Happy New Year 2019: Resolve To Have Growing Pain Understanding

Hi! Happy New Years Eve!



I'm writing this on New Years Eve, 2018, at the only Starbucks in Bangor, Maine. Oddly enough there recently were two Starbucks in Bangor, and as you might expect they were right next to each other. Further, if you count the Starbucks in the Target store then that would mean there were three within a one mile radius and then none for at least forty miles. Weird, huh?

This morning I rolled over and asked Alexa to make me a ham sandwich. The device said, "Okay, you are now a ham sandwich." Ha! The artificial intelligence in Alexa only applies to the voice recognition software. The Alexa conversation is all scripted. So that means someone heard that joke somewhere and programmed Alexa with that response. Thinking about the conversation with some anonymous person who wrote the response tickles my fancy more so than any AI pretend conversation.

AI, artificial intelligence, is going through some growing pains. Having patience with growing pains is the topic of this essay. Microsoft unleashed an AI conversation for text chat about a year back. People soon started training the AI to be  racist, sexist, homophobic. Probably just kids having fun. Microsoft quickly pulled that AI. We understand these growing pains. Like that.

As we look to a New Year it is a time of reflection about the past year and the year coming. We set New Year's resolutions we know we are going to abandon. Well, I'd like to add a resolution to your list: resolve to have growing pain understanding.

The meaning of GPU in computers means a graphical processing unit. The meaning of GPU in Irreni World Scale is growing pain understanding.

There are so many ways in which our culture is blind to growing pains that it is hard to know were to begin. It is probably best to pick something politically inert so as not to alienate anyone one.

So let me pick on Netscape. Netscape could have been Google. Netscape wanted to be what Google is today. Netscape was founded by the originator of the first web browser, Mozilla. It seemed a shoehorn to be the top Internet company the way Google is today.

The ruin of Netscape came down to growing pains. I was in college during the 1990s when the web browser first came out. I attended U.C. Berkeley and like all computer science students we were all heavily being recruited. At one of the many recruiting events I stopped by the Netscape table. There the Netscape campus recruiter was bragging about how Netscape was hiring seven-hundred people per month. As someone who studies and understands these things let me assure you that hiring seven-hundred people per month is not a selling point. It is a sign of a company out of control. In Silicon Valley we call this "your success becomes your failure." In Silicon Valley we like to pretend we can drink water from a fire hose and then not drown. There  is another name for this, unmanaged growth.

Another growing pain story from when I was in college had to do with my advisor advising his graduate students. His advice most often rendered? Learn how to walk before you run. Don't bite off more than you can chew. Seems these childhood aphorisms are not just for children. But one can kinda understand that young, exuberant, twenty-something graduate students full of themselves can be brash and reckless. But what about the CEO of Netscape? He was a former Pepsi Company CEO veteran who thought it was a good idea to hire seven-hundred people per month? What about a Congress of five-hundred-thirty-five people who decided a national health-care plan should be rolled out untested to three-hundred million people?

America embraces the Texan ethos that bigger is better. We Americans never stop to learn to walk before we run, we just run. Going viral is in fact a standard of success and not standard of managed growth. Amazon succeeded is all we see from sea to shining sea and we overlook all the Netscape failures.

Social change is no exception to this. Unmanaged growth is the end-all-be-all for social change. Take for example the #MeToo movement or Black Lives Matter. Both of these movements I hold in high regard as to their objectives. Both of these movements went national seemingly overnight. As a consequence both of these movements have suffered from public relations calamities due to unmanaged growth. Everyone wants to be an overnight success in the US. No, we must be overnight successes.

In 2008 there was a fifty-year retrospective done for the, "Brown v. The Board of Education", Supreme Court decision. One would hope that if there is any deliberative body that understood the social responsibility of social change it would be the Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court's hands are tied. The Supreme Court cannot take a baby-steps approach. The US Constitution is seriously flawed in this way. It is all or nothing when it comes to the Supreme Court decisions. This is the very definition of unmanaged growth. Anyway, the conclusion of the retrospective was that the Brown decision did little to live up to the intended consequences. Why? Because schools are zoned and funded by local taxes and not the Federal government. Rich communities still have the best funded schools for the their kids.

From Supreme Court decisions such as  Brown v. The Board, Roe v. Wade, and the ACA we have experienced first hand the down sides to social change being applied overnight at a national level. Success often comes at a heavy price of a country divided.

Irreni World Scale requires we learn how to walk before we run. If one starts thinking about the process of scaling social change then one quickly becomes to realize how the Supreme Court is a deeply flawed institution. Why? Because it has only one of scale of implementation, everyone. The same is true for Congress as well. Congress cannot make experimental laws that set up competing experiments comprised of just some States. If Congress passes a law then it must apply equally for equal rights to apply. The failure of legal experiments like with Brown or the ACA are undermined first and foremost not by the merits idea, but the initial scale being everyone.

The US Constitution then is fatally flawed in its very premise of universal laws out of the gate. We need to walk before we run. We need to scale social change from small to large.

Accepting growing pain understanding is a monumental shift in American perspective. Our entire history has been all or nothing. We've had some successes, like the Federal freeway system. We've paid huge prices, like with the Civil War. The worst aspect though of all-or-nothing is the political turmoil, like with Roe V. Wade. People in this country vote based upon a single issue alone and abortion polls as the number one, single issue voting topic. Upwards of thirty-percent of conservatives vote conservative just on this one abortion issue.

Growing pain understanding is understanding that we need to learn to walk before we run. Growing pain understanding is that "going viral" is unmanaged growth and that unmanaged growth is high risk for failure not because of the product, idea, or social change but because of the unmanaged growth, because we refuse to accept and understand growing pains.

For New Years then I ask that we all resolve to be understanding of growing pains.

Take for example the politics surrounding the hajib, the head scarf Muslim women wear. At times this is a feminist-on-feminist battle where feminists in the west are demanding that Muslim women forgo this symbol of male patriarchy and oppression. Muslim women are pushing back saying they want to wear their hajib, it is their choice.

What should society demand? Should western societies demand that Muslim women remove their hajib, especially when that hajib covers the entire face?

In many ways this conversation about the hajib reminds me of the bra-burning days of the early 1970s. Feminists felt that bras were like the hajib, forced covering mandated by the patriarchy. But that movement fell flat because western women decided they liked wearing bras. Shouldn't Muslim be afforded this choice to wear the hajib?

If one is conditioned and indoctrinated from childhood to various behaviors then these behaviors become part of ones identity and this identity is then passed onto children. This feedback loop is vicious cycle that works well for survival but undermines social change required for modern living. Pile on top of that a universal mindset of all-or-nothing adoption then we have a recipe for the social calamity we see in our politics today. We refuse to manage social change growth and want overnight change with universal health care and universal college education.

Here's a question for you. What should women do when every aspect of society heretofore has been created by male patriarchy? Every aspect of apparel has been the created by and enforced by male standards. Should women wear make up? Should women wear high heels? Can women just decide that once was a male edict is now a female desire? This seems to be the case with make up. Women have taken ownership of make up as personal identity and as personal art expression. Can this adoption of male patriarchy apparel being now female identity apply to the hajib?

The fact is there is no gender ether. What is the ether? The ether is the notion that space is fixed, that when you walk a mile the distance is determined by an ether of space, a fabric of space if you will. However, as relativity was discovered then we discovered that distance is a function of speed, the faster something goes the less distance traveled. This applies even to when you walk. However, the distance change is -10^30 in relative size. This distance is too small to measure even with today's highest tech equipment.

What is feminine? What is masculine? There is no gender ether of ideas. Feminine and masculine are expressions of culture. There are scientific studies that have shown some inborn gender traits such as girls favoring the color pink and boys favoring the color blue. However, these traits are not one-hundred percent. In fact they are not even close to one-hundred percent, just dominant. Further, these traits exhibit mostly strongly during childhood and we then grow out of them as adults.

Feminists then are struggling to answer an unanswerable question: what definitively can women ascribe to as female determined independent of male influence? Is just being new and different good enough or can women co-opt existing male notions like make up and hajib as a female trait?

Feminism is not the only social arena struggling with creating a new distinct identity set apart from historical tyranny. Minority communities of every kind in America have always been at odds with the dominant enforced behaviors.

When is your identity your identity and when is your identity that imposed by another against your will?

Taoism actually has the right of it. Your identity is your identity the moment you declare it is. Everything about your identity can be stamped as your identity in your mind at any time without any change at all. In contrast, Buddha claimed that rejection of all material wealth and material bindings is the one true path to self-discovery. That's nonsense because Buddha assumed there is some ether of "you" identity. There isn't. Your identity is the product of programming by your parents and your culture. Your identity is either to accept the identity programmed into you or to reject that programming. However, programming of identity unknown to you are not possible because is there is no ether.

What is new in 2018 is that we can all mix-and-match a new identity from various cultures using the Internet. The Internet makes identity a smorgasbord of seemingly unlimited options. Before the Internet we had books. My own moral identity is a hodgepodge of Eastern philosophy with splashes of Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism. Nothing about Christianity appealed to me, including the golden rule.

But I could not have made those Eastern choices without some exposure. Original thinking does happen, as when Newton discovered gravity when an apple fell on his head, but even Newton recognized that any new thinking he accomplished was by standing on the shoulders of giants. Newton was thinking about a need for gravity based upon existing thinking of the universe.

Irreni World Scale then is also new thinking, a new identity of MGOs replacing countries, states, and cities. But as far out as Irreni may seem to you Irreni is still very much rooted in existing thought. The scaling idea of combining MGOs of thirty people as governing building blocks is just an adaptation of Lego pieces, a toy.

Growing pain understanding is understanding that we need to learn to walk before we run. Social change of any kind springs from a fabric of the culture of the day. An idea such as health care as a right then must be applied unequally around the world because the fabric of different cultures is unequal.

It is not just American culture but human nature that wants things and want things now. National law that changes the law for everyone at one time gives us this instant gratification. It is human nature us to want  new social changes such as free college education or universal health care to happen right now. However, it is also human behavior to plan to delay instant gratification in order to mitigate failure and promote success.

The value of promoting success by mitigating failure with experiment is one aspect of growing pain understanding that we need to manifest, we need to manifest delayed gratification by scaling out. We need to start small and do the hard work of proving changes at a small scale before adoption to a larger scale.

Another aspect of growing pain understanding is accept failure due to inexperience. We all fail like a six-year-old when trying something for the first time. This means that social changes like feminism will take hundreds of years to play out. Over the course of these hundred years there will be many miss-steps due to a lack of experience. Patience is required just as patience is required when a child learns something the first time. Understanding growing pains is why I do no abandon the feminist movement even as I acknowledge that campaigns like #MeToo are suffering failures due to scaling out too soon. Feminists these days are taking quite the beating for failures of campaigns like #MeToo. I have patience with feminism because I see feminism as just getting started, a baby learning to walk for the first time. Can women have a career and a family? It will take centuries for that to play out. Patriarchy has been with us for much longer.


Social change needs to start small and scale out. This cannot happen with the concept of a nation. The structure of a country is that ideas start at the largest possible scale of everyone. This makes no kinda sense, even for human rights. George Washington was asked if he felt that slavery should be abolished outright. He replied no because there would be too much immediate bloodshed. Instead, he argued, it is better to let slavery fade away to avoid the bloodshed. The point is that even the founders were aware that nationalism was a bad idea at the time, all-or-nothing was disastrous even as they created an all-or-nothing Constitution. Washington was a prophet when it came to predicting the Civil War. This all-or-nothing aspect of the US Constitution eventually meant that slavery had to resolved in a bloody civil war because that Constitution did not have any gradual change process, and it still doesn't.

Irreni World Scale abolishes the idea of countries because they are all or nothing in the governing structure.

Irreni World Scale only has gradual change process with MGOs. Experiments must be run from small-to-large so as to manage growing pains. These growing pains include time for people taking on new cultural identities as well as developing new social skills at a rate that human nature can effectively accept. Accepting social change at the rate of cultural adoption is not possible with nations of world governments today. World governments today only make changes that can be applied to everyone at once.

The Irreni World Scale implementation plan is gradual itself. The plan will take two-hundred years. The plan starts small, with you starting and joining an MGO, a typical corporation of today with one defining trait: thirty people. Eventually all corporations are to be replaced by MGOs combining as building blocks. Over two-hundred years then corporations of today will be replaced by MGOs, then local governments, state governments, and finally, in two hundred years, country governments. 

In 2019 then resolve to acknowledge and accept growing pain understanding. And if possible the best way to do this for your society is to join an MGO and embrace Irreni World Scale today.



Freethinkers unite!

Freedom!

Party On!

Let's get cracking!

Voluntarily Reject Demagoguery!

Politics as Science!

Demand Irreni World Scale!

Anti-theism is feminism!  

Think disruption!

Empathy for all!

Moral relativity: think it, breath it!

Prove it or lose it!

Conversations equal consensus! 

Welcome to the 21st century!

Scale your empathy, scale the world! 

Find your tribe!

Be sexy people!

The future is coming! 

Innovate at a rapid pace!

Slow speed ahead!

Well come! and well met!



 










Comments

Explore

You Need To Start Making Political Decisions

Love, Hard Work Book Draft: Introduction

Irreni Manages Bad Reasoning

The Amercian Anthem: Drawing Cartoons of Muhammed

Introduction to the book "Irreni World Scale"

Kavanaugh Debrief

Love, Hard Work Book Draft: Chapter 1

No Party, No Government

Legalize Prostitution? We Are Not Computers.

The Intelligentsia Problem