Bozosity

Who Says Seeing is Believing?

Everybody knows that what you see is not simply what is there. When you get closer to something, you can see more detail. If you turn off all the lights, you don't see anything. We can't see around trees, or buildings, or the earth. The same applies to all of our other senses, and to everything that we hear from others or see on TV, and everything we make up in our own minds. (What I call Neo-Cartesianism: “I thought of it, therefore it is”). But we don't act like we know this. Much of the time, many of us act as if we know everything of any significance. This was the main complaint that Socrates made (or anyway, that's what Plato had Socrates say), and as we know, he got killed mainly for demonstrating that everybody in Athens who was anybody didn't actually know what they were talking about. To their faces.

The Buddhist Surangama Sutra also makes this point, in quite a different way. It gives the example of someone with a defect in the lens of the eye, resulting in the appearance of rainbow light around a lamp flame, and says that when one knows the source of the rainbow light, one is not deceived by it. Would it were so simple. In reality, it takes a lifetime of devotion and constant practice to make a good start on it.

Anyway, the most important result is that we don't know what is good for people, including us. This is the basic reason for the proverb, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” Most of public life is made up of people loudly proclaiming that they have all the answers, and that they know in particular what is good for me, even if I don't. Even so, I am certain that they don’t, mainly because they all vehemently contradict each other, and accuse each other of seeking to destroy the Republic, or Western Civilization, or The One True Religion (whichever) or even the world as a whole.

It is a proverb on the Internet that one should suppose incompetence before malice when things go wrong. Now, although politicians lie [Gasp! No!!! Say it isn’t so!!!!], there is no evidence that any great number of them actually want to destroy the Republic or the world, although some of them want to destroy the Myriad False Religions, even if somebody else's One True Religion is among them. My observation is that there is sufficient incompetence in government to explain everything I’ve seen so far, apart from some of the religious loonies. Of course, I could be wrong about them. Not being able to tell whether you really know anything is the principal form of incompetence, after all.

Let the Unique Gather

"In summary, this…position requires a unique individual with strong…skills and…experience."

The word “unique” is greatly overused and indeed misused in job reqs and in advertising copy. While we are all unique in various ways, there is nobody uniquely qualified for any particular job. True uniqueness of human achievement is not defined by job descriptions, but rather by individual abilities applied to achieving what nobody else would have thought of doing in that way. Like Einstein, or Gandhi, or Henry Kaiser.