It’s remarkable how much Good Inside is reshaping my parenting with peace. I’ve noticed that lately when my daughter gets dysregulated and frustrated, she externalizes it with perceptions of fault from others and blaming them. I struggled a lot more with parenting when she was younger and did the same, which I believe that she has internalized in her body.
It’s not too late. It is never too late. That is an entire chapter on exactly that idea.
To embody that idea fully, I am taking the approaches in the book to heart. I am validating her struggles and emotions to build connection with her first, then imparting lessons and reminding her of boundaries and enforcing them second.
I had a heart-to-heart with her about a parent-child interaction that she saw the other day, one in which she made astute observations and showed concern for others. So I know that she can be receptive when I have a conversation with her about my struggles parenting when she was younger and how that might be showing up for her now. I’m willing to have this conversation over and over. Whatever it takes to break the cycle of shame that started who knows when in my family’s history.
I also read Is Silicon Valley Building Universe 25? by Ted Gioia. Ted provides an illuminating short history of a mouse “utopia” built by John B. Calhoun in 1968. In short, when all biological needs were met, dominant males developed narcissistic behavior (excessive self grooming, food gorging), females didn’t tend to their young and often attacked them, there was random violence, lack of social connection.
Eventually the entire mouse population in Universe 25 died out. They couldn’t survive utopia.
They couldn’t survive utopia. What a sentence.
It’s interesting to think about what utopia really should be then. It’s clearly not having all of our needs met. Or is that even the right way to phrase it? The Universe 25 utopia experiment was all about eliminating suffering by providing for all of the mice’s needs. Except doing so created dysfunctions and other needs that the mice didn’t know how to name.
Which makes me think that any utopia must not be free from suffering. But. Maybe what could be part of that utopia is suffering that can be followed by genuine, restorative human connection. Maybe some people are already living in utopia. Maybe we are living in utopia already. Maybe utopia lies in the striving, the noticing of what we want to change and moving towards it.
Except for a few overlords, everybody else with a social purpose or meaningful vocation will be disrupted. And not because consumers want this—surveys show the exact opposite.
==Consumers hate AI replacement theory by an overwhelming majority. But the ruling technocrats want it madly. And will force it upon us—as quickly and as irrevocably as possible.==
But what happens to a society where people are deprived of purposes and vocations.
Humans are so much more complicated than mice. So if mice need challenges and obstacles in order to flourish, we need them all the more. People are not built for passive lives—and the tech billionaires who are chasing this (out of greed, not benevolence) are courting disaster on the largest scale imaginable.
The highlighted part above is really interesting to think about. Who wants automation? Sometimes it’s the general population. There are some things that need not be manual. I guess even as I write that last sentence though, I find it hard to name a particular thing that is nearly universally thought of as a good automation. I guess I was vaguely thinking about administrative things at work that have required emailing humans in the past. (Like emailing a human to determine a balance on FTR funds.) But that human who we emailed liked having the system that way and flourished in her job even with this “inefficiency”. Of course there are some considerations about resistance to change and fear of the unfamiliar. But still. It’s interesting to think about desired “inefficiencies”. Because maybe desired inefficiencies create beauty and meaning sometimes.
I think about code and automation. Writing code is automating some tasks, but what I love about writing code is writing code. No one really questions that writers like to write. It just is and is an accepted form of beauty. Perhaps people appreciate less that people who code are writers too, just in a different language. I think people who are tech-oriented see coders who code as a thing that just is and an accepted form of beauty, but there is something different and beautiful about framing coders as writers of quirky languages.
Now I’m thinking about ChatGPT and its role in writing code. I know it can be frustrating to be a learner of a new coding language (especially R with all its quirks!), so getting help from ChatGPT is helpful. But is it worth them sitting with their frustration? I wonder about the following reflection question→response→question dialogue:
Reflection question: Would it be a good thing in your opinion if ChatGPT could always write the code that you needed perfectly?
Student: Yes, it would be more efficient.
Reflection question: But is efficiency a good thing?
Student: Yes…?
At this point, I feel like a reading (maybe about Universe 25) would be helpful for the students to see.
Anomie is a sense that life has no purpose or meaning. The people who suffer from it are listless, disconnected, and prone to mental illnesses of various sorts. Durkheim believed, for example, that suicide was frequently caused by anomie.
But the most shocking part of Durkheim’s analysis was his view that anomie increased when social norms were lessened. You might think that people rejoice when rules and regulations get eliminated. But Durkheim believed the exact opposite.
How do you destroy the purpose and meaning of human life? Is it even possible?
Holy moly. What a question. Followed up by a kick in the gut:
Unfortunately it’s not only possible, but already underway. Silicon Valley shows us how it’s done, step-by-step.
Tech companies whether by misguided intentions or malicious intent (or both) are doing things that are hurting human sense of meaning.
Ted ends by discussing VR headsets. He shared a horrifying article about rape in VR environments.
The only thing that gives me comfort is the knowledge that we are smarter than mice. This would be a grand time to prove it.