Tag: assumptions

The Shoe Horn of Ought & Should

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

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When things don’t turn out how you think {and insist}, they ought to be, how they should be, it can fuck with your head. The sense of order is perturbed and a cognitive dissonance can set in. One can ignore the “data” before your eyes and try to fit an interpretation of “reality” to how it should be. One can invent stories to try to shoe horn notions so that the {sacrosanct} narrative of life does not get upended. Reality can be avoided because it does not match the fairytale.

A while back I had an “A” level physics student for whom I was a private tutor. The young man was very fluid and he was quick on the uptake when I used circular intuitive as opposed to linear list teaching. He was bored shitless at school, but we had some fun. He was a bit of a rebel. Run forward a few years and he was upset that his sleuthing skills had been unable to find much of an internet trace for me. It was a challenge for him and we eventually reconnected. His view was that people with my background do not disappear into the aether, there should be some institutional paper trail of my career. He could not find my contact details at Bedlam or Friern Barnet Mental Hospital.

In the UK alone there were ~313,000 missing persons reports in 2022-23 for England and Wales. More males went missing than females. And 0.3% of all missing persons reports had a fatal outcome. People can and do fall off the radar, slip over the edge of the world and otherwise disappear with few traces. It is harder these days because many carry a GPS monitoring device AKA ‘phone. It is pretty unlikely that anyone filed a missing persons report for me, though they might have. In which case I have not yet been found. The charities have pages devoted to individuals who are missing with entreaties for them to get in contact. I did not find a page dedicated to me. Maybe I should keep searching.

Sometimes the sense of should & ought is more subconscious than fully present in awareness.

About twenty years ago I used to give personal development courses for science Ph.D. students. I had quit {a travesty} a tenured position. Although not overtly stated I sensed that this renunciation of something to which many of them aspired was a big subconscious black mark against me. I was a suspect. They could not take me seriously because I had shown myself to not be aligned with their view of how the world {and things} should & ought to be. It was a non sequitur of elephantine proportions in the room.

In other cases people invented scandals as a driver for my exit. Perhaps I had been caught on kiss-cam with a junior at an Oasis concert. The truth, simple and unconvoluted, was against the perceived order of how things are, how they play out and how they should be.

I have no idea what stories, narratives and other bollocks may or may not have been in circulation. People can need some ersatz to keep the sacred should & ought intact.

People make assumptions often and the quality of those assumptions is generally a lot poorer than they assume it to be.

If the wife and I died quietly one night, nobody would raise an alarm here. It would only be when the post box started to fill up that anyone would suspect. We don’t get many letters and if there was no Amazon delivery due, it could take months before postie noticed. Because we are isolated nobody would smell our demise.

Maybe that shoe horn is important for a happy life with 2.2 children and a white picket fence. I suspect that many people are kidding themselves, a lot. The effort to fabricate a demonstrable outcome aligned with how things should & ought to be according to the omniscient THEY, is perhaps aback the so-called mental health crisis. It is my thesis that should & ought are in fact toxins which we socially enforce upon ourselves and one and other.

The pressure from that shoe horn squeezes the life out of us….

Inside a Boomer and Assumptions

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

A while back when we were trying to sell our house the young estate agent commented that we had loads of DVDs just like his parents. They were umbilically connected to their devices. Their default was to use a search engine instead of think. As an old git I can comment that they had no inkling as to what may or may not be inside a boomer, what that essence may be.

Around 40 years ago at Durham University, during a conference on high resolution spectroscopy of van der Waals molecules, I gave my first oral presentation concerning the paper-worthy results from my first year experiments. It was a tad precocious to speak amongst all those professors dressed in my black ripped 501s with buckled suede Doctor Martens, a short spikey flat top haircut and a Smiths t-shirt.

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My moderate hangover had to be negotiated. I made no mistakes and the talk went well. Later that evening I was “chatted up” by various profs perhaps looking to recruit in due course. My punk “fuck you” attitude was reeled in.

To use the time honoured phrase, the youth of today have no idea what it was like back then. How protest and rebellion were a rite of passage. People do not expect residual punk attitude. I was soon to become an evangelical vegan at that time. Meat is murder!

Last night we watched a short documentary on the Smiths who provided a sound track to various aspects of life, including my mid-nineties depression. “Heaven knows I am miserable now…”

People make shed loads of assumptions; they always have and they always will. There is an expression that “assumptions are the mother of all cock-ups”. {and clusterfucks} I have extended the vernacular so that it is up to date.

Even when people know that making assumptions is foolhardy, it seems that they simply cannot resist making them and assuming their accuracy and applicability. Checking assumptions is for many an anathema. People will assume how others might behave, what they will do.

My mother when asked to come to my second wedding said that it was too far away and difficult for her to come. My assumption was that her assumption was that she would be cajoled into coming.  After sufficient cajoling she would yield as if she was doing us the greatest favour in the entire world. Instead, I said OK fine and left it at that. She may have been waiting for me to change my mind and start cajoling. I did not. The wedding went ahead without us having to cater to her insatiable drama queen tendencies.

Sometimes assumptions can backfire “biggly” to quote Herr Trump.

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One of the assumptions in our modern day is that everyone is contactable, that they have contact details and because of the fear of missing out, they will never be incommunicado. People are eternally at “beck and call”. When I say that I do not use ‘phones people do not believe me. They think I mean “much” but I don’t. My mobile has had two calls in six months both of them test calls by the wife. Someone once said to me, that if I had any questions, I could call them. He may have imagined that I might. I “filed” his card without even looking at it…In my mind we would never speak again.

I suspect that in a cross generational sense we do not understand nor appreciate the difference in essence. Even within a generation a beige or a plastic may not get a goth, a punk or an indie. As part rasta in orientation I may not subscribe to the 80s “Wolf of Wall Street”. When I sat in the board room at Fleming Family and Partners in Dover Street Mayfair to discuss million pound funding deals none of the suits knew where I was coming from, nor did they care overmuch.

It is funny your true colours are on the inside and not the outside.

Messaging Assumption and Miscommunication

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Postulate.

The human ability to get entirely the wrong of the stick is close to infinite.

Herein lies the mystery of perception, bias and multiple failures in communication both as a purveyor and acceptor. People may not be aware that they are, whether consciously or not, sending messages which others are receiving and perceiving and assimilating.

I suspect that because I am largely silent and can be not expressive, people tend to imagine that I am judging and being critical. They may expect some verbal response / discussion / mutual bullshitting when talking and when none is forthcoming, they can get unnerved. The feedback mechanism is missing. They expect chit-chat. In the absence they can confer multiple meanings which simply are not there.

People can read all sorts of shit into things. They may imagine I am sending a message when I am not. People might read this blog and imagine that I am messaging them directly.

The likelihood of miscommunication in the context of different cultures and frames of refence is enhanced. People may imagine that their customs are transferable. The French attitude of laissez-faire can be interpreted as complete indifference, fence sitting and not giving a shit, disinterest. It can be read, “that person can’t be arsed, sod ’em, they are not serious. Let’s move on to someone who has a point of view or opinion.”

In trying not to impinge a different message can be received. “Waste of time.”

I’ll assume with a high confidence integral that many people have made hugely erroneous assumptions over the years as to my motivations, what I am thinking and where I am coming from. This {my} assumption is based upon my interpretations of their behaviours and could be invalid. There may be transference of their ways of thinking and prejudices onto me.

There are certain types of people who like to argue the toss and “win” arguments / debates. They like to “score” points.

If someone like this expresses a point of view and one does not counter it, remaining silent even. They can assume agreement and/or victory. The lucky recipient of opinion may disagree totally but cannot be arsed to verbalise. Agreement can be assumed and the illusion of being right /accurate taken from the non-intervention.

Many introverts cannot be bothered to do the thinking for gobby extroverts. It is not important to them nor is share of air time or limelight kudos. The introverts can be disinterested in interaction.

I am reasonably confident that I have by accident, thrown a spanner into the works, with my interactions with the French medical profession. I have not behaved in the manner to which they are accustomed and they have not had the skill or experience to handle it. There has a result been extensive miscommunication and they have made assumptions about what might transpire, what I understand and how I perceive them. It can be very hierarchical. Most medics have not interacted as I have. My need to chat and discuss is vanishingly small when viewed from the angle of French customs. If I want to find out my first port of call is research which I will do thoroughly.

Once miscommunication has gone beyond a certain point the situation becomes very difficult if not impossible to salvage. This is because face and pride have now come into play and dominate, often unilaterally, subsequent interpersonal dynamics.

Postulate

The human notion of face and implicit loss of face is one of the most expensive bits of human folly in terms of relationships and loss of human life.

Face in this context is illusion, a socio-political construct which sells gossip magazines, tabloid newspapers and underpins the scripts of television soap operas.

“Face” lies aback assumption and miscommunication. People get offended, an emotional overaction, if things do not comply with assumption and social expectation. People can assume that the {their} worldview is common and that everyone holds similar prejudices to them.

Once people have gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick the tendency is to grasp this ever more tightly. Mis-perceptions and mis-assimilations of reality are more concrete and fixed than one might imagine.

There is no better demonstration of miscommunication than the game of “Chinese whispers”. Yet surprisingly, given this knowledge, the faceless and ubiquitous “they” are somehow the font of all truth and knowledge….

There is not a lot you can do or say which is contrary to the omniscience of “they”. No matter how well you communicate it, it cannot be perceived accurately because “they” dogmatically forbid it.

The wrong end of the stick beckons with the gravitational pull of a supermassive black hole…

The Illusion of Communication

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Shaw suggested that the primary problem with communication was/is the illusion that it is taking or has taken place.

People rarely bear this in mind. They tend to imagine and assume. They can imagine communication to be good and effective when it is anything but.

There is a big problem in groups. Communication within a group feels like communication has happened but communication outside of the group has not even started. That decided in a group is rarely discussed or conveyed outside the group. Acceptance and agreement is assumed outside the group because consensus has been arrived at in group. It can be a huge surprise that no inclusion outside of group has ever happened. It is a group-mind illusion.

We might call this the crony problem.

As a speculative example. It is possible that health care professionals are discussing my case amongst themselves and maybe one day, someone will have to present it as a fait accompli to me. I will not have been involved in the discussion and therefore very unlikely to trust or accept the fait accompli just because someone said so. If I feel by-passed or ignored then my response is unlikely to be compliant-acceptant. Because discussion has occurred within peer group the illusion of communication is solid and held to be true perceptually. There is in this case a national and language barrier to boot and add icing. Inter group consensus amongst the French is important to them as far as I can see. Foreigners are less important.

I have noted multiple variations on this theme over the years. Where “they” discuss me, maybe conclude and then never even mention it to me or check their understanding of me with me. I am not being paranoid. I have anecdotal evidence in a number of cases.

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Last Monday I had a CT scan of my chest and lungs prescribed by a lung specialist. Given my asthma, COPD and past history as a smoker, this is not a routine low risk screening. There are some results in my spirometry which need an explanation.

I am yet to receive the narration of the results from the consultant radiologist.

I have had a week in which to down load the images, start a loan of some medical CT imaging software and investigate the CT data. I have access to fibre broad band and can do AI image searches on CT snapshots. I have used the software to measure the dimensions of the (hopefully) bony growth on my thoracic spine and can see that it impinges upon my right lung. {This explains a slight niggle I have had there for a number of years.} I can read articles in medical journals like “The Lancet” and have a fair understanding of the gist.

I have watched videos of radiological grading of COPD, lung nodules and lung cancer staging. I have investigated diagnosis of the bony growth and it looks as though diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis (DISH) is the best putative diagnosis. I already know that this growth cannot be reversed. I have identified one lung nodule and think I can see where my ribs, broken in a rugby injury, have healed.

 I have no idea who is meant to follow up, if at all. I am in a vacuum.

Any subsequent conversation is unlikely to be aware or informed by/of the scope of my investigations. I’ll speculate that it will not be assumed to be thorough.

Any initial point of subsequent communication will have assumptions on each side.

I have asked that if there is anything important someone gets in touch. Silence suggests that there is no problem. This assumption could be fundamentally flawed in a clinically significant manner. People are busy and in medicine often pressure prompted. The body on the table in front of you is more important that the one in a computer file and the end of a telephone line.

The whole thing, like so many things here grinds to a halt of inertia. Who knows who is responsible or is in charge of taking this forward?

Loose…means that balls get dropped…and then it is very hard to overcome the inertia once more…

Laisser tomber – BOF….

The Wrong End of the Stick Dream 16-03-2025

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

An English idiom meaning to get something wrong by one’s approach by making stupid assumptions. To think that something you’ve been offered is the opposite of what it is. To confuse left and right. To turn an ability into a disability, a solution into a problem.

From the Urban Dictionary

Overnight I have had another dream in which some people get the very wrong idea about my “relationship” with them and on the basis of that make incorrect assumptions about what I must and will do for them, to help them out and otherwise clear up a mess which is entirely of their own making. They, in the dream, imagine that I am a bit like one of them, on the same level and with the same motivations. Which I am not.

The dream prior to that says that in some things I have no choice. I simply cannot do what might be convenient because it is evil.

This recurrent theme of somebody else’s mess has occurred numerous times over more than the last decade or so. It is not my mess, I cannot clear it up, nor can I like a fairy Godmother rescue them. Bonnie Tyler may be singing a song but it does not refer to me, sorry. I cannot offer any advice because it would fall on deaf ears.

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It is said that a warrior lives by challenge. I have found increasingly that the challenge for me is non-intervention, to leave well alone and to let others have the opportunity to learn. This notion of stepping back did not initially sit well. It turns out not getting involved or conflated into the drama of others, is both relaxing and economic. In the midst of some soap opera or other everything seems very important, with detachment that looks more like emotional over reaction. Some people like drama and thrive thereupon. They stoke it and feed.

I have learned that it is impossible to explain to someone caught up in and obsessed by their social conditioning, what things are like, and how they look, when that conditioning has nearly completely gone. It is one of those things that has to be experienced. No verbalisation can convey.

This may sound arrogant, as if I may be looking down. Is that real or your reflection which you see in the mirror I hold up for you. Am I haughty? Or have I at least partially risen above the soap-opera-plane?

Poor me, I am so misunderstood…

It that my being victim or a truth of sorts.

I do not feel victimised rather inured to, accustomed with, bored by, an experience I have had often in my sixty years.

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We’re only making plans for Nigel
We only want what’s best for him
We’re only making plans for Nigel
Nigel just needs that helping hand

And if young Nigel says he’s happy
He must be happy
He must be happy
He must be happy in his world

We’re only making plans for Nigel
He has his future in a British steel
We’re only making plans for Nigel
Nigel’s whole future is as good as sealed, yeah

XTC

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Arrogance and Omniscience

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

I’ll speculate the average experience that French people have of British expatriates leaves them with the impression that most cannot be arsed to learn the language or make any attempt to converse therein. Further that “les anglais” are not the sharpest tools in the box. Well over a dozen times now people have asked me if I am English, which is a lazy use of language. I am Welsh.

The lass on the checkout yesterday tried to speak a little English but we were better off in French. Get this a young checkout woman was making a decent effort with customers. More power to her.

I’ll speculate further that people make assumptions, me included.

Because I am generally to be found in partially soiled combat trousers, in relative need of a shave and have not combed my hair for over five years, there is no obvious way of knowing what is under my hood, intellectually speaking. As a consequence, I have been talked down to on a number of occasions and ignored on others. I once offered a prof in Rennes a recent paper on T (4,14) translocations in multiple myeloma written in French by a team of which she was an (attributed) nominal part. She ignored it and swept it to one side. She then laid down the law. This was very rude and showed a marked level of arrogance. She would not have done that to an Imperial College dude in the UK.

In the UK “they” deem the French arrogant which is perhaps the pot calling its mirror the kettle, black.

I have noted that as a general rule of thumb people do not like their omniscience being questioned which suggests a lack of confidence in the accuracy of their projected and professed omniscience and a self-important ideation in which any questions of/on deity are taboo. Omniscience is particularly sacrosanct here, it is embedded in the language, “vous avez raison”, you have reason and are justified.

The internet is littered with “experts” willing to offer and even sell opinion whether reliable or not. The tendency to the exponential growth in professed expertise and dubious qualifications which sound good, gathers momentum. I could buy a fake degree, if I understand it correctly. I could run courses on dreaming and offer certification, for a fee. I do have some kosher qualifications but not in dreaming. I could invent a name “The Pan-Celtic Gorsedd o Breuddwydion”, knock up a web site and hand out certificates. I could develop a syllabus, which might be better than most.

The problem is that the arrogant have next to no idea as to where the known for them ends, they have no notion of just how limited their knowledge is. They do not even acknowledge the unknown exists let alone the unknowable. But that in no way stops them being arrogant. The assumption that they are right is deemed to be a fact, a truism. Being prone to a form of pride-encephalitis their swollen heads refuse to bow in humility. That would mean a loss of face. Bullshitting and winging it are not uncommon.

I know that should I put on a well ironed shirt, my ~£1000 leather jacket, my polished expensive black leather shoes and peer over my rimless spectacles as if I was giving a viva exam, I could adjust perceptions.

But why would I need to dress up to overcome the arrogance and assumptions of others?

Similarly, if I used a 2mm length in the buzz cut and wore a white guru shirt and harem pants, people would interact differently. People do judge books, if they are able to still recognise what one of them is, by their covers.

I have been so very lucky over the years in that so many people have told me stuff, tried to teach me, told me what I am, told me what I am thinking. They have offered me their erudite opinions ever so freely.

I doubt any could actually mange to think what/how I think most of the time which is silent nothing.

Clearly, they know that I need to be educated by them, because I am in dire need of the profound depths of their wisdom and knowledge.

I’ll assume that few have firsthand experience of a creature like me, as I am today, and that if I acted fully authentically, few could hack it.

How on earth do you manage to give someone a heads up about what they are dealing with in a manner which is both clear, palatable and likely to be believed / understood / taken on board?

I have no answer despite many attempts.

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Based on the above am I an arrogant dickhead, what do you reckon?

What does your pure wisdom mind say?