Pre-judgment

I should just leave this blog blank.

That way, you, the reader can just “read-into” it, before a single line is penned.

Such is the nature of pre-judging (a priori).

All men are mortal alright. But it is also true, all men/women carry a set of pre-conceived notions and expectations about life and its potential. Without those parameters, Social Security wouldn’t be able to price out our payments. So are the actuaries for our compensation and contracts.

How much is a man’s/woman’s life worth? what’s left of him/her after cremation for “dependents”?

What’s the cost of child rearing, of education e.g. a couple of hundred thousands to raise a child in the US, students loan/debt (depends on whose point of view), one’s expected earning potential and retirement benefits.

Our information-rich society is telling us we can now know (with prejudice) most of yesterday’s unknowns e.g. how many more months do we have to live (medically) and how soon we can travel freely (when 50% have caught the virus) etc…

No wonder cyber espionage is on the rise evident in latest hack to the Treasury of the US and hundreds of US companies.

Amazon is building its supercomputer also. So is IBM. And I am sure, China has collected (and applied shaming on) from its citizens…: who did not return its public bikes, who crosses the street on red lights…

We want the machine to be bias-free. Yet we know it’s human errors and human programmers that inject “prejudice” into those “innocent” machines.

Facebook and Youtube have collected a treasure trove of data on our Likes and Shares.

Amazon has zeta bites of consumer data to crunch (Recommendations software).

It’s we who enable current data-driven society. We who upload our profile, our photos and our places of travel. To the cloud. To the servers. And to the big Four.

Soon they will face the music (EU already imposed a fine on Twitter). Anti trust law. Privacy law. Cyber security measures. Imagine how enlightened we, the users, would be if we could access a fraction of that ever-growing database so far at the big Four’s disposal and exploit.

Just when we thought we have left the tribal village behind (as in an example of unwanted pregnant gals leaving the village), the global village pings us, beeps us like an Amber Alert in the night in a high-privacy high individualistic society.

If we manage to climb a few rungs away and upward, we get pulled right back in ( since we are so and so’s daughter …who did not approve of out-of-the-wedlock pregnancy . Of being gay. Of being handicapped.) Sociologists have coined such phenomenon “urbanization”: people move to the city, where it’s more anonymous, more impersonal to seek self-advancement and reinvention.

Many of us want to escape the past, to put on a new persona, surrounded by Likes and Recommendations (from social media).

Having paid so much attention to fulfilling work and (false) life expectations, we face a reality: what do we do with this stranger staring at us in the mirror? Do we know ourselves better than Amazon and Facebook (depends on how dependent and addictive we are to social media). Do we get all the positive reinforcement just from a machine?

The more click baits we post, the cycle reinforces itself. And we end up living alone offline, and together with people of the same prejudice online. There is a word for it: echo chamber, whose residents are all digitally walled-off. Always Us vs Them.

We find ourselves with in-bred view of the world (which world?). The only world that shrinks (golf partners keep dying on you) while the rest are growing, populating and pro-creating. At some point, we don’t recognize it at all e.g. France is battling the encroaching world of Islam. That which we don’t understand or pay attention to, threatens us. Again, all due to our pre-judgement ( that differences are worse and undesirable).

Don’t blame it on our tribes, our teachers and our texts. It’s us. We all deride some satisfaction by ridicule or cast others as irrelevant and inferior. That way, we , while enjoy momentary sense of group unity, are not challenged or forced to grow. Homo Erectus of the tribal village keep putting on blinders and finish the race (of life) by base instincts, ..full of pre-judgement, never evolve and explore the fullest potential of Homo sapiens in a global village. We should learn from the big Four, whose wealth catapult in such a short time.

Wish I had just left this page blank from the start. That way, you can read into it whatever you want.