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Donnie Takes a Blue Ribbon for Spelling!

18 Monday May 2020

Posted by petersironwood in America, apocalypse, politics, psychology, story, Uncategorized

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

America, Democracy, environment, fiction, school, short story, sociopath, sociopathic, truth, tyranny

 

two girls doing school works

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[NOTE: This is a work of pure fiction. Any resemblance to characters alive or dead is purely coincidental.] 

“Children, let’s all clap our hands together. We want to congratulate Marcy for winning a Blue Ribbon for winning the Spelling Bee.” 

Donnie rolled his eyes. He had never liked Marcy. Her skin was dark, for one thing. Not as dark as a N——- but too dark to be a real person. Maybe she was “Port of a Rico” or something. Who cares, thought Donnie. Stupid spelling bee anyway. 

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The teacher, Miss Galore, noticed that while most of the kids in her third grade class were clapping, Donnie was grinding his teeth and pounding the table and rolling his eyes.

“Is everything all right, Donnie? You seem upset.” 

Donnie made himself smile pleasantly. “Oh, I’m fine, Miss Galore. Thanks for asking. I’m so pleased as punch for Marcy. What could be better than winning a Blue Ribbon for a Spelling Bee?”

“Oh, good. I’m glad you’re okay. But since you brought it up, there is another contest coming up. This month will be a Science Fair. Let me see the hands. How many of you would like to enter the Science Fair?” 

Everyone’s hand shot up, even Donnie’s. 

Then, the bell rang. But Miss Galore ran a tight ship. The children knew that even though school was basically over when the bell rang, it would be impolite to leave until they were dismissed by Miss Galore. 

“All right, class. I’ll tell you more about the Science Fair tomorrow. For now, Class Dismissed.” 

The kids all began chattering with their friends, and walking out toward the place were parents were lined up in their air conditioned cars. 

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Donnie grabbed his books and walked over to Marcy. “Hi, Marcy! That’s really swell that you won the Spelling Bee! That Blue Ribbon looks very cool! Can I see it?” 

Marcy didn’t really trust Donnie, but his voice sounded sweet, so she handed him the ribbon. 

Donnie’s teeny hand shot out like a striking snake and he snatched the ribbon. He turned and dashed out of the room as fast as he could. He skidded around the corner and slapped into the door to the boy’s bathroom. He dashed over to the nearest stall, threw the ribbon into the toilet, and closed the stall door. Then, he flushed the toilet. He gathered his books back up, and opened the stall door slowly. He peered out. Only one other boy, Billy, was in the bathroom. Most of the kids were outside lining up to get picked up by their parents or chauffeurs, he thought. Billy, like an idiot, thought Donnie, is looking down at his thingie to make sure he doesn’t pee on the floor. Who gives a damn? So, Donnie pushed open the door to the boy’s bathroom. On the far side of the hall, only about ten feet away, Miss Galore and Marcy were both staring at him. 

Marcy’s bottom lip was trembling and there were tears on her cheeks. A big smile lit up Donnie’s face. That won’t do. He pushed his fingernails into his palms and forced himself to create a look of concern on his face instead. He had practiced for hours in front of a mirror, so that his look of concern was remarkably genuine looking. Now, he needed the voice to match.

“What’s wrong, Miss Galore? You look troubled.” 

Miss Galore took a few steps closer. “Marcy tells me that you took her Blue Ribbon.” 

“Oh, yes, I did look at it. It’s wonderful. You should feel very proud, Marcy!”

Marcy tried to make her voice sound strong, but at that, she failed. “You took my ribbon though! Give it back! I didn’t even get to show my Mom and Dad yet!” 

Donnie looked over. She was on the brink of squirting out more tears. Sort of like peeing on your own face, when you thought about it. I’ll never do that. What an idiot she was. If she didn’t want me to take her ribbon, why hand it to me, he asked himself. Stupid bitch deserved to lose her ribbon. 

“Miss Galore, I did look at Marcy’s ribbon for a moment. I gave it right back to her. What’s wrong? Did you lose it, Marcy?” 

“NO! I didn’t lose it! You took it!” 

“Oh, Marcy, I’m so sorry you lost it. We all lose things some times. As I’m sure Miss Galore will tell you — you have to be careful not to lose things —- especially things you like a lot.” 

Marcy was now screaming: “YOU TOOK IT! GIVE IT BACK! IT’S MINE!” 

Miss Galore noticed more kids were gathering round to see what was causing the commotion. She said calmly, “Donnie, can you please give me the ribbon?” 

Donnie looked affronted. “Oh, I don’t have it. I just had it for maybe — one minute — not even a minute — maybe fifteen seconds. And then, I handed it right back.” 

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Marcy held back her tears, but barely. “Why did you take it in the bathroom?”

Donnie put a look of puzzlement on his face. “Why did I go to the bathroom? I had to use the toilet, Marcy. Isn’t that why you go to the bathroom too?” 

Now, Miss Galore looked back and forth between the two children. Donnie didn’t look upset at all. But Marcy certainly did. She wondered whether Marcy could have simply misplaced it. “Do you think it might still be back in the classroom, Marcy? Maybe we should take a look?” 

“NO!” Marcy screamed. “I didn’t lose it. Donnie asked if he could see it and then he snatched and he ran out of the room and into the boy’s bathroom. I don’t have it. He has it.” She pointed at Donnie. 

“Well, I don’t have it. I will swear on a whole stack of Bibles. You can search me. Search me good. I don’t have your blue ribbon Marcy. I’m sorry you’re upset. I know it makes me angry too when I lose things. But you shouldn’t go blaming other kids when you lose something.”

“ARGH!” said Marcy. “I did not lose it! You took it! Make him empty his pockets, Miss Galore. I know he has it!” 

Miss Galore frowned. She couldn’t really do a thorough search of him. Maybe she could get one of the boy counselor’s to do it. She glanced around. Luckily, the teachers still stood out among the students. “Oh, Mr. Graham! Mr. Graham! Can you please come here a moment?”

Miss Galore explained the situation quickly. Mr. Graham frowned. “I’m not doing a strip search of the boy! How about this: write a note and ask the parents to search him when he gets home. Donnie, turn your pockets out.” 

“But Mr. Graham, I didn’t do anything. I didn’t steal her stupid ribbon. I looked at it. It’s — I have to tell you, it doesn’t look that nice up close. Her little medal isn’t even real gold. I don’t have anything bad in my pockets.” 

“Donnie. Do it now! Turn your pockets out,” said Mr. Graham who could pretend to be genuinely outraged over nothing and he genuinely didn’t like back-talk from students.

Donnie shook his head and appeared very reluctant, but he turned out all four pants pockets Except for a pack of Kleenex, and what appeared to be the wings of a dragonfly, his pants pockets were empty. Mr Graham nodded. “Thank you, Donnie. Hand me your backpack.” 

Donnie shifted from one foot to the other. “Mr. Graham, my driver, Pom-Pom is going to be mad that I’m so late. It’s just books mostly.” He handed the backpack to Mr. Graham who searched the inside and turned each book upside down to see whether there was a ribbon hidden between the pages. He turned to Miss Galore. “Nothing.” 

“You see?” said Donnie. “I told you I didn’t steal her stupid ribbon! She’s such a liar! She probably cheated to win the ribbon in the first place!” 

Miss Galore wanted this to be over. “Okay. Okay. You two get over here. I want you to apologize and shake hands. Marcy, you apologize for accusing Donnie. And Donnie, you apologize for … not making sure that when you handed the ribbon back to Marcy, that she didn’t drop it. I don’t know. Anyway, just shake hands and I don’t want to hear any more about it. I’m sure your ribbon will turn up, Marcy.” 

woman s head on plate

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That evening at dinner, when he had eaten his fill and Fred Senior seemed to be in a reasonably decent mood, and not yet drunk, Donnie casually said, “Say, Sir, did you know that there are N——-s at my school?” 

Fred Senior, sputtered through his mashed potatoes. “WHAT? Are you sure?” 

Donnie looked at the ceiling and pretended to think. “No, but I think so. She might only be half N——. I don’t really know. She has dark skin though. I never paid much attention but today she told a lie to try to get me in trouble at school.” 

“What the F*** are N****s doing at your school? I’ll talk to the Principal tomorrow and get this straightened out. Are they teaching you kids anything useful at that school?” 

Fred Junior said, “Yes, Father. I am learning algebra. That’s useful.” 

Fred Senior smirked and snorted. “Doesn’t sound like it, but the main thing is you’ll get into a good college.” 

Donnie added, “I’m going to win a Blue Ribbon in the Science Fair. I’ll find out more about it tomorrow.”  

Fred shook his head. “Christ! What rot. Anyway, how about desert?” 

Mary brought over a large dish and placed it proudly into the middle of the table. In it were little scoops of watermelon, cantaloupe, and honeydew. There were slices of apple and banana as well as some ripe strawberries all arranged quite artistically to Mary’s eye. 

Fred Senior grimaced and shouted, “What the F### is that? Seriously, Mary, have you gone nuts? I asked for desert! Not a f###ing salad!”

Mary swallowed hard. The A/C was out. It was hot as hell on this day in mid May. She had remembered that fruits were so much better for you than pies, cakes, and cookies. She thought maybe it would nice to have a cool fruit salad on a warm and sultry night. She had thought. That was her problem. She should never think. She should just do whatever Fred tells her too. Her mind raced. What could she get to assuage her husband quickly. 

Fred Senior glared at her. He had stopped yelling though, thought Mary. His voice instead had that soft, sweet, syrupy sound that it made…whenever things were going to go terribly badly for her.

Fred Senior did indeed speak in a soft, controlled voice. “Children. Go upstairs now and do your homework. I need to have a little chat with your Mother. You know. Big People stuff. You wouldn’t be interested. Boring really. So upstairs. Go on. Up. Now.” 

The children pushed their chairs back and looked straight down at the ground. They had been taught that, even a glance at each other or at Mom or Dad could — would — be considered as a reproach to their Father. So, they all tip-toed up to bed and immersed themselves in a book; they learned that if they did it well enough, they could ignore the noises — whatever they were — that would be coming from the kitchen and dining room. 

All, but Donnie, that is. His procedure, was to go up with the other kids and then sneak back down and watch. It was one of the biggest risks he ever took in his entire life. But he couldn’t help himself. He loved the way Daddy made Mommy so weak and pathetic. It made his Daddy so much bigger and stronger and manlier. He would be that way some day. He would be just like Daddy! And, next week, I’ll win a Blue Ribbon in Science! 

gray industrial machine during golden hour

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Other blog posts: 

What about the butter dish? 

Inventing a New Color

There’s a pill for that

Citizen Soldiers: Part 1

Citizen Soldiers: Part 2

Citizen Soldiers: Part 3

After the Fall

Author Page on Amazon

 

Fraught Framing: The Virulent “Versus” Virus

16 Sunday Dec 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, apocalypse, creativity, driverless cars, management, psychology

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Climate change, Design, environment, framing, innovation, IQ, politics, problem formulation, problem solving, school, testing, TRIZ

Fraught Framing: The Virulent “Versus” Virus

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Like most of us, I spent a lot of time in grades K through 12 solving problems that others set for me. These problems were to be solved by applying prescribed methods. In math class, for example, we were given long division problems and we solved them by doing — you guessed it — long division. We were given history questions and asked who discovered [sic] America and we had to answer “Christopher Columbus” because that’s what the book said and that’s what the teacher had said. 

Even today, as of this writing, when I google “problem solving” I get 332,000,000 results. When I google “problem formulation” I only get 1,430,000 results — less than 1%. (“Problem Framing,” which is a synonym, only returned 127,000). And yet, in real life, at least in my experience, far greater leverage, understanding, and practical benefit comes from attention to problem formulation or problem framing. You still need to do competent problem solving, but unless you have properly framed the problem, you will most often find yourself doing much extra work; finding a sub-optimal solution; being stymied and finding no solution; or solving completely the wrong problem. In the worst case scenario, which happens surprisingly often, you not only solve the “wrong problem.” You don’t even know that you’ve solved the wrong problem. 

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There are many ways to go wrong when you frame the problem. Here, I want to focus on one particularly common error in problem framing which is to cast a problem as a dichotomy, a contest, or a tradeoff between two seemingly incompatible values. We’ve all heard examples such as “Military Defense Spending versus  Foreign Aid” or “Dollars for Police versus After School Programs” or “Privacy versus Convenience” or “A Woman’s Right to Choose versus the Rights of the Unborn Fetus” or “Heredity versus Environment” or “Addressing Climate Change versus Growing the Economy.” 

One disadvantage of framing things as a dichotomy is that it tends to cause people to polarize in opinion. This, in turn, tends to close the minds on both sides of an issue. A person who defines themselves as a “staunch defender” of the Second Amendment “Gun Rights”, for instance, will tend not to process information or arguments of any kind. If they hear someone say something about training or safety requirements, rather than consider whether this is a good idea, they will instead immediately look for counter-arguments, or rare scenarios, or exceptional statistics. The divisive nature of framing things as dichotomies is not even what I want to focus on here. Rather, I would like to show that these kinds of “versus” framings often lead even a single problem solver astray. 

Let’s examine the hidden flaws in a few of these dichotomies. At a given point in time, we may indeed only have a fixed pool of dollars to spend. So, at first blush, it seems to make sense that if we spend more money on Foreign Aid, we may have fewer dollars to spend on Military Defense and vice versa. Over a slightly longer time frame, however, relations are more complex. 

woman standing on sand dune throwing hat

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It might be that a reasonable-sounding foreign aid program that spends dollars on food for those folks facing starvation due to drought is a good thing. However, it might turn on in a specific case, that the food never arrives at the destination but instead is intercepted by local War Lords who steal the food and use it get money to buy more weapons to enhance their power; in turn, this actually makes the starvation worse. Spending money right now on military operations to destroy the power of the warlords might be a necessary prerequisite to having an effective drought relief programs.  

Conversely, spending money today on foreign aid, particularly if it goes toward women’s education, will be very likely to result in the need for less military intervention in the future. That there is a “fixed pie” to be divided is one underlying metaphor that leads to a false framing of issues. In the case of spending on military “versus” foreign aid, the metaphor ignores the very real interconnections that can exist among the various actions. 

There are other problems with this particular framing as well. Another obvious problem is that how money is spent is often much more important than the category of spending. To take it to an absurd extreme, if you spend money on the “military” and the “military” money is actually to arm a bunch of thugs who subvert democracy in the region, it might not make us even slightly safer in the short run. Even worse, in the long run, we may find precisely these same weapons being used against us in the medium turn. Similarly, a “foreign aid” package that mostly goes to deforesting the Amazon rain forest and replacing it with land used to graze cows, will be ruinous in the long run for the very people it is supposedly aimed to help. 

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False dichotomies are not limited to the economic and political arena. Say for example that you are designing a car or truck for delivering groceries. If you design an axle that is too thin, it may be too weak and subject to breakage. But if you make it too thick, it will be heavy and the car will not accelerate or corner as well and will also have worse gas mileage. On the surface, it seems like a real “versus” situation: thick versus thin, right? Maybe. Let’s see what Altshuller has to say.

Genrich Altshuller was a civil engineer and inventor in the Stalin era of Soviet Russia. He wrote a letter to Stalin explaining how Russian science and engineering could become more creative. A self-centered dictator, Stalin took such suggestions for improvement as personal insults so Altshuller was sent to the Gulags. Here, he met many other scientists and engineers who had, one way or another, gotten on the wrong side of Stalin. He discussed technical issues and solutions in many fields and developed a system called TRIZ (a Russian acronym) for technical invention. He uses the axle as one example to show the power of TRIZ. It turns out that the “obvious” trade-off between a thick, strong but heavy axle and a thin, weak, but light axle is only a strict trade-off under the assumption of a solid axle. A hollow axle can weigh much less than a solid axle but have almost all the strength of the solid version. 

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One may question the design assumptions even further. For instance, why is there an axle at all? If you use electric motors, for example, you could have four smaller, independent electric motors and not have any axle. Every wheel could be independent in suspension, direction, and speed. No-one would have designed such a car because no human being is likely capable of operating such a complex vehicle. Now that people are developing self-driving vehicles, such a design might be feasible. 

The axle example illustrates another common limitation of the “versus” mentality. It typically presumes a whole set of assumptions, many of which may not even be stated. To take this example even further, why are you even designing a truck for delivering groceries? How else might groceries go from the farm to the store? What if farms were co-located with grocery stores? What if groceries themselves were unnecessary and people largely grew food on their own roofs, or back yards, or greenhouses? 

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For many years, people debated the relative impact of environment versus heredity on various human characteristics such as intelligence. Let us put aside for a moment the considerable problems with the concept of intelligence itself and how it is tested, and focus on the question as to which is more important in determining intelligence: heredity or environment. In this case, the question can be likened to asking whether the length or height of a rectangle is a more important determiner of its area. A rectangle whose length is one mile and whose height is zero will have zero area. Similarly, a rectangle that is a mile high but has zero length will have zero area. Similarly, a child born of two extremely intelligent parents but who is abandoned in the jungle and brought up by wolves or apes will not learn the concepts of society that are necessary to score well on a typical IQ test. At the other extreme, no matter how much you love and cherish and try to educate your dog or cat, they will never score well on a typical IQ test. Length and breadth are both necessary for a rectangle to have area. The right heredity and environment are both necessary for a person to score well on an IQ test. 

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This is so obvious that one has to question why people would even raise the issue. Sadly, the historical answer often points toward racism. Some people wanted to argue that it was pointless to spend significant resources on educating people of color because they were limited in how intelligent they might become because of their heredity. 

Similarly, it seems that in the case of framing dealing with climate change as something that is versus economic growth, the people who frame the issue this way are not simply falling into a poor thinking habit of dichotomous thinking. They are framing as a dichotomy intentionally in order to win political support from people who feel economically vulnerable. If you have lost your job in the steel mill or rubber factory, you may find it easy to be sympathetic to the view that working to stop climate change might be all well and good but it can’t be done because it kills jobs. 

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If the planet becomes uninhabitable, how many jobs will be left? Even short of the complete destruction of the ecosphere, the best estimates are that there will be huge economic costs of not dealing with global climate change. These will soon be far larger than costs associated with reducing carbon emissions and reforesting the planet. Much of the human population of the planet lives close to the oceans. As ice melts and sea levels rise, many people will be displaced and large swaths of heavily populated areas will be made uninhabitable. Climate change is also increasing the frequency and severity of weather disasters such as tornados and hurricanes. These cause tremendous and wide-spread damage. They kill people and cause significant economic damage. In addition, there will be more floods and more droughts, both of which negatively impact the economy. Rather than dealing with climate change being something we must do despite the negative impact on the economy, the opposite is closer to the truth. Dealing with climate change is necessary to save the world economy from catastrophic collapse. Oligarchs whose power and wealth depend on non-renewable energy sources are well aware of this. They simply don’t care. They shrug it off. They won’t be alive in another twenty years so they are willing to try to obfuscate the truth by setting up a debate based on a false versus. 

They don’t care. 

Do you? 

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Madison Keys, Francis Scott Key, the “Prevent Defense” and giving away the Keys to the Kingdom. 

07 Saturday Jul 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, family, management, psychology, sports, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Business, career, HCI, human factors, IBM, life, school, sports, UX

Madison Keys, Francis Scott Key, the “Prevent Defense” and giving away the Keys to the Kingdom. 

Madison Keys, for those who don’t know, is an up-and-coming American tennis player. In this Friday’s Wimbledon match, Madison sprinted to an early 4-1 lead. She accomplished this through a combination of ace serves and torrid ground strokes. Then, in an attempt to consolidate, or protect her lead, or play the (in)famous “prevent defense” imported from losing football coaches, she managed to stop hitting through the ball – guiding it carefully instead — into the net or well long or just inches wide. 

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Please understand that Madison Keys is a wonderful tennis player. And, her “retreat” to being “careful” and playing the “prevent defense” is a common error that many professional and amateur players fall prey to. It should also be pointed out that what appears to be overly conservative play to me, as an outside observer, could easily be due to some other cause such as a slight injury or, even more likely, because her opponent adjusted to Madison’s game. Whether or not she lost because of using the “prevent defense” no-one can say for sure. But I can say with certainty that many people in many sports have lost precisely because they stopped trying to “win” and instead tried to protect their lead by being overly conservative; changing the approach that got them ahead. 

Francis Scott Key, of course, wrote the words to the American National Anthem which ends on the phrase, “…the home of the brave.” Of course, every nation has stories of people behaving bravely and the United States of America is no exception. For the American colonies to rebel against the far superior naval and land forces (to say nothing of sheer wealth) of the British Empire certainly qualifies as “brave.” 

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In my reading of American history, one of our strengths has always been taking risks in doing things in new and different ways. In other words, one of our strengths has been being brave. Until now. Now, we seem in full retreat. We are plunging headlong into the losing “prevent defense” borrowed from American football. 

American football can hardly be called a “gentle sport” – the risk of injury is ever present and now we know that even those who manage to escape broken legs and torn ligaments may suffer internal brain damage. But there is still the tendency of many coaches to play the “prevent defense.” In case you’re unfamiliar with American football, here is an illustration of the effect of the “prevent defense” on the score. A team plays a particular way for 3 quarters of the game and is ahead 42-21. If you’re a fan of linear extrapolation, you might expect that  the final score might be something like 56-28. But coaches sometimes want to “make sure” they win so they play the “prevent defense” which basically means you let the other team make first down after first down and therefore keep possession of the ball and score, though somewhat slowly. The coach suddenly loses confidence in the method which has worked for 3/4 of the game. It is not at all unusual for the team who employs this “prevent defense” to lose; in this example, perhaps, 42-48. They “let” the other team get one first down after another. 

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America has apparently decided, now, to play a “prevent defense.” Rather than being innovative and bold and embrace the challenges of new inventions and international competition, we instead want to “hold on to our lead” and introduce protective tariffs just as we did right before the Great Depression. Rather than accepting immigrants with different foods, customs, dress, languages, and religions — we are now going to “hold on to what we have” and try to prevent any further evolution. In the case of American football, the prevent defense sometimes works. In the case of past civilizations that tried to isolate themselves, it hasn’t and it won’t. 

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This is not to say that America (or any other country) should right now have “open borders” and let everyone in for every purpose. Nor should a tennis player hit every shot with all their might. Nor should a football team try the riskiest possible plays at every turn. All systems need to strike a balance among replication of what works, providing defense of what one has and exploring what is new and different. That is what nature does. Every generation “replicates” aspects of the previous generation but every generation must also explore new directions. Life does this through sexual selection, mutation, and cross over. 

This balance plays out in career as well. You need to decide for yourself how much and what kinds of risks to take. When I obtained my doctorate in experimental psychology, for example, it would have been relatively un-risky in many ways to get a tenure-track faculty position. Instead, I chose managing a research project on the psychology of aging at Harvard Med School. To be sure, this is far less than the risk that some people take when; e.g., joining “Doctors without borders” or sinking all their life savings (along with all the life savings of their friends and relatives) into a start-up. 

At the time, I was married and had three small children. Under these circumstances, I would not have felt comfortable having no guaranteed income. On the other hand, I was quite confident that I could write a grant proposal to continue to get funded by “soft money.” Indeed, I did write such a proposal along with James Fozard and Nancy Waugh who were at once my colleagues, my bosses, and my mentors. Our grant proposal was not funded or rejected but “deferred” and then it was deferred again. At that point, only one month of funding remained before I would be out of a job. I began to look elsewhere. In retrospect, we all realized it would have been much wiser to have a series of overlapping grants so that all of our “funding eggs” were never in one “funding agency’s basket.” 

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I began looking for other jobs and had a variety of offers from colleges, universities, and large companies. I chose IBM Research. As it turned out, by the way, our grant proposal was ultimately funded for three years, but we only found out after I had already committed to go to IBM. During this job search, I was struck by something else. My dissertation had been on problem solving but my “post-doc” was in the psychology of aging. So far as I could tell, this didn’t bother any of the interviewers in industry in the slightest. But it really freaked out some people in academia. It became clear that one was “expected” in academia, at least by many, that you would choose a specialty and stick with it. Perhaps, you need not do that during your entire academic career, but anything less than a decade smacked of dilettantism. At least, that was how it felt to me as an interviewee. By contrast, it didn’t bother the people who interviewed me at Ford or GM that I knew nothing more than the average person about cars and had never really thought about the human factors of automobiles. 

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

The industrial jobs paid more than the academic jobs and that played some part in my decision. The job at GM sounded particularly interesting. I would be “the” experimental psychologist in a small inter-disciplinary group of about ten people who were essentially tasked with trying to predict the future. The “team” included an economist, a mathematician, a social psychologist, and someone who looked for trends in word frequencies in newspapers. The year was 1973 and US auto companies were shocked and surprised to learn that their customers suddenly cared about gas mileage! These companies didn’t want to be shocked and surprised like that again. The assignment reminded me of Isaac Asimov’s fictional character in the Foundation Trilogy — Harry Seldon — who founded “psychohistory.” We had the chance to do it in “real life.” It sounded pretty exciting! 

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On the other hand, cars seemed to me to be fundamentally an “old” technology while computers were the wave of the future. It also occurred to me that a group of ten people from quite different disciplines trying to predict the future might sound very cool to me and apparently to the current head of research at GM, but it might seem far more dispensable to the next head of research. The IBM problem that I was to solve was much more fundamental. IBM saw that the difficulty of using computers could be a limiting factor in their future growth. I had had enough experience with people — and with computers — to see this as a genuine and enduring problem for IBM (and other computer companies); not as a problem that was temporary (such as the “oil crisis” appeared to be in the early 70’s). 

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There were a number of additional reasons I chose IBM. IBM Research’s population at the time showed far more diverse than that of the auto companies. None of them were very diverse when it came to male/female ratios. At least IBM Research did have people from many different countries working there and it probably helped their case that an IBM Researcher had just been awarded a Nobel Prize. Furthermore, the car company research buildings bored me; they were the typical rectangular prisms that characterize most of corporate America. In other words, they were nothing special. Aero Saarinen however, had designed the IBM Watson Research Lab. It sat like an alien black spaceship ready to launch humanity into a conceptual future. It was set like an onyx jewel atop the jade hills of Westchester. 

I had mistakenly thought that because New York City was such a giant metropolis, everything north of “The City” (as locals call it) would be concrete and steel for a hundred miles. But no! Westchester was full of cut granite, rolling hills, public parks of forests marbled with stone walls and cooled by clear blue lakes. My commute turned out to be a twenty minute, trafficless drive through a magical countryside. By contrast, since Detroit car companies at that time held a lot of political power, there was no public transportation to speak of in the area. Everyone who worked at the car company headquarters spent at least an hour in bumper to bumper traffic going to work and another hour in bumper to bumper traffic heading back home. In terms of natural beauty, Warren Michigan just doesn’t compare with Yorktown Heights, NY. Yorktown Heights even smelled better. I came for my interview just as the leaves began painting their autumn rainbow palette. Westchester roads even seemed more creative. They wandered through the land as though illustrative of Brownian motion, while Detroit area roads were as imaginative as graph paper. Northern Westchester county sports many more houses now than it did when I moved there in late 1973, but you can still see the essential difference from these aerial photos. 

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Warren-map

The IBM company itself struck me as classy. It wasn’t only the Research Center. Everything about the company stated “first class.” Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t a trivial decision. After grad school in Ann Arbor, a job in Warren kept me in the neighborhood I was familiar with. A job at Ford or GM meant I could visit my family and friends in northern Ohio much more easily as well as my colleagues, friends and professors at the U of M. The offer from IBM felt to me like an offer from the New York Yankees. Of course, going to a top-notch team also meant more difficult competition from my peers. I was, in effect, setting myself up to go head to head with extremely well-educated and smart people from around the world. 

You also need to understand that in 1973, I would be only the fourth Ph.D. psychologist in a building filled with physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers, and materials scientists. In other words, nearly all the researchers considered themselves to be “hard scientists” who delved in quantitative realms. This did not particularly bother me. At the time, I wanted very much to help evolve psychology to be more quantitative in its approach. And yet, there were some nagging doubts that perhaps I should have picked a less risky job in a psychology department. 

The first week at IBM, my manager, John Gould introduced me yet another guy named “John” —  a physicist whose office was near mine on aisle 19. This guy had something like 100 patents. A few days later, I overheard one of John’s younger colleagues in the hallway excitedly describing some new findings. Something like the following transpired: 

“John! John! You can’t believe it! I just got these results! We’re at 6.2 x 10 ** 15th!” 

His older colleague replied, “Really? Are you sure? 6.2 x 10 ** 15th?” 

John’s younger colleague, still bubbling with enthusiasm: “Yes! Yes! That’s right. You know. Within three orders of magnitude one way or the other!” 

I thought to myself, “three orders of magnitude one way or the other? I can manage that! Even in psychology!” I no longer suffered from “physics envy.” I felt a bit more confident in the correctness of my decision to jump into these waters which were awash with sharp-witted experts in the ‘hard’ sciences. It might be risky, but not absurdly risky.

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Of course, your mileage may differ. You might be quite willing to take a much riskier path or a less risky one. Or, maybe the physical location or how much of a commute is of less interest to you than picking the job that most advances your career or pays the most salary. There’s nothing wrong with those choices. But note what you actually feel. Don’t optimize in a sequence of boxes. That is, you might decide that your career is more important than how long your commute is. Fair enough. But there are limits. Imagine two jobs that are extremely similar and one is most likely a little better for your career but you have to commute two hours each way versus 5 minutes for the one that’s not quite so good for your career. Which one would you pick? 

In life beyond tennis and beyond football, one also has to realize that your assessment of risk is not necessarily your actual risk. Many people have chosen “sure” careers or “sure” work at an “old, reliable” company only to discover that the “sure thing” actually turned out to be a big risk. I recall, for example, reading an article in INC., magazine that two “sure fire” small businesses were videotape rental stores and video game arcades. Within a few years of that article, they were almost sure-fire losers. Remember Woolworths? Montgomery Ward?

At the time I joined IBM it was a dominant force in the computer industry. But there are no guarantees — not in career choices, not in tennis strategy, not in football strategy, not in playing the “prevent defense” when it comes to America. The irony of trying too hard to “play it safe” is illustrated this short story about my neighbor from Akron: 

police army commando special task force

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Wilbur’s Story

Wilbur’s dead. Died in Nam. And, the question I keep wanting to ask him is: “Did it help you face the real dangers? All those hours together we played soldier?”

Wilbur’s family moved next door from West Virginia when I was eleven. They were stupendously uneducated. Wilbur was my buddy though. We were rock-fighting the oaks of the forest when he tried to heave a huge toaster-oven sized rock over my head. Endless waiting in the Emergency Room. Stitches. My hair still doesn’t grow straight there. “Friendly fire.”

More often, we used wooden swords to slash our way through the blackberry and wild rose jungle of The Enemy; parry the blows of the wildly swinging grapevines; hide out in the hollow tree; launch the sudden ambush.

We matched strategy wits on the RISK board, on the chess board, plastic soldier set-ups. I always won. Still, Wilbur made me think — more than school ever did.

One day, for some stupid reason, he insisted on fighting me. I punched him once (truly lightly) on the nose. He bled. He fled crying home to mama. Wilbur couldn’t stand the sight of blood.

I guess you got your fill of that in Nam, Wilbur.

After two tours of dangerous jungle combat, he was finally to ship home, safe and sound, tour over — thank God!

He slipped on a bar of soap in the shower and smashed the back of his head on the cement floor.

Wilbur finally answers me across the years and miles: “So much for Danger, buddy,” he laughs, “Go for it!”

Thanks, Wilbur.

Thanks.

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And, no, I will not be giving away the keys to the kingdom. Your days of fighting for freedom may be over. Mine have barely begun.


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Special Spaces & Wonderful Places

07 Sunday Jan 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, apocalypse, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 24 Comments

Tags

Design, environment, learning, life, pattern language, politics, school

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When you think back to your childhood, no matter how luxurious, dilapidated, or war-torn that  childhood might have been, I’m guessing that like me, you had some particular places that you loved. Perhaps they stayed secret to you; perhaps you shared only with one or two chums. Somehow, those specific places held a kind of magic for you as they did for me. I will just point out a few examples from my own childhood.

Grandpa’s basement, for instance, though dark and dank, held a printing press made of cast iron. Although he cautioned me not to play with it because, he insisted, it was not a plaything but an important tool, I nonetheless found opportunity to move the gigantic heavy four handled wheel, having first carefully noted the exact position in order to return it just as I had found it. In some way beyond my comprehension as a child, I knew this press was something magical. It was, after all, involved in printing. I recall years later seeing a picture of Benjamin Franklin with just such a printing press. And, even as a very young child, I knew that printing held great power. Beyond that, the object itself loomed and commandeered that entire corner of the basement. I knew it was heavy beyond imagining, and not just in the epistemological sense. I could judge the weight of the entire machine from how hard it was to turn the wheel which, though heavy, comprised only a small fraction of the entire press. Cast iron also has this magical texture which seems to inhale light out of the surrounding region like a giant beast. Perhaps best of all, and what appealed to the engineer in me, the machine’s form and function flowed beautifully together. Compare that with a modern automobile, for instance. What it actually does is largely hidden in the design. This goes along with branding, and advertising, and customer loyalty and so on. A modern car does not typically marry form and function nearly so nicely as did that printing press.

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On the “side yard” of our house on North Firestone Boulevard, three tulips shot up every spring, so colorful and perfect, not to mention mysterious. Where did they come from every year? How could this rounded plant of petals have a three pointed star inside!? On more than one occasion, I caught sight of a butterfly feasting on the pollen within. This place was cool patly just because adults always seemed hell-bent on the next task or chore. So, while this tiny patch of ground technically belonged to the whole family, in fact, I’m the only one who enjoyed it for more than a casual glance. I smelled and touched and explored every vein in that tulip. I watched butterflies do their drunken dance and tried (and largely failed) to predict when and where they would next alight.

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At David Hill Elementary School, the sandstone retaining wall provided another special place. With a lot of work, kids like me could turn sandstone into sand. And we did. With work, we even made tunnels. At one point, we stuffed a grasshopper into a tunnel, covered the entrance,  and watched for him until he eventually hopped out ten feet away! For a long time, none of the adults seemed to pay much attention to the fact that we were slowly but quite assuredly destroying the retaining wall which kept our school and its landscaping from falling into the playground below. Sadly, at some point, the gravely voice of the principal, which always seemed to be enveloped in the black death robes of a priest at a funeral, informed us that we were now forbidden to play in or on the wall.

When we moved to Ellet, these special places disappeared from consideration but were immediately replaced by a much grander array of them. Right behind our house lay a forest! That forest sported a spring of fresh water coming right out of the ground, two gigantic elm trees wrapped in thick hair cables of poison ivy vines, an oak with a swinging grape vine and a creek. Eventually, I came to know the special places of the creek where you could put in bark “boats” and have the longest races ad the places where you could cross with the least chance slipping on a loose stepping stone and dousing your entire body. Depending on the temperature, that might or might not be all that uncomfortable, but it would inevitably be followed by something that was definitely uncomfortable — being punished by your parents for getting your clothes all wet. Now, it must be said, that when I had done this terrible deed of getting my clothes all wet, the first thing they did with those clothes was to put them in the washer where, yes, they would get wet. Hmm. Part of what makes these some of these special places special is that they radiate event streams outward into your lives. And, the feeling or inspiration or information or decisions that come from these special places need not be confined there. We draw comfort from them, even if we know we will never visit them again.

We all know that some places “feel right” – there is something about them that seems mysterious, beautiful, awe-insipring, calming, or exotic. But what makes a place “good” or “special”? Partly it is individual experience, no doubt, but partly it is the environment itself. So what is it about form and texture and organization that makes a place special? That is an interesting question that seems to have intrigued Christopher Alexander as well. Alexander and a team of collaborators looked at places that “worked” from around the world. The result was a book called “A Pattern Language.” They formalized, to a large extent, intuitions of what makes a place “special”; what makes it “work.”

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Each actual pattern is pretty elaborate, but I can give a few examples to illustrate the point. One of the Patterns is called “European Pub” which has activity around the edges and large tables. This helps people socialize. The activity around the edges gives people an excuse to circumnavigate the room. The large tables mean that there is room for “legitimate peripheral participation.” If I’m new in town, I can sit somewhat away from everyone but still within earshot. When someone says something I can relate to, I jump into the conversation. This arrangement is much more conducive to socialization than many American bars which feature stools all facing a TV. This does not encourage interaction.

Another Pattern points out that a small town near a big city should put its “center” placed eccentrically toward the city. This makes it more convenient for a larger number of commuters to stop at local stores on their way to the city and back.

These are both gross over-simplifications of the actual patterns, but I think they convey something of what is being aimed at. There is a belief that these patterns would generally “work” in any religious, cultural, geographic, or political context. These patterns are really meant to focus on the invariants across a large number of details. In that way, they make design problem solving more effective. You will be less likely, so goes the claim, to be exploring parts of the design space that are far removed from optimal if you think about things in terms of these patterns.

A “Pattern Language” purports to take a useful middle ground. The patterns are abstract enough to be widely useful but narrow enough not to be meaningless. A “Pattern” is the named solution to a recurring problem. A “Pattern Language” is a lattice or web of Patterns that largely covers a field. Christopher Alexander coined the term after he and his colleagues went around the world to see what “worked” in terms of city planning, house design, building design, neighborhood design, the building process and so on. I think nearly everyone will find “A Pattern Language” a fascinating book.

The impact of A Pattern Language, however, extends far beyond architecture and urban planning. People have found the concept of a “Pattern Language” useful in many other domains. Perhaps the best known such domain is in Object-Oriented Programming with the so-called “Gang of Four” authoring many of the original books on the subject. Other domains which have been addressed with “A Pattern Language” include pedagogy, human-computer interaction, change management, e-business, sustainability, and how society might evolve.

I became interested in Pattern Languages at least 20 years ago and have since co-organized and co-led a number of workshops on patterns in “Computer Human Interaction” as well as “Socio-technical Patterns” including working on patterns for “Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution” and chapter 19 in John Carroll’s book on design rationale, “Patterns for Emergent Global Intelligence.”

 

In 2017, I recounted in this blog  childhood memories and how they relate to what is happening in today’s world. To summarize briefly, we have great opportunities as a species but we are also in a train wreck of trouble! We seem trapped in a nightmare of a comic farce, but one which has tragic consequences of potentially epic proportions; e.g., atomic war or having the USA walk away from the Paris accords on climate change. Is anything to be done?

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What I want to accomplish in the first half of 2018 is to generate interest in the beginnings of a socio-technical “Pattern Language” that can help us get back on track again. I’ll post some of the ones I know about, but I’d be very interested to work with people on other suggestions.  In most cases, even when I post patterns it will be the case that I did not “invent” the patterns from first principles or construct them myself. In the same way that Christopher Alexander and his team main observed what worked and only then attempted to codify generic best practices into a “Pattern Language,” I also found many of these from observation or reading other sources or both. For example, the patterns, “Who Speaks for Wolf?” and “The Iroquois Rule of Six” are not by any means my inventions. I learned about them from the works of Paula Underwood. She was the “designated storyteller” of her branch of the Iroquois and provided an English transcription of the oral history of that branch in The Walking People. Indeed, I have argued that the “Walking People” basically developed a kind of pattern language in their oral history.

https://www.amazon.com/Walking-People-Native-American-History/dp/1879678101

https://www.slideshare.net/John_C_Thomas/the-walkingpeople

https://www.slideshare.net/John_C_Thomas/walking-people-analysis

A Pattern Language is a difficult business.  For maximum utility, each pattern has considerable thought behind it and is written into a specific form. In fact, at one CHI workshop, we developed an XML specification for patterns in Human Computer Interaction called (Pattern Language Markup Language) PLML (pronounced “pell mell”). I will not be quite this formal with the form of my patterns but will adhere as closely to it as practical. I do think that the form of the Patterns within a Pattern Language is important. Each of the parts serves a purpose and it is handy to know what role each part plays. For example, each Pattern has at least these parts: A Title,  (possibly subtitled), synonyms, a Version history, one or more Authors, an Abstract, a statement of the problem, a statement of the context in which the problem and solution arise and are appropriate, an analysis of the “Forces” at play, the Solution, Examples, the Resulting Context, Known Uses, Related Patterns, and References. For many people, having such a complex structure seems to be too much “baggage” but we must remember that design problems are themselves inherently complex. In addition to textual elements, the Patterns of Christopher Alexander include both photographic images to “set the mood” and, typically, at least one diagram to illustrate the general nature of the pattern.

The domain I am most interested in developing a Pattern Language for is perhaps most often labelled as a “Socio-technical Pattern Language.” These would be a collection of patterns that would help people cooperate, collaborate and solve problems together. Although the fabric and texture, perhaps even the scent, of endeavors would depend on culture, the field, current events and a host of other factors; however, the form of these solutions to recurring problems would remain roughly constant.

Next up: An Example. “Who Speaks for Wolf?”

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https://petersironwood.wordpress.com

Fool Me!

24 Thursday Aug 2017

Posted by petersironwood in America, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

IBM, life, magic, NYNEX, school, stories, user experience, user interface

 

 

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Long before seeing television, or even knowing it existed, I listened to stories on the radio mainly with my grandmother. As I mentioned earlier, my favorites were The Lone Ranger, Hop-along Cassidy, and Tom Corbett and The Space Cadets. Looking back on it, I’m not sure why she listened although she might have answered questions for me or provided some additional commentary. As I only learned much later, these programs used special props for the sound effects of whizzing bullets, thunder, horse hooves, rocket engines, etc. At the time, it never occurred to me that there were “sound effects.” I just listened and constructed an entire “TV program” in my mind’s eye. More accurately, I was there along with the villains and heroes.

Although the stories presented each week in these programs fascinated me, my grandma’s “Old Pete Stories” captivated me even more. Grandma presided over the Firestone Park Dramatic Club and her performances for me were filled with all the drama she could muster. Her “Old Pete Stories” arose out of an actual character she knew from her days growing up on a farm. Old Pete was a hired hand on the farm; a loner and a drifter, Old Pete had a talent for getting into trouble. In fact, it is rather surprising that Old Pete seemed to get into precisely the type of trouble that a five year old boy might get into and rarely into the kind of trouble that you would expect an adult farm hand to get into. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? But it didn’t make me wonder! Not at the time. Instead, I found myself, just like Old Pete, wondering what mysteries that deep blue pond held. I found myself, just like Old Pete, terrified when he became tangled in the unseen currents and forces below the surface. And, like Old Pete, my gratitude and relief came in waves when I … er, Old Pete, I mean … struggled to the shore and pulled himself out. Although “Old Pete” inspired my grandmother’s stories, I’m pretty sure that the plots she constructed were “cautionary tales” much like Aesop’s Fables.

My mother also read me stories, mainly from a giant book of stories. Each story typically only had one ink drawing on the title page for that story. There was one about a mouse who played the piano and another about a Bull in the China Shop. She too loved to practice her most dramatic voice when reading aloud. And then, some time in the first grade, something magic happened. We were sitting around in a circle struggling through our primers when my teacher made some comment that caused everything to “click into place” for me and from then on, I could pretty much read anything! I could now read stories to myself! The stories in the school primers were generally pretty lame, but soon, I got my own books and soon after that, Tootle, and The Adventures of Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy gave way to Tom Sawyer! Huckleberry Finn!  I went to the library every week and picked out three books. Generally, these included some science books and some fiction books and often some combination. The Earth for Sam was a fictionalized account of a boy going back in time to see first hand what dinosaurs were like (among other things). I discovered that our library had a copy of our first grade science text. In fact, it also had a copy of every grade 1-6 science texts. I went through them like the proverbial knife whose molecules had extremely high kinetic energy through butter. Stories of the Knights of the Round Table thrilled me as well as The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. Some people found it odd that I read Nancy Drew, but I think they are better written and I can relate to a girl hiding in the closet trying not to get caught and not trying to scream when a spider dropped on her just as easily as if a boy were hiding in the closet trying not to get caught and trying not to scream when a spider dropped on him.

You might think from my catholic tastes and prolific reading that I would forgo television when we finally got a TV set. No way! I loved Gabby Hayes, for instance, and Superman. We had a couch and a reclining rocking chair in our living room. When Gabby Hayes explained that Quaker Oats were shot from guns (!), I hid behind the rocker as the cereal exploded out of the canon. When the Superman theme song or that of The Lone Ranger came on, I ran across the room full speed and flung myself into the recliner. My parents hated this and told me on numerous occasions not to do it despite the fact that I only knocked over the rocker once. Their story was that I would “hurt myself” or “break the chair.” But neither of these things happened. I don’t recall ever actually getting severely punished so I concluded this was just one of those things parents feel obligated to say because they see themselves as responsible adults who must therefore say such things. Meanwhile, I didn’t understand how they could be so blasé about these shows. Why on earth were they also not running across the room and flinging themselves into the chair or couch? Did they not hear the strains of The William Tell Overture? Didn’t they realize that this meant that another episode of The Lone Ranger was about to begin? Didn’t they understand that he would right wrongs? The Lone Ranger not only prevailed every week; he did so without bloodshed! He would gallop up alongside some bad guy and then jump and tackle him off his horse, wrestle him to the ground and subdue him with fists alone. On occasion, The Lone Ranger would shoot, but only to defend himself or others and even then, only shoot the gun out of the villains’s hand! He never missed the target and accidentally gave the bad guy a free appendectomy or craniotomy. And, Superman? Come on! In case you forgot from last week, it always began by reminding you that he could leap tall buildings at a single bound (though why he needed to do this when he could fly is unclear). He was faster than a speeding bullet! He was more powerful than a locomotive! How could they possibly forgo these shows to do some other thing? That seemed incredible but only for the first few milliseconds of the show. After that, I was glued to the tube and lost interest in what they were doing.

Although people hate to “be fooled” so much that when they are fooled, no matter how much evidence accumulates, they tend to dismiss the evidence and insist that they were not fooled. And yet, there are other occasions, like movies, television, novels, and plays were people welcome being fooled. This really struck me hard many many years later watching Apollo Thirteen for the third time. I knew this movie was based on a true story and I knew how the real life events had unfolded and I had seen the same exact movie twice before. But that didn’t stop me from being excruciatingly worried about whether the astronauts would make it back alive. Other species of animals and plants can certainly “communicate” with their own kind and even with other species. It seems doubtful, at least so far, that they can “tell stories” however. This may be one of the quintessential differences between humans and other species. Whether we sit down in a campfire circle to trade ghost stories or streak across the room to throw ourselves into a rocking chair, we seem to be saying “Fool me!”

“Fool me” arises in other contexts as well. The first few years that I lived on North Firestone Boulevard, a peddler appeared several times each summer with a small hand cart filled with toys, puzzles, and games. Generally, these items were not to be found in stores. One item in particular held my attention. A small number of wooden rectangular blocks, roughly card-sized but much thicker, were held together with ribbon. However, when he held them up, he ticked one and allowed them to cascade in a magical fashion so that each block changed from one side to the other. He did tell some cock-a-mamie story as he did this and no doubt, like any other magician’s patter, it was designed to draw attention away from what was actually going on. But in this case, it wasn’t the story, per se, that was so cool. It was the (seeming) physical impossibility of what was happening before my very eyes. In this case, it wasn’t that I wanted to stay fooled. I wanted to see the trick again to understand what was really happening. The peddler, however, relished making money. He wasn’t really trudging up and down the street in his rather heavy coat (especially for summer) for his health nor to entertain children. He wanted to turn a buck. So, despite our pleadings, he would never do this trick more than twice. After that, if we wanted to see it again, we would have to pay for one of these sets of “magic” interconnected blocks and figure it out on our own. I raced back inside to wheedle my parents into giving or at least lending me some money so I could buy one of these. I breathlessly and ineptly explained how these were magic blocks but they seemed singularly unimpressed with my analysis. Dad muttered something vague and incoherent about it just being the way the blocks were connected by the ribbons, but he had not seen the actual demonstration. I did not score the money nor the blocks, at least that time. I did, however, save up my money. My allowance at that point was a dollar every two weeks. So, I had to forgo my favorites from the popsicle man, substituting grape popsicles at 4 cents each rather than the more expensive (and much tastier Mr. Goodbars or even fudgesicles) in order to save, but save I did. The next time the peddler appeared, I was ready! But damn! He wasn’t! He didn’t have any more of the magic tumbling blocks and tried to interest me and my friends in some other toys. I suppose some of those were pretty cool too, but I didn’t care. You’ll be happy to know that I eventually found some when I had my own kids. I was delighted that they were delighted but they no longer held any mystery for me personally.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiIpUUsIsVE

Everyone I know likes stories and magic tricks. What I find hard to understand are people who prefer to stay fooled. They don’t want to know how a Jacob’s Ladder works. They don’t want to know how a magic trick works. They don’t want to know whether their political candidate lies and cheats. They don’t want to know whether climate change is really going to affect the lives of their children and grandchildren. If there were only say, 100 stories in the world, maybe I could understand that they wouldn’t want to know the outcomes of those 100 stories. But there are way more than 100 stories! There are way more than 100 damned good stories; I don’t see any shortage. But more than that, I don’t see any problem with knowing the outcome (as I did with Apollo XIII) still being engaged and entertained and transported by a good story, well told.

Don’t get me wrong. Just because I want to know how magic tricks work, doesn’t mean I think it is necessarily right for me to explain it and that people who don’t want to know are inferior or stupid. Different people have different preferences. I like cilantro and anchovies and blue cheese but not everyone does. When it comes to what is actually happening in the world in ways that impact our ability (and even more importantly, the ability of our families) to live and function though, it seems to me the truth is much more important than is the pleasure of listening to the same false but comforting story over and over.

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Imagine that we are all sitting around a campfire listening to a “ghost story” about a guy trapped in a pit with scores of foot long spiders who come out and nibble on him whenever he tries to sleep. I am not going to spoil everyone’s “fun” by pointing out that this is very unlikely. No way. On the other hand, if I see a forest fire headed our way, I am going to interrupt the frigging story and let people know! Furthermore, I cannot fathom why some people would rather stay and hear the story if it means they are going to die or at least suffer a lot of third degree burns. Perhaps stories are not only one of humanity’s greatest gifts, but also, under some circumstances, our greatest curse as well.

My fascination with stories continued throughout grade school, high school, and college. Although as an undergraduate at Akron U and then Case-Western Reserve, I took almost a dozen psychology courses, none of them delved with any depth into stories. I did, however, also take courses in English Literature, Shakespeare, and Drama. Even to this day, it’s a little hard to believe that these psychology courses largely skirted the whole issue of stories considering how important and fundamental they are to understanding the human psyche. Freud and Jung did discuss stories in some depth. Even in four years of graduate study at the University of Michigan, stories seldom came up as a topic in cognitive psychology. In fact, the whole enterprise of experimental and cognitive psychology at that time seemed to be about deconstructing human thinking, problem solving, learning, and decision making into different little boxes and finding out about the little boxes.

 

Humans are notoriously varied but one thing you can pretty much count on is that whatever else is going on, these little boxes communicate with each other. My senior year as an undergraduate, I had three part time jobs. One of these was teaching astronomy and space science at the Sixth Grade Educational Center in downtown Cleveland. Another was working with kids in a psychiatric hospital. Another was as a research assistant to a Professor doing experiments in operant conditioning. In the latter set of experiments, kids went into a large “Skinner Box” and pulled a lever for nickels. In front of them, during training, was a large red circle. Later, they continued to pull the lever but got no coins. During this phase of the experiment, they might be shown a smaller red circle, a red ellipse, a green circle and so on. During the time the kids were actually in the Skinner Box, there wasn’t much for me to do. So, I went out to the waiting room and used the blackboard there to teach the kids who were waiting a little astronomy such as the names of the planets and their “order” around the sun. Although my Professor was a behaviorist, he did ask me to debrief each kid as to what they thought about the experiment. To my astonishment, the kids who had heard my little mini-lecture about astronomy tried to relate what I said to the little circles and ellipses that were shown during the experiment. Of course, once they said that, I realized that to them, it made perfect sense to try to relate these experiences. After all, they came to the University, and here was the same guy (me) telling them about weird unusual things. Naturally, they tried to make one unified story out of it.

In graduate school, I got my chances for story telling to my kids but also at a more adult level. It was tradition for each sub-area within the Psychology Department to put on “skits” and I co-authored two satirical musicals, mainly about the professors (and still managed to get my degree). To show you how much on the edge I was, my advisor the first year was Dr. Reitman who studied cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. One of the main characters in the play was “Dr. Brightman” whose student (played by me) was building an AI program and trying to impress a very cute grad student.

I told her my program simulated human thought. “Oh, really?” she replied. “Your program simulates human thought?”

“Absolutely,” I answered, “although for now, purely for convenience and ease of measuring accuracy, we’ve decided to focus on mathematical thinking as a representative domain of human thought.”

“I see,” she answered, “So, this program simulates the way humans do mathematical reasoning.”

“Precisely!” I continued. “Of course, because of storage limitations on our computers, we are initially focusing on arithmetic.”

Now, her brow furrowed to signal that she was less impressed. “So, you are saying your program actually does arithmetic problems?”

So, I said, “Indeed! Or, at least it will if I ever get the code debugged.”

Well, you get the tenor of this satire. (And, by the way, the hype in AI still exceeds the actuality by about the same ratio today 50 years later!) Looking back on it, I am very impressed that the Professors in the department were able to take it all as good-natured fun.

There were important stories told in graduate school. For example, my Professor in physiological psychology discovered the “pleasure center” in the rat brain. The reason he discovered it was his inexperience. He and his professor were doing research on stimulating the “Reticular Activating System” in rats. This part of the rat (and human) brain is important in keeping you awake and alert. A small current into this part of the brain makes the rat much more alert but is punishing to the rat. You can “prove” this by implanting electrodes into the brain and turning on a very tiny current (which is not painful in the sense of an electric shock) and then the rat will soon avoid whatever part of their environment they are in when you turn on the current. But something was terribly wrong with the rat that James Olds had prepared. Instead of avoiding the area, his rat was falling head over heels in love with that area! The rat kept going back for more! When the rat was “sacrificed”, it turned out that Olds had not waited long enough for the cement to dry and the electrode had moved forward into another area of the brain. A whole line of research grew out of this “mistake.” What was “good” here was that Olds and his professor did not try to hide this unlikely result or sweep it under the rug. Instead, they strove to understand it. Although there are certainly scientists who are not as honest as these two, by and large, people go into science in order to find the truth. Not many people go into science in order to make a career out of lying. If you want to be dishonest as a career, you’ll make much more money much more easily by becoming a con artist, or some kind of unscrupulous business person than becoming a scientist. I’m not saying it never happens, but it is a rather stupid path to take. Besides the fact that people who go into science want to know the truth (and do not go into it to get rich), there are all sorts of checks and balances in science to “weed out” dolts who lie about or cover up results.

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My interest in stories and my interest in psychology, though both strong, for many years stayed separate. At one point in my IBM career, I was trying various ways to study and improve a system called “The Speech Filing System” which later transformed into the “Audio Distribution System.” This was a system which functioned a little bit like an answering machine, but was much more sophisticated. One big advantage was that you called it on purpose to leave an audio message. This puts the user in a much better frame of mind than an answering machine. If you call a human being and expect to talk to a human being and instead, get an answering machine, you are (even to this day) more likely to leave a somewhat incoherent and incomplete message such as:

“Leave a message after the beep. BEEP!”

“Oh, hi. It’s me. I wanted to … well, I… I wanted to … maybe it’s .. . you know what? Call me back. I will be gone for an hour or so unless you call in the next ten minutes. Anyway, you know my number, right?”

Yeah, we’ve all been there. By now, a few decades later, people are not quite so surprised by an answering machine, but it still sucks.

Instead, if you called the Audio Distribution System, you knew ahead of time you were going to be leaving a message so you prepared it mentally. You could also easily edit or delete your message and start over. That is just a taste of its many features. But it was new; not just a new product, but a new concept. Furthermore in those dark days of the distant past, there were no mobile phones. People were not used to using something with twelve buttons for a User Interface. The system had a lot of functions but only twelve buttons. Speech recognition was too unreliable to be used for the command interface. So this provided something of a puzzle; how could the buttons be used to make a good interface. Luckily, there were plenty of psychologists on the case. In fact, the main inventor of the concept, Stephen Boies, had been a student of Mike Posner, one of the most brilliant experimental psychologists ever, and John Gould, a prominent and experienced member of the Human Factors Society was also on the project as was I. In addition, the team included Jim Schoonard and John Richards. John was another Posner student. We may have had the only project team with more psychologist by training than computer scientists! As it turned out, both John Richards and Stephen Boies ended up doing a lot of the programming and most of the maintenance.

By using standard processes of design, test, and re-design, we developed a good set of commands. Beyond that, the interface, prompts and documentation were all derived from a state transition table so that changes in the User Interface could be made fairly easily and the documentation could be automatically updated and kept congruent with each other. However, I felt the need for something else. It wasn’t that people had much trouble “figuring out” how to accomplish a particular thing with the User Interface. That, they could do. The problem was that many of them never thought to use the Audio Distribution System. It did not require anything different. There on the desk was your same old phone. (True, there was a little template of commands that sat around the square keys). The trick was, how do you get someone to send an audio message as opposed to calling someone or sending a memo or email? For that purpose, I found a bit of video story-telling to be more effective. I portrayed by voice over what was going through my head and modeling what I hoped the thought process of the user might become.

For a variety of reasons, the Audio Distribution System, although it became an IBM product briefly, never became a “best seller.” For one thing, it was inexpensive. That’s right, inexpensive. It provided a lot of function for the customer but not a lot of sales commission for the sales person. On the other hand, for the sales person to sell the Audio Distribution System required them to learn a whole new way of thinking and then a whole new way of convincing their customers. It was much easier, and much more lucrative, to sell the customer on more storage or processing power.

I happened to attend a talk at an IBM meeting by Shelly Dews who mentioned storytelling. She worked in Raleigh at the time on a new IBM suite of networking products. We ended up working together on what was essentially a story to explain to customers what Netview was and what it did. That seemed to work very well and people who read the “story” version remembered the concepts better than the standard form of documentation and training. However, at about that time, I had an opportunity to begin an Artificial Intelligence Lab at NYNEX and so left IBM for a dozen years. At NYNEX, I mainly sublimated my storytelling by writing a play and three novels and some day we’ll come back to that.

I also worked with Heather Desurvire to develop a variation on the User Experience technique called “Heuristic Evaluation.” In that technique, you basically ask people to look for issues in the User Experience. It works better if you use experts, but even non-experts can find many of the issues in the User Experience that would come out in tests.  The variation builds on people’s ability to use empathy. So, rather than simply being asked to find issues with the User Experience, people are told to look at the interface via a series of different perspectives; e.g., a cognitive psychologists, a worried mother, a physical therapist, a Freudian therapist, and so on. People who look at the interface in a variety of ways were able to see more issues and also to make more suggestions for additional features than folks who spent an equal amount of time simply looking at the interface (presumably from their “own” perspective). This relates to story in that people who enjoy stories must be able to experience what is going on in the hearts and minds of the characters in order to comprehend and enjoy stories. It’s a little disconcerting that education doesn’t spend more time improving on people’s natural empathic abilities.

It was not till I returned to IBM to work on “Knowledge Management” however, that I was fully able to marry my interest in stories with my interest in cognitive psychology and indeed with the applied field of “Human Computer Interaction.” I was lucky enough to manage a project for several years that was focused on the “Business Uses of Stories and Storytelling.” This is not the time or place to try to summarize all of that work here, but here are a few interesting tidbits.

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At the time, there was a fairly well-known commercial about “Knowledge Management” that claimed that the “secret” to “Knowledge Management” was “simply” to provide the right knowledge to the right person at the right time. Of course, it is anything other than “simple” but even assuming you could do that, it seemed problematic in concept. I immediately thought back to my college professor who taught German. Professor Maciw was Ukrainian by birth and spent most of World War II in a German Prison Camp which is where he learned German. Perhaps that was part of the reason he tended to be a bit on the sadistic side.

At the end of the first semester, rather than giving us a written test as most Professors do, he determined he would give us an oral exam. He prefaced this by saying, “Who is dis class vants A?” Well, of course, every student in the class raised their hand. Who doesn’t want an A? In our class, happened to be a young woman who had had four years of German in high school, and had lived in Germany for three years. Her German was quite a bit better than mine or anyone else’s in the class. He began with her. His method was simple but mind-boggling. He would begin with a question, always shouted, never spoken, such as “In story of small village, who was main character?”

She would begin with “Eric.”

He would then scream in somewhat broken English (never German), “Please to give complete sentence!”

She would begin answering in German in a complete sentence, but she would not get far. After about three words, he would shout: “Please to decline!” This meant that she would have to think back to the last noun she uttered and then say the noun with the various grammatical cases. Nouns in German all come with articles that differ according to whether the noun is masculine, feminine or neuter, as well as whether it is singular or plural and what the grammatical case is. And, so she would begin with the declination of, say, “Der Hund.”

But no sooner had she begun than he would scream, “In story of Hans, who was wife?”

So, she would say, “Erica.”

Then, the Professor would yell, “Please to say in complete sentence!!”

So, she would put it in a sentence and he would immediately interrupt with: “Please to conjugate!!”

This meant that whatever the last verb out of her mouth was, she would have to conjugate the verb.

This went on for about forty minutes. At last she broke down in tears.

I am quite sure she could have correctly answered any of his questions correctly. It wasn’t the information that was problematic. It was the way in which he interrogated her.

The professor strutted around the room for a few moments with his back turned to the class and then spun about facing us as he said, “NOW, who is dis class still vant A?” Only two of us, out of a class of about thirty raised our hands. Then he started on me. I poured buckets of sweat but did not panic or break down in tears. At last he curled the outer part of his lips down to his shoulders and shook his head a little up and down. Then he started out on the other student, Mr. Lepke whose main sin, I am pretty convinced was that he had been born in the wrong country though I no longer remember what that was. At least twenty minutes of a typical hour and half class were taken up by arguments (in English, or some semblance thereof) about European history. I honestly don’t think I recall a single fact from all that argumentation. In any case, Mr. Lepke’s turn began and after about two minutes the bell rang signaling the end of the double period. All of us left.

By chance, around dinner time, I ran into the professor at the student union. He eagerly strode up to me, his eyes ablaze, “Ah! I had Mr. Lepke in class for two more hours! Finally, he said, ‘No more Dr. Maciw No more, I beg you.’” Now, I have never been in a prison camp so I can’t really say what was up with that particular professor. And, I have to say that his method, although it may have temporarily broken the other two students, gave me a great deal of confidence. Nothing since has so far been as harrowing a verbal interchange. So, in a weird way, it was actually useful for job interviews, exam questions, presentations, and so on in later life.

In any case, the next semester, we were back. None of the three of us who had been questioned dropped out. One of the early spring lectures about European history, the professor stopped mid-sentence and said, “Vat is DIS?! Someone in my class passing notes?” He sped down the aisle and snatched the note out of a student’s hand, striding back to the front of the classroom. !” I vill read note in front of entire class!” 

In his loudest stage voice meant for hundreds of students, though we were only about thirty, he read, “Dr Maciw. Your zipper is open.” And, so it was. But here too, this was the right information, delivered to the right person, at the right time. So, it seemed to me that it was crucial to think, not just about the right information content getting to the right person at the right time. It was also very much about how that information was presented. Certainly, one way that information is presented with thought about how is in the story format. Stories are about emotions, feelings, character, relationships, in other words about people. And, by the way, it doesn’t matter whether the characters are doorman or ducks or dogs or dragons or demigods from Damian three or doctors. The stories are always about people. As a child, or as an adult, I am every bit as stricken with “Lady” in the “Lady and the Tramp” as if she been a beautiful woman. I know just how Tramp feels!

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Another interesting feature of stories as a communication medium is that they allow us to talk about the union of our experiences rather than the intersection. In business, one reason the meetings are almost universally boring is that everyone must frame everything into a single corpospeak which tends to be gray and rectangular. Stories, on the other hand, are a different matter. They come in a huge variety of shapes, sizes, colors, textures, smells, tastes, and movements. Since each is about people, the variety of possible characters is essentially infinite.

Another consideration about stories is that they tend to focus on the edges of human experience rather than the “central tendency.” The universe is a complicated place, full of wonderful and dangerous surprises. Try as we might, we can never step in exactly the same stream twice. Our knowledge is limited and our personal knowledge is very limited. But, we can learn from the experiences of others. We find this especially interesting if it is something on the edges of human experience. In the same way that we find the largest and smallest and fastest mammal to be interesting, we find it interesting to see what happens when the vilest criminal imaginable falls in love with the nicest person on earth. It makes us consider what we would do; it makes us see the question of “what is love, anyway?” in a new light. A story, in other words, is far more than “mere entertainment.” It can literally be life-changing.

Charles Dickens, for instance, is largely credited at least by some for ultimately improving conditions for the poor in England. Little Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe opened the eyes of many to the horrors of slavery in a way that statistics could never do. Why? Because if you actually read the story with an open heart, you become just a little, of a slave. And, hopefully, of course, you realize that whatever pain you feel in merely reading about something hateful, terrifying, or despicable is only a teeny fraction of the pain a person actually experiencing these things would feel.

David McClelland, a former Harvard professor of psychology helped develop a three factor theory of needs: Need for Achievement, Need for Affiliation, and Need for Power. Some people, and some organizations, have various mixtures of these needs. I identify personally a lot with the need for achievement. I want to find problems, solve them, get things done, understand how things work, improve things, etc. I also identify a lot with the Need for Affiliation. I like people. I like their variety and their surprise. I do not identify much at all with the Need for Power. I like it okay, but only when it’s combined with the other two. If I am in charge and I can make good decisions and genuinely feel that I am doing what’s best for the entire group, I am totally fine with being in charge. But the instant I feel like I want to manipulate someone or bully them or make them do something so that I personally benefit, I will quit. I want no part of that.

McClelland studied children’s literature and found that over time and cultures, these needs were more or less in evidence. What he further found was that about forty years after a particular need was most prevalent in the children’s literature, that need begin to manifest itself in society. Whenever, for instance, the need for Achievement was exulted in most children’s stories, then, when those people grew up and began to make decisions and impact life, that society embodied that need and people made a lot of advances with relatively little violence. On the other hand, when the need for power was prevalent, then the adults raised on those stories had a generation with lots of heat and not much light; a lot of violence but not much progress. Stories are powerful.

Let’s now briefly revisit Jacob’s Ladder, the peddler’s toy that fascinated me so much as a small kid. Recall that the Peddler told a story as he demonstrated Jacob’s Ladder. This was no random story, after all. I recall now that in the story, the various tiles/blocks represented places such as a house or temple. The coins used in the story stood for people. So to my five year old imagination, this was not about coins disappearing and reappearing, though that would be a good trick. No, this was about human beings, being in one place and then, suddenly disappearing from that place and then reappearing in another place! Holy Toledo! If that could happen to Jacob and his brother, maybe it could happen to me! This was magic I had to understand! I didn’t realize this until this moment.  I bought one of these for my kids, and they failed to show anything like the level of interest in it that I had. But, I never told them the story.

What is your story?


UPA talk about stories with more links and references about story

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Selection of my short stories

Only You…

08 Tuesday Aug 2017

Posted by petersironwood in America, apocalypse, psychology, story, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

creativity, family, feelings, life, school, stories

Only You….

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Perhaps, like me, you recall “Smokey the Bear” from your childhood along with his famous slogan, “Only you can prevent forest fires.” In English, we seem to have stuck with the completely unmarked and ambiguous second person pronoun. “You” could refer to one single individual or to two people or to everyone on the planet! And, at least in English, the verb form doesn’t help you much either. Of course, verb forms don’t typically help much in English in any case, but you would think, since the pronoun is ambiguous, there would be some other clue in the syntax, but there isn’t. “I can, you can, he/she/it can; we can, you can, they can.” Brilliant. Although many verbs do mark for singular third person with an “s” for the verb which, come to think of it, also makes little sense. If anything, “s” on an English verb should mark for plural. Whatever. I am not bringing this up to criticize English syntax to start a revolution in order to make it more consistent and logical. I learned my lesson from George Bernard Shaw who left his fortune to at least make English spelling phonetic. He sponsored a contest resulting in a beautiful “Shavian alphabet” but his will was contested. He died in 1950 and now, 67 years later, English is just as difficult to spell as ever. Sigh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet

So, no, I am not going to try to convince you to start saying, “you can” for singular you and “you cans” for the plural. In the South, some feel that “y’all” or “you-all” marks for plural but that is not a universally held belief. In any case, when I first heard, “Only you can prevent forest fires” I thought Smokey the Bear was talking about me personally. This was no doubt reinforced by the posters which clearly showed Smokey pointing his “fingers” at me. He wasn’t gesturing to a crowd. He was pointing at me. I had already seen the Disney movie Bambi which graphically portrays the flaming horror of a forest fire so I really did want to prevent them. But how? Smokey went on to offer some helpful rules such as not dropping my cigarettes carelessly on the ground and putting out my campfires completely. I was only about five so I didn’t have much of a nicotine habit. And, several more years would pass before I went to YMCA camp or Boy Scout camp. At five, I didn’t really have much chance to make sure my campfires were out because I didn’t have any campfires. My parents didn’t let me play with matches. Yet, forest fires persisted. Smokey must have been leaving out some crucial steps as to how I was supposed to prevent forest fires.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokey_Bear

I generally tried to work out such puzzles for myself, but eventually I gave up and asked my grandpa how I could prevent forest fires. He patiently explained that Smokey was talking about people in general, not just me in particular. I don’t think I totally “bought” this explanation, but it did assuage my guilt somewhat. “People in general” is an odd concept anyway. It was weird for a five year old, but it remains weird to this day. People are very diverse in their abilities, motives, goals, backgrounds — so how can you possibly make sure “people in general” do anything at all? It wasn’t till many years later that I learned that some people set fires intentionally while a larger number are criminally careless.

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Of course, it isn’t just forest fires that need to be prevented. Parents caution kids in a thousand ways and perhaps 900 of those are actually valid concerns. “Don’t run with scissors!” “Look both ways before crossing!” “Don’t stick anything in your nose!” “Don’t stick anything in your ears!” You may have heard the expression, “It takes all kinds.” It basically means that our world needs different kinds of people in it. I agree! But I must confess, I had no understanding of why my parents would say to me, “Don’t stick anything up your nose!” “Don’t stick anything in your ear!” What!? By this time in my life, I had experienced things stuck in my nose and ears (to name two places doctors like to jam things into you). Every doctor’s visit required that Dr. Miller jam some ice cold metal thing up my nose and when that was done, into my ears! I hated it! But apparently, some kids loved that so much that they wanted to recreate the experience. A few times, playing, hiking or just hanging out a bug flew into my eyes, nose, or ears. I hated that. True, they weren’t ice cold but they moved and buzzed making it even more terrifying. So, now my parents caution me not to stick something up my nose? Of course, once the idea is planted….No, I did not partake.  Once they cautioned me, of course, I did consider it for the first time. But I couldn’t get over the horror. I actually seriously considered two possibilities as to why they would give such advice. 1. They were insane. 2. They knew something I didn’t. Hidden just beyond my view loomed an alternate universe in which things behaved quite differently. And, apparently, a person — even a five year old person like me — could accidentally slip into this alternative universe. In this alternative “up is down” “left is right” universe, it actually would be totally cool to stuff a crayon up your nose and not be able to breathe out of one side of your nose like you had the worst most disgusting bugger ever invented stuck and you could not sneeze it out. And, then, you would have a horde of grown ups hovering around you in a panic like you were going to die, and very soon, unless extreme measures were taken. So, off you went to the “Emergency Room” and some sleep-deprived intern whose mind swam with images of the cute nurse in pediatrics, stuck some cold instrument up your nose and spread your nose tissue like it was going to explode. Whether she needed to do that or enjoyed the movie about the nurse in pediatrics so much, she wasn’t paying attention, I don’t know. But either way, horrible is horrible. So, yeah, I considered it. And I considered it stupid to stick a crayon up my nose.

However, a few years later, I learned that there really were kids who stuck crayons up their nose. What!? This meant that my parents weren’t insane after all. Instead, there really hovered some alternative universe in which it made perfect sense to stick a crayon up your nose. Yeah, sure. Good times. But it isn’t a universe I particularly want to slip into. At least not ahead of schedule. I figure, if I’m lucky enough to live long enough, I may end up with quite a few tubes stuck in me various places. I might not, but I might. In that case, I guess I will have to change my attitude. I wonder whether kids who did stick crayons up their noses have an easier time with this?  In any case, please remember: “Don’t stick crayons up your nose.”

Well, okay, I can think of a scenario where it would make sense to stick crayons up your nose. Let’s say that you’re James Bond and have been issued a very special crayon; when snuffed up your nose, it provides an instant antidote to the poison you are about to release by clicking your heels together three times. BANG. Fog. Your assailants all crumble to the ground. You remove their weapons, tie them together, and waltz back to the hotel to order a double martini, two olives, shaken not stirred. Under those circumstances, I probably would do the nasty.

Sadly, a much more common set of circumstances also exist. In my real life, I had the luck to be born into a loving family. From birth on, like most kids, I was surrounded by love. And, although I wasn’t always the center of attention, as I secretly knew I should be, I had plenty of attention. My parents had their times they didn’t want me to butt in but I also had plenty of time that I wanted to be alone or with my own friends. Live and let live. But what if, instead, I had been unlucky enough to be born into a family that provided very little if any love or attention? Under those circumstances, I might have been desperate enough to try putting a crayon up my nose or even playing with fire.

Just as I never felt compelled to stick crayons up my nose, I never understood kids who enjoyed “playing with fire.” I personally don’t like getting burned, not even a little bit. I recall accidentally touching my thumb to a hot soldering iron my dad was using. Oh, my god that hurt! I didn’t want to admit to anyone that I had burned myself. How I discovered this, I have no idea, but I discovered that if I lay down on the living room rug and vigorously rubbed the burned part back and forth on the rug, the pain went away. But when I stopped, the pain returned even worse than before. So, naturally, I did the only sensible thing a six year old would do. I resumed rubbing the burn on the rug. Ah. Relief. Of course, from today’s perspective, rubbing the burned part screams of stupidity. At the time though, I eventually confessed when my parents asked me why I kept making persistent thumb love to the rug. Whatever they did to treat the pain, I can tell you it wasn’t as effective in the short term as rubbing it on the rug. But they were adults. They were interested in what is best in the long run. And, I just bring that up because it seems somewhere along the line, we seem to have forgotten that.

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In the universe where I grew up, the adults had responsibilities. Top most among all those responsibilities was to provide for future generations. At least most parents are overjoyed when their kids are born. It doesn’t seem too much of a stretch of the imagination to realize that your kids will also be overjoyed when they have kids and so on down the line. If adults are collectively unable to put off their own pleasures for the good of future generations, this particular branch of the tree of life is about to be pruned.

The idea that we adults should squeeze every ounce of earth’s resources and leave future generations far worse off in terms of the beauty of the earth, the healthfulness of the air, water, and food supply — no way! That’s what little kids might do. And, lying about it to avoid any consequences? That’s what you expect a little kid to do. Not an adult. Only a child would play with fire. It might burn far far beyond any original intention. You know, Smokey was right:

“Only you can prevent forest fires!”


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Citizen Soldiers, Part Two: What Fathers can Learn from their Kids

16 Friday Jun 2017

Posted by petersironwood in America, family, psychology, sports, Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

baseball, childhood, civility, debate, dialogue, ethics, fairness, rules, school, sports

caution

 

Growing up in the semi-developed neighborhoods I did, we never had enough kids of the same age to play football, baseball, or even basketball with full teams. One upside of that was that we played modified games according to how many people showed up. For example, we often played basketball one on one or two on two. More rarely, we played three on three. One common variant of baseball we called “Three Dollars.” One person batted by throwing the ball in the air themselves, then quickly positioning that throwing hand onto the bat in order to hit the ball. The other two, three or four players were “fielders” and if they caught a fly ball, they would receive “$1.00.” If they caught it on the first hop, it was $.50 and a deftly caught a grounder netted you  $.25.  In effect, this was just a way to keep score. No money ever actually changed hands. Whoever earned at least three dollars, then got to take the batter’s position. In my experience, everyone would rather be the batter than one of the fielders. Anyway, fielders also lost this symbolic money. If you went for a fly ball and dropped it, you lost a dollar. Similarly, you would lose money for bobbling a one-bouncer or grounder. This game seemed to be pretty well-known throughout America so I’m sure we didn’t invent it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_baseball

However, we did try tweaking the rules. For example, we sometimes played without the penalty clause. You gained but never lost “money.” But we decided to go back to the “original” rules. Then, another time, we decided to try it with a different goal, five dollars. After we tried that a few times, we all agreed it took too long to get a turn at bat. So, again, we returned to the original rules. Another slight variant that came up was that not all fly balls were equally difficult. On the one hand, a sharply curving rocket line drive is very difficult to grab! A blooper fly ball is easy; in fact, easier than many grounders. On the other hand, for us at least, a towering fly ball was again quite difficult. So, we experimented with awarding various amounts such as $.75 for an easy blooper but as much as $1.50 for a sharp line drive. It proved that there were too many “boundary cases” to make this a pleasant way to spend an afternoon. None of us really wanted to waste time arguing instead of playing baseball! That was the sort of nonsense that parents engaged in, but kids were smarter than that. On the other hand, each of us instinctively knew that we also had to “stick up for ourselves.” We could not just acquiesce in the face of injustice. Quite naturally, we would tend to see things a bit differently. Let’s say I am in the outfield and have $2.00. Now, you, as the batter, hit a looping fly ball/line drive which curves and sinks. I make a nice catch. Yay me. But now I start trotting up to the plate because $2.00 plus $1.50 for a line drive puts me at $3.50 and it’s my turn to swing that sweet honey colored bat and knock that little ball for a loop. But you say, “Whoa! Hang on there, John. You only have $2.75!” And I say, (and, please note that there is no baseball going on during this exchange) “No way. That was a line drive! That was a hard one too!” (And, I mean that in the sense that it curved and sank and it was actually quite a hard catch to make.) So, then, you say, “What? That wasn’t hard! I caught a lot of line drives that were harder than that one.” (And, what you mean by “hard” is that it was high velocity.) Generally speaking, we resolved these disputes but after 3 or four of them, we made a firm decision to revert to the original rules. In an entire season, under the “normal rules”, there might be one questionable call as to whether a ball was caught at the very end of the first bounce or just after the second bounce began. But the categories of fly ball, one bounce, two or more bounces — these withstood the test of time.

MikeandStatue

Learning by modeling; in this case by modeling something in the real world.

There are some interesting balancing acts inherent in the “design” of these rules. I am positive that this game was not invented by a single individual who used a mathematical algorithm to determine the appropriate “values” for the various fielding plays and what the stopping rule was and whether or not to extract penalties. Kids tried out various things and found out what “worked.” The rules and the consequences were simple enough (and easily reversible enough) for our small group to determine what worked for us. For example, if we make the changeover goal dollar amount too little; e.g., $1.50, the turnover is too fast. Too much time is spent running in to take the bat one minute and then running back out again later to field.  No-one gets to “warm up” in their position enough to play their best. To the batter, if feels like a real win to be able to hit the ball and, in a way control the game. Because, any half way decent batter, if they are hitting from their own toss can easily direct the ball to left, center or right field and can determine whether they are hitting a likely fly ball, one bouncer or grounder. So, for my own selfish reasons, I wanted the game to go as long as possible with me as batter. So, it made sense to hit more often to those players who had low amounts so as to “even up” the game. This also made it more exciting for the fielders because it made the game “closer” for them. An unwritten code however, also kept this from getting out of hand. For instance, if I began by hitting two hard line drives to the left fielder, and they made great catches, it wasn’t really okay to simply ignore them and never hit to them again until everyone had caught up.

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Many potential rule changes never even came up in conversation. For example, no-one ever said, “Hey, let’s count $.98 for a fly ball, $.56 for a one-hopper and $.33 for a grounder.” We wanted to spend the summer (or at least much of it) honing our baseball skills, not our arithmetic skills. And, while we soon discovered that we did not want to spend our time arguing about the boundary between a line drive and a fly ball, we knew without even trying that we definitely didn’t want to spend our time practicing mental arithmetic. And, we further instinctively knew that people would make errors of addition as well as memory. It was pretty easy for the batters and other fielders to keep track of what three people had when left fielder had $2.50, center fielder only had $1.50 and right fielder had $2.75. No way did anyone want to remember current scores such as, $2.29, $2.85 and $2.95. Then, the left fielder misses a grounder and you subtract $.33 to get to $1.96. No. Not happening.

We wanted rules. We never simply had one person bat as long as they felt like it. And, we definitely didn’t want to argue after every single strike of the ball whether it was time for someone else to bat and if so, who that might be. So, the rules were really helpful! They were simple. They were fair. And they minimized arguments. We experimented with rule changes but in every case, decided to go back to the original rules. And, there were many potential rules that we never even discussed because they would be silly, at least for my neighbors and friends.

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In addition to all the formal rules, unwritten and mostly unspoken codes of conduct also impinged upon our play. If someone “had to” bring their much younger sibling along, for example, we didn’t hit a line drive at them as hard as we could. We knew that that wasn’t “fair” even though it was within the rules. Fielders tended to “know” how far each batter could hit a fly ball and positioned themselves accordingly. Someone could have pretended not to be able to hit farther than 100 feet; keep drawing the fielders in and then bang it over their heads so they had no chance of getting a valuable fly ball. But no-one did that. It was understood that you hit the ball as far as you could. Fielders also positioned themselves far enough away from each other so that running into each other’s implicit “territory” proved rare. “Calling for” a ball occurred but not very often. We never had to say, as best I can recall, that you were not allowed to “interfere” with each other’s catches. Implicitly, even though the fielders were competing with each other to take the next turn at bat, the fielders were modeled after a real baseball game and so, in effect, the fielders were all on the “same team” just as they would be in a real outfield or infield.

A number of interesting phenomena occurred around this and similar games but the one I want to focus on now is that we experimented with the rules, we changed the rules, and if we didn’t like the new results or process, we changed the rules back to the way they were. And I find this relevant today because I find that many of my colleagues, classmates and friends seem to want to “return” to a set of conditions that no longer exist. I totally get that and in many ways can relate. It seems doable because many of us have had similar experiences both in sports and in other arenas where we try out a new way of doing things and then decide the old way is better. In my experience, this worked and with very little argument. I don’t recall spending time in my childhood screaming about whether a $5.00 limit or a $3.00 limit was better for the game. We started with a $3.00 limit, tried a $5.00 limit and then we all agreed $3.00 was better. There may well be places where the particular group of kids decided on $2.50 or $5.00 limits. But is there any group of kids who beat each other up over this? Is there even a group of kids who preferred the $2.50 limit who refused to play with the $5.00 kids? I don’t really know, but in my observations of kids whether parental, grandparental; whether familiar or professional; whether at camps I attended or ones where I was a counselor; whether in a psychiatric hospital or a school setting, I have never seen it. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, but it can’t be very common.

In our small group of neighborhood kids, we were able to “roll back” rules pretty easily and smoothly. It seems as though we should be able to do this on a larger scale, but I just don’t think that is possible. It may or may not be desirable for various specific instances, but I don’t think for many situations, it is even possible; or, at the very least, the costs are far higher than we would be willing to pay.

Consider some examples from nutrition. When I was growing up, my parents and grandparents inculcated in me that I was supposed to eat “good” meals which included meat or fish every single day. At some point during my adult life, there came to be concern about cholesterol in the diet. The theory was that cholesterol contributed to heart disease and that you should avoid eating foods like beef, eggs, and shrimp which contained a relatively large amount of cholesterol. Now, we believe that refined sugar and artificial sweeteners are both far worse sources of calories than beef, eggs and shrimp. In fact, most of the cholesterol in your blood is made by you and only a little comes from your diet. But eating a lot of sugar causes you to store rather than burn body fat and also makes your cells eventually “immune” to the regulatory effects of insulin.

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Now, people have always had differing tastes when it comes to food. Some people have completely ignored every bit of nutritional advice that’s ever been put out there. They eat what they feel like eating. Others are willing to try any new fad that comes out. Most people are somewhere in between. But because there have always been people eating beef, eggs, and shrimp, repopulating these into my diet or your diet is pretty easy. It is one case where we really can roll back guidelines.

But imagine instead of having a change in nutritional guidelines, we all subscribed to a religion which made eating any birds or bird products strictly taboo for the last thousand years. And, let’s imagine that was true world-wide. Now, a revelation comes that actually, birds are quite good to eat and so are eggs. Now what? There are no chicken farms. There are no boxes made to carry eggs. There are no companies whose business is to provide eggs. There are no egg inspectors. There are no regulations about breeding chickens or gathering eggs. Indeed, it is a lost art. There are no recipes that use eggs or chicken. People don’t realize that some people are quite allergic to eggs. People don’t realize that eggs “spoil” if they are kept warm too long. The point is, that unlike my little coterie of kids deciding to go back to $3.00 instead of $5.00 (which was easy), the adjustment of adding chicken and eggs back into our diets will be a big deal. There will be many mistakes along the way. A few people will even die of food poisoning. Still, my guess is that it would prove possible. The benefits would outweigh the costs. Even so, there would be a lot of disruption. People who sell soy products, for instance, might well claim that the religious revelation was bogus and that eggs and chicken should still be banned. Even people who are persuaded that it is not a sin to eat eggs might still think they are pretty gross because they have been brought up that way. Family stories have been passed down over generations. Perhaps Aunt Sally once tried an egg when she was little and that’s why she grew up cross-eyed. (This isn’t the real reason, but it might be the reason in a family story).

The point is that we can “change” this way of doing things, but it will be much more disruptive than changing the rules of our ersatz baseball game. Other changes are even more difficult to pull off. Partly this is because in a complex interconnected society like ours, any change away from the status quo will hit some people harder than others. Just like our “soy producer” in the egg example, whoever is “hurt” by a reversion to something older will not like it and will struggle socially, politically, and legally to keep things they way they are now. They will not want to go back to how things were (or, for that matter, into a future which is different either).

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Most of our ways of doing things are now highly interconnected and global. For example, the computer I am writing on at this moment is far, far, more powerful than all the computing power worldwide that existed when I was ten. While I know something about how to use this computer, I do not know the details of how the hardware works, the operating system, the application that I am using, and so on. This computer was produced and delivered by means of an extremely complex global network and supply chain. The materials came from somewhere on the planet and probably no-one knows exactly where every part of the raw material even came from. The talent that conceived of the computer, designed it and built it was again from all over the world. Apple does business in at least 125 countries throughout the world. Other major companies are similar. The situation is nothing like having 125 separate companies in 125 different countries. These companies are all linked by reporting relationships, training programs, supply chains, communication links, personnel exchanges, and so on. If, for whatever reason, Apple decided to become 125 different independent companies — one for each country, they would, I believe, fail pretty quickly. It would be nearly as difficult (and as sensible) as if you decided that you would no longer be an integrated human person but instead your arms, your legs, your head and your trunk would now operate as six separate entities.

We are now vastly interconnected. Certainly, WWI and WWII were deadly global conflicts. Not only were these wars costly in money and human life, but they were horrendously disruptive as well. Families were broken apart, infrastructure was destroyed, supply chains were interrupted. New hatreds flared. But even as lethal and costly as these wars were, WWIII would be much worse even if no atomic, biological or chemical weapons were used. Why? Because nearly every country in the world is now tightly interconnected with every other country. Maybe that was a great idea. Maybe it was a horrible idea. Maybe it’s a good idea in general, but we should have been much more thoughtful and deliberate about the details of how we inter-relate. Regardless of how wise or unwise globalization has been, we cannot simply “change the rules” back to the way they were 100 years ago.

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If we attempt to destroy globalization, and have each country “fend for itself,” it will be incredibly expensive both in dollars and in human lives lost. This genie, however much you hate it or love it, will not squeeze back into that bottle. If we attempt to go back 100 years, we will actually go back about 2000 years. Again, consider this computer I am using. I worked in the computing field for 50 years. And, I would be completely helpless to try to make anything like this computer from scratch. But the computer is far from the only example. Could I fix my car? Some things I could but the engine diagnostics now require a computer hook up. Could I fix my TV? Not much. My dad was an electrical engineer. The most common cause of problems with a TV in my youth was that a vacuum tube stopped operating properly. When the TV was “on the blink” we would take one or more tubes out of the TV and take them to a testing machine at the grocery, drug store, or hardware store and see which tube needed to be replaced and then buy that replacement, go back home, put in the new tube and *bingo* the TV worked again! Can I do that today? No. Can you? I doubt it. But it isn’t simply electronics and automotive industries that are global and complex. It is nearly ever aspect of life: financial, medical, informational, entertainment, sports, and so on. What about your local softball team? You know all those people personally just as I knew the folks I played $3.00 with. But where are you spikes made? How about your softballs? Bats? Mitts? The last bat I bought — a beautiful, heavy aluminum bat — it came sheathed in plastic. I think that was unneeded pollution, but there it was. Where was that plastic made? Where did the bat come from? Where was the metal mined? Where was it fashioned?

Personally, on the whole, I think the highly interconnected world we live in is more fun and interesting. In a typical week, I literally eat food inspired by Mexican, Japanese, Indian, and Thai recipes. In many cases, it is prepared by people originally from those countries. Books, plants for gardens, music, movies, games — these things are made worldwide and distributed worldwide. To me, it makes life much more interesting. If you don’t like globalization as much as I do, you can certainly stick to American authors and “traditional” American dishes (although almost all of them came originally from another country), American composers, etc. You’re missing out, but it’s your call. But no matter how you try, you cannot “disentangle” yourself completely from the larger world.

The inter-connectedness often wreaks havoc as well. Little bits of plastic micro-trash that come from the United States pollute oceans everywhere. Air pollution that originates in Asia comes across the Pacific to affect people in North America. If the Japanese kill too many whales, it affects the ecosystem world-wide. Pollutants that come from Belgium may kill bees in Argentina. A plague that begins in Thailand may kill people in New Jersey or Sweden. We cannot wish this interconnectedness away. Today’s “Citizen Soldier” needs to be smart as well as brave and loyal. You are not standing in a long line dressed in a red uniform facing a long line of soldiers dressed in blue (who are your enemy). You are going about your own business. But you must understand that how you treat people from every other country whether you are visiting a country or they are visiting your country — how you treat them will impact people globally. If you treat people badly it will impact you and your neighbors badly in the long run. We really have to think globally even while we act locally. I think it’s the “right” thing to do. It’s a little hard to imagine a serious world religion or world philosophy that justifies trying to get as much as possible for you or your tight-knit group of friends at everyone else’s expense. But even if you somehow convince yourself that it’s morally “okay” to be a complete isolationist, reality will not let you do it.

You can take your turn at bat. But you also have to go out in the field and take that turn. Kids who take their first turn at bat and then “go home” as soon as they have to go out in the field do not get called upon to play a second or third time. You might most enjoy being a bazooka shooter. But you are going to have to spend a fair amount of your time being “Claude the Radioman” (See earlier blog post) because with seven billion people on the planet, more coordination than ever is needed. It won’t work to have everyone be a “hunter-gatherer” any more. It won’t work for everyone to “do their own thing.” It won’t work to roll back the rules of the last 100 years and have every country do their own thing either. We cannot smoothly “undo” history. We cannot jam the genie of globalization back into the bottle. I have a much better chance of fitting into the pants of my first wedding suit (waist 29”).

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I mentioned that in my neighborhood, we typically did not have full teams. One day, however, while we were playing American football (five on five) in a vacant field two blocks down from my house, an older kid approached us explaining  that he wanted “his team” to play “our team.” We didn’t actually have a “team” at all. We would get together and chose captains who would then take turns picking kids for their (very temporary) “team” for that particular game. We had a football. That was pretty much the extent of our “equipment” though someone did occasionally bring a kicking tee. The vacant lot did not have any goal posts so there were no field goals. We generally played a variant of American football, wherein the defenders were not allowed to cross the line of scrimmage and tackle the quarterback until they had counted “One Chimpanzee, Two Chimpanzee, Three Chimpanzee, Four Chimpanzee, Five Chimpanzee” — and then, they could rush in and tackle the quarterback. In the five on five variant, the center was generally a blocker while the other three ran down the field and tried to “get open” so that the quarterback could hit them with a pass. Occasionally, a quarterback would try a run. If they could “fake” a pass and get the rusher (usually only one person) to jump up off the ground, the quarterback could generally sprint past them before they got back on the ground and gain a reasonable number of yards before the other defenders realized it was a run. (In case you aren’t familiar with American football, once the quarterback goes beyond the point where the ball was hiked from, they are no longer allowed to throw a forward pass).

http://www.understanding-american-football.com/football-rules.html

In any case, although five on five football was fun, it also seemed to us that it would be fun to play eleven on eleven like “real” American football. So, we agreed to come back the next day after school and face “his team.” Weather cooperated and we showed up the next day after school and so did the other team. In uniform. We didn’t have uniforms. But not only were they all wearing the same colors. These kids had helmets, shoulder pads, thigh pads, elbow pads and shin pads!  They were armored!  But we weren’t! Every time their center hiked the ball to the quarterback, a bunch of us would try to rush in to get the quarterback. No “one-chimpanzee”, “two-chimpanzee” business now. We were playing real football. And getting real bruises.

I can tell you from personal experience, that it hurt an unnatural amount to run into these other guys but we held our ground any way. It did seem unfair to us but they never wavered or offered to take off their pads or helmets. The first few times were not so bad, but once your body is already bruised, then it does hurt to run into someone with full body armor. I suppose it sometimes seemed equally unfair to Medieval peasants without armor who were attacked by armored knights. Hardly a “fair fight” as we would say. Nor does it seem a very “fair fight” for a little kid walking on some distant jungle path to suddenly have their leg blown off from a land mine. And, I suppose some would judge it an unfair fight for a village of unarmed farmers to have a rocket or drone smash their village to pieces along with many of the men, women, children and livestock. Just guessing, but that’s my sense of it.

This older kid who arranged our game did not actually play, as I recall, but served not only as coach for his team but also as the one and only referee for the game. That didn’t seem particularly fair either, but he was pretty impartial. As it began to get dark though and we were still tied, he did make something of an unfair call, at least in my opinion. Anyway, I think they won by only one touchdown. We did pretty well against these armored kids from another part of town. But we were a sore lot the next day. None of us suffered any major injury such as a broken bone though we were all pretty black and blue from the battering. None of us were very eager to have a rematch though. We talked briefly about the possibility of getting our own uniforms but we were way short of that financially. Even if we had actually collected all the pretend money we talked about in “$3.00” we couldn’t afford that kind of equipment.

Does it matter whether a game — or a war — is a “fair” fight? Or, does it only matter who “wins”? In sports, we generally have a lot of rules and regulations to insure fair play. We would consider it a gross misconduct of justice to have one NFL team denied equipment! Some readers may be old enough to recall the controversy over using fiberglass poles in the Olympics. See the link below for a fascinating story regarding the “fairness” of Olympic pole vaulting.

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2335693-munich-olympics-1972-the-other-controversy-you-may-have-forgotten

I think it may matter more than many think as to whether a fight is a fair one. A fair loss leads most people to acceptance and adaptation; in many cases, it can serve as motivation to do better . But if they think the fight is unfair, resentment will often linger and eventually result in another fight. Chances are that this time, the party who feels they had been treated unfairly will no longer care about having a “fair fight” and do anything they can to win. Anything. So, it serves us well to think long and hard about winning an unfair fight. What will happen next?  It seems to me that when we win an unfair fight, there are many negative consequences and they almost always outweigh the benefits of the win.

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First of all, whoever loses the unfair fight will resent you. Second, people not involved at all in the unfair fight and who don’t even care about the outcome, will care about the process and the vast majority will dislike whoever behaves unfairly. Third, it makes it more likely that other people will be unfair in their own transactions.

In the days of childhood sports, we sometimes disagreed about what was fair. But we never disagreed about whether it was okay not to even try to be fair. We all assumed we were supposed to be “fair.” You must understand, this was unsupervised child’s play. We did not play baseball with parents around coaching, umping, and spectating. Of course, we had disagreements and sometimes we lost our tempers. On rare occasions, someone might walk off in a huff. But, there really weren’t that many huffs to go around back then, so it was rare. And, whoever did walk off in a huff was back the next day ready to play $3.00 again. Their huff dissolved in the cool night breezes. When they went to their closet the next day, no wearable huff remained. There may have been a few tattered huff-shreds in the bottom of the closet, but not even enough to wear as a bathing suit, let alone a three piece suit of huff complete with huff vest, huff pants, and a huff coat. I don’t think any of us even owned a huff tie.

I think part of the reason was that all of our disagreements and arguments were face to face. We never sent e-mail. And, we certainly never hired a lawyer to “represent” us. For some reason, when one person “represents” another, they feel it is more “okay” to do unfair things than the person themselves would feel comfortable with. We kids simply discovered that it was a lot more fun to play baseball, in any of the variants, wearing a shirt, sneakers and jeans. A huff suit was simply too confining and too easily torn. Kids all seem to know this instinctively, but as they grow up, they may begin to fill their closet with huffs and wear them on many occasions.

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Imagine a world in which adults all gave their huff suits to the Goodwill. In this world, they talked, solved problems, had some fun, and when they disagreed, tried to do what was fair for everyone. It sounds kind of crazy, I know. But we live in a world of miracles, don’t we? And, that world is embedded in a universe of miracles. Very slowly we are coming to understand more of it. Our understanding of this amazing universe grows and some of that understanding even sheds light on how our bodies and brains work as well as the fundamental characteristics of the universe. Maybe somewhere in this vast universe of miracles, there is a way to experiment with the rules of the game until we find a way that works for everyone who wants to play. Perhaps we could pay $.25 when someone can restate what you said to your satisfaction. If someone can think of another example of the same principle, they get $.50. And, if someone has a brand new sharable insight on the topic, they get $1.00. First one to $3.00 gets to direct the dialogue for awhile. Come dressed for serious play. No huff allowed.


 

(The story above and many cousins like it are compiled now in a book available on Amazon: Tales from an American Childhood: Recollection and Revelation. I recount early experiences and then related them to contemporary issues and challenges in society).

Author Page on Amazon

Citizen Soldiers 1: Early Enlistment; No Retirement.

07 Wednesday Jun 2017

Posted by petersironwood in America, Uncategorized

≈ 6 Comments

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advertising, Democracy, progaganda, school, school days, war

Citizen Soldiers — Part One: Early Enlistment; No Retirement

Congratulations! You’re in the army now. Well, maybe not exactly in the army and hopefully, you will never have to face combat situations month after month. But make no mistake — regardless of your age, mobility, fitness and so on, you might well find yourself in a “combat situation.” Instead of a an AK-47, you might not have any real military weapons at your disposal. You may only have your wits, your experience, and whatever is at hand.

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We are all now a new kind of soldier in a new kind of war. This much seems obvious. And although we mostly won’t have to face combat or terrorist situations, we will have to be brave and loyal. But we will also have to be smart. It won’t be enough to follow orders. Rather than a clear chain of command issuing orders to a loyal army fighting another loyal army, you have already become one of 7 billion game pieces in a complex and giant “game” of war in which the sides are unclear; the objectives are unclear; the boundaries are unclear; and the weapons are anyone’s guess. At least one way to think about what to call the “sides” in this war: Life versus Death.

In a traditional war whether tribal warfare, Roman conquests, Medieval wars, WWI, WWII, Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq, and so on, death is always a possibility. Life and death are always at stake. But what I mean is that in the changing panoply of various sides and nations, there are two large themes in play. One of these is pushing toward those things that foster life: competition with rules, love, creativity, innovation, science, play, freedom, democracy, listening to all sides, cooperation — these are things that foster life. They do not just foster modern human life. Freedom, for instance, isn’t just another word for nothing left to do. Animals caught in a trap will chew their arm off to be free. Diversity isn’t some liberal invention of the 20th century. Diversity is central to the very existence of life. Life is about experimentation and seeing what actually works. Letting people play, paint, write, speak as they like — these are extensions of the great human experiment to find out more about our universe and share that information with everyone. These are the values of life, not because some political party tries to claim them, but because they are central to life itself.

Top-down central control of everything; restricting people’s religion, dress, dancing, games, speech — these are not characteristics of life. These are characteristics of anti-life. Above all, the forces of Death want to take away from you knowledge of how life really is. Whether it is making it illegal to paint pictures of birds with naked legs in Afghanistan under the Taliban or defunding public libraries and public education in the USA, the goal is the same: to make sure that your children and your children’s children grow up in enslaved ignorance to someone in power. The people who are pro-Death don’t say this of course. They will make up some crap about how this is in the service of Allah or God or that it’s to grow the economy and therefore to everyone’s benefit. Guess what? It is not in everyone’s interests. It is not in your interests. The very same techniques that have been honed over the centuries to push your buttons and induce  you to buy the brand new horseradish & sea slug ointment that will forever rid you of unsightly elbow wrinkles is also used to make you think you will not only thrive but survive under the new slave order. But you won’t. Not only won’t the horseradish and sea slug concoction not cure your elbow wrinkles. Guess what? It isn’t even a problem!  You skin is supposed to wrinkle at the elbows when you straighten your arm. Of course, once you buy the cream and apply it twice a day as instructed, and you find that nothing in your life has improved, it is embarrassing to admit you’ve been hoodwinked into spending $29.99 for a month’s supply. No-one likes to be tricked. But even less do people like to admit they’ve been tricked.

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How did you end up in the army now? How did I end up in the army? As a kid, I dreamed of being a great warrior, space ranger, or fighter pilot. When did these dreams begin? When did my battles start?

I lived in Firestone Park with my mom, grand-parents and great-grandma till the middle of Kindergarten. The two story white house with green shutters, commanded a strategic view at the corner from which any potential enemy could be spotted.  I didn’t really play much with other kids during the first half of Kindergarten there in Firestone Park. When I was five, my dad returned from Portugal and Mom, Dad, and I moved to North Firestone Boulevard. In that neighborhood were enough kids my own age to play with. At school, there were no “battles” because teachers separated kids before it got that far. Even so, those would have been more fights than battles. Cowboys and Indians as well as Cops and Robbers served that role. We played and of course I wanted to “win.” It’s just more fun not to be the dead one. Since we didn’t use live ammo or even paintball ammo, who “won” was mostly a matter of negotiation really. When we first began these games, we tried saying “I got you” but I discovered quickly that others would simply say, “I got you first!.” without any regard to who actually got whom first. If one of us were the policeman, we might argue that the good guy should always win. Then, we might argue about that. And so on. Although these games offered some fun, they generally lacked the kind of clear-cut victories I sought.

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Later, we learned to play checkers and then chess. You don’t exactly get your blood boiling as you might with Cops and Robbers, but at least checkers and chess offered a clear winner. Still later, we learned to play Risk, which I found an enormously fun game. The goal is quite simply to “take over” the world. In case you’ve never had the pleasure of playing Risk, it’s a fairly large game board overlaid onto a vastly simplified map of the world. (Of course, every war map is necessarily vastly simplified. It would make decisions about where to bomb, for example, even more complicated if you were distracted by the death and destruction to people, animals and property that you really have no beef with). No, the Risk “armies” consisted of tiny painted wooded cubes. I believe my original set contained “armies” of bright yellow, bright blue, bright red, black, pine green and pink. The map was divided into the Continents. The Australian Continent (which included Australia, New Zealand, and all of Indonesia) consisted of four “countries.” Europe had seven “countries,” Africa 6, South America 4 and so on. The version I own now has plastic armies which are not nearly so cool as the original wooden ones.

Risk was also cool because, although there was a definite element of luck, strategy played a huge part in whether I won or lost. I generally won. I think I liked winning mainly because of this: as I won more and more land and acquired more and more armies, this meant I had more and more choices in where I deployed my armies and where I attacked. Meanwhile, my “enemy” had fewer and fewer armies, territory and fewer choices about what they could do.

My strategy (hardly original) was to capture Australia and Siam. If you occupied “all” of Australia, you got an extra two armies every turn. Over time, this is a big advantage. If you owned all of Asia, on the other hand, you got seven extra armies every turn. The problem though, with trying to occupy all of Asia was that you could be attacked from many different other countries. On the other hand, to attack Australia you only had one choice. You had to attack from Siam. This meant you had to occupy Siam before you could attack Australia. Conversely, if I could hold on to Siam, I could “protect” my occupation in Australia. And, equally important, I would be preventing anyone else from owning all of Asia. Anyway, during the many years I played Risk, I seldom related it in any way to real war. Although it was played, as I said, on this crude multicolored map with little bits of wood. Is it possible the obsession with the “Domino Theory” and its application to southeast Asia was based partly on childhood experiences with “Risk”? I don’t think so. The timing is wrong. Risk came out in 1957 so people born in 1945 would only be 12 when it came out. I would only be old enough to die in Viet Name; but not make any policy decisions. Military generals with enough power to shape US policy would have had to take up playing Risk when they were at least in their thirties.

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I played a game after all. The game’s objective was clearly stated in the rules. The objective was to take over the world. It never occurred to me that this might be something “bad.” I understood, even at 12, that the other players also wanted to take over the world for themselves. Someone winning didn’t result even in a hiccup in friendships. Angry words were never spoken. However, if someone thought someone else was cheating, then that was an entirely different matter. We had to try to resolve that before moving on. Generally, on the few occasions that that occurred, I think the person accused of cheating said it never happened and we all said something like, “OK, but don’t let it happen again.” This kind of indicates that we did not totally believe the story. Actually, it isn’t quite true that my friends never got angry during play. When we played with two sides, we didn’t get angry. Three or four sided Risk did result in some angry words. The reason was that when one person began to win (usually me), the remaining players would gang up. But these alliances were only temporary. Once another player became dominant, the alliances would shift to prevent the new dominant person from “winning.”  Then, the old allies might begin to fight verbally. Managing these fluid relationships was much more difficult than managing how to arrange the armies on the board. It involved another set of skills entirely. Moreover, to “win” at that game never struck me as being quite as honest as winning at two-person Risk or at checkers or chess. To win at 3-person or 4-person Risk, you needed to manipulate others into seeing your interests and their interests as being aligned knowing full well that at some point in the future, you would have to attack your ally in order to win the game. I could never really put my heart into this aspect of the game. As a result, I eventually much preferred 2-person play which was an overt and obvious all-out competition from the beginning to end.

My cousin Bob (3 years older and who also became a psychologist) liked multi-person Risk. He spent a lot of time trying to manipulate me into doing things I didn’t really want to do.  Perhaps we can delve another time into my credulousness when it came to my cousin. In my own defense, I would remind readers that when you are a little kid, you generally believe that someone three years older knows more than you about how the world works; he is someone to learn from, after all. In fact, not only does the older kid know more, they actually are most likely smarter. Their brains are not just filled with an additional three years of knowledge; their brains are more mature; the wiring is more complete. Anyway, on one particular occasion, we were having a toy soldier fight in a sandbox at his house. His dad, a psychiatrist who ran hospitals for the criminally insane, often moved from city to city and one of our typical summer vacations was to visit him in his new location. At this point, he ran a maximum security psychiatric hospital  for the “criminally insane” in Altoona, PA and lived in nearby Hollidaysburg. He owned a large house with a dog run for Bob’s Collie, Laddie (who was now, sadly, nearing the end of his life) and included a large, hand-made sandbox. This formed the backdrop for the pitched battles cousin Bob and I set up.

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We employed the cool hollow lead soldiers that were hand-painted. Anyway, we had each set up our soldiers and we were about to go through our elaborate process to see who would “win” this battle, when my cousin brought up the idea that he wanted to use a firecracker. I objected that this was unfair and that it might actually blow up some of my soldiers besides giving him overwhelming odds of winning. He countered by saying that it isn’t just about winning. More importantly, it’s about having a good time. And wouldn’t it be cool to have an actual explosion in our battle? Now it occurs to me that I might have asked him to let me determine where to place the “dynamite” since it didn’t really matter to him who “won.” Alas, I didn’t think of it at the time and so I relented. He ran inside, got the firecracker and some matches, ran back out, carefully placed the firecracker to do the most damage to my troops (and probably therefore win the “game” that doesn’t really count so much as having a good time, let’s not forget). He lit the firecracker and there was a very short dramatic moment while we awaited the inevitable. We had stood a safe distance away so now, after the surprisingly loud CRACK-KOOM we walked back to the sandbox, Bob with a happy grin and me more in a resigned frame of mind. Well, I thought, at least it would be interesting to see the exact pattern of destruction suffered by my troops.

And that pattern was…impossible.  In fact, none of the considerable damage from the firecracker had been wreaked onto my troops. All of the fire-cracker damage slaughtered his troops. As this slowly dawned on the two of us, I burst out into laughter. My cousin, however, sprang into tears and ran inside. I found that extreme a reaction disturbing in someone so much older and wiser. Anyway, I surveyed the battle scene for awhile. I never did come up with a very good explanation of how this (and quite possibly Karmic) “smart fire-cracker” actually managed to hit only my cousin’s troops, especially since Bob had so carefully positioned it to harm mine, or so we both thought. Soon my thoughts turned back to my cousin. Why had he been so upset? It occurred to me that it really did matter to him who “won” our toy solider battle — enough to make him cry, at least when prompted by my laugh. But besides that, and more importantly, it taught me that he had misrepresented how he actually felt in order to manipulate me into doing something mainly in his interests while making it seem as though it was in my interest.

They say hunting is the only sport where one side doesn’t know they’re playing. That’s how I felt though. I had been playing a game of toy soldiers with my cousin. We had established norms and rules to decide who “won” a battle. Apparently though, my cousin was also playing another game— a game of psychological manipulation. This was a game that no-one told me we were playing. Of course, it you are three years older than another kid and the other kid doesn’t even know you are in a game of manipulation, it’s pretty easy to manipulate them.  But now, Bob had spilled the beans. For him, it wasn’t just about winning at toy soldiers or checkers or chess. It was also about winning a psychological game I hadn’t even known we were playing. I’d like to say that he never succeeded in manipulating me psychologically again. I don’t think that’s quite true, but at least there were far fewer incidents after that.

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And that brings us back to the war that we are all in today. Here. Now. This minute. It is partly a war of soldiers and positions and weaponry. On that front, the USA is well positioned. However, it is also a war of diplomacy, communication, and finding common cause with reliable allies. It is also an economic war and a scientific war. Although finding and maintaining superior weapons are not by any means the only values to having a healthy economy and a large established scientific community, it is one value. If a country finds any type of superior weapon before anyone else can develop it, they have a huge advantage; quite possibly one that cannot be overcome in any other way.

What might such a weapon look like? It’s hard to say. It could be chemical, biological, nanotechnological. It could be superior robotics or AI. Or, it could be having a huge advantage in know-how about psychological manipulation, especially if the citizen soldiers don’t even know they are playing —- and being played.

If I were in charge of trying to “take over the world” today, even if I had a large arsenal of atomic, biological and chemical weapons, I would still have a giant problem. And that problem would be international cooperation in general and NATO in particular. And the “worst” part of NATO would be its strongest partner, the United States of America. If I use atomic weapons or biological or chemical weapons, yes, I can destroy many countries. But they will destroy me and my country. So, that won’t work. But what if, instead, I destroy a country from the inside out? What if I destroy the trust and cooperation of nations in general and of NATO and the USA in particular? If I can accomplish that, I can indeed, end up taking over the world.

Okay, that’s easy enough to say. But how on earth can you manipulate a country into destroying itself? If I thought this had not already been figured out by many other people a long time ago, I wouldn’t publish it here, but they have so I will. You first look for real problems in that country. Let’s take, as a random example, America. There were real problems even in 2016. A small selection in no particular order: gun violence, crime, opioid addiction, unemployment, crumbling infrastructure, soaring medical costs, giant and growing wealth inequality, soaring cost of higher education, insane levels of greed and corruption, a distracted public that wants to “get” everything in two minutes or less, polluted air and water. So, these are real problems that could be used as scaffolding for a full scale attack on our country. These are like the Medieval ladders that allowed the enemy to scale the castle walls. But ladders alone won’t do the trick. After all, these are all problems that can be ameliorated with intelligent direction and hard work provided people cooperate. First, they need to cooperate on a way to prioritize these issues and pay for them. Second, they need to cooperate in the execution on every one of the necessary plans. So, no, scaling ladders alone won’t do it.

The second weapon that must be brought to bear is the catapult. And, this catapult is not your grandmother’s catapult. It is an “intelligent” catapult. It doesn’t just uselessly careen boulders into a mud puddle in the courtyard. No, these flying rocks are guided to the fault lines in the castle walls. Where are the fault lines? What fault lines, you ask? Well, the “fault lines” are the lines drawn in the sand between people when they can be psychologically manipulated into pointing fingers. “It’s your fault!” “No, it’s your fault!!” Everywhere you can find people divided on an issue, you can aim a rock to catapult there. It doesn’t even matter how trivial the issue is! All that matters is that there are at least two sides (two is probably best) and that they fervently disagree. It can be much more entertaining to point fingers and yell at another group of people than to sit down and calmly pick a problem and then go solve it together. I swear that there are very very few people who would not experience much better feelings doing the second than the first. And, yet, the “finding fault” is addicting. It makes you high. It really does. And, like heroin it actually solves precisely the same number of real problems in the real world. Zero. Zip. Nada. Two groups of people can scream at each other for hours, days, months, years, decades. They can throw insults; they can point fingers; they can lob bombs. But not one thing has been accomplished that way that even begins to counterbalance the damage done in the process. And, meanwhile, there is the opportunity costs of not working together to create something useful, or beautiful, or just awesome!

America has always been something of a delicate balancing act. We celebrate freedom of speech, for example, and this results in some very extreme views. We embrace diversity which engenders huge creativity and resiliency. On the other hand, it also means it may take a little longer to understand each other. And so on. But what if someone sought to upset the balance? What if someone’s idea of how best to destroy America is to put their fingers ever so slightly on the plates of those scales? And what if the way that did that was to exaggerate and inflame the various “fault lines” in America and in so doing, greatly weakening the castle walls so that scaling them would be much easier?

That is why every Citizen Soldier in any country, needs to be wary of psychological manipulation and to try to avoid focusing on finding fault and differences and instead focus on finding a soluble problem and then going out and just solving the damned thing. Yes, it’s great to be brave and loyal. But you’ve also got to be smart. Think about it. Companies spend millions of dollars on commercials to get people to buy their products. Do you think they would do that if advertising were ineffective? Now imagine a country that wants to weaken the US. Do you think they would line up atomic weapons and tanks to shoot us but then fall short of using techniques of psychological manipulation that inflame your hatred and exaggerate differences? They sure as heck would not be sponsoring radio programs to air uplifting stories of cooperation across our differences!  No. It is a war. We are all soldiers. But we must be smart. Think this through.


(The story above and many cousins like it are compiled now in a book available on Amazon: Tales from an American Childhood: Recollection and Revelation. I recount early experiences and then related them to contemporary issues and challenges in society).

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Family Matters: Part Two – Garlic Cloves and Puffer Fish

11 Thursday May 2017

Posted by petersironwood in America, family, management, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

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diversity, evolution, family, life, religion, school

 

PicturesfromiPhoneChinaParisPrinceton 177There are many directions to go for the first sequel to “Family Matters: Part One.” That blog focused mainly on my family of origin, so one obvious place to go is to talk about my children and grandchildren. But I don’t really want to speak for them. After all, they can still talk back. My parents and grandparents cannot. But the real reason is that everyone should get to define themselves, at least to the extent that it’s possible. I think it is possible to a great extent, but not completely. Not everyone can become a pro athlete or a great musician even if they try really really hard. Luck and innate predispositions play a role in our fate.

Certainly, there are many “how to” books out there that would lead you to believe that the only thing that stands between you and owning the universe is your attitude. It isn’t a totally bad thing to imagine that you can do anything and have no limitations due to circumstances or your innate abilities and predispositions. It’s a fiction, of course. It’s a complete and utter fiction. If you spent the first five years of your life drinking lead tainted water, e.g., no amount of the proper “attitude” is going to undo the harm. But, for people whose main obstacle to a fulfilled life is self-doubt, it could provide a good antidote, or at the very least, a few good anecdotes that arise from a series of unfortunate incidents taking place from following such advice.

What I have in mind however, is something different; viz., trying to show how family situations tend to be continuous threads in a way that is analogous to the continuous genetic threads. For example, my grandmother used to tell “Old Pete” stories and ran a dramatic club. My mother became an English and Drama teacher. I have always loved acting and storytelling. Several of my kids and grandkids have also written originally and extensively. My mother’s brothers all were jokesters and storytellers. Her oldest brother Karl was a principal and then superintendent of schools. The middle boy, Bob, became a psychiatrist. The youngest, Paul, became a lawyer. The next generation included two psychologists, two lawyers, a neurosurgeon, a teacher. I could elaborate further but the point is that storytelling, art, psychology, and education as well as science and engineering are threads throughout this very local part of my family tree.

Before I go any further, however, I need to explain why I subtitled this, “Garlic Cloves and Puffer Fish.” As a side note, it’s good to remember that both garlic and puffer fish are our distant cousins. The same basic machinery that makes the cells of a garlic plant “work” and live and reproduce is what does all those same things in our cells. And our other, somewhat less distant cousin, the Puffer Fish has that same machinery in every one of its cells. Of course, beyond that we even have most of the same organs and types of symmetry as the Puffer (or any other) Fish. Now, I bring up our relation to these distant cousins because I would like to have you view what I am about to say about various people as being observational and not rendering value judgements. It would be silly to go out to a garlic plant and yell, “Why can’t you be more like a Puffer Fish?!  What’s wrong with you?!” It would be equally ridiculous, of course, to go snorkeling and when you encounter a Puffer Fish scream at it: “What are you doing out here in the ocean? Why can’t you be more like your cousin Garlic who at least makes wonderful tasting (to most) and health-giving nutrients? No, instead, you poison people! What’s wrong with you?”

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Now, when it comes to people, of course, it isn’t just their genes that determines behavior. The family, neighborhood, culture, religion, and physical environment that they grow up in determines, at least in large measure, who they become. Humans come in many varieties. This is both because, when it comes to our own life, we can actually make ourselves different in some ways on purpose (there is a grain of truth in the “positive thinking will win you the universe” genre) and secondly, when it comes to someone perceiving us, their own background and character will determine what they see in you. Similarly, your background will help determine what you see in others. If you think back on your own experience, you’ll see this is true. Anyway, among these many ways that people differ is how neatness-oriented they are. The hit TV series, The Odd Couple, featured two bachelors living together; one was an utter slob (Oscar) and the other was a neatnik (Felix). We all probably know people close to those extremes. We may even know two such people in our family as defined with a small circle to say your second cousins. I’m not trying to say one of these characteristics is better or worse than the other. But I would like to point out that each makes a lot of sense, under certain conditions.

Some years ago, I was watching a TV program about Alice Waters, a famous chef, restaurant owner, and author. She believes in such things as organic, locally grown ingredients. In any case, she happened to make this offhand comment that “it didn’t really matter if a little piece of the garlic skin clings to a clove” {at least in the context of the sauce they were making for a huge fish}. Anyway, I do most of the cooking in my house and I do try to remove the skin of garlic cloves. Most of the time, it’s fairly easy. But every once in a while I have encountered a clove of garlic that is as pathologically stubborn about giving up its skin as a corrupt politician is about giving up the illusion of sanctity. Even a garlic plant has its own personality, I suppose. On the scale of neatnik to slob, I would put myself near the middle. Of course, to anyone who thinks it’s good to be super neat, I will seem like a slob. And to anyone who thinks cleaning is just not worth the trouble, I may seem like a neatnik. Anyway, my point is that maybe there comes a point where you don’t generally have to be absolutely precise in cooking. And I would guess that this rings true with your experience as well. There are some cooks whose approach is very intuitive and, although they may follow a recipe, their measurements may not be totally accurate. And, then their are cooks who will follow directions extremely carefully. Generally speaking, it doesn’t make that much difference. I tend to prefer dishes such as mixed ginger/curry vegetables, burritos, or omelets. In these dishes, you can get away with a huge variation in proportions and specific ingredients. I give these dishes care and attention to detail, but all within very broad parameters.

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In at least one case, however, it is crucial to be a “neatnik” cook and that is in the preparation of the Puffer Fish. The Puffer Fish contains a highly potent neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin. Most of this toxin is in the liver, skin, and other internal organs. It is very easy if you are even the least bit sloppy — and we are not talking Oscararian sloppihood, just normal college guy sloppihood — to nick something and release the poison into the flesh making it potentially deadly. Under those circumstances, being a neatnik is vital. In some cases, expert chefs push a little further and allow a tiny bit of the toxin to bleed into the flesh which will cause a “high” in the eater, but not be fatal. Personally, I think I’ll stick with tuna. The point is that being extremely neat and careful can be a very good thing. Packing your parachute — good to be careful! Performing cataract surgery — be precise!

On the other hand, suppose that you are spear fishing or out gathering nuts. A “neatnik” might want to make sure every fish is skewered in exactly the same way. Except, perhaps for Puffer Fish, it doesn’t matter that much; the point is to catch the fish. Similarly, if you are gathering walnuts, there generally isn’t much point in arranging them by size. Suppose you are making a rock wall. You would do well to make sure it doesn’t fall down but the way to do that is by careful arrangement and filling in the cracks carefully with cement. An alternative approach is to insist that every rock is exactly the same. This would make building the wall much easier. On the other hand, it would be absurdly time consuming to search for rocks of precisely the same size. Other approaches are to have one group of people cut rocks to preset measures and then the job of building the walls is easier or to make artificial rocks called “bricks.” Under various circumstances, any of these methods will work just fine. In other circumstances, any of these approaches might fail. It isn’t quite so simple a matter as Disney and the Three Little Pigs would have you believe.

When it comes to recipes, whether for bricks or for soufflés, It is difficult to know ahead of time which aspects of the process require a Felixian attention to detail and which aspects are fine for a more Oscarian approach. And, just as there are situations that are particularly suitable and best done by Neatniks there are other situations particularly well suited to Slobs, this same principle holds true for every approach and personality trait that I can think of. So when I describe people in my more extended family, I am not trying to pass judgement on who is better than whom. You might imagine that there is an attempt on my part to make out someone as “bad” or “good” based on your own personality preferences. Similarly, it’s quite possible that I accidentally make one or the other kind of personality sound better based on my own preferences than they really are.

Although it is quite natural for people to express different preferences on the neatnik to slob dimension, it is often a source of tension, argument, fights, and in extreme cases, probably divorce and murder. Most often, when an “Oscar” does something annoyingly sloppy, (and which to Oscar is actually typically exactly nothing), Felix will not try to dialogue about the situation and negotiate a solution. Rather, Felix’s first move is more often to call out Oscar’s character as being deficient because he is such a slob. Immediately and quite predictably, Oscar’s defenses go up. His next move is to point out that Felix is insanely OCD. And thus, the problem moves from what is immediate, simple, and fixable to one that is long-term, complex, and unfixable. Oscar will never convince Felix to be like Oscar and Felix will not ever convince Oscar to be like Felix. In fact, for Felix to even expect Oscar to act Felixian is rather silly.

You have undoubtedly heard the expression that you “marry the family” as well as your own spouse. I found this unfathomably silly when I was younger, but now I see that in many ways it is true. For example, if your spouse has unresolved issues from their childhood, those can impact your relationship. If your spouse’s family is into crime or drugs or unnecessary drama, those will certainly impact you. These people will almost certainly interact with you and your kids so they will impact your lives directly and indirectly.

Keeping all this in mind, let’s tune into “Uncle Al.” Al worked at one point as a commercial artist. In such a position, being something of a “Felix” probably worked to his benefit. But not every situation calls for OCD. Al lived in one of two houses at the end of a dead end street. What would you do if you drove to the end of his narrow, dead end street? Well, one possible action would be to abandon your car at the end of the street and walk home to buy another car or just wait there until you were beamed up by aliens. Most people however, would instead go into one of the two driveways at the end of the street, turn their car around and drive back out the dead end street. Al didn’t like that. I suppose most of us might be mildly annoyed. But after all, what else could people do other than abandon their car or back out the entire length of the street? So, while most people might be a little annoyed at strangers using their driveway for a U-turn maneuver, Al was instead, very annoyed. So annoyed was Uncle Al that he paid to have five steel posts put into the end of his drive. Indeed, this completely prevented any stranger from using his driveway as a place to turn around. Chalk one up for Uncle Al.

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Now, you may have detected a slight flaw in Al’s plan. He could no longer use his driveway either. For that matter, he could no longer use his garage to house his car either. But to Al’s way of thinking, that was worth it because he had achieved his goal. The phrase, “cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face” comes to mind.  At another point, several of my ex-brothers-in-laws went over to clean Uncle Al’s house. When they opened up the refrigerator, the shelves were all filled with the same thing. Can you guess what it was? No, you probably can’t. Every shelf was filled with tiny paper mini-ramekins. And in each of those tiny paper mini-ramekins was tartar sauce. Upon questioning, the story finally came out. Every Friday, Al went to a nearby diner where they had an “all you can eat fish” special. The fish came with tartar sauce. Uncle Al hated tartar sauce. But he had paid for the tartar sauce! So, when he left the restaurant, he took the tartar sauce with him each and every time.

This seems a little on the crazy side, but I would guess that almost everyone has sometimes taken something that they have access to even though they end up not using it. In fact, it’s a little odder and more selfish than that. We might even know when we take the items that it’s very unlikely we use them. For example, in the IBM cafeteria, I would often take an extra napkin. Why? Because on rare occasions, someone, possibly even me, would spill something and having an extra napkin that could be deployed jack-knife quick proved very handy.  But most of the time, these hypothetical emergencies failed to eventuate. Now, what to do with the extra napkin? I could put it in the trash, or since it was clean, put it in the recycling. To me, taking the time and effort to recycle is completely worth it. Not everyone does that. We can return to that later, but re-use (or in this case, first use) trumps recycling. So, I would take the napkins back to my office. I had one drawer in particular that ended up with a collection of napkins as well as tea bags, plastic forks, tiny packets of salt and pepper, and other food-related items. Small stuff. There were no stashes of candy bars or soda cans or deer carcasses.

However, this example of hoarding was not an idle and useless exercise in hoarding. When people in the lab had birthdays or other types of celebration, it actually turned out to be quite handy to have a nearby supply of napkins and plastic forks. When I thought about the design rationale for this procedure, I never thought to myself, “I paid for this dinner and there’s no rule against taking two napkins, so I want to keep what is mine.” In terms of explanation, my saving napkins and Uncle Al’s taking tartar sauce are light-years apart. But looked at in terms of situations and behavior, there are actually a lot of similarities. As already explained, all of us are closely related. Although Uncle Al was not “related” in the way that people generally use that word, our ancestors were common for billions of years. So, I would hypothesize, the behavior of keeping something that is not of immediate use but could be used in the future is one that is found broadly in the animal kingdom and in plants. We imagine that the desert plant that stores water in it’s thick leaves does not “think about it.” It seems pretty silly to think it thinks at all. But let’s expand the idea of how information is coded just a little. It wouldn’t make a difference if the rationale were written in Spanish or English or French would it? It wouldn’t matter if the design rationale were printed in 14 point Helvetica or 12 point Times New Roman. It wouldn’t matter whether it was coded in ascii or EBCDIC. So, why not extend the concept a little further. The “design rationale” for the plant’s behavior is coded in it’s DNA.  We may not be able to “read” this design rationale quite as readily as we could one printed in our native language. But that is basically a matter of convenience, not a matter of underlying truth. The plant does have a design rationale for being “greedy.”

When it comes to human behavior, of course, there are not only genetic determiners but also social ones. (Actually, this can be true of non-human animals as well). So, it isn’t just that people may have a genetic propensity for keeping extra items for future use; their particular culture has inculcated values and design rationals and ethics around greed, waste, generosity, and so forth. The design rationale that Al gave, I find too self-centered for my taste. My Mom was generous to a fault. And, when I say she was generous to a “fault” what I mean is that she was so generous that she would often give away the same item to several people. So, perhaps being overly generous can be a fault?

In any case, just as people come in all sizes and shapes, they come in all kinds of behavioral predispositions. These predispositions are probably weakly related to your immediate family both because of where you live, among other things. There is no one “right answer” as to which characteristics are “best” under all circumstances. Some may innately be predisposed to Felixism while others may become that way because of strict teachings by their parents and schools. Regardless of why Felix is a neatnik, Oscar is never going to convince him that he (Felix) should be like Oscar. That was true in paragraph ten and it is true in paragraph 17. One thing should be clear to both Felix and Oscar: if they can work together effectively, they will be able to solve a wider range of problems than they would working alone.

Creativity and diversity are always vital, but probably never more so than right this minute. Humanity has changed so much in every external way in the last two thousand years and most of that since the industrial revolution and most of that after the computer revolution. Change is not only rapid, it is rapidifying. Yes, I made that word up. That’s another symptom of the same thing. Change in media, language, meaning are all happening more and more rapidly. So, in times of such great change and such great uncertainty, it has always seemed to me to absolutely and vitally important to include every viewpoint on the problem that we possibly can.

If I am lying on the beach under a sunny sky, feeling healthy and happy, I don’t really need your advice much, at least not this second. Yes, I may not be as neat as you would like or I am far too neat but I don’t really care and it doesn’t matter. You be you, and I’ll be me.

On the other hand, if I am thrown into something beyond my comprehension, I would want to have as many eyes on the problem as possible. Of course, it feels more comfortable to surround yourself only with those who already agree with you rather than a highly diverse group. You won’t argue as much about what the problem is or about what “fairness” really means or even argue about the right process is for combining your insights. A diverse group can initially provide a slight “shell” of added awkwardness for some. In my experience, when people are focused on a situation or a problem, they get past that very quickly and every stage of the process is enhanced. There are more ideas generated, higher quality ideas, the evaluation of ideas is more robust; they generate more ways to fit ideas together. Not only is the output of the group improved. It is just plain more fun during the entire process. Perhaps a better term would be to say that it is more engaging. If someone has a slight accent, you need to listen more closely. If someone comes from a different background, not only do they provide a different way of looking at things or even solution; they also stretch your mind. It may not be as broadening as  traveling to another culture, but it is more than one step in that direction. An all-celery salad gets old fast.

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Beyond all that, it seems important to remember that these variations in human predisposition are not entirely new human inventions. Many species of plants and animals exhibit different “philosophies” or “strategies” for dealing with the same issues: getting food and water, finding a mate, reproducing, avoiding predators, etc. (Yes, plants do these things). What works for a plant in one climate will not do in another climate. Of course, it isn’t just the climate. It also depends on what other species are present, the nature of the soil, etc. Some plants, for instance, put time and energy into making flowers to attract bees, having the bees fertilize the flowers, grow the fertilized flower into a fruit that is both colorful and tasty. This means the fruit (e.g., wild strawberries or raspberries) are eaten by our cousins the rabbits and carried in many directions out from tree by the rabbits. The rabbits excrete the digested seeds which now find themselves in a tiny pre-fertilized plot. Come on!  How about a hand of applause? Do you see how many ducks have be lined up her for this plan to work?

I may have had a reputation for being a little off the wall, but this plan? This is my craziest idea on a combination of illegal drugs and then put through a cognitive blender. I worked in “Corporate America” for about 40 years. I worked for IT companies, but let’s imagine instead a company that made self-reproducing garden ornaments. The way they worked was that each ornament, after one year split in two. Anyway, they were making good money. Now, I go into the top management and say, “Hey, I have a great idea for how to have these ornaments reproduce. No more just splitting in two. Instead, each element will grow a little ornament on top of the ornament but brightly colored. This will undoubtedly attract some sort of something which will fertilize —- oh, wait, did I tell you about the whole “two sexes” deal? Anyway, we’ll then have a process for turning a fertilized element into a fruitling. The fruitling will be fortified with vitamins and sugar so that … um … something will come along and put this into its belly and carry it away into the neighbors yards where they will help build the first step of the new ornament. Give me funding for about 100 million years of experimentation and I can pretty much guarantee….” No, they would not fund a project like that. Evolution is a slow smart cookie. That tree of living things? That’s our tree. And that little teeny branch way over there? That includes Oscar and Felix and everyone else regardless of gender, age, race, religion, or hoardingness.  Does it really make sense for us to destroy the whole branch if we can’t go in exactly the direction we want? And what about how the decisions affect every other part of the tree? It is, after all, a family matter.

(The story above and many cousins like it are compiled now in a book available on Amazon: Tales from an American Childhood: Recollection and Revelation. I recount early experiences and then related them to contemporary issues and challenges in society).

Tales from an American Childhood

Family Matters: Part One

30 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by petersironwood in America, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

family, life, school

 

IMG_5452

 

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Perhaps you recall, as I do, that in the very earliest memories, parents are huge! My mother was huge and my dad was huge! Of course, they not only loomed gigantic physically, they also had a huge influence on me. That, I never thought about as a child, but we’ll return to influence later.

The other remarkable thing about my parents, in early memories, is how different they were from each other. My mother was soft, gentle, smooth-skinned with a soprano voice. My dad was completely different. He was even larger, but besides that, he was hard, physical, hairy and his voice boomed so loud I could feel as well as hear the vibrations. Needless to say, they smelled completely different and I generally saw them at different times of the day, or, more accurately, I saw my mother most of the day and my dad only for small segments on most days. They did different things, said different things, held me differently. There was no way as a child that I saw them as two different examples of a larger class of things called “people.” They were as different as night and oranges to me.

These differences were not just physical and perceptual. As I grew older, I also realized that the species of “Dad” and the species of “Mom” also behaved quite differently.  For example, I could generally count on my dad to remain calm and to get things done whereas in an emergency, my mother generally fell to pieces emotionally. No, come to think of it, she always fell to pieces.

When I was about five years old, my parents took me to a stranger’s house for one of their “Bridge Parties.” To me, “Bridge” was a complete mystery. I understood the concept of games; e.g., “Mother May I”, “Red Light Green Light”, “Pick Up Sticks”, “Checkers”, and (my personal favorite), “Red Rover, Red Rover.” In Red Rover, Red Rover, the opposing team formed a human chain by holding hands. Everyone on a team would chant in unison, “Red Rover, Red Rover, let Tommy come over.” (Tommy was my nick-name at the time). There were two really cool parts to this game in addition to the chanting. One, when it was your turn to make a human chain, you might get to hold hands with a pretty girl. Two, when you were called, you were allowed, indeed encouraged, to run as fast you could, and then SMASH right into the opposing team! That was fun. Honestly, I think I’d like to do that right now. But “Bridge?” The adults just took turns throwing cards on the table. Yet, they were generally screaming and laughing while playing this game. They seemed to be enjoying themselves but I had no idea why.

In any case, however much Mom and Dad enjoyed “Bridge Club”, I certainly didn’t. My parents took me into some random bedroom and said, “you will sleep in here.” Right. I’m five years old in a strange place and I am supposed to go to sleep while there is, basically, a mini-version of Woodstock going on about ten feet from my five year old (and therefore highly sensitive) ears. No, I’m not going to sleep. Even as a five year old, I knew that wasn’t happening. I’m not sure how my parents could have deluded themselves, but apparently they managed. Since sleep was out of the question, I needed to find some way to occupy myself.  What I can do? I’m going to explore the room!

I rather liked the room. It had wall to wall carpeting and dark, heavy, solid wood furniture. I padded about the room looking at this and that, but there wasn’t much to see really. This is what necessitated me to go to phase two of exploring the room; that is, looking under and in things. I looked under the bed, but it was just dusty. I knew it was a long shot that anyone else was trying to invent a new color and keeping the best results under the bed in little jars that had held maraschino cherries, but you never know. Well, actually, yes, eventually you do know. But I didn’t know then because I didn’t know that many people so I didn’t really know how many might be trying to invent new colors. Since then, I’ve met many people who do exactly that although not quite so literally as I was trying to do way back then. I have eleven grandchildren and every one of them is inventing new colors, each in their unique way.

My explorations of the bedroom bureau began very disappointingly. Drawer after drawer was filled with clothes. Sigh. Then, as they say, my eyes actually did become as big as saucers. Large saucers. Because lying right there atop some boring gray gaberdine pants was the coolest biggest gun I had ever seen! I liked my guns! In fact, one of my earliest memories was of a red plastic one. But now, as a “big boy”, I had metal guns. Even better, when I pulled the trigger, they went “BAM” “BAM” because of the caps. I liked my own guns all right, but this gun was way, way cooler. For one thing, it was all metal. Mine were partly plastic. And, the gun was shiny with a depth of its own — except for the handle which had a wonderful pebbled grain.

 

handgun

I could have enjoyed looking at that black gun (similar to, but not identical to the one above) for an hour. But, of course, I had to pick it up. Well, if the look of that gun had been exquisite, and it was, the feel of the gun thrilled me, filled me with uncertain terrors never felt before — to quote Mr. Poe. But alongside the terror was admiration that quickly blossomed into love. The object that constituted the gun seemed so beautifully and solidly built. Had I ever before held something that heavy and dense? I don’t think so.

I knew that my parents had told me to stay in the room and go to sleep. But they were the two people I loved most in the universe. How could I keep the discovery of something this cool, go unshared? I had to let them find out just how cool this gun was. I probably also thought that no little credit would be coming my way for being the discoverer of this marvelous instrument. (Somehow, it never once crossed my mind that the people who owned the house probably already knew about this gun). I definitely thought of it as my discovery, and so it was, in a way. And, if I were never going to get any credit from Grandpa for inventing a new color, at least I would have this great accomplishment forever written into my plus column.

Out into the living room full of laughing, screaming adults somehow getting pleasure out of “Bridge” I tottered, slightly off balance from the weight of the gun, though I was able to hold it one hand, just the way the cowboys and policemen did. “Look what I found.” Now, listening to  the memory of how I said it, I realize it probably was getting credit for my discovery rather than sharing it that most motivated me. Ah, well. Live and learn, as they say. I expected to gain some credit for my discovery and some appreciation for the gun, but I never expected the eruption of adult action and concern and panic and fear and anger and utter surprise. They provided such a sensory overload that my memory is like a loud noise and a great white light. Not only did I receive no plaudits for my wonderful discovery, I definitely had done something unspeakably wrong. (I later discovered that the gun had been loaded with the safety off). But at the time, I felt only bewildered disappointment. However, the one thing I do recall through the white noise was that Dad remained calm and managed to take the gun from me without my trying it out on him for fun. Meanwhile, Mom was being her usual “hysterical in an emergency” self.

At the time, I did not think that my mother was “typical” of all women nor did I think that she was “atypical.” It’s just that I knew this about my mother, but my mother formed one edge or point on  the growing conceptual map of people. And, everything that was true about her was all there together in her own rather large corner of my mind: soft, smooth, soprano, hysterical, gentle, slightly hard of hearing, illogical, loving, beautiful, and fun. Her body positively writhed when she found something funny. Early on, I tried to learn how to cause one of those paroxysms of laughter. Dad, on the other hand, could be counted on in a crisis. He was also hard and hairy and loud and undemonstrative. When, he laughed, most of the time, it was “UH!” That’s it! One sort of half snort, half laugh. I do that too sometimes. On the other hand, I also go into a full out writhe with laughter as well. I am part Mom; part Dad just like most of us with respect to our parents.

My parents had two different professions as well. Dad was an engineer. He was very logical; yes, even as a very young kid I saw this. Mom was an English and Drama teacher. Years later, at CHI in Atlanta, talking with Doug Engelbart, I discovered his parents had the same combination. As an adult, I can imagine that their professions not only seemed to be choices that sprung from their native talents, but that the professions, in turn, helped cement these traits in place.

I met other family members at a young age and each of them was quite different as well. My mother’s mother, Ada was smart, soft, and she told me “Old Pete” stories. We listened to radio programs together such as “The Lone Ranger”, “Roy Rogers”, “Hop-along Cassidy”, and “Tom Corbett and the Space Cadets.” Grandma was the Superintendent of Sunday School at the Methodist church we went to. She also founded the Firestone Park Dramatic Club and ran it for decades. Meetings were held at my grandparents’ house and the women (all the members were women) read plays. This turned out to be a cool deal for me because, as a little kid, whenever someone didn’t show up, I filled in because my memory was so good, that even without trying, I knew all the parts. Grandma also had to take “iron shots” because she was anemic. The best thing though was that she baked peanut butter cookies and when she made a pie, she made butter, sugar, and cinnamon roll-ups!

Her obituary from the Akron Beacon Journal begins this way: “Ada Weimer: Founder Of Drama Club Mrs. Ada P. Weimer, 78, founder of the Firestone Park Dramatic Club and its director for 30 years, died at Edwin Shaw Hospital Wednesday after a six-month illness. Born in Akron, Mrs. Weimer, 1384 Grant St., attended Greensburg High School and Heidelberg College. For many years, she was a Sunday school superintendent at Firestone Park Methodist Church, of which she was a member.” Apart from that, it lists her three sons and daughter whom she “left behind.” No mention of her peanut butter cookies though. Occasionally, after much begging, she would also make popcorn “from scratch” in a kettle. Not mentioned. She also spent a lot of time canning for the extensive “root cellar” my grandparents had in their basement. Not mentioned. Sometimes, she would walk with me up Grant Street to meet Grandpa at the bus stop. On the way, she never failed to scowl at the “beer joint” up the street where the overwhelming odor of beer and alcohol would flood out onto the street. Not mentioned. On rainy days, Grandma would take out two large shoe boxes that contained her extensive post card collection. Each had a photo, or more rarely, a cartoon, on one side and a hand-written or hand-printed note on the other side. They had come from many US states and from many countries around the world. The foreign ones also had interesting stamps to ponder with miniature scenes or portraits or animals from far-away places. I found all of it fascinating: the varieties of handwriting, the stamps, the pictures, the addresses. I would often ask her who these people were and what their comments meant. Usually, she would answer, but occasionally she wouldn’t. The newspaper was silent on the whole matter. Not one single post card was cited.

Grandma was affectionate as was her sister Mary, but their sister Emma took the cake. She was forever pawing, fawning, making a fuss, telling me nursery rhymes, hugging, kissing, etc. All three of these women were somewhat overweight and typically wore loose print dresses. I tend to think of my grandmother mainly wearing white, or off-white dresses with small flowers printed on them. Mary, on the other hand, the largest of the three, tended to wear dark blue dresses with white flowers. Emma typically wore brown or yellow dresses but made up for it with bright red lipstick and lots of make up. That entire branch of the family held family reunions every year. Much later, I met a cousin of Mom’s that had grown up with her family for a time.  He eventually became a psychology professor at an Ivy League School. Although I met numerous distant uncles and cousins over the years, I don’t much recall any of these more distant relatives. Grandma’s mother had come from Wales. My Grandpa painted a picture of the Welsh cottage that she was born in. It was beautiful and set in beautiful country but quite modest in size.

Now, speaking of Grandpa, he was as different and distinct from Grandma as Mom was from Dad. Grandpa smelled of pipe tobacco and although he too, like Dad, seldom laughed very demonstrably, he always seemed to have a twinkle in his grey eyes. Grandpa was extremely smart and knew about everything; or so it seemed at the time. Besides that, he was multi-talented. He worked as an engineer, but he was also an artist of some note. He was also an accomplished musician. Best of all, from my perspective, he was an excellent teacher. When we went out to the garden to pick corn on the cob, he taught me something about plants, soil or gardening. Einstein died when I was almost ten years old. Grandpa showed me the item about it in the Akron Beacon Journal and then proceeded to tell me about Einstein’s work (in elementary terms). He subscribed to “Sky and Telescope” as well as “The Atlantic” and “Scientific American” and the magazine of the American Museum of Natural History. He would point out particular articles to me and then discuss them with me or explain something in more detail.

No need to point out and describe every single person in my family. The main point is that each of these people seemed very very different from the others. Much later, I can see many “family resemblances” in terms of skills, interests, psychology and physical characteristics. But as a child, I perceived none of that. It never even occurred to me that we all needed to breathe or had two arms and two legs. If someone had asked me, I could have answered correctly, of course, but the similarities among these people never crossed my mind. Every week, I listened as The Lone Ranger and Tonto found someone in trouble, tracked down the bad guys, shot a gun out of their hand and rode away. After they were gone, the beneficiaries of their bravery would remark that they didn’t know the true identity of The Lone Ranger, but he had left behind a single silver bullet. In retrospect, these stories were quite formulaic. But at the time, every story was just a different story. And so it was with folks in my family. They were different. They were individuals. Beyond that, they collectively made up the space of possible individuals.

As childhood continued, of course, that people-space continued to grow. New people often revealed, not just that people could be more extreme on existing dimensions such as age, size, or how much they laughed, but they forced me to consider and construct entirely new dimensions as well. People, it turned out, came in different colors; they spoke with different accents. In fact, they spoke in entirely different languages! When I was about three and a half, Mom, Dad and I all left for Portugal. My Mom told me later that I was frustrated that a bunch of Greek sailors could not communicate with me. I don’t recall this. But I do recall a little of learning to speak Portuguese although to me, it was not “learning to speak a different language.” It was just that I encountered people who spoke differently and I learned to communicate with them. Some people don’t laugh much while others laugh quite a lot. Similarly, some people spoke the way I was used to and others spoke some entirely different way. It never occurred to me, as a child, that they spoke an entirely different language and certainly not that they spoke that strange other way because of their own family and their own country. If asked, I imagine that I might have answered that they chose to speak Portuguese rather than English. But mainly, it just was. I didn’t consider why people were fat or skinny; why they spoke with an accent or not; why some people were male and some female; why some were old and some were young. Each person was simply and completely the way they were. They went about their business and as I interacted with them they punched at the edges of the net of my ideas about what people were like. Each person punched outwards in their own direction and the space of people grew larger and larger and larger.

I guess not everyone reacts that same way. It now seems to me, as an adult, that some people only expand their space of people a little ways from the points laid down by their first family and friends. When someone is too different, they are not really part of the whole human condition, but instead, are assigned to some other category such as “old person” or “toddler” or “professional athlete” or “foreigner” or “cripple” or “gay.” For some, each category requires special treatment different from all the rest. If, for instance, a “professional athlete” assaults or rapes someone, that might be okay because there are special rules for such folks. If, on the other hand, a “foreigner” assaults or rapes someone, they should at least be put in prison and quite possibly killed.

Indeed, even my own family gave some hints that this was the way to think about people. You had to be careful with grandparents because they were “old” and could be easily injured or broken into small pieces. When my cousin threw a xylophone across the room and hit me in the head, no punishment was forthcoming because he was “just a little kid” and “didn’t know any better.” When I went to the hospital, people did not seem to be treated as people but rather as “patients” or perhaps as “pneumonia” or “burn victim” or “appendicitis.” Given names were rarely used. Although, even as an adult, I see that there are commonalities in the way doctors need to treat patients with particular diseases, it seems to me that there are also often important differences as well.

One way that people differ quite a bit is how they treat and categorize other people. To me, every new individual I meet still seems quite different although the differences I see now are not nearly so gigantic as the differences that I saw as a child. It might be similar to the way in which both our house and my grandparents’ houses seemed gigantic in that there were so many separate places or regions to the house.

In the next blog, I examine further implications of family matters.

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(The story above and many cousins like it are compiled now in a book available on Amazon: Tales from an American Childhood: Recollection and Revelation. I recount early experiences and then related them to contemporary issues and challenges in society).

Tales from an American Childhood

Author Page on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/author/truthtable

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