Action Figure Daniel

Category: Reading

  • “The Hidden History of American Oligarchy” by Thom Hartman

    • The Civil war about promoting slavery nationwide
    • Southern oligarchs turned to debt and the KKK to promote control
    • Criminalized debt forces people to keep working through “debt peonage”
    • Student debt not being discharged through bankruptcy heightened this peonage
    • Add in targeted usage of anti-drug laws
    • Convict labor is discreetly legal slavery
    • Medical debt is uniquely American
    • Organizations devolve into an oligarchy when they are large enough to maintain a managerial class
    • “We are keeping you safe”
      • They must make sure we know who we are being kept safe from
    • Control the language to control the conversation
    • Violence against humans is always difficult, you have to “other” them first
    • Always take militias

  • “Being Wrong” by Kathryn Schulz

    • I error therefore I am
    • We “know” erroring is human but strive avoid admitting it
    • “You can either be ‘right’ or be in a relationship”
    • How often are we actually wrong?
    • We never feel wrong, we feel when we recognize we are wrong
    • Specific mistakes are difficult for us to see and thus appear as an “act of God”
    • To eliminate errors, we must know when we are wholly wrong and not just temporarily wrong
    • Are errors tangents to the journey to truth or parts of the journey?
    • “Err” meant “to move” and eventually gave us “error” and “erratic”
    • “Wondering jew” was a curse from Christ to a Jew who teased Christ while carrying the cross
    • Memories are poorly understood
      • Memories are recreated every time we remember them
      • (This makes them volatile, especially if they are interrupted when we are trying to resave them)
    • We have a story maker and a fact checker in our brains
    • Confabulation is when we make up a story while our fact checker is not available
    • “There is no accounting for taste” but we tend to make accounts up
    • “Belief” is an overt conviction
    • We downplay things we want to dismiss as “self-serving” but drum up things we want to promote by stating it is truth
    • Everyone that does not agree with us is because they are ignorant
    • “Lack of evidence is not evidence of a lack”
    • Wrong bets are not bad bets
    • Inductive reasoning saves us a lot of thinking effort
      • Be careful with tortured reasoning
    • Most of our beliefs are “beliefs second-hand”
    • We tend to “see” (alter our perception of the world) to adapt to how those around us see the world
    • Our society has a “disagreement deficit”
      • (That is, we lack the ability to politely disagree and remain friends)
      • Cure, quarantine, or expel
      • The original “Zealots” killed each other rather than risk capture
    • Too many ideas and not enough convictions
    • Doubt is a mental luxury
    • Belief is the default; we must think to dismiss something
    • We manufacture confidence to avoid having to reconsider if we could be wrong
    • We revise our memories to better align with our current beliefs
    • Theories are replaced but never dismissed unless a new theory is available
    • Error detection tends to start with the smallest possible error rather than bigger issues
    • Civilizations operate on the principal of shared expertise
    • Denial is a response to feelings not facts
    • We assume because we see people from the outside that we can know them from the outside
    • We can never know what people are like on the inside
    • (“We judge ourselves by our intentions; We just others by their actions”)
    • “You don’t know me, but I know you”
    • In love, we feel
      • Recognition
      • Timelessness
      • Reunification
      • Necessity
    • “Everyone complains about their memory. No one complains about their judgement.”
    • Loving is more like sharing a story than sharing a soul
    • Our desire to be right is really our desire for our beliefs to adhere outside ourselves
    • “Stories and theories may be all that we have that God does not”

  • “How the other half learns” by Robert Pondiscio

    • A lack of reading comprehension is often from a lack of shared experience
      • (If we know enough about what is going on, we can figure out the pieces we do not know)
    • Education standardization is good
    • Instructions should be clear and not subject to interpretation
    • Paternal discipline is different from “No excuses”
    • Ethics are critical to success
    • Focus on outputs more than inputs
    • Once children have basic skills, “reading tests” are basically background information checks
    • Test based accountability has become an end to itself
    • “Is test prep cheating?”
    • Car manufactures focused only on driver-side safety until 2016 because insurance only tested and rated the driver-side
    • Schools are where kids go to EXPERIENCE societal engagement not just to learn it

  • “Equal Partners” by Kate Mangino

    • When value do not match reality, we can
      • Change our values
      • Change our actions
      • Reframe the mismatch
    • Reframes:
      1. Economics or “bread winner”
        • Reversals tend to shift expectations from men to outsourced labor
      2. Personality
        • “She is better at doing the work than I”
      3. Different priorities
        • “He chooses to do this”
      4. “Bossy wife” decoy
        • “She wears the pants in the family” or “Don’t ask me, I just live here”
        • “nagging” is related
      5. Workplace
      6. Benevolent sexism and “himpathy”
        1. “Complimentary gender role differentiation”
    • The cognitive laborer is so overwhelmed they just want to check something off their list so they can stop thinking about it
    • Ask questions you think you already know the answer to, you might be surprised
    • Talk about role balance before the relationship get entrenched
    • Rejecting guilt is difficult and possible
    • Baby’s change everything! Even balanced households transition to more traditional role when a baby arrives
    • It is too easy for fathers to succeed and for mothers to fail
    • Make the invisible seen
      • If you are not comfortable sharing what you did then there is probably an imbalance
    • “Maternal gatekeeping” is a way females reinforce their stewardship
    • Women often need to step back
    • Be wary of people helping the routine because eventually the helpers go away and the routine must go on
    • The ideal partner is an active noticer of things needed to be done
    • Practice saying difficult things
    • Reject unearned praise, especially if it is gender based
    • Reject perfection (embracing flow is a better way)
    • We can appreciate the past while shaping our future
    • Articulation is important for developing empathy
    • We teach boys to solve problems but not to process problems
    • Correct, forgive, and move on
    • Privilege allows for mistakes
    • Men having platonic female friends mean they have either failed at conquest or are not interested in girls
    • We need boys to respect all women, not just the ones in their lives
    • Phrases to avoid
      • “Boys will be boys”
      • Comparing grown men to children
      • “[gender] are so…”

  • “Full House” by Stephen Jay Gould

    • Deference to entropy only applies to closed systems
    • Deference to entropy does not mean you cannot get more organized along the way
    • Be aware of cases where change can only happen in one direction
    • Systems optimize best when they can continue at length unchanged
    • Define “progress”
    • Do not reify things aspect of the full house
    • Life needs liquidity, not coolness
    • Morality needs intentions to be accurate