anti-Causality


Saturday, December 15, 2012

Defective Dominance: De-evolution and the spread of greed




Defective dominance, a phrase I use often (but never wrote about) to describe the ugliness we see in "our" human society is "defective dominance." This is to say that, because it is easy to profit using cruelty, and difficult to prevent cruelty through kindness (or profit from generosity), cruelty, and especially cruelty-causing genes, win out in "our" synthetic world.

In the political context, psych-types would describe this defective dominance in terms of personality disorders, the most dangerous of which is malignant narcissism, what Adolf Hitler had. I assume Dawkins would agree; I believe he speaks from experience, as he, as academic oligarch, probably self-describes in his best-selling books about "selfish genes."

Surprisingly to me, I found "defective dominance" to be important evolutionary and genetic term, though not necessarily widespread. (I was expecting to find more paranoid conspiracy-type stuff.)

Like most genuine genetic-evolutionary material, references to defective dominance are exceedingly difficult to fathom, but very easy to observe in everyday life. By adding up all the "ugliness" that we see, and then adding to it all the "ugliness" elsewhere that we don't see (which requires multiplication), and then "factoring in growth" which means raising it to an exponential (such as "squaring" it), any of us can comprehend that we, as a Human race and a planet Earth, are in deep trouble. The result will be mega-genocidal disaster in coming decades.

The question is "how will we reverse the control of the defective dominant?"

The humanitarian approach is to attempt to create awareness of the problem, but I believe that effort will be ineffectual; I use the Vietnam war as an example: it was the military action by Vietnam that ended the war, not the active opposition to the war by the US population.

Blocking possibilities of a popular "information-based" solutions is the academic use empiricist science--which is very much what it sounds like. Empiricism has, for 23-2500 years, focused on developing empire-building technologies for the economic growth of the aristocracy (with a short communist experiment): roads, weapons, ships, towers, medicine. Academia, for its educational effort, has been rewarded with its own "ivory" tower in it has metacognitive control over nearly every one of us for big parts of our lives as students.


Economics as a symptom of defective dominance
Most importantly, economics is not constructive nor a whole systems model. It is a connected sequence of causal conclusions designed to resemble a model.

This should be a major concern to every one of us, because it is an alternative to the system that we evolved in (or God granted us); it is a synthesis -- a fiction. The terminology and math used are complicated lies designed to show that as a market-based synthetic system it benefits all through growth. In reality, it declines financially because of inflation, erodes the meanings of our lives, and will ultimately consume all the planet's resources --as a result of uncontrolled growth.

Specific fictions within the terminology and math of economics could be, for instance, the use of retail consumption as a positive asset (or growth) when in actual business, it is a debit (or decline). House building, as a product is an asset, but in its present context it is consumption, not production, as retail is.

Production has, of course, been largely shipped to other countries, and market values --the actual measurement of a market-based economy-- are out-paced by inflation.

Economists see growth in empiricist math, but the wealthy can only grow by absorbing the resources of others and undercutting their salaries. Even the wealth of the wealthy is eroded by inflation necessitating increasing "greed" to maintain lifestyles.

Technical Reference

Crutchfield, J. P. and Schuster, P. (2003). Evolutionary dynamics: Exploring the interplay of selection, accident, neutrality, and function. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Responses 

From the highy-supporting György Stiffel


  • Wonderful, John! Very well said (written)! And it is very simple to understand.
  • John Bessa wow, thanks -- I was going to post it on your wall, so glad you found it  I also got interesting comments from other venues (websites)

  • György Stiffel I´m very glad to know you because you are one of the "thinking" members of our society. But we have to recognize, that we can not change the world and its way into the final collaps[e].


From OpEdNews posting

Gentry L Rowsey



This is fascinating, John.
And I wonder if you saw the same TV program I saw, maybe a year ago, about a pure mathematician who had worked out a theory of how self-sacrificing genes could  prevail over selfish genes, and then went crazy because he tried to give away everything he owned including his shelter and clothes, and thereafter, committed suicide. Left unexplained (at least to me) was whether his suicide was evidence for or against his theoretical explanation of how altruism can genetically displace selfishness. And needless to add, the math was eons beyond what I could comprehend in my lifetime.




Reply to Gentry L Rowsey: 10,000 generations ?!
Thanks for the positive feedback, I have heard of your forest employees organization -- I have heard of a lot of suicide by heavy-thinkers who go too heavily involved these deep topics. My view is that DNA is pretty tough stuff, and to f* it up you have to really abuse it, which is apparently what is happening. What should only be about 1% is from 10% (DSM) to 30% if you included high-functioning psychos, but still a minority, so there is reason for hope and not to kill yourself. According to the technical reference, there will have to be 100,000 generations of this madness before it peters out... (heh)

Ned Lud


 
Reply to Gentry L Rowsey: the river styx
This reminds me of a story about a man who claimed to know 'what it was like' after death. He said it was exactly the same there as here. There was no difference at all!

  • There are places where the rational (or mathematical or scientific) mind cannot go and cannot explain because when it does, or attempts to, it looks stupid.
  • This is why true sages are often regarded as idiots.
  • And why parables and allegories are also important.
  • Science is essentially a dead end.

 



Friday, December 14, 2012

Cultural counselling services

Multicultural barriers for the therapeutic alliance exist on two levels: social barriers that can be thought of as misunderstandings or biases, and medical mismatches where the symptomatic descriptions and expectations of non-mainstream clients result in a conflict with basic clinical values and procedures. These mismatches result in misdiagnoses and wrong treatments such that client reflections can be mistaken for psychosis, somaticism, disassociation, personality disorders, and malingering. Kirmayer and his associates (2003) sought to show the value of recruiting mediators who are expert in translating the languages and explaining cultural values of non-mainstream clients, such as immigrants and refugees; these specialists provide cultural consultation services (CCS), and the cultural experts are called “culture brokers.”

Cultural formulation

The core of the study was a cultural formulation of the clients exceptional traits and states. There is no reason not to include clinical cultural traits as well (which was psychiatric and thus medical), as, in the end, clinicians benefited in much the same ways clients did. The components of the multicultural formulation where drawn from personal histories (that included the traumatic results of war for at least 40% of the participating clients), and current issues (which for the war-traumatized includes the anxiety of waiting for official decisions). Current factors for the clients were the effects of immigration on family structure and supports, friction between generations, personal identity issues with respect to society and gender, and spiritual losses. On the clinical side, biases were mediated not just by differing cultural values, but by the clinicians views of clients’ poverty, unemployment, politics, and even race. Both clients and clinicians felt the mismatch of differing approaches to medicine such that clinicians were frustrated by their inability to match clients’ descriptions of symptoms with DSM-provided data, and clients were disappointed by the clinicians’ inability to provide what they have come to expect from medicine.

How CSS works

When clinicians contacted the study team for CSS assistance, a signal was sent to the clients of the clinicians’ concern that instantly benefited the alliance. As the CSS helpers provided symptomatic translations and understandings, previously puzzling symptoms were put in contexts that could be related to the DSM. Clinicians also immediately benefited personally as their frustrations and biases gave way to appreciation for the sophistication of their clients' cultures. In the cases where only clinicians met with the CSS helpers, clinical alliances were built around the issues and thus motivated action.

How CSS can be applied

The core value of the CSS study is the “formulation” that seeks to model a relationship between both the cultural values clinicians and clients by embracing both. The client can then benefit along parallel tracks of care: traditional cultural approaches (which may have a social dimension) and current mainstream clinical that may better treat symptoms. A first step is for the clinician to signal the client of interest in client’s cultural approach by attempting to fully comprehend it. The clinician might note each component of the client's view of problems so that a holistic model can be constructed such that correlations can be identified to link the clients’ approach to mainstream diagnosis and treatment structure.

Conclusions and after-effects

The study had interesting after-results including the recruitment of the researchers as therapists, as some of the participating clinicians chose to "dump" their clients on them. This brought added attention to the transitional needs of multicultural clients as newly-provided understandings resulted in new diagnosis and treatments. Another need stressed by the study was for the clients' self-determination in determining the duality of treatments; many who might have benefited from CSS had likely left therapy or never attempted it because of the cultural rifts, both social and medical.

The service is not cheap because, to be successful, the consultants have to be well-trained; the study showed that low-cost substitutes, such using menial-level hospital workers as translators provided poor returns, and is thus not cost-effective. Further, clients may reject CSS support from community members as they are concerned that their privacy will not be protected. A similar concern is that many clients “dropped out” or never sought help because of the problems caused by multicultural rifts. An issue of concern for the refugees was their fear that a poor diagnosis would affect their status-seeking efforts. Beyond cultural and clinical support through cultural services is the need to promote the guarantee of ethical protections to the immigrant sub-cultures.

Complimenting cultural values benefits all

When components are found to be different, the approach should be complimentary; a holistic value is matched with a clinical procedure such that clinical does not replace the cultural, but confirms and enhances it. According to the study, a complimentary and mutually embracing approach benefitted clinicians as well as clients. It also opens the possibility that the cultural connection can benefit mainstream medicine with the dissemination other-culture knowledge.

Reference

Kirmayer, L., Groleau, D., Guzder, J., Blake, C., & Jarvis, E. (2003). Cultural Consultation: A Model of Mental Health Service for Multicultural Societies. Canadian Journal Of Psychiatry, 48(3), 145.

Defective Dominance: De-evolution and the spread of greed





Defective dominance, a phrase I use often (but never wrote about) to describe the ugliness we see in "our" human society is "defective dominance." This is to say that, because it is easy to profit using cruelty, and difficult to prevent cruelty through kindness (or profit from generosity), cruelty, and especially cruelty-causing genes, win out in "our" synthetic world.

In the political context, psych-types would describe this defective dominance in terms of personality disorders, the most dangerous of which is malignant narcissism, what Adolf Hitler had. I assume Dawkins would agree; I believe he speaks from experience, as he, as academic oligarch, probably self-describes in his best-selling books about "selfish genes."

Surprisingly to me, I found "defective dominance" to be important evolutionary and genetic term, though not necessarily widespread. (I was expecting to find more paranoid conspiracy-type stuff.)

Like most genuine genetic-evolutionary material, references to defective dominance are exceedingly difficult to fathom, but very easy to observe in everyday life. By adding up all the "ugliness" that we see, and then adding to it all the "ugliness" elsewhere that we don't see (which requires multiplication), and then "factoring in growth" which means raising it to an exponential (such as "squaring" it), any of us can comprehend that we, as a Human race and a planet Earth, are in deep trouble. The result will be mega-genocidal disaster in coming decades.

The question is "how will we reverse the control of the defective dominant?"

The humanitarian approach is to attempt to create awareness of the problem, but I believe that effort will be ineffectual; I use the Vietnam war as an example: it was the military action by Vietnam that ended the war, not the active opposition to the war by the US population.

Blocking possibilities of a popular "information-based" solutions is the academic use empiricist science--which is very much what it sounds like. Empiricism has, for 23-2500 years, focused on developing empire-building technologies for the economic growth of the aristocracy (with a short communist experiment): roads, weapons, ships, towers, medicine. Academia, for its educational effort, has been rewarded with its own "ivory" tower in it has metacognitive control over nearly every one of us for big parts of our lives as students.

Economics as a symptom of defective dominance
Most importantly, economics is not constructive nor a whole systems model. It is a connected sequence of causal conclusions designed to resemble a model.

This should be a major concern to every one of us, because it is an alternative to the system that we evolved in (or God granted us); it is a synthesis -- a fiction. The terminology and math used are complicated lies designed to show that as a market-based synthetic system it benefits all through growth. In reality, it declines financially because of inflation, erodes the meanings of our lives, and will ultimately consume all the planet's resources --as a result of uncontrolled growth.

Specific fictions within the terminology and math of economics could be, for instance, the use of retail consumption as a positive asset (or growth) when in actual business, it is a debit (or decline). House building, as a product is an asset, but in its present context it is consumption, not production, as retail is.

Production has, of course, been largely shipped to other countries, and market values --the actual measurement of a market-based economy-- are out-paced by inflation.

Economists see growth in empiricist math, but the wealthy can only grow by absorbing the resources of others and undercutting their salaries. Even the wealth of the wealthy is eroded by inflation necessitating increasing "greed" to maintain lifestyles.

Technical Reference

Crutchfield, J. P. and Schuster, P. (2003). Evolutionary dynamics: Exploring the interplay of selection, accident, neutrality, and function. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Responses 

From the highy-supporting György Stiffel


  • Wonderful, John! Very well said (written)! And it is very simple to understand.
  • John Bessa wow, thanks -- I was going to post it on your wall, so glad you found it  I also got interesting comments from other venues (websites)

  • György Stiffel I´m very glad to know you because you are one of the "thinking" members of our society. But we have to recognize, that we can not change the world and its way into the final collaps[e].


From OpEdNews posting

Gentry L Rowsey



This is fascinating, John.
And I wonder if you saw the same TV program I saw, maybe a year ago, about a pure mathematician who had worked out a theory of how self-sacrificing genes could  prevail over selfish genes, and then went crazy because he tried to give away everything he owned including his shelter and clothes, and thereafter, committed suicide. Left unexplained (at least to me) was whether his suicide was evidence for or against his theoretical explanation of how altruism can genetically displace selfishness. And needless to add, the math was eons beyond what I could comprehend in my lifetime.




Reply to Gentry L Rowsey: 10,000 generations ?!
Thanks for the positive feedback, I have heard of your forest employees organization -- I have heard of a lot of suicide by heavy-thinkers who go too heavily involved these deep topics. My view is that DNA is pretty tough stuff, and to f* it up you have to really abuse it, which is apparently what is happening. What should only be about 1% is from 10% (DSM) to 30% if you included high-functioning psychos, but still a minority, so there is reason for hope and not to kill yourself. According to the technical reference, there will have to be 100,000 generations of this madness before it peters out... (heh)

Ned Lud


Reply to Gentry L Rowsey: the river styx
This reminds me of a story about a man who claimed to know 'what it was like' after death. He said it was exactly the same there as here. There was no difference at all!

  • There are places where the rational (or mathematical or scientific) mind cannot go and cannot explain because when it does, or attempts to, it looks stupid.
  • This is why true sages are often regarded as idiots.
  • And why parables and allegories are also important.
  • Science is essentially a dead end.