ON WHAT MEAT 

 I had a long, entirely unnecessary call with a customer contact yesterday.

Because of the peculiar reason for the call and the fact she was very forthcoming about the obvious fact what we were discussing and the reasons she had requested the call were entirely irrelevant and uninteresting to her, we were on the phone far longer than either of us anticipated and discussed and shared matters completely irrelevant to our dubious and improbable relationship.

She told me about her adult son who has some undisclosed disability. Her relationship with him has defined her purpose in life and shapes her expectations, plans and fears.

Random fact: She stopped going to parent-teacher conferences when he was in second grade because it was too much. He is now twenty-five.

Another son also just had another grandchild. They just keep having babies, those two. This all takes place in Kansas.

Memory came up in context of what we were actually on the call to discuss. I mentioned that experience of going into another room and forgetting why.

She got excited and stated she was interested in studies of psychology and had learned that the physical boundaries like doorways were prompts for memory.

She didn't say it like that. I am interpreting. I of course then added to her superficial knowledge and my own by sharing the free energy principle and the idea our brains create models of the external world.

During the longer course of the conversation as I shared more and more stuff I have been cribbing, she asked a key question.

We learn these things and can repeat them, but does the information translate into anything useful we can act upon? Does learning influence behavior is another way of putting it.

She is a reactionary person, fascist adjacent if not openly fascist. I am interpreting again from my interactions. Only fifty-four, she seems much older.

I answered her question with an example in sports, testosterone's influence and how a coach, knowing how T causes overconfidence, undervaluing others' input and impulsivity, will use drills and rules to curb young players' behavior in the game.

It was not the best example but it was what I could come up with and factually on point.

What I want to highlight is her ambivalence to learning, to her own evinced interest and enthusiasm, and her skepticism of the value of knowledge and the implied doubt of her own interests in other respects.

Here we see in the wild the origin of doubting science, of devaluing learning altogether, and of how we can at times act against our own self-interest.

At one point in the conversation, without conscious intent, I brought up my education degree and how it had served me in contexts outside teaching.

She has an MBA. She had started the program dubious of its worth and of her own interest in it, but the studies had then gone on to define her life's passion.

These discussions did not come up as conscious rebuttals of her skepticism. The sequence was disjointed. Only this morning did I start to make connections.

Humans are fascinated by things, and curious. But then our biology and social relations retract for practical reasons from what seemed relevant and then later pales and stales in light of other priorities real and imaginary.

We descend the heights too quickly having enjoyed the view too briefly to understand coherently what we glimpsed and, all too often, fail to integrate the insights into who we are now and going forward.