Wind of Change
I typed the title of this post, and nothing more, on 11/23/22 at 11:45 am. I did not even look at it until yesterday. Thirteen days ago I had an epiphany. And then it died. Probably not from natural causes. I think I killed it actually. Not intentionally, but you know how it goes when things get killed. Ideas, not people.
Thank God for satisfaction, it does so much more besides bringing back to life cats dead from curiosity. It brought me to write this post, and now, it has brought you the joy of reading it. There is a God, and He smiles down on me quite a bit. One could say He is smiling on you now. One could say.
I read the Substack above on a regular basis, it is written by a musician after all. I absolutely disagree with many of his points of view, but he argues them with a deadly combination of passion and purpose that I’m left with an unsettling ponderance in my mind.
Did I just learn more about that subject? Or just more about me?
The beauty of disagreement is that it so stirs the passions as to compel one to compose a more thoughtful argument against it. If one cannot do that, one must move to the next step: Change the thought. If one doesn’t, one’s argument is indefensible with logic. You’ve just lost the argument. Now, you’re merely defending your pride, not your point.
I love Argument and I love to write about it. Some people don’t like argument. I can think of a few in my life. Argument as Art instructs. As Rhetoric, it constructs. As Weapon, it destructs. I’m an expert in the latter application, much more to my detriment than benefit, sadly.
The author starts with this
and provides a definition of the difference between signal and noise that is the most elegant I’ve ever read.
“Noise, to an electrical engineer, is whatever is not regarded as signal. Analog media always include noise, necessarily - efforts to minimize noise in analog environments adjust its ratio to signal (‘signal-to-noise ratio’), but never eliminate it. Digital media, on the other hand, are capable of separating signal from noise absolutely. Given a definition of signal, the digital environment can filter out noise completely; this is fundamental to its efficiency as a medium for communications.
“However, what I know well from working with sound and music is that noise is as communicative as signal.”
RUSH followed up their seminal album Moving Pictures with a more seminal record perhaps. Or at least it was to me. Signals tore RUSH from the analog past and uploaded it into the digital future. Between 1980 and 1984, Gen-X escaped their childhood and confronted their adulthood.
Damon Krukowski goes on to illustrate how political actors are using digital engineering to erode our discernment skills as consumers in the online news marketplace. The core of his argument is brutally and logically clear.
But as muddled as his thinking is on social and moral topics, when Musk talks signal-to-noise ratio, he is using a logic widely accepted by engineers. The more the digital platform Twitter can eliminate noise, that reasoning goes, the better it will perform as an information system compared to the messy, inefficient, analog-tinged platforms of conventional news.
Do we believe this? If you have regard for Musk as an engineer, you well might. But engineers are people too. And people are political. Musk, it is now screamingly clear, is highly politicized. His recent statements and actions are loudly motivated by political objectives. And those objectives are expressed through what he considers “signal,” and what he considers “noise.”
But to be as logically clear here, and to use talking points I’ve heard fall out of talking heads on TV, It’s a private company. He is the owner and engineer of this train. It’s his signal to send and yours to receive. Or not.
We control the input. Analog taught us that. We know how to filter the noise from the signal. I am not arguing the specifics of your signal compared to mine. Or canceling your noise. The point of this argument is Art. I seek to illustrate.
Hell, after two years and nine months after being sent home for 15 days I have no idea right now of what is noise and what is signal. That is the core reason that I continue to write this dispatch.
December 30, 2020 is a digital crossing for me. It is the start of MY Substack. Without understanding the full complexity of my actions, (nothing new for me) I embarked on this mission without a goal. Again, I have a knack for tumbling up in the dark.
Up until about a month or so ago, I wrote about 2000 words two times per week. Then my signal changed. The noise increased and my filters went on overdrive. The culmination was less than 6 hours of sleep in a 40 hour span last weekend.
Physical limits constrain mental ambitions. Relaxation and sleep are rejected as weakness. Going through motions to produce results becomes easier than thinking and reacting. Automation of automotion becomes life. Upload me.
deficit of experience
What is noise? What is signal? My last post discussed the differences between Utilitarianism and Consequentialism, and how SBF/FTX spawned a bastard they called “Effective Altruism”, and how that digital Frankenstein devoured billions in the Ponzi scheme of this century. SBF was never analog. Crypto makes no noise. Just signal.
As the piece from Mr. Krukowski discusses, that may be the goal. Damon points out that the noise itself contains information, and when left out, that very act creates a deficit of experience. And a direction and tone of signal.
Why does the dealer in Blackjack keep one card down? The players cards are all face-up, signal and noise exposed. Dealer is hiding one of those from the rest, and he bets on his inside knowledge. The full experience is eliminated in a trade off of risk and reward.
This is a good place for a soundtrack. I composed this on the fly and listened to it several times now. Driving. Writing. Upside in bed with headphones on. It’s painful at times. It’s freaking long. Like 20 song-long. So, break it apart and enjoy it in byte-size pieces., like a slice of π.
Tons of noise and signal. Some you’ve heard and some not. All connected to this idea of personal growth and change, and the positive and negative experiences we must embrace to accomplish that growth.
The Scorpions’ Wind of Change was written to celebrate the first Western bands to play a Heavy Metal Festival in Russia for the first time in forever. Less than a year later, the song become the soundtrack when the Berlin Wall fell.
Most recently, the lyrics were changed to reflect the War in Ukraine, and the reversal of freedoms in Russia. The rest of the songs play to the changes in life, from analog to digital, that has affected others so much so that they wrote songs to sing about it.
Driving down the street the other day, the Gray Lady played peek-a-boo with buildings, hide and seek in the hills, and beckoned from beyond the horizon. I talk to her on a daily basis. I am in DTLA everyday. I drive her streets alone and with millions of others. Sometimes, it feels like prison. Other times, it feels like I was just released.
All alone, but in the midst of others. Lots of others. We see the same things together, from the same point of view, at the same time. Shouldn’t our understanding of what we are seeing be the same? No? What accounts for that?
NOISE & SIGNAL
Sitting at a red light, I saw a hand written cardboard sign haphazardly displayed in an apartment 2nd-floor window, right next to a Jesus and Mary Christmas decoration.
The sign simply said “ABORTIONS SAVES LIVES”. My first thought was what an odd juxtaposition of concepts. The second thought was to agree with the sign-writer. I think it fair to state that most sane people agree that abortion is a valid consideration in cases where the mother’s life is in peril, incest, or rape.
I’m not here to argue abortion, that is not a hill I choose to die on at this point. That sign is an example of my last post. It is without debate that an abortion extinguishes the life of the fetus. Hypotheticals are pointless, other than for mental masturbation, but let’s stroke this one together.
Kill one person to save 20 can be argued as a noble act. Kill one person to save the entire human race is the definition a noble act. Abort one baby to save the life of a mother in danger. Absolutely. The worth of a life underway is measured against a life yet started. A value equation is made and the results are tabulated and accepted. And life goes on. Except for one.
But that’s the bargain we make, and we are always making bargains. See Blackjack above. So, in this abortion debate, what’s the noise and what’s the signal? Pro-lifers have one signal and consider everything else to be noise. Vice-versa on the pro-abortion side.
Take every major issue today and apply the signal to noise ratio to it. We keep subscribing to the same frequency and we keep getting the same program. The border. Big Tech. Jan 6. Covid/masks. Education and parental rights. Trans and gender issues.
Where do you draw your perspective from? What informs your knowledge base? What point are you arguing? Can your argument withstand a blistering cross-examination? Who is supportive of your argument?
Are you eliminating half of your potential experience and knowledge base by refusing to listen to ideas and opinions you disagree with? More than that, do you approach disagreement and conflict as growth opportunities? Or do you shrink from them, because they make you feel uncomfortable?
Take for instance the Twitter debate. Since it’s inception, it had one signal-to-noise ratio. Now it has another, different one. If you are ok with the former but not the latter, why?
My overall point in writing, indeed, in my life it seems, is to spread the message that you don’t have to like everything you experience. Whether it be Food or Music or Art or Craft or History (read more about those elements here). The personal freedom and individual liberty that God and America granted you as your birthright permits those choices to be yours and yours alone.
It’s not mandatory that you enjoy everything you read, hear, or see. But it is necessary for you, as a member of the human race, to engage with those thoughts, ideas, and concepts that you don’t like. When you choose, out of hand, to discredit, deplatform, or demonize the distasteful, loathsome, and ugly, you’ve eliminated half of the variables needed for an equation. Good luck solving for X.
When you do so without even exploring their validity, you’ve taken it upon yourself the mantle of God.
You’ve chosen your signal, now deal with the noise,
Ric
