Musings & Meanderings

The more active relationships we maintain, the more we are asked for our opinion. If they’re mostly social relationships, the questions range from ‘which restaurant for dinner’ and ‘what’s our take on the new guy in our crowd’ to requests for common interest commentary on sports, film, books, whatever. In active, successful business relationships, we’re constantly asked about anything from deal points to personal reputation ratings to predicting the future.

The people closest to you ‘know what you think’, and can probably also describe your official position on most important things, from politics to marriage to sex. Eventually your persona can get developed to the point where there are multiple versions of the same package tailored to levels of familiarity and interaction (enter FaceBook). The full story is for those closest to you, then there’s a summary version, the short version, the sanitized short version, …the Twitter version.

When was the last time someone asked you a question that made you not only stop and think about the answer, but perhaps even examine some of your beliefs? The sort of question that couldn’t be answered instantly, that couldn’t be answered fully within the confines of chat or forums, email or a blog post, that couldn’t be answered without some serious thought and exchange of views?

When was the last time you asked someone a question that startled them, made them look at you intently wondering if you really wanted to know, or elicited a surprised, “No one’s ever asked me that before!”.

Some of us have a best friend or three, maybe a business partner, maybe a spouse, who sometimes knows us better than we know ourselves, and with whom we can really share ‘thinking out loud’. Those who do often have an air of being grounded, of being at home wherever they are. Whether that’s a result of finding someone to trust enough, or a measure of ability to trust, isn’t relevant for this post. What matters is that the trust, in ourselves and each other, creates strength and vitality and a sense of being intensely alive in our interactions which spills over and transcends private relationships.

Our world moves ever faster and keeps getting more crowded. We live in ever more transient societies. The sound bytes keep multiplying and getting shorter because, like a long url, longer messages can get truncated, or simply drown in traffic and competing noise. Sometimes it’s noisy enough to convince you that no one is actually listening to anyone else. Please don’t buy into it. Some of us are listening, and often wishing that more speakers recognized this.

There’s a lot of awesome potential in the explosion of population and sound. Potential for connection and communication. Every voice, your voice, can be heard. Identifying correctly what people ‘want to hear’ is the standard method of being heard by many. If, however, your goal is to engage and to interact, then deeper listening for things that matter to many is the way forward.

What are the important things that you wish someone would ask you about? Why? Do you wish someone would listen to your thought and ideas? Will you listen to theirs?

Matt posts Best Open Source Social Networking awarded to WordPress by Packt Publishing. Wtg!

Check out the numbers in A Hollow Victory Microsoft which says “the fact is that open source has won this battle”. There’s a lot of spin in this post, which refers only to web hosting software, rather than the OS upon which Microsoft’s empire is built, but the basis is real. Unix and Apache are increasingly adopted by enterprise developers because they work, and new development growth continues to be increasingly based on open source vs Windows.

Open source isn’t about free. It’s about self sufficiency and community. It is about building things for ourselves instead of serving a master.

The anonymous WordPress blog to which I linked above, called There Is No Government Like No Government, claims to be about anarchy, yet is rich with the political cant of the extreme left, with an occasional right wing position thrown in. Does anyone other than me find this ironically amusing?

There’s a hidden chasm in many a segment of open source communities which is tied to political agendas (qu’elle surprise). Many community members bristle at big business, and many corporations deserve it, exhibiting intent to capitalize on free software, as they do on the free content millions of individuals create on the web every day. Open source community members are far more likely to be on the political left than the right. Nevertheless there is a core of practitioners of true free enterprise, which is apolitical. Here new economic models are needed, and here casting aside canned political agendas can make a great difference for all of us.

Open source developers who are apolitical shouldn’t worry about capitalistic opportunism, other than in the aspect in which it gains baseless dominance through big government support, regardless of which party is in power. The fact that open source has the momentum it does, is based on achievement and performance, not politics. Keep that thought.

We’re too smart and sophisticated to fall for a scam, right? Even if that is true, can you say the same thing for everyone you know and care about who uses a computer?

‘Rasslin’ with people who mean us harm is a pretty brave thing to do, and I’m grateful to those who take it on for all of us.

We can each do something every day to make the world we share a better place. Helping one another isn’t a formal obligation or duty, it’s an exercise of free will. Snoskred does more than her share.

From Please Help! What You Can Do To Stop Internet Scammers NOW.…

“Educating people about scams online is one of the most difficult things I have ever done in my life, because every time I think the word is getting out proof comes back to me as a surprise that it is not.
I have the knowledge to stop people from being scammed but it still isn’t enough. I can’t make the word go far enough. I can’t seem to get other people to write about the scams and link back to information I have here on the site about them.
The elderly, the stay at home Mom’s, the disabled, the depressed, the lonely, the vulnerable - these are the people who get scammed the most.”

You can read more about Snoskred’s scambaiting activities here
Snoskred and Sephy’s new site Scam Warning.

Clay Shirky recently posted a brief message on achieving balance between arrogance and humility as a function of successful design. Arrogance and humility are powerful words. Our definitions of them vary as widely as do our definitions of success. In the commentary, I came across a suggestion to replace the word ‘humility’ with ‘empathy’. My first thought was that perhaps the author was misinterpreting the intended meaning of humility in the post, associating it with humiliation instead of with being humble. How differently we define these things!

To be humble, in my understanding, is to acknowledge ourselves in the context of God (secular or otherwise), of all life, including human life, of our universe, including all that is knowable to us and all that is not. Humility is not a denial or denigration of self, but rather a means of unity with a whole greater than any one of us. Although it is a concept taught as a virtue in many religions, it does not require a theological framework from any one, or any religion, to be understood.

Empathy is a more modern concept. It is the idea that you can do more than observe me and try to deduce something about me. By empathizing you can supposedly feel what I feel. Is this possible? Can you understand me well enough to feel what I feel? If you can, does this mean you can think as I think? That you can understand my motivations, actions, and responses in the same way I do? The answer to all these questions is no. Even a ‘psychic’ does not profess to achieve more than occasional and limited forays into the mind or soul of another.

So is empathy merely a buzzword? A useful term for opportunists? Did you believe Bill Clinton when he looked into the camera and said, “I feel your pain?”. Is it possible that this word is misused and that it can represent a concept of value which is generally not well understood?

In my view, empathy is a form of intimacy, not in the Biblical sense, or in any metaphysical way, but on an emotional level. The empathy may have a basis in familiarity, but it is intimacy which makes it true empathy.

You watch your child, rushing forward with an eager face raised high, stumble on an obstacle, and you experience the fall on a visceral level. I have had a similar experience watching an athlete go down. My imagination expands as far as my experience and knowledge allows. If, for example, I’ve heard the crunch of tearing cartilage in my own joint, my memory can instantly supply the sound. From my knowledge, I can also supply enough personal understanding of the person with whom I am empathizing to contextualize in time. How it feels to fall unexpectedly related to age, previous falls and injuries, how long it will take to heal and forget. Layers of meaning … an entire tapestry of past present and future context.

Empathy for strangers, especially those with whom we do not personally identify, on some level, is really very rare. It is difficult to do unilaterally, because strangers are, more often than not, entirely discomfited by the intense observation required. The projection of intimacy of any sort can be frightening. People who have a talent for it usually learn to keep that talent hidden, and to only reveal it in specific circumstances, usually presented as prescience or acumen.

There’s a less intense, and therefore easier, level of empathy, which is limited to a very specific context based on similar circumstances. We may both be parents of small children and recognize the commonality of what this demands of us each day. We may attend the same school or work for the same employer or be the same age or share the same cultural background, and so on. Empathizing in limited and contained ways with a peer group is natural for most of us. Empathizing with strangers is not.

Empathy, which can give us a valuable understanding of one another, is not a socially passive trait. On the opposite face of empathy is respect. We need respect as an active social trait in order to co-exist peacefully, and we need empathy to co-exist happily.

I believe that we can be highly empathetic without arrogance but not without humility. Arrogance, however, supports not only unshakable belief in knowing what others want, but also claiming the right to decide for them. That is, considered closely, a breathtaking claim to some of us. To decide for others through leadership based solely on arrogance is only possible through the use of force. To decide for others based on the humble understanding that their lives have at least the same value as our own, is to make a contribution of which we can be proud.

Marc Andreessen’s post titled Modern Financial Markets, Explained! offers a great video that explains it all.

Seamless satire from Michael Lewis.

A serious post on irresponsible lending by Dr Eamonn Butler on the Adam Smith Institute Blog.

“The two chief enemies of the free society or free enterprise are intellectuals on the one hand and businessmen on the other, for opposite reasons. Every intellectual believes in freedom for himself, but he’s opposed to freedom for others. He thinks there ought to be a central planning board that will establish social priorities. The businessmen are just the opposite. Every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but when it comes to himself that’s a different question. He’s always the special case. He ought to get special privileges from the government, a tariff, this, that, and the other thing.”
~Milton Friedman