Month: January 2025

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.

I assume most of my readers care about the wellness of our planet and are committed to leaving it in better shape for our children and grandchildren. Some believe the emphasis on carbon dioxide and methane in our atmosphere is the key to that. My premise is that a focus on fossil fuels themselves misses the key point: we must reduce the need for fossil fuels – in part by appropriate development of renewables, but more importantly by changing our demand for energy itself.

Several of my blogs have disclosed what drives that demand, which of course depends upon the things the planet produces and consumes under the seemingly inarguable banner of what people need to be comfortable, safe, and healthy. These are not givens for much of the world beyond the wealthy nations, and most of us know that we routinely export our sins to these god forsaken areas, often in the name of noble ideas like EVs and PVs sickening and killing people in our insatiable desire for rare earth elements.

So, you would expect that our largest corporations would be responding to this in ways we can all support. Perhaps not. Susan and I watched the Netflix documentary, Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy, that pulls back the curtain on the world’s top brands, exposing the hidden tactics and covert strategies used to keep all of us locked in an endless cycle of buying – no matter the cost. The recent articles about the health challenges in our food chain point out UPFs … ultra processed foods, that are enhanced with unhealthy ingredients to drive up consumption.

Here is an excellent article on this from the New York Times: The Healthier Eating Challenge: The Healthier Eating Challenge: Why You Crave Ultraprocessed Foods – The New York Times  You will learn that you are being deliberately deceived into thinking you are still hungry … so you eat more! Do you remember the ad for Lay’s potato chips: “Betcha you can’t eat just one!” You guessed it … food processors are deliberately and intentionally designing foods this way. And it’s no surprise to most that bars intentionally provide free salty snacks to drive patron’s thirst for their profitable beverages.

We are in a vicious cycle of deception and greed that deliberately deceives us into believing that corporations are doing the right things for all citizens and are responsible for their products from production through ultimate disposition. I was suspicious of course, but little did I know just how devious this all was, and that it had even penetrated almost all the food we eat. This is certainly why, in part, we are seeing the rise in cancers, obesity, etc.

Yes, we are more sedentary for sure, but more importantly, we have been drugged into a coma of indifference about so many things. The cumulative effect is going to be much worse for our children and grandchildren if it is not acknowledged and addressed.

Please do take some time to watch Buy Now! on Netflix. You will be outraged. That’s a nice beginning to engagement. Then, consider processed foods in your life … read the labels … if there are more than three or four ingredients in them, your health is probably being compromised. Check the ones you eat most online. Do your part. Eat healthily!

Perhaps you saw the movie A Few Good Men with its famous ending scene where the of the Guantanamo Army Base commander bellows at the prosecuting attorney, “You can’t stand the truth!” Yes, the base commander had done something terrible. Yes, it was good theatre to watch the plot work out. And, once again, we learned that there are often many levels upon which to try to understand the truths’ leaders live with.

The recent death of Jimmy Carter has brought forward retrospectives both good and bad, and most of us just want to remember the good when someone dies, especially when we believe in our hearts that they were good people. After all, what’s the point of criticizing a person when it can’t change situations, even if that criticism is deserved on some level.

History is hard to reconstruct fairly because it is most often written by the victors. So, they tend to color the record, forget to tell the other side of the situation, and often exaggerate the claims. Here is an excellent summary of the public views of Jimmy Carter at the time and over time: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jimmy-carter-retrospective-public-opinion-cbs-news-poll-analysis/

The summary I most often hear now is that Jimmy Carter was a good man but a lousy president. This article concludes the same. We did have a second oil embargo causing an energy crisis that transformed the world. Out of that, he was the first president that set us on a path to energy independence, which we now are close to achieving. He was right insisting we all had to “do our part individually,” but that wasn’t popular then and remains unpopular now.

Are we fair when we use public opinion as the criteria for good or bad? Carter was right on our personal accountability, and it is even truer today. Today’s electorate does not want any accountabilities … they want others to simply make problems go away. As a result, we are overweight and lazy in almost every dimension of life. Perhaps we have replaced needs with wants because we don’t want accountability at all.

Yes, the interest rates under Carter were crushing. I literally couldn’t afford to sell our house and move into another one at the same price because my mortgage was at 8% and the mortgage rate then was about 16%. But I never thought I should blame him for that. The world situation was unsettled in the middle east … just like it is today … but actually a bit safer back then even though we didn’t know it … yet.

Somewhat serendipitously, Susan and I have started watching an Amazon Prime four-part series covering Winston Churchill on how he led Britain through wars, somewhat by the skin of his teeth, but largely because of his incredible talent as a speaker and leader. He was a realist in his remarks, recognizing it was going to be brutally tough on everyone, but the goal was worth the sacrifices. Where is that kind of leadership today? Could it even exist?

History is written by the victors, and I hope it is kind to Jimmy Carter. What point is there in pointing out the flaws of a very good man, who upon hindsight might appear to have made errors in judgement? I like our pastor’s approach to funerals. He captures the wonderful and humorous stories about their lives and does include what we can all learn from their challenges but avoids outright criticism. After all, what’s the point?