Data miners, Psalms, peak obedience, and Albertan finger salutes
TL;DR
Danielle Smith is giving Mark Carney a giant 🖕
Get worried when you hear lots of people trumpeting about how free we are
A nonprofit’s helping parents work together to de-techize their kids’ lives
The data miners are comin’ for ya
We’re reached Peak Obedience
How the Psalms can teach you about your own psychology
But first … intuition:
HUMAN
Intuition, or that Sixth Sense, has fascinated me for a long time.
Couple of years before my wife and I got married, we befriended the lady who would become my wife's bridesmaid. We met her in a group setting. As I studied this lady, before I'd even been introduced, I thought to myself, "This lady's just been through a bad breakup". Where on earth that came from, I've no idea. I discovered two weeks later that I was spot on. She had just moved back from British Columbia after a bad breakup. And I've had a number of similar experiences since. I've learned the hard way never to ignore my gut instinct, even though it isn't always right. It's like radio astronomy - the stars are emitting information to us at frequencies that our eyes can't detect, and that they won't emit on any other frequency. You have to train your mind to be open to those signals, for they can be critical. The
guys explore the Sixth Sense idea in some intellectual depth here. (Gosh these guys put out great stuff.)
Alberta premier Danielle Smith is pushing back against Project Carney, argues
. This delights me no end. I'm not a climate change denier, but for me this isn't about climate change. It's about Big Brother telling you small fry what to do, and this is going to be the lay of the land going forward. Can't stand that. I don't doubt that Danielle Smith is capable of her own high-handedness; she is, after all, another politician. But I'm all in favour of the Small giving the Powermongers a giant 🖕finger salute, anytime. I'm not an Albertan, indeed I live a scant hour's bike ride from the Ottawa Halls of Power. But there's a corner of my mind that secretly hopes the Alberta separatist movement does throw a spanner into the works in Ottawa.
A lady named Tracy Foster has demonstrated that it’s possible to push back against tech infusion into our lives, and win. She found herself thinking that she was the only one struggling with "Mom! I'm the only one in class without an iPhone!" syndrome. Reasoned that she WASN'T the only one, and started a nonprofit called Screen Sanity that connects parents concerned about tech stealing their kids' minds and childhoods. Brilliant stuff. See the
article👇 asks "Have we only ever been told we’re free while every part of our lives has been quietly controlled, guided, and shaped by systems we didn’t design, leaders we didn’t choose, and ideas we never questioned?" (Anonymous - I love that title for a newsletter, Why didn't I think of that?) Anytime a government or media outlet starts hammering away about how lucky we are to be so free, my spidey sense starts tingling. Methinks they do protest too much.
TECHNOLOGY
In a similar vein to
, has put out a piece suggesting that it ain't Big Government Brother you should be so worried about, but Big For-Profit Brother, i.e. the data miners and traders. It's a good piece. Although methinks Both Big Brothers are working in cahoots.
WHAT I’M DOING
Taking a holiday, that's what.
will be offline for a couple of weeks, as I go hiking and who knows what with my wife and daughter. I'm exhausted.There are so-called gurus out there advising newsletter publishers: Never miss an edition. Put out rubbish if you have to, but never miss an edition.
Taking that under advisement, and advising them: I'm missing two editions. I'll take my chances. Will likely be active on Substack, just not publishing any NerdLetters.
See y'all the first week of June.
FROM THE SOURCE
I'm on a chronological, read-through-the-Bible-in-a-year reading programme.
Lately, it's been nothing but the Psalms, many of which are authored by King David ... and likely the majority, as many of the unattributed ones seem to have David's penmanship about them.
(Side note: I got curious. Perplexity.ai says that 73 psalms are explicitly attributed to David. The remainder are either unattributed, or attributed to Solomon (2), Heman (1), Ethan (1), Moses (2) or the sons of Korah (11). So David definitely gets the lion's share of the credit.)
I've been reading the psalms for decades. What's fascinating to me is:
1. Everytime I read one, it still feeds my soul, even if I already have the words down by heart.
2. The variety of moods that David was in. The man was up, down, up, down, inside out, upside down, right side up ... Hard to say if he was depressive at times. He might have been.
Sometimes he seemed to be in a mood to grab his sword and go out attacking wicked people. You gotta wonder if these were almost songs that they'd be singing as they marched into battle.
But inevitably, his works are either upbeat ... or start low, and end upbeat.
All save one.
Psalm 88 is a man in the throes of depression. It ends on "The darkness is my closest friend." (Interestingly, that's not one of David's, that's Heman the Ezrahite.)
I've never been prone to bad depresssion. I'm rarely low for more than two days at a time. But I've known people who were, and it's not funny. Nothing seems to pick them up, for months on end.
How interesting that the compilers of the psalms saw fit to include the thoughts of a depressive, who can't seem to see even a sliver of light. Clearly they did not see depression as something to be spoken against. They saw it as an inherent facet of human nature.
VIEW FROM THE LAPTOP
But there are two facets of human nature that do need to be spoken against:
Peak obedience
Refusal to course-correct in the face of looming disaster
I've read a lot, and watched documentaries, on the First World War. That's a war that almost everyone could see coming, long before it arrived. People from the top to the bottom of society could see it. And yet they couldn't bring themselves to take the necessary avoidance measures, even though they knew the consequences would be catastrophic.
Why?
My take: The measures meant abandoning principles and mental models that had kept the Powerful powerful for a long time.
Even after war was declared, the mental models weren't abandoned. People obeyed and obeyed. They did as they were told, marching into battle, going over the top into a hail of bullets, even though it hadn't worked before.
Obedience is a noble mental model, when directed at the Right Source of Instruction. (A divine one.)
But directed at a human source of instruction. Not noble at all.
It's hammered into us from early on. I remember my dad glaring at me, "You do as you are told!" The human survival impulse kicked in, and I obeyed. And obeyed. That's what it was, a survival mechanism. I obeyed parents and teachers, who themselves were only acting out the same mechanism that had been hammered into them.
Now we're heading for another probably-looming catastrophe: AI
I'm not sure where this is going, but my adrenaline levels are up.