The Mother Son Debates will illuminate the differences in values, ideas, hopes and approaches to life between my mom and I.  Perhaps in putting these thoughts out there we might learn more about our respective generations, our social networks and the contexts of our own value formations.  We might also change some of our own view points in the process.  Oh, and yes, we’ll have a lot of fun!

Topics We’ll Debate:

• Health Care Reform – why reform? who should pay? what’s the end result we want?
• Free Will – do we have free will?
• God – current concept of God? is there a God?
• Education – what works? what doesn’t?
• Designer Genetics – should we design our children?  redesign ourselves?
• Technology Enhanced Human Biology – cyborgs? intelligence enhancers?
• Determinism – is it all determined?
• Global Warming – is it real? does it matter?
• Human Rights – what are human rights?
• Universal Truth – are there any universal truths?
• Personal Responsibility – who’s responsible for everything?
• War and Peace – is there a positive to war? is war necessary? is there an acceptable cost of war?
• Generational Shifts – does every generation think the incoming generation has great challenges? eroding values? is not ready to take on the challenges? is the older generation a has been? old ideas? outdated? technophobic?

First topic will be Health Care Reform, as I know that will get my mom into the debate!

The format is simple.  We’ll start with a one paragraph statement of our positions in one blog post.  The debate will happen via comments and follow on blog posts.  Everyone is free to join in the discussion.

Quoting old dead white guys is allowed but is greatly frowned upon.

About Donna Smith, My Mom:

Donna Smith is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Colorado College with a degree in history. Her journalism career includes work as a stringer for NEWSWEEK magazine. She has been honored by the Associated Press Managing Editors with 15 regional awards from 2004-2006 and by the Inland Press Association’s top honor in 2006 for community-based journalism. Since 2007, she has co-chaired the Progressive Democrats of America’s national “Healthcare Not Warfare” campaign, and she has so far spoken in 41 states and the District of Columbia about single-payer healthcare reform.

Donna continues an active writing and speaking career, and now blogs and writes op-ed pieces about the health care crisis. She also is the founder of American Patients United, a non-profit group educating citizens about health care reform on the national level. She also works as a national single-payer health care advocate and community organizer for the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee. Donna and Larry now live in Washington, DC, and they have six children and 14 grandchildren.

About Me

You can ready the far-less-impressive-for-the purposes-of-intellectual-debate background in the About Russell tab of this blog.

1. Can you be satisfied and functional AND integrate the idea that there is no universal meaning?
2. Is ignorance bliss?
3. How long will it take for us to give up on free will?  will we ever do that?
4. Will technology take over for athletic skill in all sports? if it does, will we enjoy it all the same?
5. What’s the next big thing after the Internet?  will we recognize it when it happens?
6. If there is a formal limit to knowledge, is there a point in knowing anything at all?  see question. 2
7. why do people assume “intelligence” in the human sense is a better strategy?  the dinosaurs survived hundreds of millions of years without this “intelligence”.  or did they?
8. If the universe expands to the point where observers on earth cannot observe any other object in the universe that isn’t on earth or near to it, will observers consider our scientific theories myth?  or will we beat that unobservable future with technology?
9. Can you have thoughts without language (verbal or other symbolism)?
10. What is time? no, really.  what is it?

“No, the results did not surprise us,” says Lindenberg. “What surprised us was the size of the effect.”

This is not unlike the findings from last week’s feature on social conformity we found on CNN.  What’s different is the more sound conclusions from these researchers.

It’s not that good people turned bad, either. One goal simply surpassed another in importance. In the case of the mailbox, the desire for cash superceded the desire to behave appropriately, because others already hadn’t. “People are not bad. People are just subject to social influence,” Lindenberg says. An effective tip for crime prevention is to be aware of norm violations on all fronts. After all, says Lindenberg, “Even old grandmothers would do this.”

Values are contingent and contextual.  Ain’t no good and evil, bad and good.  Only situations and consequences.

Public reaction to her reaction to having her “life savings” wiped by the Madoff situation surprised her.

This is a great example of how the rules we all play by are specific to our own contexts/situations in life.

In reading the CNN piece and Penney’s writing you might say:

• God, she still has a lot of money
• Why would anyone fall for Madoff
• Madoff isn’t in jail?!
• Why do ponzi schemes work?
• What a whiner
• Madoff should rot in hell
• …

Penney seems to be really offended. The justice seems to be really light on Madoff.  Madoff seems to have really had a lot of people who trusted him.

Our perceptions of that reality are 100% dependent on our own history.  We will almost always be surprised by others reactions in such conflicting contexts.

In short: this is a fantastic book. You should READ it before seeing the movie.

Writing a review of the book poses a challenge because of how the story develops and the content of the story.  To write to0 much about the story itself would destroy some of the experience of reading it.

It’s a mere 200ish pages, reads in probably a long night of reading or over a period of 3 or 4 nights before you go to sleep.

Yes, it is a love story and crime story and a slice of history piece.  It has all the trimmings of lost love, failed dreams, shame, moral dilemmas and truth seeking.  It is not remarkable in style or story arc or character development.  The Reader startles you in the conclusions it doesn’t draw.

What a sad story, I thought for so long. Not that I now think it was happy.  But I think it is true, and thus the question of whether it is sad or happy has no meaning whatever.

- page 217, The Reader

I brought to it my world view and in that context I found a sympathetic story to my belief that we are not objective, autonomous humans capable of rising above the environments and realities of our own situations.  Truth is contingent on context.  Our justice systems, historical accounts, and romantic relationships can’t escape this fact.

Few things could be more dangerous than letting your children fall into the trap of believing what they do doesn’t matter. Teach them that there are consequences of their actions. Teach them that even small decisions and actions consistently made, have far-reaching effects.

But wait; didn’t we just go over a news article on Google that reported that a teacher was axed because she told the 7 year olds that Santa doesn’t exist? Teaching that in a school, no less. What is the world coming to? Oh-no, Batman, another liberal chop at family traditions and faith-based holidays. It wasn’t on CNN.com or Time.com, Reuters, the washingtonpost.com or wsj.com. Should I believe it? What should I do?

What are the consequences of the Santa thing? I certainly enjoyed it growing up. And we all have heard, “What was good enough for me is damn good enough for…” Oh, wait a minute. That was called upon by my parents concerning values that they wanted me to have….that weren’t true, good, or right. You know, buying GM cars that started on fire, racism, bigotry, sexism in business, education and even dictums on whom to marry.

Hummm… seems there is just one more set of conflict of beliefs. What we do is a testament of our values. We thus value the stuff of our traditions more than we value the truth or all that other stuff we teach in school. …We could use this relational logic to teach intelligent design in schools, maybe a course in Wicca and another in Karma for Tots at the YMCA or JCC.

Should we really be surprised that people go postal or freak out in less dramatic fashion when these ‘absolute’ rules from our parents, teachers, and representatives change?

My sister’s response: “Well as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone (another stellar admonishment that the end justifies the means…) why not have Santa, the Easter Bunny and a Virgin Mary?”

Besides that, consequences are complicated even if they are universal. Myths are fun and simple and that is what we need today so we don’t have to deal with the antecedents that result in foreclosure, bankruptcy, layoffs, SEC fraud and bailouts.

Considering the need for fun and distractions, you might consider a small but compact 22 cal pistol as a gift for your child or perhaps some Mary Jane that isn’t a shoe.

if “no”, then is that an absolute truth?

Refer to Tarski’s Undefinability Theorem.

I enjoyed this guys write up on some details of the theorem.

or maybe you want to play with coherence theory?

or maybe you should just see how others arbitrage the search for truth in pursuit of google rank!

hahahahah.

peace.

Like a flu virus in a preschool lunch room, the question comes up every 6 months or so as to “Why do children lie?” and “What does it mean?” and “What do you do about it?” The latest incarnation was on CNN/health in a Parenting.com article.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/family/11/12/why.kids.lie/index.html

There is huge divergence out there on the answers to the above questions. Even when the conclusions are correct, like Michael Brody, M.D. who correctly says “There’s nothing wrong with telling it [a lie]” he’s grossly mistaken when he says that, “Very young kids don’t know the difference between truth and fiction.”

And again later in the CNN article, when it states “It doesn’t make sense to punish toddlers for truth bending, since they don’t get that what they’re doing is wrong.” Right conclusion for the wrong reasons, again.

Alix Finkelstein in her book, Baby Name Tool Data Set and her article “Baffling Kid Behavior – Explained” subtitled “Why they say one thing and then do another — and how to know what they really want” concludes with the assessment that is chilling: “Kids are a bundle of contradictory impulses.”

So, what do the above proclamations tell us? Can these authorities with all these published works and fancy letters after their name be mistaken?

It is very clear; children can tell what contingencies are operating in different contexts as well as when those contingencies change. They understand counter-control before the parents are driven to pap in doctor office magazine racks for clues on what “counter-control” means.

Parents are the one’s that have been deceived and have not been told the truth. For instance, parents are told that the ‘Terrible twos’ is just a phase that the children go through, etc. That period boils down to the children learning rules – everyone’s rules, faster than the parents learning the children’s rules. They and teachers and ‘authorities’ see no inconsistencies with encouraging their children they can be President of the United States some day [or a princess or baseball player] with that same child also needing different strategies of how to navigate the politics of third grade.

The enveloping scheme here though is the different rule sets the parents have that conflict with the rule sets the child have.

Ask the 3 year olds living on the streets of Rio de Janeiro without parents if they know the difference between truth and fiction. Ask the four year olds working in the factories around the world if they can tell the difference between right and wrong, good and bad or about ‘truth’. Ask the five year olds in Bagdad, Darfur, Mexico City, NYC, Moscow and Rome if they understand the rules (contingencies) for telling the truth, lying and what is fiction. Consequences control behavior. Get over it and on with life.

We all live in a world of fantasy and reality. Telling the difference is not easy for children and it is not easy for adults who have been given license to be uncritical of what controls behavior. It is not made easier with superstition and traditions that foster fantasy masked as reality – Christmas – the Easter Bunny – grandpa is now sleeping in heaven – mommy is busy – when the child senses what is going on and it is not what is reported to be going on.

For a child to NOT pick up the differences on what is going on and what he or she is told defines a level of what all parents dread more than anything…the child is a dolt! For parents to NOT manage these relationships with communication supports the contention that parents don’t understand behavior –theirs or their children’s – any better than Finkelstein does above with her assessment that “Kids are a bundle of contradictory impulses.”

Here is a list of scenarios that lead to lying. Can you tell which are for children and which are for adults?

• Boredom – lack of stimulation and social attention
• Anger over some broken rules by others

o Betrayal

o Frustration

o Their own rules conflict

• Seeking material gain
• Mimicry
• Story telling to connect things that seem unconnected
• They want the lie to be the truth
• Escape / avoidance from aversive stimulation

I can’t tell either.

Business models will always be inaccurate as business is unpredictable and almost intractably so.

Software will always ship with bugs.  No amount of qa can squash them all.

Your best approach to product development is to try things and try a lot of things and see how they catch on.  Attempting to predict user preference or consumer demand beyond an educated guess is a waste of time, money and energy.

Time is intervening variable.  What we care about and what we actually measure when discussing time is change – the change in position relative to gear ticks, the change in position of the planets relative to each other, the change in our bodies relative to our experiences and so on.

If not you, someone else.  That holds for discoveries, jobs, relationships.  We’re all interchangeable and we will be interchanged.  The systems operate with or without us, sometimes “we” impact the system, sometimes we don’t.

Human cognition and the increase in our life spans is not “breaking the design” or “breaking from the constraints” of evolution.  The consequence of big brains, complex nervous systems can play out exactly as we are.  Other biological strategies are possible and have been “successful” at sustaining a species.  We do not know how we sustain the species by increasing life span and expanding knowledge, we can only observe and won’t know unless we persist as a species long enough or we die off (then we really won’t know).

There is a formal limit to knowledge.  The formal limit is far greater than our practical limit.

Philosophy provides little real insight into how it all works yet we all have a philosophy due to the practical limit of knowledge.

We are not even close to our practical limit of technology.

Math is a useful tool.  It is not pure and it is not objective truth.

Science is highly relative to/subjective of the person/people doing it.  It is a narrative, not statements of absolute truth.

If a theory takes longer than observation to explain something, it has little value.

We will never be able to predict the markets completely – never well enough to avoid the big shocks.

I’ll have more statements later this week.

Of course, I’ll even back these up!

~R

Hired Code Slinger: You want answers?
Congressman: I think I’m entitled to them.
Hired Code Slinger: You want answers?
Congressman: I want the truth!

Hired Code Slinger: You can’t handle the truth!  Son, we live in a world that has web sites. And those web sites have products and services that must be refreshed with code every damn second.  Who’s gonna do it?  You?!  You, Congressman?   I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for news updates and you curse porn. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that porn traffic, while illegal, out-sells everything else I try to do on the Internet.  And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, makes everything on the Internet happen… You don’t want the truth because deep down, in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that keyboard. You need me on that keyboard. We use words like bomb, socket, mash-up…we use these words as the backbone to a life spent providing you with content. You use ‘em in a punch line!  I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain my work ethic to a man who rises and falls asleep to the sound bites of Britney Spears or Anna Nicole Smith clips I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it!  I’d rather you just said thank you and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a laptop and code-up. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you’re entitled to!

Congressman: Did you order the code released?
Hired Code Slinger: (quietly) I did the job you need me to do.
Congressman: Did you order the code released!?
Hired Code Slinger: You’re goddamn right I did!!