Try to Understand

Cognitive Resources are limited. You only have so much cognitive energy to allocate each day, and how you choose to do so reflects powerfully on your personality. If you devote your cognitive energy largely to solving problems at work, you are likely to be driven, successful individual, for example, but you might have no energy left to deal with your family when you get home. It is obvious that people choose to allocate this scarce resource in widely divergent fashions. You may be far more interested in tracking your local sports team than in recent news on the possible dissolution of the Euro.

With this in mind, I am conflicted about the lack of empathy I observe among those around me. Note, here, the difference between empathy (the ability to understand and share the feelings of another) and sympathy (feeling bad for someone else's misfortune). When juxtaposed, sympathy is a comparatively selfish emotional response. In effect, when you feel sympathy for someone, you are saying "I would hate if that happened to me - therefore they must hate that it's happening to them." This is a simple reaction, requiring little in the way of cognitive resource expenditure. It doesn't push you to consider a different frame of reference or state of mind. You're simply projecting your own reaction onto other people, and assuming that theirs is likely the same.

Empathy, on the other hand, requires significant cognitive energy output. To do it effectively you have to re-frame your entire worldview and bring it in line with that of another person. Rather than projecting your own understanding of a situation out, you're pulling someone else's in. This involves first an identification of issues important to the other person, then an analysis of their state of mind (emotional, pragmatic, etc.), and a variety of other cognitive twists as well. It's not easy. Despite this, it is absolutely necessary for any meaningful connection with another person. Without empathy, you're stuck in your own bubble dealing with two-dimensional avatars, not three-dimensional human beings. Without empathy, there is no communication. Without communication, there is no connection.

I try to empathize with everyone with whom I interact. I don't succeed. I don't expect others to succeed where I, myself, cannot. However, I don't see even a moderate effort at empathy on most peoples' part. I see a theory of mind that stops at awareness that other people have distinct experiences; a theory of mind that refuses to acknowledge the validity of those distinct experiences, insofar as it doesn't push people to try to see things through the frames created by those experiences.

An ode to the incomplete

The primary impediment I face in maintaining a blog is a desire to present only crystalline thought. The idea is simple: if I only present lock-tight perspectives, I will insulate myself from criticism. As it turns out, this is not necessary. Some critiques are valuable - they help present new avenues of thought that I had not considered. Likewise, freeing myself to present ideas that are not fully fleshed out will promote further thought - I don't need to have all the answers before I share. Having realized this, let's see if I can put it into practice and actually update this thing more than once in a blue moon.

Today I saw a blind boy. He was climbing the stairs between two subway platforms, moving from one train to another. It was rush hour, and behind him writhed the thronging masses of rush hour commuters, desperate to be somewhere else. The boy seemed oblivious, patiently ascending one step at a time, his face radiating a pleasant smile, his hand gripping the railing. He was unable to account for those caught behind him on the stairs, and so he simply paid them no mind. They would have to wait.

The people behind him showed an altogether different awareness, both from the boy and from one another. The few immediately behind, close enough to see his tentative steps, his dark sunglasses, and his red and white cane, seemed distraught. Their faces were a mix of near anguish and utter frustration. Normally when someone holds up a line of eminently (self)-important men and women during rush hour there is hell to pay. Angry shouts would be heard reverberating down the tunnel as shoulders are shoved and quick feet dart through the tiniest gap. But for those few with full awareness of the holdup, they could feel only frustration and, correspondingly, shame at their lack of empathy for the boy.

Of course they would rather have moved unhindered to their train. Of course they are irritated by this unjust impediment. Yet they know there is not so great a rush as they would pretend, and so their irritation turns back on itself and becomes guilt for holding this boy responsible for his infirmity and their slowed progress.

Those further back had no such guilt. They lacked knowledge of the reason for the holdup and, justifiably or not, assumed it to be mere incompetence or insensitivity on someone's part. Here were glowers, frowns, glares, and a whole panoply of angry facial contortions more typical of rush hour delays. As I walked past them knowing, as I did, the source of their anger, I wished I could dispel it with a a simple gift of knowledge. "You are not in so great a hurry that the slow pace of the young blind boy ahead should cause you such anger. Let him travel as he does and, soon enough, you will be back on your way."

But in the hurried crush of rush hour there is no time for such conversation. I went on my way, the boy on his.

We’re stuck on this tiny ball of rock. We can’t really get off, so, for the foreseeable future this is it. Look around you: left; right; down… but not up. That’s it. That’s everything we have to work with. All the oil, coal, and gas we can possibly burn lies beneath our feet. Sure, when you’re standing on the surface of this ball it looks awful big. But go up maybe 25 miles – a 20 minute drive on most highways – and you’ll start to see just how small it is.

While you’re up there, you’ll notice something else too –how large we’ve become. Did you know there’s not a single place on the surface of our world where you can’t detect the traces of humanity? Travel into the deepest heart of the Amazon and you’ll hear the whirr of chainsaws or the whoosh of jet liners flying overhead. There’s a reason some scientists claim we’ve entered a new geologic age – the Anthropocene.

Our world glows with the light of human invention. It’s a truly beautiful image, made possible by the incredible growth in knowledge we’ve achieved over our brief history. But it is still the image of a civilization in its infancy. Sir Isaac Newton – one of the founders of modern science – once said, "If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." It is a noble thing to give credit to one’s predecessors, and right to do so.

Today, rather than standing on the shoulders of our ancestors, we are burdened by their weight. So many trillions of man-hours, and so many millions of livelihoods, have been poured into legacy technologies and systems that we can barely conceive of doing away with them. This is partly due to fear of the unknown, but there is a more legitimate source of momentum to overcome as well – all that work has produced astounding results!

From one gallon of decayed plant matter we can propel ourselves and our belongings more than a day’s walk at a speed only the fastest of natural creatures can match. This is an achievement to be celebrated, as it has fundamentally changed the way we interact with our world. However, the fact that it works so very well is no reason to ignore the development of newer, better technologies – especially now that we know the side-effects of our ancestors’ ingenuity threatens all that they began.

No such legacy system has any inherent right to a continued existence. If it is truly the best at what it does, it easily will fend off all challenges. However, if there are other, superior ideas, it is positively criminal to hinder their development. Likewise, attempts to retrofit these antiquated ideas, rather than replace them outright when new developments show great promise, are foolish and short-sighted. When creativity may only flourish in pre-ordained fields; when truly new ideas are smothered by entrenched interests; we all lose.

The internal combustion engine is only one example of such societal inertia. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to suggest others. Particulars aside, the general principle remains true: stagnation of innovation will destroy our civilization.

The Bonuses are Just a Distraction

This post is excerpted from a comment thread found here. I’ve pulled out the original post and made some alterations for clarity. The subject is the AIG bonuses and the bailout the company received.

About the current CEO:

• He's being paid 1 dollar a year.
• He gets no bonuses, either way.
• He gets no stocks.
• He didn't sign these contracts, he inherited them.

About the people who tanked AIG: (the CEO said it was only about 25 people within the AIG Financial Products branch that caused all this mess, and they’ve all left the company already)

• They are gone.
• They were few.

About the people who received the bonuses:

• They did not kill AIG
• They were offered these bonuses last year, to stay for another year, and clean up the mess.
• They reduced $2.7 trillion of shit to $1.6 trillion of shit.

About the bonuses:

• They are less than .1% of the bailout money.
• They were offered last year, to retain people (NOT the people who caused the problem in the first place) until they cleaned up the mess.
• They were NOT meant to retain people for next year.

What if we didn't pay them?

• The people who are (successfully) cleaning up the mess, would leave.
• Then, they would sue (rightfully so).
• AIG would have to try to replace them, while trying to prevent losses on the suddenly 'unmanaged' accounts.
• AIG might be forced into bankruptcy, for defaulting (aka: we lose).
• AIG might survive, but take further losses, and need more help (aka: we lose).

Personal thoughts:

• The current CEO deserves nothing but respect, but instead, he gets death threats.
• The people who stayed on, and cleaned up the mess, deserve to be well paid. They saved us a ton of money, and the bonuses are marginal in comparison.

Analogy:

The people from FP (financial products) are the burger flippers at McDonalds. The people who got the bonuses work the counter at McDonalds. The burger flippers made some seriously shitty burgers. They got fired. The counter crew has spent the last year trying to find places to safely unload those burgers (worm farms, bacteria labs, etc.) It was a dirty job, and Mike Rowe wasn't available.

This post is made based on analysis of  the full hearings on C-Span that occurred last week. I haven’t had time to watch them myself, but the above summary seems reasonable and I wanted to share it. Feel free to click the link at the top and see the rest of the discussion in the comment thread.

 Update: I’ve been thinking more about this and wanted to make something clear. I, personally, make no statement as to the morality of giving out bonuses when AIG has become the world’s largest Welfare Queen. I’ve seen reasonable arguments on both sides (For bonuses: They’re the only payment these people are receiving, and they’re the only ones who can handle this mess right now; Against bonuses: they should be putting every dime toward maintaining solvency) and I see no clear answer.

The only point the above post addresses is whether or not the people receiving bonuses are, in fact, the ones responsible for nuking AIG in the first place. They do not appear to be, and as such are not deserving of our scorn on that basis.