Like Clockwork Orange

 The Point of this post is to serve as a working list of real life examples where people's names seem oddly deterministic to their lives. As weak psychological effects, they are a personal curiosity, and I'd like to remember them after noticing them. Derek Chauvin :                The now famous police officer responsible for the death of George Floyd, an event which had reverberations around the world, has an unfortunately coincidental name. I could not help but notice that the racist intentions which have been cast against Officer Chauvin are made in the interesting political light of the current moment, where is being used as an example of the problematic alignment of police officers with certain white-national and jingoistic ideologies. The question then becomes, does/did this officers namesake influence his personality in any way - was the death of George Floyd a result of an overly chauvin istic officers abuse? It's impossible to ...

                      Humans are slaves to information. Just as we must eat, we cannot help but filter everything in the world through the information-loving organ between our ears. And just as there are many different flavor palettes, there are equally numerous information palettes in our environment for us to sample. There is every flavor of movie, subtle notes of conversation, and carefully curated textures to every news article. Within themselves, each has similar common information structures which have all been commented on, spun out, and then pushed to the limits by creatives to be delivered back to us in continuation of the cycle of consumption and regurgitation. There is a problem however, because what our evolutionarily primitive palettes enjoy most are not the foods and information that are best for our species. And yet, we continually feed ourselves poor quality food and bad information. In this way, we have ...

     When I was in 2nd grade I moved to a new city. Having lost all my old social connections I felt angry and lost. Although I had been fairly popular at my first school, I didn't make a good first impression at this new elementary and struggled to form the same prosocial connections again. I sank into a more reclusive personality.     Everyone deals with bullies at some point, and while it was never really something that plagued me, I do recall once instance where a bully accused me of harming his younger brother in some way. I had no idea who either individual was, but being confronted by this larger opponent and not wanting to be blamed and have to reap whatever punishment that was coming for me, I decided to lie my way out. The exchange went something like this:          "I heard you were the one that hurt by little brother!"                      "Uh no, it was that ot...

     Whenever I drive into the "whiter" and more evangelical parts of Orange County, where absolutely not one liquor store exists and the only wine for miles is locked behind chapel doors, I always feel confined by a moralizing authority that simply seems excessively fraudulent . I'm talking of course about Yorba Linda. Everything here is nicer, and richer, and much more conservative - after all who wouldn't want to conserve all this goodness once obtained?      Recently, I was picking up someone slightly more than a friend - who herself was staying at a friends house - and I arrived to an obscenely large estate marked by an equally large flagpole. Curiously, it was the only flagpole on the block. It happens that in my own more diverse neighborhood there is a similarly conspicuous flag pole that waves daily either touting "Trump", Beer themes, POW, or baseball paraphernalia. This being my only point of reference, I make a quick blanket assumption that the...

Developmentally, a child accidentally touching the stove is often used as an example of how the strength of a stimulus trains us to avoid or return to a behavior. As the saying goes, “He who plays with fire gets burned.” But maybe old adages are faulty guides because plenty of people can play with fire and come out the other end unscathed. Perhaps the question then is how ‘He who played with fire’ got burned. Perhaps he didn’t know what he was doing. Like Prometheus bestowing the gift of fire upon a child, the child cannot rightly be expected to know what to do – or more crucially, what not to do. Reliably, initially he will get burned. But overtime, that same child has learned to wield fire and has now entered a technological age where he believes his talents at controlling Prometheus’ first gift also make him adept at wielding his latest [digital] contribution into the lives of humans. Unfortunately, like the proverbial child, we are being burned by our new social technologies, exce...