Invisible face of prejudice

Lately I've been having a recurrent thought about the problems of the world. I feel they are usually about statistics related ignorance. Prejudice is intimately connected to that perception, but not in the way most of its critics usually describe. In fact, the opposite case is the true one. The reason why that happens is that those who openly defend prejudiced views are usually quite stupid and irrational.

Thus, it seems to make sense to attribute these very characteristics to prejudice itself. But while the moral condemnation of prejudice generally has solid base, the statistical one has not. This knowledge is key, not for prejudice to be spread out, but for it to be contained. Prejudice is hard wired in humans. It's intrinsic to our cognitive process. We learn quite early in life that our species is unique because of our rationality. That's not even a half truth. We are indeed capable of rational train of thought (in highly variable degrees). However, this rationality is always mixed with plain instinct, but also, and in a very unconscious manner, several layers of prejudice.

This makes it much less of a moral flaw than a cognitive limitation. Every second, we're exposed to tons of raw data. Our current neurological hardware wouldn't possibly be able to process that rationally or even consciously. So while we are able to place our focus on a specific issue and voluntarily make effort to solve it, this is applied to a tiny part of the problems we face everyday. The vast majority is tackled in a semiconscious and automatic fashion. For these, there's no voluntary action. That doesn't mean solution is random or magic. We possess several structures in our brains that are capable of super fast and accurate action. So do many of the so called inferior creatures. We share this mechanism for movement coordination for example.

It would be quite overwhelming, if possible at all, if we had to rationally deal with all relevant physical variables that allow us to drive a car. But obviously this is done unconsciously, and quite precisely so. Driving is such a great example because it's absolutely unnatural. There's no possibility of drawing from instinct when dealing with a 20th century man made machine, which proves there's something else at play.

This doesn't apply only to movement related tasks. The same also happens with a wide array of interactions we have with others and the environment. That's when prejudice comes in. It is mostly a mental shortcut, allowing complex scenarios to be evaluated and acted upon with a great deal of precision and speed. For these mechanisms to be selected by evolution, they don't need to be flawless. The trick is to save time and energy while providing descent enough results. This extra time and energy can be far more useful than, let's say, a 10% improvement in situation diagnostic precision. 

To sum everything up, my point here is to show two things: first of all, we're not as rational as we think we are. And second, prejudice is, together with other automatic mechanisms to process data, the reason why we can afford doing this quickly enough, without getting hurt or killed. 

That said, I feel the only way we can fight prejudice is to understand its purpose and utility. Purely saying it's bad is too simplistic and hardly adds any meaningful value to combating its harmful effects. The way out of this imbroglio is not only prejudice related knowledge, but its meta-knowledge. Bringing social justice to the world must indeed be in mankind agenda. But advocating for mere prejudice elimination is almost as innocuous and stupid as prejudice itself may appear to the more spirited minds. 

Pseudo scientific essay on Tindering

Tinder is getting increasingly popular. It's a great way to conciliate digital era autism with the wish and need to meet people, for friendship or something else. It has a greatly simple user interface in which you are presented with pictures of girls or boys or both. All you have to do is swipe to the right if you like what you see, or to the left if you don't. If the main pic is not enough to convince you, it's possible to tap it and check further pics and a self description the person might have entered. Filters are also simple: age, and how far people are from your GPS location. Fun part is that other people are doing exactly the same on their phones. If you both like each other, the app notifies the two of you, and then you can chat in the app or exchange contact info to meet in real life.

Everything is very simple, and because of that it's also very easy to spend a lot of time doing that process. Rejection always occur below the line, so no body feels bad. And even if you're a shy person, you can interact with hundreds of people (potentially thousands if you're really fast), because you can reduce your judgement time to a matter of seconds.

Can we learn something about human romantic relationship with this experience? I think so. Otherwise, at least it will be fun. Let me give it a try by making some basic assumptions and proposing some hypotheses.

This way of selecting people you feel attracted too is very natural and very artificial at the same time. As with normal real life interaction, the first thing you evaluate is appearance. But in the case of Tinder, you're summarized by a single picture. Upside for your rate by others is that you can be very editorial about it (people usually are in very peculiar ways). It means you can pick your best picture ever, the best angle, clothes, light and this will be you in the platform. Downside is that everybody does it, so the photos of others you're evaluating are also potentially very much edited. While it's great to look your best when putting yourself on display for others to say whether they find you attractive, this highly edited character can generate cognitive dissonance when the real date happens. People can feel mislead, as it's usually the case with food advertising.

Let's now suppose you're a guy, and you start playing around with the app. These are all the possible scenarios you can come across:

1- Person is actually attractive to you
2- Person is not actually attractive to you

Within both cases, you'll find the following situations that regard perceptions:

a. The photo takes you to the same conclusion as real life meeting.
b. The photo makes you reach the opposite conclusion.

Not having met that many Tinder people live, I don't have enough data about the distribution of 1a, 1b, 2a and 2b. In my really limited sample of 3 people, I've met one 1a and 2 2bs.

Since sample is too small, let's keep within the app. In a short period, you'll start identifying some interesting patterns in the photos:

1- Contrary to the old apps that theoretically did the same thing as Badoo, Tinder has a much higher percentage of users you actually find attractive (in the app). This is basically due to the fact it has become fashionable among those people you feel you would like to meet.

2- You can just make two choices, either rejecting the person or liking her/him. However, as one might logically expect, your call is not that easy to do. Because a low percentage of the users' pictures show either very good looking or really ugly (these are perhaps 25% of total users you are exposed to, very attractive folks corresponding to 5% and very ugly ones to 20%). Probably this split varies according to the country. I've actually checked it in several locales, and in fact this is not really equal across geographic regions (reason to be explored later on).

3- Then while these roughly 25% of the pictures are very easy to evaluate, most of them are not. There are many reasons for that, such as how photogenic a person is (which is related to attractiveness but not necessarily). Technical quality of the photos can also influence very much this judgement. Low quality, distorted and inadequately sized photos will be usually perceived as less attractive, even being totally unrelated to a person's actual look.

But apart from that, photos are a very narrow example of one's look. Exactly because all these factors can influence perception, reality of your evaluation from a photo can be very different from the one you'll have when meeting the person face to face. Thinking about this distribution, Tinder user interface is quite helpful. In the evaluation flow, besides like and reject, you can also get more info, as I've mentioned above. When you click on this option, you'll get access to a bunch of other photos from the person, as well as his/her auto-description.

This extra context can be really helpful in making a more accurate evaluation of how much that particular person seems attractive to you. But there's still the editorial aspect of them. Anyhow, if a person appears attractive in several different contexts and angles, chances are her appearance is not that influenced by these factors.

4- Photos have themes that can be observed very often. In the case of girls, maybe the most common pic is a kissing pose. You can see that so often that it seems they've arranged some sort of coordination scheme. Pictures with wild animals like lions and tigers are super common as well. But you can equally find travel pics, skydiving, cars and motorcycles. It's interesting that in San Francisco Bay Area, women use to pose with friends. So quite often, you don't know who you are judging. After thinking the matter through, I didn't reach any conclusion about why someone would do that.

While themes can be curious, in my opinion other patterns related to the photos chosen for one's profile are much more intriguing. The level of sexual insinuation on them changes a lot. My hypothesis is that it relates to ones intention when joining the platform. But these are not as straight forward as they may seem.

This is only one aspect of how people pick pictures to represent them to their target audience. Because the idea is not just delivering the best possible self portrait. Photos also show one's personality, intentions, preferences and so on.

Social and economic status also play an important role in the game. In countries where the gap between the rich and the poor is not as huge as in Brazil, I'd suppose showing off status signs like cars or expensive trips is not that important. This is the case at least in California, but I'm not sure about the rest of the country, which is also highly unequal in many dimensions. But here in Brazil there's a great deal of elements in the picture that aims to place the person at a particular socioeconomic level.

An additional peculiarity is that here, people from different socioeconomic groups usually go to separate bars, restaurants, clubs, etc. Which means that by going to these specific places, you're already making sure you won't meet people from other economic background. One could argue this is not a very open minded mindset and be right about it. But this is not necessarily discriminatory. It can be just the natural desire to meet people that share a larger common ground, since this really helps further integration.

But in Tinder that doesn't happen that much. The filters for age and distance from your location can provide a bit of this selection, but still much less than the common modus operande would. So even if users demographics are distorted to a higher income due to the need to possess a smartphone, popularization of these devices guarantees you're going to come across many people that have much less money, education, and opportunities to travel than yourself. Maybe that explains why travel photos are so popular.

While all these observations are very peculiar, the fundamental question about the app popularity still remains: what are people really looking for when they use Tinder? I'd say the first reason is basically instant gratification. Each match shows you a picture of someone you've rated as attractive and that has done the same to you based on your picture. Apart for any future perspective, this is pleasant in itself and even addictive to a certain degree.

Second, it's very convenient. Real socialization takes time and effort. You need to go somewhere, spend money, put yourself on the spot if you are a guy. Tinder removes all these obstacles for you. Socialization comes at a very low cost and on a very large scale.

What's the problem them? Why people feel kind of uncomfortable by using the app? I see two main reasons for that:

first one has to do with the utter lack of social economic preselection, which can make Tinder seem like a place you wouldn't normally go. Even in the unrealistic case you'd find everybody attractive, issue is you need to have some degree of communication and depending on the differences in background, that can be virtually impossible. Second one is another speculation of mine since I don't have much data apart from what I've heard from female users: guys can be too aggressive, direct, and sexual, which might feel uncomfortable to some girls. When something like that happens, people tend to overgeneralize, creating a biased perception of the whole game.

However, there's some truth in this perception and it's rooted on the very core of the app functioning. As in real life, if you're not a particularly good looking fellow, the chance to find someone interesting is highly correlated with how many girls you approach. But the great disadvantage is there's no visible rejection. Together with the low engagement the channel provides to its users, average male behavior can end up being less polite, further reinforcing the impression of a somewhat weird and wild place.

Regardless of these down sides, I believe the main drivers for people to meet online are stronger than ever and this habit is not going away. I don't think this is particularly problematic. The invention of the phone and the fact people could call each other didn't make them stop meeting altogether (otherwise birthrates would have dropped much more dramatically than they actually did). But I feel the underlying conditions in which Tinder thrives are indeed a bit concerning. The app may not be the reason why people socialize less. However, its success is probably a consequence of that, among other things.

So while I think apart from the weirdness of it, one can find super interesting people by tindering, I think we should make sure to spend enough time with those we already love and a reasonable amount of time caressing our phones in search for someone new.

Power abuse several flavors

Brazilians, especially upper middle class, feel our country is very special in terms of the absurd stuff that happens around here. Usually I tend to disagree and attribute this perception to both the usual egocentric view of the world coupled with a limitless ignorance about it (going to Miami every now and then to waste money doesn't really count as knowing the world, sorry.)

But I do think we have peculiar features around here (tending to nag my grandfather and his book about nonexistence of such a thing as national character). Anyhow, I'm not trying to become chief of department at the University, so unlike him I can just throw ideas in the air.

I feel we're walking paradoxes. We have the smallest bikinis in the world (and also the pubic hair management system that goes with it). They are famous worldwide. Brazilian girls sexiness is like a national export product. And still we're very much used to morally judge and condemn women who have an active sex life. This leads me to think we don't really value the insinuating beauty of our girls. We treat this as a male consumption product, objectifying women. Instead of empowering them, their beauty and attractiveness become a sort of sordid prison (although possibly with a great view).

As with girls derriéres on our sunny coast, people's prejudices are also often out there in the open, despite an also very generalized self-consciousness and will to please others (yeah grandpa, talking about the cordial man here). Curious thing is that these constant contradictions create anomalies such as our extreme right politicians. These guys are a perfect condensation of the nasty side of our culture. So much so that a reelected federal congressman named Jair Bolsonaro has the balls (or not) to say at an open tribune he just wouldn't rape a fellow congresswoman because she doesn't deserve it (meaning she is not attractive enough for motivating him to do so).

Well, in this case I've got to admit this seems a little too much. Maybe people in power say that in Sudan. But it's a war zone, and killing and raping are best practices in these circumstances. My take is that power abuse happens everywhere. It just assumes different shapes and colors, but it's very much always the same. It can occur at high level companies, promoted by both men and women, at the congress, or a battle field.

Some people struggle for life to understand how the hell the holocaust has happened about 75 years ago. Others have the nerve to deny its existence, which is not only idiotic given the amount of hard evidence available, but also despicable. I'm not slightly interested in this later group. But for the struggling one, my point is that the answer is as simple as power craving. It's always around the corner, and it's highly appreciated and rewarded by our society because it retrofits its logic, creates more wealth for the already wealthy, thus maintaining the status quo. It fuels discrimination and inequality.

I'm dead sure power seekers might have been useful at some point of our evolution. Now they are probably our biggest risk of being wiped out from the face of the Earth. And unless the rest of us that hate power do something about it, they might end up getting what they want.

Meditation, Health and Happiness

People with emotional issues are often sent to psychotherapy, and not the right kind of it. Today I wanna show why this is not the right way to go.

Science
Let's start with science. There's no scientific basis for the effectiveness of these therapy types on the most common emotional disorders. The ones tested and approved are Cognitive Behavioral based. They are short. Not for life. This article on NY Times captures these differences quite well. Meditation, like CBT, has been widely studied and has proven benefits on the brain. That reflects in gains in mood, attention, creativity and happiness.

Money
Deep psychotherapy is highly expensive and because it has no proved effectiveness or expected time to last, most health insurances won't cover it. That's especially awful when you're sick and really unsure about your income. Therapists usually negotiate the price, which is also not something you'd like to do when your fragile and afraid of losing your job. Meditation is free (although you may pay once to learn a technique). You can also learn from a friend. Free of charge.

Time
DP is not convenient. You have to schedule an appointment, which can be really hard, go there regularly, and that can take time and strength you don't have, precisely because you're overwhelmed with emotional issues. Plus it can last forever. No estimate about when you'll get better. Meditation can be done at your convenience, wherever and whenever you want or need. And if you have the discipline to do it often, it will work.

Being in control
With DP there's dependence on someone else. This person, even a fantastic one, also has bad days, gets sick, goes on vacations (usually when you feel you need them). Meditation is always with you. It's up to you. It depends on you.

In conclusion, if you're sick, reach out to a psychiatrist. That may help. Pick the right kind of therapy. One that's really effective. And meditate. Always.

So this is Christmas

In Brazil, Christmas starts earlier every year. At least for our shopping malls. Inspired by them, I'm also going to consider it's already that time of the year.

Too many people get really sentimental. I think it's natural for several reasons. Main one is that everything stops, and dust settles on everyone's life, no matter how busy it has been during the year. Then it can hit you: the fact you've spent most of your time at work, solving somebody else's problems instead of being with your loved ones and helping them out. And if that was the case with you, it means you were lucky enough to have a job, to be able to sell your time and skills for money, and to buy yourself a slice of descent life.

Anyhow, feelings may emerge from that change of pace, and you may actually remember a lot of things you so successfully managed to forget during almost all the year. When that happens, some people write beautiful messages to their loved ones, full of good wishes and hope for the future. I don't have anything against this approach and I really endorse demonstrations of true feelings. I think if you're able to tell your dearest people you love them, you should really do so.

But this year I'm going to break this tradition and address people I despise first. Why? Because I believe even being just a few, these folks can make too much damage. So if my wishes to them come true, everybody else will be much better off.

I need to take a step back and briefly describe these folks. They are unfair, opportunistic, power driven, and coward. It's common for them to take credit for others' work, since they don't do much themselves. They are not really smart, in intelligence or knowledge terms. Maybe because of that, they are great at selling certainty to others. If they were smarter, they'd naturally be aware of their own ignorance, which would prevent them to impose their arrogance to others, usually taking advantage of privileged conditions and better opportunities. They are very good at defending those better results they get as a consequence of their hard work and skill. Many of these folks won't even reproduce and pass over the genes they consider so superior to everybody else's. Still they are capable of creating great negative social impact, despite being logically so insignificant.

What I wish for this people is simple: I want them to go back to where they really belong. I think this usually happens sooner or later. The problem is that when later is the case, others will suffer. More so when for some reason they don't have adequate means to defend themselves. I don't want these horrible people to necessarily die or suffer, although I have to confess sometimes these desires populate my dreams. I really want them to be disarmed, to lose the means to do harm in their own best interest. If this happens, they will also automatically stop taking ownership of resources that they haven't even helped producing. This will certainly reduce inequality, which is bad by definition, but even worse because of the way it's unfairly produced.

With that, all my beloved friends and family will have a truly Merry Christmas. Not only them, but everybody else struggling to make a living while high class parasites stand on their ways, covered in idiotic certainties. That's my dearest wish for Christmas, New Year and for everyday we all have the privilege to inhabit this blue planet.

Sincere question

This blog has been created mostly to allow me to share some answers about which I had been thinking for so long and finally got to a descent level of clarity on. Depending on how you look at it, I've got to admit it's quite naïve. But it's also so like me. To get deeply inspired by new feelings, ideas and experiences and think that it would be so wonderfully possible that other people could be part of a chain reaction, bringing about collective enlightening, so to speak. Well, today I think it's already safe to acknowledge this hasn't happened. At least yet (I can't help it!).

Anyhow, today I'm coming here to get an answer from someone, God, the Universe, you name it. Or at least a sincere attempt to get to one. The question is tough and despite practicing a technique that could lead me to skip this question, to avoid burning out, I feel I want a second opinion. Here's the deal: all my factual observations, both of myself and scientific research have pointed out to a quite uncomfortable and unfair realization. Maybe society doesn't do it on purpose (most people certainly don't), but the fact is there's a sharp asymmetry between the amount of effort and dedication required from a disabled individual to achieve material outcomes that can be considered ridiculously small if you keep all variables constant, changing only disability (I know, I've repeated that ad nauseum).

My question is, what's the correct attitude towards that? I've learned with my own experience that acceptance has a great power to reduce suffering. It's totally obvious that from a subjective perspective, that's the way to go. But then there's a small detail: when I accept something like that, automatically the level of sacrifice I'm willing to make is drastically reduced. Because I know I'm not going to make it getting remotely close to where I theoretically could. What's happening to me right now, and I think quite logically, is I've just stopped valuing all those earthly things that I've tricked myself with to prove I was a perfectly capable and normal human being. Now I know I'm a perfectly capable and normal human being, but I also know there will be cumulative barriers on my way that will make it appear otherwise to the average external observer.

Should I enjoy the fruits of my painfully acquired wisdom to limit my useless suffering? Or should I act like a hero of some sort and face the world head on, knowing I've already lost? Both answers appeal to different parts of my deepest soul. Justice is a word that albeit usually biased and distorted, is still resonating with some primal desire I've got, which makes my blood turn to steam. On the other hand, I know physics, and it's pretty clear to me what happens when someone tries to stop a train with bare hands.

There are days in which my patience is gone and I get so sick of being treated as something I know I'm not that I just want everything to end, because this is what's going to happen eventually anyways (to everyone, by the way). But then something else emerges like a stream of lava and makes me crave facing all that as if there was a really large reward somewhere. Is there a right answer here?

Saddest thing

Don't wanna indulge in sadness. There's hardly any good in doing so. But this aspect is relevant, and maybe its awareness can improve someone else's life. Disability can bring a very special kind of loneliness. It's not that being disabled implies in not having friends, although this can happen as well. Loneliness I'm talking about is a much deeper one. So much so, that if not acknowledged, it can really destroy someone's life.

What does being together mean? What are the reasons behind our social nature and our almost constant attraction to other people?

Maybe all of them spring from our animal basic needs such as food, sex and shelter. We're one of the species that rely the most on social groups for these needs to be satisfied. In primal settings, a single human hunter was a very easy target to better physically equipped predators. Not only that, but these fellows could also be an easy pray to other humans. Total intra-species competition would make the whole humanity weaker and more prone to be extinct. But our huge brains have allowed us to drop this idea of total war and join forces collectively, thus becoming a very powerful multipurpose machine. Somehow people realized the results of fighting the environment and other men at the same time would yield less average benefits than collaborating.

But this has happened thousands of years ago. What about us? How do we relate to each other in this hypertrophied highly specialized society? Maybe all this sophistication we have today is just the natural historical evolution from a very well coordinated hunting machine.  Maybe the basic principles that have made us stick to each other are still out there, but they just have a different external appearance, exactly because of all this sophistication and complexity.

In any case, it seems to me that the most fundamental ingredient for these social systems to work is that individuals have the ability to see themselves in others and in the whole society at large. When someone sees herself in another person, they are no longer two entirely different entities. They become a new organism, that will act on its own needs which in turn will get individual needs satisfied as well.

This is true for a group of friends, for a family, a city or even a country. In all these cases, people need to identify with each other, so they can collaborate to reach common goals. Trust is born from the awareness that the person in front of me has similar feelings, desires and needs (empathy). Therefore we have a common ground upon which we're going to build a collective existence together that is much more interesting and richer than what each of the individuals could provide for themselves in isolation.

Interpersonal bonds are stronger when people share a larger common ground. This can potentially maximize alignment and make agreement something more natural. It's not impossible to have a good friend that lives a totally different life compared to yours. But in this case, identification is different and mutual exchange can be limited and asymmetrical, making bonds weaker (at least friendship ones). This is also truth in terms of distance. It's usually much easier to maintain friendship with people that are physically close to us, because that facilitates the sense of availability we feel from them, and enlarges the common ground we have with each other. Very often people are close friends during school and grow steadily apart as they get engaged in different social environments.

Besides being physically close, common experiences are hugely important to build affinity. Maybe because of the evolutionary background mentioned above, we tend to feel safer and happier when we can share our experiences. Not necessarily because others can actively do something about a problem we're facing (although that can also be the case) but because sharing makes us feel stronger and more capable to tackle all the problems in the world.

This might make up for a good explanation about why rehabilitated disabled people can feel so bad and lonely, even being in much better absolute conditions than the folks that never went through this process. Rehabilitation is hard work. It hurts, it can suck all your energy, but usually it delivers a great deal of functional improvement compared to doing nothing (depending on the nature of the underlying condition).

Issue is we are social beings. It is rarely enough to perform better in daily activities. Performing them differently (in time or fashion) from the way most people like us do means losing the possibility to share similar experiences. Of course it's better for me to be able to move slower and with a cane than not to be able to move around at all. It's quite stupid not to acknowledge that. But this doesn't take social needs into account. So it creates the surreal experience of being a massive success and a huge failure simultaneously. The "mere physical issue" thesis is blown away at this point. Someone can be smart enough to make it in all intellectual tasks that generally lead to some degree of material success. But then there's common ground. While this person can theoretically perform all the necessary activities in a job description, the perception part and also the self-motivation part are usually not fulfilled.

This adds up to the unequal quality of the world we inhabit. You can indeed train a somewhat disabled person to perform all the tasks needed to live a good life in society. But the fact they will be done differently and thus won't let easy identification happen will create a gap that theoretically didn't necessarily have to exist. In other words, the worst thing about disability may not be disability itself, with all its pains and difficulties. It may well be loneliness. Because maybe you're able to do so many things but at the same time you are too different. Your life is very different and because of that you can't really see yourself in others and usually they can't see themselves in you either.

Making the huge effort for being capable and capability itself make you go only a small part of the way. The rest of it, albeit physically possible is socially unattainable. This is the paradox of rehabilitation and, in my opinion, it's the saddest thing about disability.

Luciano Huck não morreu. Ele apenas foi assaltado. [Pop post from my old blog in Potuguese]

O apresentador de programa vespertino da rede Globo Luciano Huck é um sujeito muito empreendedor. Além do seu salário Global (que não deve ser nada baixo) Luciano também toca uma longa série de outros projetos bem rentáveis. Em decorrência disso, conseguiu ficar bastante rico. Bem, não como Antônio Ermírio de Morais ou o finado “jornalista” Roberto Marinho, em cujo império de telecomunicações hoje trabalha. Porém, Luciano faz parte do diminuto grupo de brasileiros que podem se dar ao luxo de ter um Porsche ou vestir Armani (coisa que aliás não sei se faz, visto que não leio a revista Caras).

Ainda que Luciano tenha méritos e talentos indiscutíveis, que o conduziram em sua ascensão social meteórica (coisa que não se pode dizer tranqüilamente dos papas da mídia no Brasil), pode-se dizer que os mesmos talentos não se aplicam à escrita de artigos em jornais. De fato seu artigo na Folha de São Paulo do dia primeiro de Outubro não tem nada de mais à primeira vista. A não ser pelo fato de transparecer uma certa falta de traquejo. Tudo bem, dado que o apresentador não está pleiteando um Nobel de literatura e sim fazendo um desabafo sincero em um dos jornais de maior circulação aqui de Terra Brasilis.

Aqui começa a parte interessante dessa história: Luciano se recusa a andar de carro blindado “por filosofia”. Desde Nietsche a filosofia não era assim tão perigosa. O fato de um sujeito apenas rico agir assim já seria suficiente para que fosse considerado doido. Mais ainda no caso de Huck, considerando sua visibilidade e conseqüentemente a de seu dinheiro. Porém, publicar essa decisão de dispensar a blindagem em um dos jornais de maior circulação do país é praticamente eutanásia. A não ser que nesse mesmo dia ele tenha desistido da militância nos "sem blindagem" (MSB). De qualquer forma, tomara pra ele que a tese daquele Antônio Carlos de Almeida esteja mesmo correta e que os sequestradores não sejam capazes de ler e compreender o jornal.

Luciano se diz indignado com a violência na cidade de São Paulo. E ele tem razão. O curioso é que a maioria das pessoas com seu poder econômico já resolveram seus problemas de insegurança há muitos anos. Como? Através do uso indiscriminado de SUV’s que rodam com diesel subsidiado, placas de Curitiba (para não serem importunados por multas ou IPVA extorsivo) e blindagem à prova de mísseis intercontinentais e minas terrestres. Como se não bastasse todo esse aparato, está na moda entre os ricos pagar escoltas armadas para segui-los aonde quer que resolvam ir (se bem que com esse trânsito não é que possam ir mesmo muito longe).

Outro dia mesmo, por exemplo, tive a infeliz experiência de me interpôr entre Ana Maria Braga em sua Mercedes-Benz S600 de 800 mil reais e sua penca de capangas particulares em um Toyota Corolla preto. Eu tinha acabado de voltar de um ano vivendo na Europa. Lá ter um carro como esse Mercedes não quer dizer muita coisa. Por isso não dei a mínima importância ao veículo prateado naquela ocasião. Na verdade eu queria apenas ser gentil com uma senhora que estava já sem esperanças de conseguir passar no maldito cruzamento sem farol perto do Panamby. Depois dela e outros quatrocentos carros passarem na minha frente, percebi que aqui em São Paulo não dava pra ficar pensando muito no civismo e nos bons modos, senão quem não saía do lugar era eu.

Mas antes que avançasse com o meu carro e bloqueasse o fluxo na perpendicular, a maldita barca Mercedes se enfiou na minha frente como se fosse um Smart. Depois da peripécia dessa outra funcionária da Globo, tive cinco minutos de terror com aquele bando de maníacos piscando farol e colados na minha traseira como se eu fosse um criminoso, sequestrador de celebridades e tivesse furado o comboio do presidente Bush. É que ao contrário de Luciano Huck, é assim que a imensa maioria dos ricos leva a vida aqui por essas bandas. Felizes, satisfeitos e cada vez mais ricos e de bem com a vida, já que dinheiro atrai bons fluídos como o petróleo do tipo light e Veuve Clicquot.

De modo análogo, os moradores das favelas (gente predominantemente muito boa ao contrário do que diz o tal Almeida aos ávidos leitores de fim de semana) também estão dando o seu jeitinho pra se defender dos criminosos. Porém, muito menos glamuroso e eficiente que o dos ricos. Tratam-se de milícias, ou seja, grupos de foras-da-lei armados até os dentes que são pagos todos os meses, como o carnê do baú, para proteger os moradores dessas comunidades. Isso acontece porque a polícia está toda nas mãos dos narco-traficantes que operam dentro e fora das cadeias.

A classe média por sua vez tenta em vão reforçar suas guaritas com seguranças e colocar dois ou três portões elétricos em seus edifícios, além de câmeras e circuitos internos de TV que oneram muito os condomínios. Há prédios em que você pode inclusive acompanhar ao vivo a chegada do seu convidado, desde a entrada do prédio até à porta da sua casa por um canal da TV. Mas em matéria de segurança, digamos que o artífício é mais eficaz no controle do namorado da sua filha do que dos outros bandidos que por ventura resolvam invadir o condomínio.

Por isso, a sensação de insegurança ainda é grande demais e parecemos estar sempre um passo atrás do crime. Em face à inépcia ou conivência do Estado, a população de todas as classes sociais está se virando para levar a vida de maneira relativamente normal. Desnecessário dizer que os piores efeitos dessa guerra civil se fazem sentir nas favelas e não no Jardim Europa. Desnecessário também dizer que as reclamações vindas do Jardim Europa são escutadas com muito mais atenção nas altas esferas do poder público.

Então, lendo aquele relato melodramático do heterodoxo filósofo Luciano Huck (é normal ser meio piegas quando alguém te põe o cano do 38 na cara), tive uma idéia. Quando você e seus amigos são assaltados e levam seu relógio da Diesel, ou o laptop que você nem acabou de pagar ou o iPod que seu primo trouxe de muamba da Disney, não há espaço para chorar as pitangas em um quarto de página da Folha de São Paulo. Na verdade a página no jornal é apenas uma minúscula amostra do que o descontentamento dos ricos pode fazer. Imagine se o Sílvio Santos não pudesse mais ter segurança particular e carro blindado. Certamente ele não mudaria correndo de país. O país é que teria que mudar correndo. Por isso, seria muito benéfico que todos os ricos saíssem de suas bolhas de vidro à prova de bala e caíssem na nossa real. Também talvez fosse interessante que a classe média-alta saísse um pouco de trás do celofane preto dos vidros dos seus sedans médios e fosse dar um rolê em Heliópolis, caindo na real dos favelados.

Claro que se isso aqui fosse uma democracia de verdade, não haveria a necessidade de todos nós termos o tipo de prerrogativa que tem o Huck e sua turma com os meios de comunicação, porque de quatro em quatro anos todo mundo tem, em tese, exatamente a mesma chance de escolher aquele pessoal de terno e gravata que nos representa no congresso, nas assembléias legislativas ou na câmara de vereadores, blá blá blá....

O caso é que apesar da razão de ser dessas instituições ser a de nos bem representar, os lobbies, as negociatas, a corrupção e o tráfico de influência nos distanciam cada vez mais dessa gentalha. Apesar do benefício aparente, isso não é bom. Daí o que a gente faz é tentar resolver as coisas como dá, de preferência do modo mais rápido, indolor e privado possível. Ou seja, se a gente é classe baixa, a gente paga a milícia, a polícia e o traficante. Se é média, a gente não pára no farol depois das 11 da noite, evita deixar o carro muito limpo, evita trocar de carro, anda de janelas fechadas cobertas de celofane preto. Se a gente é rico, a gente anda de Audi blindado e tem uma porrada de seguranças armados na porta do nosso prédio. Se a gente é banqueiro, anda de helicóptero e passa boa parte do tempo fora do país onde se sente de novo o doce gostinho da normalidade.

Porém, no final das contas, por melhor que seja a blindagem, o celofane, o capanga ou o portão de ferro de que pudemos dispor, melhor seria não precisar deles em primeiro lugar. E para isso não adianta inventar cópias pirata da ROTA ou tratar ainda pior os suspeitos de crimes por serem pretos e pobres ou desrespeitar os direitos humanos dos presidiários como sugere Luciano ao conclamar a tropa de elite, indignado com a perda do seu Rolex de 5000 dólares. Huck não sabe que a prescrição fascista das tropas de elite da vida não vai resolver coisa nenhuma. Mas não precisa. Luciano não é especialista em segurança como espera-se que seja o Secretário de Segurança Pública do Estado de São Paulo. Por isso, o que ele tem que fazer é convidar os amigos high society a também torrar bem o saco do Governador, do Presidente e de todo mundo que realmente tenha poder pra mexer as peças desse tabuleiro.

Discordo daqueles que criticaram Luciano pelo seu artigo. Eu o aplaudo e peço que todos os ricos comecem mesmo a reclamar. O começo da solução de todo esse imbróglio está mais nas mãos deles do que nas nossas, sem querer tirar o meu da reta. Os ricos têm que chorar, gritar e espernear o mais alto que puderem, como fez Luciano na Folha de anteontem.

Conclusão: a solução para o problema da segurança nas grandes cidades brasileiras é acabar com os carros blindados. Mas é claro que também não faria mal nenhum investir uns 30 bilhões de reais em educação e pagar aos professores de todos os níveis um piso salarial de 10000 reais. Garanto que fazendo isso, em 10 anos a violência urbana iria minguar no Brasil como gelo na sopa quente.

How much bullshit can someone tolerate

That's not very motivational. If you're looking for that, you're going to be disappointed. I'm just going to quickly mention the curious fact that a idiotic physical disability can expose you to a whole new level of apparently unrelated bullshit in life.

Maybe that only has to do with the fact the world is mostly made out of outer meaningless shells that people manage to preserve because of information asymmetries and too much self-interest. If you have any issue that messes with that, damage is really disproportional, as what has always happened in my life.

Today, more than craving normality and a reasonably good and safe future, I pity these pathetic mechanisms, celebrating the fact in the end everybody will die the same, and all this visibility and appearance crap will be reduced to dust.

Let's switch gears here. This is to my fellow CP population.

Some months ago, I've retried to do something I had already experimented with when the first social network came along in Brazil. This time, I went to Facebook to try to find people with similar life situation compared to mine, so maybe we could exchange some thoughts, impressions and experiences and hopefully reach collectively a better place.

My first attempt back in 2006 was a total failure. The community I've created has attracted all sorts of people, some related to Cerebral Palsy reality, but extremely rarely someone that actually had it as well. I felt really frustrated. But at the same time, my level of acceptance of this condition of mine was very low at the time. So frustration was somehow balanced with the feeling I was pretty unique and maybe I didn't need this kind of social context to build my own identity.

Then I've lived in Scandinavia, and I traveled all western Europe. And while places were beautifully different, all of them had something in common among them and also with Brazil. I was still an outsider, and it was impossible to blend in.

I'm not saying I didn't have a great time, or that I didn't make good friends or nothing like that. But it has become crystal clear I wasn't a regular guy my age, sex, education, economic and cultural background. I was something else. And even if I wasn't only that, this is what others would think of me in general and treat me accordingly.

I don't want to talk about the kind of suffering I've had because of that. I think I've already written too much stuff on that part. As I've said in the title, this text is not meant to foster awareness of abled bodied people. I'm targeting disabled folks. Especially the ones in similar conditions to mine. Let's just say I wasn't happy at all.

It has become clear to me that this suffering had one single root cause. And the reason why I feel I can make this claim is because it has ceased since this piece of the puzzle has dramatically change. Let's go for it.

Humans are true social creatures. They sometimes don't know that, but most of what they do is referenced in social groups, including their expectations for themselves, their lives and their future. This lack of awareness justifies with perfection why I wasn't able to get support from friends and why psychotherapists have done nothing to make me feel better. In both cases, we were not using the same social references. Therefore their advice was useless for me at best.

This suspicion has compelled me to look for people like me. And this is the same thing that makes similar people cluster together and be the context of each other's life. But of course nobody does that with great level of consciousness, so in general they feel there are lots of coincidences in their recurrent affinities.

As I've mentioned earlier, in 2006 this search effort was a huge failure. But then I've tried again a few months ago. This time, things were different. I did find some people that had probably being diagnosed with something very similar to what I've been diagnosed 33 years ago. Not in Brazil, because here I suspect general social conditions wouldn't allow someone with my level of disability to get close to where I got in life. But I thought maybe in the US that could be the case.

On the other hand, I had read a bunch of articles and participated on a project as a researcher that had pointed to the fact there was a huge socio-economic gap between someone with or without a disability, keeping the other demographics constant. According to this scientific literature, I wouldn't find people competing at the same social play field. The reason for that is really simple. Disability represent a disadvantage on every stage of one's life. In each of these, there is some degree of loss in growth potential (social, emotional, and also economic). So, in the end, the gap gets really wide as time passes.

The curious thing is that, although this fact is backed up by serious scientific research, I'd have a surprise when I've started having conversations with people with CP in this Facebook community. Apparently the conditions in which these people lived were at best similar to mine, never significantly better. Despite of that, they would systematically deny the reality we've all lived in and as I was absolutely convinced they were wrong, I wouldn't change my mind without putting my hands on trustworthy data that would prove I was wrong. I must say that, in this case, being wrong would make my life and my future outlook incredibly better.

The guy responsible for the community, who was also incapable of tolerating a well backed informed opposed position has then expelled me from the forum, which is very compatible with someone without good arguments. But he has also completely eliminated his very poor chances to prove me wrong, but also make me very happy.

Today I dedicate this text to him, and I reiterate my challenge of outsmarting my conclusions about life outcomes from people with medium cerebral palsy diagnosis. I have to confess I don't even remember his name, and I don't feel like searching for it to put it here. If he's right, I don't have to do that, because somebody else will come to this blog and show what I'm saying is BS.

I'm assuming this is not going to happen for the time being and I'll close this text based on this assumption (that I promise to change if anyone brings good info that justifies doing so): I think that guy was in denial. Maybe he's happy like that, which I honestly don't believe. My take is that he isn't, because denying these differences and disadvantages (which I've also done for most of my life) implies in feeding unrealistic expectations, which in turn leads to chronic unhappiness and confusion (which was also my case).

My journey of getting rid of these illusions of normalcy has been tough, I'll never tell anyone otherwise. A friend of mine told me something analogous about ending a relationship. You need to bury the memories, but more importantly, you must bury the future you've dreamed of living together. This was exactly what happened to me when I gave up on normalcy. I've had to let go of the future I've dreamed for myself based on the false assumption I was like everybody else.

The fundamental difference in this case is that sadness can be finally overcome since changing expectations will effectively destroy the illusions feeding chronic unhappiness because of what was supposed to be. And I can guarantee to my CP fellow that this was the best and most liberating event that has ever happened to me. Thus, although him proving me wrong could potentially improve my concrete possibilities in life, he or anybody else will have to do a killer data analysis job to accomplish that. The challenge is on!  Good luck.

Abusers' weapons to get away with bad conduct

Abusers have the talent to turn justice safety mechanisms into personal shields. They also benefit from the fact people in power receive better treatment (although everyone prefers to believe this is not the case or to justify that by some sort of illusional merit). 

Let's look at some of the examples:

1-When you get abused, you need to prove it's happening. It's only fair as from this perspective the abuser is presumed innocent. Issue is they certainly know it and will do a great job in not producing evidence that would make them get busted.

2- If you manage to collect some evidence, then they will use another super common mechanism that works perfectly for those in power: they claim to be ignorant of the fact that turns their apparently harmless conduct into abuse. This works well from presidents to low rank managers.

While they count on these weapons mentioned above to deal with external monitoring, they use their power over the abused person to create cognitive confusion about what situations really are, making it super hard for the harassed person to even be sure about the nature of what's going on.

I'm surely not uncovering anything new here. That's happening everyday, in everybody's face. But while people in power will use organizations and institutions to protect themselves, I want abused people to use this knowledge to do the same.

It's not easy, not fair and ugly. But this clarity can at least bring you some inner peace to deal with those nasty situations that are so common in the world of disability and discrimination.

Apparently logical decisions can be tough

There's a myth or a hope that once you accept your own condition in this world, things will get much better. It's definitely true, but shortcomings still keep coming. Because person/external world interaction is dynamic as the references one uses to evaluate her own condition. Thus, despite of living better on average, times of recurrent crisis still take place. Then there's a large temptation to relapse into old thought and response patterns. Resistance has to be active and must be in fact constant. For some reason the mind resembles stones being eroded by water. After a while, all water will run through the same paths over and over. It's tough but necessary to actively divert thoughts to a desired and healthier path as many times as we have the ability to in order to reverse damaging patterns. And at least in my experience, meditation is the only reliable tool to promote that change.

And now what?

I was writing an essay on politics, maturity, hate and escape. But I don't have a real keyboard right now and I think those issues really require one.

Instead I'll write about something simpler: my life. The thing is lately I've come to several conclusions for which the time to act has clearly arrived.

Truth is I've learned through suffering and meditation I'm not the same as my counterparts. My efforts are much less effective and even exhausting my resources I might not get even close to where they can arrive on average. Expectations need to be reshaped in that light.

I still live above my economic means to distract myself from this fact, but that's obviously not sustainable. However, I'm less and less dependent on these external signs of normality to feel good about myself, which favors mental and emotional well-being despite lower material conditions.

Sometimes I feel abandoning my current professional framework, although relieving me from people that certainly don't contribute to improving my conditions since they are incapable of tolerating my different ways of doing things, would be another cheap escape. Another childish nonacceptance move.

On the other hand I still entertain the possibility to find a better spot that will enable me more than disable. But I understand since chances are lower, that can take longer, and I might have to once again pay the economic price.

Bottom line is these people deeply and negatively affect my vital energy levels, so I start feeling bad as a response to be forced to be in their presence once again.

But I can't let myself go by standards which are not and won't ever be my own. Instead I need to be wise and cold and judge reality in the light of my real choices.

That said, I still feel breaking point approaching and the fact I still haven't found the alternative path makes me nervous about the future.

Depression and Evolution

I've had my first experience with depression at the age of 10. It was really horrible, but I don't want to go into the specifics right now. I want to talk about the conscience that came along with it and the questions concerning humanity as a whole that started popping up in my head back then. And don't get me wrong, I don't think life must be an endless stream of joy and amusement. Pain can teach us valuable lessons indeed, as I've been witnessing non stop in the last couple of years. But whoever has ever struggled with severe depression, knows exactly this is not the case with that particular condition.

While suffering like I've never had before, I've started asking myself what was the purpose of that pain. Honestly, I wasn't able to find an answer from my own perspective, though I'd spend almost all my time awake trying to figure it out. I believe the reason why I wouldn't find the answer was not the fact I was only 10, since I'd have 23 additional years to think about the matter while depression would parasite my life and yet I wouldn't get anywhere either.

Depression seems to want to kill the person that has it, and often enough it accomplishes this goal. Suicide is the obvious case that comes to mind, but there are several others like malnutrition and heart disease. What's the biological logic behind that, assuming there's one? I think some myths must be destroyed for greater comprehension to be finally possible.

Many people believe depression comes from the depths and complexities of the human mind, which is a late 19th century conception. Then there are all sorts of psychological theories that attempt to give a systematic explanation and propose some measures for treatment. While a lot of interesting reading have been generated from this assumption, there are some strong evidence it's not at all valid. Interestingly enough, these don't invalidate the influence of human mind complexity on the disorder outcomes. They just point out that the underlying mechanism is something more primitive. It turns out that many animals can get depressed as well. This fact is the base for all the efficient pharmacological treatment available today.

If Freudian, Jungian, Lacanian theories or the likes were true, animals wouldn't possibly get depressed. You can still claim that what animals have is not the same (while identical symptoms point again to the opposite direction). But supposing they indeed get depressed, what's the biological advantage springing from that phenomenon?

Well, at the individual level I've never managed to find any descent answer. On the other hand, although nasty, depression can make sense at the population order of magnitude. It can be a way for less adapted individuals to succumb as a result from the interaction between the environment conditions and their self perceived ability to cope with them (which is actually how researchers cause depression in animals to test the drugs). This will leave more natural resources for better adapted individuals to thrive and reproduce and can even abbreviate suffering from the ones affected by the disorder (this would account for the humane part of it). Assuming part of the reasons for superior adaptation is genetic, that would support the survival of the best genes. This mechanism could also be beneficial in case of environmental sudden changes, in which disabling part of the population will to compete with each other could save the whole species from self-inflicted extinction.

Today depression prevalence figures in humans seem to point to an up trend (check WHO for details). That could also be consistent with the fact population is huge and resources are finite. Therefore, it seems a quite compelling hypothesis that in the face of a species-wide extinction danger, some genes would get activated and make some of the folks just give up and die without a fight. It makes a lot of sense for the species, (but so would the annihilation of the weaker by the stronger in wars, genocides, etc). Maybe that explains society discriminates depressed people, attributing all sorts of undesirable personality traits to them.

But to me this is the right moment for all human complexity to jump in and finally save the day. It was once very common to die at 30 because of some infection that today would be easily treated with inexpensive antibiotics. It was also natural to have to wonder around to get some food, since agriculture is a human invention too. Isn't it plausible that mental illness is just another natural frontier we need to cross? Couldn't it be just another naturally occurring condition we can decide to abolish, because we are able to replace it with less cruel mechanisms to preserve our existence as species?

For me, at the individual level, the most effective approach to fight depression has been to quit searching for existential reasons for it to have been born within me. Because of our brain power to process and retrieve information, it's quite likely anyone can find these reasons, even if they don't actually exist. This exercise won't help getting better from depression. It's very unintuitive, but in fact the best way to fight depression is to separate one self from it and act deliberately against one's urges emerging from the condition.

Depression and anxiety are deeply affecting human lives at the individual level, but also at the social one. Economic impact is huge, even not being currently accounted for entirely. Families and individuals suffer to great extents and most often they are left alone and abandoned by others as if they were morally flawed. So incredible things never get done because of these nasty conditions and the super counter productive habit of judging and condemning on the basis of these diseases. It's the medieval thing to do and yet it's still done at huge scale in 2014.

If rationality and inteligence really make us something unique in the Universe, it's urgent for us to step up and use these in our own benefit. That's the kind of evolution it's up to us to promote and we must start taking responsibility fot it right now.

Emotional distress and critical decisions: Possible Approaches

Yesterday I've had a terrific talk with my able bodied friends at a bar. This chat has made me realize once again how deeply different we are, despite apparently belonging to a very similar social circle (people that have studied at University of São Paulo in the late 90s and the first decade of 2000's).

The matter of the chat was pretty straight forward, but for some reason our perspectives were radically opposed. Core question is whether or not you should make a critical life decision if you feel under severe emotional distress.

Curiously, this question has two different, opposed and absolutely correct answers:

1- No, you should avoid making a critical decision under these circumstances since common sense shows people's decisions quality will be significantly impaired by a highly emotional state (especially a negative one). This is factual. So why is there a need for a different answer? Because this answer depend on the following factors to be valid:

a. Event frequency: emotional distress must be something sporadic and transient.
b. Independency: decision at hand must not be a highly relevant factor for determining whether emotional distress stops or continues.

If these 2 conditions aren't present, you'll need the second answer:

2- Emotional reasoning is a common distorted thought pattern. It usually emerges from a person will to avoid more emotional distress (usually anxiety). Depending on how cronic this pattern is, it can lead to immobilization, because the person will avoid taking action while the need for it remains. It's a loop mechanism, in which the individual doesn't act because she/he believes it's not the right time and because of the decision not to act, emotional distress can continue for much longer.

In these cases, not only it's beneficial to act in spite of negative feelings, but doing so can actually be the single way out of the whole crisis.

Next, I'll discuss the reasons why my friend finds so obvious 1 is correct and why I tend to go for 2.

Perception, perception, perception...

This text is like an onion because it has multiple layers which are somehow very similar to the others and to the whole onion itself. However, each layer also carry some sort of uniqueness which somehow can align one to crack the code and understand the relationship within the layers through the whole onion and vice-versa.

So I'm presenting a set of cases that function as the layers of the onion and I'll draft both their similarities and their differences. Hopefully, that will allow me to give the reader a better understanding of both the onion and its sublayers, but also the difference between onion layers and non-onion layers.

I've always liked very much what's straight forward and clear. Daltonism test is a visual example of that. Depending on the numbers you see (or not) in the test, you can determine in a very simple and clear way whether or not you are color-blind. It can be influenced by non-relevant factors to what you want to learn with the test, such as the quality and conditions of the screen you're taking the test on. It can also potentially be influenced by the other components related to the computer video or even other factors that can indirectly affect the colors and patterns displayed on the computer screen. But as far as the observer is concerned, the test is well designed to be used with most people and it allows to draw some stable conclusions about a given specific individual.

Maybe I like these tests that much exactly because many of the relevant situations in life don't resemble them at all. Maybe that's why people in general really like them, although most of these people will find it very difficult to understand the underlying mechanism at work here. Understanding this mechanics is a double edged sword. On one hand, this awareness can make one realize that most of the situations in which she finds herself in everyday have a very small margin of control. On the other, people are required to make decisions all the time and we have been gifted or cursed with the ability to employ rational resources to make the ones that we feel will benefit us the most, directly, indirectly or both. So if we are biased towards thinking we have more control over the environment and situations that surround us, we'll also observe two opposite classes of effects: the feeling of more control over one's life is highly correlated to ones perceived quality of life. This phenomenon is actually pretty easy to understand in the positive way. Because, if effort is required from us in life to keep it going, it's very reassuring to have the feeling we can influence and even control the outcomes of what we do.

Only this is true to a very limited extent if we think statistically about the concrete world around. The interesting fact is that humans suck big time in consciously perceiving probabilities related phenomena. Therefore, objective mistakes in these terms are not only the most common case but actually the general rule of thumb. But because this reassuring effect of feeling in control is so important, human brains tend to ignore this very concrete piece of information and act if probability distributions were completely different. Or much worse, as if they were absolutely irrelevant to important decisions in life.

Now this could generate a tragic effect on people, because unexpected things are not only happening every now and then. They are happening all the time. But then we kept very primitive brain structures along with noble cortical ones. These old folks that take care of many of these very otherwise conscient mind boggling phenomena in a super fast and efficient way that we hardly notice. So despite the fact we consciously live some sort of self-generated ever occurring deception, we usually don't feel too much harm from that.

Now there's another fuzzy element. If we were able to see reality on a very objective light like we feel we can with the color blindness test, we'd soon enough realize the correlation between our desires, efforts and their outcomes have a real distribution that is absolutely incompatible with what we expect them to be. And then comes another really curious fact: that doesn't really matter, because our minds have the habit (that is very efficiently neutralized by the scientific method) to reshape our perceptions in order to better match our expectations. In other words, since we're not able to control the precise distance we can launch a ball on a court, our brain dynamically reshapes the results of our observations in order to make things smoother and more logical.

Some of these distortions, and this might have a lot to do with the way we evolved into highly social creatures or been a consequence of that, are shared among a large number of people. Because of that, and because these people cannot usually grasp what different people might actually perceive from the same phenomenon, a false truth can be born and raised quite easily.

Back to the colorblindness test, imagine that it didn't come with any instructions whatsoever. And imagine that people taking the test didn't know its mechanics and purpose of it. Very objectively, a large group of people (actually most of the human beings on Earth) would get to see the same numbers. However, color-blind people would consistently see different numbers. If you can anticipate where I'm heading to, it's not really hard to realize that the answer to the question "what can you see in this circle" will admit more than 1 correct answer. If you think about it philosophically, it actually admits endless right answers since there's a degree of clear subjectivity in the question itself.

However, if no disclaimer about what's supposed to happen to that perception is made, we tend to see the building of two mutually excluding groups of answers which are both essentially correct. But there's something very interesting behind this scenario. Almost everybody will be able to easily and consistently see a steady set of numbers in the test. Except that most of the population will see a set of numbers and a minority will see a different set or no number at all.

In the situation in which someone with authority will come and prompt people about the basics of what's going to happen, it's fairly easy to anticipate that rational beings won't try to prove other people wrong, because differences in perceptions is not only expected, it is the very value of the test in the first place. It's actually what makes a test out of the activity in the first place.

Now imagine instead of this disclaimer about a test to identify people's ability to see colors, people get prompted this is just an ordinary set of numbers. In this case, in case everyone is familiar with the symbols and if they share a common understanding of what numbers should look like, it's very likely that people will possibly disagree about which is the correct answer to that simple innocent question about seeing something inside of a circle.

Then suppose this is not just a matter of right and wrong. Imagine that there are all sorts of earthly benefits or disadvantages of seeing one set of numbers and not the others. This could actually be a test to keep color-blind people from accessing some sort of resources. As the non-color-blind are the vast majority, they could actually determine that seeing their right set of numbers is a condition for taking part on a particular social activity.

This could be done with some sort of coherent idea in mind like preventing color blind people from operating machinery in which inability to tell different colors could pose harm to them or to others. It could also be used as some sort of way of establishing "normal" ow "desired by majority"standards of perceptions. These could or could not be confused with the objective truth. It would depend on:

a. Is the group imposing the standards while being aware of the exact extent in which the test will identify a difference among people? If they know the fact that the test will essentially identify people that are not able to see colors in what's considered normal range among human beings, they will be already expecting to see different results and to tell they can be both correct since they change according to how people perceive colors. For those with this knowledge, the moral load attached to the answer will be close to 0, and it will be fairly easy to rationally avoid any sort of non-sensical and much wider perception of deviation in people seeing colors differently.

b. Now let's imagine the issue came up within a democratic context but there's no previous knowledge about what are the possible outcomes of the test and even less information about the underlying causes of each different scenario. In this case, it's not at all hard to imagine that the majority of the people could come to the conclusion the only right answer is the one shared by the majority itself. And this is something really easy and straight forward to determine. Then the problem is entirely different. Because there will be an answer which is widely considered to be consistently the correct one, and because of the lack of relevant knowledge about the underlying causes of the observed differences, people will certainly going to wonder why some people see one set of numbers, while much fewer people will say very candidly that the answer is completely different.

Let's approach the next layer of this onion: what is at stake here? Color-blindness is considered a fairly benign condition, since seeing colors usually won't prevent someone from performing daily necessary activities well enough. And it's clear that has to do with the characteristic of this particular individual or group but also to the conditions considered "normal" within a given society or smaller social group. If society had evolved to give lots of importance to color perception, and often used that everywhere at the space in which members of the group interact, color blindness could represent a highly disabling condition. Imagine if there was a deadly disease transmitted by a species of green mosquitoes. But also that there were identical red ones which were 10 thousand times more prevalent and completely harmless. In this case, ability to see colors would clearly represent a huge advantage.

Biological reasons are not the only relevant factor in determining disability level. Situation of color-blind people would vary a lot depending on the social conditions in which they find themselves. If they were the majority of the people, and they lived in a fairly democratic environment, the issue of not being able to tell the difference from a harmless mosquito and a deadly one might generate a series of social efforts due to its huge potential risk and harm to a very large chunk of the population. If there weren't any associated condition that could determine social exclusion, it's very likely there would be incentives for someone to:

a. Come up with a plan for solving the detection problem
b. To spend public money on its implementation

After these two steps, depending on how well the issue was tackled and the percentage of its efficient mitigation, it's quite possible the issue could be reassessed as something considerably less important, not only as a limitation for people that are color blind, but also the value of having a "better" color perception. It's easy to establish in this example that the extent of disability that will affect individuals is very much connected with:

a. how large and socially relevant is the population affected by a difference in the way they perceive a given aspect of current social reality

b. how large are the incentives for someone to individually or collectively generate and implement a solution for the problem at hand (item "a" is very important in determining item "b")

My example is hypothetical, but something really similar has actually happened with common vision impairments that can be effectively corrected (or mitigated) as long as the adequate lenses are utilized. If these conditions weren't so prevalent in socially relevant population, there might not have been enough incentives for the solution to materialize. Which would mean that a condition that today doesn't impose disability to the people that have then, could represent a severely incapacitating one.

Although I've discussed different cases of disability or potential disability, it's clear that human perception is the real core issue here. It's also the core issue on every case of social exclusion on the face of the Earth, explained by anatomic and physiological differences or not. The fact this problem structure is so widespread is not as astonishing as the fact this mechanism is almost always ignored by everyone, including those who suffer discrimination.

I must say it's very tough to acknowledge you are going to get worse life outcomes like income and health because of that structure. It's also more likely for you to get socially isolated, whether you deviate from the expected level of achievements characteristic to your social group or not. This reality is bitter, and it's not irrational to want to ignore all these issues and try to live your life the best way you can.

Unfortunately, this is not a very good option. We are social creatures above all, and it's natural to seek external references in life, especially when growing up. Therefore, I tend to believe that despite being something so bitter and unfair, it's important to be very candid about it from the very beginning beginning beginning beginning beginning beginning beginning beginning beginning beginning beginning beginning beginning beginning beginning result in cognitive dissonances that can be far more destructive than the concrete conditions themselves. I feel more important than to generate more general awareness, it's critical to provide conditions for this awareness to be created very early.

The knowledge of the rationale for discrimination doesn't make the phenomenon lighter. But it creates the possibility of defense. It allows people to resist in mental clarity rather than being treated like garbage in utter mental confusion.

On Politics: What makes it so hard to discuss [part II]

Alright, so now the task is to choose the best representative. It may seem simpler than to actually solve problems in the public sphere with your own hands (and probably it is). But that doesn't make it easy.

As I said in part I, in democracy theoretically you don't need to bother thinking about others. They can take care of their own interests, right? Yes, theoretically. But then comes the other tricky part of the deal. People have different education levels, which means that the knowledge about the political process itself can be deficient. In other words, some people might not be prepared enough to choose their representatives to defend their interests later on.

The answer to this imbroglio was supposed to be political parties. If you check out their roots, you'll realize things shouldn't be that complicated. Political parties are usually organized in two possible ways. First one is an ideology like Socialism, Social Democracy, Liberalism, etc. In these cases, a party will represent a mindset and an opinion on how public issues should be approached and solved. The other type of party organization refers to a particular social group, like the labor party. These doesn't necessarily perfectly align with any specific ideology school. These parties will act in the best interest of the social group they represent. This allows for a further degree of freedom to common people, since they don't need specific theoretical knowledge to make their political choice. In theory, this is a basic assumption to choose a party by ideology.

Alright, there we have it. The instrument for political engagement is in place and decision making theoretical frameworks are outlined. Let's add one more layer of complexity: in any given group of people, even those closely aligned ideologically, there's still room for disagreement. Not every factory worker will feel exactly the same about life, in the private or the public spheres. And although the other path has united people exactly around political principles, it turns out that they can also disagree about a number of things.

Results of that are a bit discouraging. It's fantastic to be able to influence the public sphere and to choose our representatives among those who uphold our principles and interests. But apart from the fundamental interpretation problem, you might not agree with anyone in terms of government principles. One of democracy shortcomings is that in this case your views won't be taken into account. So one can say that a precondition to be represented is to find a party which has similar interests in their agenda. But since numbers are in the core of the democratic process, likelihood of unique views to be represented is very low, because of their uniqueness. This is particularly bad if the majority is wrong about something.

But lets suppose you're one of the lucky ones to find a party that actually represents your interests and worldviews. Cool! Game over! Next! Not so fast.  

Because of size and complexity, the same logic used to determine who would be representing people in the government is applied to government decisions themselves. What that means is that in order to relevant measures to be executed, they must also win elections, when they are judged by all the elected representatives of the parliament. Again in life we get to the point where things are rather probabilistic, not deterministic. Even if your candidate to the government has won the elections, the measures to be taken still need to go through a similar process in parliament. Then, on average, it's possible to expect that the party with most elected representatives tends to be able to get most projects approved and executed.

I'm sure you've already noticed the game has become extremely complicated already for your decision to travel from your head to concrete reality. Well, there's much more!

Complexity and size of both the matters to be managed, the mechanism to get it done and the population to be represented, create additional challenges. Politicians are not robots (although some of them act like machines). That means besides public interests they were chosen to defend, they also have their private affairs. With governments getting larger and larger and more complex, average voter visibility of what's being done on her behalf is very limited. So these politician folks are dealing with huge amounts of resources that are public and the owners of these resources can't really see how these are spent.

This creates one of the most perverse system fragilities. Democracy is about numbers, and it's not possible to mess with them, right? Wrong! If the elections are clean, it indeed has this arithmetical flavor to it. But even in these cases, brute force, or money in modern terms, still have many options to have it its way. One of their options is available before elections. Capital can approach both voters and candidates, offering advantages in exchange for favors. This can be done legally or illegally. It actually also depends on the context.

It's interesting to note that the possibility capital has to influence political decisions doesn't end there. After the elections, people with lots of money can still explore politicians individual desires to have decisions made in their best interest. Corruption is the name of the game when it comes to overcome democratic barrier.  Then what? See you in part III.

On Politics: What makes it so hard to discuss [part I]

Elections period is an interesting one. Not only because since 1984, Brazilians have the privilege to choose the ones to represent them in the parliament and government. There's something quite interesting in the very way people make their decisions and position themselves politically.

Because of that, my goal in this series is to outline a simple and short guide for a rational political decision. I'm not probably qualified for doing so in large depths, so I'll concentrate in the process as a sequence of steps leading to a final decision.

But in this first part I think I need to tackle a hard question: what does it mean to make a political decision? As much as I like history, I don't want to go back in time too much because then people will lose interest. After all, history books are there for anyone to read from, but people usually don't. A political decision depends on context. There are common principles that tie political realities in every democracy, but the process is seldom identical. Let's summarize as much as possible.

Humans have liked to live together since quite early existing as such. That might have to do with the fact we are rational, and it's not hard to conclude it's better to live in community and in peace than fighting everyone else all the time to satisfy our basic needs.

Despite that being definitely a good thing, it comes along with some hard challenges. People want to live together and share a number of things because that can bring benefits to everyone involved. Public goods are the ones that only make sense if shared by the entire community. However, reality is not perfect, and there will be times in which a public decision will be more beneficial to some than to others. It's very intuitive that the more diverse society is, the more this kind of discrepancy in interests will occur.

The matter can be solved in two ways: either we reproduce wild life conditions within society and let the stronger decide and benefit themselves (which will always happen to a certain degree) or we come up with mechanisms that allow everyone to participate in decisions, so there's more balance in who gets more benefits from public decisions (and hopefully) a maximization of common good. The word politics comes exactly from the word polis, which means city. Politics means the issues from the polis, or the issues arising from living in community.

If we lived in a community with 20 people, it would be fairly easy to take everyone's opinion into account in public matters without compromising the speed or feasibility of the decision making. But when numbers increase, it becomes impractical to consult everybody on every decision (even if we still agree that decisions affecting everyone should get everyone's input to make them fair). Apart from the numerical issue, the world has indeed become very complex and specialized. This basically means that it has become impossible to be knowledgeable about everything public that's going on all the time.

Democracy was the best mechanism to solve the numbers part of this dilemma. Society needs different people getting busy with different things. In the current state of affairs, we've decided that people will allocate their time the best way they can, thus maximizing their individual return and also the social one. But that also mean that a huge chunk of population will be occupied with matters that are far away from managing public interests. Someone has to do it on their behalf, and democracy makes that possible.

The genius idea about democracy is that the mechanism to choose representatives theoretically determines the opinions of the majority will naturally prevail, thus distancing society government from the wild jungle. It also theoretically eliminates the indicidual need to think about others in order to make better collective decisions. You can think exclusively about your own interests but the public resources will only benefit you if the needs you're expressing are the majority ones. In democracy, a very powerful and rich person's vote is worth exactly the same as the one from a humble and poor person. In the jungle-like scenario, the poor person would never have any voice. But in democracy, if the majority is indeed poor and humble, public decisions will benefit them, not the rich guys.

This simplifies life a lot. Because instead of being directly involved in all the public matters, individual decision is limited to choosing the best representative. The latter is the one responsible for studying the matters and making a sound decisions. But of course this is not as easy as it may seem. I'll cover this part on the next part.

Lousy Gigs Teach You a Thing or Two

I've always been the musical type. It's a constant in a life of constant changes. However, I've never known quite well why this was the case. Music has always been a source of happiness (or extreme annoyance when it comes to bad music). Since I was very little, my father, who is another music enthusiast, has stimulated me with music and sound. We used to listen to classical music on the radio, and then he has taught me very early to recognize perfectly all the different orchestra music instruments. It was natural and easy for me.

Also, and I've never thought about that link either, I've learned how to read and write by myself, at the age of three. Letters are graphic elements, but what really fascinated and made a lot of sense for that 3 years old me was the logic tying letter combinations and sound. This Eureka moment has probably been the most incredible discover I've ever did.

As the years have passed, I've heard tons of music. The reason I love radio so much is that fact someone is always preparing a playlist for you. You can travel across these songs, enjoying them individually, but also the craftsmanship with which someone has created a specific sequence. Internet has really turned magic to me when it became an immediate source of endless streams of music of any kind. When living by myself in Denmark, I've discovered and loved Pandora. A simple idea of an algorithm that could present you with brand new but related songs to the ones you've pointed out has become an addiction, company, friendship. And in the meantime it has absurdly enlarged the number of songs in my memory. Songs that invariably when not playing in some device of mine are constantly being played in my mind.

Playing music instruments has always also been something I've loved. The discovery about instruments was that I've also have some special talent. I can reproduce any melody on any instrument by only hearing it once. So again, at a very young age, I was able to sit at the piano and play any song (as long as execution wasn't limited by motor coordination issues). But this ability has been both a blessing and a curse in my musical education. Because I've got a perfect relative ear, reading music has always felt like something unnecessary, boring and basically frustrating. It was like turning a beautiful, flowing and natural bike ride through a beautiful scenario into going down a the same road with massive traffic, when thinking about your relative position to the other drivers is annoyingly demanding and really takes all the experience flow away.

Of course a lot of practice  could actually make reading music a very valuable tool in my music skills. But music has become a sort of a holly ground or a temple, from which I didn't want to take the magic feel away. On the other hand, music is also social. It's about playing to others, providing them a fraction of your great experience producing music. Plus there's playing together, which can also provide the magic feeling of building something lovely out of thin air, together.

However, music as a social interaction shares a lot with all the other social interaction experiences. There has to be agreement about what and how music will be played. Tone is the common denominator for doing so. In these regards, sheet music is a great aid. It guarantees that with minimum instrument knowledge, it's possible to coordinate playing efforts, hopefully producing a pleasant finished product: the musical execution.

Not only it's possible, but it's actually very common, especially in popular music, that musicians are totally intuitive like myself, being able to play together by combining perceptions until they finally reach the common denominator, just by listening to each other. This isn't that difficult when it comes to acoustic instruments if people have the perception skills and are able to translate them into the instrument language.

But once electric/electronic instruments come to play, they usually bring along their speakers. These are great for letting music have increased reach. On the other hand, it will kill people's natural ability to hear each other, and even to hear what they are doing. There are many ways this shortcomings can be overcome. People can rehearse so much, that their own feedback becomes a bit less critical. They can also use auxiliar speakers that allow them to hear what they are playing, no matter how much noise there is around them. I've never had access to such a system that could be good enough for a clear self-perception.

For these reasons, playing at random gigs with friends has often being very frustrating. Because even if I knew the song by heart, and I've had some notion about what my band fellow players were doing, I'd have to stick to the programmed melody, because not having any self feedback, I'm not able to improvise, since my ability to make the notes fit is absolutely tied to hearing. And until yesterday, I've never seen any connection between how frustrating these experiences usually were, and how they were connected with disability matters.

Yesterday was different. We had not been rehearsing together for quite a while. Not only I couldn't remember the melodies we would usually play. I couldn't relearn them on the fly, which I can easely do when I can hear what I'm playing. Maybe awareness about all these issues has finally clicked because just before the gig I was playing at a friends place, with many of the same guys that now were at the stage with me. Half an hour early I was happily directing music where I wanted it to go. Not only the one that came out of my saxophone. I was also leading everybody else to collaborate to a melody that would perfectly fir the chords coming from a guitar (acoustic).

At that stage I felt disabled for a second time. It's funny how neatly the experiences have connected, making total sense. As with the other of my life, there's always been this very fragile balance between what I could do and how and what the abled bodied people around would think about what they would perceive compared to their expectations.

I was exposed on that stage. The ones that go on stage usually know what they are doing (at least they think they do). And the audience expect them to know their think, and produce music which is compatible to their expectations. It's funny that most people are not particularly musical or gifted for that although it's really rare to meet people that are indifferent to music, or that don't have a pretty large amount of music in their lives. That truth creates information asymmetry between the musicians and most of their audience. People have a vague perception about the quality of the music they hear but they usually don't know the basic elements behind this perception of quality, or the root causes of problems with that perceived quality.

So crappy played usually doesn't go unnoticed. It creates a feeling of annoyance. But usually the people that get more bothered about bad playing are the musicians themselves. Up that stage I've felt disabled and I knew that playing anything just for the sake of it was going to further disable the band. My other musical instruments, other than the sax, the flute and the clarinet is the piano. The piano has a great advantage when playing in deaf mode. It's a very visual instruments, and even if you're not hearing that much, you can still play with these visual cues.

I was standing there in front of the crowd and I didn't know what else to do. I'd look at my fellow players for some sort of emotional comfort. I think they knew what was going on to a certain extent. Especially the ones that had seen me playing simple but coherent stuff a short while before. I was kind of shamed, although I knew it wasn't my fault, just like with disability. My ability to play had just vanished when I wasn't able to hear myself. It was simple as that. But I was actually concerned with others perception, exactly like it has happened so many times when I'd have to do something in front of strangers that would make my physical disability even more obvious. And like with the concert audience, although everyone is able to tell I'm not moving as everybody else, people who know the real causes for that are really hard (usually restricted to my existing friends and doctors).

But as with real life, I didn't wanna just leave and let the rest of the band in the middle of the gig. So I stood there, trying sometimes to play louder, hoping that this would make me hear, and show everyone I wasn't a drunk, or a moron, or deaf. Again, just like I've always tried to do using my intellect to circumvent people wrong perceptions about myself. At some level I wanted to please them. And I wanted them to love me for that. To love despite the fact I'm disabled. To accept me just as I am. That would mean I've made it. It would mean disability didn't take away the best out of my life experience.

I felt a quick and enourmous relief when for some reason we've switched to a song I could sing instead of playing. I haven't thought about that up to that moment, but when you sing you can hear your voice through the vibration of your skull. All of a sudden, I wasn't disabled anymore. My old great ear would lead me to produce something beautiful and harmonic. My voice isn't itself that great, but with a flawless ear at least I can be sure I'm not ruining anyone's music experience with it.

Music magic was back for a brief moment. A really pretty girl with curly hair and black eyes just like mine came from the audience and we've started making a duo. Maybe it wasn't as fantastic as I felt at the moment. But looking deep into her black eyes, hearing her voice, seeing her lips move and being able to sing something that perfectly fit her voice and the rest of the band was the best thing that could have happened to me. Everything was in the proper place and disability was gone.

The whole experience was truly exhausting. Driving back home from the gig I've spoken a lot, as usual. But I can't remember what I talked about for more than half an hour. My mind was still on the stage. A voice would repeat, over and over, that I shouldn't have gone up the stage to play in those conditions. It was harshly condemning myself for exposing me in that utterly disabled way. But today it has just become clear that as well as with the physical part of my disability, not being disabled is not a choice for me. So writing this text I'm doing what I've learn is my best. I may not be able to make that choice that would definitely change my life in the most profound way. But I can make a sense of this non-choice and in doing so I can lead again. And feeling secure about being the lead and knowing where you're going is the exact opposite feeling of being disabled.