Same action different reason

The choice by parents to not vaccinate their children is not a simple one. The Pro- and Anti- camps don't want to paint it that way, a simple binary is all that is apparently desired, at least among the voices that yell the loudest.

In discussions with my wife on the topic, I never could get her to understand the nature of my position regarding vaccines, in large part because I could see past the propaganda that each "side" was using to try and make the "us vs. them" as clear as possible.

Vaccines work. That is not controversial to people who are honest, the controversy comes entirely from what is built upon that simple fact, and that is where the "houses" of the Pro- and Anti- stances that are most popular will eventually crumble to the ground. The reason they haven't already is that enough time hasn't passed for the consequences of their errors to have played out completely.

For example, one disconnect that people struggle with is understanding the difference between how something works at the hypothetical level, and what we actually deal with in reality. An anecdotal argument of this type I got into with a friend years ago which highlighted this problem was on the topic of circles.

I had said that this: ____________ was the most accurate representation of a circle that we could materially make.

It's a 2d shape looked at from the side, so it becomes a 1d line.

The basic reason why this is the most accurate representation is that it has no thickness, and it has defined edges.

Now, the reason that the 2D shape most people associate with a circle is not nearly as accurate is because a circle has no corners or vertexes. From Merriam-Webster's online dictionary, they even more specifically state: "a closed plane curve every point of which is equidistant from a fixed point within the curve".

From pixels on a screen to the arrangement of atoms in the graphite deposited on paper, we never actually achieve representing this perfectly. Pixels are arranged in a rectilinear manner, so while our eyes cannot perceive it, when we see a circle on a screen, it's an abstraction, a close but not-quite-perfect representation of a circle. Similarly, while our manufacturing efforts are impressive, the way that subatomic particles arrange themselves is something we still can't control at the individual particle level, and even what looks or feels to be a smooth surface, let alone a perfect circle, upon close inspection under a microscope reveals an imperfect arrangement. Now, in most cases, this difference is irrelevant, we can work just fine with the abstracted manifestation of a circle because the details which differentiate our imperfect manifestation from the definition can be safely ignored.

But under what circumstances are such differences sufficiently important?

Return policies for goods that we have purchased are a great example of an answer to that question. When we purchase something and expect a certain feature or functionality, and the resulting product does not have those features or functionality, we can make a value judgment on whether the difference is enough to demand that the product be replaced or currency refunded.

When the disparity between expectation and manifestation are sufficient, we do want to seek redress.

And that's the nature of the nuance with my position on vaccines.

I've seen the chart that shows how many communicable diseases saw significant reduction before the implementation of vaccines. Such a graph does not change the fact that vaccines work at all, but does address the cost-to-benefit ratio.

I've seen the paperwork criticizing the ingredients used in vaccines. Such papers do no change the fact vaccines work at all, but it does address how we make or store vaccines.

I've seen the claims about how children were harmed by vaccines. Such claims do not change the fact vaccines work at all, but does expose that whatever chemical combination was used in the vaccine triggered a response in an individual, and we should try to figure out what that is exactly, but the numbers clearly demonstrate that it's not a very common problem at all. It's not impossible, but it is improbable, but we should still seek to understand what factors affect the odds.

Finally, I've seen the articles from people who do try to explain how vaccines don't actually work, and while this would directly deal with the fact vaccines work at all, I do not possess the required expertise to tell when medical professionals who refute such articles in layman's terms that I do understand are simply lying.

To give an example of what that could look like, I have a degree in mechanical engineering, and both my job and hobbies all involve interactions with machines. Because of that knowledge and experience, when I see "Popular Mechanics" try to debunk criticisms of the 9/11 story, I can tell where they are hoping their audience doesn't know enough about structural engineering and materials science to see through the lies.

Similarly, I've worked in the aerospace industry for about a decade. With the recent resurgence of the popularity of "Moon Landing Hoax" theories, I can quickly tell who has really done their homework and really understands the mechanisms they're describing, whether Pro- or Anti-, and who is just parroting something that was merely sufficiently convincing for them to believe.

With vaccines, I don't have that innate ability because I haven't spent the time to become an expert. When I do start digging though, it doesn't take long for me to find that people forgot the "verify" part of "trust but verify". It's certainly possible that every piece of information I am looking at is a deceit, but then such a simplistic heuristic applied consistently would mean that I can't trust either the Pro- or Anti- stances regarding vaccines at all.

So when things are that bad, what choice does one have?

Well, at the most simplistic level, I cannot know the ingredients in a specific vial with any degree of certainty.

I don't know which ingredients are supposed to be there, and which aren't.

I simply don't know how big the disparity is between what is in a particular vial and what should be there based on the hypothetical ideal of a vaccine.

So the best answer is to believe neither, do nothing, and wait till more information can be gathered.

If we can't trust large organizations that sell products for a profit, then every Anti- website which sells books, herbs, supplements, and all sorts of alternatives is no more worthy of trust than the FDA or the CDC or "Big Pharma". They're all in it for themselves, and will say anything they need to drive you to make a choice that lines one of their pockets.

Eroding trust in established organizations has consequences that people still haven't fully comprehended.

Don't confuse people who act like you as doing so for the same reason. Don't mistake someone who seems to agree with you for having gotten there the same way that you did. And if people want to undermine trust instead of building accountability, just enjoy the show when the same simplistic and crude dynamics are used right back on them.

Sylvanas did nothing wrong

Due to a friend, I recently switched my gaming time from one online game to another, back to an oldie that I hadn't played in a long time. In getting back into the swing of things, I wanted to get caught up on the story as well as all the gameplay dynamics changes, and what I found was rather amusing.

To put it shortly, in the World of Warcraft, a character named Sylvanas is the leader of a faction called "the Horde". There is a single major opponent to them, called "the Alliance". The two fight over all sorts of stuff, and in the game story, Sylvanas recently burned down a the massive tree that served as the capitol city for a race of that is a member of the Alliance. Because it was a capital city, there were "civilians" killed as well as military, and so the game and players of the game have tried to portray this action as barbaric and evil.

Except that they miss the justification offered by Sylvanas herself: "This is war."

The old phrase goes "all is fair in love and war", right?

People don't believe or understand that, not really. ALL is fair?

One of the major Horde characters chastised Sylvanas stating "There is no honor in this!"

You know, because during a time of war, honor is more important than survival. Ideals are more important than living another day.

The Horde and the Alliance have a set of mutually exclusive values. The Horde is largely a collection of outcasts and misfits, a largely untenable amalgamation, if not for the races of the Alliance, who have subjugated and killed all of them at some time or another in their own history. The Horde has struck back, so they are no innocent doves either, but what that means is that there is no "good guy" in this mess. Both sides have blood on their hands, both sides have done terrible things, and neither side is without the need for redemption in some manner or another.

But that doesn't stop people from virtue-signalling their pacifism and lofty ideals about how wars should be fought.

Peace is a lofty ideal, but it is just that, an ideal, and in a fictional realm where everybody is guilty of crimes against someone else, peace won't come through negotiations and talk. The races of the Horde and of the Alliance want different things, have different priorities, and deep scars that will never truly heal.

What this means for the Horde and the Alliance then, locked in conflict, is that whoever survives will be the one that eliminates the other. Whichever subdues or subjugates the other will "win". It's an existential fight, and so neither side has any reason to hold back on their enemies. They're enemies.

And this is where people try to confuse things, to insert their superior morality where they have no enemies, and so they would seek to broker peace. These people do not quite understand that, because it's a fiction, because it's not real, of course nothing that either side has done really matters, because it's all pretend. The story is make-believe, and so Blizzard can make it whatever they want.

In reality, though, peace often isn't an option. Diversity + Proximity = War, and that's despite lofty ideals, because those lofty ideals can often be the grounds for the ideological diversity that then leads to conflict in the first place.

The Horde and the Alliance are at war. There is, in the nature of their war, no way to fight that isn't terrible. It's all tragic, it's all horrible. War has always been described as such, and in portraying accurately how each side will do heinous things to their enemies, Blizzard unintentionally exposed the idealistic pacifists who do not really understand that they are playing a game which is simulating war.

In war, your goal is to win and go home alive. To do this, you will do terrible things that, were you not in war, could be categorized as "wrong". You will kill people. You will break things and destroy stuff. You will commit atrocities in the name of survival that, were they not required to be done in the first place, you'd not have pursued otherwise.

And that's why, in terms of war, what Sylvanas did was not wrong, and despite her own significant moral failings and personal flaws, she made a decisive strike against her mortal enemies in an ongoing war where her faction desires to remain free of the authoritarian rule of the Alliance, let alone worse.

Sylvanas essentially nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and if you've seen the revisionist history trying to make out the United States as evil for having done that during WWII, for having gone "too far", for not having tried harder to "make peace", then you'll understand why so many folks, even those who played Horde characters, were taken aback at the decisive action to destroy an enemies' stronghold.

Sure, the story has been written such that it supposedly backfired so the Alliance then sack a stronghold of the Horde as well, and Sylvanas' character is full of bitterness and hate, but those things are a distraction, an irrelevance, they don't change whether what she did was correct or not in the context of war, regardless of the entanglements that existed on a personal level.

Choose to fight a war, to win it, instead of dying for an ideal which cannot actually exist.

Understand the times you are in, and act accordingly.

Those without compensate throughout

When someone doesn't have something they're supposed to, or even that they believe they're supposed to, the brain naturally seeks to compensate. We know this occurs physically, like when people lose their sight or sense of hearing, and over time their remaining senses seem to grow sharper. There are also examples of this dynamic breaking down, like with "ghost limbs", where the brain is receiving sensory input from an appendage which is simply no longer present.

So if this occurs in the physical realm, is it a surprise that the same compensation occurs in the psychological realm?

Fathers of daughters, without sons, will tend to push at least one of their daughters towards more masculine activities, and due to the natural mirroring of the young female mind to a dominant male mind, they'll go right along with it, completely unaware of how odd the circumstances may become. This is the "tomboy" phenomenon, and while not necessarily a good or bad thing in and of itself, against the backdrop of a more and more feminized society, what was otherwise innocuous takes on a more foreboding connotation.

To contrast with a more intrinsically masculine society, women would still have had skills and talents which may overlap with men, but the overlap was never taken to be a form of equality. A frontier mother would need to know how to shoot, to dress game, to care for livestock and such, not because her husband couldn't or wouldn't be the one primarily responsible for accomplishing those tasks, but because sometimes she needed to help out, sometimes her husband would be gone for a time, sometimes he'd be sick or injured, and especially if her sons were still young, she'd need to step up.

In one case, the compensation is natural, driven by external circumstances, and in the other, the compensation is unnatural, driven by internal expectations.

Parents have an intrinsic desire, a deep seated need, to pass on what they know to their offspring. This passage of information played a role in our current social dynamics, because young boys and girls are constantly being taught that there is no difference between them, that any lesson meant for a boy can be taught to a girl, and vice versa.

The problem with this is that the compensation for boys and girls is, again, forced, not naturally occurring. The boys and girls are psychologically compensating for reasons that are terrible, in that the boys are pushed to compensate for not being girls, and the girls for not being boys.

The result of this over time is that girls don't ever become very good women, and boys don't ever become very good men. Both end up in the middle somewhere, poorly defined, no specialization based on inherent capability, and thus no excellence to be found either.

Such reasons to compensate then, to adapt, are obviously unwise and should be avoided, but why aren't they? Why do people even go so far as to double-down on such experiments by forcing other people to behave like them as well through social or legal pressure?

What has happened is that, thanks to resource abundance, the selective pressures which sustained the constraints for which people properly compensated or died, have now been replaced with abstract or arbitrary constraints, defined by ideals and hypothesis absent any real negative consequences should a choice turn out to have been the wrong one.

Specifically, in the current era, you can be entirely pathetic as an individual, lacking in any real redeeming qualities, and your survival on a day-to-day basis isn't really threatened at all. Even if you have a lot of resources at your beck and call, the results of your efforts are little more than altars to waste and excess.

The lifted short-bed pickup truck with low-profile mud terrain tires.

The headphones that cost hundreds because of the brand and not their audio fidelity.

The handheld devices that filling every minute of your day with pointless distractions.

Each of them had a tangible, pragmatic, useful ancestor. Each of them, at one time, had constraints on them which shaped and formed them based on their actual utility, and not just on how they made someone feel.

And this is where psychological compensation gets its grounding, albeit subjectively and shakily, in feelings.

The tacticool rifle and useless survival gear makes the guy feel like he can survive SHTF.

The social media account with tons of followers and interaction makes the girl feel like she has value.

The successful career and freedom to do anything he wants means he's been successful in life.

In each case, they are compensating, adapting, in alignment with a subjective belief, and not an objective reality. In each compensation for something that these people think they don't have, and either need or need a workaround for, they're shifting their behaviors based on perception, not truth. Sure, an individual can get lucky every now and again, and what one feels does align with reality, but that's usually more of a coincidence than a result of the individual being correct or trustworthy.

As bad as things can get, however, because these prompts for compensation are synthetic, they can always be replaced, and if done intentionally, by grounding them objective truths as well. You can synthetically apply to yourself the restrictions necessary to shape you in objectively better ways.

Even for someone who has journeyed down the wrong path for even the majority of their life, it's never too late to make better choices, to ground themselves in what really is or isn't instead of what one merely thinks is or isn't. People are never beyond redemption so long as they can still make choices.

It just takes more effort, since nature and fate have stepped back for a time and aren't forcing one to choose better.

So choose better, even if you're not being forced to do so, in how you raise your children, in the type of vehicle you drive, in the type of foods you eat, in the company of folks you keep.

Even better, what you'll also find is that over time, what you feel will align to what you do. Instead of being driven by emotion, what you do will shape how you feel, and so the greatest difficulty is mostly in the beginning, when your feelings are still calibrated by chance instead of your choice.

Broad shoulders

Then the man said, “The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate.”
And the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”
The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” - Genesis 3:12-13 (NKJV)

In case you don't know the rest of the story, God is thoroughly unimpressed by the excuses of Adam and Eve in the garden, and they still bear full responsibility for their actions and are promptly kicked out on their own.

Shifting the blame never ultimately works.

Among humans, you may end up distracting folks from the truth for a very long time, but God catches all of it, and there's also the material consequences for choices which affect you, even if nobody can understand why.

A child may blame a sibling successfully, and the parents never figure out, but the child then has had a bad behavior reinforced, and they'll do it again, only that next time the consequences may not be so easy to hide.

Escaping blame is never a blessing, and so it is much better to embrace it. To take responsibility, even when you don't have to, because the reality is that there is never an excuse, a reason, for a choice that you have made where someone else can take the blame for you.

Even coercion requires your participation, your judgment on whether refusal is worth your life.

All this said, this does not mean you take responsibility for what isn't yours. It is not your job to take on someone else's burdens, just like nobody else needs to take on yours, so while one should be quick to own their own choices, the reverse should be true when it comes to others.

You can offer inputs, suggestions, advice if it is asked for, but you should not take on their choices, their blame, for then you stagnate their growth, their maturity. You teach them that someone will, or at least can, always come to save them, so instead of taking responsibility, they learn how to summon the best hero to save them from choices that they've made.

Own your own decisions, let other people own theirs.

Advanced civilizations require constant conflict to survive

“Discernment is not knowing the difference between right and wrong. It is knowing the difference between right and almost right.” —C.H. Spurgeon

One of the stereotypical generational gaps that most people are familiar with is related to technology. "Old" people didn't grow up with a new technology, so their adoption and mastery over it is inherently hindered and limited compared to "young" people who did. The temptation on the part of the "young" people is to presume that this is an intelligence or experience thing, to look at the bumbling behaviors of "old" people and mock it as if it is the "fault" of the "old" people in some manner.

The problem is that, should the young person go back in time to when the "old" people were the same age as them, the same type of skill displacement would be readily apparent. They'd be bumbling to adjust to a different environment and having just as much difficulty as the "old" people did to their new technology.

Understanding this phenomenon as described requires the ability to grasp subtlety, and to grasp that subtlety you need discernment.

To cite a dictionary definition:

1 : the quality of being able to grasp and comprehend what is obscure : skill in discerning
2 : an act of perceiving or discerning something

To "explain like I am five", I could say that discernment is "seeing that two things are not the same".

For example, the difference between two apples that came from the same tree. They both may be genetically identical, with similar color patterns, shape, and overall size, but one may appear to have a hole in it from where a worm or insect ate into it.

With humans, this is like knowing the difference between a set of twins. They're genetically similar, and again of similar physical appearance, and when playing practical jokes they may hide their distinctive behavior patterns to fool people, but there are differences if one knows them well enough.

A final example comes from counterfeit currency. The entire goal of the counterfeit is to exactly reproduce the genuine article in substance and use, and to do so in a way which fools others into accepting it as the genuine. Being able to tell a counterfeit from a genuine requires discernment.

In each case, while appearances are not irrelevant, what information one can gather on a cursory inspection will not be sufficient to make a good determination as to whether two things are similar or different. While an "old" person may not understand that they haven't been selected as the sole inheritor of a Nigerian fortune, a lot of "young" people don't understand the difference between "good" and "bad" soil to grow plants in either.

Advanced civilization requires discernment because the levels of automation required to achieve that advanced state will naturally hide themselves from the end users, and so in order to be stable over long periods of time, people need to be able to dig past the surface level to determine what the root problem is so that it can be solved.

An example I like to use to demonstrate this is with two sportscars of equal power, but one has a manual transmission and the other an automatic. A person who is a skilled driver can drive both safely, but an unskilled driver will burn out the clutch on the manual, but could essentially drive just as fast as the skilled driver in the automatic, at least in a straight line.

In this case, the unskilled driver is much more quickly able to go beyond their actual skill level, but until driving conditions that challenge the driver show up, to the casual observer one can't tell the difference between the skilled and unskilled driver, especially since the physical requirements of professional driving don't result in quite as physically obvious distinctions in participants of the sport as, say, weight lifting.

Advanced civilizations automate simple processes in order to enable the end users to move to a higher tier of complication without investing the brain power into the lower tiers, since the human brain and its processing capability is finite. Formula 1 cars don't have a manual transmission with a clutch, because the speed at which the vehicles drive and the intricacies of the road courses requires their full attention.

On top of that, Formula 1 drivers have "crew chiefs" to monitor various performance metrics so that the driver can focus on driving and not on certain aspects of maintenance of the vehicle while they are driving.

Lacking discernment, one would presume that the surface level is all there is. That you get food from a grocery store, and just one of them will have everything you need all the time, presuming you should even have to leave your house in the first place. That you can just push a button on a website and you can get things, same day shipping just like you went out to buy it! That car shops all do all the same car services, so even if it's called "Discount Tire" they probably do oil changes too, right?

The hiding of the lower level mechanisms certainly enables them to be ignored so that other more important tasks can be focused on, but it's a double edged sword in that it also allows those who weren't capable of handling those lower level mechanisms to get past the barriers to entry to participate in activities that are beyond what their skills and knowledge can support.

So, how does one generate and hone discernment? Conflict.

Again, the Formula 1 drivers have automatics, or semi-automatics if you want to get pedantic, but because they're trying to drive better than everyone else, they are required to hone their skills in driving and they can't just take advantage of not having to focus on shifting gears with a clutch pedal, because everyone else also has that same advantage, and so if they want to do well they need to push themselves.

Competition is conflict, and without a reason to try harder, humans simply won't. Advanced civilizations which abhor conflict and competition will become unstable and fall apart because without the impetus to improve, people won't. Without a reason to learn, people won't. We're efficient in that manner, because time wasted developing skills we don't need would have put us at a survival disadvantage compared to those that didn't waste their time and energy at all.

That's why Western Civilization is falling apart now, because enough bought into the delusion that, absent conflict, humans would choose to invest time and energy in pursuits which would grow them, when in reality all of our behavioral dispositions handed down through the generations gear us towards only investing time and energy into that which is required.

Now, there is a catch to this, because even a civilization which seeks to avoid conflict can't eliminate it completely, because when we lack in physical conflict, the philosophical begins to rage. Namely that if you exist in an environment absent challenges, purpose and meaning become arbitrary. There is nothing that you need to do to say alive, to keep existing, and so lacking any need for purpose or effort to stay alive, a nihilistic boredom with existence sets in, and the conflict then boils down to "why am I still alive?"

With no clear "winner", people commit suicide because there's no good reason not to.

This has a eugenic effect in that, were a civilization able to sustain itself otherwise, over the course of generations only the people who could summon the motivation to push themselves harder regardless of circumstances would reproduce and the society would overcome the problems of nihilistic boredom through natural selection.

The problem is that because this is so small a portion of an existing population, the suicidal stage crashes the whole system down to nothing, and so the selective process for those types of people never has much of a chance to occur, and thus the vast majority of humanity that does survive continues to be those who require external motivations to drive their behavior, because when those advanced civilizations crash, everyone is reverted back to the most basic tiers of activity and is forced to rebuild again, or die trying.

When all the layers of automation and complexity are stripped away, all the power of our intellect as adapted to that highest tier is lost, as even the most stupid and incompetent will retain the most basic survival instincts to stay alive, instincts which are not activated or manifested until the appropriate external stimulus is applied.

This is why artificial conflict, which synthetically introduces the same instincts and drives, is necessary for advanced civilization. When an advancing civilization properly grasps this and enshrines this in its cultural milieu, when it applies it such that it affects everyone, that everyone is conditioned to face and cope with conflict and have both their instinctual and intellectual pathways activated, they'll be the first to break the cycle that humanity has been experiencing since our creation.

Western Civilization didn't do that. I wonder if the civilizations that will rise from its ashes will do better.