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 

Lamenting the lost hopes of a past future

These days we live in the unimagined future – a twenty-first century of micro-tech miracles that only Arthur C. Clarke actually predicted.

On the way to Mars, concept for 1981 flight,via NASA.

We don’t have universal flying cars, or interplanetary passenger rockets, or moon bases, or any of the things we were supposed to. What we do have is even more wonderful – gadgetry that lets us communicate anywhere, with anyone. Phones with more computing grunt than NASA’s mainframes during the Apollo programme. The social impact is being felt in all fields of endeavour, not least of them the entertainment business.

And yet I cannot help lamenting the future we lost.

Does anybody remember the Six Million Dollar Man? Seventies sci-fi TV about an astronaut rebuilt with uber-tech after an air crash.  You knew when he was invoking his powers because he’d drop into slow-mo, backgrounded by annoying ‘bip-bip-bip’ noises and Oliver Nelson’s soundtrack (yes, that Oliver Nelson – the guy that wrote the best jazz album ever made, The Blues and the Abstract Truth…sigh….)

Wonderfully lampooned by Spike Milligan, and perhaps rightly so – the whole thing was, after all, very silly. Not least because you don’t just use legs and an arm to lift weights. (‘I’m sorry, Mr Austin, it’s not an extra bionic bit, it’s a hernia.”) The plots devolved to secret agent stuff, or plain silliness where the bionics became brute-force answers to problems that had simpler solutions. It hasn’t aged well.

Still, it summed up the optimism of the day. In 1973, when the pilot aired, humanity had just been to the Moon. Our future was a heroic, optimistic future of big engineering answers. Got an astronaut mangled in an accident? No problem – we can rebuild him. Things that worry us now didn’t enter into the calculation – I mean, the bionics were nuclear powered.

It’s this optimism – call it naïve, wide-eyed, sure – that we’ve lost. Swallowed by a wave of cynicism, cost realities, the collision between dreams and the immutable laws of physics.

Sure, today’s world of small-scale tech is wonderful. But I can’t help lamenting that lost age when we dreamed big and had every expectation that those dreams would come true. I lament it not because we missed out on those wonders – but because, when we found we couldn’t do them, we lost that sense of hope, too.

That’s what I miss. We need it. What do you figure?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Top things I have never understood…

I have never understood quite a lot about the world. Why, for instance, it always happens that…

1. Whenever you’re in a supermarket queue, the air is inevitably shredded with hysterical cries of pain and terror. You look around for the murder scene only to discover some three year old has been told by their mum that they can’t have the chocolate bar in the checkout rack.

2.Whenever you approach an ATM machine without a queue, people hastily swarm in from the side, ahead of you, to form a queue before you can get there.

3. Whenever you do the laundry, no matter how sunny the day is, it starts raining three seconds after you peg the last shirt out.

4. The teller in the post office puts the ‘closed’ sign up just as you get to the head of the queue.

5. Trek may have predicted auto-opening doors, but contrary to what you see in Trek, they enter their ‘close’ cycle just as you get to them.

…and finally…

6. When the zombie apocalypse hits, you discover you’re one of the zombies.

Any 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: is kindness also weakness?

The other day someone suggested to me that the reason kindness has faded of late is because, in this day and age, it’s viewed as weakness.

I  had to agree. It seems we value people who are ‘tough’, who can show ‘toughness’ by – well, you’ve guessed it, being able to discomfit others.  At heart it is power – ‘I’m stronger than you’. Kindness, by this view, is the ‘soft option’. Not a new view, but I think it has become one of the factors that has de-normalised ‘kindness’.

I don’t see things this way. Kindness does not mean compromising self-respect or integrity, or being ‘weak’. Actually, it is a means by which people show strength and earn respect. I have a story about this.

Ten years ago I wrote a biography of Lieutenant-General Sir Bernard Freyberg (1889-1963), who led the Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force in the Second World War. He was a huge man – 6’2” – who still carried the childhood nickname ‘Tiny’. In the course of a career spanning both world wars he received multiple wounds, was awarded the VC, the DSO four times,  the CB, was knighted twice in further recognition of his service, and later raised to the peerage. He was brave as a lion,  a fighting commander who led his men into battle. J M Barrie’s 1922 lecture ‘Courage’ referred to Freyberg’s astonishing feats off Gallipoli in 1915.

By twenty-first century standards he was an archetypal ‘tough guy’ – a real-life action hero. One of the people we think of today as ‘strong’ in all respects. And he was.

However, he was also very kind, in the true philosophical sense I’ve been discussing in the past few weeks – fair, tolerant and reasonable. He had a repute for it. He was always thinking of others. This extended to tolerance of attitudes that were typically Kiwi.  Major-General Arthur Smith, Chief of Staff in Middle East Command, complained that Kiwi soldiers never saluted officers. ‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ Freyberg explained. ‘If you wave to them, they’ll always wave back.’

Yet tolerant kindness did not mean softness. Freyberg had boundaries, made sure people knew what those were – and was respected. He demanded results, including expecting his officers to show the same standards of personal courage as his own. That combination of strength and a philosophy of genuine kindness inspired people to follow him – the very best sort of leadership.

That was brought home to me when Penguin published my biography of him in 2005. Even as the book was getting a delightfully positive response from independent professional reviewers, New Zealand’s military-academic historical community exploded in a frenzy of  hostility in our national media.  They appeared to be falling over each other in their eagerness to deny my worth and skills in a field where I had published 30 books to that time, without financial support or affiliation, and on personal merit; and where I was paying their full-time salaries to write books competing with mine, through my taxes.

Normally I hesitate to dignify ‘publication rage’ by engaging it, particularly as not one of these academics – who included my former thesis co-supervisor – had the integrity to talk to me in person about it (nor have since).  However, their wrong-at-every-turn assaults – which extended to denials of worth in all my work - included claims that were factually untrue and which made me look generally incompetent as a person. This overstepped the mark, and I was wondering whether to take the advice of my solicitor when my phone started ringing.

The calls all opened the same way. ‘Is that Matthew Wright? I’m one of Tiny’s men.’

Sixty years after the war – more than forty after Freyberg’s death – his soldiers remained faultlessly loyal, and were extending that to me. I had, more than one of them said, nailed Freyberg’s character. He was a great man by any measure. By rubbishing and defaming me,  those military-historical academics were also rubbishing Freyberg. And the remaining soldiers of the Second New Zealand Division – Freyberg’s men – were not going to have any of that nonsense.

It told me just how great a man Freyberg was. And Freyberg inspired that lifetime respect and loyalty not by exploiting army command structures to assert power, but through the virtues I have been mentioning – thoughtfulness, reason, tolerance, intellect – and kindness. A remarkable legacy.

That experience, to me, reveals the power of kindness as a philosophy. And its incredible strength.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Kindness 2013: the many ideas that lead to kindness

I’ve been posting for a few weeks about the importance of kindness. Especially in this day and age. And we all know what kindness is….don’t we?

Well, I figure yes – and no. Let me explain.

In most ways kindness is obvious. It’s about doing things for other people, altruistically, with no reward for yourself other than the feel-good factor of knowing you’ve helped someone. It can be as small as a smile to a passing stranger; or as large as you like.

But to me it’s more than that. Kindness is underpinned by many related ideas, including ‘thoughtfulness’ – making sure you don’t do something to somebody that is unkind, even by accident.

In order to be ‘thoughtful’ we must also understand what people are doing, and why. That draws in ‘compassion’. Understanding’ also demands ‘reason’ – we have to be able to think our way through the issues. It demands ‘tolerance’ – because if we allow ourselves to see somebody else as a threat to our own ways or self-esteem, we are likely to lose ‘reason’, ‘understanding’ and ‘kindness’.

To me both ‘understanding’ and ‘tolerance’ also demand ‘abstraction’; an ability to step back and not allow the emotions that cripple our kindness – anger and revenge, mainly – to intrude. More on this anti-kindness pitfall in a later post.

Kindness, in short, is a word that encompasses a philosophy; a philosophy of care, of compassion, of thought, of reason, of tolerance, of abstraction and of understanding. Particularly, of understanding the human condition – for if we understand that, then we can know and avoid the pitfalls.

All these things are the tools that make kindness possible – reliably, often, as an everyday part of life. They also surprisingly difficult to do, for reasons which I’ll explain about in a subsequent post.

And yet I can think of people who do this, right now. And there is a fictional character who does all these things too.

Spock.

Not the 1960s Spock of Star Trek (1965-67), but the multi-dimensional Spock of the later movies, the elder Spock of the 2009 re-boot especially. The difference was specific; in the 1960s, Spock was prisoner of an emotionless Vulcan biology in which his ‘human half’ had to be allowed to shine through. A contrived character. But by the 2000s, Spock had become a much more developed character, and his emotionless approach had become something else – a philosophy. Vulcans were violently emotive; they had to find ways of controlling their destructive side. And where does a philosophy of calm logic, science, abstraction from emotion (especially anger, if you’ve seen the movie) and reason lead us? By Spock’s rules, it is to kindness.

What do you figure? I’d love to hear from you on this one.

 Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013 

Kindness 2013: beginning with small steps

I posted last week about making 2013 the year of kindness. And I have been absolutely humbled by the wonderful response. Thank you!

Along the way, someone pointed out, on Twitter, that kindness is a good idea – but human nature will prevent it working. And, alas, and alack, that’s quite true. History is littered with efforts to be kind which founder on the usual culprits – jealousies, greed, ego, assertions of ‘us’ over ‘them’. Human nature is multi-faceted, complex, and largely split between altruism and self interest, both personally and in terms of the groups we identify ourselves as belonging to.  Kindness exists, but it is inevitably counter-balanced with unkindness along the way. And often, alas, it is the unkindness that wins.

Why? Because unkindness often appears to be the easier course, and – unfortunately – also the more rewarding for some people. I’ll explain more about that later. But as a historian, science geek, anthropologist and general cynic I agree that we can’t eliminate the darker side of the human condition.

But we can, I think, make kindness the side that wins more often than not. If enough of us try. What’s more, I think that as the world gets more crowded, more intrusive, less private and faster, the onus is on us to make sure we do. Otherwise we risk ending up fighting over the wreckage. It’s happened before.

The thing is that, at the end of the day, kindness is rewarding; acts of kindness make the recipient feel good. It makes you feel good, for doing it. It’s also easy. Kindness starts in small ways. It can be as simple as holding a door for a stranger. Or helping someone cross the road. It can be as simple as a genuine smile. Being nice costs nothing, and gives so much

What do you figure? I’d love to hear from you on this one.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

This series continues next week. Later this week: ‘So you want to be a writer?’ First of a series on the A-Z of the art. Check it out. Then: ‘ Inspirations. Dreams stay with you in a big country.’ And more.

Let’s make 2013 the year of kindness

I have no personal resolutions for the year. But I do have hopes. And I thought I’d share one with you. Late last year I posted about the eventual end of the Earth.  The planet is not going anywhere. But we might.

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

When I look across human history, at the fighting, at the injustices we do to each other in so many ways, I think the human condition carries the seeds of its own destruction.

I see it everywhere, near and far; I see it in my own life in the the petty intellectualised denials of worth in their peers, on which New Zealand’s historical academics float their egoes,  I see it in the behaviours of thugs who seem to think that knives and threats, or beating up people in their own homes, can earn respect. I see it in the way that people in one country plot the death of those in another and feel good for doing so. It is an awful indictment of the human condition.

Where is kindness?

No matter how often we insist wars are over, that we’ve learned from past mistakes, injustices keep happening. And today, with twenty first century technology, it’s worse than ever. Instant personal communication anywhere in the world is a miracle by the standards of a generation ago. What do some use it for? Bullying. Nuclear weapons cannot be un-invented. Diseases are a natural threat, and science has discovered ways of making them worse. We’re using resources like there’s no tomorrow.

One theory is that we suffer from a faulty survival mechanism. According to this idea, back in the Pleistocene, altruism helped humans survive. Kindness counted. We see this in the archaeological record, not least in stone age humans with crippling disease or injury kept alive solely by the kindness of others. But there were also advantages to bands of humans competing with each other.  ‘Us and them’ kept the bands tight, drove them to command their environment. The oppostition worked when humanity consisted of clusters of groups, widely scattered. But, the argument goes, it doesn’t work in larger societies.

Certainly humanity has an endless capacity to abstract and intellectualise the darker side of the human condition. And along the way I cannot help thinking that reason, tolerance and kindness get lost.

Some remember kindness. I am impressed with the work of Bill Gates. This man helped make the modern computing world, and now he’s helping cure some of the world’s problems.

Kindness counts, and we need to remind ourselves of that every so often. Reason allows us to see the problems , tolerance allows us to accept others – to let go of what we perceive as a threat to our own self-beliefs - and kindness is the way to deal with others. We must ask not how do others threaten us, but how can we help them?

It may sound naive, but it’s not rocket science. And wouldn’t it be great to make 2013 the year of kindness.

What do you figure?

 Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Running the zombie Christmas mall gauntlet

it’s Christmas again…and that means a visit to (dramatic chord)… The Mall.

The Zombie Christmas Maul

It’s the same every year. The endless shuffle of zombiefied shoppers, drifting around shiny glass-and-glitz caverns, a mass of humanity with glazed eyes and shopping bags, punctuated by toddlers who lurch aimlessly out from the crowd, shrieking and hyperventilating. There are teenage boys who smell like they’ve just showered with a cocktail of propionic acid and brevibacteria, girls who giggle and text somebody three feet away, just because they can, all endlessly circling like – well, endlessly circling things who like circling endlessly.

And then, in the midst of this glittering temple to the worst excesses of shallow consumerism and the transient disposability of post-industrial A-gen society…Father Christmas. He’s moved here from the North Pole apparently.

There’s something about these places that turns the brain to mush and reduces people to zombiefied numbness. I am not allowed to punk them – you know, do the zombie walk behind these  shoppers and murmur ‘braaaaaiins’. Well, I can, but She Who Must Be Obeyed has to walk on the other side of the mall atrium for a while afterwards.

But honestly!

It’s done deliberately. People buy more if their mind’s switched off. And I have to feel sorry for the poor folks that have to work in these places. Malls are the twenty-first century equivalent of the workhouse when it comes to conditions.

Every mall I’ve been to from North Sydney to Lower Hutt to Bangkok has been exactly the same. The Australia and New Zealand ones even look the same. Is this the unity in diversity beloved of anthropologists?

I’ve got readers of this blog from Melbourne to Florida, from the Netherlands to Cape Town, from Houston to New York to France to Moscow to Dunedin. Am I right that it’s the same everywhere? The look. The raw horror of it all. The commercialism? The mindless advertising. The glitz. The ….the…

“Braaaainnns….”

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012