It’s always the bad apples that poison the waters of possibility — and incredibly, we’ve created a culture that caters to such kind. Even in my tiny world of work, the waste I have witnessed is staggering. What the powers that be in most companies don’t get — is that you create more conflict in cultures that go to excessive lengths to avoid it. It’s just that the conflict is concealed in subtleties that disguise mounting frustration and waste.
While they put out their PR and pretend this undercurrent of crap doesn’t exist. And when someone calls them to account: The problem magically becomes the person calling out the problem.
I know the feeling — all too well!
Justice and decency are carried in the heart of the captain — or they be not aboard
— Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)
In a world of words without action — my calls for accountablity do not compute. The image above embodies what this is all about: It’s just an image! And anyone who tries to reveal the reality underneath — isn’t part of the team. In a world where rigging your own reality has become normalized: You can decorate your walls and website with lofty language (complete with how you care about “Candidate Feedback”):
And not give a damn about what someone who worked there has to say:
For the time in my career, I contacted HR to raise a code-of-conduct complaint against a colleague. I was mysteriously fired a month later. “Our impact is strengthened by our unique points of view and experiences.” Somehow my experience of being put me through a living hell for 6 months — with grossly unprofessional (and occasionally childish) behavior by one of Ecolab’s best: Doesn’t comport with their claims.
A lot of that goin’ around!
Some would seize on the pattern they see in all the conflicts I’ve faced over the years. There’s a pattern alright — as I’ve always clashed with a culture that increasingly values bullshit as currency. But no matter how far I’ve had to repeatedly lower my expectations of people and their precious pride — my concessions could never keep up with the pace of pampering that plagues our society.
Until you’ve taken on the entire country by yourself — you can’t even imagine the mountain of spectacularly stupid shit I’ve seen by those going for gold in the Gutter Games of Government.
Bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant.
— Blurb to On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt
A TON of that goin’ around!
Left & Right:
Whatever your aims — you’ve got a crowd to comfort you. In this fantasyland where wishful thinking rules: You can win an argument without even knowing what the issue is about. What you do in denying the undeniable daily would be unthinkable for me to do ever.
V for Victory & Venom for Values
Until the rise of podcasts, twitter, and the various forms of independent media / journalism, people weren’t really aware how legacy media was influencing their thinking. I think people are finally waking up and may surprise you here, especially if more talk about it.
New formats for funneling information that caters to your cravings is not what I’d call enlightened. And those who couldn’t spot clearly dishonest actors before — think they’re wide awake now? The Twitter bio behind that quote begins with “Groupthink averse.”
It would never occur to him that everything in that Tweet is Groupthink 101.
“Groupthink averse” . . .
After all — it says so in my bio.
Just as that’s a charade — so too is the emptiness of buying books and broadcasting beliefs without the work it takes to act on them. Same goes for endlessly recycling the same story without moving the needle — and never examining the efficacy of your efforts.
But why bother when failure is a pretty profitable enterprise these days!
Building on his enormously successful first edition. Tom Nichols confirms his thesis and proves that the assault on expertise has only intensified.
So, outside of selling books and building a following, you didn’t succeed — at all. When a deservingly popular book didn’t make a dent in 7 years (and everything’s gotten worse to boot): I fail to understand the excitement for an expanded edition doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of making a dent either. Such questions don’t compute with this crowd or any other.
That cat is so fitting for the folly of our times:
“And now, even now” . . .
The cat . . . TOTALLY out of the BAG!
Congratulating yourselves for ordering a book and broadcasting it for Likes: It’s all so goddamn pointless (as there’s no purpose beyond pretending you’re part of some glorious pursuit of the truth and what’s right). Never mind you all refuse to listen to any expertise that challenges you — which flies in the face of the whole f#@king point!
Your followers are so passionate about expertise — that they blow off the person who was years ahead of you in explaining this problem (and in far more sophisticated ways):
Not to mention offering real-world ideas on what to do about it.
The same person telling you that new edition has exactly zero chance of doing of any better than the first (in actually accomplishing anything — which I’d like to think, is the whole idea). And when that prediction comes true — all your audience will care about is congratulating you when you come along advertising the 3rd edition: Waiting in line for the signed copy they crave!
I took on the automatons of the time (Left & Right). No one listened, and lo and behold — automatons exponentially multiplied. Those times were tame compared to today. The toxicity of venom has been taken to a whole other level with pride. And your precious politicians and pundits make it all so easy for you hate — so you can look the other way while woefully failing to live up to virtues you supposedly love.
People want an authority to tell them how to value things, but they choose this authority not based on facts or results. They choose it because it seems authoritative and familiar — and I’m not and never have been familiar.
— Michael Burry, The Big Short
We’re not talking about your love of talking about your love affair with facts — we’re talking about having a history of objective scrutiny that shows your commitment. And for people who flaunt their love for facts — you sure have a helluva lot of hate for irrefutable facts that fly in the face of your calcified convictions.
As it turns out though — that is an opportunity (to take a problem and turn it into a solution). You’d see it so easily but for the poison of pride:
If that overture about authority figures were not overwhelmingly true, this site would not exist. I would not have been practically spit on for 20 years of telling undeniable truth of mathematical certainty: Painfully obvious deception shaped everything you see today.
No rational person would repeatedly deny the undeniable, and just minutes into anything I’ve written on this issue — you should know something’s not right.
But you find it’s with me . . .
[As] I’m not and never have been familiar . . .
If I came across this and hadn’t done my homework, on the title alone — my first thought would be “I must be missing something pretty big!”
You have other ideas:
Button your lip and don’t let the shield slip
Take a fresh grip on your bulletproof mask
And if they try to break down your disguise with their questions
You can hide hide hide behind Paranoid Eyes
I point you to a 7-part, 2 hours and 40 minutes doc — that distills a story that demanded a massive amount of effort, thought, research, and writing: And you tap a Tweet with a talking point or two — thinking you can inform me. Almost every post points to an identifiable disconnect — enough to know that something’s not right with people you put on a pedestal. But you’re not looking to learn, you’re looking to respond.
And entire industries are engineering that need.
We get rewarded by hearts, likes, thumbs-up — and we conflate that with value, and we conflate it with truth.
“I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” . . . Palihapitiya’s criticisms were aimed not only at Facebook, but the wider online ecosystem.
The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion … draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects or despises … in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.
— Francis Bacon, Novum Organum Scientiarum, 1650
Long before brain imaging to understand human behavior, we already had all the tools we needed for a hopeful humanity. We didn’t take advantage of the gifts were were given, and what a shocker — we don’t make good use of those fancy new insights either. Fueling this folly on steroids is the smorgasbord of subcultures that’s hardening minds while believing they’re being broadened. The commentary in these communities speaks volumes about social media and the state of society: Habitually hailing high praise for purveyors of virtue . . .
Virtues that vanish the second they’re called to put them to the test.
Echo chambers across social media worship channel hosts as “National Treasures” — treating them like they’re some of the greatest minds to ever live. At the helm of these cesspools of sycophants — are people who peddle repeatedly rehashed insight their sycophants praise like they split the atom. To be sure, some of it is insightful.
But these “geniuses” are so wise in their ways: They’re oblivious to how they’re feeding the very problems they’re ostensibly trying to solve.
Isaac Newton and Einstein were brilliant — partisan hacks and high-minded influencers fueling a fix, are not. These people are not problem solvers, they’re entertainers. Their audience doesn’t know the difference (and I’m not sure they do either). I’m sure it’s intoxicating to amass a following and feel like you’re making a difference. But I’m going to weigh their impact partly as a reflection of their community: How people behave, not what they believe. If they can’t get that right, I don’t care how big their following gets — they’re taking this nation nowhere. What’s more, they’re making matters worse and being rewarded for it.
If you abandon your critical thinking skills the moment you even perceive a threat to your interests — doesn’t that bring those skills into question? How can you expect anyone to admit when they’re wrong if you won’t? And every time you allow emotion to run roughshod over reason — you further calcify habits at the other end of the spectrum from these:
Rather than assert that all opinions are equal, students in seminar learn to judge opinions on the basis of the reasons given for those opinions.
Nobody ever had to explain that to me. I’m sure you all feel the same — and yet here we are:
As I said in my doc:
We have become a society of spin doctors who manipulate language anytime it suits our needs. Nowadays you can “agree to disagree” about subject matter that you know absolutely nothing about. Being smoothly smug is now considered civil — never mind the notion of genuine courtesy that comes with the willingness to be wrong.
I wrote that years before I ever heard of Tom Nichols — so I was writing about the egregious abuse of “agree to disagree” years before I bought The Death of Expertise in 2017. I was delighted to see that he was the first person I found who felt the same on this asinine “agreement” bound by utterly baseless beliefs. I’ve written a lot on the sickening slop of applying “agree to disagree” without any regard for its original intent.
But nothing tops Tom’s “conversational fire extinguisher” for a one-liner to call this bullshit what it is:
No matter what the subject, the argument always goes down the drain of an enraged ego and ends with minds unchanged, sometimes with professional relationships or even friendships damaged. Instead of arguing, experts today are supposed to accept such disagreements as, at worst, an honest difference of opinion.
We are supposed to “agree to disagree,” a phrase now used indiscriminately as little more than a conversational fire extinguisher. And if we insist that not everything is a matter of opinion, that some things are right and others are wrong . . . well, then we’re just being jerks, apparently.
Oh yeah, I know the routine — all too well! Alas, had he replied to my email back then and taken a look at my doc and what I was trying to do about the “death of expertise” in my own way: He could have brought it back to life in ways his books never will. But I guess he was busy.
And why bother considering fresh ideas that might work when you can stay busy on what won’t? A lot of that goin’ around!
Some champion of truth and reason:
Tom Nichols blocked me (not for challenging not the quality of his books, but the efficacy of his efforts). Never mind I’m saying the same thing I’m saying about everyone. But rather embrace being challenged and elevate debate — apparently he prefers acolytes heaping praise upon him all the way to the bank.
A lot of that goin’ around too!
I have no idea why this painting sold for $300 million in 2015. But I do know that I’m wildly unqualified to know. You don’t have to be qualified in order to have an opinion about whether you like something or not. But when you haven’t trained your mind to understand what you might be missing, you’re in no position to be the arbiter of truth on the value of the work before you.
I had a choice between Art and Music Appreciation at Purdue. I made a mistake — as I’ve always wished I had taken both. The image above is to the boxset of cassettes from that course. I learned to listen in ways well beyond music. Alas, we live in a nation that never listens and never learns.
And has seemingly forgotten how understanding even works:
Which do you think is more valuable?
Me explaining every aspect of the banner image below — or you working it out for yourself and asking questions on anything unclear? In a sea of sameness, where are those who thirst for inquiry that requires reflection and wonder? The curiosity to consider:
Is he critizing the books, the execution of their contents, or both?
If I summed up my scrutiny for standard scrolling with ease — it wouldn’t be compelling without understanding the story behind it. But in a world where easy is all the rage, it’s almost impossible to find anyone willing to put the time and effort into anything that doesn’t conform to the formula.
So you blow right by illustrations and clips at the crux of the story: Racing to conclusions on what you find uncompelling (slinging snippets about how you can’t understand what you didn’t stop to consider). After all, you’re busy . . .
You’re always busy!
None of those boxes of beliefs are entirely wrong, but bonding within them makes you think you’re entirely right (on everything). And that is why the mirror image has meaning here — as the boxes of beliefs reflect how you see yourselves.
If you didn’t know that, wouldn’t you want to? Would you want to live in a world where books were written with words that never advanced your vocabulary? Do you think I chose this checkered flag just for the hell of it? Without the long line of those who immeasurably influenced my thinking by demanding more of my mind — do think I would have thought to thematically connect “racing to conclusions” with the cloudiness within them?
About those boxes of beliefs . . .
About those “results” . . .
If you’d take a break from broadcasting your beliefs once in a while, you might take notice of the counterproductive nature of endlessly beating into the ground. But every single day, you all make the same mistake John Wooden warned you about:
Pay no mind to how many times we go backwards by the means in which you move forward.
The Yellow Brick Road is the Path of America’s Predictably Counterproductive Pursuits: Where systematic oversimplification has taken over to the point where inconvenient correlations are condemned as convoluted. And any attempt to have a conversation on issues that clearly call for careful consideration — is hijacked by baseless beliefs beaten into your brain as bedrock fact.
From decades of being increasingly accommodating of liars aligned with your interests: You kept lowering the bar — and now there is no bar. Do the people you put on a pedestal really wanna solve problems anyway? Do you?
Man is at least as much a problem-creating as a problem-solving animal. Better a crisis than the permanent boredom of meaninglessness.
— Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom
Life at the Bottom — how fitting:
Do you wanna sell books or solve problems? Hear me out and you can do both. The ultimate irony is he’d sell a ton more books with what I have in mind. America has gone totally off the rails, but the problem with people like Tom is that their wheelhouse is their worldview (so they don’t see anything beyond it).
So no matter how beautifully he articulates this problem — he miserably fails to see that they are more dimensions to it (including the fact that he’s part of the problem):
The United States is now a country obsessed with the worship of its own ignorance. . . . [W]e’re proud of not knowing things. Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue. To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything.
It is a new Declaration of Independence: no longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.
A go-to tactic of the doubt-free is to make damn sure the debate never reaches the merits of the matter. I’ve seen highly intelligent people derail discussions by claiming that “everything’s just an opinion! Nobody really believes that — it’s just a cop-out. And if you call ‘em on it, they fall back on Old Faithful — “agree to disagree.” How this hijacked-for-hackery catchphrase caught on over the years can be charted with the times:
Where things that once meant something, now mean nothing.
Clearly you think my line of thinking is incorrect and I think yours is wrong also so I would have to say this is one of the spots where agreeing to disagree is appropriate. I know you don’t believe in that but I’m sure it’s safe to say that you aren’t going to change your mind on . . . and neither am I, BUT THAT IS Ok!
— 2011 exchange with a friend
The minimum standard for a “line of thinking” — is to do some thinking! You cannot counter with nothing and say it’s something. AudioEnglish.org does a nice job of defining line of thinking: “The process of using your mind to consider something carefully.” As in how actual critical thinking works (as opposed to what damn near everyone is doing today in the non-bolded bit below):
Indeed, nowadays, we tend to take in and repeat whatever the values and beliefs of those around us have rather than forming our own independent thought and stopping to organize and evaluate the information we are receiving.
Perfectly put — except for the “fading” part.
In our Age of Unenlightenment — “fading” is an understatement for the ages. The echo chamber below embodies the islands of idolatry that operate entirely on narrative, not principle. But they believe it’s principle for precisely the reason Baker beautifully captured above (to the point where people seem to believe that advertising virtue equates to embodying it).
And on that note:
