Action Figure Daniel

Author: Daniel

“Caste” by Isabel Wilkerson
- Silent earthquakes are a thing
- “We did not build this broken house, but it is our house now”
- Castes are about power, not feelings
- In America, race is a strawman that maintains the caste
- Virginia colony had a special form of enslavement more extreme than in England
- We are shocked when the actors do not match the expected containers
- Rooting out offenders helps us think we solved the problem but does little
  - (Offenders are people who crossed a line. Excising them pushing them out of the system… but the system still remains.)
- Color does not indicate race (multiple “races” have the same shades)
- Color is a fact; Race is a social construct
- Caste is not inherently hatred
- Casting is based on
  - Assumption of divine will and laws of nature
  - Heritability
    “If you can act your way out of it, then it is class not caste”
  - Endogamy and marriage control
    (Restricting marriage to intra caste)
  - Purity vs pollution
    Their degradation justified their degradation
  - Occupational hierarchy
  - Dehumanization and stigma
  - Terror as enforcement, cruelty as control
  - Inherent superiority vs inherit inferiority
- Dominant group threat syndrome
- True Alphas do not need to yell
- Omega’s act as a jester and pack glue
  - Because they can poke fun at everyone, they can defuse and mellow the group
- Culture is built to subordinate castes successes more than almost anything else
- “There is never ‘caste’ only ‘castes’”
- Caste usually trumps class
- We usually tend to defend our caste even if sacrificing self-interest
- Tolerance is not love; we need to love, not just tolerate
19 May 2022
“Indebted” by Caitlin Zaloom
Note: I continue to be shocked at how bad the Federally sponsored Student Loan system is. Part of it is because, well, Government, but part is because it is big business and vested parties do not want to see the money slow.
- College is a hope for a better life through income
- It is also a symbolic acceptance of middle-class “values”
- Having to rely on government loans conflicts with the core concepts of independence
- For agrarian cultures, the entire economic system was based on free child labor
- Loans Direct requires repayment fresh out of college
- Planning requires stability, not the other way around
- Stuff feels important to have
- Future planning requires balance between providing now for providing later
- Standard forms–like FAFSA–render families liable to the government and infer appropriate relationships
- We blame the poor of having bad financial skills but do not have financial education
  - (It is interesting to me the mandating teaching financial literacy is so strongly opposed in so many places. I have not delved far into the reasons, but a cursory review seems to be that “teaching about money is the family’s responsibility”. I concur. As is all other education. I find this stance folly for three reasons:
    teaching about money does not seem to have been adequate heretofore,
    teaching about money in the classroom does not preclude families from teaching at home–just like any other subject–and,
    how can the financially illiterate be expected to teach at all, if not well, something they do not know)
- Higher education transitioned from a “national” benefit (“this benefits the country”) in the 1900’s to a family benefit (“this mostly benefits a family”) in the 1980’s
  - With this transition, grants (for the public good) were replaced with loans (for the private good)
- Middle-class parents shield kids from financial conversations, which is often a bad thing
- Parent PLUS is based on credit history, thus unequally distributing benefits
- Children can feel stymied if they are making financially based decisions
14 May 2022
“Remember” by Lisa Genova
- How to remember
  - Get the information
  - Weave it together
  - Store the woven information
  - Fetch the memory
- Storing the memory takes time and can be interrupted
- There is no “memory bank”
- We rebuild memories, not replay them
- We can only remember what we pay attention to
- You have 15-30 seconds to pay attention to sensory input and convert them into memories
- Three memories: things we know, things we do, and what happened
- Self-testing is important to remembering
- Space out your learning
- Repetitive learning and recall
- Meaning can improve memory retention
- Tying to something autobiographical enhances memory
- Episodic memories are very plastic
- Every time we remember, we save a new version of the memory
- Descriptive language affect memory
- “Ugly sisters”–words similar to what we are looking for–distract us… keeping us looking in the wrong place
- Prospective memory–listing things now to remember later–is something we are not good at
- Be precise when trying to remember to do something for the future
- Stop replaying or sharing memories to forget them faster
- Forgetting is important to drop irrelevant information and declutter the mind
- Your physiology is part of your memory context
- Sleep aids muscle memory
- Naps provide short term boosts
31 March 2022
“13 Bankers” by Simon Johnson

A fascinating history of Finance and Banking the US from the earliest days (1776) through the financial collapse of the Great Recession (2008).

An industry that makes so much money has to be good at managing themselves

22 March 2022
Alain de Botton on Emotional Education
- Emotions are not intuitive
- There is something wrong with everyone, it is what binds us
- Religion used to console us about our misery
- With the decline of religion, we thought culture could replace it, but it has not
- We want emotional rewards associated with materials, not the materials themselves
- Meritocracy believes people on top deserve to be on the top and people on the bottom deserve to be on the bottom
  - (Conversely, you are where you deserve to be)
- Ancient societies used to believe the “divine” had a strong effect on success or failure
  - “They are unfortunate” literally “They are not touched by the goddess Fortune”
  - “Loser” denotes someone who is failing in a race
- Failure and vulnerability are the only way to make friends
  - We know ourselves from the inside but others only from the outside
- Leaning into the weirdness brings relief
- Having a divine interloper brings relief
- A problem on devices is that we do not have enough time with our own thoughts
- Childhood sets our pattern for the rest of our lives… until we defuse it
- We all start as a True Self but build (by choice or force) a False Self on top
- Often, a mental breakdown is because the True Self is breaking through
- Transference is moving historical behavior into the present context
- The most “adult” people are the ones who have reconciled their childhoods
- Romanticism has corrupted our ideas about relationships
  - There are no soul mates
  - Disagreements are normal
  - Instincts (our feelings) tells us we are in love
  - Humans replaced Angels
  - (Romantics tended to die young… which helped them hold their paradigm)
  - Sex is the same as love
  - We should be loving who someone can become, not who they are
  - Mind reading is short-lived
- We are not “falling in love” so much as “refinding love”
  - The problem is, we are basing “love” on what we grew up with
  - We avoid people who are too healthy for us because we associate love with suffering
- We are often too selfless because we do not know how to not be
  - Ask yourself: “If I dared to be more selfish I would…”
- Parents needs to be “good enough”
  - The role of parents is to let kids down in a structured way
- “The best cure for love is knowledge”
- Forgiveness comes naturally after peace is achieved
8 March 2022