Morning on the River of No Return, Salmon River, ID

For those unfamiliar with me, I’m a graduate of multiple elite universities (Case Institute of Technology, Duke University) who elected to be a professor at a land grant institution (Washington State University – main campus in Pullman) for my career. I’ve also done sabbatical overseas, and lectured around the world, on every continent save Antarctica. I’m still open for invites there, FWIW.

To put it succinctly, I’ve kinda seen it all. But the academy that I joined out of high school, in 1979, has changed very dramatically in the past 45 years. Many of the causes of the Left (being anti-war, for example) have now been embraced by those same Lefties. Suffice it to say I’m stunned that the Left is now the pro-War party.

Along the way I’ve developed a theory I call Structural Memetics, which explains how information flows are created in content and complexity through the different topologies of social networks, as well as the psychosocial development of their agents. That’s a mouthful. And while I’d argue that it’s all not that hard, others tell me differently.

So it’s with great excitement that I find someone who gives examples in a way that precisely line up with my work, but in a way that is more accessible. That’s why I recently wrote a piece on Rob Henderson’s book, Troubled, and in particular his concept of luxury beliefs. What is a luxury belief? It’s a belief that elites have, and champion, that they don’t follow, but use to virtue signal to each other that they are elite. These beliefs often hurt the poor, whom the elites profess they want to save. A great example is “Defund the police.”

Rob is primarily working on the individual level in examples in his book. Which is fine — but the overall concept of luxury beliefs can also apply to institutional strategies, or entire societal edifices. Academia (which Rob discusses in the context of individuals and classes) falls into the same pattern. One can look at contemporary Wokism and its destructive fascination with infinite fractal categorization as a great example of aggregated luxury beliefs (intersectionality, etc. — everything but people forming their own opinions of others) as a primary cancer on both the individual and institutional psychosocial development process. No one has embraced this nearly as much as the entire academic enterprise. The universities that have pushed back against this can be literally counted on one hand.

People going to elite schools, for the most part, do not have to worry about their material circumstance, and usually have their employment futures secured. They are elite, and have been granted a lifetime of elite coding and signaling that they also share with high level employers. When they interview, they know how to shine. One more etiquette dinner will neither make nor break their lifetime trajectory. I taught at Duke as a professor for my last year before I moved to WSU. I remember a conversation I had with one very nice, and competent young man. I asked him what he was going to do after finishing school, and if he was worried about finding a job. “My father is on the board of a Fortune 100 company,” he replied. Even though this was 37 or so years ago, it simply wasn’t on the top of his mind. Woke had not yet been borne into existence, but the one thing I did notice with all my rich students (at the time, Enzo Ferrari’s granddaughter went to school there, and you can guess what she drove — it wasn’t a Volkswagen) was they were intellectually curious and most were also hardworking. They did not take well to drill — they were truly better than the average bear — and greatly appreciated creative educational planning and exercises. Telling them they were not going to get a job if they didn’t listen to me was obviously going to fall on deaf ears.

This is not true at all with my current crop of land grant students. In part because of the diligence of myself and the faculty in my college, our numbers of First Generation students + Underrepresented Minorities (some confounded benchmark) now is 34% of our engineering class. I’m proud of this number — it took some serious perseverance, and largely happened before Woke, or the current fascination with DEI even became a thing.

Yet they are being bombarded, through the copying and mimesis process that our larger institution follows with regards to beliefs in elite schools, with the same luxury beliefs that the virtue-signaling elite schools ostensibly embody. There are many examples of this — I can recall a recent trip to our student rec center where all the signal boards were largely dominated by announcements for the LBGTQIA+ community, including reading sessions for “queering the literature” (whatever that means.) Kids come to land grant institutions to learn stuff to get a leg up in the job market. It’s our professed purpose. Those other elite schools can do what they want — but the anchor departments of land grant institutions are Mechanical Arts and the Ag College. It’s not a value judgement against the other stuff. It’s just our fundamental charter. How is “queering the literature” going to help them make a buck? Or even provide any social meaning that isn’t inherently relationally disruptive that might give employers pause?

One of the most destructive parts I’ve seen transmitted to our land grant institutions, that we can ill afford, is the corrosive belief that hierarchy doesn’t matter. Elites, and children of elites, are smart enough to dodge this nonsense, while giving lip service to it. But poor students simply have no reference for it. And we, as faculty, at some level are supposed to cater to it. It all looks warm and fuzzy on the surface — shouldn’t we treat students fairly and equitably? But as I tell my students — once you get past basic human rights, you are not my equal. It’s a toxic message that you’re getting, that you’d best ignore. Any professor that tells students “I’ll learn more from you than you’ll learn from me,” is one best ignored, or better, transferred out of their class. Students are literally PAYING me money because I’m supposed to know more, and I’m supposed to teach them.

What these beliefs really do is set up the university as a low responsibility environment, and not very different from a dysfunctional family where narcissistic inversion — the children taking care of the parents — is never far from the surface. And worse, when the student hits the job market — especially the ones from dysfunctional families — they have no functional codes for finding a mentor that can actually help them learn. No one learns everything they need to know in college. Especially in engineering, you learn how to be an engineer the first three years on the job. But one can also see that elites, through luxury beliefs, are sabotaging the non-elites, who might actually believe that garbage. Already behind because of family dynamics, they fall further behind in identifying functional adults to help them, as well as the protocols for interaction.

I recently had a situation where I had two former students who came to me because they were underemployed. Both these students would be in a DEI-protected status group. Both would NEVER be considered a DEI hire – they were in the top quartile of students I’ve taught, or better. They were a male and female, and both, I thought, would have been placed in a prestigious company after graduation. Yet both had ended up getting scooped up by our employment vacuum scourge in mechanical engineering — mechanical contractors associated with the building trades, looking for hires to train as air conditioning inspectors — instead of getting hired by Meta, Blue Origin, or one of the myriad high profile and high prestige companies that support my clinic program.

My analysis will not be popular, but I think two things were likely in play. These students’ records supported getting an initial interview — they very likely got by the AI screening. But they were not armed with the right behavioral codes to “close the deal.” My personal intervention and recommendation would likely help, of course, in the future. But a lot of my students get jobs, often at these prestige companies, with no help from me at all. At some level, in the abbreviated interview process that hiring occurs (especially for new hires) they committed some sin of omission — no moment where the hiring manager sitting across from them profoundly thought “I want this person on my team!” And so they were edged out of another opportunity.

And the whole DEI enterprise is also profoundly harmful for their prospects. Even though there are incentive systems in place to hire underrepresented minorities, the reality many managers face is that if they do hire someone, and that person doesn’t work out, it will be almost impossible to fire them without some level of social stigmatization. What that translates into is that lowering the bar through DEI actually RAISES the bar both racially and in a class sense. Elites from underrepresented minorities, who already can deliver messages in the social codes of the day, can indeed quickly get hired. But those without that same coding — which is primarily a class consideration — are inherently sidelined, and underemployed.

Are these simply the times we live in? I actually think Peter Turchin, in his book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, is spot on with his analysis that societal tumult dramatically increases when elites overproduce themselves. He notes in the book that polygamous societies undergo these changes at about twice the rate of monogamous societies (I can’t remember the interval, and just listened to the book) and it seems to jibe. Further, because there are not enough interstices for elites to plug into, as well as enough material wealth to distinguish themselves with, they start producing software instead of hardware. These beliefs, dependent on the competitive pressure, become more and more fractal, situational, and imposed from the outside as time goes on — a perfect explanation of wokism.

One of the unanswered questions I had when listening to Turchin’s book was how elites “cull the herd,” so there are not so many elites around. Elite overproduction has to end with some level of competitive elimination. Absent war and direct human extermination, what we’re witnessing with elite/land grant competition instead is high level memetic psychopathic gaslighting, with the emergent goal being that same process of elimination. Henderson writes in his book, Troubled, about how students at Yale would protest investment banking one day, while the next lining up to interview for the elite, high paying jobs at institutions like Goldman Sachs the next. Classic “stated vs. elected preference” bullshit. And since institutions can assume the same memetic character, they function in the same role of mimesis/mirroring of these institutions that profoundly handicap them from moving up precisely when the elite institutions are weakest. Instead of recognizing the lack of grounding and overt falsehoods regarding success the elites are propagating, and overt gaslighting happening on an institutional level, they end up as Tail End Charlies, taking the flak, and getting picked off as the formation passes overhead.

Henderson brings this up as well — the professed elite belief in “luck” as a driver in success. I myself have a very financially successful son, who is one of the blockchain pioneers. As one of the youngest founders of a Unicorn — a start-up hitting a $1B valuation, even I will tell people that luck was involved.

And it was. But my son also had the extreme advantage of me as his father, who drove constant problem-solving throughout his life. And he was exposed to the latest trends in tech through me. He learned self-education early on in his career, and basically taught himself the entire field of cryptography (which he has lectured at Stanford on in a graduate class.) And he worked hard as well. Luck indeed.

There is more to all of this, of course. But I’m going to ask readers to comment on this piece along the lines of “what statement do you hear from a given young person that immediately seals the deal for hiring them?” What is being omitted that you DON’T hear, that then causes you to down-sort a given individual?

Brothers (and a cute dog)– in the Valley

I’ve recently completed a book that I think should be on the reading list of basically everyone in the United States, who is involved in understanding and wanting to change the current milieu. The title is Troubled, by Rob K. Henderson, and it’s the life story/memoir of a young man raised largely as poor in the foster care system, who at the current point of his life is finishing (or has recently finished) his Ph.D. in psychology at Cambridge in the U.K.

The book is a first person memoir that covers the time period from his birth to the present. Born to a drug addicted mother, whom he spent the first three years of his life with, he traverse the foster/adopted parent landscape, with his eventual enlistment in the US Air Force, followed by a degree at Yale, and then his current Ph.D. posting. What is amazing about this book is that it is largely representative of those of us coming from profoundly dysfunctional families, with the family structure shifting and dissolving almost on a regular 9 month interval. Rob bounced through some nine different foster placements, IIRC, after being taken from his mother at the age of 3, for being tied up by his mother and screaming while she entertained various men in their apartment.

The beauty of the book is its low level dysthymic tone and structure. Not everything is bad all the time, and that gives a far more accurate view of poverty in the United States than others. I recently attempted to get through, for example, Barbara Kingsolver’s recent novel, Demon Copperhead, but could not, because it turned into a classic Misery Olympics tome. For the record, I’m a pretty big Kingsolver fan — she grew up across the Ohio River from my own hometown of Portsmouth, OH, and I’ve always appreciated her descriptions of my own childhood environs. But Henderson does a much better job of capturing the grinding sadness of loss of faith in stability of adults in kids’ lives, as well as the actual violence that people in poorer communities across the US experience. The short version is simple — it may be more stimulating, and glamorous if the violence is upped a couple of clicks. But then you usually don’t survive it. You get killed, or you kill someone and end up in jail. Henderson’s journey is one of the actual lower classes, and not nearly so dramatic. And that is the reason to read it.

Though I never experienced the chronic extent of what Henderson endured, I’m fond of joking that on the ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) scale of “bad things happening to you in the course of your life”, I’m a heptathlete on the scale of 1-10. I experienced the fighting, the dealing with chronic adult problems and the like. But like Henderson, I never had to deal with sexual abuse, which in my opinion is likely statistically the thing that really makes young people go off the rails. Though it’s no way to raise a child, there’s also no question that chronic abuse lends to those lucky enough to inherit a robust neural system the ability to discern insights into the human condition that you simply can’t get from a happy, two-parent home.

And that’s what makes this book so important. It’s an actual window into that world, with the author stating right up front (I think in the preface) that the usual nostrums of education as a ladder out of dysfunction are vastly overrated. Stable attachment is actually key, and as someone that shares his own diagnosis of chronic dysthymia (low level depression and cynicism) I can attest that this is correct. You end up outside the stable family ice cream shop, perpetually looking in while you spend a lifetime processing your wounds, often incorrectly, while others are enjoying their lives.

I also deeply share Rob’s view that he also states in the book when people tell him “well, you turned out alright.” Either the implication is “it couldn’t have been that bad” or “this must be an OK way to raise kids.” Lordy. I’ve found from my own experience the only people holding that opinion are either the divinely clueless, or pathological narcissists.

There are a couple of points which I conjecture likely saved Rob from utter destruction. I think he does a great job in the book of explaining how life in the military helped him navigate his early adulthood while not going to jail. He also seemed to avoid lots of hard drugs, and that had to help. But oddly enough, One of the factors I conjecture that he likely survived because he did get to spend the first three years of his life with his drug-addicted mother. I’m not attempting to minimize the trauma associated with being an infant and having some level of abuse directed at him. But while it likely has given him unstable attachment patterns, he likely at least has some. Kids mostly form up their young brains in the first two years, and having a constant caregiver, no matter how poor, is key. Rob’s own story shows that it’s far more likely to get passed through a series of foster placements than to end up adopted. That’s what happened to him.

And early attachment matters. I’ve fought for this at the university for years — providing day care for children and mothers so that young infants don’t experience a revolving door of violation from caregivers leaving every couple of months. If we really wanted to prioritize something that might make a difference in the next generation, it would be this.

Itinerant father figures do pop into Rob’s life on a more unscheduled basis, and Rob’s writing once again supports my thesis that common wisdom delivered from elders is important, and relatively uncommon. One thing Rob does a great job of describing is how many successful life habits, mostly involved with longer-term consequential thinking, simply did not occur to him at various points in his life. They seem obvious (and are likely mimetic, not memetic) but they absolutely are not to an increasing number of young people. I find in my classroom (I’m teaching senior undergraduate engineers here — people who by any measure of success have almost made it) that the notion of holding yourself accountable to excellent work is a foreign concept. I beat into their heads that they are the best, and that is not a snowflake brag — it is a brand promise to pay attention to the world around them to excel. These are the folks that are designing the next generation of planes, rockets and trucks. You better hope they’re the best.

Rob also singlehandedly demolishes the current ‘Woke’ movement in one of his final chapters with what I believe a term he’s coined — “Luxury beliefs.” He does a great job of explaining elite coding at a more accessible level than I do. Elites often subscribe to beliefs to prove their virtue to each other that they themselves never follow. This is a classic “stated preference/elected preference” gaslighting technique that manipulators use. One of the examples he gives is “Defund the police.” He correctly notes that this affects poor communities far more than rich communities, but if you want to move up in current elite liberal circles, you have to rep it. These destructive beliefs virally propagate because they are fundamentally ungrounded, and sound nice on the surface, but are deeply problematic.

And as Rob also notes in a measured tone, with each of his examples, there may be opportunities for continued progress in better and more humane solutions. But the impacts of any policy will be felt more harshly on the poor than the rich, who often end up with disastrous, collapsing cascades of personal crisis. One of the statistics I cite a lot in arguments is the fact that 25% of African-American kids are likely to experience an eviction before reaching the age of majority. And then that leads to other disasters. Not everyone survives these disasters, especially if they have a fractured family, full of immature actors. And they either melt into the justice system, or they die.

So read this book. It’s the best text I’ve listened to in a while, and Rob himself narrates it. The one thing that I did find memetically interesting is that Rob ended up in elite circles himself — he is at Cambridge, after all. I’d encourage him to dig outside the thinking that dominates in those circles, and use his experience well, with a critical eye. If you read this, Rob, do know that those people’s thought patterns are largely broken. They really don’t understand psychopathy/Cluster B well, and many of them are afflicted, as well as being afflicters. Check out my work, of course, but also dig into my metamodern pals, like Hanzi Freinacht (Daniel Goetz and Emil Ejner Friis.) They also tend not to like Bowlby and other family systems therapists either. They’re just not systems thinkers, and the problem is, of course, that people are trapped in systems that are poorly understood, but deliver execrable outcomes for the lives of far too many.

And Rob – thank you for your heroism. One of the chief problems with even getting people like Rob to write down their narrative in a meaningful fashion is that many of the people who are the perpetrators are still alive. And needless to say, they don’t like being written about. Curiously enough, since Rob’s tale is one of chronic abandonment, it’s likely that he’s relatively safe from the legal hassles normally engendered when writing about one’s dysfunctional past openly and honestly. And while I absolutely do not condone child abuse, nor adult abuse for that matter, the ancient Greeks knew that this was the path where heroes were born. Hercules didn’t have twelve labors for nothing.

For those interested in a somewhat sanitized and incomplete version of my own story, here you go.

You know that the world is in the need of understanding the power of psychopathy when one of the singular events, specifically hosted to bring the nations of the world together, instead is hijacked for relational disruption. The 2024 Summer Olympics seem destined to fill the bill for this.

I’m sure there are lots of those classic Olympic moments that show the value of competition, and good sportsmanship. The problem is that the Olympics is an event that necessarily must be seen through the lens of the mass media. We can’t expect coverage of the myriad venues solely by independent observers on social media. So in a sense, we actually get to see the perspective of the media as well as what they attempt to show us. It’s left up to social media to then interpret what’s happening. It reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s analogy in his seminal work, Slaughterhouse V, where our own perspective is described by the space aliens in the book, the Tralfamadorians, as being strapped to a rail car, with long pipes tied to our eyes, on a track turning and twisting.

And even as Simone Biles twists and turns through the various events (she is indeed the GOAT), two warping events have at least dominated my media cultural view. The first was the opening ceremony, and the second involved a gender-misrepresented boxer from Algeria, competing in the women’s division, who is quite obviously a male, and was declared a male by other boxing authorities outside the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

The opening ceremony was a pretty blasphemous representation of the painting by Leonardo da Vinci of Jesus’ Last Supper. Instead of having apostles, we had drag queens with a fatty, haloed princess occupying the role of Jesus. The thing that was fascinating was the director, Thomas Jolly, is a declared ‘queer’ (whatever that exactly means) and of course assembled the cast for ‘representation of diverse constituencies’. It appeared to me that rather than the Last Supper, the montage was more a representation of a Feast of the Gods representation by Jan van Bijlert from 1635, which also seems to copy the Last Supper. Arguing about the factual content, though, is exactly the point of the manipulation. In order to prove one’s point, one requires esoteric knowledge (is it, or is it not the Last Supper? Or another Dutch Master? Excuse me while I clutch my pearls…) available only to a particular, cloistered class, that can then stake a claim of moral virtue for having the unwashed identify the paint as da Vinci’s. It hardly serves the role of bringing the world’s traditions together. And by doing so, it attacks the deep, tribal codes involved in the Guest/Host relationship, inviting both Host and Guest to offend the other.

And when you do that, well, the Gods are angry. And since such an affront is typically prevented by cultural codes literally around the world, what you end up with is transcultural rage.

The second primary affront occurred in the boxing ring. Imane Khelif, ostensibly a female from Algeria on her birth certificate, but quite obviously a male, who tested with XY chromosomes, got into subsequent rings and beat the hell out of a number of women boxers. Along his/her way to their medal (I think I’ve covered all the pronouns) he broke Angela Carini’s nose, an Italian boxer who stopped the fight, but later apologized to Khelif for casting any aspersion in his/her direction.

Imane Khelif – if that ain’t a dude, I don’t know what a dude is

By not drawing any kind of a clear line on sex, the IOC showed that they were more tools of the elites than anything else. Various other boxing organizations had disqualified Khelif as being a male before the Olympics, which immediately draws into question what the hell is really going on in The Matrix. The end strategy, and result, however, were clear. Only experts can decide what is plainly obvious to the rest of us — without having to look down his pants. And if we can get ordinary people to fight, well, that’s the point. While the lumpenproletariat is busy brawling, at a minimum, the elites establish their advanced coding and, well elitism. They really are better than the rest of us.

And what better venue than boxing? All of this is so misogynistic it makes my head spin — and I’ve got a pretty stiff neck. It’s code switching for women to box in the first place. Call my parents old fashioned, but the taboo violation of men hitting women was deeply ingrained in my upbringing.

Now you bring women on the international stage, and you have a man kick the living shit out of a woman, all the while lying about whether one of the women is a dude — psychopathic backlash is what you are going to get. Whether you planned for it or not. Having a backlog of bullshit to justify this (lots of pictures of Imane as a child being raised as a girl) might get you some advocates from the ranks of the elites. But it is in direct violation of the whole point of the Olympics. Which I thought is for folks to find common ground, across countries and cultures. Not to demonstrate the latest fashion in virtue signaling among the privileged.

The other male/female boxer, Lin Yu-ting, from Taiwan, also proceeded to getting a gold medal in their weight class. The thing that was most fascinating for me is that both the Algerian contingent, AND the Taiwanese contingent, were speaking vociferously in favor of the deception on X. If there’s a meta-hierarchy of tribalism in groups visible in the Olympics, it is really in identification with the largest, low v-meme coded group you can find. Even my wife, who is Taiwanese, was willing to roll on the Algerian boxer. But though apparently the physical evidence is roughly the same, as well as the circumstance (both were declared males by the other various boxing organizations) she wouldn’t give in when it came to the Taiwanese Dudette. “I have lots of friends that look like boys” she said. DeepOS will out.

And then there’s the general hopelessness of other countries, outside those that can support megalithic athletic programs that can consistently produce Olympic champions. Maybe the real lesson here is that a competition based on gaslighting us into believing in equality of competition between nation-states is really a waste of time. And both these controversies are emblematic of emergent behavior that would come out of the deep code of the event. In the United States, we recognize this intrinsically in all our high school sports competitions. No “Single A” high school football team expects to prevail over a “Triple A” school with a much larger population base. Maybe it’s time to recognize this and create a better system.

Whatever. I honestly hardly can bring myself to care. It’s just a broken opportunity, and part of the inherent forces of decentralization that are at play in the world.

And outside watching the larger memetic experiment on display, I won’t be watching in detail. Especially boxing. I really don’t need to see men beating women up, and then being told that’s not what I was watching. Those with real experience of violence know what they’re looking at. What’s really going on here is using a deliberate blurring of hardware and software in order to get people to fight. And I’ll have no part in it.

This piece on Woke Dynamics is a good intro on how all this works.

One of the hardest things I’ve seen people struggle with is their cognitive incapacity to realize someone else they’re talking to is NOT understanding what they’re saying, and that the target of the communication likely cannot understand. People, of course, want to map this kind of miscommunication to subject matter. I have a Ph.D., I did my research in chaos theory, so therefore if I talk to someone about chaos theory, they won’t be able to understand what I’m talking about because THEY don’t have a degree in engineering. 

Of course, this does indeed happen. If you write a thesis on chaos theory, you’ve hopefully gotten a reasonably sophisticated understanding of the ins and outs of said theory. Unfamiliar words, like bifurcation, limit cycle, attractor and so on will likely cause confusion for a lay person, not grounded in advanced mathematics. 

But I also ascribe to the viewpoint “if you can’t explain your research to your grandma, you likely don’t understand it very well yourself.” What that really means is very different. It means you ought to be able to take what you’ve done and analogize it so that a non-specialist can generally get the gist of what you’ve spent 3 years sitting in front of a computer doing. 

Sometimes, topics are so convoluted, that’s not even possible. But I’ve found that most subjects are not so weird that if you practice analogizing, you can spin a narrative that grandma can grok. 

All that’s well and good. You SHOULD be able to take whatever it is you do and at least have as a goal that people can modestly understand some complicated, multivariate process that you need to explain. At least with you in the room, and connecting to the people you’re explaining it to. We do this all the time in engineering education. Young people aren’t raised on concepts like entropy and enthalpy, of course (and probably not most readers of this blog!) But when you’re navigating complex issues (like whether COVID was invented in a lab) with multiple twists and turns, that contradict the mental models that people have on how the world is supposed to work, things get more challenging. 

An example is in order. Let’s talk about my job as a professor. One of my favorite multi-panel pastiches is below. It’s wildly accurate on how people perceive my position.

There are multiple versions of this meme. Here’s another one. 

Or this one… (you have to have some deep memory to get all the frames on this meme…)

It IS true that (at least before the Age of Laptops) that most of what I did was pushing some version of paper around. Now, of course, I push the electronic version. Last week, for example, I had to confirm for one of my grants that I had not stored nor kept any equipment from a given project (the sponsors take my word for it!) that should have been returned THREE YEARS AGO. I’m lucky if I can remember what I had for breakfast — not the equipment requirements for one of about 80 projects I’ve had in the meantime. 

But even that doesn’t convey the actual complexity of my job. Let’s say I write a grant to the National Science Foundation (NSF), the branch of the federal government that hands out money to people like me to do research on things various people might, temporarily, consider to be VERY IMPORTANT as an up and coming area of national interest. I, as an expert in something, am supposed to be paying attention to announcements from the NSF, where Very Smart People have figured out what we’ll need to know in the future. And then pay people like me, or rather have people like me pay graduate students to actually figure out that knowledge so the national interest is served. 

On the surface, this seems reasonable. 

1. VSPs figure out where our knowledge deficit is.
2. They publish a Request for Proposals (RFP) .
3. I read the RFP, and think I have some ideas that might help.
4. I write a proposal to NSF.
5. NSF reviews my proposal, along with others, and then gives me (hopefully) the money.
6. I supervise the graduate students who then generate the knowledge.
7. We publish the knowledge in journals, where other scientists have reviewed our work to make sure it’s right.
8. Science, my career, and life march on!

All this maps to what I would call a meta-linear progression that would make sense to most people. Except, of course, it’s not how it works at all. 

It’s not impossible to draw a block diagram of how this ACTUALLY works. But it would be complicated. And what are the complicating factors?

1. In order to have any hope in hell of getting the money for a given RFP, I likely have to have something like 50% of the work already done that I might propose.
2. I might have participated, if I have a close relationship with NSF and the program manager, in constructing the RFP, so there are potential (but never acknowledged) conflicts of interest in getting the money.
3. If I’m reading the RFP for the first time, the odds are I could never write a competitive proposal, because NSF really only funds mostly incremental research that will only stretch out about 1-2 years in the metacognitive space.

I could go on. There are also memetic forces inside the agency I’ve written about here that make the agency resistant to funding any truly innovative work at all. All this is counterintuitive, and in a complicated and complex fashion, have most people either a.) rubbing their heads in disbelief, or b.) assuming there’s a conspiracy afoot to make us all stupid. 

In order to actually believe what I’ve written, you’ll either need some grounding validity experience yourself in the process, meaning you’ve written proposals to NSF that alternately were or were not funded, you think I’m a sour grapes kook that hasn’t had much luck with NSF funding (kinda true) or you’ve lost the plot and thrown all this into the ‘government is a fucked up conspiracy anyway’ bin.

Here’s the point. Somewhere along the plot line, unless you’ve had a lot of experience with NSF (as I have) you hit your complexity limit. You had likely a straightforward interpretation of how things work in getting a government grant, and when I started loading all the other stuff in the hopper, you got lost (or you didn’t care.) In short, I lost you. Either the story itself wasn’t so great (very possible) or my authority on the issue, in your mind, was weak, and so you just flushed the whole thing down the garbage chute. 

The knowledge structure work that I’ve done can help you understand this — here’s a recycled picture.

Short answer — once we get off that relatively straight line progression, most humans hit complexity limits relatively quickly. 

What’s the takeaway? All we have, especially when communicating with the public, is to remember the straight line principle. Make sure to use models that people understand when making analogies, especially when blended into narratives. 

Or you’ll lose virtually everyone.