Odd "Wisdom" - Quareness Series. (50th "Lecture").
My memory's not as sharp as it used to be...also...my memory's not as sharp as it used to be!
But I do remember somebody once asking...what's the biggest gripe of retirees? and somebody replying...there's not enough time to get everything done (surprisingly true). This same second somebody was also asked...what do you think is the best thing about being 104? and replied...no peer pressure.
Just goes to show how dodgy pre-conceived impressions can be...here's another example...a
woman came home to find her husband in the kitchen shaking frantically, almost in a dancing
frenzy, with some kind of wire running from his waist towards the electric kettle, and intending
to jolt him away from the deadly current, she whacked him with a handy plank of wood, breaking his arm in two places...up to that moment, he had been happily listening to his Walkman.
And here's a yarn which throws some light on why we should be proud of Irish "wisdom".....
After having dug to a depth of 10 feet a few years ago, British scientists found traces of copper wire dating back 200 years and came to the conclusion that their ancestors already had a telephone network more than 150 years ago. Not to be outdone by the Brits, in the weeks that followed, an American archaeologist dug to a depth of 20 feet, and shortly after, a story was published in the New York Times: "American archaeologists, finding traces of 250-year-old copper wire, have concluded that their ancestors already had an advanced high-tech
communications network 100 years earlier than the British".
One week later, the Irish Department of Agriculture reported the following: "After digging as deep as 30 feet near Ballyhaunis, Co Mayo, Mick O'Connor, a self-taught archaeologist, reported that he found absolutely fuck all. Mick has therefore concluded that 250 years ago, Ireland had already gone wireless."
When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change
- from the way of the Tao.
A man be the name of Dan Ariely, a Professor of Behavioural Economics at MIT Cambridge/ Boston has written some quite interesting stuff about the effect of expectations (amongst other topics) which he concluded from various scientific research experiments that he and his collaborators conducted. His interest was partly triggered by a friend who had been a foreign
correspondent in the North of Ireland some years back when during an arranged meeting with some members of the IRA, news came through that the Gov. of the Maze Prison had been assassinated. The IRA people present greeted this news with satisfaction - a victory for their cause. The British of course saw it quite differently with London headlines the following day boiling over with anger and calling for retribution. In fact the British then viewed the event as proof that discussion with the IRA would lead nowhere and that "Óglaigh na hÉireann" should be crushed - so much for intelligent foresight and conflict resolution.
Anyway in one such experiment Professor Ariely wanted to explore how previously held impressions cloud our point of view. What he did was set up temporarily in the Muddy Charles (one of two pubs on the MIT campus) to determine whether the expectations of bar patrones for a certain kind of beer would shape their perceptions of its taste. For this he used Sam Adams (as distinct from Budweiser, in deference to the "real beer" crowd) on the one hand straight up and on the other hand laced with a couple of drops of balsamic vinegar. First off he offered the separate small samples free without telling the stoodents which was which - the reward for participating was a large free glass of whichever one they fancied. Most chose the second one with the vinegar. Later stoodents on the scene were told that the first to taste was standard commercial beer and that the second had been doctored with the vinegar. And most chose the first. These results strongly suggested that if you tell people up front that something might well be distasteful the odds are good that they will end up agreeing with you, not because their experience tells them so but because of their expectations. In plainer language it seems that when we believe beforehand that something will be good we generally tend to experience it as such (and indeed vice versa for something "bad").
However, the good professor also wanted to test if prior knowledge would actually modify the
neural activity underlying the taste itself so that when we expect something to taste good (or bad) it will actually taste that way (you still with me I hope?). And so in the next phase of the experiment he and his co-conspirators didn't initially tell the "not at all too reluctant" volunteer tasters about the vinegar but rather had them taste the beer first before revealing the chemical facts. In theory if knowledge merely informs us of a state of affairs it shouldn't matter whether the participants received the information before or after tasting the beer. On the other hand if telling the tipsytors about the vinegar at the outset actually reshapes their sensory perception to align with this knowledge then those who know about the vinegar up front should have a markedly different opinion of the beer from those who first swigged before being told. As it turned out those who found out about the vinegar only after drinking liked the beer much better than those told about the vinegar beforehand. In fact the former crowd liked the beer just as much as those who weren't aware at any stage there was any vinegar in the beer at all.
Moral of this story - in truth we may not know ourselves or others at all well and this lifetime may be best viewed as an open minded journey of discovery - and beer drinking may never seem quite the same again?
Experiments, oddly or otherwise carried out in Sydney Australia, have shown that if ya zap people's left brainbox (or "inhibit the left hemisphere of the brain of a right handed person by directing low frequency magnetic pulses into the left frontotemporal lobes" be jaysus) they become more realisitc i.e. their minds get better at seeing the objects in front of them, cleared of theories, narratives and prejudices. So there ya have it - things ain't always (or maybe even
often) what they seem....
Suppose every day 10 Aussie mates go out for beer and the bill for all of them comes to $100
and they pay the bill the way we pay our taxes. The poorest 4 men pay nothing...the 5th pays
$1..the 6th pays $3...the 7th pays $7..the 8th pays $12...the 9th pays $18...and the 10th (the richest man) pays $59.
The 10 men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw in a reward..."since you are all such good customers," he said, "I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20"...the drinks bill would now come to just €80.
The group still wanted to pay the bill the way we pay our taxes. The first 4 men were unaffected, they still drank for free. But the other 6 (the paying customers) faced a bit of a problem...how could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his fair share? They realised that $20 divided evenly among them would give $3.33 each, meaning that the 5th and 6th men would each end up being paid to drink his beer.
The bar owner suggested that in order to follow the principle of the tax system they had been using, it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by a higher percentage the poorer he was, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each would pay under this method...the 5th man (like the first 4) now paid nothing (100% saving)...the 6th now paid $2 instead of $3 (33% saving)...the 7th now paid $5 instead of $7 (28% saving)...the 8th now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% saving)..the 9th now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% saving)...and the 10th now paid $49 instead of $59 (a 16% saving). Thus each of the "paying" 6 was better off than before, and the first 4 continued to drink for free.
However, at the end of the first "new method" session, the men began to compare their savings, and resentment entered the scene that the richest got back up to 10 times more than the others. The air rang with rantings such as "the wealthy get all the breaks" (by the middle bracket) and "this new system exploits the poor because some of us didn't get anything at all" (by the initial free "loaders"). In the event the 9 aggrevied beat up on the 10th man.
The next night the 10th man didn't show, so the 9 sat down and had their beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered they didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!
And that in fact is how our "free world" tax systems work...the people who already pay the highest taxes will naturally get the most benefit from a tax reduction...tax them too much and they just may not show up anymore...or move their custom to where they perceive there to be a friendlier atmosphere. And maybe it's not just how our tax systems work???
And here's a final sobering thought...H. L. Mencken wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not "to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality."
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
January, 2015.