I’d like to openly “discuss for you” a theory I’ve been investigating.
I will not do it by *specific* name, in order that you remain fully and completely unbiased toward the discussion while I take a few minutes to describe it. Which is, somewhat ironically, the exact reverse of the usually-good-practice principle of ‘researching a given topic to some degree before endeavoring to consider a thoughtful discussion on it.’ Please bear with me, I *know* it sounds strange.
Let’s for the moment call the theory in question the ‘cognitively appropriate albeit disproportionately extreme response to trivial nuisances’ theory.
Something which might be loosely rephrased as “at what point, if any, does it become appropriate to literally go ‘stark raving insane’ about the thousand and one nuisances which, in their aggregate, appear to be killing us by the death of a thousand cuts strategem?”
Or again as:
Are robocalls potentially equivalent to LETHAL FORCE applied over a wide enough spread of the population so as to become completely non-obvious as the lethal force appliers which they can, in some sense, quite literally be described as being?
Now I imagine with that particular introduction you’re somewhere in the realm of
What the fuck is this guy talking about? Robocalls are certainly annoying enough, but they are *definitely not* “lethal force.”
Which, by all rights, I expect and even HOPE you are. I would actually prefer to try to make this as reasonably fair an argument as I can and since it’s an ‘amusing’ enough challenge, perhaps you’ll see your way clear of entertaining me with a short(ish) read and then maybe even a thought or two in the comments section below this ‘unusual’ piece.
Ok then. Robocalls: are they actually lethal in any sort of perceivable way?
Givens:
- They ARE annoying. As defined by the fact that the vast majority of people beyond any doubt consider them annoying.
- They DO NOT ‘serve a legitimate purpose.’ Again, this is almost by definition. The most salient objection to it is that they seem to be protected somewhat bizarrely under the right to free speech argument regardless of whether they serve a legitimate purpose or not. Gets a ‘little sticky’ here, because I’m NOT (not yet, anyway) arguing about free speech. However, I can show (I will, very shortly, show) the ‘free speech protection’ argument is a specious argument. If that is the one protecting them from being eliminated permanently and instantly by act, for instance, of Executive Order of the POTUS at least here in the U.S. where I am penning the piece, they’re as good as gone already. We can’t simply “eliminate them because they should be illegal” without at the very least clearly illustrating that they should be illegal. And thank you, I will take that challenge. In fact I already have and I’m in the process, hopefully with a hand or two from you, my differently-eyesighted reader. I need (or at least WANT) your view of this ‘puzzle/nonpuzzle.’
- The burden of proof that they serve a legitimate purpose, failing the test of freedom of speech protections (just above) and failing the test of perhaps some other Constitutional protection which I am not currently recalling, is on those who would wish to continue using them. It is not on the overwhelming majority of people who would prefer that they would not, could not, should not ever be allowed to be used. To use the Seussian form of it. I’m ready to show that this is also provably the case; the burden of proof must be on those who would wish to harass others, regardless of which means they use to do it.
- #3 above implies that even if an Executive Order is not signed about this topic the legal tide would instantly turn in favor of less harmful and illegitimate societal noise should condition 3 be evaluated as true. i.e. “Hey Supreme Court, have a look at #3 above and maybe issue a press release of some kind on it. k thanks bye.” This is because if it is understood that 3 is TRUE versus FALSE, Robocallers would then have to justify in the interests of at least the public good WHY they are calling when they call. Whereupon we can ‘kind of’ let the courts decide with stiff counter-incentive-ary measures (fines and the like) which massive telecommunication origin site of endless tentacles of auditory clickbait gets to die and which gets to live. I’d personally like that, so I will vote yes, #3 is true: let the burden of proof be on the call-ER not on the call-EE.
Ok that’s enough about that for now. But that’s a far stretch from them actually being deadly. I mean, isn’t it?
Well now what precisely does deadly even mean? I mean, the lead in the pipes in Flint, Michigan isn’t exactly deadly now is it? I mean the City of Flint didn’t all of a sudden get tagged with a thousand homicide-level offenses now did it. Nope, it really just didn’t. So lead isn’t deadly. Not exactly.
And cigarettes aren’t deadly either. Not to the people who smoke them and not to ‘those nearby’ — which starts to show the kind of pattern I’m suggesting with this whole analysis.
Perhaps a “new way of drawing the lines that must be drawn.”
No robocalls are not the regular definition of deadly. But, see, when we (in my lexicon) “so indiscriminately” throw that line down there — like ”Yep. No doubt true. Line there, robcalls: not deadly.” I think we jump the gun, and
Jumping the gun is the first and most important line to be VERY VERY clear where you’re drawing the line about. The Alpha case of the whole puzzle, if my view of the thing is to be at least that far believed. Heck, if you don’t know where you’re going to draw the line on jumping the gun then at least in EVERY case that anything is anything remotely resembling a race
you will have unfair races every single time, or at least ‘almost without fail.’
Everyone who ‘gets to’ jump the gun has an advantage and then it all devolves into a Wild West shootout where the guy with the itchiest and fastest trigger finger and the most accurate gun gets to blow everyone else away in a sort of a reverse pyramid scheme. Not pleasant for the ‘slow and steady’ turtles who like to win races too. Like me, for instance.
If, however, ‘jumping the gun’ means *actually* pulling a trigger — like it’s *really* a life or death matter, I mean — then everything instantly becomes an ‘arm’s race between hair trigger finger and terribly good bluff and since that’s a sort of a race in which you might even have double the level of unfairness about “just because it’s really a life or death” matter, that situation kind of sucks for most people, too. Again I vote with the numerous turtles.
Especially considering that it *almost* seems like if it’s really life or death situation it DOES SEEM to become ‘even more important’ to have LESS unfairness.
And yep it seems strange, but we’re not even very many paragraphs removed from are robocalls deadly?
Unless you are truly daffy, you *do* seem something very curious going on here. You almost HAVE to. Because there IS something very curious about thinking about this particular puzzle in this particular way.
Now here’s the point where I actually get to feeling kind of scared. I am not sure why, though typically for me it’s because I’m just thinking the kinds of things that no one needs to think about because they’re just too damned unlikely. I’m a bit of a social ‘hypochondriac’ or something like that. I always feel like “the end is near” and perhaps, again, you can help me out at least with THIS ONE at least just this one time.
Because this one, to me, looks very different than the others.
I’m actually kind of fearful of robocalls.
Now you can say I’m crazy. Certainly plenty of people have said it and plenty others have agreed. And maybe I am crazy, at least a little bit here and there. But hear me out to THIS, the very heart of this ‘very scary’ puzzle. A part I wrote in its earliest form way back in 2009 or thereabouts, on Quora.
Someone had asked a question about pre- versus post- 9/11 U.S. transportation. My response — which I’ll duly note was censored thoroughly, almost instantly, and rather unjustly (in my view) — basically drew a quick sketch of how the terrorists had really kind of won at that point. They certainly had not lost anyway.
Hence the reason for the quick censor: You have a little bit of freedom of speech in this country and an even tinier bit of freedom of the pulpit, but if you start going around saying things that ‘sound blasphemous enough’ you’re going to find your copy of the Constitution revoked in short order.
Especially if the little lake you’re floating in is the dismal excuse for a social media information site Quora was at the time (until it progressively got even worse and I left for ‘greener pastures.’)
Yep, I kind of said (I implied, actually, didn’t even say directly “yep, terrorists won. This is how you keep score and because this is how you do it, they won, we lost, end of story.”) they won.
And “no one” wanted to hear it.
And here I grind my axe assiduously (though this time briefly) at every pass I need to make through this many times chartered area of the waters:
I *know* that “no one” “wants to” hear (extended: actually listen to, heed, and in some way take action on rather than TALK action on) things that they NEED to hear. That’s one major reason why we say NEED to hear rather than WANT to hear.
BECAUSE YOU DON’T SAY YOU NEED WHEN ALL IT IS IS A WANT ANYMORE THAN YOU SAY IT’S A WANT WHEN IT’S REALLY A NEED.
Prima facie obvious, that one. Not arguable in any conventional way by any conventional person of any describable authority at any possible time except perhaps as a joke.
Need <> want and want <> need. Period period.
I mean that is the single most basically and utterly fucked up part about this whole world (as I see it) and *every single last human being I have ever talked to about it has seemed to in some ways NOT really ‘get it.’* [Yes, I did grow up in the “First World” and yes, I know that causes obvious selection effects.]
But you’re goddamn right I’m upset about it anyway. I am seething that not a single person I’ve come across in 50 plus years of life in the Western world understands that wants and needs are not the same thing even close to as well as I understand they are and to me that means I ought to finally get to say my peace on the topic to an audience other than the fucking mirror.
It’s the *only* thing I know that I am absolutely CERTAIN no one else knows and as soon as I even tangentially bring the topic up I’m immediately censored or sent to the corner like I have leprosy. Every time. [Which, for the record, leprosy is not. ‘All that’ contagious I mean. COVID it is not.]
So how did the ‘terrorists win’ exactly? Or how do *I* think they “won” to be more politically correct about it?
They did it by knowing how to keep score better than we do by a far margin.
Because you cannot count quality of years lived as any more or any less important than quantity of years lived, because to do so is, *strictly speaking* irrational.
This clearly implies that death count alone does not make up the scoreboard.
You know, in case that wasn’t abundantly fucking obvious BEFORE now.
Forced change despite resistance — a.k.a. reduction in quality of life — is a metric that must also be considered. You *can* win at chess by “capturing” all pertinent opponent pieces by ‘freezing’ them in place even without removing them from the board.
So all I did was the simplest math connection I could between the two. Quality and quantity of life, sort of.
I basically said, “one human life is equivalent to the mean age of mortality in a particular culture” and then did a bit of time/death multiplication. It went sort of like this:
“In response to the event of 9/11, the terrorists are now leading the ‘global arms race.’ The rational is simple, and goes as follows:
The death toll from the attacks of 9/11 was something under 5,000 human lives. Because these lives were in the process of being lived we can actually calculate those lives as ‘mathematically similar’ to ‘only’ the death of about half as many perfectly viable newborn children.
So basically “just” 2,500 infant-equivalents.
The FAR MORE SERIOUS implication of the incident, however, and the one
on which the score must be kept, for reasons of rationality and for the shortest-path-approach to the highest chance of winning the game of “World Peace or Dominate everyone” that everyone seems to want to win
is just this:
How much time do we now waste specifically because of the attacks of 9/11?
My Quora analysis went perhaps too dispassionately into an analysis of “how many people through how many airports and how much additional time and life nuisance do we have to absorb to ‘get over’ the incident of 9/11?”
Answer:
So many millions of man hours wasted that the ‘true’ death toll [a.k.a. the ‘scoreboard’] becomes mind boggling to consider.
And I somewhat too-gleefully delivered my personal observation:
Just a few short months before 9/11 occurred, I walked into the San Diego airport less than ten minutes before a plane I wanted to be on *AND DID NOT HAVE A TICKET FOR* was scheduled to take off, and I managed to board the plane anyway. With a short enough delay that the passengers aboard it didn’t even seem to be very annoyed that I was getting on and ‘sharing the ride with them’ so to speak.
And that SOUNDS LIKE ancient fucking history in 2021’s two-hour obligatory beforehand in COVID gear airports.
Which is because it IS ancient history. Things WERE better when at least one of us had the beginnings of an inkling how to ‘keep score’ and how not to. Which hopefully now I’m starting to gather a few ‘allies’ on, in terms of this ‘certain way’ of thinking.
Which brings us right back to robocalls, conveniently.
Do they waste ANY of ANYONE’s time?
Oh YES, YES in fact they very much do.
Well how then. How many? How regularly? In what way? At what times?
Oh! Oh! So VERY often they do it and seemingly always at the wrong time. Take me away from what I was doing, require me time to get back to what I was doing and in that way
really do take away a freedom from me — the freedom to live unmolested by things that should never have a right to pester me endlessly in the first place
And then I would ‘round the argument out’ with the following:
ONE ‘good computer’ and a tiny amount of capital can send literally billions of phone calls per day out of a garden variety cheap-to-operate completely autonomous ‘outbound call’ center. Basically that a million calls can be made for a fraction of a cent. Let’s call it a million per penny, not sure what the real number is, but it doesn’t matter very much.
A million per penny and then let’s say — for a guess — that it costs just ONE minute (the interruption of what you were doing/thinking/saying/etc.) and then another minute (“wait, who is this, what is this about?”) and then one more minute (“Now what was I doing, oh yeah, it was this.”) and then one ‘very last’ minute to account for the disruption of your endocrine system which annoyance generally causes and which thereupon contributes to worse health outcomes in a ‘death of a thousand cuts’ sort of way.
Which makes a million calls per penny to create 4 million minutes of ‘social annoyance disruption’ a.k.a. NOISE.
Great SCOTT! It’s the most genius invention in all of eternity! The ability to instantly vaporize lives for pennies which are also infinitely scalable using an ‘ingenious’ but rather uncomplicated process of taking more money and building more computers and telecommunications connections to do it to one’s heart’s content.
Presto!
Money + computers + a few telecommunications connections + a sociopath or three and Skynet is born! Hoorah for the dumb shits who allowed this to happen so easily under our noses/in our pockets/purses/lockers at the gym.
Yep, that was indeed my informal ‘victory lap’ upon the conclusive proof I just provided that
Robocalls are indeed deadly in a very dangerous neural-toxin sort of way.
They take from you your very life and your happiness both and they do it for such a trivial cost it seems to paradoxically prove that “Skynet” hasn’t really taken over everything yet.
The phones would all be ringing off their hooks.
Which they aren’t. Not yet they aren’t anyway. Not exactly.
4 million minutes is (coincidentally) the same as 66,666.67 hours.
Which is the same as 2,777.78 days which is the same as 7.61 years which is a good pause point for the value of a single penny of “computer overhead.”
Why?
Because of course that makes ONE US dollar equivalent to 10 human lifetimes — at least when it’s spent [I would say ‘frivolously’] on allowing people to annoy one another and not even forcing them to in any way rationally justify doing it before smacking them in the face with yet another equivalent of a “pop up” ad.
So wait wait wait wait wait…what is that you’re saying? Are you saying that robocalls are so effectively lethal that it’s a wonder we don’t call them Sarin gas deliverable by telephone wire? You know, to ‘make them more appetizing’ for the utter sociopaths who deploy them as a conventional method of
human attention slaughter
Yep. That’s almost exactly what I’m saying. Sarin gas by telephone wire, metaphorically speaking. Actually impacts your endocrine system in a pinpoint/pinprick fashion. Not deadly of course. Not exactly.
Now I will admit my bias here on the matter, I’ve got nothing to hide. I really DO enjoy it when people read one of my “holy shit, it’s a full thirty minutes?!” articles. I respect the investment of time it takes to go on a good fishing trip with me as your captain. One wooden leg and all that I have.
That’s why I kind of resent it that people who simply have a *lot* more money than I do can ‘get people’s ears’ in a fashion that is about a quadrillion times more effective than my simple pen is. I’ve got just one internet connection, a single phone, one computer, and a brain (sometimes.)
Why should THEY get to vaporize 10 million people with a simple million bucks when all I can get for my monthly disability check is enough dough to buy cat food and cat litter and stop at McDonald’s for a Happy Meal occasionally. To make all my troubles go away on a Friday night for example. Seems pretty fucking unfair to me.
I mean at least it would if I were a sociopath, too.
But I’m not a sociopath. I just know how to hunt one down by the signature it leaves. And if they think they’re going to keep right on ‘doing their thing’ now that I’ve taken a more careful look at their processes they will shortly find themselves mistaken. Because if they think that robocalls and the like are the superweapon that marks those that use them as alpha predator on THIS particular planet then they haven’t tuned into quite so many of my Medium posts as they might better have to avoid the unpleasant prospect of being fried from a distance with my laser beam eyes.
I can smell them cooking up their schemes from any distance and I’m virtually coming down their chimneys kamikaze style like Rambo wearing a Santa Clause outfit and a rubber mask made to look like the Grinch.
Say your prayers, fellas. Time’s almost up.
Gonna get you guys. Don’t yet know where you are exactly, but I know you’re out there and I also know missile command like the back of my hand. Get ready to play Return Fire with a guy knows how to drive a virtual tank.
So yes yes, robocalls are deadly. But that ISN’T EVEN the chief purpose of this article, which you’ll recall I began under the title
“Cognitive sensitivity”
and which I then went on to specify I was writing as a means of ‘looking into’ a theory about a certain topic I had my eye on.
Now I’ll admit that was half true half BS. Or all true because my own scientific theories really are theories even if you do think I’m a crackpot and all I say is utter BS.
I want to know something specific, and it’s about actually observable stressors and their real impacts on the central nervous and endocrine systems of people as they relate to those people dying premature deaths.
You see? I told you I was a ‘bit of a hypochondriac.’
What I suppose might be the case is that waves of stress, acting in sum, progressively ‘drown the life out’ of organisms. Or at least that it looks like they can ‘drown out’ or ‘stifle’ human beings. Stress waves KILL people.
In a way far more direct than robocalls do, to be very clear about it.
I mean, it’s certainly true that if you had a million daily annoyances with absolutely no way to avoid them you would shortly thereafter slit your own throat. Seems like there’s kind of no way that THAT is not true.
In other words it couldn’t be false. It sounds almost like an Edgar Allan Poe situation: please don’t let THAT sort of death come upon me.
Which is why my analogy (below) which I think is well done even though it is ‘somewhat elaborate,’ is what I would like you to the most seriously consider at the conclusion of this article — hopefully to comment on at the bottom. Sincerely, please do that. Give me your opinion.
Birdland: A mythical place
Let us say that there is a ‘far off’ country that you have always wanted to visit.
Let us also say that you do not speak their language yet (you hope to, someday) and that they also have a rather ‘bizarre’ series of perfectly plausible in a physical sense — though strange in the extreme — ‘customs’ or ‘laws.’
Let us finally say that you really don’t care when you visit the place, how you get there, or even whether you’re bringing anything at all along with you when you go. Not even money. You just want to see it. Experience it. Be there.
With those as our prime conditions, I ‘teleport’ this conversation to the precise far off country I just described. In fact right to the center of the public square of the capital, which is built in a somewhat ‘normally’ human customary way. It has a fountain, a big circle, lots of benches, people walking and talking and pushing baby strollers. A few birds around, enough to create ambiance and some pleasant sound, but not enough to be ‘annoying.’
The circle in the public square is enormous. There are something like 10,000 people on the entirety of the structure of it, and an easy thousand of those in the central cobblestoned circle of the plaza. It is a cool day. Not cold exactly, but a bit breezier than one likes dressed in light clothing.
In the very center of the circle in the middle of the plaza is a curious bowl-shaped formation of stone. It is seen as a holy place by many of the people of the district. It usually runs over the sides with water, is poised on terraces each about four feet higher than the last off the ground, and thus the presentation is something akin to a wedding cake, with the topmost part of it some thirty or forty feet in the air.
There are no other towers or vantage points within 200 meters of the center of the square that are as high or higher than this point; no way to ‘look inside’ the bowl from the plaza without some sort of aerial camera, and one of the traditions of the society is utmost respect for birds being those that look down upon us as if our superiors:
They have no technology of flight themselves, no aerial cameras, and the sky above the plaza is unblemished and unobstructed aside from a stone arch some thousand feet in the air, from the central point of which lies suspended a butterfly — not a bird, mind you, but a butterfly — constructed somehow of a single piece of topaz apparently a hundred feet across and as thinly carved as physics allows it in some fashion to be.
They are basically a people who worship birds, in a very weird kind of way.
So this day comes along and it’s more populated than usual in the plaza, and perhaps some customary celebration is going on. It is about 3pm in the afternoon.
Which would seem to be the perfect time for you to stroll through for a visit. After all, you could wander through the park seeing anything you like and without saying a single solitary thing and no one would probably bother you.
And even though your clothes would presumably be quite different that is more than offset by the one thing you admire MOST about their civilization:
It is basically the only civilization which has ever been known in human history to not care in the slightest what costume or make up or mask that you wear, you are still one of them if you at least do everyone the favor of wearing *some kind* of costume that IS NOT
The Emperor’s New Clothes type of costume.
Seems fair enough. They just don’t want to ‘see’ you nude. It’s the ONLY thing they expressly forbid and they forbid it so harshly that it’s almost a death or excommunication type of offense in the district of the birdpeople:
It’s THIRTY FULL DAYS in a hole in which you can’t see out of and *ALL* of your rights are stripped of you while they feed you a series of bizarre chemicals to *really* strip you of any semblance you have of who YOU are versus who someone else wants you to be.
Thirty days. Food might not be very bad, but it’s a place of utter ridicule if not utter embarrassment, and those two are actually quite similar. They are just not *quite* exactly the same.
So yeah, PERFECT TIME for you, and you always said you wanted to go.
ZING! You’re there.
You *know* you are there. You see you are there instantly: you’re gazing straight up at the blue butterfly hanging down from the center of it and that’s a thing which exists in only one part of the world: in Birdland.
But oops. There is ONE problem.
You know you must be in the legendary center of the plaza, and that means you know you’re also in the center of a stone bowl that it seems pretty clear is a holy place.
Oh yeah, and one more thing: you’re naked.
…
At this point, while it sinks in that you somehow just got teleported into the best dream you thought you had and it’s actually a nightmare, I’ll pause for a moment before I tell you how fast the clock is ticking.
Yep. Naked in the bowl. There’s some water in there, about a foot at the moment, and the bowl is actually about four feet deep. No one can see you yet.
Alright, let’s feel it out. Hmmm…water seems uncomfortably warm. It’s not burning you though, so that’s fine. At least for the moment it is. I mean, it couldn’t get any hotter, right?
But unfortunately now you know that it very much CAN get hotter and you also know that somewhere along the line you must have made some sort of Faustian wager: Always wanting something but now instantly realizing the problem in not being quite particular enough about what you wanted. You made a wish was all you did.
You got it, of course, but you’re not wearing anything.
Which basically means you aren’t ever going to be able to ‘get to stay’ for any length of time because if they see you as you are, you’re history.
And then all of a sudden the water does start to get warmer.
“Oh WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS NOW?” you say, petulantly protesting the delivery of the thing that you wanted now that you know better. “Now I’ve got to not only think but think fast?”
And having someone subject you to such a curse is among the unfairest of the unfair things — at least in the case that you didn’t ask for it to be coming.
Which in this case you DID, but just to make sure it doesn’t feel overstated…
The water gets warmer and warmer and warmer, but it gets marginally deeper, too, and in effect, you’re given a not very long hourglass’s worth of time to either bail out of the bowl or get scalded within an inch of your life.
And then, as soon as you realize it’s going down like that, you remember the virtual presentation of what the plaza is supposed to look like and you know that you will have to bail yourself down four or five tiers until you’re standing naked in the center of the plaza, and after that
look for a place to hide as fast as you possibly can.
And since that is observably impossible to do you know that you will be in the hands of authorities you don’t even know how to speak to rather instantly and then thereafter be thrown into a hole and fed pills to erase your identity.
And now you know exactly what it’s like to be a bipolar person in the United States of America in 2021. Congratulations, you passed the test of being patient enough to listen to a ‘mad man’ while he was speaking.
*Even though I had to ‘cheat’ you with a single-blind experiment of a sort, since I didn’t tell you from the outset I was bipolar I just threw my back out trying to write this piece in a fashion ‘politically correct enough’ to avoid you being insensitively triggered by the way I say things like your way of saying things is the right one and mine is somehow, by default, utterly wrong.*
The burden is on ME to prove that I am sane and YOU get to decide what the definition of sanity is simply because your numbers are greater than mine? That to me sounds like grade school bullying, and since that is true even though few people yet recognize it to be true, I’m basically beginning the coup that ends this fucking rigged game once and for all.
When you see what I do with the Constitution of the United States I think you might actually be pleased, but that presupposes you can follow A B C arguments about what is fair and what isn’t fair at least as well as you’ve done here, and, for the record,
Yes, robocalls ARE still lethal force appliers and no, they will not be lasting very much longer regardless of whether the “Supreme Court” of lightweight legal thinkers agrees with me or not.
Law and ethics are not the same things, and since ethics is what must be chosen over law in each and every case of a conflict, the only thing we *NEED* is ethics. ALL LAW will soon be banished from the face of this earth because LAW is the crutch of those who can’t deduce the simple principles of ethics to a utterly perfect degree.
Also the books are too long, it’s too hard to memorize, there’s no way to track the reasons why it is the way it is (aside from the “god’s spell” fashion of “said so in this here book” a.k.a. “Constitution” which is basically the equivalent of “a bunch of old white somewhat smart [sorry, Ben Franklin, much respect, but you don’t know it all never did never could have] said so so it must be true.”]
Game over. You lose if you fight me thanks for playing. ;)
