Re: genY has no interest in hi-tech careers



On Thu, 1 Nov 2007, morrisjcroy@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

I'm glad I'll be gone before they find out.

(Personal question). At around what age did you start to become very
cynical?

Well, two things: i) I can't describe the "start" and "very cynical" as if it were a sea-change in feeling, ii) there were always _compensating_ factors that were also present to "balance off" the cynicism.

However, my father was probably more cynical than anyone else I ever met (and yet he had his reasons that _compensated_, at least to some degree, against his cynicism). Me, I just felt that, based on my experience with other people that the world just wasn't that bad, wasn't that screwed up (today, I would re-qualify that under factors such as hypocracy, head-in-the-sand coping mechanisms, and old fashioned greed-selfishness, etc.).

Most of my cynicism dates back to when I was in high school. I recall
I was in the 11th or 12th grade when I first came across and read such
books as: Mein Kampf (Hitler), the Communist Manifesto (Marx +
Engels), the Satanic Bible, the Anarchist Cookbook, etc ...

I would be vary interested to know _how_ these related to your cynicism. And, is the Anarchist Cookbook about cooking or anarchism?

I have a notion that Satanic/Satanists followers (based on a wee bit of reading) or a few of them anyway have found something to "believe in" because they need it and are not at all satisfied with mainstream religion.

At around
the same time I was also listening to a lot of punk rock music, where
a lot of the song lyrics were very cynical and about topics like:
anarchy, anti-religion, anti-police, corruption, etc ...

I have yet to come to some, or any, "understanding" as to why the vocal lyrics of some of this music developed such seemingly destructive/pathological content. Was it an offshoot of youthful rebelliousness? Was it some attempt to see the world as it is and avoid the hypocrasy? Were there any themes--in your memory-- to make the world a better place?

Curiously, however, my deeper reading of history indicates that people hundreds to thousands of years ago, in their own way, had a wide range of "evil" intents and actions and so perhaps this is all not a recent phenomenon reflecting a qualitative change in society (i.e. decadence and decay).

With 20/20 hindsight, most of the writings and music I was into in
those days are largely a joke today. Most of the books and music back
then, fed into my own clinical depression and viewpoints about life.
I suppose when one is clinically depressed, it's easy to want to think
that the world is a very dark and gloomy place and reading/watching/
listening to whatever stuff portrays the world as such a dark and
gloomy manner.

I have a more multi-leveled, multi-pronged viewpoint this. Real _clinical_ depression probably might be best approached with the help of some medications that I understand are available, but I also feel that one can develop _philosophical_ constructs that allow one to deal i) constructively, or ii) defensively with life's tribulations, foibles, machinations, schemes, conivings. The oldest book I ever read about was from somewhere in Mesopotamia and it was about--guess what--coping with life's problems. My two favorite undergraduate subjects were: calculus (amazing how integrals and differentials worked) and psychology (which helped me understand how human beings 'ticked' but I had the feeling that most students just learned for the exams while I was looking at the knowledge to figure out why my species is so screwed up [there's that book with the great title: "We've had psychiatry for 200 years and the world is still getting worse" but its terrible inside the book; Eric Bern's book "Games People Play" was much better and I think largely valid]. Human behavior and thinking is, has been, and will always be, for me a fascinating and important subject. "Management"-types are into this, too, because I think they all want to see themselves as some kind of god with superior mental abilities (and yet, for at least decades of management "science" the business failure rates have not changed, so no progress there.).

My current reading of history has been very rewarding in terms of answering (or partly answering) some of my questions about the species and our future (maybe it just doesn't matter if humans ruin the planet and become extinct?) and whether we can "improve" ourselves in some way.

It seems that our brains are wired in such a way that we like to
search for any information which confirms whatever personal biases we
have, while ignoring contradictory information.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias


Its absolutely one of the human race's major intellectual problems and it is also a problem with scientists who are supposed to be open about new, better theories and actually give them fair treatment. I remember reading a long article in _Science_ many decades ago about this. It even turns out that younger scientists are worse than older ones, in this regard, since the prevailing notions are that old scientists are incompetant and have outdated knowledge and are surely senile. And, along those lines, I can report that out of my reading _Science_ continuously from 1962 to about 1996, there was a ton of important, significant wisdom and knowledge published in the major articles and short research notes. The book reviews were priceless, too.

But, getting back to depression (at least the kind that can be seriously debilitating), I have to think about people I've run across in life who had real problems and no idea, or inclination, how to solve them. And, I have no magic answers. Years ago when I was in graduate school and discouraged (a not uncommon feeling if you read "The PhD Process" by Dale Bloom, etal, reviewed on my website), I did go around and ask lots of faculty to talk with me and if there is any general bottom line it is that everyone has their caveats, everyone has their frustrations (greater or lessor), and everyone has to deal with all this in some way _but_ there are not that many generalizations. You crash and burn and you have two options: i) stop and die, or ii) pick up the pieces, or what is left of them, and just do the best you can with what is left. Of course, there are the "miracle stories" out there where guys start with nothing and become famous, rich, etc. Even thousands of years ago, there were guys who started out life as slaves and became kings, emperors. Of course, those were very rare events. And, there was a lot of luck and circumstance involved, too.

"Confirming personal bias"? Let me give my "mantra": nobody can be without bias. A totally unbiased person should be a paradox. I don't think it is possible. On racism(s): I don't think it will help society in any way to seriously dig up any grounds that could be used to treat differently one group of people from another. It will just make some people mad and other people will be deluding themselves. Let sleeping dogs lay. On hate: I hate overpaid, underperforming, unjust, overprotected, overpampered CEOs, and evil leaders of countries that caused wars, death, destruction, and pain.

I guess I have clinical "diarhea of the keyboard". That started in the early 1990s.

.

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