You Can’t Handle the Truth!

It’s not often that three disparate sources talk about the same issue, and when this happens, I like to sit up and take notice. 

This title for this posting came to me from the famous line that Jack Nicholson said to Tom Cruise in ‘A Few Good Men’. Although it doesn’t fit perfectly, it’s a great starting point for this topic which is: wars, spies, and the things we don’t know, or don’t want to know. 

 

 

 

Cameron Ortis, an elite member of the National Intelligence Co-ordination Centre(NICC), has been convicted of “intentionally and without authority” communicating “special operational information”. Apparently he was feeding useless information to enemy spies in the hopes of luring them into a more comprising situation. He was doing spy stuff.

Typically this is the kind of information that goes under the public radar, as it should. The whole point is that it’s not supposed to be public. If it was, it wouldn’t be spy stuff. And in fact, Mr. Ortis is having a Kafkaesque time mounting a defense, as the majority of the material he would need to defend himself is classified, he can’t access the internet to do research, and is restricted from pretty much all forms of modern communication. 

 

 

A Women of No Importance documents the life and times of Virginia Hall, posthumously recognized as a heroine of the French resistance, and from one point of view is credited with decreasing the length of WWII by 9 months.

However the part relevant here is her travels back to France after the war to meet with her old comrades from the French resistance. Most of these meetings did not go well, as the old resistance were now ostracized and sidelined from the new administration and some were even criticized for their activities during the war.

And make no mistake, some of their actions were dicey because, well, it was war. Day to day life threatening decisions were the norm. Sometimes these decision were at the expense of others in order to live and fight another day.

I’m a huge fan of the Phillip Kerr Bernie Gunther series. Starting with the Berlin Noir books, I think I’ve read them all. However, recently I came across one I hadn’t encountered before: ‘Greeks Bearing Gifts’. Although it is fiction, I think Kerr perfectly captures the atmosphere, both physical and mental, in his main character, an intelligent non-Nazi German, attempting to survive the war. 

 

This book is set in Munich in 1957, twelve years after the end of the war, and part of Bernie’s plight (or Christof Ganz, which is his current nom de plume) is dodging his wartime past. Even though he was never a Nazi, he worked as a detective for Nazis including the SS, who forced him into that role on the threat of death.

The parameters of what is ‘normal’ during a war are not the same after the war has ended. Both Virginia’s friends and the (fictional) Bernie Gunther suffer for surviving WWII at the hands of those who came after and cannot fathom or justify the actions that were forced on them. Perhaps they (we) think they should have maintained their moral stance, and most likely been shot.

 

The Cameron Ortis story is different, but I see a similar thread. We trust our security professionals to ‘do things’ that are probably murky and it’s best not to ask too much about what is going on. It’s a Catch-22 situation: we can’t know what they’re doing, because if we were to know, they wouldn’t be doing it.

The key word is ‘trust’. Was Mr. Ortis trustworthy, and did he have the authority, which seems to be a key word in his trial, to do what he did. Probably, and maybe that’s as good as it gets.

Let’s give Jack Nicholson’s character the last word: 

“You have the luxury of not knowing what I know”. 

 

References: 

Jack: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104257/

Cameron: https://nationalpost.com/feature/secret-trial-of-canadian-spy-cameron-ortis  

Virginia: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40595446-a-woman-of-no-importance  

Bernie: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35621912-greeks-bearing-gifts  

 

New Clear Vision

 I had the cataract replaced in my right eye recently. A simple 10 minute procedure, with patients lined up and wheeled in and out of the operating room: an optical assembly line. That day my right eye was very light sensitive and my vision was blurry, but I started to notice something else as the blurriness started to clear. 

Everything I saw in my right eye was very blue-ish, as if the lighting was coming from a bad fluorescent light. Left eye was a nice sepia-toned view of the world, right eye bright and blue. My wife's pants are green with the left eye and grey with the right.

The next day during my follow up appointment, I asked my ophthalmologist when the blue-ness would dissipate. 'Oh no', he said, 'now you're seeing things the way they actually are'. 

He explained that over time, the lenses in the eye start to deteriorate and everything gets tinged with yellow, as is the case with my left eye. 'Your right eye is now seeing things the way a 5 year old does'. I'm told that over time, my brain will adjust to the new normal, and when I get the other eye done (soon) I won't know the difference, I suppose because I won't have a previous reference. 

He told me of an artist that had cataract surgery and was despondent because all his paintings looked completely different. 'They're all shite' he said. That must be a tough row to hoe: working with perceived colours in such a detailed and personal way and then have the ground, or colour palate, pulled out from under you. 

This is not an unknown result.  My ophthalmologist's explanation is confirmed:  'Cataracts significantly reduce a person’s ‘blue light’ perception. This happens as cataracts have blue light (short wave length light) blocking effect. Given that cataract is a slowly progressive disease, human mind does not perceive the alteration of color and slowly adapts to reduced blue color perception. Hence, after surgery, some patients see ‘blue’ with the eye, as compared to the other non-operated eye. This is normal. The ability to perceive colors in their correct form returns to normalcy within a few weeks ..'(1)

This brings a lot of things to mind: Do I now re-visit art galleries and look at the paintings with my new 5-year old eyes. What colour did that painter, with his 50 year old eyes, think he was painting, and am I seeing the same? And, what is blue?

I recall a discussion about vision and perception from my philosophy class. What colour is and is not is a hot topic in the Representative Realism niche of philosophy. '... the color of something is determined by the physical circumstances, the object, and the unique type of sensory mechanism of the perceiver.' 

Locke believed that objects have '... a disposition to cause perceived colors'. Berkeley's view is that colour is a mental property. Pluralism sidesteps the issue: '... Norm and Norma perceive different colors - and both are right.'(2)

I'm not sure where this leaves me. I really like the left eye view; yellow, sepia-toned, like an old faded photograph, but pretty soon I'll be fully on board with my new vision. It might be time to up the version number to Bob 5.0. 

The world will be the same, but my perception of it will have changed. Or maybe my perception is what the world is. I'll go with the pluralism approach: Both Bob 4.0 and Bob 5.0 perceive different colours - and both are right. 

1. https://www.dragarwal.com/blog/all-about-cataract/seeing-a-lot-more-blue-after-the-cataract-surgery-information-on-colour-perception-changes-after-a-cataract-surgery/

2. Introduction to Philosophy. Jack S. Crumley II, 2016. Broadview Press. pp 122-123

Soulcraft as a Way to Meaning in Our Livelihoods

 Shop Class as Soulcraft - Matthew B. Crawford. 

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6261332-shop-class-as-soulcraft

Although there are a number of things I don't like about this book, there are some interesting points of views offered.  He takes some of the ideas of 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance', the joy and value in fixing something yourself - how this gives a person what phenomenologists call agency and defines yourself in the world. 

What he doesn't address is that we all can't just tinker and fix bikes for a living. Yes, it's important to have a craft that you can dig into, and it would be nice if we could all make a living at it, but his rose coloured glasses approaches definitely takes away some of the import of his message.

However, he gives a pretty good analysis of the corporate world in the chapter 'Contradictions of the Cubicle', and I must admit that I have more sympathy for middle managers than I did before. I was relating parts of this chapter to my final job in Higher Ed IT, and perhaps I now better understand the dynamics going on around me at that time. It also made me realize that I still have things to process from that time. 

Crawford describes the role of managers and middle managers in bureaucracies as:

• 'managing what other people think of them'
• 'constantly vulnerable and anxious...' with the constant fear that an organisational upheaval could damage their careers.
• 'a constant interpretation ... of events that constructs a reality in which it is difficult to pin blame on anyone'
• 'mutually contradictory statements are made to cohere by sheer forcefulness of presentation allowing a manager to stake out a position on every side of an issue' 
• 'the intent of this type of language is not to deceive, it is preserve one's interpretive latitude so that if the context changes, a new appropriate meaning can be attached to the language already used.' 
• 'people are not held to their word, because it is generally understood that their word is always provisional'

(these insights he attributes to the sociologist Robert Jackall)

He goes on to describe 'that the world of managers resembles that of Soviet bureaucrats' who had to walk the line between living reality, but talking the party line. Sheesh, and I thought I had it tough. It sounds absolutely Kafkian. 

I recall one of my first meetings where an external business consultant gave a presentation that was filled with business vision jargon that was absolutely Dilbertian. I was incredulous, and even more so when one of the project sponsors glowingly praised it. I probably should have walked out then, but I needed the job. It ended up that none of that stuff was ever implemented. 

Back to the book, Crawford laments the loss of individual agency and responsibilities to the team approach. Not that there's anything wrong with teams, we can't do everything ourselves, but if the entire focus and importance is on team relationships, the actual work becomes secondary, and the product turns out to be the team and work relationships. The medium is the message, or in this case, product.

When I first started in IT in the 1980's there was a strong individual element to the job. This does not mean that people didn't work together well in groups and teams, but there was a very strong sense of individual responsibility of one's contribution. 

Perhaps what I saw over my 30 years in IT was the eventual emergence of teams, management bureaucracy, and 'process as product' that Crawford describes in the book: the loss of the sense of personal accomplishment, the move to a more disinterested assembly of components, and the rise of non-technical people involved in projects and making technical decisions. 

I'm thankful that I managed to maintain the 'individual as team member approach' for as long as I did, but I now realize that this approach was becoming obsolete as teams and process became more important than the individual, and I didn't (or wouldn't) keep up. And, there's no blame to be assigned. The culture and business practices changed everywhere. Managers are making the best of it themselves with pressures from below and above, and Kafkian jargon and targets to jump through. 

Fall 2020 PSYC100 Musings - 03

 TLDR; - WEIRD as a concept in psychology shows how we see the subject through a Western lense. Emotions may not be innate and also are subject to a Western prejudice.

An interesting part of my PSYC100 textbook declared that, to date, psychological writings and research have focused on WEIRD subjects, where WEIRD stands for: White, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic. I was interested to see the same in a Douglas Todd column where he reviewed the Joseph Henrich book 'The WEIRDest people in the world'. (It turns out the author and his colleagues napkined out the concept at a Chinese takeout lunch at a basement food court at UBC. Hey, I had lunch there quite often. Yes, Jane. I used napkin as a verb.)

As Douglas Todd notes '...more than 96 per cent of experiments in social psychology were based on subjects who are WEIRD.'

And Henrich himself says that my PSYC100 textbook should be renamed:  “Textbooks that purport to be about ‘Psychology’ or “Social Psychology’ need to be retitled something like ‘The Cultural Psychology of Late 20th-Century Americans.’ ”

Basically, this says that all of our psychology is culturally biased. This a contest between 'cultural' subjectivism and objectivism. That is, is it really possible to develop a psychology for all humans, or are we so affected by our societies and cultures that we're beyond this? Are we committing cultural or psychological anthromorphism by projecting our WEIRD viewpoint on other cultures? Once you open this door, it's hard not to see it everywhere. (The AI behind Siri written by WEIRD computer programmers? Does the word 'systemic' now take on more gravitas?)

Contrast this with my other reading (acting as a pseudo-TA for Jane): How Emotions are Made (Lisa Feldman Barrett). The premise of the book is to disavow the 'classical' view of emotions: that there are 6 basic emotions that are innate (biological, like instincts), that are common across all cultures. Here we go again! The argument against this view considers emotions as constructed by our brains, not triggered like instincts.  

However, for this essay, the interesting part of the book is the premise that there is no basis for limiting emotions to the famous six. It turns out that the first experiments studying emotions (approx 50 years ago) were based on Darwin's theory that facial expressions hold the key, and from this, six emotions became defined as representative of all basic emotions, and we've been stuck with them ever since! Very weird.

Even studies of emotions in foreign cultures who have not had contact with the West are compromised, as the researchers reject from the study any emotions that they don't recognize. There could be a multitude of emotions in those cultures that our narrow six-pack of emotions can't fathom. And even further, are we in the West now constrained to these six emotions? Can we not now think outside the box we've put ourselves in?

Not sure where we go from here. The PSYC textbook, although identifying the WEIRD syndrome, does nothing to counter it. How could it? where do you start? And the emotions book is just getting started with creating a new theory of emotions after blowing up the old one.

But I should probably stop this now, and get back to studying for the midterm.

References:
https://psychology.pressbooks.tru.ca
https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-youre-most-likely-weird-and-you-dont-even-know-it
https://lisafeldmanbarrett.com/books/how-emotions-are-made/

Fall 2020 PSYC100 Musings - 02

 Chapter 2 is rather boring: research methods. Yes, yes I know about case studies and surveys, and the problems there-in. Or so I think! 

One of the things that I learned in my Philosophy course last term is that I do have a cursory understanding of lots of things, but not of the details, and my understanding isn't deep enough to actually talk intelligently about the topic: it's just all in there somewhere.

For example, this week I discovered my terms of reference are wrong. It turns out that there is a negative correlation between divorce in families and student academic achievement. At first I thought this meant there is *no* correlation, but a negative correlation is just as informative as a positive correlation; it just means that it's an inverse relationship.

I am still struggling with the completely online nature of this course. There are no planned interactions with anyone. Our only activity this week (other than reading the textbook and other suggested videos) is to study a research proposal and ask ourselves questions about it.

So, this time around, I'm wary that I need to do the work, and actually write things down. It's a completely different thing to draw it out of my mind into cogent statements.

 

It's interesting working with a digital textbook (kudos to Capilano for using a free digital textbook). This free textbook initiative is being provided through BC Campus' Open Textbook Collection. 

I recall Clint Lalonde from BC Campus doing a talk on this at a BC-Net conference about 5 years ago. It's good to see it's come to fruition, saving a student close a $100 per book).  The textbook has live html links, mostly to the BC Campus site for graphs, but also links to the famed Khan Academy site for specific and additional topics.

Fall 2020 PSYC100 Musings - 01

 I decided to take a basic PSYC100 course this term at Capilano University. This follows the Philosophy course I took in January 2020, which was relegated to online when the pandemic hit in March.

So, this is a itinerant record of that experience, sort of a psychological study of the new online post-secondary environment, using a psychology course as the vehicle for the study.

First things first: I'm enrolled in 1 of 12 sections of PSYC100, all but one are fully asynchronous online. That is, there are only videos to watch and the textbook to read. No streamed lectures. I'm disappointed by this. The streamed lectures in the previous philosophy course that kicked in when the Pandemic hit worked out quite well.

The start to the term did not go well. I was not enrolled in the class before classes started on Sept 8 (day after Labour day). The Cap Learning Management System(LMS) - Moodle) was down on Labour day (actually I think the single-sign on server was down, Moodle was fine), and was incredibly slow on the first day of classes. 

(This is understandable, and kudos to my new and old colleagues at Cap for at least keeping it up and running on the first day of classes when everything is online. This in itself is one of those remarkable achievements that IT departments routinely pull off with no one the wiser as to the incredible challenge this poses.)

The entire class missed the welcoming Zoom meeting that was supposed to happen Sept 8 morning, probably because the messaging did not come through in time. The instructor sent out another invite at about noon for a similar afternoon meeting. I missed the message, and I don't think it was well attended. 

The videos for the first week are a mix of introductions, Cap specific content, and generic PSYC content from the web. One video lecture I found particularly interesting was the relationship between Philosophy and Psychology (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieE1XMIezV4). Another was Cap specific and introduced me to a new visual of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Good to see there's a sense of humour. 

First week's assignment is to submit a one page document to describe what I thought Psychology was before I started the course, compared to what I now think it is after I've studied the content (videos and textbook) for the first week. Not challenging so far.

One observation that I had before, and was enforced by my readings, is the defensiveness of Psychology professionals in labeling their area of study a science. That is, Psychologists consider their field a science. However, the 'hard' scientists (Physics, Chemistry, Biology) scoff at this notion.

I think I remember...

As sometimes happens, I'm reading two books at the same time: Bill Bryson's 'Notes from a Small Island'(a day by day account of his 8 week walk around Great Britain) and David Bergen's 'The Time In Between'(the story of an American Vietnam War vet revisiting Vietnam after 30 years). There was no real plan with these two books, I just happened to find them around the house. Coincidence.

What I've come to notice is the complete opposite representation of history, or perhaps memory, that  the two books represent.

Bryson revels in how Great Britain '...manages at once to be intimate and small scale and at the same time packed and bursting with incident and interest. ... in the space of a few moments you pass the home of Christopher Wren, the buildings where Halley found his comet and Boyle his first law, the track where Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile ... a landscape packed with centuries of busy, productive attainment.'

Contrast this to Bergen's book where history and therefore memory is actively forgotten. There is good reason for this. Most recently the horrors of the Vietnam War: 3M killed, 30k missing, 2M injured, 1M widowed. 'And we have suffered a lot. It was Americans who invaded Vietnam. It was not our desire to fight.'

As the veteran's daughter tries to find some closure, she finds an old man in the village is content to eat his soup and sleep in a dry bed, with 'no wish to tunnel back through the years.' And that time is both scarce and never-ending, '...from a certain point onward there was no turning back and that it was important to reach that point'.

There is a similar theme of actively not remembering (although some continue to) in Madeleine Thein's 'Do Not Say We Have Nothing'. Of course, in China, this was part and parcel of Mao's Cultural Revolution.

I'm not sure what to make of this, I hesitate to make conclusions, so will just offer these observations.