What’s wrong with progress? Nothing, except the way we think about it.

I am always bemused about the way we frame everything, often unconsciously, around the notion of ‘progress’.

Progress – bigger, faster, heavier… more. This sucker is four times the size of the trucks I used to deal with when I was working for a trucking company and can take 100 tonnes of spoil in one hit. That’s me on the right.

The concept of progress has been part of our lives ever since the Age of Reason burst upon the western world and we started down the path of that led from rationality to industry to nuclear weapons and climate change. Progress.

Not every society has that view – but western society does. We see ‘progress’ in a lot of things. It’s how the world, supposedly, works.

Things ‘progress’ from primitive to sophisticated; it is often used to explain or justify human constructs – ‘you can’t stop progress’, usually uttered as a wrecking ball slams through the last piece of rain-forest.

The implicit meaning is ‘directional change for the better through time’. It suffuses the way we think, and is so much an automatic assumption that often we don’t think about it.

Karl Marx used the concept of ‘progress’ as a pivot for his theories about social change – the notion that society changes directionally towards an ultimate final point. He’d taken that in turn from his inspiration, Georg Hegel. As Barbara Tuchman points out, one outcome was that Marx became the butt of one of history’s greatest jokes. His concepts of verelendung and zussamenbruch simply didn’t work. History is not determinist. Yet, as far as I can tell, this same principle of progress to a final end point also framed the thinking of Francis Fukuyama when he declared, in 1992, that history was over with the fall of the Soviet Union. Democracy and capitalism had won, we’d hit the final ideological nirvana and there would be no further change.

The problem, I think, is that we misunderstand the concept of ‘progress’. We mix up two different ideas.

Progress describes the process of human learning and invention – the way we discover things, and the way we apply those discoveries. Look at computers. In 1995 I bought a computer running Windows 98 with a 266mHz PII CPU. In 2006 I bought a hand-held iPAQ (not an Apple product) whose ARM processor outspecced it. That’s progress, and very good progress too.

As I write this, I still have the iPAQ.

Earth. An image I made with my Celestia installation (cool, free, science package).

But this concept of progress doesn’t describe everything humans do. Still less the way the universe works. The wider universe doesn’t automatically change in a direction at all, still less in a better one. We might define some of those changes as an improvement from our perspective. But not all.

Take the climate. It’s always changed naturally. Did it ever change in an ‘improved’ direction? Not really. It just changed. The state – ice age, dry, wet, and so forth – was  always transient. Of course now it’s changing in a specific direction, thanks to us, which is certainly not an improvement. Not for us, anyway.

It seems to me that the supposition that things change directionally has skewed our view of the way things work and – paradoxically – held up our understanding. We mask the deeper secrets of the universe from ourselves by viewing it through an obscured lens. And if we’re not careful, it’ll play jokes on us, the way history played jokes on Marx.

What’s your take on this one?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

When one plus one equals three – welcome to online marketers

The other evening She Who Must Be Obeyed fielded an email from an online bookstore. She looked up and said to me, ‘You and your Neandertals!’

OK internet – market me something based on what I’m doing here. Go on. I’m some dude in a hard hat. Wanna sell me beer? Actually – and this is not a joke – I was photographed in a coal mine while researching a book in which I mention Neandertals. Really. I’ve got a publisher contract, a grant and everything. It’s being published next year. Would you know it from the photo? I suspect not. But I’d still buy the beer…

Years ago, I did an undergrad degree in anthropology. I’ve kept up with the paleontological side ever since. I’d used her account to buy a study of our closest relatives. Now she was getting offers to buy other books about Krog the Cave Man.

Not her interest, but the store thought it was.

Which begs a question. Everything we do online – everything with our phones, where we go and so forth – is tracked. What profile does that really build?

We can’t control adverts served up randomly (as administrator, I don’t see the ones that turn up on this blog, but I bet you do – I HOPE they’re OK).

Point being, there is a story I heard about some guy who clicked on an offensive pop-up advert to make it go away. Next thing, his social media page – which he’d logged out of – was reporting he’d looked at this site. Made him look dodgy.

So injustices happen – and yet the logic is impeccable. Account holder X bought such-and-such, so they must be interested in such-and-such, therefore we’ll serve them advertisements for more of it. Person Y clicked on pop-up Z, so they must have looked at it and been interested in the content.

Thing is, sometimes 1 + 1 doesn’t make 3. Marketers know what we do, but they don’t know the thinking behind it, or even necessarily whether it’s the same person, even.

This sort of 1 + 1 = 3 thinking is pretty common, historically.  Assumptions are made about how people behave, or about why they behave, based on prevailing frameworks of thought – themselves framed by prevailing ideas and prejudices.

History is also littered with examples of it going wrong. In the medieval period, for instance, if a woman went near a cow and it sickened, there was a fair chance she might be burned as a witch. The logic was impeccable at the time – woman X went near the cow, the cow sickened and died, so she must have hexed it. Whole trials were held to prove the point, all pivoting on the proximity of the woman to the cow.

Mad, by our standards, but logical and obvious then, at least to some. The frightening part being that medieval Europe got there by ordinary, rational steps. Starting with: ‘If you are innocent, you have nothing to fear’.

Just saying…

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013 

Why I don’t like the Caveman Diet

A few years ago I was introduced to the ‘Caveman Diet’.

The theory goes like this. Civilisation is an eye-blink in our history, and we’re not adapted to the things we eat today, which make us ill in consequence. We should be eating the same food that Ugh Ugh the Cave Man scoffed in 35,000 BC – raw nuts, grains, fruit, vegetables.

To which I said then – and still say now – rubbish!

Not only are humans geared to eat cooked food, we look like we do because of it. If we had to munch raw nuts, fruit and grains all day (and it would take all day to get the calories), we’d have jaws like an orang-utan. (I had breakfast with one once, but that’s another story…)

The science is clear. An ability to control fire – which may have begun 700,000 years ago – allowed early hominins to cook. Cooking reduces the energy needed to digest food, increasing the yield. One side effect was the drop in tooth and jaw size. It was also reflected in biochemistry.

As for the ‘cave man’ diet – well, there wasn’t one. A  lot depended on where people were. Even today, African hunter-gatherers have a wider range of foods available than people living on the edge of the ice sheets.

Neandertal family group approximately 60,000 years ago. Artwork by Randii Oliver, public domain, courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

The diet near the ice sheets was typified by that much maligned character, Cucu! the Neandertal. About ninety percent of the Neandertal diet was meat, and big game meat at that. Get this – Cucu! the Neandertal would head out armed with a heavy thrusting spears, and go into combat with mammoths and rhinocerii. Seriously. Skeletons have been found with upper body injuries identical, in form, to the ones rodeo riders get while steer wrasslin’. (What’s Neandertal for ‘yeeee-haaw!’?)

I’ve ridden elephants. There is no way I would want to go into combat with one, armed only with a spear. As for rhinos…well, uh…

The other issue is that there’s no return path to Ice Age foods for us.  We’ve selectively bred everything we eat today, and studies have shown that our biochemistry has adapted to suit. Today’s main wheat strain didn’t even exist 100 years ago (the guy who bred the super-wheat we use now only died recently).

The ‘cave man diet’, in short, is fantasy. Paleo-nostalgia.

So why does it work for some people? Part of the reason is that modern foods contain additives. Commercial chicken, for instance, is full of antibiotics, so if you’re intolerant to penicillins, it won’t do favours. All sorts of issues follow from immune system dysfunction – so, on the cave man diet, some people feel healthier.

So does this mean we’ll eventually adapt to being able to lie on couches with our Game Boys and TV remotes, surrounded by the detritus of chips, pizza and cola drinks?

Well, maybe, but something tells me not.

What are your thoughts?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Does Thatcher’s death mean the 80s are really over?

Former British PM Margaret Thatcher’s death this week has not, it seems, provoked a sense in Britain or even around the world that the deceased can do no wrong.

The ‘Iron Lady’ steered Britain away from a failed post-war course. But the cost was division, bitterness and dispossession. She polarised; and the bitterness re-emerged this week to the point where the Telegraph apparently had to shut down its twitter stream.

Thatcher was not alone. Many developed nations, one way or another, had their ‘Thatcher’ in the 1980s. Including my country, New Zealand.

It was unsurprising. Thatcher’s brand of conviction politics – certainties based not on pragmatic understanding of human nature, but theoretical dogma – was on the rise around the world. It was of its time, framed in the ideological oppositions of the late twentieth century, the moment when the new generation got hold of the tiller on various ships of state around the western world and, probably unintentionally, steered their societies unerringly into a riotous exaltation of self.

Eighties glitz and glam; a photo I took in a Wellington central city mall at the height of the yuppie boom, 1987.

On the back of it the eighties became an age of arrogance, of asserted certainties, of big hair, big shoulder pads, wedge-shaped cars, over-priced and under-sized food, greed, status, displays of power – and bad behaviour.

Was it any good for us? I was in my early twenties when New Zealand followed the Thatcher lead. There were winners, other young twenty-somethings around me who partied up large – for whom the display and assertion of power was an end in itself. The future didn’t matter. What counted was now.

And there were losers. Anybody over 40 was a has-been, unemployable – a dinosaur. Failures. Because they were old. Because they hadn’t made life exciting. Whatever.

Some of the young, selfish, upwardly mobile and badly behaved party animals in white shirts and wide ties crashed and burned in 1987. I don’t know where most of them are now. For myself, I recall it was hard to get work.

I survived; so did others who thought the same way I did. But it wasn’t easy. And every visit I made to my home province brought heartbreak; closures, derelict buildings, a sense of gloom – even as city office workers partied up amidst chromed, neon-lit bars with their revolting ‘goldfish laybacks’ (don’t ask) and Corona beer swilled straight out of the bottle.

With hindsight, I think that whole social mix of the eighties was symptomatic of its time, the antidote for the world wars that had dominated the first half of the twentieth century; a reaction to the safe, solid, protected, grey societies that followed. It made a selected few from a new generation into winners. But I cannot forget the way it also dispossessed. And the generation who had made that 1980s world possible – who had laid their lives on the line to defeat fascism and make democracy safe – were the generation who lost. A twentieth century phenomenon.

We’re well into the twenty-first now. The Cold War is long over. New technology is transforming the way we interact – and the way we can produce and earn. And yet, I have to wonder. It seems to me that the eighties, fundamentally, tapped into an aspect of the human condition. It’s always been around, one way or another, for our entire history. Sometimes society lets it out. And I wonder if that particular genie has really been put back into the bottle, even today.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Sixty second writing tips: being professional

I’ve always said that professionalism counts for writers. Publishing is a business, so is writing, and professionalism gives an edge. To me it is:

1. Competence – understanding the field, what’s needed to write well, and being able to do it (a lot of my recent blog posts are about how to do this part).

2. Reliability and committment – honouring the spirit of agreements.

3. Accepting responsibility. If you’ve made a mistake, admit to it.  Understand how it happened – so you know not to repeat it next time.

4. Abstraction – I’ve said it before, and it deserves repeating. You are not your writing. It does not define your self-worth. If you get criticised or knocked back – don’t take it personally.

5. Modesty. You do what’s needed, get stuff done – and maybe some amazing stuff. But don’t let it give you airs. There is no room for a sense of self-superiority in this field.

Do these work for you? Do you have a definition of professionalism?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Fashion week makes me think laterally about the obsession with skinny

A photographer’s flash went off nearby as I walked down Wellington’s Lambton Quay yesterday. I soon discovered why. It’s Fashion Week, and the streets are filled with models on outdoor photo shoots, out in the crowds.

I had no idea it was happening. Of course, you’re talking here to a Kiwi bloke. I randomly purchase clothes, then randomly pluck them from the closet. She Who Must Be Obeyed occasionally points out which shirt goes with what trousers, as opposed to conglomerations of jeans and t-shirts, or odd shoes

What’s more, my favourite model is Thunderbird 2. I am not kidding (hey, every bloke of A Certain Age knows exactly what I am talking about…)

My favourite model. I’ve had this Dinky toy of it since I was a kid. For some reason, I’ve never tossed it out…

But I digress. It got me thinking about the fashion industry with its curious images of what constitutes ‘normal’ and ‘overweight’ for women. it seems to me this tells us an awful lot about what is wrong with western society in general.

Go back half a century and look at Marilyn Monroe, who symbolised western ideals for one and maybe two generations. She was a Size 16, which I believe is known as ‘plus’ size today.

Today? Apparently Size 0 is obese and models are required to survive on cotton wool balls soaked in orange juice, protein shakes and still have to dehydrate themselves for two days in order to get ‘the look’ (hmnn… lots of protein, starvation stress response, no water…’kidney failure’…).

What’s more, both men and women are relentlessly conditioned to think this is normal for women. I still recall someone informing me, years ago, that any woman who didn’t look like the ‘supermodel de jour’ was a ‘blimp’.

The science is clear; people come in all shapes and sizes, and somebody who’s an endomorph (round), under no circumstance, is going to look thin. No matter how little they eat. No matter how much they exercise.

In a way it isn’t surprising. History is rife with examples of social trends, fashion and otherwise, that deny the human condition one way or another. And today the image is also driven at us with all the force of mass media and the power of industrial-age marketing.

Yet there is something else. For 99.99% of all human history, the human condition has involved a struggle to find food. Being fat was a sign of wealth – status. Also fertility; look at the neolithic Venus figures, for instance. Or the paintings of Pieter Paul Rubens.

Today, industrialised society – the same industrialisation that is leading us inexorably down the path of global climate change – has also solved the problem of finding enough food to eat. So what does society do? We create a social ideal for women of being unhealthily skinny, instead.

What, as a society, have we lost perspective of here? What do you figure?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

In which your humble author foils a robbery in his own home in daylight

It was the end of another late summer day. My wife was in the kitchen. I was working on my computer. And I heard somebody call.

No knock. Just a call.

Couldn’t locate the sound. I went into the hallway to discover a large gentleman with his head through the back door, apparently on his way into the house. We’d been going in and out earlier, it wasn’t locked.

I confronted him at the door. At 182 cm I’m not short – but he was at least 10-12 cm taller than me, complete with shaved head and massive build to go with his height – 120 kg at least. Not someone to mess with. And I’d caught him trying to enter my house.

He looked at me.

‘Do you use that car?’ he said without preamble, pointing to my car. ‘Do you use it?’

‘I don’t know who you are,’ I replied.

‘I buy cars for others.’ No name, of course.

My car’s 23 years old and obscured from the street by a high gate, which this guy had opened, whereas my wife’s vehicle was in full view in the drive. And I’d stopped him coming in.

I knew what he was really up to. He knew I knew, too.

People get hurt in these moments – the intruder doesn’t care. I’ve had training in hand-to-hand combat – which told me the chances of stopping someone this big if he attacked me were low. But my wife was in the house. So I stood my ground and applied Lesson No. 1 – talk politely and play the game.

‘Car’s not for sale,’ I said. And asked him to leave, politely. I wasn’t sure it would work, but after some tense words, he turned and left, abusing me as he departed.

By the time I got to the street the light truck he’d parked part-obstructing our drive was half way down the road. I couldn’t get the number.

The police arrived within 90 seconds of my call. It was then I discovered I wasn’t able to give a detail description of the interloper’s clothes. I realised I’d been too busy looking at his face – the eyes betray intent.

All this happened in full daylight, around 5.30 pm, in a quiet residential street.

I could ask, rhetorically, what society is coming to – but I already know. And it’s sad.

Your thoughts?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Kindness 2013: the power of confidence in yourself

I thought I would wrap this series up with a few thoughts about what, to me, makes kindness possible on an every day basis.

I mentioned a couple of weeks back that one of the reasons why people forget kindness is that they wrap their sense of self-identity around something – often a goal or status. When somebody else intrudes on that – achieves ‘their’ ambition, or tips one of their sacred cows – the rules of common etiquette and courtesy seem to be lifted. Kindness disappears amidst a sudden frenzy of avenging anger.

It’s a pitfall into which humanity seem to keep plunging. Is there a way around it? Sure. One answer, it seems to me, is in being quietly self-confident.

I don’t mean arrogant, or hubris-laden, or self-entitled. These are, of themselves, roads away from kindness. I mean, quietly , modestly self-confident. Feeling secure in yourself. To me, modest self-confidence means:

1. Accepting mistakes – and figuring out how to not repeat ‘em. ‘Sure, I stuffed up. But I know better for next time’.

2. Being prepared to learn.

3. Being secure in your own beliefs, meaning that you are not threatened by the beliefs of others.

4. Humility. There is a difference between arrogant self-entitlement and self-confidence. Self-confident people, in general, seldom indulge in exercises of ego and power over others. No need; they feel secure enough in their own sense of identity.

It’s not always an easy pathway. I think western society, in particular, leans against it. I think the human condition, in general, carries aspects that lean against it. But I think quiet self-confidence – based on humility, acceptance and tolerance  – also fosters kindness.

And hey – at the end of the day, it all boils down to one thing. Being nice to people isn’t hard. Often it costs nothing – a simple smile, holding a door open. Little things count as much as the big gestures. And the rewards never stop.

What do you figure?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up later this week: more writing tips. And a new series – the funny side of real science. Starting with UFO’s. Good for a laugh? Oh yes.

Bohr, Dirac, Planck, Heisenberg et al vs the ‘Law of Attraction’

Last week there was a post on the ‘Change Your Life’ blog (down in my links list) inviting readers to have their say about the ‘law of attraction’. Fact or fancy?

I posted a short comment, but there’s a lot more that I could say. I did physics before I swung into the arts. (My niece doesn’t call me ‘Uncle Sheldon’ for nothing).

The ‘law of attraction’ was made popular a few years ago in The Secret, a book by an Australian author. I did read it. As far as I can tell, what you desire is attracted to you via this ‘law’ which, apparently, works by ‘quantum physics’. Apparently thoughts create ‘vibrations’. Positive thoughts create more powerful ‘vibrations’ than negative, travel further, and so attract the desired object or outcome to the individual. If it doesn’t happen, it’s because the person making the wish didn’t have enough desire for what they wanted.

It is, of course, gibberish. As I understand it, the ‘law of attraction’ not only violates macro-level physics – specifically, the Second Law of Thermodynamics – it also violates the real laws of quantum physics. As a friend of mine pointed out, quantum physics is stochastic – that is, it’s about probabilities at scales below the Planck length, which is 1.616199×10^-35  metres.  Kind of small.

By contrast, the ‘law of attraction’ is deterministic and operates in terms of abstract human desires.

Niels Bohr in 1922. Public domain, from Wikipedia.

This is something that has always bemused me – how so much that is actually metaphysical can be attributed to ‘quantum physics’. I know Einstein called it ‘spooky’, but it’s not THAT spooky! The principles are well established. Subatomic objects are waves and particles – the duality is an artefact of our classical physics approach; the blend is the closest we can come to defining what the subatomic object actually is. It’s possible to determine EITHER velocity OR position of this ‘wavicle’. Work by various physicists in the early twentieth century – Dirac, Heisenberg, Planck, Bohr and others – explored how the universe worked if the positions and velocities of the particles that made it up were indeterminate – if they existed as probabilities, not discrete and defineable numbers. It was utterly counter-intuitive. But it was also entirely about probabilities at subatomic level.

The cause of the ‘new age’ version, as far as I can tell, came out of a misunderstanding of Heisenberg and Schroedinger’s efforts to describe how a watching human might see the ‘spookiness’. This was then conflated with the problem of observational interference – that is, an effort to observe or detect a quantum event collapses the probabilities to a single outcome. This led to the idea that human consciousness causes the outcome. However, in real quantum physics, no human consciousness or personal observation is required. This was proven by experimental demonstration using a machine ‘observer’ as far back as 1998. Here’s the link.

To me real quantum physics is amazing enough without making it apparently magical as well. As for the ’law of attraction’? Hokum. People get what they want because they work to achieve it.  Affirmations and visualisations can be part of the journey , helping direction – a motivation, a spur to happiness - but they don’t create anything of themselves. Only our own actions do that. I think people need to have faith in themselves, in their own abilities – and to be proud of what they achieve. To accept that they get what they want through their own efforts – which to me is a far, far more rewarding result than wish fulfilment.

What are your thoughts on this?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Kindness 2013: revenge – it’s called epic kindness fail

In the past few weeks we have seen that kindness is a philosophy  - a  way of life that encompasses tolerance, reason, thought and compassion. And, it seems to me, all the more necessary as the planet becomes ever more crowded, ever more polluted, and as our resources diminish.

Alas, a quick glance at any news bulletin reveals inhumanities from civil wars to terrorism to horrific stories of toddlers being run over in China and left to die because strangers are too scared to intervene, lest they be held financially liable. Every day we hear stories of muggings, robberies and other deeds. And that’s without considering the ways people are unkind to each other in everyday life.

There are many causes. However, one of them, it seems to me, is the way we enwtine our sense of self-worth around an ambition, a desire or a cause. And when that is intruded upon – when our self-worth seems slighted – what happens? Why, the wrong must be avenged! And the hatred that follows is neither rational, nor reasonable.

My Airfix model of a Mk IV tank, 1917 – one of the ways the Germans were defeated in 1918.

What’s more, revenge happens on all levels. Remember World War 2? The how-and-why has been subject to relentless analysis, but it boils down to one point; Germany was sore at its defeat in 1918, particularly at the hands of France. A little Austrian corporal with shell shock managed to exploit that sense of popular injustice to get himself into power – and engineer revenge. It was made explicit in 1940. When the French capitulated, Hitler made a point of humiliating them in ways that related to 1918, even down to having them sign the armistice in the same railway carriage used to sign Germany’s capitulation in 1918.

Why do we keep doing it? Revenge initially feels good. Not only good, but – so it’s been shown via scientific analysis - more rewarding than kindness. And, as if it wasn’t enough to have that time bomb entwined into the human psyche, we’re also bombarded with the message daily. What’s the slogan? ‘Don’t get mad – get even!’ We always hear that ‘revenge is sweet’. We are even sold books and movies because we can, vicariously, feel that sense of thrill as a character wreaks revenge on those who wronged them.

It’s insidious, and what worries me is that it’s also accepted. You’ve been slighted? No problem – hunt down the miscreant and smash them over. Bwahahahahaha!

There is, of course, a catch; what those studies also found was that the people wreaking revenge not only kept the sense of injustice alive – and thus felt worse for it – but that the act of revenge itself had a psychological backfire point, afterwards.

In other words, it was a momentary sense of satisfaction only.

Kindness? Well, guess what. The feel-good sense lasts. So kindness trumps revenge in the end. A no-brainer, really. Except…well, the human condition also pushes us towards instant gratification - the path of revenge. So I fear that the philosophies of kindness that are important to us – that will make it possible for us to survive as a species, once the planet hits the tipping point and ruin is upon us – will get lost along the way.

Our world, in short, won’t blow up in a sudden armageddon. It’ll get ugly, nasty, and die horribly and slowly. Unless we make the conscious effort to have a philosophy of kindness.

What do you figure about this one?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013