Prayer and Altruism

Every time there’s some sort of tragedy, I see a jillion facebook statuses and tweets offering their thoughts and prayers to the victims of whatever happened.  For this article I’m going to altogether ignore how ridiculous the concept of prayer is, as that could almost be an article all on it’s own (so if you think about it long and hard enough, god’s going to change his master plan just for you? yeah, okay lol).

Prayer is purported to be an altruistic act.  It supposedly helps the bereaved in some way simply from the goodwill of the person praying.  The problem with all of this is that any altruistic act announced to the public is not altruism at all.  

Altruistic acts are those that are done simply for the benefit of the recipient, and for no other reason.  People who announce their beneficent acts to everyone are not motivated by their desire to help someone, they are motivated by the rise in social status they get when someone clicks that facebook ‘like’ button.  They are not motivated by altruism and compassion, they are motivated by narcissism and their own greed.

This concept of praying in public being narcissistic is in the bible itself:

-”Be careful to not do your ‘acts of righteousness’ before men, to be seen by them.  If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.” Matthew 6:1

-”So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets. as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men.  I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.” Matthew 6:2

There’s a lot in Matthew about not praying in public, and yet I see so much of it on social media sites.  A little while ago after the Newtown shooting I posted a passage from Matthew as a status on facebook to remind people what the bible actually says.  It’s a really sad day when I, an atheist, have to quote the bible to tell people what their holy book actually says.  I think that’s pretty revealing in of itself.

So if you want to be truly altruistic in your actions and prayer, dont be public about it.  Don’t go posting photos of you volunteering at a soup kitchen.  It’s great that you did it, but doing it for the wrong reasons removes the veneer of nobility from your actions to reveal the true core of vanity and narcissism.

Sociology and Psychology on Wall Street

Any market is an inherently social institution.  A market by definition exists when two people trade something.  As such, one cannot fully understand an institution like Wall Street without understanding the sociological and psychological foundations underlying it.

The ways in which financial analysts price assets like bonds are subject to social trends.  They are now priced by the state-pricing model.  Before that it was the capital-asset pricing model.  Before that it was, i dunno, maybe a guy reading pig entrails or something.  The point is that there is no reliable objective way to predict the future market value of an asset.  "Experts" instead rely upon whatever theoretical foundation is currently the flavor of the week churned out by academia.  Once you view financial market participants as a human society, a more accurate picture of how the market works emerges.

In the short run, market prices are explicitly what the society values an asset at.  In the short run this has nothing to do with any fundamental value behind an asset, but rather what the society collectively values it at.  All of those graphs tracking an asset's price over time are literally graphs tracking the equilibrium price at which the society values that security.  As such, all of these prices are subject to human societal and cognitive biases.  Socially, things like crowd psychology run rampant.  Consider the recent string of IPO's by social tech companies.  Ignoring the fact that the companies had little to no actual revenue streams, the trading society's conscience collective was ignited by the story of Mark Zuckerberg and the promise of riches from those companies.  And how have they fared since their IPOs?  At the time of this writing, Facebook (FB) has dropped from $45 to $21, Groupon (GRPN) dropped from $31 to $4, and Zynga (ZNGA) dropped from $10 to $2.  I think LinkedIn (LNKD) is a bubble waiting to pop with a price to earnings ratio of over 900! This societal stampede towards easy riches can be seen in any market bubble.

Wall Street itself is set up in a manner that encourages a herd-like mentality of traders.  People like professional analysts, Warren Buffet, Jim Cramer, etc. are all presumed to have knowledge that the layperson does not.  As a result, the vast majority of market participants herd towards any stock they recommend, while they stampede away from any they don't.  Similarly, beginning level traders are often expected to conform to the views and beliefs of their superiors.  How else would they hope for promotion?

It's also interesting to see how the social market bubble also applies to other areas of finance like Venture Capital.  I'm an aspiring entrepreneur, so I've done a lot of internet research on business opportunities.  Every "Hot Start-Up" list for the past 5 years lists App company after App company, Social this and Social that.  Venture Capitalists giving these entrepreneurs their funding are just as subject to societal movements as Wall Street Traders are.  Which one of them wouldn't want to be the next Peter Thiel (an early investor in Facebook)?

Psychological effects are also important to note.  Since they are in every human, they are bound to effect social markets on a large scale.  There is a whole industry dedicated to predicting future stock prices based on past performance called technical analysis which relies heavily on analyzing stock charts.  They talk a lot about moving averages and support levels.  I think those are great examples of the anchoring and adjustment heuristic.  Other things, like our tendency towards risk aversion, and hindsight bias also play important roles in how people trade.

Another interesting aspect of all of this is how regardless of irrationality, how we socially define reality essentially is reality on Wall Street.  For example, it ultimately doesn't matter that technical analysis is ultimately a pseudoscience quackery.  If enough people believed in it, the markets would behave exactly as the chartists predict because in this case the chartists are the market.  I don't remember who said it or the exact phrasing, but a phrase I like goes something like this.  Irregardless of reality, a thing is real if it is real in it's effects.  God doesn't exist, but he has still influenced a couple thousand years of human history.

Now the question is, how do we make money from this?  There are 4 ways to make money on Wall Street.  1- Cheat.  Make a Ponzi Scheme, trade on insider knowledge, etc.  2- Get REALLY REALLY lucky (unlikely).  3- Invest in a passively managed index fund.  This is a great strategy advocated by those of the efficient market hypothesis which you can read up on your own if you want to.  It is, however, kind of boring.  4- Value investing.  Buying stocks that have a high book to market ratio.  This is usually pretty hard to stomach however, as it means betting against the prevailing wisdom/social forces on Wall Street.  This is what Warren Buffet advocates.

Oh I almost forgot a fifth way.  Make money selling your own bullshit advice (*cough* Motley Fool *cough* Jim Cramer *cough*).  On that note, you should really look into buying some Tesla Motors Stock.

(Disclaimer: I am long Tesla. But you should really, really buy some too.)

The American Dream as Social Control

"Hope is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength and your greatest weakness." - The Architect, The Matrix Reloaded

The American Dream- the belief that enough hard work will earn you a place in the upper echelons of society- is rooted in the Enlightenment ideals of the 1800's.  Our society was one birthed in the denial of a formal class system, and it was this idea that spawned another, that surely with enough work, anyone could ascend to any height of economic or social prosperity.  I have no idea if the Founding Fathers intended for this to happen, but this newly created American Dream became a method of exerting social control over the disadvantaged classes while simultaneously building America into an economic powerhouse.

It is the American dream that drives the huge influxes of immigrants from their homelands into the US.  Immigrants like Albert Einstein and Andrew Carnegie who aded value to our society and built it into something great.  It is the American dream that busses the lower classes to menial daily jobs, where they trade their lives for a daily wage in hopes of a better future.  It is the industry of the lower classes, fueled by the American dream, that elevated the US to economic heights previously undreamt of.  The problem with this whole thing, is how unfair it is in it's effects.

I'll start with an example.  I've had several days when my stock portfolio has jumped a healthy percentage, netting me (lets say for example purposes) $1k.  Thats a third of the money I made last summer working three jobs I made in one afternoon.  A glaring problem with the American dream is that hard work does not translate into wealth.  That work has to be focused in a certain way.  It is only the hard work of the capitalist, the entrepreneur that may result in wealth, not the sweat of the day-laborer.  This may seem obvious to you or I, but rest assured the vast majority of people out there don't understand this key point.

The few society members that understand this point rise to the upper echelons of society and pass down their wealth from generation to generation.  Those that don't remain in their destitution and squalor.

The effect of the American Dream on our society is to pacify the lower classes.  Have you no money?  Then surely you have not worked hard enough, for America rewards the hard workers.  In fact, you are a lazy parasite on our society if your hard work has not made you rich, and you need assistance from the government to survive.

Because of the American dream, the lower classes can only think to blame themselves for their poor living conditions, not the upper classes that constantly use their institutional advantages to maintain their power over the plebeians.  And so, they are pacified.  They plot no revolutions or coups- they turn to religion in hopes of claiming their justly deserved but nonexistent rewards in the afterlife.  If I haven't previously covered how religion is a system of social pacification, I may do so in the future.  For now, suffice to say that it functions in a manner very similar to that of the American Dream.

Announcement

For the month of April, if not longer, i'll be deactivating my Facebook account. For any of you still interested in getting updates from this blog, you'll either have to check the page periodically of your own accord, or check my twitter page which I will only be using for blog updates (@NOTdavidu). I'd have deactivated my twitter too, but then any blog updates would have been totally devoid of an audience.

P.S. this is not an april fool's joke.

P.P.S. Really? 2 votes in the poll? jerks.

Our Collective ADD

Emile Durkheim argued for the existence of a “conscience collective” (when you read that phrase, do it with a French accent), a collective representation each society has of it’s shared beliefs and values that exists exogenously from it’s component human members. Once it’s created by the humans of a society, it exerts an external pressure (usually moral in nature) upon them apart from their own thoughts and actions.

I think our conscience collective has been radically changed by our rapid pace of technological advancement. In this day and age, our conscience collective has the attention span of a 4-year-old at a church sermon. Everything has become a meme.

The proliferation of internet-based technology combined with the 24-hour news cycle has seriously impeded our ability to focus on any one thing as a society for more than a minute.

We jump from celebrity story to celebrity story, from viral video to viral video, often reacting viscerally initially, but soon losing interest. The 24-hour news cycle seeks news to report news 24 hours a day (no shit) even when there is no news to report. This results in stupid meaningless stories being reported as news in an attempt to drive up ratings (Casey Anthony, Snooki’s pregnancy, etc.). Even when the story has important things in or surrounding it, it becomes an only once-thought-about meme. Remember those Jesus hates religion but loves god videos? Kony 2012? Those were reported by CNN as actual news and could have sparked nationwide debate about serious topics, but they haven’t. Even with massive events like the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Initially the whole country had a lazer-like focus on them. Over time however, people simply stopped caring.

In previous epochs without the technology we currently have, entire populaces were more able to concentrate because of the lack of information. Only the most important issues or news could be spread by word of mouth or by the headlines of a daily newspaper. That ensured the focus of the conscience collective.

Nations can only be mobilized to great achievement when the entire populace is focused on a goal. Germany in the 1930’s, America, Britain, and Russia in the 1940’s, Athens in the (albeit failed) conquest of Sicily, Rome in the conquest of Gaul, etc. etc. Unity and a clear focus on a goal are required. Both are being retarded by our current level of technology.

On the Nature of Politics

A while ago, I bemoaned the lack of great leaders among our current politicians. I suppose that this post is a follow up.

In the novel the Tides of War by Steven Pressfields (a great book), two characters, Alcibiades and Socrates, have a discussion about politics. Although it is a fictional book, I feel like the fundamental arguments they convey are still true and applicable today.

Socrates began by arguing for the debasement of politicians. Can there be nothing more debase than the demagogue speaking to the masses, changing his every belief to match those of the mob (*cough* Mitt Romney *cough*) to seek their validation? He becomes the tool of the mob, he becomes their slave.

But then Alcibiades counters. What if the politician speaks not from the desire to appease the masses, but from the deepest precincts of his heart? What if he speaks not to their beliefs, but to his own, to persuade and lead the public? Can there be anything more noble?

I feel like modern conveniences have irrevocably changed the nature of politics. Now, when every statement can be instantly analyzed by the 24-hour news cycle, the only type of politician that can survive that gauntlet is the debase demagogue. This is perhaps why there seems to have been great men in the past, while few in the present.

I think this is why Mitt Romney is so universally despised; he is the archetype of the debase politician. This is also why, while everyone doesn't necessarily support him, Ron Paul is almost universally admired. While his ideas may be a little whacky, he is still striving for Alcibiades's noble form of politician.

We have been inundated by debase politicians. Let's hope that more noble ones can rise in the future.

Also... I could really use some more input: answer the poll por favor

Kony 2012

Something interesting I've learned: whenever people are making judgements about something, they react with their emotional parts of their brain before the parts of the brain associated with reason light up. This is one of the truths to the process of human reasoning: the unconscious parts of the mind react first with emotion, and then the conscious parts rationalize the emotion- it doesn't actually make the decision of how to react.

When I first watched the Kony video, I had a negative emotional reaction (towards the makers of the video itself, not just Kony). This blog post is essentially the rational parts of my brain attempting to explain why I did so. To be honest I'm not 100% sure why, but as the unconscious processes are much more powerful in information-processing than the conscious, I will stand by my initial reactions.

At it's heart, the Kony video is a marketing ploy. A brilliant ploy, yes, but a ploy nonetheless. Did you notice all of the emotional strings the movie deliberately pulled in you? They wanted you to react emotionally-positive to their video, and let your rational conscious follow blindly behind.

The video purports itself to be the progenitor of a grassroots movement. The problem with this is that a true grassroots movement has no progenitor. Take the Occupy Wall Street protests as an example. Yes, some magazine did initial posit the idea, but once the idea was out there a whole community seized upon it and made it their own. Movements (described by Eric Hoffer in "the True Believer") by their very nature evolve over time. Kony 2012 will not; the Invisible Children organization has already laid out their plans, and they expect them to be followed. The video claims to be a bottom-up movement, but it is not. In reality it is top-down; the unthinking masses following the plans of the few that set them in motion.

Marketing their group's aims as a grassroots movement was a brilliant and well-executed move. The illusion of such a movement draws the impressionable and movement-hungry youth in, generating buzz via social media (as the video said it would do). That buzz is then covered by the ever reactive (not proactive) 24-hour news cycle getting the organization tons of free media coverage. The reason why I think i had a negative emotional reaction to this, was that if their goals and group were as noble as they seem in the movie, they wouldn't have to have a marketing scheme. Things like women's rights, civil rights, etc. didn't need clever marketing gimmicks for their change to be wrought. Marketing something implies that the actual product itself is in need of marketing: meaning that the real, not-made-too-look-better-than-it-actually-is product wouldn't have been bought by itself. That reeks of general badness to me. I'm not sure what that badness is exactly, but badness nonetheless.

Also, the idea of the US committing itself to a military intervention in central Africa is beyond ridiculous. And honestly, any US citizens advocating such a thing have attention spans that goldfish would scoff at. Anybody remember the last time we put our forces in a foreign land brimming with really complex sectarian violence? You know, those little 10-year, economy-sinking wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? It's amazing really, that people could be advocating for ending those two wars and bringing our troops home "you know, after they stop off in central Africa for a little bit". It is totally possible that the African Union, in concert with foreign (US) military advisors takes Kony down. But that's also what we've been doing, which would make this whole "movement" superfluous.

This general subject is really interesting in terms of crowd psychology. It's a similar to that one video about some bullshit of Jesus hating religion but loving god or something. On social media, where everything is a meme, people react quickly with their emotional responses first before actually reasoning things out (not that I am any exception). This leads to these videos and pictures being spread and made to appear more important and intelligent than they actually are. We individually invest little time or effort into clicking that retweet or share button, so we invest little in terms of our reasoning-brain power in deciding whether it's something worth sharing or not.

Not that taking Kony down would necessarily be a bad thing. Note further that recently newer critical youtube videos have come out criticizing the legitimacy of the Invisible Children group. You can search for them yourself.

ALSO: I've been thinking about maybe trying to turn my blogging into some sort of money making profession, either maybe trying to write for some other website/paper/group/whatever, or by continuing what I've been doing but more heavily promoting my writing via other methods (I haven't done much more than posting updates to Facebook and Twitter) and making money from adds or as a stepping stone to the former. To help my decision making process, I've included an anonymous poll on the right on this page about why you've chosen to read this. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to answer the poll, or to comment with your input on how you think I should move forward. Thanks.

Lower the Drinking Age!

We gotta fight the man, man. We gotta fight, for our right, to paaaartay.

The drinking age law is one of the most universally ignored laws there is. It's an open secret between college officials, parents, and kids across the country that a huge portion of underage kids drink alcohol. The law has done virtually nothing to curb teen drinking. It was originally intended by Mothers Against Drunk Driving to stop car accidents caused by drunk drivers (which I certainly view as a worthy cause), but the laws are so ineffective that the people who are stupid enough to drink and drive still have no problem getting alcohol. If a law is virtually ignored everywhere, what good is it?

Some might answer that if a law is virtually ignored, we'd be better off strengthening it than repealing it. Well, in the case of alcohol we have some precedent. There was a constitutional amendment banning alcohol. How well did that hold up? There was another amendment repealing the first (chronologically first of the two i mention here, not free speech and all that) amendment, and in between the two a huge black market industry rose in bootlegging. In the case of illegal intoxicants, the answer is never to ban the substance- that only drives up profit for those willing to sell it regardless, and people always find a way to sell it.

Furthermore, lowering the drinking age may actually save lives. In cases of alcohol poisoning, it would reduce hesitation by bystanders to call an ambulance if they thought something was wrong with a friend. Removing the fear of legal or parental repercussions would increase the likelihood that someone in trouble would get the medical attention they need.

I recognize however, that we as a society are probably not ready for no age limit, so I propose lowering it to 18. Why 18? We are legally recognized as adults at 18, and we should have the full rights of an adult member of our society. And, this brings me to the crux of my argument, to a point that I take personally.

I'm a 19-year-old male citizen. If ordered, I could be drafted into the military to go fight and die somewhere for my country. And you're telling me that I can't have a beer before I do? How does that make any sense? This is particularly relevant given how close we came to instituting a draft during the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now unfortunately this doesn't look like it'll be changing anytime soon. This issue would matter more to people of the younger demographic who are notoriously indifferent to politics. Any politician who dared broach the subject, other then possibly Ron Paul, would be ridiculed on a national scale, not to mention deeply offend MADD- a powerful political organization, especially compared to us young-uns.

So it doesn't look like anything'll be changing anytime soon. So for now, I'll have to confine my indignation to angrily-worded blog posts and ignoring that particular law even more.

Gender Norms of Altruism

You've probably seen this photo being passed around Facebook: its a newspaper clipping of a guy that was spending his valentines day with his girlfriend in class (college), when a shooter broke in. The guy shielded his girlfriend with his body- she survived, he did not. Not surprisingly the photo's received a zillion "shares" and a jillion comments about how brave, noble, and filled with love he was. This article is in now way meant to detract from what he did. What struck me as... I guess the best word is interesting... is how rare the reverse would have been.

I think our social norms have conditioned us to expect different types of altruism from us. Not that it hasn't ever happened, but I think it'd be much rarer for the girl to have shielded the guy. Now the question is, why? We expect male altruism, in the vein of chivalry, to be directed towards women, but we don't expect for the reverse to be true. Female altruism (based off of my assumptions which could be totally wrong) is generally more directed towards the protection of children. Not to say that the flows of altruism don't overlap, but generally this is pretty much the way things go.

I'm not really sure where to take this line of thought besides noting the oddity. Normally once noticing something like this, I'd usually take a normative stance. I don't think i can here. Altruism is the personal choice of self sacrifice, and I don't really think I have a right to tell people for whom they should sacrifice themselves. The only normative stance I'll take is regarding the original poster's caption, which I think sums up collective societal feelings "What makes a good boyfriend? What makes man? This guy knew what it took to be both, and he paid the price. God rest his soul, in my eyes he is a hero."

I'm not sure manhood (or being a good boyfriend) should be defined by the degree to which you are willing to sacrifice yourself, quite literally, for a woman. Such altruism can't be indicative of manhood, because it requires the presence of a woman to sacrifice yourself for. And really, is it fair to call someone either immature or "a bad man" for not sacrificing your life for a woman? And should women be held to the same standard of altruism as men? Why or why not? Again I'm not sure I can be too normative here. Sociology is said to be the self-consciousness of society- here I raise these issues more for your introspection than anything else.

The Linguistics of Female Mate Selection

The process of using the linguistics of a culture or social group to analyze the inner mechanics of the social fabric is not a new methodology. Here, I attempt to apply it to the modern woman’s mating strategies. Maybe what I’m writing about is not news to anyone, but I think it’s interesting and still worth discussing.

Two of the colloquialisms I’ve heard exclusively used by women (meaning men don’t use them) in relationship (c wut i did thur?) to the males they are interacting with is describing them as “good (or bad) catches” and thinking about select males as “the one that got away”. Now these phrases I’m sure aren’t used by every woman, but they are used by at least a significant portion of the population, as evidenced by the recent success of the Katy Perry song. Similarly the conclusions I draw from these phrases I’m sure don’t apply to every woman, so please don’t think I’m over generalizing. This is food for thought, not some proclamation of transcendent truth.

Both of those phrases, to me, brought into mind the functioning of fishermen (fisherwomen?). Good or bad “catches”, and that “one that got away” all are obliquely referencing how a fisherman might feel about the fish that he catches. I think this is incredibly revealing (unless you knew all of this already. Remember that I am male, and as such will be forever doomed to an eternity of attempting to understand the female, but never quite getting there).

Women fish for men. They dangle their good looks, flirtatiousness, and attention into the water as a lure hoping to snag a target male. This is interesting for several reasons. First, it explains a bit of the general confusion in mate selection. Remember that lures are designed to catch fish in general, not one specific fish. Same goes for men and women. Women dangling lures in the water will often encounter unwanted advances from men they are not targeting. Furthermore men, targets or not, often have difficulty determining whether a lure is therefore actually meant for them or not. Some men respond by not biting on lures meant for them out of uncertainty, others bite on all of them, either out desperation, or out of an overriding confidence and inflated picture of themselves.

Is there a way out of this confusion? Probably not. One solution may be if women changed their strategy to be more like that of the typical male’s. If I were to continue with the fishing metaphor, (other then being the fish the fisherwomen catch) I’d describe males as more like the hill-billy hand fishers. Also note that I haven’t actually seen the show, I’m just going off of the caricature in my head based off of the title. I’m not saying this strategy is superior to the female strategy, but it is typically more efficient in determining intentions, though I’m sure many a frustrated female would disagree. If females behaved in the male way, people would be constantly reaching out and either hitting or missing each other without much in between-ness. Such bluntness, I think, would create a lot more heartache but a lot more successes as well. Overall not necessarily “better”, but perhaps a world with less confusion and mistaken intentions.

At any rate, it doesn’t really matter what possible solutions there are. We’re all evolutionarily programmed to pursue certain mating strategies to the exclusion of others. Two more notes to conclude:

-I appreciate that these assertions are gross generalizations. As i said before these are not definitive statements but rather food for thought.

-In the future I think it’d be fun to pick up on more phrases from both genders to delve into this further. Unfortunately for any female readers, In my experience male colloquialisms are generally variations along the theme of “dude, she’s so hot”. I’m not sure any exciting insights reside within that kind of dialogue.