Noise

I really didn’t like psychology in college. I admit it. I still don’t. I grudgingly tolerate its many tentacles because I equally grudgingly need to tolerate people. Don’t get me wrong: I love you all – so long as I never have to see or speak to any of you. But since this life objective is increasingly more difficult, I do continue to lower my defenses and try to learn this crazy mix of art and science known as “human”. Noise by Daniel Kahneman an, Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein is my latest notch in the psycho-mal-logical belt.

I had read Thinking Fast and Slow by Dr. Kahneman in ’18 and wasn’t really blown away by the profundity of insight but rather just had a concrete basis from which to extrapolate behavior that I had noticed in myself and others over the years. I called it my own L1/2 cache vs processor registers vs muscle memory. So I actually had it broken up in 3 because I’m into ternary computing! None of this quantum fashionista garbage! (I crack myself up.) But thinking back, the simplicity of Dr. K’s synthesis is exactly what I want from the discipline. A model of the world that works with that fountain spring of unpredictability known as homo sapiens.

I doubt that Noise will give you that as it didn’t do for me. What it did, however, was both by anecdote and data, provide a typical reflection of: OH YEAH…I noticed that! And almost always introduce auto-biographical hooks into the pages. I know this style is itself a form of psychological manipulation but it works. And I actually like it because I still have to attend those sales meetings my rock stars/ninjas/gurus arrange for me.

I also know that many of these tactics are used on us in the warfare against the peasants that our governments have waged for much longer than I have been alive but much more obviously and unrestrained over the times of Cholera. Or Covid. Or lower-primate pox. Can we just start incrementing small releases of panic instead of risking offensive-naming? I also know and massively resent that Dr. Sunstein (co-author) had co-written Nudge with Richard Thaler and considering that my communist-refugee mother has nudged me for my entire life just as she was by the politburo propaganda arms, I feel the chill of all the tactics in my bones from the first innocent-sounding question:

(Very sweetly) Q: Are you cold?

Translation: I want the temperature turned up to 77 ° Kelvin but under no circumstances will I ask directly for it. (And that’s one of the more innocent ones.)

However, being the reasonable non-reactionary that I try to be, I still wish to interface with the manipulators’ tactics on the only terms I can. One cannot solve an equation by waiting it out nor can one lift weights by screeching at them for being heavy. I want to keep solving these infuriating puzzles for no other reason than to know what our dear leaders are doing to us. In this respect, Noise is a fantastic primer on the self. And others. Besides, these books are psychological weapons and the professors/authors are just arms manufacturers. Who would possibly be stupid enough to blame them for how their tools are used by criminals – within government(s) and without? What kind of adolescent intellect could be so obtuse? A: probably the kind that’s not going to strap up themselves. Pity.

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