User talk:CQ/2009

Below are collaborative efforts and V.A.U.L.T. entries. They are Top Secret, so please do not look below this line. (Unless of course you are a collaborator)

Hi Quin
Thanks for the pictures; it is unusual to find someone who can "empathize" with a layered stack approach to empathy! I am not certain what put that thought into my head, but the model works. If the empathic constructs are missing, then there will be predictable bad behaviors in the above layers whether they be in the self, the group, or in society. Going in the other direction, bad behaviors are manifested by missing constructs, and the types of behaviors can be linked to specific missing constructs. (This applies to Autism, though only in the sense of handicaps--my empathy approach follows Darwins link from the natural affection of animal parents to our present day morality.) In the nasty stuff that affects us everyday, be it war, corruption, threatening tail-gaters, the same types of constructs seem to be missing, putting these behaviors into a single category: the predator.

I happen to be working on a "clean" Christian model myself, which, as you might guess, works upwards from healthy neurological constructs. It also looks downward at unhealthy ones, and seeks to mitigate the damage that bad constructs produce (mostly) through forgiveness--even for the real baddies, such as Saddam Hussein. I believe that when paranoia takes hold of the real baddies, that is when things become most difficult. The trick, then, is to mitigate the paranoia, through forgiveness.

I also like the simplification approach Christ took towards Jewish law, reducing 700+ laws to a handful. His approach could work wonders for the tax code, and I am not being facetious!

The body armor idea came out of some research on rucksacks. I am not seeking to make body armor, but to integrate it with backpacking ideas, so that soldiers are wearing it all the time and it does not add to the load. Integrating load carrying with body armor logically worked towards a single piece model, which I believe would provide the most safety. In part it is about reaching out to the "other team," as I have historically been a pacifist and somewhat left, and opposed to military in general. But many of the rank and file are no different than us, and are just in a difficult situation. Often officers are in the same situation, so it makes sense to approach the culture in beneficial ways. I am pretty much done with the article as it only proposes design criteria and research paths.

Here is a link to some Katrina/NOLA writing I did for my degree based on my experience moderating a Katrina Flood discussion group on Care2.com: http://thinman.com/text/katrina_story.html. It has a unique perspective as to what happened since it was a montage of observations including reports from the city during the flood.

Layer [was] OSI vs Maslow's hierarchy of needs
The most important thing about the layers, is that, like in Internet networking, every event hits on every layer. A war, for instance, starts with some really bad thoughts and interactions, and beneath those thoughts are unhealthy neurons and twisted neural constructs. The model says "it hits on every layer every time," where exceptions when they happen don't break the rule. In my experience, the model works pretty well, and helps predict problems, and helps create a good "soup" for beneficial social constructs.

It's a model, so anyone using it can mix and match ideas and observable results so long as they can prove or disprove the validity of the various components. This is refreshing alternative to the stuffy "scientific model" of hypothesis -> testing -> theory -> practice--which is producing precious little except headaches these.

Christian "clean" model
I have been attempting a "Christian top ten" that I describe as an implementation of Christ's ministry in terms of its experience in ways that are acceptable to wider society, including the seculars. I think it is better described as "Christ's contributions to social science." The ideas have labels such as "breaking bread" and "forgiveness," and point in two directions: useful (and provable) applications, and their sources in the Gospels. I intend to become familiar with Christ's contemporary environment, so that I can try to comb all the Gospels for useful social science. My pastor agrees that Christ was the first social scientist, but I don't think he has read my social science writing on the Middle School Science page (and ).--JohnBessatalk 14:57, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

God's Handwriting
DNA is God's handwriting, and the goal of DNA along many different evolutionary lines is empathy: love. God is love. There are mistakes in the writing, and in a sense, God's work is a "work in progress." In nature, higher organisms typically live and grow in family or community units, and when the DNA of love fails for a higher organism, that organism cannot function in a generous way that makes him a contributing member of his group. God's handwriting has a mistake in it, for whatever reasons, and that organism, typically attempts to gain the resources necessary for live in non-beneficial ways--what we can think of as taking from others, but not giving.

There is a contradiction, or perhaps even an irony, in this view of God's handwriting as DNA, and evolution as God's creation. Higher organisms--us primates being the highest--are normally all highly empathic, the highest among us having the most sophisticated empathy. Normally we, typical of higher organisms, care for the less fortunate, and they return emotional gratitude that completes a circle of caring. This includes caring for organisms that have mistakes in their DNA, and in typically in nature those with mistakes tend to live short lives. The contradiction appears when the broken DNA is the DNA that creates the empathic neurons. In humans, we know that this broken DNA can not only deprive the highest empathic facilities, but the defect can reach very far into the history of DNA. Humans, apparently externally normal, may be so genetically damaged as to lack even the most rudimentary DNA structures dating back to the beginning of God's work. Humans may literally have only the communication abilities of, say, reptiles or snakes, yet may be able to function intellectually well enough to carry out a functional role in society, that is to say, have a job.

The result of this contradiction is that humans dysfunctional in this way, victims of God's mistakes in his handwriting of DNA, completely lack what we think of as humanity and can conceivably act in nearly purely inhumane ways, usually typically to gain the resources necessary to have a pleasing life. The image that comes to my mind is the sadist in prison, the person who, for pay, works for the totalitarian to inflict pain. Extending this contradiction, is that much of humanity attempts to define the torturers actions in terms of society, environmental experiences. These philosophic humans, typically psychologists, attempt to apply what they think of as empathy towards humans whose DNA is so mis-written that mis-define empathy, they use the term in every way except the way God means it, to create an avenue of escape for these types of very broken people. This is where God's contradiction become human irony. Organisms who nature would condemn to a short life, in a perhaps cruel organismic fate, actually become the most powerful in human society, as they are able through the protection of society's men of philosophy to kill in great numbers, and in-so-doing, create vast accumulations of resources called Capital.