Choosing Life in a Distorted Reality Bubble

Lies attract Liars.

I don’t see how it is possible for a person of integrity to respect a clearly dishonest or disingenuous argument. Worse, eventually all respect is lost for the person who is habitually disingenuous. The honest person withdraws from discussions.

The dishonest person is left to the company of those with lower standards for integrity.

This may in fact be very comforting to the dishonest. After all, who doesn’t like being validated? Slowly, reality distorts to suit vanity.

It can come as a horrible shock when outside reality forces an intrusion into this comforting space. The threat may trigger a fight or flight response. The group may have enough power to hold reality off but inevitably defenses crumble.

It’s just a matter of accumulating variables.

Image by Flickr profile hellomokona

My Basement Monster

The pipes in the house were bumping and thumping and making all kinds of scary noise. It sounded like a monster was chained in the basement, trying to escape. That turned out to be a fairly apt metaphor too.

I spent hours trying to bleed the air out of my boiler heating system. The air wasn’t even supposed to be in there. I’d had a special bleeder valve added to the system awhile back so that air would automatically escape. Yet there the air was.

More alarming than the noise was the monster’s breath. Sporadically, steam hissed out of the bleeder valve in a menacing blast.

It puzzled my furnace guy. He never saw the steam but he didn’t doubt me. He thought that the air in the boiler water was a sign that the bleeder valve wasn’t working anymore but he couldn’t explain how it still allowed steam to escape.

He showed me how to bleed the system manually. It was a time consuming process involving water trickling through a hose into a bucket, watching bubbles of air escape. The procedure was complete when there were no more bubbles.

The noise you’re hearing is just air in the system, he told me. Get the air out and you’ll be fine.

He promised to check on the cost of replacing the bleeder valve. It was solid brass. The metal had become very costly lately.

I trickled out bucket after bucket, watching air bubbles rise. They were endless.

The noise continued. Once or twice a day I caught the monster breathing steam again. I’d been warned that the boiler could crack if there was too much steam. That would mean a whole new furnace. I cut the power to the boiler and kept on bleeding it.

The bubbles were endless.

The house got cold.

I turned the boiler power back on. I kept burping the monster.

The bubbles were endless.

At one point the controller box began to hum loudly, so loudly that I was afraid it was some kind of alarm. I swatted it with my hand. It stopped humming.

Ah, percussion maintenance works again, I thought.

The next morning I found that the boiler no longer responded to the thermostat.

I told all of this to the furnace guy.

Keep bleeding, he said.

It was getting cold out and he was handling a lot of calls from his customers, working into the evening day after day. I’d always known him to work this hard. He’d been born into the business that his father had started in 1950 and he’d been running it himself for over a decade.

That night the boiler steamed and thumped with reckless fury.

Turn off the boiler, he said. It could crack. Do you have another heat source? Can you stay warm? You must need a new controller. I can’t get one until the morning.

The controller would be about as expensive to replace as the bleeder valve.

And the furnace guy’s labor and expertise were appropriately costly too.

The next day he showed up with a new pump.

I was talking with some of the guys, he said, and we decided the real problem is that the pump is failing. The heated water isn’t being distributed well through the system. The boiler water is overheating because it doesn’t get far so sits and cooks. That puts air into the system and makes steam.

He swapped out the pump. This part was about half as costly as either of the previously proposed solutions.

The house began to warm again. And it was quiet. The banging stopped. There was no more steam. The controller worked again. The monster morphed back into a quiet house helper.

I’m grateful that my furnace guy listened to my description of what was happening. The boiler neither thumped nor steamed while he was present, just meekly kicked in. Except for the bubbles in the system, everything had seemed to be working.

His listening skills had paid off.

I’m grateful that he kept thinking and didn’t just charge into the first solution that presented itself, or the second.

Both solutions would have been expensive and neither would have fixed the problem.

His years of experience with problem solving had paid off.

I’m grateful that he’d shared the problem with others in his field and considered their ideas.

His professional network had paid off.

The most valuable component of the service he’d provided wasn’t a new pump, it was himself.

Over the past year I’ve been saddened to hear many people devalue the labor and experience of other workers with no real understanding of the requirements of the fields they deride as overpaid. I pray this type of mass derision and contempt never falls on my furnace guy or the others in his field.

Because as expensive as the labor was for my boiler service, it could have been much worse. There is no basis for expecting omniscience from a problem solver, ever. Human beings are often inventive and clever but no one can truthfully call any of them perfect.

The best and closest substitute for troubleshooting perfection that we can have is a process that includes patience, knowledge, thought and respect.

Those attributes carry a necessary cost but such a process is what the best troubleshooters must rely on if problems are to be actually solved.

Image from Flickr : “fallrod”

Students, you will be receiving your Thinking Caps!

Research suggests that electric stimulation of the brain can speed up learning.

Scientific American: Transcranial Stimulation Shows Promise in Speeding Up Learning

In Praise of the Witness

According to an article in Time magazine, “In recent decades, rates of sexual abuse have actually plunged. Child molestation by casual acquaintances and sexual abuse by caregivers decreased 61% from 1992 to 2009, according to the Crimes against Children Research Center
 at the University of New Hampshire.”

The researchers credit awareness, prevention, and prosecution. People and organizations are more vigilant than they used to be.

Vigilance creates real and significant results, a 61% decrease from 1992 to 2009.

That means fewer victims. Less pain. Less trauma. Fewer ruined lives and ruined careers.

All because victims and their families/advocates/witnesses/supporters have stepped forward and said, “This is what happened to me” or “this is what I saw/heard.”

Cases of abuse have plunged because people spoke up. By speaking up, they helped prevent others from becoming victims.

In spite of the pressure to stay silent, some people stepped up. In spite of knowing that others would call them liars, question their character or say that they were asking for it somehow, would judge the way they’ve lived their lives, would slander them and their families, criticize them for making noise about it, criticize them for waiting so long to say something, or for not saying enough, or for saying too much. In spite of knowing that speaking up would have negative effects on their lives in the short-run and in the long. In spite of knowing that they would be accused of having ulterior motives for speaking up, would be accused of trying to hurt the abuser for their own gain. In spite of knowing that everything would change.

That’s Courage.

Think about the grown men in the Penn State case who were faced with this kind of discomfort and backed off. They decided that the victims didn’t need help. They decided that it couldn’t have been so bad, that the abuser was one of them and so they “had his back” and would keep it between themselves. They decided to tell the abuser not to make them uncomfortable by doing it in their own territory and they decided to look away and pretend that if they didn’t see it then it meant that he had stopped.

Think about how easy and normal it is to have that response when faced with something so personally uncomfortable. Think about how easy it is to identify with the nice but authoritative abuser and be sympathetic and maybe even forgiving because he’s so darn human and just made a mistake.

Abusers can be so nice! If they are in a position of authority people look up to them. They can be charismatic, jovial, funny, generous, gregarious, and friendly. They can look so innocent, yet assertive. They are likable, empathetic, and kind. They might even have candy but that would be the least of their offerings. Praise, sympathy, belonging and approval can be so much sweeter than candy.

Serial abusers are usually surrounded by people who have experienced all of these things and think the abuser is wonderful.

Sometimes people step forward and speak up. It might make you uncomfortable but remember that where there is one victim there may be many more, both in the past and in the future. Remember that the friendlier you feel toward the accused the more you need to guard against refusing to hear the witness. Remember how hard it is to speak up. Remember how easy it is to disbelieve the speaker.

Remember that turning away may mean future victims.

The Dangerous Group

The young man squinted hard at the lines in front of him. He’d been asked to match a line to another line of the same length. He could see very clearly which it was. There shouldn’t be any doubt.

But the other young men who were seated at the table with him were unanimous. And they had, all of them, chosen the wrong line.

Pressed for an answer the young man went along with the group, knowing their answer was wrong.

To him, agreeing with the group was more important than the truth, was more right than fact.

Soloman Asch, the psychologist that led the experiment, found similar results in group after group. With nothing tangible at risk and no persuasion at all most subjects were willing to let a group of unarmed, nonthreatening strangers prevail at least once.

Questioned later, many of the subjects indicated that they’d feared the ridicule of the group. Some seemed to have even convinced themselves that the group must be right and they themselves wrong.

Conformity studies such as this one seek to observe the level of need of the individual to fit in with a group, but what about the group? What is there to fear from a group and why?

The answer is that groups do have the power to enforce their collective will on an individual, through punishment if necessary, regardless of the rationality, or lack of rationality, of the demand.

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT), the United States military policy formally repealed today, represents nothing so much as the power of a group to force its own version of reality upon dissenting individuals. Non-conforming service members faced the threat of losing their jobs and their homes, the companionship of their local friends, and were vulnerable to blackmail, perpetuating a threat to national security.

LGBT U.S. military personnel have now gained the right to claim their own thoughts and feelings about sexuality.

The unspoken and well supported fear of the group by individuals is another matter.

Loss and love

On Loss and Love, and the pain…

Everyone you know is represented in your mind as a construction that you created through your perceptions and thoughts about them. They connect to many things: your memories of their name, face, shape, style.

But your loved ones are special. They are wrapped in your memories and dreams, awash in emotions and meaning. It’s an impossible stew to undo.

Faced with their loss, your mind must inform all of those connections. Pools of emotion are released. Sometimes they flood you, sometimes they trickle or steam, but they won’t be held back completely once the barriers that hold them are punctured.

Pain comes as your mind severs connections to your dreams. The lost one’s part in all the dreams evaporates. The connections that once reached out to them lie exposed and raw, stinging like any physical nerve would. They ARE nerves. Feelings and perceptions flowed through them. Now they bathe in anguish.

Blessed are you if you still have other connections to other loved ones who can offer you comfort, extending lifelines that lift you up from drowning in the rushing tide of your loss. Blessed are you if you have nurtured loving connections to God.

Brain Time

“Time is this rubbery thing,” Eagleman said. “It stretches out when you really turn your brain resources on, and when you say, ‘Oh, I got this, everything is as expected,’ it shrinks up.”

– from:
The Possibillian : The New Yorker.

I can relate to Eagleman’s memory of the suspension of time during his childhood fall. I experienced it once as my car launched into the air over a ravine, tree branches whipping by, and also during a fall from a galloping horse, and while in the basket of a rapidly deflating hot air balloon plunging towards a swamp.

Like Eagleman and his grad students, I feel bedeviled by time. Tasked to invent a test for an industrial organizational psychology class, I wrote a measurement for “time sense.” But my test was primitive and rudimentary, especially compared to Eagleman’s methods using EEG, fMRI, musicians, and dropping subjects into a horrifying 110 foot free fall backwards to a net.

Missed exits

I had a mechanic check the cooling system of my car yesterday. It had overheated last Friday, late in the afternoon. Some thingamajiggy had popped off and all the coolant dumped out.

“Freak accident,” Tim the mechanic said. “It’s fine now.”

I don’t really believe in freak accidents. I’ll apologize right now to my scientist friends. I do know that my feelings about that are normal. I plead normalcy!

Because the car had overheated, I changed all of our plans for the weekend. Instead of farmers markets and friends and family, we had a quiet weekend at home because I didn’t trust the car. Who knows what the weekend might have been like otherwise? Might we have gotten in an accident or gotten a ticket? Whatever it might have been, the thingamajiggy changed it.

Once, years ago, my brother Bill called me from his truck.

“I missed my exit,” he said. “How do I get to your house from the next exit?”

I told him how and we hung up but it wasn’t long before he called me again. He’d had an accident and he needed me to come get him.

It turned out that he’d gotten caught in a left turn only lane at the 2nd stoplight. He’d had to stop behind a little Honda turning left. A massive SUV, a Navigator, came up full speed behind him and smashed into the back of his mid-sized Dodge Dakota pickup truck. It pushed him forward and he hit the back of the Honda in turn and almost pushed it into oncoming traffic.

I went and picked him up. He was upset and kicking himself. When he saw me he started to cry.

“I’m such a screwup!” he said.

I gave him a big hug. It wasn’t his fault! The girl in the SUV had been gabbing away on a cell phone and not paying attention. She hadn’t even hit the brakes!

“Besides,” I said, “I think you saved that girl’s life by being there. What if that SUV had back ended the Honda instead of you? Think how much energy your truck absorbed. It acted as a buffer. If she’d hit the Honda it would’ve gotten the full force of the impact and it certainly would’ve been pushed directly into the oncoming traffic.”

“Bill, I think you were meant to be there. I think God asked you to miss your exit and he put you there to save that girl.”

He got quiet. The tears stopped while he thought about it. It seemed to make him feel better.

It was true. Whether there was a higher power involved or not, his truck had buffered the impact on that little car. The girl in that car was hurt enough that an ambulance had taken her to the hospital. A direct hit from that SUV could have killed her.

I believed then and I still believe that Bill saved her just by being there. He seemed to believe me too. At least, he stopped beating himself up over it.

God bless Bill for feeling comforted by the thought that he’d taken a metaphorical bullet for some girl that he didn’t even know.

Whenever I miss an exit or something happens to cause me to reroute my plans, like a thingamajig jumping off my car, I think about Bill and the girl in the little Honda.

How a Personality Profile Helped Uncover John Edwards’ Lies

It’s easy for a confident liar to lie. Getting that same liar to tell the truth is another story, a story told by David Perel, former Editor-in-Chief, National Enquirer, in a recent post.

As Perel recalls, no one wanted to take the National Enquirer seriously when it published a piece about the pregnant girlfriend of a married presidential candidate. The man, John Edwards, denied it. Edwards’ aide supported the lie by claiming paternity himself. And with the supermarket tabloid’s long history of reporting ‘news’ about such fantasy figures as Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster, displaying photos of Satan’s face in a black cloud, denial was an easy sell for Edwards.

Incredibly, the Enquirer team had not expected the denial or the creative cover story. Edwards was betting that only his confession could validate the unsavory story. He wasn’t about to do it.

Unwilling to write off an actual news story and all of the effort and high-tech resources that getting it entailed, the Enquirer hired a mental health professional to help them to understand why Edwards was lying and how to gain his confession.

The analyst told Perel that Edwards was a man who prioritized and controlled his own carefully constructed image. He would never confess to anything unless it was the only way to keep some of that control. This knowledge changed the way Perel handled the growing evidence.

Perel held most of the evidence back but let Edwards know that the Enquirer team had stalked and photographed him throughout a recent encounter with his mistress. Edwards was given just enough information to realize that the Enquirer’s claims were true. From there his own imagination and guilty conscience could take over. Not knowing what else the Enquirer had, Edwards confessed to the affair but continued to deny fathering a child with his mistress, keeping some small control of the extent of his betrayal.

It was enough to validate the Enquirer. Thousands of man hours and the use of the best technology available had still come down to one thing: understanding Edwards and predicting his reactions.

According to Perel, letting Edwards imagine the worst was the only way to get him to tell some truth.

8 Ways to Motivate the Apathetic Voter

8 Ways to Motivate the Apathetic Voter

We sure saw a lot of campaign ads last month. Across the country, billions were spent on the 2010 mid-terms. Billions with a capital B.

All of that cash to motivate voters to go to the polls. Motivation, not information, as surely no one would base voting decisions on generally misleading ads, right? Who would do that?

No, the recent mid-term elections help illuminate a political truism; the candidate who can best get their constituency to the polls wins. That means motivating people who otherwise probably wouldn’t vote. Somewhere around half of the eligible voters are in this group on a typical election day.

So who are these people who don’t vote?

Likely some of them don’t care; some are too busy or can’t be bothered; some (quite rightly) think their single vote won’t make a difference; some may be all of the above.

Take out the people who are unable to vote due to disabilities or conflicting responsibilities and that mostly leaves those who don’t care enough to vote.

This is the group of apathetic non-voters, the true focus of all of those billions in campaign dollars spent, the voters sought by the well funded politician. Elections are swung and won when enough apathetic voters get up off the couch and go to the polls.

So what’s a candidate to do? How does one motivate these people to vote?

In the interest of cutting wasteful spending of campaign billions here’s a quick list to help future candidates to appeal to apathetic voters, based on some recent techniques that seem to be effective.

1 Raise emotions like hope, rage, disgust, self-righteousness, and fear. Talk about how evil and cynical the opposition is. Catastrophize! The future of the free world is at stake! Get that adrenaline pumping! It gives voters the strength for this task that they find so difficult. But don’t ask apathetic voters to just care on their own. They wouldn’t be apathetic if they actually cared. That would be going against their nature.

2 Entertain the apathetic voter with drama! Sinister images and shadowy bad guys work well. Use simple symbols like guns, grizzly bears, demon sheep, lumberjacks, brown bag lunches or dream homes and families with 2.5 children. Be sure to always represent yourself with positive images. Sometimes candidates get this mixed up and make themselves look like a shadowy Darth Vader type or a witch. Don’t do that. Apathetic voters watch television and know which cultural icons are supposed to be vote worthy. Done right you can make voting feel like an interactive reality show.

3 Pretend that you are revealing important information. Make these voters feel like they know what they are talking about even though you really haven’t told them anything truthful and anyone who isn’t apathetic knows it.

4 Mock media outlets for attempting to give voters any information or insight that might contradict your own story. Really, just shove them out of the picture if you don’t have complete control of them. See them as the competition that they are. Kneecap them if you have to. One recent candidate had his security people handcuff a reporter for asking questions. That’s the spirit!

5 Don’t ask apathetic voters to think. Thinking means work: research and knowledge that takes work to acquire. That’s too hard. They want their opinions to be spoon fed to them in little sweet or salty bites, like candy or chips, preferably in an entertaining way that doesn’t require them to turn off the TV or radio. Thinking is bad.

6 Don’t bore or over whelm apathetic voters with details. That requires thinking (bad, see above!). Besides, a voter who feels overwhelmed is a voter who feels incompetent to make a decision. A conscience might prevent such a voter from voting, definitely not the result you want.

7 Mock any opposing candidate who tries to provide details or an actual plan to voters. What do they think this is, a job interview for an executive position or something? Don’t they know that the world is run by C students and college dropouts? Average people shouldn’t know how to write position papers very well and above average people are threatening. Make sure that apathetic voters know that you hold details in utter contempt.

8 Never let the apathetic voter think the candidate is smarter than the voter. That might cause the voter to think the candidate is high fallutin’ and elitist and smug. That does not conjure a vote-worthy cultural icon. In TV Land this is someone who is going to get taught a lesson about street smarts and common sense, important things that are apparently surgically removed to make room for education and actual experience. Apathetic voters believe that common sense and book smarts can not coexist in the same person. They nobly choose beer smarts for themselves and want leaders who have also made this sacrifice.

Candidates, don’t spend a penny unless that money uses these ideas. Any ad that doesn’t flatter, cajole, condescend to, or enrage an unmotivated voter is just wasted cash and we want politicians who can spend billions in the least wasteful way.

Or something like that.