are four attributes of the ‘gated’ which can be used here: their political power (their ability to set agendas or change their preferences), their own information production, their relationship with the gatekeeper, and their alternatives. There are multiple types of ‘gateds’ here, too: the traditional gated, the dormant gated (e.g. a captive audience, a vagabond reader), the potential gated, the bounded gated (e.g. the frustrated gated), and the challenging gated. In the literature, these types of ‘gateds’ appear mainly as dormant gateds – people who have very limited bargaining power with their gatekeepers. Higher, more active levels of the gated do not appear significantly.

We can then apply this networked gatekeeping theory to online uses: examining the gatekeeping processes in viral information transmission online, examining discussions in Wikipedia as controlling its information synthesis processes, examining distinctions in Twitter between the 20% informers who share information generally and the 80% ‘meformers’ who share information mainly about themselves, examining the role of search engines in channeling information, or examining the self-regulation of virtual communities, for example.”

via: http://snurb.info/node/1197

“A memory hole is any mechanism for the alteration or disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts, or other records, such as from a web site or other archive, particularly as part of an attempt to give the impression that something never happened.

Current usage

A memory hole is seen by some as one of the common tactical and strategic operations of governments, particularly as a method of silencing those whose historical views are out of step with governmental or more popular views. As two seminal quotations note: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” — Inner Party member O’Brien in 1984; “Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.” — I. F. Stone”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole

http://infowar.net/tia/www.darpa.mil/iao/

http://improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume16/v16i2/cartozoology-AIR-16-2.pdf

Love it!  🙂