Approximating Intelligence: Conversation Starters

This follows on from a post I did about the topic of 'Monkey See, Monkey Do' but the overall theme of these ideas is how less intelligent people mitigate the advantage of more intelligent people such that intelligence is not a 'winner take all' trait. The topic of this post is some variation of ye olde 'never let the truth get in the way of a good story.' and is really about how unintelligent ideas can effectively hobble intelligent people by draging them into conversations and arguments that don't merit starting.

My best attempt to put it succinctly is that there are conversations that are complete wastes of time, they do not merit embarking upon. Something simply is the case, and as such there's no point speculating on what isn't. A Conversation starter is to exclude the necessary fact that obstructs the possibility of conversation.

Examples: The world is an oblique spheroid. Cryptocurrency isn't currency. Homo sapiens are dimorphic. There is no compelling evidence of the supernatural. etc.

Now when I worked in a call center, I would ask my coworkers ridiculous hypotheticals, and one style of answering an absurd or ridiculous hypothetical took the form: 'Well I just wouldn't be in that situation so I would never have to make that choice...' which is to entirely miss the point of a ridiculous hypothetical and that is entertainment.

I'm not the fun police. Questioning a vegan as to whether if nobody was around they would pay $2 to ride a unicorn that was crying over its captivity, may be inconsequential on account of unicorns not existing (sorry mum) but it is still entertaining.

In an attempt to be brief, I'm going to be blunt. I spent 3 months corresponding with an anti-vax friend. It was a long exchange. It ran into the arse-end of the Joe Rogan podcast interview of Dr. Malone. I found it easiest to respond to a podcast with a podcast, namely Sam Harris interviewing Nicholas Christakis.

Anyway, what happened was that in the interview Nicholas casually mentions that the mrna vaccines are something like 5 times more effective than natural immunity. And this was rejected by my correspondent as a baseless claim. I conceded that this claim was asserted without any allusion to the studies that produced the conclusion, but gave it a quick google. And found that if you looked at the mortality rates of unvaccinated people it's something like 1% or thereabouts, and if you look at the mortality rates of the vaccinated it drops to 0.2% or less. So 5x more effective than natural immunity.

Here is the powerful pull of the rabbit hole. I should point out my correspondent friend lives in Australia. Roughly 21 million Australians were fully vaccinated at that point, or 8 in every 10. (and over 9 in 10 when you exclude the child population of Australia). Like to be hesitant about a vaccine at that point, would require morgues to be backed up, hence the appropriate term is anti-vax.

And really, that's it. The conversation can't really take place anymore, unless you find some way to dismiss the evidence.

Which my correspondent did. It was like 'we can't trust any research that is publicly or privately funded' and to be clear I am interpreting/condensing here. 

But this is the principle that is the subject of this post. 

An Argument for Flying

Say you want to fly under your own power. You come to me and say "If I can just jump off something high enough I think I can escape earth's gravitational pull" and then I throw a rock off a cliff and it plunges straight down to the ground below. 

Conversation, argument, over. Without introducing technology, people just can't fly.

You say "well who says that all mass is going to fall to earth every time."

And I'm like 'motherfucking physics that's who.'

And you're like 'I don't believe in physics.'

This might seem like a stupid example, but this shit is happening all the time.

Capital Punishment

A long time ago I was sitting around a table in a Fitzroy apartment discussing the plight of pedophiles. For the sake of argument, we'd all agreed to assume that pedophiles can't be "rehabilitated" in the sense of being cured of their paraphilia. Basically, once a pedophile always a pedophile, this was a premise we'd all agreed to regardless of whether it turns out to be true or not.

Then came the trouble of sentencing, paroling, releasing. My friend, one of my best friends made this extremely frustrating argument it went like this:

Capital punishment is fucked, it would never work, too many problems with it. But it would be good if we could just line pedophiles up and just shoot them.

So I'm no expert on writing syllogisms, but it would translate to something like this:

Premise 1: Capital punishment is overdetermined to be ineffective aka it's fucked.

Premise 2:  There are pedophiles.

Conclusion: We should use capital punishment on pedophiles.

This argument, or more accurately non-argument still annoys me to this day. It's like an anti-begging the question, where your first premise is a rejection of the conclusion. Most people are not this obtuse though to make arguments of the form 'I don't have an argument, here's the argument.'

But it does illustrate the basic form of what I'm calling 'Conversation starters'

Basic Form Conversation Starter

"This doesn't occur in reality, but if we can ignore reality then we have something to talk about."

Approaching intelligence it is rendered into the form "We can ignore reality, so we have something to talk about." that move from "if we can" to "we can" is often really tricky, as in buried under 30ft of word salad.

An Important Disclaimer

I'm likely to touch on issues that most people view very much through an 'Us-Them' prism. I have many friends that I would describe as 'Crusaders' for example, in which like the historical crusaders, they believe what they do is of paramount importance, don't understand what the actual crusades entail and have no idea that the texts the crusade is based upon are not descriptive of reality. 

As such, if for example I say 'Anti-racism has no real basis' you might be tempted to leap to the conclusion that I'm suggesting 'White supremacy' is the natural order of things, particularly if you've already signed on to the Anti-racist crusades. However, Anti-racism is but one approach to combatting racism and inequality in society, there are alternatives like humanism and importantly alternatives that have been far more effective historically that Anti-racism is now set about demolishing.

This is the unfortunate thing, if you have a rat poison that will maybe kill a bunch of rats in your house and definitely kill your own children, two parties are likely to object to you using that poison A) rats and B) people concerned for the wellbeing of your children.

Criticism doesn't just come from people who want you to fail, criticism can also come from people who want you to succeed.

Ryan Chapman

No more beating around the bush. From Greg Lukianoff and Johnathan Haidt's article in the Atlantic in 2015, to Brett Weinstein's talk 'How the Magic Trick Is Done' in 2018, to Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, Douglas Murray, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Andrew Doyle, Sam Harris, Coleman Hughes... hundreds if not thousands of hours have been spent by world-class minds taking far-left theory very seriously in order to understand and dissect it. Contemporary to writing this post, Douglas Murray and Peter Boghossian sat down to try and concur as to why so many people are taken in by (here referred to as) Woke ideology? I would argue some parties like Brett Weinstein and James Lindsay have been driven insane in the pursuit to understand and overcome it.

In this sense and context 'conversation starters' as approaching intelligence have been a huge success.

I am a big and almost immediate fan of youtuber Ryan Chapman, who like me has time on his hands to look at phenomena like Wokeness as a cultural phenomenon. His breakdown of the intellectual roots of wokeness is (trust me relatively) succinct and simple. Clean like his mid-century-modern décor:

and as per the packaging on the box, it delivers on what it promises - the intellectual roots of woke ideology.

At my own peril of losing you, I'm going to switch to hopefully a simpler analogy: Bitcoin. There's a super excellent deconstruction of nfts and crypto made by youtuber Folding Ideas called 'Line Goes Up - The problem with NFTS' It is over 2 hours long and as at writing has been viewed 8.3 million times such that if you managed to find this, you've probably already seen it.

If you watch it, you wont have wasted your time, however I'm going to employ the dubious word 'should' which is: making a 2 hour well researched, argued and executed video on NFTs being magic beans shouldn't be necessary. The bitcoin conversation shouldn't even get started. Here's a shorter alternative that I'm fairly sure I bring up every time anyone brings up crypto or nfts with me:

The question that plagues me, with bitcoin and its spin offs, is "why don't people immediately notice that Jerry doesn't eat sushi and doesn't wear kimonos" aka Kramer is not actually describing reality.

Easily the best thing I got from 'Line Goes Up' was the sense-making revelation that in the early days of bitcoin, bitcoin enthusiasts were just slapping 'we accept bitcoin' stickers on businesses, whether they did or not (mostly not) and it was hard to validate because nobody used bitcoin to buy anything anywhere and nobody knew anybody who used bitcoin to buy coffees and muffins from the corner store that according to a sticker on its window accepted bitcoin.

And like Kramer, eventually we could see people get rich by virtue of not understanding reality, just as Kramer has his shiny new suit after bankrupting Japanese tourists.

In the same sense, Ryan Chapman traces a line from contemporary 'Wokeness' simply and directly back to the ideas of Karl Marx. One could take Marx back to Hegel too if you like. 

Marx is poignant, because he had his own intellectual produce and historically every one that has gotten excited by and attempted to implement Marx's ideas has brought about a disaster. 

Karl Marx is Kramer, Kramer is even correct about some stuff - the Japanese are big gift givers, Jerry's TV may well be Japanese. But Kramer is crucially wrong about the value of the Yen, and the viability of Jerry's sitcom in the Japanese market, leading all parties to disaster.

But if we ignore the fact that Jerry doesn't eat sushi and wear kimonos, that USD$300 was then the equivalent of Y30,000 and not "practically free" as a price point, then Kramer's ideas can really get cooking.

In the same way if we ignore the fact that nobody is really representative of the group to which they belong, then we can discuss identity politics. (And I do mean literally nobody is representative of any group you can identify with. Based on the 2011 ABS census data, the "Average Australian" was defined of which, not a single Australian in 23 million was statistically average.)

So much as I like Ryan Chapman's analysis, I think the emotional roots of Wokeness, Crypto, Flat Earth, Stop the Steal are a lot simpler to understand and summarize than the intellectual roots:

Enough people want it to be true. aka Motivated reasoning.

The Economics Joke

I got this from Australian Economist Steve Keen's old 'Debt deflation' blog:

A physi­cist, a chemist and an econ­o­mist are ship­wrecked on a desert isle, along with a con­tain­er full of cans of baked beans.

The chemist says that if they can start a fire, he can cal­cu­late the tem­per­a­ture at which a can will explode.

The physi­cist says that she can work out the tra­jec­to­ry of the baked beans after the explo­sion, so that they can gath­er the baked beans and eat them.

The econ­o­mist looks at them in dis­dain, and final­ly says Guys, you’re going about it the hard way. Let’s assume we have a can open­er.

This is a field I hold a qualification in, albeit a minor and unimpressive one. But there's actually a lot of this 'assume we have a can opener' shit going on.

Apples

I have four apples. Benny cries 'no fair!' to the chief. 

The chief makes me separate the four apples into two groups of two and Benny gets to pick which pair he takes home.

Benny demands the pairs be weighed. We weigh them, one pair is slightly heavier than the others.

'For fucks sake Benny just pick the heavier pair.' I say growing tired of this whole thing.

'You'd like that wouldn't you. The smaller apples will be sweeter.'

'I don't give a fuck, I'm hungry I want you to pick so I can eat my apples.'

'...but the larger apples have a greater flesh to skin and core ratio...'

'Yeah so pick whatever. Chief can you make him pick already?'

'I demand a 30 day cooling off period, in which tohm isn't allowed to eat his apples should I determine that the division of apples was unfair.'

'You can have all the apples. Just let me get out of here so I can buy a McMuffin.'

'I want a McMuffin too! Why do I have to eat apples while you eat McMuffins.'

'Fine I'll buy you a McMuffin Benny.'

'Oh what so you can have all the apples?'

'No so I can get out of here and eat something.'

'You're trying to swindle me out of the apples by bribing me with a McMuffin...'

Benny's mistake is that he thinks his problem is that I have all the apples and he has none. Benny's actual problem (because I made him up) is that he's miserable. He's miserable without apples, he's miserable with apples.

I don't make this analogy to trivialize economic inequality. Rather to illustrate the perils of misdiagnosis. Benny is motivated to believe that if he just had some apples, he'd be as happy as me. Probably my method of oppressing Benny in the dialogue above is that I don't care and he does. Likely a privileged position if I can give away apples and buy Benny McMuffins, but Benny has poisoned his own mind, such that while the chief as an independent arbiter may view it as fair that we each have two apples and a McMuffin, Benny won't see it that way.

Society probably does have problems if Benny needs to petition the chief to redistribute my apples. I'm not denying there is a problem. I am asserting that Benny has misdiagnosed that problem.

How does that happen in real world examples?

Epistemic Inclusion

I keep promising to myself I'll write a post dedicated solely to the subject of epistemic exclusion. This is not that post though.

An epistemology is a way we produce knowledge. Experimentation for one. Mathematics (a subset of rationalism) another.

Not all epistemologies are equal however. 

So this is my own basic conclusion on the question of including or excluding epistemologies - where epistemologies converge on findings, include them. This is largely to give credit where credit is due. 

For example, revelation, believe it or not, is an epistemology. This is like when God visits someone in a dream and tells them what they need to know.

So the gold standard of epistemologies is generally regarded to be empiricism, repeatable experiments that produce consistent results. 

In a scenario where an empiricist has a bunch of people coming down with cholera, does a statistical analysis of the cases and detects a behavioral pattern among patients that they are using three distinct water pumps in the London area, then samples that water and looks at it under a microscope and discovers microbial life in that water supply that isn't in other water supplies that aren't producing cholera cases, the empiricist determines that cholera is spread by these 'germs'.

Then someone is visited by God in the night and says 'Yo, disease has nothing to do with a persons character, it is spread by these other life forms I created because unnecessary suffering is necessary' then yeah if divine revelation reveals things that turn out to be reliably true include that epistemology.

But if someone is visited by God in the night and says 'Yo, these cholera cases are my punishment for legalizing same sex marriage in a country your citizens have no jurisdiction over, because I'm disappointed in your lack of holy war enthusiasm' then revelation should be an excluded epistemology.

Why?

Because it is my presupposition that what constitutes knowledge is predictive power. I can only claim to know how much money is in my wallet if I can accurately predict how much money I will find in there. 

Or as Matt Dillahunty of the Athiest Experience specifies - knowledge is a subset of beliefs, beliefs held with the highest degree of confidence. Athiest youtuber Paulogia offered me the criteria of 'adjudicated by predictive power.' 

"Confidence" comes etymologically speaking from the Latin "confidere" - to have full trust. In this sense mere confidence is insufficient by itself to establish knowledge. Confidence can be misplaced, my trust is predicated on predictive power.

But One Case Study: Standpoint Epistemology

Standpoint epistemology is basically as I can understand it, taking your subjective experience as sufficient to generate knowledge about reality. (This is complicated because I'm going to assume that standpoint theory is in the critical theory school that rejects notions like "objective reality").

Eye witness testimony is likely an example of standpoint epistemology. It is not a sound epistemology. For example, the biopic 'Hurricane' depicts a limitation of eyewitness testimony when witnesses are coached to identify Rubin Carter as perpetrator of an armed robbery. (and in reality all we know is that witnesses changed their accounts and were inconsistent with each other and their own testimony at different times). 

A more contemporary example is the witness testimony in the shooting of Michael Brown. 

I'm not sure that strictly speaking eye witness testimony is regarded in Academia as a subset or akin to standpoint epistemology. Regardless, witness testimony is something that has been heavily scrutinized through our judicial systems and by the field of psychology such that we know it is unreliable. Unsound.

For example there's Dr. Elizabeth Loftus' work on memory with the famous car collision experiments:

One of Loftus' first experiments, published in 1974, involved car accidents. In the lab she played videos of different incidents and then asked people what they remembered seeing. Their answers depended greatly on how she phrased the question.

For instance, if she asked how fast the cars were going when they "smashed" into each other, people estimated, on average, that the cars were going 7 mph faster than when she substituted the word "hit" for "smashed." And a week after seeing the video, those who were asked using the word "smashed" remembered seeing broken glass, even though there was none in the film. ~ sourced here

 There's inattentional blindness also. Which might combine with "What you see is all there is" Here's the famous invisible gorilla video:

and here's a scientific american overview of the limitations of eyewitness testimony relative to the weight given it by jurors.

How do we know about the issues with eyewitness testimony? Because it gets compared to sound epistemologies like empiricism. We can check its correspondence with reality. Its predictive power. For example an eyewitness identification of a perpetrator should predict their DNAs presence among the forensic evidence even decades after a trial.

Furthermore, as in the Michael Brown case, not only should witness testimony predict things like the amount and pacing of shots recorded on video devices, but it should also predict other eye witness testimony.

If you can keep witnesses independent before giving their statements, if this subjective measure was predictive of what happened, one eye witness account should largely predict the contents of another eye witness account. And as in the Brown case sometimes they do, but sometimes they don't. There's a phenomena documented called 'The Rashomon effect' to add to the pile.

So standpoint epistemology in its attempt to produce knowledge faces all the above problems/limitations of subjectivity. But here's some specific examples of its limitations.

I meet Rhonda at a party. When she shakes my hand she finds my intense stare creepy and intimidating, she notices how much I am sweating and that I mumble 'nice to meet you' in a cursory manner. From Rhonda's standpoint it is concrete evidence of men's objectification of women and failure to see her as an equal. Another day as a woman living under the patriarchy.

When later this characterizations of events are brought to my attention, I give my own accounts from my own standpoint - 

Before arriving at the party I ate my dinner of a Nuclear burrito. It was harrowing I couldn't get my mind off the burrito which was now sitting in my gut like two rabid weasels. I recall Jenny introducing me to someone, but at that stage all I could think of was escaping to a bathroom.

To get around this problem of subjectivity, or 'he-said-she-said' which is a real problem, instead of appealing to a sound epistemology, like I could have produced a receipt or bank statement for my burrito, or the person who waited 20 minutes outside the toilet could have corroborated my account. 

Of course this solution would end the potential conversation about patriarchal oppression, so instead near as I can determine standpoint theory overcomes these he-said-she-said or Rashoman problems by designating "epistemic privilege". Namely that some subjective standpoints count, and others don't. Some examples:

Kristina Rolin states that "the assumption of essentialism is that all women share the same socially grounded perspective in virtue of being women, the assumption of automatic epistemic privilege is that epistemic advantage accrues to the subordinate automatically, just in virtue of their occupying a particular social position."

The above is a fascinating excerpt, because to me it could read exactly as a description of why standpoint epistemology is unsound - it assumes essentialism and it assumes privilege. However I suspect it is meant to be descriptive. A counter example might be a passenger on a flight. The pilot of the plain has power over the lives of the passengers, who ultimately have to obey the pilot's demands - stay seated, fasten seatbelt, don't use the bathrooms, fit your oxygen mask first, abandon vessel etc. If geese fly into the jet engine and force an emergency landing, few people would recognize the subordinate passenger as having epistemic privilege over the pilot. Anyway, another example:

In Harding’s 1986 book The Science Question in Feminism, she distinguishes the idea of a standpoint from the more generic idea of a perspective with the requirement of political engagement: She argues that due to the political engagement of feminists and their active focus on the lives of women, it allows them to have an epistemically privileged “standpoint.”

Which to me reads as 'feminists know women better than any woman does by virtue of their political engagement.' Which may periodically or incidentally be true, I would have to see the argument to be compelled by it. 

 Now to be clear, its not like we can't know anything from subjective accounts. Documenting people's standpoints is highly worthwhile. Where standpoint epistemology serves as a "conversation starter" is privileging it over empiricism. When people start talking about 'truths' 'realities' 'my truth' 'your truth' or 'alternative facts'.

For example, on the recommendation of Youtuber 'Just Some Guy' I read the comic book series 'Excellence' which can be summarized as 'Coming 2 America' meets Harry Potter. The artwork is excellent, and while casting spells with magic wands isn't my bag, there's worldbuilding in there. But I'd say it is worth reading because it is worth having the standpoint of the creative team as data, it's good to know that like they think they have a true analogy of contemporary US society and race politics.

Alas, regardless of it being a true reflection of what the creators believe, there's little to no insight beyond 'this is what some people believe' to be found in the chapters that have to date been released.

Where something like standpoint epistemology approaches intelligence as a conversation starter, is very few people are trained to say 'wait, what epistemology are we using here?' and can get bamboozled by being told that asserting their own counternarrative or appealing to evidence is a form of oppression etc. 

It's also an epistemology that permits things that have also been ruled out by social sciences subjected to empiricism, like mind-reading is a big one.

Remedy

The remedy unfortunately will require cumulative acts of intestinal fortitude, and people who want a better tomorrow may be social casualties along the way.

The key phrase to counter a conversation starter is:

I reject your premise.

There's probably softer ways to word this, a nice one is the question 'is your belief falsifiable?' this was literally the first thing I asked of my anti-vax correspondent. He claimed yes, but that belief was in turn falsified and it took about 3 months of back and forth. 

If I were to obtain some sort of public profile such that I wound up sitting down for 'an evening with Joey Soloway' there's juicy interesting conversations that could start (I single out Joey because of this assertion made in their talk with Hannah Gadsby for the New Yorker festival, it's a handy example that comes to mind):

There's this thing that happens at parties where there's a guy and this woman is passed out and the guy wants to have sex with her because she's passed out and he calls his friend first. What's that about? [asked of cis male podcast hosts] and they just like go silent. [mimics nonwords] "...I don't know"

 I'm like "yeah you know" it's what men do with the degraded half of the divided feminine. They use it as an excuse. They use her passed-outness as a conduit to connect with other men sexually. Her passed-outness, her unconsciousness demands that they experience something sexually with another straight man. And it's her fault for not guarding her egg. ~ transcribed by me, sourced here.

It's such a fascinating conversation starter, but there likely isn't a conversation actually there unless I as a cis man am so completely out of touch and Joey somehow happens to be in touch.

Where any and all conversation of these social-science type discussions probably need to begin with is the question:

Is literary criticism a sound epistemology?

Or something like that. My example seems to be more a kind of Freudian analysis that presupposes a universal experience, and of course standpoint epistemology and mind reading. This circles right back to the transition from the basic form of "This doesn't occur in reality, but if we can ignore reality then we have something to talk about." to "We can ignore reality, so we have something to talk about."

In the above example we've skipped the part where we establish that this is a thing. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure date rape and taking advantage of drunk and passed out women is a thing. What is not established is that men who take sexual advantage over passed out women also habitually call their straight male friend and that with this addendum that's a universal male experience. 

But see! The conversation has started. 

What needs to happen is: 'fascinating insight, how did you establish any and all of the claims you just made?'

Afterword: Clarity

As near as I can guesstimate the real trick of conversation starters that approaches intelligence seems to be based on a propensity of some subset of people to render equal 'difficult to understand' with 'intelligent'. 

Here I have to posit, but cannot prove, the existence of a certain kind of person, that say when you try to explain the elliptical orbits of the planets around the sun and how that translates into the transit of Venus across the sky from the perspective of earth, they are hearing something true and factual, but they don't necessarily understand the explanation. They believe you because you seem to know what you are talking about.

They are using a rule-of-thumb their own kind of epistemology, that is: if an argument is too complex to understand accept the conclusion.

Which leaves this hypothetical person vulnerable to bamboozlement or idea smuggling.

It's annoying to engage in conversation or argument with someone about the safety of vaccines when they reject all the best data available to lay people off-hand, and instead favor anecdote but not just any anecdote only anecdotes that support the conclusion that the vaccines are dangerous.

It's another thing altogether to be arguing with someone who is spewing out nonsensical word salad, whether they be New Age Spiritualist, Christian Apologist, Bitcoin Enthusiast or Radical Leftist.

It is worse to be sent onerous 'reading material.'

The sum total of my experiences with these started conversations is that with time and energy and intense concentration they all say 'Assume we have a can opener'

It's hard to stand your ground and say 'I reject your premise' when you have no idea what it is they are saying.

So I return to Ryan Chapman again with his video on what constitutes a Good Argument, which is refreshingly informal while still being insightful. The last aspect of a good argument is on the subject of clarity. 

He winds that section up with a quote from Karl Popper, here's an expanded version that I feel also captures that heuristic of equating incomprehensibility with intelligence:

Many years ago I used to warn my students against the widespread idea that one goes to college in order to learn how to talk and
write 'impressively' and incomprehensibly. At the time many
students came to college with this ridiculous aim in mind, especially
in Germany. And most of those students who, during their
university studies, enter into an intellectual climate that accepts this
kind of valuation - coming, perhaps, under the influence of teachers
who in their turn had been reared in a similar climate - are lost. They
unconsciously learn and accept that highly obscure and difficult
language is the intellectual value par excellence. There is little hope
that they will even understand that they are mistaken, or that they
will ever realize that there are other standards and values - values
such as truth, the search for truth, the approximation to truth
through the critical elimination of error, and clarity. Nor will they
find out that the standard of 'impressive' obscurity actually clashes
with the standards of truth and rational criticism. For these latter
values depend on clarity. One cannot tell truth from falsity, one
cannot tell an adequate answer to a problem from an irrelevant one,
one cannot tell good ideas from trite ones, and one cannot evaluate
ideas critically-unless they are presented with sufficient clarity. ~ The Myth of The Framework, Chapter 3: Reason or Revolution?

In that sense there's been a long conversation going on about alternate epistemologies and 'other ways of knowing' that in itself really should have been over a long time ago; maybe in 1994 with Popper's Myth of the Framework, or Chomsky saying postmodernism consists of nothing but truisms and has no real content. 

No doubt earlier, but because that conversation is ongoing it has enabled a lot of conversations to start that shouldn't have.

This post on the other hand is over.

Maximillian 'Max' Jesus Esq.

 I don't share much of my life here in Mexico, and one reason (among many) is that I live a life now where most of my anecdotes are about dogs, kind of like when Reese joins a dog pack in Malcolm in the Middle. So brace yourself for a dog anecdote, but it was a win for us, well except for the dogs Doki and Usma who by-and-large didn't care.

It began with our usual morning walk. Though I go to pains to make sure these walks aren't routine, because as a house husband I try to maximise productivity through killing two birds with one stone we typically have two-and-a-half destinations for morning walks: the supermarket, the carneceria and/or the mercado which is opposite the carneceria.

For those 2.5 different destinations I have at least 10 different routes to take the dogs by so they get the intellectual stimulation of sniffing pee-stained walls that are different from the walls they sniffed yesterday.

Anyway, I'd taken the most straightforward route to the carneceria yesterday, and I'd padded out the shortened distance by stopping in our neighbourhood park we always have to cut through and throwing Doki's ball for fetch, while Usma grazes in a nearby garden bed selecting and eating the tastiest blades of grass. 

This gave our party of three the maximum chance to encounter a bunch of neighborhood dogs by virtue of standing still and letting them come to us. This created some minor chaos when it was time to leave with other people's dogs wanting to come with Doki and Usma and after some sorting we got the respective dogs all walking in the right direction.

This is so banal an occurrence that it is not anecdote worthy. I was making egg and bacon "McMuffins" so I stopped at a fairly shitty bakery "Croissants Alfredo" to pick up my favorite substitute for English Muffins. That's where our duo of dogs picked up another tagalong dog. 

Some vocabulary: Street dogs are dogs that get turned out by their owners because they are underfoot, or because the house is empty while parents are working and kids are at school, in Mexico, a bunch of dog owners just let their dogs lie out on the pavement and wander the streets as they please confident they will return home as per their routine. Stray dogs are dogs that live on the streets, nobody owns them, they are homeless. Stray dogs are rarer than homeless people, generally picked out by their mange. 

In Guadalajara, Mexico, in our 'Colony' or Suburb, Street dogs are neck-and-neck if not the majority of dogs compared to the less visible house dogs like ours and the few fellow dog-walkers I spot throughout the day.

In Australia, house dogs are the clear majority. Street dogs are almost non-existent because our councils function rather efficiently such that there's only so long your dog can wander streets unescorted before a nice person might check its collar for a contact number, or a precious busy-body calls the council to come pick it up. 

Thanks to a lack of interest and subsequent credulity in Catholicism, in Australia most pets have been desexed, are registered with the local council and possibly have a microchip in their ear. This is not the case in Mexico, which means that the majority of street dogs are male but more to the point, you can turn your dog out here and be reasonably confident nobody will pay it any mind.

I appreciate that while many street dogs are fine; in our neighborhood we are quite fond of street dogs Princessa, Whiskey, Blackie aka "Don Perro" and Pachino, enough street dogs are public nuisances that I have come to believe that having a system like Australia which renders street dogs non-viable is indeed social progress. (As is most dog owners being out of the breeding game via spading and neutering your dogs. We should read A LOT into animal rights groups like the RSPCA and PETA being so enthusiastic about taking away your pets reproductive rights.)

So at first, when Doki and Usma attracted a third collarless Chihuahua-mutt, I thought almost nothing of it. One of the most immediate things I find annoying is when street dogs are latching onto our dogs and they do a shit in front of witnesses. Because I walk Usma and Doki off leashes, I am self-conscious that people will assume the tagalong dog is also mine. There's also good odds I'm carrying a bag of shit and I can read the confusion on my neighbors faces when I clearly do pick up dog shit but refuse to pick up the shit a dog in my company did in front of their house. 

Which is what the collarless street dog did as soon as I got out of Croissants Alfredo. But whatever, I walked two doors down to tie my dogs up out the front of the carneceria and head in to chat to Gustavo and buy biscuits for Ale, bacon for our "McMuffins" and an iced tea for me. The dogs are making a minor motherfucking ruckus being tied up and still being bothered by this collarless street dog.

This in hindsight is the part I feel most terrible about, but in my mind this dog strikes me as in the annoying street dog category.

An annoying street dog is the kind that ignore all the signals Usma and/or Doki have had enough of having their buttholes and bits sniffed now. 

So I unleashed Doki and Usma, which allows them to flee attention and thus makes them less snarly and barky and snappy, and then I tried to shepherd this street dog off. 

It was "one of those" though that would not just reluctantly head off in the opposite direction but try and sneak around an obstacle like a parked car. Also not helpful when I'm shepherding is that Doki aka "Doofus" and Usma aka "Dawdler" don't take advantage of my ability to physically intimidate street dogs (one of my messages to Alejandra she enjoyed most this year was "I chased off this dog and it fled today, I felt like a big man.") and put some distance between them and the annoying street dog. This was one of those kinds where Doofus and Dawdler decided instead to come and investigate what I was doing, trying to shoo this dog away.

So I gave up and we just walked home, with the street dog following us the whole way. In retrospect, the failure of my shooing strategy was the first clue I wasn't dealing with a street dog, as maybe it's reluctance to let go of Doki and Usma's walk was that it had nowhere to go.

Up until we got home, absolutely nothing was noteworthy. There was a annoying + size = menace street dog I dubbed 'Lonely Boy' for example, that wouldn't leave our dogs alone, I couldn't shoo or shepherd away but closing our front door on it gave it enough pause for thought to find someone else to bother.

This dog didn't move on. Sparing it no thought after I got home, I started to hear howling.

Dogs howling is pretty rare. My dogs growing up Lil and Bess rarely barked, and never howled. You've almost certainly heard dogs bark and dogs whine, but maybe not howling:

So this story was a win, and this was really when Max won it. By behaving out of the ordinary, he just hung out at the front of our house, howling.

It was unusual, and just as an aside but it reminds me of those moronic morality plays that probably still populate youtube, tiktok etc. In fact I know they do, because I tried to find an example on Youtube and I just refuse to watch or share videos with titles like "Undercover billionaire changes homeless man's life (shocking!!!)" even if they have 6.7M views already. But the one's I think of are where the playwright is trying to prove something by having a homeless person ask for change and show how many people ignore them or get annoyed with them, then they dress them as a business person and have him ask for change and almost everyone is willing to help them out.

The moral is I'm guessing something like 'don't judge people by appearances' or 'look how awful/hypocritical people are' and I've always maintained, these morality plays prove nothing. If anything it's just that people with limited information manage their scarce resources by giving small amounts of money to problems that can be solved by small amounts of money and they don't small amounts of money to problems that will likely be sustained by small amounts of money. If that's too cryptic, I'd restate it as this:

A person who looks like they sleep rough asking for change is not in any way shape or form irregular or unusual. In many cities of the world, it is not unusual to be asked for change by people who appear to be sleeping rough multiple times without crossing a street. It is relatively rare to come across someone who appears to be gainfully employed asking for change. It is even rare to give such a person small amounts of money and then turn around to see them ask the next person to walk past for a small amount of change. So the big difference is, that one stereotype will not be satiated by pocket change, the other stereotype can be reasonable expected to be satiated. We can conclude that people are generally happy to help, but are wary of futility.

So Max gets credit for being a business man asking for small change. He differentiated himself from the run-of-the-mill street dog by camping on our doorstep and howling, cueing myself and our neighbours into paying attention and trying to figure out what was wrong.

My first theory was that he wasn't particularly bright, and had gotten lost by following Doki and Usma's buttholes. So I tried to lead him back to the park and he wouldn't follow me. I knew we needed to go to the supermarket latter to get lunch stuff and I'd take the dogs so we'd try again then, hoping he'd follow Usma and Doki back to the park and then remember where home was and go there, or at the least, take an interest in some other dog and leave our street and stop howling.

The howls did stop, so I assumed he'd moved on. And he had, he'd moved three doors up and was just chilling in the shade of a tree.

I tried the next plan a little later when I took the dogs to our local supermarket, but he wouldn't follow. He came down to sniff Doki and Usma, but would not follow and leave our street. He retreated. 

When we returned 45 minutes later, a Senor from the factory opposite our house where our landlord/neighbor borrows ladders to climb onto our roof and into her house when she forgets her keys came to tell me the dog had been howling, and I clarified that it wasn't one of mine and I don't know where it's from but by this stage it had been hanging out for four or five hours on our street. 

Another man from further up our street brought it dog chow in a bag and I put out a container of water. This guy tried to coax it into eat and drink but he wouldn't let anyone near him. I started to suspect some kind of trauma, and it also ruled out the prospect of me picking him up and carrying him to the park.

I messaged Ale who was now out getting her laptop repaired to tell her it was like living in the puppy's first howling video. Ale said she was walking home from the train station, so I decided to try luring him back to the park again with Usma who was really not keen on a third walk for the day (it's 30-32 degrees Celsius every afternoon for like the next 4 months here) but I dragged her on the leash and this time I was successful and Max followed us.

We ran into Ale just around the corner of our house a few hundred meters from the park, Ale suggested we all go to the park and hope he would follow us. She had asked at Michoacana's (the biggest icecream and milkshake franchise in Mexico where you can get a litre of sugar for AUD$1.40) if anyone had been around asking after this dog, and they'd said no. 

We got to the park, and Ale had obtained somewhere a Jack Link's stick of jerky and managed to get him to eat from her hand. I said ambiguously 'well he's following us home now' and then Usma pushed herself in front of him as if to say 'hey! where's my jerky?' 

After some sitting, Max howled, which moved Ale's jerky clogged heart and she decided to ask the staff at Croissants Alfredo if they recognized or knew the dog. When she came back she reported that they'd seen him around but didn't know who he belonged to. Ale said there's a facebook page for our neighborhood and she posted a 'is this your dog? come and get him.' post there, before scrolling down and spotting him!...in another 'is this your dog? come and get him.' post made by our neighbors three doors up where he'd been chilling all afternoon.

Now, some more Mexican culture, in Australia if you were to ask 'is your dog a rescue?' it would be implied that someone had adopted that dog from a dog shelter - the "rescue" part is that we rescued a dog being cared for from being humanely euthanised, to manage shelter capacity.

In Mexico if a dog is a rescue, that means somebody took a street/stray dog home and started caring for it. I'm not sure if it's even a 1 step process (my rough translation 1. approach slowly and pat it. 2. take it home and love it):

photo credit: Instagram.com/Soy_DogVader

And Max was endearing, I was feeling the name 'Sparky' at this point, and we could take on another dog but we were not the first and best option compared to someone who was considering getting a dog at this point. So Ale created a post on her personal page to see if anyone wanted to adopt this dog we'd found.

Then one of the Park locals, walked past with one of his three dogs that I don't know by name but certainly see on an almost daily basis. Ale asked him if he knew our mystery dog. He said he did, that he lives around here and he'd previously tried to walk him home but he doesn't want to go home.

With this confident response, my perception shifted - we were dealing with a street dog with an extremely shitty owner. It was a big relief though because it now just seemed a matter of time before word would drive the owner to come pick up their dog and any residents of our street would have the opportunity to give him a piece of their fucking mind.

In fact, this is where on balance despite my affections for Princessa, Whiskey, Blackie and Pacino on balance street dogs are a nuisance. The best argument I can think for the practice is that it is potentially more humane than trapping a dog indoors for hours with no real stimulation. But to use economic speak, street dogs are an externality, it is abdicating an owners responsibility for a dog onto the community, whether that means having to slow down in order not to hit the dog as it crosses roads, or other dog walkers having to chase off or otherwise get rid of your dog when there's no owner there to call them, or the people who tend to the park that have to pick up after your dog or the residents that have to clean up after your dog because you don't.

Even the street dogs I like, likely have a shortened life expectancy greater than strays but shorter than house dogs. Lula, not quite a street dog but a shop dog, recently died because she got into a fight with other street dogs.

So through the unproductive heat of the afternoon Ale and I settled down to eat our belated lunch. I should point out that all the while that Max took refuge on our step, or the step 3 doors up and howling, we were constantly checking on him. I was feeling it inevitable that he'd wind up in our house when the sun went down if Max's irresponsible owner didn't turn up to collect him.

Ale was thinking a good name for him would be Chato ("Flat") because she thought he was a Chihuahua-Boxer cross. Then she got a message, and that's how we found out Sparky/Chato's name was Max.

Max had gotten lost and wound up almost 5km from home, 4 days after he went missing before happenstance had him glom onto Usma, Doki and my morning walk. 

Max had stopped howling because three doors up our neighbors with a dog called Matilda were out on their stoop comforting him. They'd also successfully coaxed Max into being patted and was securely purched on a lap receiving constant reassurance.

We informed them of Max's name and then Ale compared notes on the timeline of Max's adoption of our street. After about 20 minutes, Max's family arrived to pick him up.

Relieving such a state of anxiety both in dog and man, is a very sweet thing. I'm sure none of us wanted to budge for the payoff of witnessing a lost dog reunited with his owners. 

In a testimony to Usma's seperation anxiety, Max's response to seeing his owners after 4 days living on the streets was very subdued compared to Usma's response to seeing Ale after an hours separation.

While Max was cradled in the daughter's arms, we got the missing pieces of Max's puzzle.

One of the daughter's of the family, not present had taken Max with her to Morelos Park, 5km to the North of us. She carried him, meaning that Max wasn't well oriented to where home was relative to the destination, a Michoacan opposite the Park. She'd left him to wait outside while she got her sugar fix, and some pendejo kicked Max, causing him to panic and flee. That was the last they'd seen of him.

He'd then wound up heading South instead of West and kept on heading. 4.2km via unknown route to wind up where, credit where credit's due, he'd found us. 

His owners speculated that the neighbors three doors up from us, had a front door that looked a lot like theirs and that's probably why he got attached to it in particular. Even down to the DIY dog flap of unattached fly-screen. 

This happy ending, needs to be remembered as an ordeal that ended in relief, a precious second chance. I recall, every time, with annoyance, a former colleague of mine describing an incident to me where her smart phone got snatched but some hoodlums in the Melbourne CBD who then ran straight into some police officers and she described it as a real 'God moment'. All affection I have for my former colleague aside, she knows we have this point of disagreement, but I recall sharing reassuring glances of incredulity with colleagues in the break room to this attribution.

Presumably, should the hoodlums have got away clean with her phone, this would simply not be a 'God moment' but something else. God's presence or absence oddly coinciding with the presence or absence of a tax-funded public institution that has been refined over centuries in an ongoing scientific process. 

And of course, God gets credit aparantly for putting police on a street corner, but not for putting thieving hoodlums there to steal the phone. Or maybe those hoodlum's life purpose in the eyes of our Creator is to afford one of the devout a truly trivial demonstration that God's there and he cares. Just as he cares and loves for the young people who were predestined to live the kind of life that motivates phone snatchings. If only they'd open their hearts to Christ... their life could be marginally better.

And so too, Max was unlucky that some cunt kicked him. He was lucky to run into myself and the other dog lovers that populate our street. He could have run west and got his bearings and only be missing for one or two hours tops, or located the next day as the search began with posters in his home neighborhood. He could have run North or East and I'd never know his story, but it quite probably would have worked out the same. 

He could have been very unlucky and met someone worse than someone who kicks a dog, because there are people who murder dogs for whatever unfathomable reason. He could have been hit by cars crossing the indeterminate number of streets he crossed before I got to him. He could have been lucky and his owners unlucky if somebody just liked the look of him and adopted him in the one-to-two-step-process of Mexican 'rescues' making no effort to determine if anyone was missing or looking for him.

Then there's all the matters that weren't luck. It's not luck that I strongly empathise and sympathise with dogs, to the point they hack my brain and take over my faculties. I feel terrible about trying to shoo Max away, given the ordeal he was going through. 

It wasn't luck that Max had no collar, dramatically increasing his vulnerability to being lost for prolonged periods. It wasn't luck that Max didn't know his way home. Small as he is, he is clearly capable of walking up to 5km. 

It also wasn't luck that Max's behavior drew attention and resources to his plight. A quick google tells me dog's were domesticated somewhere between 14,000 to 29,000 years ago, or 2.3 to 4.8 times a young earth creationists duration of all existence. Staying on our street and howling was by far the biggest contributing factor to Max's rescue.

And there's the incomprehensible, the black box of what a dog is thinking. Did Max end up in our park via a random walk? Was he incompetently thinking he recognized landmarks all the way and stopped in our neighborhood on the 4th day in a state of confusion. On the morning of publishing this article, I ran a 9km round trip to the park where he went missing and back to my house. 

It seems "truly" a "miracle" that four days later Max was in my local park. I don't know when he actually arrived, he could have been there all the previous day. It's just that the journey is simple but not straight forward, as in straight, forward. A major freight line needs crossing, then there's major 4 lane arterial roads, two of them, before you get to our sleepy neighbourhood tucked behind the bread and cake factory. In the backstreets there's so many opportunities for unfriendly dogs to send a lost dog off in random directions.

Of course the odds of a shuffled deck of playing cards coming out in any order is astronomically small (literally 1/(8x10^67), or more than there atoms on planter earth) yet we know the cards have to come out in some order. Just so, it's lucky Max ended up in one of the times and places that would lead to his owners finding him, but there's probably less outcomes of where a stray dog can wind up after four days in Guadalajara.

If I locked myself out of my house and forgot my wallet and Ale was away making rain through the power of dance and my housemate was competing in Roller Derby and my landlord was visiting a relative, I would get hungry. 

Dog's don't have this problem. The streets of Guadalajara offer an abundance of calories if you are willing to eat off the ground and out of Garbage bags. The climate is also friendly to homelessness this time of year. 

Factoring in as much as I can to the limits of my imagination, the outcome of a lost dog story in Guadalajara is: Random. Once you lose control, it is reasonable to do what you can and maintain hope.

It might seem then, that the story is much the same in Australia. The thing is, somewhere between every week and every month in my Mexican neighborhood new 'Se Busca/Have you seen' posters go up for missing dogs. It was a rarity when I lived in Kew, between one and three a year. 

I speculate that the 'have you seen' posters in a city like Melbourne have a much lower ratio of happy endings. Once it comes to the putting up posters stage, things are not looking good. (You still should though, during the lockdowns a local music store had their cat disappear, he was returned after three months, don't know what the story was, I never have a reason to go in there.)

But that's because I would also speculate that 1) your dog isn't on the streets all day everyday to begin with. 2) your dog is not going to be confused with a street dog and paid no mind. 3) if a local doesn't take an interest in the unescorted dog in their street, the council will.

So most dog escapes in Melbourne, Australia are resolved very quickly, maybe before you've even had a chance to notice your dog was missing. 

Before the fact of your dog going missing, you'd probably rather be a dog owner in Australia. After the fact, it's probably better to be a dog owner in Mexico. In Mexico you've probably got a 50/50 shot of finding your dog after days or even weeks. It's just instead of the dual efficiencies of the rarity of stray dogs making them conspicuous and having a bunch of council workers regularly driving through your local streets, it's probably going to get into the system and back to you.

An Australian might widen their search parameters by visiting an ever increasing diameter of animal shelters, Max's family had to widen the net through like, actual detective work, following leads until they stumbled on rumors he'd been spotted in our suburb, and then checked our neighborhood's facebook page.

Mexico is how things work in a libertarian worldview.

So we run into the shortfalls of not requiring a dog-ownership license. Mexico has a dog culture that I imagine Australia hasn't had since the 50s or 60s (including racist dog names). Our household is on the frontier of the new school of 'pets as surrogate children' model that dominates Australian urban dog ownership. 

Plenty of owners clearly mentally categorize dogs as distinct from family members, something I now struggle to comprehend. They are something between house plant and family member. It's likely many dogs in Mexico are owned first and foremost as home security measures and secondarily as domestic pets.

Max is a family member, but I'm guessing he gets carried a lot, picked up a lot. Of course he's a lapdog, but I feel Usma is less vulnerable to winding up in a strange neighborhood 5km away. (Though clearly more vulnerable to having her amygdala seize control of her control levers and running her straight under a vehicle).

Because there's a spectrum of dog ownership, rather than a binary. I feel dog owners need to think of their dogs as selectively bred captives. You have a moral obligation to look after their mental health, not to thrust that upon them because you wanted a dog but feel they need to appreciate the realities of the modern gig economy.

Dog's don't quite get the recent innovation of cars. They probably had horses figured out as a trampling hazard, but even born after the advent of TikTok dog's are slow adopters of technology. They need mental and physical stimulation through regular walks along novel routes. The added perk of this is that they will know how to get home.

My first dog Lil was too smart for her own good, that and my dad was not smart enough to weld a Lil proof latch on our backyard gate. She was able to push it open with her nose and regularly not so much 'escaped' as 'took herself for walks' she only went missing once and was found the next day. My friend Hayden conveyed that news to me at school. 

But usually we would get reports from neighbours of seeing her sitting waiting for it to be safe to cross the road to Lake Wendouree. 

Anyway, the point is dogs can learn, and perhaps most controversially, learn to cope somewhat with independence. They can learn their neighbourhoods and learn to walk off leash. In Australia, most councils are able if not obliged to fine you for not having your dog on the leash, but in 15 years of owning Bess I got one warning despite walking her off-leash every day.

I approve of the law though as a deterrent, the best argument being that no driver can be expected to know my dog isn't going to run out into its path and if they don't fancy killing a dog; are forced to slow down just by being in proximity. And there are no dog licenses, so there's no way anyone can reasonably expect any dog owner to have any control over or instill any discipline in their dogs. Giving council workers discretionary powers to issue fines based on the behaviors of dogs and owners is probably the ideal arrangement.

Again, I feel that Max's owners are loving, doting owners as evidenced by the efforts they went to to track Max down. They did their necessary part to recover Max. I also don't know the lap-dog/toy breed too well in terms of temperament and what not. 

So in no way shape or form do I want to confuse or conflate Max's owners with what I want to touch on next, which is what I will call the 'Narcissistic Owner'.

I use the weighty term 'Narcissistic' deliberately, with the plague Narcissists are upon the economy. People defined specifically to be hyper sensitive to and motivated by esteem, with little to no sensitivity to their cognitive or affective empathy.

To clarify what I, and potentially only I (because I'm not a qualified psychotherapist), mean by the prefix 'narcissistic' is that it is the plague of people who want to be a supervisor, a team leader, a manager, a C-suite executive, a CEO, a doctor, a surgeon, a founder, an entrepreneur, an influencer without wanting to deliver any of the value (do the work) those positions entail. They just want the good table at the restaurant, the attention, adulation, the salary, the perks etc.

And for a narcissistic owner, they want a dog, they don't want to pick up after it, take it for regular walks, take it for novel walks, take it for sufficient walks, take it to the vet, pay the vet bills etc.

Again Max's owners, are not the kid from 'The Puppy That Lost It's Way' they near tirelessly sleuthed and hit the pavements and the socials to find Max. 

However, this is a problem for dogs worldwide. Narcissistic owners disregard the interests and incomprehension of their pets in the same was as narcissistic employees disregard the interests of their subordinates, their managers, the shareholders and the community.

I do think given dogs capacity to learn, that owners have a responsibility to educate them just as they do with a child. 

I've already mentioned my suspicion that the influence of Catholicism might have something to do with why so many street dogs aren't spade or nuetred here. Paradoxically, I'm also thinking the influence of Catholicism may have something to do with the culture of dogs in general - in Mexico I feel people empathize less with dogs. 

There are certainly dog lovers and enthusiasts, but there also appears numerous people who regard dogs as meat machines, rather than thinking, feeling creatures. Australian philosopher Peter Singer talks about an expanding circle of empathy, that we as a species should continue to care about people on the other side of the world, and maybe one day care about people that will live in the future, and eventually all animals.

I suspect Mexico has a slightly more contracted circle of empathy, where dogs are just another beast God gave those he made in his image dominion over. 

It was nice to see Max's howls mobilize our street to attempt to feed him, take care of him and find his or a suitable home for him. A country like Australia has largely legislated and regulated empathy for dogs in, such that our largest concern are likely Narcissistic owners. 

Anyway, after Max was safely off back home, Alejandra and I celebrated a rare double high five, so Max's story was a win. Our neighbors three doors up, did say 'see you next time.' when they said goodbye to Max. So this story might have a sequel, and that sequel might suck. But I think it will be quite some time before Max's owners get anywhere near complacent. 

As for the dickwad that kicked Max. Well, your story can't be going that well if you are kicking a dog minding its own business.

Approximating Intelligence 1: Monkey See, Monkey Do

Perhaps in your life you've experienced being on either end of a comment like:

"You haven't read 'Harry Potter'?!"/"You can't use chopsticks?!"/"You can't swim?!"/"You've never flown in a plane?!"/"You don't have a credit card?!" etc.

These incredulous statements tend to arise, I assert, because someone has overestimated the life-or-death importance in the activity/skillset in question. 

'Esteem' is a perennial curiosity to me, because I believe there are people who literally cannot imagine how one could survive a situation like showing up to school/work/party and discovering that everyone else has seen, read or eaten something that they have not and are presently discussing it. This post however is not about esteem, rather this post is about how over valued and over diagnosed understanding is.

So in testimony to my own stupidity, I realize I created an ambiguous title 'approximating intelligence' that I'm going to use, because I don't know what intelligence is. It's something. I don't know if I could define it. Something something pattern recognition, something something recalling and applying, something something predictive power.

But also, the subject of this post is a hueristic I label as 'Monkey See, Monkey Do.' and for me it is a puzzle piece, I suspect it may even be a corner piece, to getting a picture of what the fuck is going on in the world.

Setting monkeys aside. Let's start with bears. Specifically a bear that has made its presence known to two suddenly unhappy campers. As the old joke goes, one of the campers starts putting on his running shoes, and the other camper says 'you really think you can outrun a bear?' and the one in his running shoes says 'I don't have to outrun a bear, I only have to outrun you.'

This joke illustrates a situation where even a small advantage (running slightly faster) translates into a huge disparity of outcome (survivors guilt vs being mauled to death by a bear, or if you will: being able to run a split second faster predicts a difference in life-expectancy of 50 years).

My feeling, (please note, not my robust finding) is that intelligence is not one of these factors where a slight advantage in intelligence produces disproportionately large differences in outcomes.

This might be encapsulated by the saying 'if you're so smart, how come you ain't rich?' which in itself is an extraordinarily dumb thing to ask, as it demonstrates a lack of basic observation skills. At the same time, it isn't surprising that this saying exists given psychological phenomena like the illusion of superiority, the illusion of control and the just world hypothesis, among others.

To try and be clear, for example, I do not think that IQ (or 'G') is a synonym for intelligence, just a proxy. Probably the best proxy for intelligence psychometrics has to offer. My limited understanding is that IQ can explain about 20% of a person's career success, and that that is one of the best predictors we have. 

To try and put it in layman's terms, if someone is smart, and they work hard (the next best predictor is conscientiousness/industriousness) then it gives them maybe a 30% chance that their career will work out better than a colleague that starts working the same day who is dumb and lazy.

So just using IQ as a proxy measure of intelligence, and keeping the context to employee careers, yes, smart, hard working employees are the ones to bet on, but it isn't by any means a sure thing. We can tentatively conclude that firms are not efficient at promoting intelligent employees.

Bringing us to Monkeys. 

I recently listened to an Audiobook of Terry Pratchett's 'Men at Arms' a novel in the Discworld series that functions kind of like a detective novel, or police procedural. It has a good example of why advantages in intelligence don't translate into massive advantages in life. Leonard of Quirm invents a handheld firearm, something previously unknown to that world. In a world without guns, the first gun is a gamechanger and it took a genius to invent it. But when asked by his employer, Leonard admits that it wouldn't take a genius to replicate his gun, they could just copy his design.

Another example is 'Moneyball', I was listening to a recent episode of the Michael Shermer Show a podcast about skepticism, and I can't remember which one it was, because I've watched a bunch of them. But the host asked a question about the game theory of Moneyball, and the guest responded that that was why the Oakland Athletics were no longer competitive. They had an advantage when they first (and were the first) realized Major League Baseball completely mispriced its players, but now all the other clubs have been forced to imitate Oakland Athletics pricing model, and the market now reflects value again.

Intelligence might convey an advantage of 'insight' but 'Monkey See, Monkey Do' can mitigate the advantage of insight.

In other words, and in summary: You don't have to be intelligent, just recognize intelligence.

This saying 'Monkey See, Monkey Do' appears to be quite ancient, but I was first exposed to it as a 'life-hack' sitting on the carpet during story time at my primary school library (at least as far as my decaying recollection can place it, it could have been a book I borrowed from the library or my older brother and read at home.) I do not know the book, but it was in the same vein as a Morris Gleitzman book like 'Blabber Mouth', 'Sticky Beak' or 'Worry Warts'. I would be grateful to anybody who can scratch my itch and recall the story I'm referring to:

The protagonist was a young boy who was illiterate, not so young that illiteracy would be natural though. This boy couldn't read menus at fast food outlets, so he had to get around the ordering process while being unable to read he waited and listened for someone to order an approximation of what he wanted and then called out 'same again!' I can't remember anything else but this exposition at the beginning of the book, but it at least as a workable solution to a disability, made an impression on me. 

In my own case, in younger, less environmentally conscious years I journeyed through a number of major transport hubs. Around the world transport hubs are magnets for predatory business models that target uninformed tourists. I have been successfully scammed twice thanks to my own stupidity, but was fortunate to only lose inconsequential amounts of money and time. But the 'Monkey See, Monkey Do' is a tool I can employ to lower my risk of being scammed.

Basically follow the herd, marching confidently through the terminal in lockstep with people, presumably locals, who look like they know what they are doing until I am outside the perimeter of spruikers of unlicensed taxis, rooms to rent etc. This method often delivers me to an official cab rank, or bus stop, complementary shuttle service or connecting metro train line when signage isn't clear. One can use this heuristic to find restaurants, night life, locate a market or entrance to an attraction. Something called 'Zen Navigation' in the original BBC adaptation of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, where you simply follow somebody who looks like they know where they are going.

I'm of an age where I can remember when the first season of 'Survivor' aired. In that first season, Rich was the eventual winner. He won because he formed a voting alliance. They met in private, discussed who they would vote off and then stuck to it. In the first season, literally none of the other contestants thought of this. I remember finding it painful to watch the other contestants come to the realization that other contestants were coordinating their votes. Everybody outside of the three in the voting alliance were turning up to tribal council and voting for who they individually felt deserved to go based on recent events, such as performance in the latest immunity challenge.

By season two, voting alliances were pretty much mandatory, and have remained so since, (although admittedly I haven't watched the most recent 214 seasons) to the point that they pretty much nullified the advantage Rich enjoyed.

Yeah, there's Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, the Google dudes, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos that translated an advantage in intelligence into stupendous wealth. But I suspect that's what that 20% explanatory power of IQ translates into plus the exception, rather than the rule of Intellectual Property (IP). If IQ were A) not a proxy but a synonym for intelligence and B) highly predictive of success, we could almost infer from the success of the various Silicone Valley Tech Billionaires that they would have very high IQ scores, the highest in fact.

Controlling for that though, I predict the real world outcome would be that the richest people in Tech do not possess the highest IQs, even within their own companies and that we would find individuals with equal IQs to billionaires, who work in laundromats. 

I'm going to consider a different billionaire now however, being Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Because he articulated a variation on Monkey See, Monkey Do, which I might think of as 'Monkey Do' without the necessity of 'Monkey See'. Taleb calls it 'The Green Lumber Fallacy' which is written up on Farnham st which tells me it is a 5 minute read.

Strictly speaking, the Green Lumber fallacy cautions us not to conflate good talkers with good doers. As such good 'doers' aka practitioners may actually possess knowledge that "expert" commentators don't. But my first impression was the observation that people do not need to understand, in order to do and do successfully.

Perhaps a good example is money. Do people know what money is? Contemporary to writing this, I'm living in a world where people are struggling to navigate both crypto-"currencies" and concepts like inflation. Yet most people can successfully navigate life, obtaining food, clothing, shelter and even leisure by generally selling their time and energy in exchange for an increasingly abstract convention.

Conservative Economist Thomas Sowell brought my attention to the recurring prank of 'Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide' where people frequently fail to understand that Di(two)hydrogen Mon(one)oxide(oxygen) is a synonym for H2O or 'water'. One of the more impressive applications of the prank was putting 'Caution! Contains Hydrogen' warning signs on a public fountain to prevent people from swimming in it. Which again, there's almost no necessity for understanding the chemical composition of water to successfully coexist with water, though yes, many people drown. 

All of this is just to lay out the idea that people can get very far in life without understanding how. I think this idea is what gives me such a distaste for successoligists, (people who study successful people as though anyone can reproduce that success).

So the benefits of intelligence are hard to hoard. We need it, why? because the environment changes, we may need intelligence as a kind of communal good to protect us from intelligence that is changing our environment - think of technological innovation followed by regulation. 

Then enters a historical event like a global pandemic. I feel an event like this (but not limited to, see also: economic downturns, wars, crop failures, wildfires etc.) is disruptive specifically of the status quo, of routines and this in turn washes out just how much of the population simply do not understand their own lives.

The threshold of understanding might be that if they turn up to work consistently enough, they will have pay deposited into their account but they may not understand that their pay is connected to the operation of the institution they work for. (Author Jeffrey J Fox in his 1998 book 'How to Become CEO' suggested having pay stubs printed with the reminder 'your wage is paid for by our customers') They understand that their bank card can draw down the balance of their bank account and this needs to be managed between paycheck to paycheck but they may not understand how the price of goods and services is determined. (I used to have a colleague that complained that the price of petrol goes up but they don't put our wages up to pay for it.) People might understand that they have a balance of days they are entitled to not show up for work, and that they can call on this along with their bank balance to take a holiday to Bali, or "Hipster Bali" (Japan) once a year for a couple of weeks, something they understand to make their jobs endurable but they may not understand that a vast web of agreements underpinned by a vast number of conditions being met facilitate their ability to move from country to country.

So borders close, offices close, whole industries experience a collapse in demand (travel agents and insurers in Australia) and others experience surges in demand (ICU hospital beds in New York, Milan etc.) leading to collapse.

Here we have been intimately connected to our ancestors, and there is I feel plenty of circumstantial evidence to bolster my assertion that many people can lead successful lives without understanding their own lives at all: Panic buying, Quackery, Covid orphans, and poor people withdrawing from superannuation to buy crap.

Evolution moves slowly, such that, if we travelled back 700 years we could transplant a 5 year old child of the Vijayanagra South India Empire into a Finnish or Norwegian public school and they would have every chance of becoming a Theoretical Physicist or Blockchain coder than the kids next to them.

We can get 'okay boomer' type illusions from observing our parents inability to keep pace with new technologies like the automobile, typing, email, touchscreens, wireless network printers, predictive text, q-codes etc. but this I feel is more a product of 'Monkey See, Monkey Do' over time.

We like our prehistoric-preagrarian ancestors live by finding a niche. We try to understand until we understand how to survive. Then we stop expending valuable calories on understanding things. 

And we know our ancestors must have survived without understanding. Appendicitis is likely to kill any person who cannot safely perform surgery. That's a very recent thing. I would have died age 10 if not for people understanding how to cut open my abdomen and remove an inflamed appendage without me dying from shock.

We are the descendants of people who found a supply of fresh water, and a fairly low risk way to obtain calories. People that historically were entirely at the mercy of: plagues, droughts, earthquakes, forest fires, floods, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Vikings, Rus, Mongols, Islam, Qin, Han, Japanese, Mayans, Mexica, Comanches, the French, the Dutch, the English, the Spanish etc. etc.

The key words being 'at the mercy of' because mercy exists, it's just that you are unlikely to have any agency over the situation. Contemporarily many, if not most vaccine-hesitant (though at this point is it really fair to characterize it as "hesitation") won't die from Covid, they are just at the mercy of Covid to an extent far greater than those with two or three doses of a safe and effective vaccine.

I contend, that a large number of people still basically live this way, and they can still live this way in 2021 because 'Monkey See, Monkey Do' permits one to accommodate all the inventions of intelligence.

I guess what goes wrong, is when Monkey See, Monkey Do steers you into a comfortable niche, and you forget that you got into your comfort zone by following others who looked like they knew what they were doing. 

Then something changes.

And you have no idea why your niche is now a very vulnerable wide open space with buzzards circling overhead.

But yeah, that's the first puzzle piece: understanding is not necessary to live a relatively successful life.

Youtube Curation: Public and Private Imbeciles

 You are probably familiar, or at least have been exposed to the concept of 'public intellectual' other terms might be 'science communicator' or the prefix 'pop' as in 'popular' as in 'pop-psychologist' 'pop-philosopher'. 

A term I've recently felt increasingly necessary is 'public imbecile' and in the case of an alarmingly growing number of 'public intellectuals' a more accurate moniker.

I wish to briefly clarify this idea though. Imagine you were obstructed by a big wall. It was plastered over and painted white and tapping on it didn't tell you anything about its underlying construction. You start to think 'maybe if I just took a run up and charged at it, I could just smash through.'

Enter the 'public imbecile' in this case a one-tonne Spanish bull. It charges at the wall obstructing you both and crashes into it head first knocking itself out and not even making a scratch or indentation in the wall.

Now you are thinking 'shit, if the bull can't smash through the wall, I'm not going to.'

The public imbecile in my view is somebody who can serve the valuable function of teaching the public humility. A public imbecile is basically a 'public intellectual' + humility. 

At the beginning of the pandemic I recall Warren Buffet (one of the world's richest men, and I believe the most successful investor ever) being interviewed on the pandemic, and he is good friends with Bill Gates having willed most of his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation (prior to their divorce and the Jeffrey Epstein affiliations) and he mentions that he was talking with Bill Gates about the pandemic and that he, Warren Buffet, just listens to people that are smarter than him like Bill.

Then he demonstrates a rare and amazing piece of discipline, the journalist asks him what Bill said and Buffet replies 'I shouldn't say, and you shouldn't be asking.'

Tom Nichols author of 'The Death of Expertise' writes to my own sensibilities when in his Politico Article he states:

And [experts] too easily fall prey to the arrogance of believing that their expertise in one subject can be applied to almost any issue—especially if there’s a healthy paycheck involved.

 A temptation that Buffet, an expert investor resists when he decides not to comment on epidemiology.

One experience of the Covid pandemic years for me, has been watching public intellectuals join the esteemed rank of Isaac Newton, famous for physics, but also the go-to example of how someone super intelligent can lose their entire fortune through malinvestment. 

First came the Weinstein brothers, I am speaking hyperbolically, but they almost immediately went insane. I wrote a whole thing about how Eric was rubbing me the wrong way, but by way of introducing the second video, I want to describe what happened to me with Brett Weinstein.

It was an intuition, there was something aesthetically off about he and his wife Heather Haying sitting in their studio that looks like a basement reading through the pre-print servers of medical papers to an anonymous audience distributed around the world. Their intelligence is not in question, but they exhibited enough behaviors to indicate they weren't really 'in touch' for a lack of a better phrase and that furthermore I got no impression that they had considered who their audience was.

There's a great and telling podcast clip between Tom Green and Joe Rogan where Tom puts his finger right on the nerve, that people listen to Joe, and he isn't an expert on anything but his own standup act. (He probably couldn't explain why his podcast is so succesful such that someone else could reproduce it).

So the first curation is good old Jordan Peterson who I have almost no surprise needs inaugurating into the category of public imbecile. And this needs some clarity - Peterson is from everything I've seen, a competent and ethical clinical psychologist, that he is so often wrong about religion, evolution, biology, atheism, law, the environment etc. likely because of the problems Tom Nichols describes this does not mean he is wrong about far-left progressive memes and their disastrous mental health repurcussions. I'd personally just prefer a better, more well rounded champion - like the people over at Heterodox Academy.

Peterson seems to now have been captured by his audience, the danger faced by public intellectuals and particularly, despite all the popularity, outsider intellectuals to attract an audience of outsiders sympathetic to the ostracism and marginalization efforts.

I watched all of Peterson trying to teach himself 'the Austrian School of Economics' by interviewing an Austrian School Economist because listeners had pointed out JP might be sympathetic to the Austrian School and saw many analogies.

But I have chosen his interview with a member of the Austrian School and Bitcoin evangelist to demonstrate the 'public imbecile' trap. Now Jordan Peterson, a Clinical Psychologist and teaching Academic is using his platform to talk about economics from a fringe school about crypto-currencies. I couldn't make it through this interview.

Nothing makes my eyes glaze over faster than cryptocurrency, and I have tried, I have really tried, to pierce through my own bubble and understand if there is a 'there' there at all and I shall leave in white text below the precise moment this interview lost me:

Interview 1:

Interview 2:

Interview two is yet another interview from Skeptic, quickly becoming my favorite place to hear out actual experts. Thankfully true to the philosophy of skepticism it doesn't fall prey to what JP and the Weinsteins and Heather Haying do, which is overexuberence. In fact I discovered Tom Nichols through his interview on Skeptic.

This clip though I recommend because it deals with the 'Private imbeciles' side of the title - largely the myths that create a cottage industry of 'experts' on 'millenials' who consult with companies, provide no value at all and get compensated.

I have friends that have feathered their nest based on expertise that turns out to be no expertise at all. People paid thousands of dollars of shareholder's money to fly somewhere and say things like 'Millenials all love Von Dutch hats, so offer a Von Dutch hat as a signing bonus.' This of course is a hyperbolic and dated example, but I hope it serves to illustrate that there are a lot of 'experts' that are compensated for peddling bad stereotypes. 

Generational myths are popular and prevail though, so I'm always interested to hear what holds up and what doesn't:

My thoughts in White (click and highlight to read):

So the point at which Dr. Saifadeen lost me was when he posited his theory that Bitcoin would become the dominant currency because it was something like "the hardest currency" ever. I am employing a heuristic here to allocate my scarce attention which is largely a presumption that if someone is making an argument they lead with their strongest one. With my limited economics training spanning from high school to a bachelors degree in Economics and finance, I immediately identified this claim as both a fringe view and a highly subjective interpretation of history. Sure he may have done his research and detected some kind of pattern, which he does describe. But it ultimately comes across as a narrative and one that is highly dubious.

This is my general experience of bitcoin enthusiasts and the materials they write and have been shared with me - they talk about shit that nobody has previously cared about, ad hoc rationalizations of why bitcoin is going to succeed and they'll show us.

I also got frustrated with JP as an interviewer, for missing obvious questions like 'So this is a really hard currency, limited by (intelligent) design to 21 million coins - then no more coins are produced... so the current price of a bitcoin is ~USD$50k, do I have to have $50large to buy one?' To which I imagine the response is 'Oh no, bitcoins are infinitely divisible the pirates used to divide gold coins into "pieces of eight" a bitcoin however can be divided into 'pieces of 50k, pieces of 50M, pieces of 50B if necessary' now this sounds to me like crypto has a problem of hyperdeflation which would describe a situation where on Monday 20c buys you an apple. You take a dollar to the store and you get an apple and 80c change. On Tuesday .0000000002c buys an apple so you take your 80c to the store and the shopkeep says 'I'm sorry I can't give you change.' 

The other thing being that JP doesn't ask 'okay, it's unhakable, uncorruptable, but it isn't backed by a state. Bitcoin and what army? what ability to pay its debts with taxes? It seems to solve a problem that is in its way a solution of devaluing a currency to pay off debts, but why should anyone care at all? How is a bitcoin different from a Tulip?

Anytime someone is spruiking bitcoin (and yes, sure people who bought it for 20k and sold it for 67k made money, real money by speculating on disneydollars, but people did that with Tulip bulbs and imaginary internet companies and British debt) I think of Kramer lecturing Jerry about 'that TV you watch, the sushi you eat even those kimonos you wear.'

Since JP recorded that interview, Bitcoin dropped 20% in value to historically obscenely grossly overvalued given that bitcoins actual value to pedophiles, drug dealers and criminals is probably in the vicinity of something like $0.4USD this interview temporarily will look stupid until the next wave of irrational exuberence takes bitcoin up to a bajillion USD a coin and still useless.

The real point though, is not that JP should 'stay in his lane' but exercise due humility.

The skeptic interview by contrast probably claims things that will later be debunked, but the attitude and approach is right - people are asked to explain their findings and express their uncertainty and this is a critical difference in my opinion between skepticism and prejudice. 

Peterson is just prejudiced against socialism, and inconsistently so. I have long speculated that the reason JP is progressive enemy number one is because of the Narcissism of Small Differences. Peterson can turn rational and offer plausible, credible consise critiques of social constructionism with the best of them. He will then turn around and do hours and hours of 'close reading' bullshit deconstructions of the Bible employing the same epistemology as a Queer Black Feminist might apply to Othello, with a similar lack of humility.

Bart Ehrman is an expert on Biblical Scholarship, and can answer the straightforward question of 'do you believe in God' and 'did this shit happen'. Peterson is not. and that's what qualifies him as a public imbecile - when he applies his considerable intellect and learning to a persistent societal issue, he more often bounces off that wall.

A Youtube Curation: Outsourcing a Free Speech Post

I'm not a free speech absolutist. I can think of simple examples where I prefer a world where speech can be legally suppressed, penalized or compelled. Financial advisors should not be allowed to recommend products that pay them the highest commissions but do not deliver the greatest or safest returns for their clients. Doctors should not be able to omit a less intrusive and debilitating treatment program because it makes them less money etc. A witness called in a court should not be able to commit perjury. etc. etc. etc.

The pandemic that went global in 2020 though made me further reconsider my position on free-speech. I feel where I arrived at was a 'put up or shut up' amendment to free speech.

Which is to say, I have a specific problem with dishonest interlocutors who translate 'free speech' into 'if I am losing/have lost an argument, I can just ditch it and go make the same losing arguments to a new audience that hopefully isn't smart enough to rebut me.'

The 'put up or shut up' is more if you make a claim or assert a truth, at some point you need to meet your burden of proof or desist in asserting that claim. 

Fortunately, this was one of those areas where inaction paid off, and I was able to outsource much of the heavy lifting, including the useful phrase 'constitution of knowledge'.

Unlike my last curation, these youtube videos aren't necessary in contrast to each other from an ideological or approach point of view. One is a very useful role play where one free speech advocate takes the contrary position (speech should be limited) to force another free speech advocate to defend their point of view. 

The second deals with a 'constitution of knowledge' and in this case, the curation I'm doing to pair these youtube interviews together follows a logic more in line with conversation 1: Addresses a misunderstanding of what 'free speech' is, what it means and why it is important. conversation 2: A domain in which it is desirable to limit speech - claims to knowledge.

Conversation 1:

Conversation 2:

in this case, I realize that somebody who may benefit the most from watching these two videos might object on the ground that all the participants are white men. I did recently listen to an interview about free speech with the eminently qualified Suzanne Nossel who while still white is an accomplished woman it just left me feeling malnourished the way I felt she shied away from discussing cancel-culture, critical race theory and critical pedagogy etc. It left me with a similar feeling as when Trump grits his teeth to condemn the Ku Klux Klan or Jordan Peterson hates the question 'do you believe in God?' where I just feel someone rather than engaging, is aversive to alienating a meal ticket. 

Understandable but malnourishing.

A Youtube Curation: Two Contrasting Conversations

 This post goes out to all those people in radio land who already like long form interviews, podcasts etc.

I don't know about you, but my experience of Youtube, pinterest and other algorithm driven social media is that once I engage with anything I am given the impression of the algorithm that it works on a principle of 'Oh you like x then here's ALL THE x.' and yeah, granted, sometimes like if I listened to a great song on Youtube or saw a great piece of art on Pinterest, what I do want is more variations on the same theme. 

An easy distinction, I feel, is if I am consuming an aesthetic good or an intellectual one. So Pinterest doesn't bother me that much apart from the asymmetry of saving one pin will fill my feed with similar ones, but hiding a BILLION astrology or christianity memes is required to convince it I am not interested in astrology or christianity. Particularly not the pinterest meme versions of those subjects.

Anyway, this preramble is already too long. Point is, when consuming intellectual content - like arguments, long form interviews what I am most interested in and Youtube least likely to proffer to me is a contrary point of view. I would love a feature that was like 'people who hate this love that'

Spoiler - I don't think I've succeeded at creating a manual alternative to piercing algorithmic bubbles. It's a lot of work to find someone to say something that will actually make me reconsider a position I am first persuaded to. What I can curate is the contrast between a conversation that is fascinating and one that is interesting. So I present to you two conversations and I'll put my actual thoughts in a white font below to give you every opportunity to judge these convos for yourself without having me poison the well. You can highlight the white text with your mouse and it will be readable.

I do want to stress though that in curating this, both long form interviews are worth watching. They were worth my time, and if you have the time to dispose on a bit under three hours of content, I feel they may be worth your time. 

Conversation 1:

Conversation 2:

Thoughts in White:

I like this pairing that I would characterize as fascinating vs. interesting. They prompt me to look up definitions, for example 'fascinating' means 'extremely interesting' which would mean that conversatio 1, which I'd describe as 'fascinating' is the superior...but looking at the etymology of 'fascinating' seems more in line with the intuition that drove me to distinguish the two conversations in this way. From the Latin 'fascinum' meaning 'spell' or 'witchcraft' where by contrast the etymology of 'interest' is a bit more complicated~

late Middle English (originally as interess ): from Anglo-Norman French interesse, from Latin interesse ‘differ, be important’, from inter- ‘between’ + esse ‘be’. The (last) -t was added partly by association with Old French interest ‘damage, loss’, apparently from Latin interest ‘it is important’. The original sense was ‘the possession of a share in or a right to something’;

And that's the thing, I find the first conversation to be populated by big ideas that are kind of untethered. Exercises in our imaginasium. The second conversation is tethered it takes a problem and attempts to ground it in 'what are we actually dealing with?' 

In that sense my temptation is to regard the first conversation as 'radical' and the second conversation as 'stoic' which again in turn prompts me to look up the definition of 'radical'

Radical turns out to mean 'of the root' or 'fundamental'  and that's where I get confused. The reason for my confusion is that I would regard the second conversation as also 'radical' in the sense that they are using a scientific method to investigate the roots of the problems of male violence. By contrast, the first conversation I feel I could make the case with confidence exhibits behavior from which it is reasonable to infer a kind of willful ignorance as to what drives the problem.

But, I've tentatively refined my understanding of what 'radical' means when people identify as 'radical' (previously I just let this wash over me) and it does make sense of the meaning of the word - it means people who see the solution as just uprooting everything. I may be employing a kind of confirmation bias but for me this thought shores up my own generalization of the left-wing political camps - those who view history as essentially arbitrary: the world looks as it does for no particular reason, the butterfly effect or something, and as such we could just wipe the slate clean and organize the world in any way we like. Then the other camp I don't have a name for, its certainly aligned with stoicism, methodological naturalism, the scientific method etc. which is that history is non-arbitrary, even if it isn't understood.