Posts
There ARE indeed gods that atheists can get behind. Kipling wrote about them.
Unfortunately, those kinds of gods aren't terribly discriminate, and many of we sons of Martha will shoulder the price, too.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
AGR+ Militant Atheism
The Pompotous of love is married to a wonderful, intelligent, kind, patient woman. Who is a Christian of sorts, an Episcopalian to be precise, but not one of the "let's go to church because that's where the money and status congregate" types of Episcopalians I knew as a young Pompotous. She does indeed believe in some sort of supernatural something or other.
Everybody has AGR. This religious belief of hers (along with her perpetual optimism about what she can actually accomplish in a limited amount of time) rank as her high points of AGR.
But over the years of our interactions I've think I've identified some things that may be the roots of the "militant atheism" moniker that has been the topic of discussion lately. (Various blogs have touched it, the most excellent vjack's is always a good place to go.)
Here's the thing: for those of us steeped in the humanities, you go off and do history and historiography and philosophy and cognitive science and phenomenology and psychology and so on and so forth, each discipline taking itself as the lens through which the entire world can be viewed, and if you are interested in consciousness, one of the things that you eventually come across is that sanity is primarily a socially defined construct.
Yeah, yeah, almost everything is a socially defined construct, got it, when does the interesting part come in?
Well, we have all these social constructs that point out what is right and what is wrong, what is "other" and bad, what is acceptable and what isn't. (Think of homosexuality being in the DSM until what, '73? Or putting "God" into the Pledge of Allegiance in the 1950's to distinguish the US from "godless" communism. The various ways various groups (Irish, Italians, Jews) have been integrated into American society over time.) The more complicated a society is, the larger it is, the more communication and interactions between people, the more stress will be placed on competing social constructs.
As a professional interaction experience designer, additional interactions complicate things almost exponentially. If you lived in a primitive village and never knew what happened 1/2 a mile beyond the boundaries of the village the simplistic "everything not mandatory is forbidden" (with, of course, memetic variations) might be workable enough. But an empire has to be more flexible. ("Forgive him Caesar- he is a barbarian and thinks that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature," as Shaw wrote.)
Reason and the scientific method provide us with the tools to examine social constructs as objectively as humanly possible. Most people cannot use those tools. Some of them can only use those tools in limited areas (think so-called "scientists" who claim the scientific method should only be used in the job or in the lab, not in real life, where faith should prevail).
But enough people have been exposed to the scientific method and the fruits of scientific discovery to see, hey, it works! Like the cartoon, only some really fringe anti-evolutionist cases are going to take the antibiotic that worked 20 years ago instead of the one designed to combat the evolved form of the infection.
So when an atheist steps up and says, "Keep your baseless historico-social construct out of my life" what we're really saying is, "You have high AGR -- you have a disconnect with reality." If you believe in something without evidence to back up your beliefs you are, in point of fact, insane.
If some politician started making decisions based on World of Warcraft lore and trying to make policy based on Horde versus Alliance affiliation, that politician would be widely viewed as insane. But from the Pompotous's viewpoint, a politician standing up and talking about faith being a deciding factor in decisions is much the same as yelling, "Horde rules!" during a senate debate. It reveals a disconnect with reality, it reveals high AGR.
My wife knows I think she is insane. But she knows that I admit my own insanity -- everybody has AGR to a greater or lesser extent.
Religion and faith play by different rules. A religionist looks at somebody else who is a different religion and they are wrong or heretics or apostate or whatever, and you may kill them or torture them or pray for them or whatever, but the other whackos are playing at a similar level of AGR.
I've seen several atheists use the argument that religionists are atheists to every god except their own and that's just not true. A religionist's denial of other gods is not based on reason and evidence and all those other good things, it is based on faith and thus isn't atheism. Religion is not rational. That doesn't mean that any specific theist is dangerous -- not all crazy people are dangerous -- but it does mean that every specific theist is irrational on the subject of religion.
Any atheistic declaration is an attack on the theists sanity in a "you people aren't connected to reality" way. That's the attack. That's the "militant" position. It's not comparing apples to apples in a communal way of "mine is better," it's saying, "all of your apples have the same existence in reality as the 'tea' my 2-year old daughter pores for me out of her empty play teapot."
Atheism based in rationality and the scientific method is utterly at odds with religionists about how reality is determined. That is a deep conflict. Imagine someone made it to 40 still believing that Santa Claus personally put his presents under the tree after coming through the chimney -- wouldn't an anti-Clausian's attempt to persuade the poor fool of reality be seen as an attack upon his world?
Everybody has AGR. This religious belief of hers (along with her perpetual optimism about what she can actually accomplish in a limited amount of time) rank as her high points of AGR.
But over the years of our interactions I've think I've identified some things that may be the roots of the "militant atheism" moniker that has been the topic of discussion lately. (Various blogs have touched it, the most excellent vjack's is always a good place to go.)
Here's the thing: for those of us steeped in the humanities, you go off and do history and historiography and philosophy and cognitive science and phenomenology and psychology and so on and so forth, each discipline taking itself as the lens through which the entire world can be viewed, and if you are interested in consciousness, one of the things that you eventually come across is that sanity is primarily a socially defined construct.
Yeah, yeah, almost everything is a socially defined construct, got it, when does the interesting part come in?
Well, we have all these social constructs that point out what is right and what is wrong, what is "other" and bad, what is acceptable and what isn't. (Think of homosexuality being in the DSM until what, '73? Or putting "God" into the Pledge of Allegiance in the 1950's to distinguish the US from "godless" communism. The various ways various groups (Irish, Italians, Jews) have been integrated into American society over time.) The more complicated a society is, the larger it is, the more communication and interactions between people, the more stress will be placed on competing social constructs.
As a professional interaction experience designer, additional interactions complicate things almost exponentially. If you lived in a primitive village and never knew what happened 1/2 a mile beyond the boundaries of the village the simplistic "everything not mandatory is forbidden" (with, of course, memetic variations) might be workable enough. But an empire has to be more flexible. ("Forgive him Caesar- he is a barbarian and thinks that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature," as Shaw wrote.)
Reason and the scientific method provide us with the tools to examine social constructs as objectively as humanly possible. Most people cannot use those tools. Some of them can only use those tools in limited areas (think so-called "scientists" who claim the scientific method should only be used in the job or in the lab, not in real life, where faith
But enough people have been exposed to the scientific method and the fruits of scientific discovery to see, hey, it works! Like the cartoon, only some really fringe anti-evolutionist cases are going to take the antibiotic that worked 20 years ago instead of the one designed to combat the evolved form of the infection.
So when an atheist steps up and says, "Keep your baseless historico-social construct out of my life" what we're really saying is, "You have high AGR -- you have a disconnect with reality." If you believe in something without evidence to back up your beliefs you are, in point of fact, insane.
If some politician started making decisions based on World of Warcraft lore and trying to make policy based on Horde versus Alliance affiliation, that politician would be widely viewed as insane. But from the Pompotous's viewpoint, a politician standing up and talking about faith being a deciding factor in decisions is much the same as yelling, "Horde rules!" during a senate debate. It reveals a disconnect with reality, it reveals high AGR.
My wife knows I think she is insane. But she knows that I admit my own insanity -- everybody has AGR to a greater or lesser extent.
Religion and faith play by different rules. A religionist looks at somebody else who is a different religion and they are wrong or heretics or apostate or whatever, and you may kill them or torture them or pray for them or whatever, but the other whackos are playing at a similar level of AGR.
I've seen several atheists use the argument that religionists are atheists to every god except their own and that's just not true. A religionist's denial of other gods is not based on reason and evidence and all those other good things, it is based on faith and thus isn't atheism. Religion is not rational. That doesn't mean that any specific theist is dangerous -- not all crazy people are dangerous -- but it does mean that every specific theist is irrational on the subject of religion.
Any atheistic declaration is an attack on the theists sanity in a "you people aren't connected to reality" way. That's the attack. That's the "militant" position. It's not comparing apples to apples in a communal way of "mine is better," it's saying, "all of your apples have the same existence in reality as the 'tea' my 2-year old daughter pores for me out of her empty play teapot."
Atheism based in rationality and the scientific method is utterly at odds with religionists about how reality is determined. That is a deep conflict. Imagine someone made it to 40 still believing that Santa Claus personally put his presents under the tree after coming through the chimney -- wouldn't an anti-Clausian's attempt to persuade the poor fool of reality be seen as an attack upon his world?
AGR+ Gay Marriage
The Pompotous touched earlier on the issue of gay marriage in a rather rough sort of rant. Over at Pharyngula a similar topic showed up while PZ was on a trip (the problem is we exist). And there were a few comments made about the appropriateness of a "gay" issue being on a science and atheism blog.
"Science" isn't a collection of facts and hierarchies of description. (I'm sure all of you can sympathize with the "it's JUST a theory!" crap the vomit-bags shout about evolution. Yeah, so is gravity, dimwit, how about stepping off a tall building?)
Science is about reasoning and investigating and continuing to explore the universe to reduce our inherent attenuated grasp of reality. It is a wonderful thing. The people who are "against" homosexuality suffer from AGR. Most of them (if not almost all) base their arguments on religious prejudices.
The exact same reasoning methods that demonstrate atheism to be the lowest AGR viewpoint on religion also demonstrate that gender discrimination in marriage contracts is a high AGR viewpoint, and as such should be opposed by atheists and scientists.
"Science" isn't a collection of facts and hierarchies of description. (I'm sure all of you can sympathize with the "it's JUST a theory!" crap the vomit-bags shout about evolution. Yeah, so is gravity, dimwit, how about stepping off a tall building?)
Science is about reasoning and investigating and continuing to explore the universe to reduce our inherent attenuated grasp of reality. It is a wonderful thing. The people who are "against" homosexuality suffer from AGR. Most of them (if not almost all) base their arguments on religious prejudices.
The exact same reasoning methods that demonstrate atheism to be the lowest AGR viewpoint on religion also demonstrate that gender discrimination in marriage contracts is a high AGR viewpoint, and as such should be opposed by atheists and scientists.
Attenuated Grasp of Reality
The Pompotous speaks about AGR (Attenuated Grasp of Reality). After a decade working for a Fortune 500 company in a capacity that had the Pompotous interfacing with numerous departments and executives (not a lot of love there, let me tell you!) the concept of AGR became obvious.
Let's get the freshman and or grad student objections about reality out of the way. This is a complicated subject that many have written on, but mainly the subject is one of mental masturbation -- yeah, it is fun enough, but there are more pleasurable things to be done with a partner around, so let's get on with things.
If you keep in mind that you may be wrong, if you communicate and investigate and apply the scientific method in gathering and analyzing information, you will minimize, as much as possible, your human potential for AGR.
A couple of things can massively increase the amount of AGR you have. One is emotion. Ever been in love with someone bad for you? 'Nuff said.
The other is incompetence. Time and time again I'd run into incompetent people who would do or say things that seemed intended to actively hurt the company. Each time I'd point out their errors they wouldn't consider the matter in anything other than personal terms: I was arrogant, things had to be "my way", I just wasn't a team player -- and these are issues on which I had scientifically gathered evidence in a variety of forms.
Eventually I had to accept that the studies out there are depressingly correct: incompetents are completely unaware of their own incompetence, that is the first and foremost condition for being incompetent. And the only thing that they do well is ingratiate themselves to those like them and those people whose jobs are above the "detail" level of getting things done.
I do not know how incompetent people reach decisions. It is, I think, much like faith. The idea pops and there it is. To stay. In the decade of the Pompotous at that Fortune 500 company I usually prevailed, almost always through bitter fighting. But not a single incompetent learned a single thing. Not a single incompetent ever remembered being wrong. Not a single incompetent remembered the evidence that demonstrated that they were wrong -- sometimes they'd reverse the evidence in their heads and spread the incorrect data! And so the fights continued, year after year, with more fighting each year as I'd continually have to correct the errors of old as well as the errors of the present.
Attenuated Grasp of Reality: it is a bitch. There are people with hardware problems who have AGR because the equipment they use is damaged in some way (Oliver Sacks has a couple of good books, such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat that deal with these kinds of problems.) And it is tragic to review those cases. But when seemingly neurologically normal folks of probably average intelligence have high levels of AGR it sends the Pompotous off bellowing, "CULL THE HERD!"
Which is perhaps (and perhaps not) unfair of the Pompotous. Rational thought and the scientific method, with their built in checks and balances, are the best method that we as a species have ever had for reducing AGR, and reducing AGR is the best way to find correct answers to problems, and damn, do we have a lot of problems! In the next posts the Pompotous will speak about how the concept of AGR extends into some of the threads others have been talking about.
Let's get the freshman and or grad student objections about reality out of the way. This is a complicated subject that many have written on, but mainly the subject is one of mental masturbation -- yeah, it is fun enough, but there are more pleasurable things to be done with a partner around, so let's get on with things.
- There either is or isn't an objective reality. If there isn't an objective reality, it is still reasonable to act as if there is an objective reality.
- No, we don't have any "direct" experience of objective reality. We do have communication and the scientific method, which is the closest that we're going to get and, being the only game in town, is close enough for jazz.
- My personal opinion is that we probably don't have free will -- at the same level of discussion of saying that we don't have "direct" experience of objective reality. There are many, many good reasons for acting as if we have free will, and that's good enough for the Pompotous.
If you keep in mind that you may be wrong, if you communicate and investigate and apply the scientific method in gathering and analyzing information, you will minimize, as much as possible, your human potential for AGR.
A couple of things can massively increase the amount of AGR you have. One is emotion. Ever been in love with someone bad for you? 'Nuff said.
The other is incompetence. Time and time again I'd run into incompetent people who would do or say things that seemed intended to actively hurt the company. Each time I'd point out their errors they wouldn't consider the matter in anything other than personal terms: I was arrogant, things had to be "my way", I just wasn't a team player -- and these are issues on which I had scientifically gathered evidence in a variety of forms.
Eventually I had to accept that the studies out there are depressingly correct: incompetents are completely unaware of their own incompetence, that is the first and foremost condition for being incompetent. And the only thing that they do well is ingratiate themselves to those like them and those people whose jobs are above the "detail" level of getting things done.
I do not know how incompetent people reach decisions. It is, I think, much like faith. The idea pops and there it is. To stay. In the decade of the Pompotous at that Fortune 500 company I usually prevailed, almost always through bitter fighting. But not a single incompetent learned a single thing. Not a single incompetent ever remembered being wrong. Not a single incompetent remembered the evidence that demonstrated that they were wrong -- sometimes they'd reverse the evidence in their heads and spread the incorrect data! And so the fights continued, year after year, with more fighting each year as I'd continually have to correct the errors of old as well as the errors of the present.
Attenuated Grasp of Reality: it is a bitch. There are people with hardware problems who have AGR because the equipment they use is damaged in some way (Oliver Sacks has a couple of good books, such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat that deal with these kinds of problems.) And it is tragic to review those cases. But when seemingly neurologically normal folks of probably average intelligence have high levels of AGR it sends the Pompotous off bellowing, "CULL THE HERD!"
Which is perhaps (and perhaps not) unfair of the Pompotous. Rational thought and the scientific method, with their built in checks and balances, are the best method that we as a species have ever had for reducing AGR, and reducing AGR is the best way to find correct answers to problems, and damn, do we have a lot of problems! In the next posts the Pompotous will speak about how the concept of AGR extends into some of the threads others have been talking about.
Friday, August 15, 2008
I have a dream
The Pompotous has a dream, which is a nightmare to others: to successfully cull the meme-scape the herd wanders around in.
Yesterday I was listening to a Jackson, MS classic rock station, and the DJ, for some inexplicable reason, began talking about a study saying that "white people" would be in the minority in the US by 2042.
This brain-dead bozo then proceeded to rant about how some color/nationality unspecified "they" were taking advantage of the good things that America gives out too freely, and "we" were giving everything away and were going to lose and America was going to go down, etc. etc.
Presumable "they" are like the hordes of "people whose souls flickered out years ago," as the Style Section of the Clarion-Ledger refers to Jackson inhabitants: people who aren't "white."
What bothered the Pompotous the most wasn't that this retard DJ held his opinions, there are way too many stupid people in the world to go ballistic on just one moron. What bothered me is that, in this area, I couldn't conceive of circumstances under which this waster-of-our-oxygen fool would face any sort of censure. (The next worse thing is that I don't think there is another classic rock station in the area, which means my music listening in the car is going to become more complicated, because damned if the Pompotous will waste emotional energy on that kind of claptrap.)
I have a dream: a dream that one day black children and white children and all the other color children of the rainbow will be laughed at, humiliated and disrespected for the stupidity of their ideas and not the color of their skin, to the point that they grow up, herd culled, with the minimum of asshole irrationality that humans seem to need.
Yesterday I was listening to a Jackson, MS classic rock station, and the DJ, for some inexplicable reason, began talking about a study saying that "white people" would be in the minority in the US by 2042.
This brain-dead bozo then proceeded to rant about how some color/nationality unspecified "they" were taking advantage of the good things that America gives out too freely, and "we" were giving everything away and were going to lose and America was going to go down, etc. etc.
Presumable "they" are like the hordes of "people whose souls flickered out years ago," as the Style Section of the Clarion-Ledger refers to Jackson inhabitants: people who aren't "white."
What bothered the Pompotous the most wasn't that this retard DJ held his opinions, there are way too many stupid people in the world to go ballistic on just one moron. What bothered me is that, in this area, I couldn't conceive of circumstances under which this waster-of-our-oxygen fool would face any sort of censure. (The next worse thing is that I don't think there is another classic rock station in the area, which means my music listening in the car is going to become more complicated, because damned if the Pompotous will waste emotional energy on that kind of claptrap.)
I have a dream: a dream that one day black children and white children and all the other color children of the rainbow will be laughed at, humiliated and disrespected for the stupidity of their ideas and not the color of their skin, to the point that they grow up, herd culled, with the minimum of asshole irrationality that humans seem to need.
Dismal stats
The Pompotous has a few words about some DISMAL statistics about Mississippi: the county in which I now reside voted 79-21 in favor of banning gay marriage. (As opposed to 57-43 in the county the Pompotous favored in Kentucky.)
What does that mean? It means that 4 out of every 5 voters in Hinds county are idiots.
The issue comes down to a very simple question: is marriage a legal contract, or is marriage a sacrament from some mumbo-jumbo superstition? (No, the Pompotous is not the first to put forward this argument, nor will I be the last, despite the dirt-simple and irrefutable rightness of the thing.)
If marriage is a legal contract -- and it is, ask any of the thousands and thousands of bloodsucking lawyers making money off of it -- then the government should be held accountable for not discriminating. How do you think an amendment to describe marriage as the solely the union of two black people would go over? Or an amendment that the only people who can marry are practicing Roman Catholics?
If marriage is to be approached as being defined as the whack jobs would have it, as some sort of mystical claptrap sanctioned by some ghosty-ghouly-zombie type somewhere, then what possible frickin' reason is there to enact a law about it? Are the taboo ridden putzes saying that a state legislature is more powerful than (insert imaginary friend of their choice)? If the state legislature does not have the power to bind their god or gods then who gives a shit who the state lets marry, let the imaginary friends sort it out.
The herd in Mississippi sure needs to have its thinking culled on this subject. And I thought it was pathetic how Kentucky responded to this issue.
What does that mean? It means that 4 out of every 5 voters in Hinds county are idiots.
The issue comes down to a very simple question: is marriage a legal contract, or is marriage a sacrament from some mumbo-jumbo superstition? (No, the Pompotous is not the first to put forward this argument, nor will I be the last, despite the dirt-simple and irrefutable rightness of the thing.)
If marriage is a legal contract -- and it is, ask any of the thousands and thousands of bloodsucking lawyers making money off of it -- then the government should be held accountable for not discriminating. How do you think an amendment to describe marriage as the solely the union of two black people would go over? Or an amendment that the only people who can marry are practicing Roman Catholics?
If marriage is to be approached as being defined as the whack jobs would have it, as some sort of mystical claptrap sanctioned by some ghosty-ghouly-zombie type somewhere, then what possible frickin' reason is there to enact a law about it? Are the taboo ridden putzes saying that a state legislature is more powerful than (insert imaginary friend of their choice)? If the state legislature does not have the power to bind their god or gods then who gives a shit who the state lets marry, let the imaginary friends sort it out.
The herd in Mississippi sure needs to have its thinking culled on this subject. And I thought it was pathetic how Kentucky responded to this issue.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
USA all the way!
Pompotous is going to speak of love today, the love of country, the love of the good ol' battered and backsliding U.S. of freakin' A. and how much I wish I was living there and not in Mississippi.
For the last decade Pompotous dealt with Asian-Pacific cultures that are sometimes called "high context" cultures, particularly with an R&D department the Fortune 500 company I worked for opened in Cebu.
In R&D in America, if you said you were going to do something you did it. If there were problems or obstacles you related them clearly and assessed them as well as you could. Rational, truthful, low-context communication is vital to development processes. Because, the artistic elements aside, you can't do development well without using the scientific method, and you can't do the frickin' scientific method if you rely on high context communication!
So when someone in the Philippines said they understood (when they didn't), it drove us nuts. When someone in the Philippines said that their code was complete, when it wouldn't even compile, it drove us nuts. When someone in the Philippines would stall by, after receiving a directive in e-mail, replying, "When you said 'A' did you mean that we should do 'A'? Or did you want us to do 'B'?" it drove us nuts.
The evidence so far seems to indicate that Mississippi and the lands where we outsource jobs to the cheapest labor (it MUST be a good deal to get a software engineer for $16 a day, right?) have something in common.
The first thing Pompotous noticed was that the house my family and I moved into was quite dirty. The carpet had been vacuumed, the hardwood and tiles swept, the counters wiped, but that was it. We'd specified that the house was to be professionally cleaned before we moved in. Apparently it was, to the tune of $650. And what did this $650 get? Well, not scrubbing the tile shower. Not cleaning the dog hair off of the baseboards. Not cleaning the ceiling fan blades in almost every room. Not mopping the tile or hardwood. Not cleaning the blinds or the windows. Not cleaning inside the cabinets. Not wiping down the walls.
I remember my days in basic training -- there is apparently a spot in Mississippi open for a cleaning team run by a drill instructor, because based on the team that cleaned my house the definition of "clean" is a bit fuzzy for folks in Mississippi.
My wife and I opened a local checking account. As part of that, of course, we placed an initial order for checks. Well, we did. The woman at the bank who set up our account didn't. Which my wife found out 3 weeks later when calling, asking where our checks were. My wife then asked me to handle it -- a new woman at the bank (the previous helper having left or been fired) said that she'd mail new counter checks to us and put in our order for the checks we'd ordered three weeks before.
Today she called and left a message said that our counter checks were in and I could come pick them up when I liked. What happened to mailing them?
I ran over a screw and had to get new tires. On the way to the mechanics my brakes began acting funny. I ordered two new tires and asked for my brakes to be checked. Four hours later I got a call saying that my car was ready. I asked what had been wrong with the brakes. The mechanic replied, "What about the brakes?" I was told that he'd look at them prior to closing and I could pick up the car the next day.
The next day I called in the morning, starting when they opened, to ask about the brakes. I left a message at the first call, being unable to get someone to answer the phone. The next 5 calls, over the course of an hour, were also unanswered. Eventually, I went in. After I showed up they said they would take a look at the brakes. More hilarity ensued when they ordered up a master cylinder for an ABS equipped car and received on for a car without ABS. I was told that the part would be in the next day. I was told that the mechanic would call me when it got in so that I could bring my car back. That was 4 days ago, I do believe I'll be going to a different mechanic.
We found a daycare for our daughter, the best of the lot reasonably available. There were two possible start dates, we were told that they would call us the Friday before the Monday they were able to fit her in. When my wife called to make sure they'd have space on the later date, she was informed that the daycare assumed our little girl was going to be there on the earlier date, she'd been told to just come ahead then. Which wasn't true, of course, but like so many conversations I've had with people in the Philippines, in her head it was the truth, even if that truth bore not the slightest resemblance to verifiable reality.
The Mississippi web site for registering a car listed four things necessary for transfer of title (plus the fee, of course). In practice we needed only 1 of those 4 things, plus 1 additional item not listed on the Mississippi web site.
Recycling is picked up once every two weeks -- except that the garbage men ignore the recycling container, even on recycling days.
A pest control person that comes into the house, sits at the dining room table uninvited and proceeds to hold forth at length on the complexities of pest control and the accuracy of television shows on pest control.
There are more instances in the list -- insurance people, more state car regulations, additional cleaning people, on and on.
It is distressing, but the institutions and workers that I've come into contact with in Mississippi clearly share habits and attitudes with the $16/day software engineers in the Philippines: whatever you do is enough. Whatever you say shouldn't be taken seriously, because it might or might not be the truth. Your just saying what needs to be said for the sake of saying the right thing, it has nothing to do with actually doing anything. If there is a problem, someone else will deal with it.
For me, America is an attitude, a set of laws and expectations about behavior that bind us together. I used to live in America. Now I live in Mississippi, not too far from the Philippines.
Pompotous speaks, and says it is time to cull the herd and annex Mississippi into the United States of America.
For the last decade Pompotous dealt with Asian-Pacific cultures that are sometimes called "high context" cultures, particularly with an R&D department the Fortune 500 company I worked for opened in Cebu.
In R&D in America, if you said you were going to do something you did it. If there were problems or obstacles you related them clearly and assessed them as well as you could. Rational, truthful, low-context communication is vital to development processes. Because, the artistic elements aside, you can't do development well without using the scientific method, and you can't do the frickin' scientific method if you rely on high context communication!
So when someone in the Philippines said they understood (when they didn't), it drove us nuts. When someone in the Philippines said that their code was complete, when it wouldn't even compile, it drove us nuts. When someone in the Philippines would stall by, after receiving a directive in e-mail, replying, "When you said 'A' did you mean that we should do 'A'? Or did you want us to do 'B'?" it drove us nuts.
The evidence so far seems to indicate that Mississippi and the lands where we outsource jobs to the cheapest labor (it MUST be a good deal to get a software engineer for $16 a day, right?) have something in common.
The first thing Pompotous noticed was that the house my family and I moved into was quite dirty. The carpet had been vacuumed, the hardwood and tiles swept, the counters wiped, but that was it. We'd specified that the house was to be professionally cleaned before we moved in. Apparently it was, to the tune of $650. And what did this $650 get? Well, not scrubbing the tile shower. Not cleaning the dog hair off of the baseboards. Not cleaning the ceiling fan blades in almost every room. Not mopping the tile or hardwood. Not cleaning the blinds or the windows. Not cleaning inside the cabinets. Not wiping down the walls.
I remember my days in basic training -- there is apparently a spot in Mississippi open for a cleaning team run by a drill instructor, because based on the team that cleaned my house the definition of "clean" is a bit fuzzy for folks in Mississippi.
My wife and I opened a local checking account. As part of that, of course, we placed an initial order for checks. Well, we did. The woman at the bank who set up our account didn't. Which my wife found out 3 weeks later when calling, asking where our checks were. My wife then asked me to handle it -- a new woman at the bank (the previous helper having left or been fired) said that she'd mail new counter checks to us and put in our order for the checks we'd ordered three weeks before.
Today she called and left a message said that our counter checks were in and I could come pick them up when I liked. What happened to mailing them?
I ran over a screw and had to get new tires. On the way to the mechanics my brakes began acting funny. I ordered two new tires and asked for my brakes to be checked. Four hours later I got a call saying that my car was ready. I asked what had been wrong with the brakes. The mechanic replied, "What about the brakes?" I was told that he'd look at them prior to closing and I could pick up the car the next day.
The next day I called in the morning, starting when they opened, to ask about the brakes. I left a message at the first call, being unable to get someone to answer the phone. The next 5 calls, over the course of an hour, were also unanswered. Eventually, I went in. After I showed up they said they would take a look at the brakes. More hilarity ensued when they ordered up a master cylinder for an ABS equipped car and received on for a car without ABS. I was told that the part would be in the next day. I was told that the mechanic would call me when it got in so that I could bring my car back. That was 4 days ago, I do believe I'll be going to a different mechanic.
We found a daycare for our daughter, the best of the lot reasonably available. There were two possible start dates, we were told that they would call us the Friday before the Monday they were able to fit her in. When my wife called to make sure they'd have space on the later date, she was informed that the daycare assumed our little girl was going to be there on the earlier date, she'd been told to just come ahead then. Which wasn't true, of course, but like so many conversations I've had with people in the Philippines, in her head it was the truth, even if that truth bore not the slightest resemblance to verifiable reality.
The Mississippi web site for registering a car listed four things necessary for transfer of title (plus the fee, of course). In practice we needed only 1 of those 4 things, plus 1 additional item not listed on the Mississippi web site.
Recycling is picked up once every two weeks -- except that the garbage men ignore the recycling container, even on recycling days.
A pest control person that comes into the house, sits at the dining room table uninvited and proceeds to hold forth at length on the complexities of pest control and the accuracy of television shows on pest control.
There are more instances in the list -- insurance people, more state car regulations, additional cleaning people, on and on.
It is distressing, but the institutions and workers that I've come into contact with in Mississippi clearly share habits and attitudes with the $16/day software engineers in the Philippines: whatever you do is enough. Whatever you say shouldn't be taken seriously, because it might or might not be the truth. Your just saying what needs to be said for the sake of saying the right thing, it has nothing to do with actually doing anything. If there is a problem, someone else will deal with it.
For me, America is an attitude, a set of laws and expectations about behavior that bind us together. I used to live in America. Now I live in Mississippi, not too far from the Philippines.
Pompotous speaks, and says it is time to cull the herd and annex Mississippi into the United States of America.
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