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Tag Archives: objectivity

Believe everything you hear? I hope not – for your sake.

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Posted by threeresolutionsguy in Character and Competence, Discipline

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7 Habits, Abertillery, competence, domestic violence, fake news, integrity, media, objectivity, poverty, seven habits, statistics, stephen covey, time management

Today, I want to write about objectivity. Objectivity is a discipline, and one that is not easy to execute because we are all biased by our experiences, upbringing and value systems. What we see, we see through a lens that has been fogged to some degree, unless we occasionally choose to clean it in an effort to ensure that some clarity is possible. I raise this issue because what I see going on around the world is, it appears to me, the result of deliberate fogging of lenses by interest groups that have become so powerful because of social media that we risk going down a path that could so easily be avoided if we just asked better questions when ‘facts’ are trotted out for us to gullibly accept.

I heard a statistic the other day. The speaker (a socialist) was upset that 1 in 5 children lived below the poverty line. I thought, “Is that possible? That would require 8 houses in my street to be ‘in poverty’, and for every street that had no poverty there would have to be streets with massively more than one in five.

Of course, if you conclude that children don’t earn any money, and that relative poverty is defined as poverty created when people earn less than 50% of the average wage, then that statement could be true – but the kids weren’t necessarily poor or living in a poor household.

Another one – According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales year ending March 2020, an estimated 5.5% of adults aged 16 to 74 years (2.3 million) experienced domestic abuse in the last year. Extrapolated, that means that domestic violence takes place in two houses in my street, or more in other streets. Or is it more likely that the same victims are being abused by the same perpetrators and this isn’t reflected in that figure? A third – and a remarkably consistent one – is that 250,000 people go missing from home annually. When I was a cop, the same girl went missing from a children’s home every day – are those separately counted, or is each a separately counted incident?

Of course, I don’t know. I do know that figures can be warped; as I say, I was a copper and crime figures – well, least said, soonest amended. The COVID stats are hilariously warped – crushed by rocks but died within 28 days of a positive covid test? Boom, another covid death. And more justification for lockdowns and other restrictions on freedom. (The Sue Grey Report came out yesterday. Ironic.)

So the discipline I invite people to consider is this: to question what you are told, and not blindly accept everything you hear. I say this because I see the anger, ire, combativeness and hatred created by facts that simply aren’t yet verified.

This week, a child reported he’d been racially abused, chased, and lost a finger having climbed a fence to escape. I don’t want that to be true – the thought of kids that age being racist in 2022 is sad. If it is true, let punishment follow. But years of child abuse input (and some personal experiences) state that a child should not be interviewed by untrained staff, nor asked repeatedly what happened, because of the risk of accidental embellishment if they feel they’re being challenged.

Yet the press, celebdom and interest groups have all had their bandwagon launched, and statements have been demanded and occasionally delivered from those in authority, all of whom are angry and incensed – before any police investigation has even started. And all of them are supposed to be intellectual and objective. Their bandwagon behaviour suggests otherwise. It means either they’re not astute enough to wait for the facts to be fully provided (bad) or it suits their agenda to spout (really bad and malevolent).

So my plea today is to wait. Use the gap between stimulus and response to decide if you have enough data to believe what is being put to you.

Because that’s exactly what you’d hope would happen if YOU were the subject of conjecture, wouldn’t you?

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Stephen Covey taught me Scepticism… (bear with me).

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Posted by threeresolutionsguy in Character and Competence

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character, competence, cynicism, discipline, hyrum w smith, learning, objectivity, purpose, scepticism, service, stephen covey

I have always been ‘intelligent’ in the sense I could pass examinations, but I don’t think I became really intelligent until I started studying the works of Stephen Covey. He didn’t make me any cleverer in IQ terms, but he did open my eyes to a new mental approach to things. He showed me how people – you, me and an awful lot of politicians and celebrities – are psychologically flawed, and in recognising those flaws I realised just how much what we are told is ideologically biased. Not necessarily on a political ideology – just a set of ideas about which the speaker feels certain, even though they have no empirical, objective evidence for the firmness of that certainty. It is, to use a Markleism, a ‘lived truth’ and is therefore subjective.

I hear a ‘fact’ now, and I realise that it is rarely factual. It is routinely an opinion. It is an opinion honestly held in the sense that the person stating it (usually) genuinely believes it, but it is rarely an absolute, objective truth. I now question everything I hear, because I know about Values. They believe what they are saying because they want it to be true. And anything which challenges that ‘truth’ is not only wrong, it is an absolute lie!

Attaching emotion to an argument colours it, so when I hear emotion – anger, passion, hate, fear – then I also hear bias. And just because I disagree with you doesn’t mean I am right, either. Objectivity requires acceptance that you may also be biased.

Covey taught me many things, but one of them was to see things not through ‘my eyes’ but through ‘principles’. The main principle of debate and learning being – ‘have we heard ALL the facts?’ So I accept nothing, believe no-one and check everything.

For example, when I hear someone on one side of the political divide start insulting the other,  I remember Desmond Tutu’s advice that when in debate, instead of raising your voice, raise the quality of your argument. Try explanation and a quiet, considered voice – and I’ll hear you.

When I hear ‘There is no evidence to show …….. (whatever the speaker does not wish to believe)’, I ask, “Have you even looked?”

When I hear ‘something terrible IS going to happen’ (e.g. Brexit), I recall Hyrum W. Smith (author of What Matters Most) saying ‘ Results take time to measure’ and recognise none of us can tell the future. Try ‘might’ happen – and I’ll listen.

When I hear ‘you MUST do it this way’, I look at the background material and frequently find that ‘this way’ is not the ‘only way’. Indeed, it is occasionally the wrong way. Question what you are told – even if the answer remains the same, you will understand it to a far more informed degree.

When I hear talented actors, who I’ve watched grow up from their first childhood films to mature individuals, telling me their opinions about politics I ask, “When exactly did you do your—–ology degree?” They have a right to an opinion – but all too often they have no ‘authority’ behind it. (And as I get the impression that ‘creatives’ are almost consistently left-wing, I also ask how that stands up, statistically?).

And when I hear an academic’s opinion that is based on their expertise, I remember that they may have found the evidence they sought, but was it objectively tested? And you can get a degree with a 40% pass mark, by the way. Having letters after your name may just be confirmation of a bias!

In essence, what I am promoting, here, is to live a life of healthy cynicism, where you question what you hear – even your own experiences. The last thing this world needs is to move from objective reality to ‘lived truths’.

Listen, but assess. Could they be wrong – because if they are and you act on that, you’re wrong too.

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Life without government – yippee(?)

23 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by threeresolutionsguy in General, Purpose and Service

≈ Comments Off on Life without government – yippee(?)

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anarchy, government, objectivity, taxation

I’m afraid I am briefly going into politics, a sticky subject but read on, it’s on one question. A friend on Facebook, and some of his friends, opined that the world would be better off without government as governments caused wars, repressed the people, and so on.

Imagine a world without government. There would be no interference with our lives, and no taxation. Everything I earned would be mine to spend as I pleased. Health authorities could act without focusing on targets, focusing instead on providing health care to those in need. Teachers could spend their time educating our children instead of preparing them for tests and making sure that the target-driven paperwork was completed. There would be no call for a military to defence the country’s interests against the malevolent designs of other governments. Society would have no bipartisan politics to concern them and could start looking at what was ‘right’ and not what was ‘ideological’. Heaven.

Imagine a world without government. No taxation, so I would be responsible for building my own roads, parks and amenities. Which of course I would, all on my own without the help of other people also acting in their own self-interest. I could also spend on my own health care with the money I had left from buying a road. I could ‘send’ my children to a local, self-funded home school with the money I had left after that. Then, when someone with a malevolent motive such as greed, or even hunger, decided to attack me for what I had, I could buy a gun and defend my stuff – other people can defend their own, of course. And we’d save on the cost of government, elections and other waste.

You see, the one thing that government and taxation does is that it makes me pay for the better good. As a middle-income earner giving 25% of my money to government, I was forced to pay towards the security of the country, the building of infrastructure and the safety and health of the less privileged. Without government I would have been unable to do that unless I did so with other like-minded people in several, broad ranging and diverse special-interest groups all vying for my time and money. And let’s be frank, inability is one thing – willingness would be another. You complain that the rich would not contribute to the better good – well, many do, but taking your point, would they be any more likely to do so if there wasn’t a government making them contribute something, even if the loopholes reduced that level of ‘something’?

Government is, generally, good. People in it may occasionally be lowlifes, but in general the alternative is not as sweet as anarchists would like to think. Perhaps holding governments to a higher standard is a better objective than just getting rid.

Weekly Challenge

Question your motives, see if they are as objective as you think. There is often an alternative viewpoint that you can still accept, if only you are willing to see it might exist. That is proactive.

And wherever possible, exercise your vote.

Blog Part

This week, I are mainly being ill. (British readers will understand that terminology.) I think the diet made me a bit constipated, so I took a pill and the world fell out of my bottom. (Too much information?) I was then very, very tired for a day but recovered enough to execute another 5.74 mile run only for my knee to flare up as it did last week – I’ll have to monitor that but resting seems to do the trick. I therefore anticipate doing 4 runs a week instead of 6. On the plus side, 194lbs, so inside the target.

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