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genius in one endeavor,  and so completely naive in another.
genious in planetary science, naive in social science.
nominated by trump to oversee the cutting of jobs about which he knew nothing. Nominated because Trump wanted to ally himself with the richest person in the world.
x fired with  a -lined email ……   x though a, their job was very important b they were doing a good job and were appreciate…. many had commendations…….. now found they had no means to pay their mortgage, or their children’s needs, no medical coverage,

ONE  40,000 years ago a young man goes out to look for food. He sees animal A.   He succeeds in killing it, taking it home and eating it. The need is for nutrition,  the drive or motivation is hunger, and the gratification is eating.  The next day he sees another animal A.  The same thing happens and he is gratified. Now learning takes place.  The next day he finds a different species, animal B.  He tries to kill it but it is too fierce. It injures him and he goes home to recover. Again learning takes place.  He has learned that the door is open to gratifiction when he encounters an animal A, and that the door to gratification is closed when he sees an animal B.

Humans learn gratification from many things.  Some find gratification in helping others.  Some find gratification in killing others.  Verbal expression is gratifying.  Some find gratification in telling others how highly they think of their writing or their piano recital or their apple pie.  Others take gratification in expressing hatred and anger.  Yelling at someone in traffick or cursing someone on social media is gratifying.

Status by becoming an agent of gratification is common.  If one says, group X are bad or inferior for some reason he is offering gratification  by expressing hate and fear. The agent is trying to create a group over which he has power – a power base. After the Civil War, there was a great dislocation of status when the slaves were freed.  plantation owners were stripped of much of their means of production and wealth.   Non slave owners who were the vast majority………….. George Wallace was elected 4 times as governor of Alabama his advocacy of segregation, and his belief that fro-Americans should not be admitted

Percieved status and power are gratifying.  It is gratifying knowing you are mayor of a city or leader of  gang.  It is gratifying to become a member of an exclusive country club or become a member of those worth a billion dollars.

Gratification through identification is virtually universal. Gratification of being American or Polish and seeing your country win a gold metal. Gratification as a fan of a college or professional sport. Often fans use the pronoun ”we” when referring to their team.  We play Chicago next week. Gratification of seeing another black man elected president of the United States.  Gratification of your spouse or family member’s accomplishment.  ‘My son graduated first in his class at Tufts this year.’
‘Wilbur Wright was my great-grandfather.’

Behavior is shaped by learning which doors are open to gratification. And to control man’s behavior, for better or for worse, men have attempted to control the doors of other men. Hammurabi created one of the first codes of law nearly 4000 yeas ago.  The purpose was to close the doors to gratification from doing things that were harmful to the society.  Laws against murder and stealing and many others.

TWO  Social science in practice

Not a simple yes/no question.  No

1  All humans wake up in the morning with motivations (drives) to acquire gratification.  need-drive-gratification-drive, necessary to survive.  First drive in the morning is often to eat breakfast, gratification of satiating hunger.
2  Humans see the same food at the same time.  They fight.  Winner gets food and another gratification – defeating opponent.
3  Loser in 2 makes grunting sound or scream. (tennis player whacks his racket on the ground) expressing disdain, disgust, anger, hate is gratifying
4    2 humans, maybe brothers, work together to kill an animal.  They share the food.  gratification from working together, teamwork and friendship.
5  humans go to tavern not ot drink but to drink together. commaraderie is gratification.
6  expressing anger or hate is a gratification.

7. THe repertoir of gratification of anyone is greatly affected in the developemental years.  Caregivers model. But is altered all of life.

8.  Role models are people who have something that others want. Bad guys have money or status, thus x wants to act like him.  Also role models are people whom x loves and respects thus respects the way they act.
9 A person’s perception of whether a door to grat is open or not is acquired by trial and error. expectation of grat results in negrat.
10    repertoire of grat may be good, neutral, or bad for general welfare. goal is to mold behavior by rewarding good behavior, extinguish bad behavior by neg reinforcement.
11  racism may be a result of an agent telling you that x or xx is bad, and opening the door to gratification by disparaging a class of people. But class racism useful to put a whole catagory of people below you like was quite easy to do under slavery. Same with women. For milenium man has agreed on the cultural value that women, because they have less physical power, they have less of any power.

12  Gratification by association or identifiction.  Yankee fan, Democrat, Christian, Swede, New Yorker.   All categories we may identify with, and derive gratification from.  We can also identify the “other” categories we are in competiton for – black, jew, Muslim, Red Sox fan.  Those who get less grat from positive activity -work, family, sports or identification by positive groups – fan, Democrat, relgion are attracted by the grat offered by negative activity- violence,  expressing hatred or anger  or identification with negative soc  groups – nazis, white supremacy, gang activity.

13 Crusades were based on grat both to defeat an individual with a sword and victory of group-identified  Christianity.  same as sport. An athlete’s good individual performance and the team victory.

I had a wonderful dream.  A dream about how people would never have to work long hours again.. Most people labor 30, 40 or 50 hours a week. In my dream AI put an end to all the drudgery.

The  stringed instrument makers were relieved. It takes months to make a great violin, viola, cello or bass.  The finest Norwegian spruce, maple and willow must be obtained. The wood must be aged. Then it must be slowly shaped, sanded, manipulated into 71 differnt pieces for a violin by a team of craftsmen. Then carefully oiled and varnished till finally the non wooden pieces are applied.  In my dream, all that labor was avoided by wonderful AI-created instruments,that were cheaper and that produced sounds so near to the traditional instruments that even some experts couldn’t tell the difference. The instrument makers were freed to enjoy the casual life usually reserved for royalty.  And amazingly the new AI instruments played themselves!!!!  Musicians, who spend countless hours a day practicing, were no longer required!!!

The best basketball players must start very early, at 5 or 6 years old and practice for 15 years almost daily to make the NBA.  But in my dream  magnificent physical robots were created for basketball.
The best were allowed to try out for the NBA!!!  Several made the teams!!  The next year only 6 humans were playing for NBA teams because the robots had elevated the art of basketball so wonderfully. The thousands of hours saved from constant running, dribbling shooting released teens to enjoy Tic Toc like normal kids.

Doctors have to spend 8 long years at college and several more as interns before they can become surgeons.  But in my dream AI had  elevated surgery with precision operations that emancipated young men and women from the exhausting 24 hour shifts and allowed them to enjoy the  pleasantries that normal people enjoy.

In my dream, a wide variety of people and professions were given respite from their tedious 9 to 5.  However some problems still existed. The number of drug addicts and overdose dealths quadrupled and were creating quite a nuissance to communities. And domestic violence was up.  I woke up at about this point, considering what had just happened.  Everything was utopian in the dream except for the drugs and homes.  I came to understand that the dream simply hadn’t finished.  I’m quite sure AI would have come up with  a wonderful solution to the problem of drug addiction and home squabbles had I slept a little longer.

Instrument makers

Basketball Players

Master Builders and Architects

Medical Researchers

On Nicole Wallace’s podcast,  Ken Burns, the great historian said that when racists found that blacks were going to be on their favorite baseball team, the higher quality individuals embraced the fact, came to accept it.  Not that simple. What makes higher quality?  It rather should be looked at as the decisions made  based on doors of opportunity to attain gratitification.

Hammurabi wrote a code  of laws for Babylon 4000 years ago, it was with the wisdom that the society as a whole would be much more productive, predictable, and happy if laws and enforcement curtailed some of the violent, unfair, and disruptive behavior.

But now we have to go deeper.  We know that men can aspire and conspire to circumvent, change, and rewrite laws to gain power and influence that is beneficicial to a small group but harmful to the greater number of people in a society.  To make  long principle short, the problem is that man, as a species,  community, or nation  has not yet engineered a way to control the small minority of humans who seek unfair, disproportionate wealth, power, or other advantage over the society, at the expense of the majority of the members, and sometimes even to the demise of the society.  Some members simply don’t care if their actions will lead to the destruction of the society as long as it is after their lifetime. “What do I care.  l’m not going to be around in 30 years.” (an actual quote from Donald Trump)

So the initial question is – how do we as a society control those few who are hypermotivated to gain huge personal power to the detriment of society. There wust be new institutions, attitudes, stated moral principles.   This question is more theoretical.  More practical is How do we reverse the present situation where the top 1% owns 32% of the wealth and the bottom 50% own 2 per cent of it? .   slavery was an institution that was overwhelmingly accepted in the North s well as the South in the US in the 18th century. Back then the idea that black and white children would be educated in the same schools, the same universities. was simply not in the dreams of anyone of any color. So maybe we can take solace that it is possible to reverse the tides of the political economy that dictate the hegemony of the financilly elite.

I saw a clip where an excited man was saying that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time. The reporter dismissed the man’s thesis, but the man insisted.  “No, no, there is new evidence.  They have pictures.”  I’m not sure what he meant by that but anyone with a formal education, and most people who do not, understand the lack of credence of the idea.  The earliest humans evolved 200,000 years ago.  The dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago.  This is not a theory.  Paleantologists, paleozoologists, archeologists, anthropologists, and other scientists who have studied the prehistoric biosphere are quite in agreement.

Elon Musk, on the Joe Rogan show,  related his rather goofy  ideas about finding civilizations in outer space on other planets in other solar systems, etc, etc.  then Rogan excited replied that, hell, there may have been an advanced civilization here on earth 10 million years ago.  To this Musk joyfully agreed.  But to the above mentioned scientists, this is just as bananas as the moron who claimed proof that man was on earth together with dinosaurs. They above named scientists have determined when the first life forms appeared, the first vertebrates appeared, first mammals, and most other life forms appeared. They have developed a massive taxonomy of plants and animals all over the earth and when, where, and how they lived.

If there had been a civiliztion ten million years ago unknown to today’s scientific community,  not only would all remains of the civilization have to have been lost but hundrds of thousands of years of the peoples predessessors’  traces would also have to have been lost –  artifacts and fossils.

Joe Rogan prooved congruent in ignorance to the first dinosaur-excited character in his lack of sophistication of  evolutionary development.

People saying China  1-child policy  was a mistake.  The proof of that is that now there re too many old people, not enough young people.
But the populaion has grown from 1 billion to 1.4 billion in 20 yers.
Invasive species.  expansion of man’s numbers has caused extinction of 100’s of speies per year.   fellow invertebrates, many fellow mammals and most fellow primates. …  New short sighted or selfish declaration that more babies will make a country better. 1001 ways to solve the societal economic dislocations – any are good – EXCEPT ENCOURAGING INCREASING THE POPULATION!!!!!!!!

Everything makes a difference – sometimes imperceptively on the sub atomic level, sometimes with broad global ramifications.  The decision to take anti-oxidants last year may have stopped a tiny cancer process in one cell in your stomach. The decision to appoint Hitler as Chancellor by von Hindenberg in 1933 caused worldwide suffering.

Language has many purposes. It is used to communicate facts and opinions, compliments and insults. Virtuallly all languages have built-in
structures to express respect. Titles.  Mr. Smith, Dr. Brown, professor
Jones, general Black, reverend Bush, father Furgusson, officer Blake, your honor, your highness.    If your child is in the hospital, you address the doctor as Dr. Jones.  If you were to say, “Hey Jones, what is your prognosis? How long will Billy have to stay here?”, you may  convey a lack of respect for his station.  Dr Jones may be slightly less likely to give the same deference to your son, Billy.

Another structure present in virtually all languages is what anthropology calls forbidden words. In the vernacular:  profanity, curse words, obsenities, expletives, swearing or foul language. Forbidden words have a multitude of uses.

They are used by an in-group among themselves where they wouldn’t use them publicly to define an identifiction. On my dormitory floor in college, we all used profanities fluidly. it was sort of a bonding mechanism.  ”My goddam prof gave us 30 fucking pages of reading.”

Secondly they are used to convey respect by not using them in many situations. The same college student goes to a History discussion class and refrains from using the forbidden words that are de riguer back in the dorm. They would be out of place, and convey disrespect. If  a pastor gave a sermon and said,  “Theres’s too much fucking sin in the world”  it would likely raise eyebrows and be deemed inapproprite and disrespectful- breaking the taboo of forbidden words. And thus the respect for the pastor may diminish.

In 1972  Comedian George Carlin had a comedy routine where he identified the 7 words you cannot say on TV:  shit, piss, fuck, cunt, motherfucker, cocksucker, and tits. He was arrested for breaking obscenity laws. The case was dismissed but  later the case went to the Supreme Court when a radio station broadcast the Carlin sketch. SCOTUS ruled that the Federal Communications commision could sanction broadcasters for airing inappropriate material. But the decision was accompanied by subjective definitions that attempted to define speech that was “indecent,” but not “obscene,”  protected by the first ammendment, or “patently obscene,” which is not protectected. It asserted that speech that was merely indecent, (and, in turn, indecent defined as inappropriate for minors) could be broadcast only at certain times of the day. And that “patently obscene” could not be broadcast at all.  Of course all this meant not only that  all these terms were debatable, but the passage of time changed the words that fell into each catagory.  Since Carlin, the word pis, one of his 7 forbidden words, as in pissed off, is a regular staple of even buttoned-down news shows.

The hard sciences are concerned with hard concepts:  light, heat, energy, gravity, wave, particle, distance, speed, time, and others.  There are other real concepts which effect daily life that are only considered scientifically by the social sciences.  Fear, hate, motivation, gratification, structural violence, love, learn, and respect. In testing rat labs the international standard for motivation of the rat to find food is a reduction in the animals weight by 15%.  And a recent one, structural fear, which means fear propagated by demagoguery to compel a target audience to support a certain cause or leader.  Typically a population is made to be fearful that if a leader is not elected or a law is not adopted the country will be thrown into war or inundated by rising crime.  Many people speak casually about what they think of these concepts but it is left to the social sciences to  speak of them with operational definitions and  determine the  interaction and impact of these concepts on the society.

Once a student of mine said, scornfully, that just because he saw a murder on TV doesn’t mean he would go out and commit  murder.
For most people this is true, but the social sciences have massive amounts of scientifically attained research showing that, indeed, mass media has enormous influence on human behavior. The Bandura experiments showed how groups of young children reacted more violently across several measures, including hitting a plastic punching bag, than the control group after watchining a more violent video than the control group. And, rarely, the effects have an immediate, striking impact.  The film”The Boys Next Door” showed teens, trying to impress, made the stunt of lying down on the line in the middle of the road, letting cars pass by on both sides.  Within a week, in 2 different incidences, two youth were killed after trying the idiotic stunt in real life, on a real highway, and the film was shelved.

A society, at any given time, has its own tacit rules of what speech is acceptable and when. In 1940 the classic film Gone with the Wind was
made.  A minor scandal was caused when the producers decided to include the later famous line, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
Such a word had never been spoken in a public medium. The producer David Selznick, was fined $5000, but the line was subsequently allowed in the film.  But why?  Why are there forbidden words?  Again it is a device arising out of culture, a device to maintain a level of respect in the society – respect that reaches across differences.  And this is a quintessential element of forbidden words, as well as titles – to generate respect across barriers, personalities, ethnicities, ages, religions. We use titles for people who are opposite politically, ethnically, regionally. Societal respect. A reflection that we all benefit from the sacrafices, accomplishments, and diligence of the many who came before us and helped build our society.

So why do the forbidden words become no longer forbidden and what are the effects of the process?  The most overwhelming driver of  the process is, of course, the media, and its go-to phenomenon that substitutes for great writing – voyeurism.  Violence, along with sex, loathsome behavior, betrayal, etc is the required voyeuristic  formula for modern TV dramas.  And violent, abusive, language is, of course, mandatory.

screenply…???   eloquent, forceful, dramatic, convincing, and entertaining without erroding the purpose of the taboo on forbidden words.

Media shows a US president who is patently, and unabashedly dishonest in House of Cards, a vice president of the US who is cynical and disingenuous (as all of her co-workers are) in the show VP,  a former teacher who is in the glamorous, exciting business of  drug smuggling in Breaking Bad and the Sopranos, the  mafia family and practitioners of glamorous violence – ie voyeurism. And we shouldn’t omit the glamorous violence of every episode of Game of Thrones.

What is  role model?