Captain Obvious

Versus telling me what to think!  Ask that question as you listen to the voices in your lives.  Are they pushing their agendas and talking points and trying to convince you they are right? Or are they offering thoughts to promote your thinking … letting you synthesize, sort, sift, and consider things holistically?  Do they want you to think, or to simply accept the thoughts of others?

So many of my recent blogs have been about the bombardment we are all under by those who want to convince us to follow their lead, rather than perhaps find our own paths.  Yes, we as a nation need to collectively decide what to do about our challenges today and into the future, but I am not convinced that our leadership is interested in a dialogue.  They have made up their minds and just want us to give them the permission and money to do what they want.

Admitting we don’t quite know the answers to our profound problems requires humility and curiosity … traits I find conspicuously absent today.  True dialogue depends upon critical thinking and most Americans have been lulled into the false hope that our political process will naturally synthesize the best answers to profound questions.  That presupposition assumes the questions we all face have been accurately asked, and that we are not just trying to address symptoms rather than underlying diseases. 

Let me repeat this last thought: we are way too prone to medicate away our symptoms rather than search for and face the underlying causes.

We have a lot of intellectual work to do … at a time when most Americans are exhausted just trying to make ends meet, get through their days, and enjoy some time unwinding as they get ready to go to bed.  Sorry … most Americans are not interested in thinking any longer. We don’t even play games like Monopoly and cards with each other or even work on puzzles together.  We sit in front of our electronic screens rather than in front of our fireplaces talking to each other.

I never liked most games a lot because the results of chance confounded my desire for predictable outcomes.  I entered engineering because the laws of physics and energy offered concrete answers to complex problems.  Monopoly reminded me that bad things happen to good people even when you do the right thing.  After all, how could anyone enjoy the fact that random events resulted in windfalls.  Engineers don’t like that.

Games made me think.  Life can make us think.  Most TV programs and especially the news do not encourage us to think.  They tell us what to think.  We can’t force each other to think, but we can create fertile environments for it by asking better questions … not to trap a person into thinking they are wrong, but perhaps to encourage each other to share insights that collectively might bring us to higher ground in life.

Leaders must lead, but when their talking points become indoctrination agendas they have moved beyond leadership to manipulation and attempts at brainwashing … aka gaslighting … they are not only assuming you aren’t thinking, but they are also attempting to lure you into giving up thinking. 

Please think!

I am not a football follower, but with nothing else to do or watch, I turned on the game between the Eagles and the Chiefs.  I had read this was going to be a nailbiter, so I was prepared for the game to go right to the end.  But I must admit that by the end of the second quarter I was ready to watch a movie or go to bed.

As a result, I saw what is always billed as a signature moment: the halftime show.  There were repeated advertisements for it all during the first two quarters, but I had no idea who the artist was.  Given Taylor Swift was there, I wondered whether she would make an appearance.

So, the half-time show started, and I thought the trick of having all the other performers coming out of the car was clever, but why out of a car?  And I could not understand what the performer was saying.  It was obvious he was angry, but I was not sure what he was angry about.  By the end of the show, I was puzzled … what was the point?  What am I missing?  I called my daughter, and she was puzzled as well.

When I got up this morning, I checked online to see what the media was saying, and I was further shocked at all their gushing over the show.  Nowhere could I find others commenting that the tone and content seemed inconsistent with the event and the spirit of good competition and excellence.  The Superbowl is supposedly a good will event.

Then, as I read more and more, I could see what this was all about.  While some in the media defend the show as a statement in the ongoing battle between hip-hop artists, I fail to see why an artist would use a venue like this to continue that argument.  Other news commentators thought the halftime show was a protest about the country’s decision to back away from DEI.  Still others thought it was also a response to Trump’s comments about Philadelphia during his run for the presidency and a public display of opposition to Trump’s actions.

I do understand, respect, and encourage people to express their opinions, but let me say to anyone who thinks this halftime show helped these agendas: get a grip … you just demonstrated why this focus on one perspective is so egregious by making all of us even more aware of the low brow, angry, and frankly interpersonally dangerous perspectives of these people.

You don’t want me to be fearful of a hoody in the neighborhood?  Or a gang in hoodys piling out of a car? Try something more alluring than an angry rant that you’re not getting your fair share.  Try a little more sugar because the acid of your tone does not make me want to listen, hire you, or fight for your views.

While we are on the subject, please remember the election indicated that most Americans reject the DEI and CRT focus and perspective.  The movement toward the right was evident EVERYWHERE in the country, even within the hard-core democratic big city areas.  Evidently the reactions to the halftime show were a reflection that most media still have not come to grips with the results.

This show will be remembered, but not in the way this protestor intended.  Those hoping they made progress on the DEI issue continue to show complete ignorance of how they are being perceived.  This was not good for the country.  The halftime show did not help their cause or case.

I am less prone after this to even want to listen to this perspective … sad … very sad.  And, no … I am NOT a racist … I am an American and this was not helpful to bring the country together, nor did it lower the temperature of conversations.

It is fascinating to watch how people today react to change.  I guess it is natural to resist it because, after all, there are things that often get worse along with those that get better.

I remember arguing with people that staking trees to get them to grow straight had parallels in life … if you can start with a very young plant, it doesn’t take a lot of strain to get keep the plant growing straight.  However, the failure to correct a young tree makes correction later much more expensive.

In fact, if the tree is mature, it is going to take a whopping amount of strain to straighten it out, and at some point, you might even have to admit the tree has to go.  Take it down, convert it to lumber, etc., and then plant a new one.  It is simply easier.

Similarly, people working with elephants have learned that if you chain them to a stake when they are small and can’t pull away from that stake, they learn not to try.  So as mature elephants who could easily pull the stake, they remain chained because they have not tried to pull away since their youth.

One of my favorite people was Joe Collier, the Chief Marketing Officer at Florida Power and Light who left there to become CEO of Central Maine Power.  He always reminded me that “it was easier to change people than to change people.  I love that … but you must have known Joe to know what he meant by it.  It was all about the difficulty of correcting an adult in life … a low percentage task to say the least.

People in real life who make decisions like this generally get a bad name as they are doing what they believe needs to be done.  The phrases in the title of this blog are descriptions often attributed to them.  Their methods at times seem crude: wrecking balls.  Their tactics cause lots of things to appear broken: Bulls in a China Shop.  Their diplomacy and grace seem conspicuously absent: Blunt Instruments.

Yet, they get the job done and do it more quickly and at lower costs than the “kind and gentle” business models so many today believe are appropriate.  Leadership today is being told to use consensus … which results in the gravitation to the mean … which means that nothing truly revolutionary can ever come out of that. Worse yet, it discourages truly ingenious solutions to situations.

Just like sausage, it isn’t pretty to watch things like this made in real life.  We must relinquish our desire to think we are in control and give leaders time to lead.  Our news cycle and cynical tendencies to ask an endless stream of “why” questions that can’t be answered with adequate assurances should have taught us to trust more … not less.

I grew up under the leadership of Admiral Rickover who singlehandedly built our nuclear navy from the ground up.  He was not a nice person.  He was arrogant beyond measure.  He was ruthless during his interviews and legendary in the stories told about him.  He got the job done.  We now have a nuclear navy.

He surrounded himself with the smartest people on the planet and I must say working for them was daunting.  We are talking scary smart.  But nobody complained.  They knew what the goal was, and they fell in line pushing for that goal.  And they did it.

Leadership is a lonely place because it must be for it to be effective.  Consensus is comforting, but delusional.  Give leaders time before thinking you are so smart.

Now that our society seems once again to say it values merit and excellence, we should be very careful to define it and be sure we can measure it.  Perhaps it is easier to think about how we measure the opposite: failure.  Is that easy to measure?  To be fair, no!  Not in real life.  Almost everyone fails at some point in their life, and it is how they pick themselves up and learn from it that generally leads to success.  Plus, if luck plays a key element, you wind up defining excellence the same way you would as a gambler who did well.  Lucky.

How do we truly measure excellence?  Some sports seem to offer easier measurements than others: gymnastics, track and field, etc.  But, quite naturally, these sports define ground rules for competition, most often with a primary fear of performance enhancing drugs or some other form of cheating.  That sets up a “catch me if you can” scenario where, if there is enough money in the sport, the physicians concoct drugs that are undetectable.

There was a time in my life when my wife Susan gave me a wonderful birthday present: a five-day course on how to be a professional bass fisherman: three 8-hour days of instruction in class with five professionals, one day of practice on the water, and one day of competition.  It was exhausting but incredibly educational.

What did I learn?  I was very good … I had all the right skills of lure selection, casting, sensing the bite, etc.  But what disgusted me was learning the way professionals cheat.  There is too much money in the game.  I will not digress any further …

The pursuit of excellence sets up kind of a war like the online hacking games where security companies are trying to keep up with nefarious and devious attempts to break security systems.  Now, with AI developing deep fakes, this problem just got so much worse.

It is interesting to watch how security companies try to stay ahead of this. They sponsor hackathons where creative people compete to illustrate their cleverness and thereby uncover security flaws.  These events also offer these hotshot coders opportunities for gainful employment.

But our society thinks like our society, and most of the nefarious agents are abroad, in places with different moral codes than we have.  If you listen carefully to their justifications when they are confronted, you are made frightfully aware that their definition of merit and excellence is far different than ours.  It reminds me of the Vietnam War and why we lost it.

If we are on a path towards excellence, how would we measure it?  If you Google the idea, you will see metrics like the following:

For Technical Tasks: Honesty, clarity, accuracy, comprehensiveness, accessibility, conciseness, professional appearance, and correctness are metrics.  Who defines them and do we believe this truly brings about the changes we need?

For Healthcare: A quarterly dashboard that tracks clinical and operational data to help organizations improve the quality of care.  Really?  Why aren’t we measuring prevention?

Cost Efficiency: Saving money or resources to improve the quality of a product, service, or process.  Not so fast, this is the reason we have offshored our pollution and the production challenges we would face here processing rare earth elements.  We are killing people in the name of cost efficiency!

My career has been largely in the energy and power production technical areas.  My concern is that we have a world that will run out of conventional fossil fuels at some point in the future, even if we were all to go back to burning wood, peat, and dung.  Nuclear may be the long run winner, but getting there requires leadership and consensus that are not present nor actionable today.

Underlying all this is a world with way too many societies living in substandard conditions, and it is rightful to bring them clean water and safe living conditions.  Plus, we have learned from China’s one-child policy that sustainable populations require more than simple answers.

So, imagine you are King of the World and can just decree the right paths to follow.  You don’t need public opinion and can seek merit and excellence and select the best and the brightest members of your team.  How would you measure their intellectual and social capabilities to get this job done?   You quickly realize that no one individual can do it all.  We are not in the days of Admiral Rickover where one man can define our navy’s power choices.

Do we know how to define this recruitment task?  I fear not.  We don’t agree on what we are looking for yet.  So, how can we define what we are looking for?

Are we simply going to hope our politicians can do this?  They rely on votes and the average American wouldn’t know this kind of excellence if it bit them in the ass … which it probably would because people who can work together to solve this problem, like me, are not popular, nor care to be.  That is why we don’t run for office … we don’t like politics.

We must first step back from our challenges and ask tough questions and take some time, do some fundamental research, and consider our choices.  Just saying we will hire the best and the brightest doesn’t mean we get anywhere.  Worse yet, we are using politics.

Haven’t we learned anything?  We are doomed to failure until and unless we go back to the authoritarian models for leadership: warts and all.

Perhaps we have a litmus test in progress.

My recent blog on searching for truth prompted me to take a deeper dive into what likely underlies the problems we all have when we say we are seeking the truth. Intellectuals know the root problem is most often confirmation bias which, according to Wikipedia, is “the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values.  People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs.”

Therefore, since AI uses written and numeric data from the real world, how can it detect confirmation bias, and if it can’t, isn’t it going to recommend biased results?  Plus, if the consensus on something is what AI is going to spit back at us, how do we train it to also offer contrary opinions, so we know the full story? Here are some excellent suggestions from the University of California at Merced:

“Confirmation bias can lead to miscommunications, escalating conflicts when key pieces of information are overlooked. Consider these three ways to counter confirmation bias to improve your communications, relationships and work product:

Focus on falsification bias – Confirmation bias can be a strong influence, so you will need to actively look for evidence that disproves your point of view.

Get a different perspective – Get out of your echo chamber. Approach someone you know who sees things differently from you and ask them what they are seeing. Be open to their ideas and try to explore them.

Talk with an outside party – Approach a coach or someone you trust to help you impartially explore your thoughts and beliefs without judgment.”

Well now isn’t that interesting. The key to maturing our thinking and avoiding errors in seeking truth is that we should be listening to others, especially those who disagree with our points of view. Seems like we are back at the same conclusion I recommended in my prior blog. Listen to voices that disagree with our preconceived ideas … listen … question … don’t argue. Let the diversity of thought soak in … deeply.

Now, let’s look at how AI coupled with social media can concoct a toxic cocktail. Again, from Wikipedia we learn that confirmation bias is amplified using filter bubbles, or “algorithmic editing”, which displays to individuals only information they are likely to agree with, while excluding opposing views.

Some have argued that confirmation bias is the reason why society can never escape from filter bubbles, because individuals are psychologically hardwired to seek information that agrees with their preexisting values and beliefs. Others have further argued that the mixture of the two is degrading democracy—claiming that this “algorithmic editing” removes diverse viewpoints and information—and that unless filter bubble algorithms are removed, voters will be unable to make fully informed political decisions. Therefore, our search for truth is hard work since we are fighting against both internal and external temptations to seek confirmation for what we already believe.

May our new year be filled with new and loving insights as we learn to listen to each other better. That should be a resolution we can keep if we really care at all.