Bit Bucket #1
"Arrange whatever pieces come your way." - Virginia Woolf
[The vast majority of what I write never sees the light of day. I write each post off-line in Obsidian before copying the final draft to Substack. Each Obsidian draft has a "scratch pad" section where I keep incomplete thoughts, references, and text I pull out that just doesn't quite fit but I want to keep around. Bit Bucket posts are collections of unrelated bits and pieces from the stable of scratch pads.]
On Artificial Intelligence
The case can be made that the two are moving toward each other - AI's intelligence is increasing while the average human intelligence is decreasing.
On Coaching
Coaches work to improve teams and companies by proxy. They don't actually DO the work. They just describe what needs to be done and leave it up to the worker bees to make it so. I recall an experience from my scrum master days when something went off the rails and I thought to myself, "How come I didn't see that coming?" Shortly after that the company hired a high-dollar coach to "fix things." When something rather significant with his plan didn't work out, his rather terse quip to the scrum masters and team leads was "How come you didn't see that coming?" And I thought, "Ah, blame shifting. So that's how coaches do it."
On Beliefs
To each their own, I say, as long as you're the only one who will pay the price for holding untested beliefs. And if you end up reaping great rewards for the beliefs you hold, congratulations and enjoy!
Knowing we might be wrong and that our beliefs must constantly be refined is what keeps us humble and receptive to new ideas. Failure to engage in this effort is to join the race to the bottom.
On Education and Future Leadership
Grade inflation, driven perhaps more by parents then by teachers, has created a generation of adults who believe they are smarter than everyone else. In a 2012 survey comparing themselves to their peers, "78% of entering college students believed they were above average in their drive to achieve, and 63% believed they were above average in their leadership ability. " (Twenge, 2023) These beliefs are, of course, a mathematical impossibility. Anything over 50% is an indication for how over-inflated the self-views of these students had become by the time they entered college. Twelve years on, they are now occupying positions of authority and power, making decisions that affect perhaps millions of people for whom they have little or no understanding.
"Everyone get's a trophy" was carried forward to "everyone get's an 'A'." Carrying forward the lessons learned from their "helicopter" or "hothouse" parents, we're now seeing this fixed mindset installed in policy, laws, and regulations - the perfect nesting ground for inflexible ideas. The magic of always getting a trophy and the magic of always getting an 'A' seems to have left many policy makers and bureaucrats with the belief they can evoke the same magic just by declaring "everyone gets an income" or "group X is Y% of the population so Y% of CEOs must be composed of group X." This is a fine recipe for enshrined mediocrity.
On Manhood
I know from personal experience and from countless conversations with like-minded men we generally have a question running in the back of our mind when we meet a lead hand type of man. Am I up to that kind of task? Do I have what it takes? Do I have within me the qualities of character that will elevate me to lead hand and make me worthy for riding the the outside circle?
On Science
Studying mice isn't the same as studying human beings. It's the sloppy popular press that most often makes the false equivalence. People schooled in the ways to scientific thinking understand that animal studies often suggest ways to approach the empirical study of human biology and behavior. No experiment or theory is an end unto itself. Rather, they point a direction to the next experiment.
On Self-Improvement
There is a gravitational pull away from the kind of credentialing and ethic demanded by working close to Nature. It's an artificial pull, more of a vacuum than it is a force of Nature. Isn't a vacuum a force of Nature? If it is, it's the force of Nature born by an absence of struggle and challenge and skill and competition and merit. It's a force of absence rather than a force of substance, like gravity, which builds with mass.
External vs internal locus of control - what ails us in today's culture is the expectation that all the solutions should come from somewhere or someone else. Rather than act from our own center, we expect others to adjust the wind to match our sails. Sails of which we probably known little if nothing about how to work. Or even that they exist.
On Social Media
The vast majority of what gets spilled on social media isn't for public consumption. Unfortunately for the unaware, the intoxicating effects of the social media open bar have let slip so many dogs of private thoughts that it's impossible to feel outrage at the tsunami of blather. Quite the opposite, so much of what I read is cringe worthy in the same way we might see an esteemed colleague turn into a belligerent blowhard after a few drinks. Social media is antithetical to meaningful self-exploration via writing.
Most people don't filter and refine their thoughts with a system like the one President Lincoln used. That's always been the case. Except when someone blurted out a malformed opinion 160 years ago, much to their chagrin, the consequences were usually minor, fixed with an apology, and forgotten. Today, people gleefully fill the Internet with their unfiltered and unrefined thoughts where they aren't forgotten and apologies fix nothing.
If you have any questions, need anything clarified, or have something else on your mind, please send a DM or email me directly.
Photo by Jeff van Roosmalen on Unsplash