Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

by 14 Comments

Why Your Attention Span Sucks

It’s a common refrain that attention spans in general have been decreasing for the last century or so. Whether or not this is specifically true isn’t especially important.

First, let’s define what an attention span is. An attention span is an inclination, a habit, and a tendency. If a person has a short attention span, they start to feel uncomfortable after a short period of concentration on a task.

The notion of a general attention span is probably mistaken: an auto mechanic is probably capable of long periods of intense concentration to determine what’s wrong with an engine, but probably has a short attention span for studying complex insurance law.

If people as a whole are struggling to find time to focus on what matters to them, it probably results more from early conditioning than from other factors. A common thread through John Taylor Gatto’s writing on compulsory education concerns the frequent interruptions that educational institutions subject young children to when they’re switching topics.

Children attend shallow classes lasting for between 30 minutes to an hour or so each day, at which point the bell rings, and then the subject changes. Homework assignments will be shorter or longer, but any student will have to juggle many different topics from entirely different fields of knowledge in order to complete them.

It’s probably not a coincidence that TV programs tend to have a similar length to class periods. All TV producers know that their audience will probably have a shared background of compulsory schooling, so they’ll be accustomed to focused periods of approximately that time.

This differs from what’s actually required from skilled workers or thinking people, who are expected to focus on particular problems with great intensity for hours, days, months, or years at a time.

Because the training complex produces such people mostly by accident rather than design, the working world tends to be filled with people who are constantly scheduling distractions, meetings, and time-wasting presentations laden with graphics in order to create periods of artificial time pressure and deadlines to ensure something resembling work gets completed.

The root of this encouragement of fragmented attention is in the political ideal of equality.

Intellectual equality is impossible to establish. Given a mission to establish equality among students, schools adjust protocol to fudge a result that looks like limited success.

To achieve this, schools train students to be distracted and uncomfortable with the long periods of focus and daydreaming that otherwise arise in many people. This prevents individual students from pulling ahead of the herd unless they fall out of line.

If most of the students graduate with mediocre levels of knowledge and skill, that’s less important than if they are all within the same general range of mediocrity. Excellence in anything requires focused practice — when an athlete shows exceptional talent, schools may break some rules to accommodate their longer and more intensive practice hours.

Encouraging such deliberate practice, focus, and the sorting of the capable from the incapable necessarily undermines equality within the greater body of students. In a democracy which is supposed to encourage universal political participation with equal standing for all, this can only be tolerated to the extent to which it’s absolutely necessary.

Permitting this sort of specialization always causes serious ‘disparate impact’ to emerge: women and men will succeed in different areas, different racial groups pull ahead or behind, and some of the duller or more aggressive types are too useless for any responsibility whatsoever.

Training internally fragmented people creates a more similar populace which is less separated into the disparate specialties from which many of our surnames derive. With some help from scientific management, the baker can be interchangeable with the candlestick maker, and the son of the dentist can be encouraged to pursue his dreams to become a circus juggler. This emphasizes the larger political narrative that all people are interchangeable and that all people can determine their own fates if they have good school attendance and study hard enough.

Social media and schooling

The most successful and profitable social media platform derives from the academic social setting. Facebook emerged as a copy of an inferior Harvard facebook website that made it easy for students to message each other privately and in groups. It’s like a school yearbook that updates itself continuously — even after school ends.

Because compulsory schooling is the one social experience that most modern people hold in common, modern people feel uncomfortable when they’re jarred from that particular social setting. Technology permits people to contain their attention to the cycle of interruption and chatter that they’ve become conditioned to expect from their entire lives.

The interruption is a source of comfort because concentration takes a physical exertion. Preventing concentration maintains a sense of anxious comfort — and a realization that there may be nothing all that important to concentrate on, which can be disquieting in and of itself.

Like many elements of modernism from art to industry, services like Facebook and Twitter break down what the media accomplishes into its base elements: a source of gossipy distraction mixed with artfully crafted advertisements. The constant distractions are more important than the content of those distractions. Once the attention is served, advertisers can then capture some of the value of that attention by appealing to some latent desire or another.

What this tendency makes for is a people less capable of deliberate exertion, who are more aimless in their behavior, who are incapable of profound conversation, who speak in a shorthand of multi-megabyte images rather than in the bits and bytes of speech.

This common acclimation to constant focus switching has made it more challenging to do serious work or to engage in serious conversation about much of anything beyond whatever the current herd obsession happens to be.

When college professors complain that their students would rather check their smartphones than pay attention to the lectures, they’re missing that their students are adapting to the conditioning that their schooling has provided from an early age onward. If you wanted students to be capable of deep focus, you would raise them to develop that focus, rather than constantly distracted by shallow factoids and highly stimulating media.

It’s also difficult to communicate to any such audience, even of educated people, because the common body of knowledge which a speaker could once assume to be present will not be present.

On the individual level, it’s difficult to break the addiction to constant interruption once it’s in place. The benefit of going into withdrawal is an increased ability to perform any of the tasks that you do choose to focus on uninterrupted and undistracted.

by 7 Comments

New York Slashy

A while ago, I published a long and poorly-titled article about New York’s current mayor as he was assuming office.

Since then, some of the retrospectives about the upsurge in reported violent crime have been trickling in – especially about the so-called ‘slashing’ attacks, of which there were more than 550 in 2015 alone. The pace in 2016, according to reports, looks to be at over 10 attacks per day.

In a typical slashing — which often but not always occurs along racial lines in a pattern that good people who think correctly won’t notice — a young man aims to disfigure a woman with a knife.

So, what explains these ‘puzzling’ attacks? The safe explanation is that the attackers are ‘crazy’ or that it’s a result of the pullback of policies like stop-and-frisk and the increased caution that the police forces have towards any action that has a disparate impact across racial lines.

The way to solve the mystery is to recognize that it isn’t actually a mystery: you’re just supposed to be befuddled by it to remain in polite society. To express puzzlement is to show that you are a good person, even if by being a good person who supports the new direction of the state, you result in the disfigurement and traumatization of hundreds of innocent people per year or more.

Let us imagine that there are some groups of people that can win more through violence than they can through trade. This isn’t hard to imagine because there are countless examples that we see in our own lives and in history. Pirates hit the high seas in search of booty because it’s both more fun and more effective for them to rob boats and kidnap people for ransom than it is for them to go to trade school to learn how to weld.

Similarly, there are entire classes of people who can get more from the world by being unstable and dangerous – like the political leadership of North Korea.

By attacking civilians with impunity, you demonstrate in blood that the current political authority is incapable of providing effective security even at an inordinately high price.

When animals attack other animals in a bid to solidify their claims over territory, we rarely call the attacks ‘random’ or ‘senseless’ — instead we aim to understand the behavior in a detached way.

Humans, also, are intensely territorial and have many complex means of cooperation and coordination. One way that humans and many, many other species assert dominance over territory is to use limited violence to demonstrate control. What the laws say about who owns what is much less relevant than who can use violence with impunity in what territories.

Behaviors always have reasons motivating them, even if those reasons don’t meet high standards of rationality.

The press – and even articles like this one – also encourage more symbolic attacks, because effective countermeasures are forbidden and alternative security arrangements are some combination of illegal, infeasible, and culturally taboo for modern New Yorkers.

The reason why people use violence to achieve their political goals is because under the right conditions, it’s both cheaper and more effective than the alternatives. The slashers slash because it gets them and their fellows what they want for a couple dollars in hardware and a flick of the wrist.

Similar to the motivated incomprehension that people show in regards to terrorism, the better sort of educated person knows to make themselves stupid in how they think about ‘random’ violence between groups.

by 12 Comments

Busting Dumb Clichés About Terrorism

There are many dumb clichés uttered about terrorism in the wake of any attack.

One of the more important ones to debunk is the notion that Islamic radicals are the people who cause problems.

The public organs often say that ‘radical clerics’ cause ‘radicalization’ or that otherwise ordinary Muslims become ‘radicalized’ after watching too many cool beheadings on Youtube and reading too many Al Qaeda PDFs.

The responsible press people want to do this to draw a distinction between peaceful, law-abiding Muslims and the types of people who detonate nail bombs next to baby carriages in airports.

This is a foolish distinction to draw.

Terrorism is a disquieting demonstration of power that synergizes well with instantaneous global communications technology. It can make people in Chicago nervous from a small explosion thousands of miles and an ocean away. The bomb isn’t just a bomb: it’s a media event.

It also generates results vastly disproportionate to the resources spent on it. A cheap bomb combined with some expendable people results in billions or even trillions of dollars of wasted expenditure on security while also serving as an effective recruiting advertisement for other political organizations.

For states, it also creates more demand for state services. It’s win-win-win all around except for the people who get blown up, the soldiers who have to fight in the wars, and to the broader society which could have used the resources in less wasteful ways.

But back to the stupidity of the distinction between the radicalized and the normal-law-abiding-tolerant types.

The greater threat is actually posed by the large populations of ordinary people who will change the overall character and political nature of the West.

Terrorists are just producers of political theater. The ordinary people are the ones you need to filter out, because not only do they provide a comfortable community that fighters can swim in, but they create a sustainable and growing ethnic faction that will cause greater political and cultural instability far into the future.

One bomber kills maybe 10 or 20 people and makes for exciting television. One mother produces somewhere between a few and a dozen new foreigners who will change the host culture in more profound ways over a longer period of time.

The terrorists are just dramatizing what’s going on over a longer period of time in an instant.

This is why the focus on terrorist plots as mysteries to be solved by genius detectives, spies, and other super sleuths is quite stupid. The plots are just plots of stories which are much less consequential than the larger reality of population replacement.

Figuring out which cleric radicalized whom and where the guns came from is stupid. Stopping the bombing with some last-second waterboarding but allowing the movement of millions of foreign people into your country is extra-stupid, as in stupider than an entire Special Olympiad stupid.

If anything, all the super-sleuthing and high-tech spying just makes the overall situation worse because it reduces how many embarrassing bombings there are, which adds to the sense of alarm among the general public.

Turning your otherwise nice country into Morocco, Iraq, Syria, or Pakistan is the great stupidity. Not catching a bomber or two is an understandable error. The problem is not the bomber, but the ordinary people with ordinary views from the country that he came from who now live in your formerly nice country.

Filed Under: War

Top Posts & Pages