just a blog

  Being well-adjusted to our current society means relying on fully on words and formulations. Our society has graduated from the previous savage tribalism to running mostly on heuristics, and well-adjusted people do not develop attachment or a sense of value for you if you don't consistently participate in shallow conversational conventions.  These conventions generally have no deeper meaning, but if you don't use them, you are the only person who isn't virtue signaling in an ocean of people who are virtue signaling, constantly and diligently. If you are a decent and capable person, this is the equivalent of having a good product but zero budget for marketing in a world where thousands of other businesses with possibly worse products have six figure budgets to spend on bombarding people with their brand name. People have limited attention spans, nobody actually cares, your product fails. A friend sent me this article: Pesce, N. L. (2019, April 2). Most college grads with...

 

  A lot in this book is familiar.  One of the authors is a soldier, the other a sociologist, so that's a fair combination of hands on and theory. They will usually take a real example from the US army - either training or combat - and show how the character and leadership of the people in charge contributed to either the failure or the success of the project.  Army is strictly hierarchical, so it's mostly giving that bad character of the commander eventually leads to character breakdown of the whole unit. People will at best stop communicating, usually start low-key abusing each other in a way that still can pass off as a joke and at worst commit violent crimes and so on.  I like the conclusion they make, which is (obviously?) to fucking stay away from people with a characterless sort of behavior. If you work with them, you've got to find something reportable on them to get rid of them. If they are your friends, you need new friends. If they are your entire neighborh...