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I started this blog by describing human behavior through the model of an NPC as a funny way to demonstrate how all of us can sometimes be quite stupid.  The NPC metaphor is not meant to be dehumanizing but I rather intend it to allow ourselves a bit of distance between who we really are and this purposefully ridiculous toy model.  This distance can allow us to view some of the crazy/stupid/bad things that we do as not horrible personal flaws/sins but rather as simple bugs in our programming.

My next goal was to provide a new, better, and uplifting model of who I think we are as humans.  I wanted to flesh out that model by contrasting it with what I think is our current model of humanity “the abstract individual” (for Westerners at least).

Yet this feels somewhat sacrilegious because there is already much good, beauty, and truth in ourselves, in our self-conceptions, in our societies, and in our ancestors.  I feel obligated to acknowledge on a personal level that we are not just NPCs making some stupid mistakes or even abstract individuals.  We are beautiful but flawed, but beautiful creatures, who owe deep gratitude to all that created us.

What I want to do is first build up a personal view of at least who I am before moving to the limiting model of “the abstract individual” and then moving to the new model of humanity I want to put forward.

I promise to limit the personal stories; like when I peed in the corner of room of my hated 2^nd grade teacher.  Or how I learned she was not a real witch after realizing she could not read my mind.  She always seemed to know when I was not paying attention—mind reading!  But then my flailing for freedom retreated from the physical to the mental.  I stopped fidgeting and just stared blankly at her while not paying attention.  She thought I was paying attention.  I won my war against her by not learning cursive writing or anything else that entire year.  My mom still doesn’t know that I can’t even sign my name properly in cursive, but my mom was angry about me peeing in the corner of the classroom… multiple times.

The current plan for the personal interlude:

• Childhood as play, family, and friends
• School as prison, difficulties of learning, wealth, and family-mental-health, and jobs
• Religious pluralism Christianity/Quakerism/Buddhism/Missionaries/Atheism
• The heroic, rebellious, sexual, and retreating adolescent
• Finding your passion and career path, business: coding, design and organizational design patterns
• Politics and how I only voted once, and it was for Hillary

I think these should be short-ish posts and should provide enough content of actual humanity to allow me to extract from that actual humanity the model of “the abstract individual” which then we can use to build a better model of humanity.

Why I am interested in putting forth a better model of humanity is that I believe our concept of who we are creates our society.  Our conception of who we are influences how we think about ourselves, the world, other people, our interactions, our obligations, and the institutions we create.  This blog is a humble attempt to better the word through elevating understanding and through creating concrete thinking tools.

Arguments don’t change the beliefs of NPCs.  Yet NPCs can be convicted of being moral cockroaches through social pressure from moral-debt and the violation of social norms.  This means, the point of casual arguments is to convict the other person of moral transgressions as defined by social norms.  The legal burden of “beyond a reasonable doubt” rarely applies when not enforced by a court; instead in casual arguments both sides and the informal jury are all partisan and usually dishonest.  Evidence is chosen to support confirmation bias and partiality and plurality are jettisoned in favor of black or white thinking to make convictions easier.  The usual tactic is to strawman the other person, so they look completely evil and stupid.  Casual arguments are not about trying to understand, they are about trying to convict.

When someone is attacked by an argument they will respond by: pointing out evidential flaws in the strawman, replacing the strawman with a steelman, using whataboutism to redirect the argument, questioning the meaning of words, attacking the person making the argument, or any combination of the above.

Arguments have an explicit frame that is about: this is what we are going to talk about, and I am not going to let you deviate from it.  Whataboutism is used to break that explicit frame by trying to widen the discussion to also include other topics.  “You want to talk about Right-wing violence, but that is a misleading frame without also talking about Left-wing violence.”  There is a meme that whataboutism is invalid, this is wrong.  Whataboutism is valid if you are not accepting the frame of their argument and want a different and better frame.

The implicit frame of the argument is: commonly accepted social constructs, agreements on how we are going to talk (honest, non-threatening), binary understanding (good vs. evil, right vs. wrong), singular judgment (must be decided and acted upon).

Someone accuses you via an argument:

• Delay: ask for them to more information to gain some time to gather your thoughts.
• Goodness: Say you are reasonable and good.  Entreat them to be reasonable and good.  If not, then they are acting threateningly and are potentially dangerous and evil.
• Deny jurisdiction: say they are not deserving to judge you since they have not shown they are honest and impartial; instead, they seem partisan, bigoted, and hateful.
• Countersue: they are bad to attack you, their argument is morally wrong.
• Your Interests: bring up positive changes that you want to make or values that are important to you.  Make it so they have to cater to your interests (you are not just a perp, they have positive obligations towards your positive interests).
• Attack their argument: Their characterization of your argument is strawman; detail how.  Require them to repeat a non-strawman version of your argument, if they cannot or won’t then they are a bad faith actor.
• Attack their explicit framing: Their framing is a misleading trap (too narrow, too broad, Kafka Trap, Catch 22, damned if do, damned if not); detail how.  If they don’t agree to your reframing, then a discussion is impossible.
• Interrogate their implicit framing: our tools of partiality and plurality can be used to attack the social constructs (concepts) that their argument uses directly or indirectly through framing.  Partiality “it’s more complex than black or white.”  Plurality, “there does not just have to be one way, there are other explanations as well.”  The words and talking points we use for ease of communication can be interrogated (“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”).  When we are not looking for just ease of communication but instead proving or disproving then words have to much more precise, and their definitions questioned.  If you cannot agree on the meaning of words, then the discussion is impossible.
• Mistrial: If they are a dishonest and a bad faith actor then they are harassing you and should stop, and this argument is over.  A judge / prosecutor / jury member should be recused if they lack impartiality.

Summary

• Strawman-vs-steelman-vs-good-enough: Require your opponent to restate your argument in a non-strawman version that you would accept and is not a purposefully weakened version of your argument.  “You are a very brave man to attack opponents made only of straw.”
• Framing: The implicit assumptions outside the explicit argument are often more important than the actual argument.  “Framing someone of a crime is illegal, your framing of this argument is so misleading that it should also be illegal.”
• Reframing-with-whataboutism: Do not accept a misleading framing of an argument, instead explicitly break that frame using whataboutism, and tell people that is a valid move.  “Your framing is so misleading that we need to whataboutism to another frame.”
• Argument-concept-deconstruction: Use to tools of concept-partiality (“Yes and no…”) and concept-plurality (“Yes and other explanations too…”) to interrogate the concepts in the argument and framing.  “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”

“The mind is not reducible to the physical-brain.  The mind is universal-consciousness.  The mind is universal-creativity.  And our physical-brain acts only as a filter to that infinite-mind.”  Sounds cool.  But we are going to be talking about a much less cool way our brain acts as a reducing-valve.  Namely: the way that our brain reduces its countless thoughts into a (somewhat) singular order for its body to take a (somewhat) singular action.  Why?  No.  But why?  Because life’s core-essence is about taking-action.  We can question “why that specific action rather than another” but since humans are to a degree action-things, questioning why they are taking-action is a category error (humans are always taking-action).

Behold the crazy person doing crazy things!  “Why?”  Wrong question!  Instead ask “why that crazy-action versus another crazy-action?”  Not-acting is not special, it’s just another action, and when framed as just another action we think of not-acting differently.  Everything is a choice, everything is a decision, everything is an action.  The “view from nowhere” hides the fact that for humans to get to and utilize that “view from nowhere” requires another choice, requires another decision, and requires another action.  Humans are always taking-action.

Summary

• NPC-is-an-action-verb: “Never ask why someone is taking a crazy-action, instead ask why they are not taking some other crazy-action”
• Many-truths-into-single-action: “The brain reduces many possibilities (thoughts) into a singular actuality (an action)”

Long ago when I was a young wage cuck a group of us used to work late and would often play football in the office to decompress (Terry Tate Office Linebacker, Football in the Office).  Now this was behavior was certainly explained by the fact that we were young guys recently out of college with too much energy to just sit in chairs all day.  We were sometimes “caught” by older people who also worked late, but they understood and let us have our fun.  That is until we were actually caught by the office manager who through a fit and complained to the CEO.  I was a bit worried because when she was chastising us she kept bringing up our actions but not that we only did it late at night.  And I was a little confused since she would often run around the office during the day in a performative way that even a young guy like me thought was kinda dangerous. The CEO was a good guy and just told us to be careful and not do it during the day.

The office manager focused on our behavior; while we focused on the context of it being at night.  I considered the office manager’s running performative (“look how hard I’m working”) while maybe she actually considered her work important enough to run around the office in heels.  This is called the fundamental-attribution-error: we explain other peoples behavior based more on their personality traits and less based on the situational context.  Now is this always true?  Of course not.  The utility of the model (all-models-are-false-but-some-are-useful) is in reminding you to consider both personal traits and situational context when trying to explain behavior.

Thinking broader about personality traits and we get into fundamental drives.  Thinking broader about situational context and we get into games.  We can apply the concept of a game to pretty much all human activities with the added benefit that the concept of a game implies a rather robust structure.  Games have purposes, rules and players who have goals, roles, strategies and whose behavior changes bases on feedback and incentives.  So, while the Fundamental-attribution-error helps us remember to consider the situational context, the concept of games gives us a useful framework to at a rather deep level analyze situational context as it applies to human behavior.

• What games are going on here, and what are the purposes of those games?
• What are the rules of the games?
• Who are the players, what are their goals, do they have specific roles?
• What are the incentives for the players?  (Meaning, when players are pursuing their goals what feedback do they receive that might cause them to change their behavior.)
• What strategies are being used?

Summary

• “Why is that NPC behaving that way?” “Well, do you know what game he is playing?”
• Fundamental-attribution-error: Explain peoples’ behavior based their personality traits rather than based on situational / environmental traits.  “Forget it, Jake.  It’s Chinatown”
• Game-theory-games-rules-agents-goals-incentives-strategies: People are never just existing, they are always engaged in the various games of life.  “Don’t hate the prisoner, hate the prisoner’s dilemma”

Homosexual relationships and marriage are now widely accepted, I mean come on “it’s the current year.”  In the year 2000 only 20% of conservatives supported gay marriage, 20 years later 50% of conservatives support gay marriage.  That’s quite a change.  And again, it points to a flaw in the NPC model where people rarely change their beliefs.  This time we are going to posit that on many political issues NPCs don’t even have individual beliefs, instead they outsource their beliefs to what is commonly accepted by their tribe and society at large (“I believe what my tribe believes, I am a good boy”).

So, when there is a society wide change (usually top-down) most people accept the change and update their opinions.

We see then that changed opinions come temporarily through personal pressure (guilt) and permanently though social pressure (conforming to norms) rather than through rational argument.

Summary

• Belief-outsourced-to-the-tribe: NPCs conform to their tribe’s / society’s norms, “I mean come on, it’s the current year”