Justifiably Paranoid

For purposes of this posting, let’s presume that most people prefer to be liked, accepted, or, at least, tolerated. That begs the question, “By whom?”   Who is the person or persons who determine your worth?: family? friends? neighbors? co-workers?   Do you believe that all the valued ones want to see the same attitudes and behaviors from you?   When their expectations conflict, which, if any, members of the multitude exert the greatest influence? Where are you, yourself, in the “how to be” equation?   When you realize that someone or some group expects you to exhibit a particular attitude or behavior, do you start with them or start with you?   What parameters do you apply when attempting to reach your conclusion?     Equally important, what parameters do you ultimately apply when acting upon your decision?   If your decision and/ or action is contrary to expectations of valued others, do you explicitly address the discrepancy or not? Of...

 Most evolution scientists assert that human language began 200,000 to 300,000 years ago and they use speech development as a defining feature, if not  the  defining feature of homo sapiens. People, of course, could communicate via body language and physical signaling of various kinds at some undefined period, as well.  And pictorial communication, such as by cave paintings, are conventionally dated to about 30,000 years ago.  Before 1844, real time talk required real time physical, in-person interaction.  That meant that people were consciously or unconsciously perceiving not only the literal content of their verbalizations but also their body language and prosody (vocal pitch, length of sounds, loudness, and timber [quality of the voice]).  Ancient wisdom acknowledges the importance of body language and prosody as expressed in the advice, “It’s not what you say but how you say it.” Not until the invention of the telegraph approximately...

Please pause before reading this blogpost and answer the title's implied questions for yourself. Okay, let's try a concrete metaphor to begin our discussion.  Imagine you live immediately adjacent to a field pock-marked with many bare and grassy areas.  You do not have a garage or driveway, so you park on the street and your car occasionally is dusty.  How often do you wash it?  That depends on your personality and on external factors as sifted through your personality. If you are a "car person," you might wash the car often.  If you are a "it's just transportation" person, you might wash it rarely or never.  But even in the second case, if the car is new, you might be strongly inclined to keep it clean.  My example is so simplistic and obvious that you could consider it worthless.  Almost anyone would realize that both internal and external factors would affect car-washing. However, I believe that literally everything you think and feel ...

Let’s begin with a short retrospective time travel.  Picture yourself as an early elementary school child, pencil in hand and paper before you. You are just learning to regroup in addition and subtraction—what then, respectively, were called carrying and borrowing.  At the time, no one labeled these as “algorithms,” but the lessons probably were your introduction to them.  You need not have known anything about rationales behind the processes; if you followed them faithfully, you invariably arrived at the “correct” answers and were happy to have done so.  However, in contrast to algorithms, you already had learned some fundamental heuristics long before you entered your first classroom.  And much of that learning was acquired independently and automatically.  For instance, you could have come to believe that grandparents were more likely to buy you a new toy than were mom and dad.  You, of course, were not aware of the term “heuristics,” and they ...

  According to the United States Centers for Disease Control, inadequate sleep is associated with a host of physical and mental ailments, including type 2 diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, and depression.  Perhaps for that reason, WebMD.com distributed a posting entitled, “What Your Sleep Position Says About You.”  The post reported the following "research" relating body position to personality: ·         Five percent of the population prefer to sleep on their backs with arms close to their heads.   They frequently are good listeners and attention-seeking. ·         Eight percent of the population prefer to sleep with arms down and close to the body.   They tend to be quiet, keep to themselves, and expect a lot from themselves and others. ·         Fifteen percent of the population prefer to sleep on their side with arms down.   There...

  I am privileged to communicate conjointly with all of you across time and space for one primary reason -- science.  That simple everyday fact of 21st century life would be unfathomable to virtually anyone born before 1900.  Think about that for one moment.  Those who perished before the 20th century could communicate with each other only if they could deliver and receive auditory or visual signals naturally through their unaided senses.   What is true for communication is true for virtually every major feature of contemporary life.  Those from the 19th century could not access vaccines to prevent disease nor antibiotics to treat them because science had not progressed that far.  Back then, Covid-19 would have decimated city populations far beyond what it has done thus far to us. Science is so critical to the contemporary world that the United States government alone expends 50 billion dollars on pure research; that is, on projects with absolutel...

We all have heard the adage “Say what you mean, and mean what you say.”  And that advice usually strikes us as being sound.  Why say something that you don’t mean?’  You know potential answers to that question.  Some obvious ones that readily come to mind, for instance, are that we fear hurting someone’s feelings and/or of diminishing our standing in their eyes.  There are a thousand “good” reasons not to truly say what we mean or truly mean what we say.   What do all the potential reasons have in common?  They all depend on what psychologists call “mindreading.”  When we consider what to say to someone we must explicitly or implicitly “decide” what to say.  Another way to frame the issue is to consider whether mindreading is distinctly separate from or merely a sub-part of metacognition (thinking about thinking, in general).  That is, when you try to guess what another person thinks or will think, is that process different from how...