Technology Evolves Rapidly, Human Nature Does Not

If I look at what’s happened just with blogging and RSS feeds alone since 1999, the technological improvements have been both very rapid and very beneficial.

But when it comes to human nature things haven’t changed since the dawn of recorded history. There are no conferences you can attend to speed to pace of evolving human nature. If there was such a conference I’d pay $1000 to attend. I worry that attendance would be sparse. A conference on how to make money via blogging, on the other hand, as you know,would be much more popular.

Please note there are no ads on this site and it is not currently my objective to make money off of this site. I do hope ultimately there is a revenue model for TVbythenumbers.com (don’t bother going to the site, it’s not live yet) which I co-founded.

There are many aspects to human nature, and one of them is that in bits and pieces we love some vicarious drama. We also, quite naturally sometimes love to get a laugh at the expense of other’s misfortune. The German word for this is Schadenfreude and while I didn’t get as much of the Schadenfruede genetics as my brother Steve, like anyone else, I’m not immune.

A couple of examples. Last Tuesday I walked from the Marina over to 24 Willie Mays Plaza to see Barry Bonds hit #756 (it was an exciting, emotional and exceptional 10 minutes or so). It’s over a 4 mile walk and I walked it through Fisherman’s Wharf and then around the Embarcadero. It’s not the shortest path, but it’s gorgeous and there are no traffic lights on the Embarcadero so other than the tourists in Fisherman’s Wharf, there’s nothing to slow you down.

As I walked through the Wharf I saw about 60 people congregated on Jefferson St. and looked over to see what the heck they were checking out. It was that staple of the Wharf, “The Bush Man”. He’s been there for years and his shtick is that he hides behind a few branches he carries around with him and then jumps out from behind them scaring the bejeezus out of unsuspecting passersby. The crowd of 60 or so that had amassed was enjoying it.

Schadenfreude.

Via my friend Mike Raneri’s real-life social engineering (it didn’t happen on Facebook if you can believe it) he’d actually wound up scoring the 2 tickets in front of our seats for the game where Bonds hit #756 so four of us got to enjoy it which was really nice. I sat in front of Raneri, who as it turned out had been dropping peanut shells on the top of my baseball cap for about 20 minutes. He was amused, as were the other two. As a younger man, this might have really irked me, but I am not a young man. I thought it was funny too and was OK with the others (including some of the other 42,000, I’m sure) having a laugh at my expense. C’mon, it’s not like he was putting the shells in my beer!

All the attention on Paris and Lindsay is of a similar nature. This weekend, the Web 2.0 crowd had its own little version of this with The Winer-Calacanis Slapfest involving Dave Winer and Jason Calacanis.

I wrote about this, and Jason posted some of that on his site and between that and a frenzy of people searching for “Calacanis Winer Gnomedex” I had about a 600% increase in traffic. Of course that’s easy because this site has no traffic, but typically Saturday’s are the slowest day and I had record traffic.

It’s no different than my friends being amused with the peanut shells on my cap or the crowd of people gathered to watch “The Bush Man” scare people by jumping out from behind is branches. I accept that’s the way it is, though this acceptance has been a long time coming. My preference would be that more people would want to read about whether capitalism is self-destructive and how to lose 80 pounds and keep it off. But the way human nature works, we’re more interested in Paris, Lindsay, Jason, Dave and The Bush Man.

Another part of human nature is that if you “attack”, people tend to fight back. I wasn’t at the Gnomedex conference and didn’t see the full context of how Dave heckled Jason. But I saw what Dave wrote on his blog and even if he’d not heckled Jason at the conference, Jason would certainly have responded similarly. For Dave to not realize that calling Jason a spammer would be viewed as an attack, at least by Jason is to have complete disregard for how human nature really works, and also completely ignores cause and effect. I’m sure Dave doesn’t view his write-ups on Friday and Saturday as any kind of attack on Jason. But, they were. The odds of Jason having a response were predictably 100%!

When Jason (somewhat surprisingly to me) received a lot of support via the blogs, Dave somehow felt victimized. Steven Hodson called Dave pissy in a post at winextra.com and Dave responded to him with a comment that Steven was being disrespectful and was somewhat aghast at the response. In this instance, Dave, like billions of others before him sometimes have been, is in denial. I’m not really sure that’s a bad thing either, though I think Dave would be a better friend to himself with a little self-examination on the matter.

The world will move on either way.

We Lie to Ourselves..but Why?

What we say: Pew: Consumers Tired of Celeb Scandals

What we actually do: Lindsay, Britney Boost Entertainment-News-Magazine Ratings

Please excuse me for being the kind of person who is more prone to believe in what we as a people actually do rather than what we say. What I am trying to decide between is whether:

1. by lying to ourselves as we do we are really, really holding ourselves back from progressing or

2. if lying to ourselves in this way actually saves us from extinction. I worry that the truth may make people more prone to killing themselves and others...

Is Capitalism Self-Destructive: Barry Bonds & Bud Selig Edition

Almost everything can be self-destructive, and that's just the truth of the way the world works. It applies even to good things. For example, I am curious about a great many things and I love to learn, and right now I'm highly motivated for the first time in years. All of that has coupled together in a way that has been very enjoyable and that I have been very enthusiastic about.

However, there is a downside, and that is I have gotten on average about 4 hours of sleep a night for the last 2 weeks. I need to rein it in to make sure I'm getting a good 7 hours or so at least 5 times a week. Is being curious self-destructive? Is a desire to learn self-destructive? Is being highly motivated self-destructive? You wouldn't think so and you'd think it's a preposterous notion to suggest such a thing probably. But it isn't completely preposterous.

If I keep on my current path and then wind up developing some illness as a result of wearing myself out: it's self-destructive. It's definitely on me to rein it in and balance very good attributes (curiosity, desire to learn and motivation) against my overall health. When you don't balance something against "overall health", it's self-destructive, no matter what it is.

It is the same for capitalism. Is capitalism in and of itself self-destructive? I don't think it is, not any more than I think being curious is. But when it runs unbalanced and unchecked against things we really value – say "overall health", it's problematic.

We don't love our nature. Human nature that is, and I think Oscar Wilde said it best when he said, "If you want to tell the truth make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you". Please don't kill me though: our nature is, that sometimes when the stakes are very high, or perceived to be so, there is a very strong propensity to lie.

That we don't LIKE that this is the way that it is seems to be as much of a problem as the lying itself. Because that it's hard for us to say, "yeah, the base condition is that in situations like that, people lie, whether it's the president, Barry Bonds or Bud Selig." That we can't easily admit (and me either by the way) this is the way it is produces much of the hypocrisy. Sometimes I think it's our lack of fortitude for dealing with, accepting and talking about our human nature that can produce situations like what has happened with performance enhancing drugs in Major League Baseball.

Because we don't want to deal with the truth:

1. We loved the home runs and the ticket sales show that
   
2. The incentive to cheat by the players was very high because better performance means a much bigger contract. Can you say Jason Giambi?
   
3. The incentive by management to look the other way was very high (see #1)
   

The truth, the real truth – and I couldn't find a way to make it funny, so please don't shoot me is that almost everyone has a role. The fans, the players and the ownership/management, we all participated in this. That most of the fans don't want to admit that is as big of a part of the problem as anything else.

I believe that if you could blood test any random sample of 10 players, 5 position players, and 5 pitchers, at least half would test positive for Human Growth Hormone. If what Bud Selig is REALLY doing is trying to press the union (MLBPA) to allow blood tests into the collective bargaining agreement: this I would support strongly and I would give such testing the benefit of the doubt. But the problem is: my eyes. The MLBPA's resitance to just saying "we hate cheating and we want to fix it, so bloood tests!", is real resistance. I'm not imagining it or making this up. They are in fact resisting just that.

The NFL for example had a problem with steroids. They implemented testing, they did NOT do any witch hunt to find past sinners, but perhaps with the NFL the players and management were always more in unison (this seems to be the case based on observations over my lifetime). But then again, there are players in the NFL, even the size of their heads, who make Barry Bonds look like a petite ballerina. The stakes are very high in the NFL too. All the same "human nature" aspects apply.

Do I believe the NFL doesn't have an issue with performance enhancers? Not really. I believe for a variety of reasons, we give them a pass. I believe if Barry Bonds only had 500 home runs right now, baseball might have gotten a pass too. I'm not sure about that, but it seems football didn't have the same "sanctity of the game" issues baseball is plagued with.

What I do believe in is fixing problems. I'm not sure we really want this problem fixed. These issues come out as polarizing issues where human nature is…we want to pick a side. In the case of cheating in baseball, I don't think there really is a side. Players cheated because it was lucrative, the fans seemed to enjoy it and the owners looked the other way because no matter how loud we were crying about Bonds, we were still buying millions of tickets and spending more money on baseball.

To fix cheating in baseball without legalizing the cheating (that's certainly the easiest solution and the path of least resistance) all sides need to take accountability. The players don't want to take accountability, the ownership doesn't want to take accountability and in the mainstream, neither do the fans.

You can't test for human growth hormone and the positive impact on HGH for these guys is enough that sure as heck, if they can't get caught, they'll take it. Giambi got caught taken amphetamines when it was possible he COULD get caught (and he did). So what do you think his stance is on stuff he can't actually be tested and caught for?

If it were up to me to fix, I'd just have the President of the United States have Donald Fehr and Bud Selig over to the White House for a little Tony Soprano style sit down that goes like: "Invoke some kind of full-on blood testing right now, or my last act in office will be to see that the antitrust exemption for MLB is removed. I don't think either one of you wants that."

But see, here's the thing, Mr. Bush himself started this by being very vocal about usage of steroids and other performance enhancers in his 2003 "State of the Union Address" (on the heels of 73 home runs by Mr. Bonds). I'm beginning to think, like most people, Mr. Bush just wants to see Barry Bonds nailed and doesn't want to fix the problem.

I'm actually more concerned about fixing the problem, and am surprised to wind up in the minority on this one. This is further complicated because of the issues of race which also concern me. Giambi gets a pass, Bonds doesn't? That doesn't play out well over time and I hate to see it.

I am OK with taking the blame for this problem, but I'd actually like to FIX it or decide we just don't care and move on. It shouldn't just be about a witch hunt, and that is all it seems to be.

Is capitalism self-destructive? I don't think so. But human nature sure can be.

Is it OK to Capitalize on God? Yes: But You’d Better be GOOD at It!

I ran a little ad campaign tied to keyword “God” linked back to just this lousy landing page from a few days ago.

Google’s system is fair, and early in the game, “God” could be had fairly cheaply. $.25 a click for God. That’s not freaking bad man –for GOD!

But this God is fair and just and so is Google. People think some of the ways Google adwords work is nefarious. Those people are DOPES, do not listen to them. Google just works very well and is set up to constantly be optimizing on its own. .Here’s how it works: it can calculate the performance of your ad. If my ad tied to God resulted in clicks where every click left the page pretty much immediately (which was the case in over 80% of the instances), Google views that as a “low quality” ad. Here’s what happens as a result: the cost of the keyword gets jacked up. What happens then? Well then what happened is the campaign stopped.

It’s a good system. People don’t want to be paying for lousy ads (even @ .25/click) and moreover, Google wants ITS users to get good results. If its users continually click on your ad and then bail immediately, your ad (in this case my ad) isn’t giving Google users what they want. Google wants to continually optimize to produce better results (period), this sort of optimization is good for everyone.

For purposes of experiment, I don’t mind blowing $20 to see how it works. But how it works is because the site they landed on was not what the people who clicked wanted –and I could’ve experimented around with landing pages to see if one without a picture of Paris Hilton would’ve done better – is Google deems the ad “low quality”. Google will let you run low quality ads, even for God, but, there’s a price premium. In my case a 25X price premium! That’s right, because my ad was lousy they jacked up the CPC on God to $5. That is a CPC that is outside the bounds of what I am doing here (which is trying to learn and satisfy my own curiosity). I’m $.25/click curious, but not $5/click curious

I could have started over and had God at $.25 again, and when I create some content that would likely please God (and Google) for $.25 I may try again. For now,I think this system works really, really well. For you, for me, for Google – and maybe even for God.

Is Capitalism Self-Destructive: Part II

I had dinner with a couple of friends/former colleagues last night. One of them has a 2 year old son and at some point we got around to how kids have their own calendars (for scheduling purposes) in Outlook, how kids are doing more and more, getting their cell phones earlier and earlier. The view of the world from San Francisco’s Marina district is not necessarily an accurate indicator of national trends – and the fact that our dinner was in Cole Valley probably really didn’t change the dynamic a whole lot. But it seems more than ever things are very competitive for children.

I mostly attributed this both to the real Darwinism (it’s natural to compete) and Social Darwinism. But my friend Bob pushed back. He didn’t really believe those things really produce happiness or a high quality of life. Bob S. is actually very interested in the concept of self-actualization and he doesn’t see (at least right now while his son is 2) the “checklist” approach as the way to go -- the throw the spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks: music, sports, , getting into the best school (even pre-school can be very competitive here) just so your kid can be competitive, that’s not the way Bob wants it to go with his child.

But like many people I know, Bob isn’t just interested in it from his and his son’s perspective, but interested in broader change.

The current system we live in is not motivated and can not easily be motivated towards broad change (see Newton's First Law of Motion -- inertia). But it's not just the physics of it, which make change hard enough, it's the capitalism.

Of almost anyone I know (there are a few exceptions, but only a few really) I’m the least qualified person to opine on how to achieve self-actualization. However, that particular circumstance makes me extremely qualified to opine on what self-actualization is not.

Capitalism, today, right now, capitalizes on “fear”. I’m not above doing that myself sometimes. I mean it wouldn’t bug me at all if Roger Goodell was scared as heck that I am right and decided to cut me a check for $3.8 million dollars. I could live with myself OK if that happened.

But I know a thing or two about fear and I can connect the dots to self-actualization. If you’re afraid of stuff that doesn’t really pose you any threat, you’re not self-actualized. If you’re not afraid of stuff that actually does pose you a threat (but you don’t even really consciously consider the threat), you are not self-actualized. If you have both? You’re even further away from self-actualization.

But Capitalism – our brand of capitalism, it seems to need way, way, way more than a handful of people who are afraid of many things which do not really pose a threat. In fact, capitalism mostly seems to thrive off of making sure that a great many people are afraid. Afraid not to have a nice car, afraid not to be consumed with looking as beautiful as they possibly can.

It sends mixed messages on the other side too – where people should be scared but aren’t. You remember that Budweiser commercial where they say: “Everyone who drinks Budweiser won’t become an alcoholic – but for the % of you who do? Oh man that’s going to SUCK for you!”

I don’t remember it either.

I don’t see where the groundswell of motivation to change this is going to come from. Bob can (and I’m sure will) teach his son about these things, about how to ignore the fear-based marketing, or the marketing that is dishonest about the actual threat. Bob can model what he values with his son, and hope he turns out to be a well –rounded, well-adjusted adult with a real shot at being happy and thriving regardless of where his passion may be.

But I do not believe we can hope for a self-actualized society in this system because the system needs an awful lot of people who aren’t self-actualized to thrive.

I’m still not sure whether capitalism is self-destructive, but I’m sure it’s no easy road to self-actualization for the masses.

Capitalizing on God: I’m Falling for Paris

Either we’re having our “wow, our little girl is growing up!” moment or, Paris has really good media spinmeisters advising her. It’s all quite a turnaround from the “it’s so unfair!” of last week. She’s taking her lumps. Doesn’t want to appeal. She did the crime, she wants to do her time. It’s the right thing to say.

But she also said, “God has given me another chance!” Not only that, she said something about how she is going to stop acting dumb and put her influence to good use. I wanted to just hug her really.

I’m mixed on the playing of the God card. I still haven’t reached a conclusion on whether Capitalism is Self-Destructive, but as fodder into the mix, I propose that in a system that capitalizes on EVERYTHING, the number one thing it capitalizes on is God.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. Actually I am sure how I feel about it, but I love Paris anyway. She could’ve been resistant to doing the right thing, she could’ve used her position to just continuously do whatever the hell she wants anyway – and time will tell whether she is REALLY repenting here. But she’s saying she ought to repent and I’ll give her points for that because…it’s the truth.

As for God, that’s an essay for another day. But it’s true, as long as you’re alive, you always have another chance. My favorite fortune cookie of all time had the following fortune: it’s never too late to be what you might have been.

It really isn’t. Not for me, you, or Ms. Hilton.

Schadenfreude Part 1: Is Capitalism Self-Destructive Behavior?

Robert D. Seidman © June 3, 2007

I like to get an idea about what a person is passionate about. Usually just in talking to a person that comes out over time. In the case of my brother, whom I've known all my life, he has at least 3 passions:

1. Quotations – he loves a good quote
   
2. Food – he loves food like a normal person, but he does have it in him to be a food critic/restaurant reviewer. His attention to detail and subtleties around the eating experience is very high, and something that gives him pleasure
   
3. Schadenfreude
   

I think there are still internet opportunities to get his ideas around food into the world. Quotations has been well done all over and isn't worth approaching. But where my brother could be king of the internet is with Schadenfreude. Schadenfreude is basically the notion that you're not actually happy unless someone else is at least a little bit miserable.

How this usually manifests with my brother is… Well, if it's 75 and sunny in San Francisco with no wind. Me? I'm just delighted because it's gorgeous. Not so with my brother. If it's 75 and sunny with no wind, that's just kind of another day UNLESS it also happened to be 17 degrees with 11" of snow or 95 degrees with 98% humidity back in Washington, DC where most of his colleagues are. If we have good weather and they have bad weather, that's a good, good, day for my brother, it's like he's aroused or something.

I do think there is an opportunity internet wise to aggregate all the stories of people's happiness through other's misfortune. I think there's a market for such a site.

As with most things, things are on a continuum and Schadenfreude isn't any different. My brother is just at the higher end of the range compared to me, but I think everyone, myself included participates in this at least sometimes in some ways.

--

I have spent the last four years in a careful examination of self-destructive behavior, in this case, my own. This examination did actually produce LESS self-destructive behavior, but that was indeed the goal of the exercise. But the examination on an individual level got me wondering, what about self-destructive behavior when it's in an organism, like a company, or even a society. Further, can the process I used on an individual basis be reworked as a process for multi-organism groups (companies, societies, etc).

You see examples of self-destructive behavior in corporations all the time. And I think it's harder for corporations to deal with because if you manifest self-destructive behavior as an individual everything about "cause and effect" does indeed make sense if you have the strength to look at it. But in a group, self-destructive behavior it's not as easy to see even if you have the strength to deal with the truth.

I was happily in what probably would've been about a 2 year process to figure out how to deal with self-destructive behavior at a bigger level when I got sidetracked by a good friend of mine, who raised the question that I no doubt would have had to come to grips with, but it probably would've been a year from now when I was ready for it. The question he raised is this: is capitalism self-destructive behavior?

I am having an issue with both the question and the person who raised the question to me. My friend is one of the more successful people I know. He's a CIO at a fortune 500 company and one of the most optimistic, decent people I've ever met. It seems like less than 2 years ago we went on a 5 mile walk in Los Angeles (I know, nobody walks in LA, but it's not REALLY true…they just walk for exercise, not for transportation) where the bulk of the conversation centered on his belief that progress and growth can be perpetual. I wasn't so sure, but he was.

So, now I have to deal with the question AND with, "Wow, he must've gotten kind of cynical in the last 2 years to throw that question out!"

-

This is part one in a long series. It's still going to take me a while to process it, but one of the things I'm particularly good at is "thinking out loud", so here it goes.

The first premise – separate from any judgment of whether it's good or bad is this: capitalism will capitalize on almost everything. One of the biggest tools of capitalism is MANIPULATION.

Here, I also am not passing judgment on the term "manipulation", I'm smart enough, and aware enough and secure enough to know that sometimes, beyond any shadow of a doubt, we LIKE manipulation. Sometimes we'll even pay for it.

For example, when you shell out $10 for a movie, you want to be manipulated into thinking you got your $10 worth. You want to be manipulated into feeling entertained. Hollywood is expert at this. From visuals, to pacing, to music – it's all aimed at manipulating your emotions and leaving you feeling entertained.

We're all GOOD with this sort of manipulation.

And there are many, many people just like me who are ok with this, and even embrace it. But there's SOME manipulation that's just not OK with me and I have figured it out on my own over time. Nobody taught me, there was no class in school, but judging from looking around at the rest of the world, perhaps there should have been. So let's get to examples that are not OK.

1. There are news organizations that use music during their news broadcasts that effectively is the same music that is in the videogame SOCOM (a military shoot 'em up involving Navy SEALS). In the videogame I'm ALL good with having my emotions manipulated. I paid the $50-$60 for the game for that very reason. But with NEWS? No, that's not OK. Don't let your NEWS manipulate your emotions. That turns the news into a movie or a videogame and the news should be something else.
   
2. Any situation where they want my money and my money is more valuable to them than their product is to me.
   
3. Any situation aimed at DELIBERATELY TRYING TO MAKE ME FEEL BAD in an effort to get my money
   

I don't know if I can come up with an example of #1 other than some of the FOX/ABC television and radio broadcasts, but #2 & #3, we're surrounded by this sort of manipulation. And that's where the Schadenfreude did wind up saving my butt.

I listen to radio at night before going to bed. The commercials go something like this:

1. You're poor and your life sucks (buy Gold!)
   
2. You're bald and your life sucks (buy our snake oil that DOES NOT WORK, but the fantasy that it might will be worth the money!! – and hey, if they attached some type of $100 million dollar lottery to it, the fantasy thing might work in their favor)
   
3. Your colon is busted but you KNOW you're too scared and cheap to see a doctor, so buy our special beverage to fix your colon or your life will suck
   
4. You smoke, are fat, an alcoholic, or in some other way out of control, and since you don't really want to work at being a better person (which is in fact why your life sucks) buy our magic pill to distract you from why your life sucks!
   
5. Your penis is small or just doesn't work nearly as well as it should, and OH MAN YOUR LIFE REALLY SUCKS!
   

The penis thing saved my ass because of the Schadenfreude. As it happens, I am bald, and four years ago, I was an obese smoker. I'm not now, but back in those days when I was being pummeled by these commercials, it was the "your penis makes your life SUCK" commercials that allowed me to fall asleep at night. Nothing else much was going right, but my penis wasn't small and really, when you got right down to it, it may be the only part of me that worked EXACTLY like it should.

And I got a lot of Schadenfreude out of that. Because I could (and did) think, "I may be a fat, bald chain smoker, but I don't have it as bad as THOSE POOR FOOLS!" This thought gave me hope, and the strength to carry on and the ability to fall asleep some nights. I'm thankful for the Schadenfreude.

I do wish I'd bought that gold 4 years ago though.

In closing, it's a far lesser deal to me, but my colon is fine too. In the meanwhile I'd ask you to use your own brain to consider the examples of manipulation and the advertising examples of the specific manipulation designed to make people feel bad, and ask yourself, is it self-destructive. What do you think?