The Neurodivergent Professor

As we conduct the great KEW acid tests I have to establish a baseline. In this episode I want to touch on a few elements of the 'human personality' and our 'global value system' that I think we can improve on. I think humans are great, but there are a few key items I want to mention:

One of the big issues is that we think linearly. We tend to look at things as either improving or getting worse - over time. For something to be 'good' or 'successful', it has to 'get better' through time. If things get worse over time, it is bad. This is rarely true as things are constantly changing. Getting better, getting worse, in a dynamic motion through time. Really, it depends on how much time, or how long, you are looking at a thing. 

This is part of dogmatic thinking. Regardless of discipline, our doctors, scientists, philosophers, plumbers, electricians, and fast food workers suffer from the indoctrination of their bosses, managers, leaders, and careers. For whatever reasons, we identify with what we do, and seem to accept that to belong we must allow indoctrination. Or maybe it's subconscious. I don't know. I just know that many of the people I see doing jobs not only identify with and follow whatever rules necessary to define what they do.

Along with the dogmatic and linear modes of thinking comes a certain arrogance that we are right. As individuals and as groups. I don't know if this is an artifact of the 'career identify' or the divisive nature of separateness, but there's a certain amount of undeserved surety that goes along with identifying with a group. That group must be right, right? Becuase I am right to be a member of that group, right?

The most obvious expression of these traits is the idea that humans are the 'best' or 'most' evolved species. If you consider evolution a linear process, we are the most recent primate to evolve. Primates are the most evolved mammals. In other words, it all ends in us. So we must be the 'best', right? 

All of this combines to produce this incredible arrogance that whatever humans do is great. Technological advances are the best example here. Obviously, dictators and racists are evidence AGAINST this theory, but we somehow blame those on other issues and this blame shifting allows us to maintain a righteous position at the top. 

Yes, we have cured some diseases. We live longer. We produce more food. But if you really look at the whole system involved in these advances, there are far more consequences than the ones we consider. In short, it is also possible that our technological advances have not been 'worth it'. 

This of course, comes down to what 'worth it' means. What is 'good'? What is 'the best'? What is 'success'? These definitions have to do with our individual values and can be subjective.

However, I will argue that there is also a 'global value system' that is suggested or indicated by nature herself. I think there are fundamental and underlying rules about what is 'good' in the world based on millions of years of evolution. This will be part of the acid tests. 

In short, what does nature suggest about how humans can live instead of or in addition to the ways we are currently living? Let's for a moment consider that we might not be 'perfect' or even 'good', and look to the natural world to shed some light on the conversation that follows.

More next week. Thank you for your attention. Please comment and subscribe to join the discourse!

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I apologize that it has been nearly a month since my re-introduction post and Episode 101. I have been overwhelmed with thoughts, ideas, tangents, trailheads, and rabbit holes regarding this new direction for my blog/podcast/and YouTube channel. In this Episode, and over the next 4-5 I will start to unravel this rats' nest into what I hope to be an interesting adventure.

An acid test is a generic or colloquial term to refer to an assessment of value. Often, it is referencing something like a pH indicator test, where an acidic substance will turn color when the indicator is added, and an alkaline substance will not.

Many may also know of the "Electric KoolAid Acid Test", a book by Ken Kesey that describes the adventures of the Merry Pranksters when the new drug LSD leaked out of the controlled labs and spilled out into the streets of San Francisco. In the last Episode I talked a bit about this and got a few things wrong that I correct this week.

My point in using the term Acid Test is not to take LSD (though I am curious about having a new psychedelic experience) but to reference another acid: Deoxyribonucleic acid, to be specific. Or DNA.

I intend to use DNA as a proxy representative measure of Nature and pose the question of whether Nature can inform us about life's Big Questions. Specifically, I wonder if we can use Nature to inform 

The meaning of life

Why we are here

What our purpose is

And as a measure of how well we are doing as a species on planet Earth.

It will take me 4-5 Episodes to unload, but I hope you will come along with me on the journey. 

You can subscribe to my podcast on all the big podcasts hosts and the YouTube channel, of course. Search for Knowledge + Experience = Wisdom. 

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It's been six months. Though I wasn't sure what would happen with KEW, I knew I would be back. 

After 100 Episodes and over 30 interviews, I am inspired to work on new material here on Knowledge + Experience = Wisdom. I'm ready to get back on track releasing new Episodes weekly in podcast and YouTube video formats.

Follow here, at Knowledge + Experience = Wisdom on your favorite podcast host, or on the YouTube channel (links to this episode below). 

In the last six months I have been working on another project with my buddy Paul Gadola. You can find interviews with him in the Links tab on the KEW homepage. He and I are doing a YouTube channel called Being Better Being and we are already 20 Episodes in! On BBB, we discuss Paul's new book called, "Integrity and Peace: Loving Your Neighbor and the Path of Truth" which you can get directly (email [email protected]) or on amazon.com. If you like KEW, you'll probably enjoy our discussions on BBB.

Otherwise, I have been doing a lot of personal work and learning at a rate higher than I can remember. I turned 50. My second daughter went to college. We started homeschooling my youngest. Lots of changes but lots of the same, too.

This Welcome Back Episode offers a preview of what's to come in the next one to 100 Episodes on KEW. In short, I am going to more thoroughly investigate how we can use nature to help us answer the biggest questions of human kind. 

Why are we here?

What is the meaning of life?

What is my purpose? 

If you are familiar with the 'Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests', you will LOVE where I am headed. Hope you enjoy the Episode and will stick around (and share with your friends!!) for the future of KEW.

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In the most recent Episodes I shared the capstone of my work thus far on Knowledge + Experience = Wisdom. Episodes 99 and 100 represent the culmination of the preceding 98 Episodes and 30+ interviews. The Uniqueness Imperative and the Evolution Paradox emerged, organically, from two years of podcasting and blogging on KEW and I appreciate your help elucidating those ideas. 

For the past couple of weeks, (May - June, 2022) I decided to write a book to further develop these two ideas. But I realized the ideas were still bigger than that. If you have been here awhile, or listened to a few Episodes, you'll see that the subject matter is quite broad. I realized, recently, that I can't focus solely on the DNA elements of my work. So, rather than write one book, I will be writing MANY books.

And the vehicle for some of these books is the paid writing website Medium. Fortunately, Medium is doing well for me and I have already reached many more interested people there than I have in two years with my wordpress site, podcast, and YouTube channel. I also learned that I have a keen interest in writing. Which makes sense, I have written a doctoral dissertation, a master's thesis, a self-published ebook about my time owning a craft brewery, and a dozen or so peer-reviewed scientific papers. I just kind of forgot writing was cool.

Unfortunately, that means I am choosing to spend my time writing as opposed to podcasting or vlogging (but don't worry, there's one this week, see links below).

It is also unfortunate that Medium is a paid site. Readers can only access a few articles a month for free, or have to subscribe for $5 a month. It is incredibly valuable for me, but may not be for everyone. 

However, I will be resharing many of the articles on this very site, www.chrisburcher.com Knowledge + Experience = Wisdom. You can still experience the next wave of focus, just without the audio and video components. I like to think the next '100 Episodes' will be fine-tuning the previous 100 and ultimately result in a handful of ebooks and one or two magnum opuses focused on the Uniqueness Imperative and the Evolution Paradox; something honoring the magic of DNA.

Here's a link to my Medium page for those who are interested. It really is a fun website if you like good old fashioned reading. https://medium.com/@kpluseiswise

Everything about our 'biological-ness' is really about change. The developmental stages are all change. We all grow bigger through life. We go through a brief period of fast growth, then switch over to a period of reproduction. These things are true for all life forms.

We share, with ALL biology, this unanimous and ubiquitous feature. We change. 

The universe also changes. The laws of thermodynamics essentially describe these changes. Physics studies the how's and what's about these changes. We take what we learn and flip it over in time to try and predict how things will change in the future.

If there's one thing you can count on in life (biology), it is that things will change.

If you don't like the weather, wait a big. It will change.

When I googled quotes about change I was surprised to find out there hasn't been more said about this phenomenon. This truism. This, dare I say, FACT. 

There really aren't many. . . maybe NO other things we can be as sure about that things are going to change in the world. On a regular and recurring basis.

In fact, there might not be much more to really know or understand.

Yet, and here's the PARADOX, our lives today are very much obsessed with NOT changing. With ending change. With forcing a stop to a process that is as real and universal as life itself. 

Talk about a cognitive dissonance.

Or banging your head against the wall.

With the introduction of the Evolution Paradox, I merely point out this extreme irony. That life is entirely about change, and dealing with change, yet today's societies around the globe are obsessed with trying to avoid change.

I can't think of a worse situation to be in. It's like being a fish that's allergic to water.

There is no winning in this race. The universe is going to win. 

There is no energy strong enough to overcome this power. 

It is useless to resist.

And, what you resist, persists.

Until we can wrap our head around and EMBRACE change, we are doomed. 

And not in a dystopian way, simply in a severe amount of suffering way. 

Me? I'd rather accept a minimal level of suffering, allow life to unfold and change any way it wants, and learn to roll with it, baby.

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I kind of can't believe the title of Episode 99, but this is the culmination of the previous KEW Episodes and Interviews. Hopefully this body of work, thus far, has given me a bit of credibility. Coupled with my PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and over a decade in multiple modalities of therapy, counseling, and coaching, I think I have some room to 'weigh in' on some of the big questions.

One of the emergent themes from the Are vs Should Problem investigation, which includes a 50-Episode arc and interviews with 13 unique individuals (links to all here) is the Uniqueness Imperative.

I honestly believe we are supposed to REALIZE our uniqueness. Instead, we are taught to depress our individuality and conform to societal norms, laws, and culture. Don Miguel Ruiz calls this a 'dream' of 'domestication' where we are essentially trained to conform to our local rules. Our families, churches, schools, and villages encourage us to 'be like them' in an effort to teach us how to live.

While this indoctrination is well-intentioned, it has devastating effects on our identities. 

And all around you are examples of this devastation. Hunger. War. Anxiety. Suicide. People are struggling.

And, don't get me wrong, I am not looking for some utopian existence, I believe there will always be a baseline amount of struggle and suffering - in a very Buddhist sense - but this is extreme. 

Hopefully we can agree that these examples suggest we are doing something wrong. And this is the problem I aim to address. 

And one of the solutions, is to ask the question: "Rather than suppress our individuality and conform to societal norms, what if we encouraged each other to develop our quirks and realize our uniqueness". How would this look in the world? What would be different? Would things look better or worse?

This Episode is the end of the first part of the KEW experience. In Episode 100, I will introduce the other half of this experiment, and in Episode 101 begin the next phase.

From Episode 101 on, I will be writing a book in real time focusing on the Uniqueness Imperative and the material from Episode 100. I hope you will join me. Please subscribe to my blog here, to the podcast and/or the YouTube channel to make sure you don't miss out. 

And, as always, I encourage you to comment so that we have a true discourse rather than just me talking.

Episode 99 will automatically populate your podcast app or your YouTube feed if you subscribe.

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Are you familiar with the 'bell curve'? It's also called a 'normal curve', or a Gaussian distribution because it describes what statisticians call a 'normal distribution'. Here's the wikipedia definition:

a probability distribution that is symmetric about the mean, showing that data near the mean are more frequent in occurrence than data far from the mean

And here's a video link if you want a more detailed explanation. 

Essentially, this picture is a visual image of how 'typical' things sort of fall out in the world. 

Like size of largemouth bass. If you could remove every single bass from a lake, measure them all, and enter the number of each fish in each size class it would *theoretically* look like this.

If you could measure the height of every person on earth it drew vertical lines for the number of individuals in each size class (by total inches, for example) it would also *theoretically* look like this.

And the same goes for just about anything on earth you can measure. Theoretically.

I add the theoretical part because, for lots of reasons - mainly reality, things don't always follow a normal distribution. Sexual selection, for example, may skew the human height graph one way or the other depending on mate preference for taller or shorter partners.

But so what, anyway? Well, the normal curve shows the probability of finding an example for a given characteristic. Like, how likely is it to find a man that is 4' tall? This would fall in the very left hand tail of the bell curve representing a very low probability. Finding a 5'7" person would be relatively easy, as it falls in the middle part of the 'bell'. 

So the cool thing about normal curves is that they visually illustrate some parameters. I like the say that statistics helps us understand how likely something is to happen. I talk about this in many Episodes including Fear and Analysis Paralysis. We often over or underestimate the likelihood of things happening to us, and normal curves are a way of illustrating reality.

For example, a lot of people have a fear of flying because they are afraid of a plane crash. If we could actually see the normal curve for flying success, or the probability of a crash or problem we might feel more at ease. Especially if we were to compare this figure to one that shows the probability of crashing in a car. Being able to visualize the relative sizes of probability, or chance, can help immensely.

Once you learn how to read a normal curve, you can understand quite a bit about the data. Normal curves show all kinds of statistics like the average, variance, range, maximum, and minimum values. These can also help you see the pattern, get a better idea of probability or likelihood, and feel better about your decision making.

As I say in the video below, averages are incredibly misleading estimates. We use them all the time to talk about things we might not really understand. Being able to more accurately interpret what is going on is a skill we can all develop to live better lives.

I have lots of exciting things coming up and share more in the full video and podcast. I will be starting a book and blogging about it starting with Episode 101. I am also releasing a new YouTube only project called 'Being Better Being' with my good friend Paul Gadola, you know him from multiple interviews on KEW.

So please follow, share, subscribe, and tell your friends so we can enjoy the future together.

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Do you put on your oxygen mask first?

Then what?

We help our kids, our partners, the people sitting next to us.

But we don't think too much about what to do next. We are sort of obsessed with taking care of ourselves.

And some of us suck at it. If you, like me, struggle with codependency, people pleasing, and conflict avoidance you may actually struggle with putting your needs first.

Getting your needs met is THE FIRST STEP toward a better life.

Unless you're incredibly selfish, then you need to practice empathy.

But for those of us who are defining our values, working on ourselves, and trying to make the world a better place, it is IMPERATIVE we figure out how to take care of ourselves.

Not just because we owe it to ourselves, but we owe it to EACH OTHER.

To change the world we have to change ourselves.

We have no hope. Literally NO HOPE in changing the world if we can't get our own selves straight.

But we can! And we must.

But . . . . the next steps. The HOW do we fix the world once we have our own oxygen mask on?

It may seem hard. It may seem overwhelming.

But I actually believe it will be easy. It's the first step that is the hard part.

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You know you do it. You think you are right about something, only to find out you were incredibly, undeniably, 180 degrees wrong.

It happens. To all of us. To all of us humans, anyway.

We all think we're right. If we didn't, we wouldn't have conviction. We'd be open. We'd be undecided.

Once we have made a decision, well, that decision is correct, correct? I mean, right?

But not always.

Many of us are plagued by self-doubt. And this might be a healthy thing in this context. We should carry with us a humble sense of openness to being wrong. Sure, we can feel right. We probably *should* believe in ourselves and in our unique right-ness. But even in our most confident I think it's important, even critical, to leave the door open - even slightly ajar - for being wrong.

So 'right' is kind of like 'truth'. They may or may not exist, but it doesn't matter because we'll never be or find either one. The key is to get close. 

To approach being 'right' with just enough humility that allows us to also be wrong.

Because we always need a direction - something to work toward. A HYPOTHESIS, if you will.

And a hypothesis is just a fancy way of saying an idea that we think and/or feel fairly sure is real. Something we figure makes sense. Helps us answer a question, or achieve a goal, or make a decision that is important. We need to move through our days, after all.

But every hypothesis NECESSARILY and BY DEFINITION has a companion with it - the 'null' hypothesis.

The null hypothesis is that door you left open, even just a little bit. The null hypothesis basically says, 'well, my hypothesis MAY not be truer after all'. Or, in other words, 'I could be wrong'. 

So every guess, decision, idea, direction, feeling, surety, or move forward we have MUST always be accompanied by an opposing force that allows for all of those things to be inaccurate. Incorrect. Wrong.

That's how science is set up and we can equivalently set up our every day thinking to mimic this . . . . modesty.

So we always have an option of being incorrect. Which directs us toward the next question of interest. 

Well, that didn't pan out, how about this?

The secret is not go get bogged down. To move forward. To let the water roll off your back as if you were a duck.

This behavior is healthy. And it has the added benefit of helping you appear less arrogant and more likable:)

So the Type II and Type I error are basically which hypothesis you choose. This system allows for mistakes. Sometimes you think you're wrong but you aren't. Other times you think you're right but you're wrong. 

So not only do we leave the door open about being wrong, we leave a couple more doors open that allow for similar errors.

Makes you wonder how we could possibly move through life thinking we are always right.

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Do you enjoy friendly competition?

Many of us do. Some say it brings out the best in us. Some thrive in an environment where other people push us to perform at higher and higher levels.

I can appreciate friendly competition like this. But I rarely see it.

And sometimes even friendly competition turns sour. Feelings get hurt. Tempers flare. The high level of energy surrounding competitive exchanges can often spill over into anger.

In Economics we talk about competition in markets, and often talk about 'pure competition' vs other types. In pure competition the conditions are perfect and the playing field is perfectly fair for all parties.

This rarely happens. This fairness.

It's hard to separate our emotions from competitive interactions, and thus the 'pureness' falls short. 

These are the types of competitions I have been privy to most often.

Most of the competition I have seen involves hurt feelings, anger, and even violence. That doesn't sound very pure or perfect to me.

In my ecological endeavors I learned a lot about competition in nature and how the avoidance of competition leads to speciation. This is an amazing artifact of evolution and, in essence, controls biodiversity. The better we are at avoiding competition, the more species there will be. The more species there are, the more redundant and adaptive our species is. This ensures our persistence and stability in the face of an ever changing environment.

AVOIDANCE of competition. In fact, competition in nature is rare, despite what you might see on the National Geographic channel. 

There are lots of other types of biological interactions that prevail. Like cooperation. Symbiosis. Even parasitism is more common than competition in nature.

Because competition only happens when resources are limiting.

Or in arenas, race tracks, and soccer fields across the world. 

Think about how we interact. Think about how it makes you feel. Beyond a friendly game, what does competition really do for us?

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