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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

So what is AGR? One of the Pompotous's buddies did a humorous chart of the "10 levels of AGR" but I'll be a bit more serious here. Everyone on the planet has some level of AGR. Both because we have no direct experience of reality and because no human is omniscient. Because of those two things everything that we do is a "best guess" at the moment, and those best guesses may be wrong.

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.