Monday, October 7, 2013

Tjeerd Andringa - Hour 1 - Bureaucracy, Cognition & Geopolitics: Authoritarians vs. Libertarians



 I recommend you go to the link below to hear a podcast about the Title above.
http://www.redicecreations.com/radio/2013/10/RIR-131004.php
The following are notes I took.
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Bureaucracy from the point of view of cognitive engineering and science.

Tjeerd Andringa wrote a paper about this and seeks to show why some people will always want bureaucracy to fulfill a need for control.

He studied physics at the University of Groningen.  There he was involved in student government.

He was doing research outside of the university which was considered illegal where he was working on how to recognize aggressive human voices through sound recordings.  This made him worry that his research would help spying that was against his morals so he went back to the university.

Then he researched about how spaces can facilitate learning.

He is studying natural intelligence and modelling it with A.I. and robots.

Another research path he is on is listening to a town to hear if sonic qualities need to be changed.

Cognitive Science studies how the brain and thought works.

One time when he was working on the problem of how to make a robot that knows what it is doing, he noticed that a bureaucrat doesn't know what they are doing either.

He makes an important distinction between how intelligence means one's ability to perform as commanded or requested.  Understanding, however, is to know why one should do as asked.

In a bureaucracy, its members do not have to know why they do as they are instructed, only that they must comply.

The purpose of a bureaucracy is to homogenize behavior within a closed system of control so its easier to predict and control the behavior.

Tjeerd uses an example of how there are people that consult with college students about their grades and they can be bureaucratic if they don't say anything because they don't care or they can help the students.

Henrik asks Tjeerd what example of a bureaucracy he had in mind and he answers - a dictatorship that tells you what not to do.

No one is responsible in a bureaucracy.  The lower level people blame the upper and the upper blame the lower.

The paper and authority in dress and monopoly of threats of violence are what end up running these systems as they degrade into a police state of blind allegiance (the NAZI's did this and it didn't work as an excuse in terms of war crimes - not my department.)

There becomes a battle between people that need the bureaucracy and the bureaucracy that sees people as a nuisance.

The _Authoritarian Dynamic_  is a book by Karen Stenner who graduated from Princeton that Tjeerd read by chance.

She asked people how children should be reared and educated until adulthood.  The choices were children were to obey parents or to be responsible for one's self.

They could have be taught good manners or they could know why they should act as they are recommended.

To follow the rules or one's conscience.

Authoritarians were the one's that taught their kids to follow rules, libertarians taught to think why.

She concluded that authoritarians weren't so much trying to avoid complex thinking but that they hate the complex world.

You have to have understanding there.

An authoritarian can be smart and good at school but they don't understand the world at the level a libertarian does.

An authoritarian feels uneasy with a libertarian around because they are so at ease with the world around them.

An authoritarian has to already know how to adjust to the people and world around them or they are out of their element.

We slip into both roles dependent on the environment.

The authoritarian wants a problem to disappear and not return while the libertarian wants to know how to solve the problem.

An authority is a process or an agent that either creates, maintains or influences a living environment.

Its not a state or particular person.

The normal example is that the state is the authority.

A state intervenes to fix an economic situation.

A libertarian would solve it themselves.

An artist like Britney Spears and those today are authorities to the youth.  The youth follow this not to their favor as it degrades their morals when they thought it was popular thus a good idea.

Tjeerd describes how he studied the 9/11 conspiracy subjects and he wondered why the majority of people weren't learning what many are about how we're slaves to the banksters.

He realized that authority is a psychological concept.  You either are one or need one.

The word agency, agent means behavior that is self selected.

An agent must do something or be harmed or die or it may do something to optimize its living environment if it chooses.

The first environment forces the agent to act and the other allows the agent to choose action based on the environment.

Henrik asks about how people could say this is too simplified?

Is this too robotic to describe human behavior?

Tjeerd mentions how we are the end result of evolution where systems build on existing systems that are solid in order to function.

We have an autonomic nervous system that takes care of automatic functions like breathing as well as our more complex realm of perception and reaction.

Maybe this simple dichotomy of determining under what authority we act comes from our earlier operating system in the evolution of life forms we're based on.

The first bit of perception is if you are in a safe place or not.  Enjoy it or fix it.

The inner voice we hear is our left hemisphere talking.  It might come up with a ludicrous idea of what the rest of the brain is feeling.  The real reason we do things might be inaccessible to our left brain that we hear as our voice of reason.

The level of fear in our environment determines if we act from an authoritarian or libertarian position.  This would explain how and why terrorism operates as what attempts to use to gain compliance with authority to deliver fake safety.

This is probably deep occult knowledge about how to manipulate humans.

They agree this is millenia old.  This is the first time, however, that the normal people know it so we've got that going for us.

Henrik mentions how he thinks it doesn't make sense that people say when someone claims an event is a conspiracy that it is a cop out and makes it easier than for them

The general public is not given the ability to understand what is going on in the world so they comply out of fear and ignorance while those who do understand see plans the others don't see or understand.

These people's job is to explain in the form of a scientific inquiry into measurable events what is going on so the other's can see why they would follow a higher authority than they currently do.

There are two ways to develop.  To develop one's self or dis-empower your competition.  This dis-empowerment describes the reason for most of what does go on in the world by the controllers.

We decide when we go to war or we'll always go to war.

www.geopoliticsandcognition.com

to face the truth; but, seeing things this way makes how to navigate in life more difficult even if more correct.