Author: Philosophics

Philosopher of language and author of speculative fiction

Music Property

Posted in art, Audio, economics, language, music, philosophy, politics, power, propertyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

The topic of intellectual property gets me every time. As much as I am opposed to the notion of property in general, intellectual property is a complete farce. Along with Rick Beato and David Bennet, Adam Neely is one of my three main music theory staples on YouTube. Here, he goes into more depth than I would have expected, but it’s worth hearing the perspective of a musician. I won’t break down his video fully because it speaks for itself. Instead, I’ll share my thoughts and pull out highlights.

Podcast: Audio version of this page content.

November 8th, 1548 is the day in history that the French King Henri II opened the door to intellectual property, an obvious giveaway to a benefactor, creating a publishing monopoly. He turned community cultural knowledge into property, turning the benefit of many into the benefit of one. This is the crux of capitalism—favouring the one over the many.

Before continuing, it seems that there is a schism in the legal system itself. In fact, it is very fractured even within this small domain. At the same time it wants to be precise and analytical, it’s dealing with a subject that cannot be analysed as such. To add insult to injury, it exempts musicians and musical experts and requires music consumers to decide the outcomes of trial cases. To be fair, even relying on so-called experts would lead to mixed results anyway. They might as well just roll the dice. This is what happens when right hemisphere art enters a left hemisphere world.

nature + work = ownership

Adam establishes a grounding on the theory of property rights à la John Locke’s ‘sweat of the brow’ concept, wherein nature plus work equates to ownership. He then points out how intellectual property has even shakier ground to stand on. It relies rather on notions of originality and creativity, two concepts that have no intersection with the left-hemisphere heavy legal and jurisprudence systems. Moreover, like pornography, these things cannot be defined. They need to be divined. Divination is no place for lay jurists. It’s a recipe for disaster. The entire English court system is rife with problems, but the left-brainers feel these are just trivial devils in the details. I beg to differ, yet I am voiceless because I won’t participate within their frame.

Adam also points out how out of date the law is insomuch as it doesn’t recognise much of the music produced in the past few decades. Moreover, the music theory it’s founded on is the Romantic Era, white European music that often ties transcriptionists in knots. If the absence of certain words to emote experience is a challenge, it’s even worse for musical notation.

In any case, this is a hot-button issue for me on many levels, and I needed to vent in solidarity. This video is worth the 30 minutes run time. His ham sandwich analogy in part V works perfectly. It’s broken into logical sections:

  1. 0:00 Intro
  2. 1:45 Part I – Rhythm-A-Ning
  3. 7:07 Part II – Property Rights
  4. 11:25 Part III – Copyright
  5. 15:58 Part IV – Musical Constraints
  6. 22:18. Part V – HAM SANDWICH TIME
  7. 26:51 Part VI – Solving copyright….maybe?

Give it a listen. Cheers.

The cover image for this is of Thelonius Monk (circa 1947), who features heavily in the video.

Trust and Performance

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Apologies in advance for another business-oriented post, but it ties in well with the latest McGilchrist content. Simon Sinek is the presenter, and he asks how the Navy pick the members of Seal Team Six—as he says, “the best of the best of the best of the best,” which happens to align with the way my toddler might tell me how very, very, very, very much she likes something.

Simon is an adept communicator with a high woo factor, but this isn’t about him. I’ve cued this video to a place where Simon illustrates the assessment mindset employed to separate the wheat from the chaff in the minds of the Navy command. I’ve effectively recreated the chart Simon draws, and I use it as a reference.

Performance is on the Y-axis and Trust is on the X-axis. Effectively, they assess competency on and off the battlefield, respectively. He describes Performance as capturing “Do I trust you with my life?” and Trust as “Do I trust you with my money and my wife?” Perhaps he’s reflecting the sentiment of the generation managing the Seals. Not judging.

His point is that no one wants an untrustworthy low-performer (bottom left) and everyone wants a trustworthy high-performer (top right). He goes on to say that high-performing, low-trust members are toxic to the team. The team is better off with a relatively moderate performer that is otherwise trustworthy. I suppose the rest is a wash.

Performance is typical left-hemisphere fare: how much, how many, how fast, and so on. Companies have a million and one ways to measure performance.

Trust is a resident of the right hemisphere. This is an intuition and can’t be measured.

As Simon points out, even without explicit metrics, if you ask each team member who’s the highest performer, they’ll all point to the same person. Correspondingly, if you ask who’s the most trustworthy, they’ll all point to the same person as well. I can’t say that I trust this judgment, and thankfully, they do document whatever performance measures they have determined are appropriate. This option is not available for trust, so they have to rely on intuition. I don’t know if they also rely on consensus. I will grant that if all of the members do point to the same person as having the highest level of trust–presuming some performance threshold has been met–and the goal is to find a leader for that team, this person would make a fine leading candidate. If this person happened to be the highest performer then great, but being the best leader doesn’t require being the highest performer.

A sports coach doesn’t even need to excel at the sport s/he is leading. Their function is to motivate and inspire the team. Of course, in the case of the seals, I’m presuming this role is more of a player-manager. Still, the cohesion factor should be taken into account.

Trust is a heuristic that can’t be measured, and it’s fairly simple to find examples of people who appeared to be trustworthy but turned out not to be. It’s also conceivable that a trustworthy person may be misunderstood and perceived as trustworthy.

My question relates to the object of trust. When I think of police officers in the United States, I think that their trust is in each other, but at the expense of society. So they will generally protect each other even when they are morally and legally in the wrong. This is not the trust we want to foster for the public good. But since in my opinion policing is not about the public good but rather maintaining the status quo power structure, this is not a problem for their hiring managers.

Tone Deaf

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Real music comes from the heart. Rather, it’s a right-hemisphere affair. Beethoven was such a true musical genius, he had to express himself even when you couldn’t hear himself.

Above, Rick Reato gives us a little appreciation for Daniel Barenboim’s rendition of Beethoven’s Op.110 Piano Sonata. I’ve included the entire opus below. The entire 31st sonata can also be found on YouTube.

To be a musician and continue to write when deaf is the same as continuing to write as a deaf author. Musical notation is just symbols as words are symbols in a different medium. The inspiration happens in the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere translates them into symbols.

Musically speaking, I am more left-hemisphere. I have ideas that spawn from the right, but without an instrument, I couldn’t articulate them. Not even relatively. Many of my own compositions are left-hemisphere fare. I either take a mathcore approach or perhaps something along the lines of Schoenberg, where I want to convey a pattern—an example that comes to mind is Tool’s Lateralis, wherein the lyrical melody is based on the Fibonacci sequence—, or I let the instrument do the talking and transcribe the music after the fact. I know just about enough music theory to be dangerous, but not enough to be self-sufficient. This is why I always tended to collaborate with music directors or someone competent in this along the way.

My point is that the ears are not necessary to produce music—at least after you’ve figured out how to articulate it. For the record, there are blind artists and sculptors.

Warmth

Posted in healthcare, nature, perception, philosophy, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

My mind is a Pachinko machine; my brain fatigued. Add to this the environmental distractions, such as breakfast, and it’s not conducive to focus. Today, it’s scrambled eggs and dry muffins—sans jam or butter, only some whipped substitute unfit for human consumption,

My prompt for writing the recent post on Professionalism was my reaction to the hospital staff and their demeanour—or as a colleague suggested in a comment, decorum. Perhaps I can remain focused on the words on this page as I type.

For service staff, warmth is a necessary ingredient of professionalism. This is particularly true for persons in the healing arts. The top indicator for pursuing legal action in a medical malpractice suit is the doctor’s bedside manner—personality and disposition—, whether the patient feels a personal connexion—a human connexion.

My experience in hospital is that the Medical Doctors have been hit or miss in the department—more miss than hit. I can even recall the names of the memorable ones. I suppose were I to be ill-treated, I’d remember as well. Here, it’s either treated nicely as a human or otherwise as an object in an assembly line. Thankfully, there have been no mistreatments or abuse.

The Registered Nurses had a better warmth ratio. Asking my circle of family, friends, and associates, this seems to be the general consensus. The rest of the staff were somewhere in between.

This warmth or human connexion extends beyond healthcare and to the service industry where human-to-human contact is made, even where that connexion is virtual—perhaps more so in order to bridge the distance. In my experience, the human factor tends to fall more at or below the level of the Medical Doctors. Any warmth is accidental. I am not saying that the people themselves lack compassion—though that could be the case. Rather, I am saying that they are moulded into automatons by the systems they are part of. It saps people of their humanity.

I started writing a post titled Bureaucracy is Violence, but I never completed it because I got lost in research. In a nutshell, bureaucracy is a Procrustean bed. I’ll leave it there for now. If you know, you know. Meantime, rage against the machine.

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

— Dylan Thomas

Professionalism

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We hear about professionalism all the time–being professional, acting professional–, but we may not know what it means or its origin. Many people might describe it as an attitude or disposition, perhaps a way of dress. “She wasn’t acting very professional; he wasn’t dressed professionally,” are common utterances. These are subjective statements, so let’s see if we can determine where this term came from and maybe how it’s used in the contemporary world. 

The root word, profess, derives from a Latin root that means ‘to take a vow’. More specifically, it means ‘to declare publicly’ or ‘to declare openly’. It’s a religious term akin to fealty.

From profess, we get to profession, which in Old French means ‘vows taken upon entering a religious order’. This was extended from theology to include law and medicine and then sciences and education. Appropriately enough, prostitution was added to the mix. By this time, the meaning had evolved to ‘occupation one professes to be skilled in or a calling’. This is where we jump to professionalism, which is where we are today. The bar is a bit lower in sports and entertainment, or perhaps the skilled portion is assumed. In these domains, it is meant to separate paid from unpaid (read: amateur) participants. For the record, an amateur is a lover of something. These people are in it for passion rather than money. The cynic in me says that some amateurs do it for the love of the game and the hope for a lottery payout, shooting for the big leagues.

The question remains how do we go from being skilled in something to the appearance of being skilled. In my experience, some people would prefer to work with a minimally-skilled person who looks the part than a skilled person who doesn’t. Certainly, one might argue that they prefer both, but we can’t always get what we want.

Communication Breakdown

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It’s good to remember that words are but a small portion of communication, which operates in a larger space. Body language, gesticulation, facial expressions, speed, tone, inflexion, and intonation, all combine to convey at least as much. This is why a written document is always lacking. This is why important or sensitive information should be delivered in person unless you are willing to risk misinterpretation.

In the post-covid reality, some people have moved a lot of their previously face-to-face communication to one of the various videoconference services. Infants rely highly on the face, and they express much through the face. Even domesticated dogs have expressive faces. The face conveys a lot of information. This helps to make videoconference a decent means of communication. It is a step up over the telephone for instant communication, but it still falls short. Even over the phone, one can still use delivery speed and pacing. Tone, inflexion, and intonation should be able to be conveyed, but this may also be limited by connexion quality as well as microphone and speaker quality. However, body language and gesticulation are still largely absent. What may be present can be lost over a small viewing screen or poor video quality.

What gets left behind or limited are cues of authenticity and trust. I remember I had a client in Texas who preferred not to speak with my manager and other executives from the New York office. We had all met in person in the pre-Covid world, and the Texans had judged these people as “fast-talking city folks” instead of real down-to-earth people. I may be a city-slicker, but I’m not as fast-talking. One of these men was a great communicator in my eyes, but these are city eyes. As for the other person, he had snake-oil salesman written all over him, but he tried to hide it in all his erudition. He was very book-smart but lacking in authenticity.

mean what you say, and you say what you mean

Allow me to pause for a moment to riff on authenticity. In one way, I don’t believe in authenticity because I don’t believe there is anything to be authentic to. I write about this in many posts and at length. On the other hand, authenticity is that you believe what you are saying—you mean what you say, and you say what you mean. So what you are asking me to believe, you believe yourself.

If spoken communication is so important, why do you write a blog? That a picture is worth a thousand words is telling. In fact, a picture may convey a thousand words, but it’s probably conveying almost infinite words—or it could be. Words typically fail to transmit metaphor and intent. If we want to be clear, we need to add all sorts of additional words to allay confusion. Perhaps we need to include background information, tangential information, context, and whatnot. By the time we include all of the information that would be conveyed by the face and gesture, we’ve probably overwhelmed the recipients with a document that reads like a terms and conditions page—the ones almost no one reads but tick the box at the end anyway.

What is lost or diminished over video is authenticity and emotional content. Of course, a person can convey sympathy, empathy, and compassion over the phone, but to me, it’s like the wire monkeys in the old psychology experiments by Dr Harry Harlow. You get something to cling to—perhaps even a blanket around the wire is better than nothing. If the telephone is a wire monkey, videoconference is the wire monkey wrapped in a Teri-towel. The human element is still missing. We’re interacting with a simulacrum.

Princess Leia Organa

Some people are amazed at the prospect of holograms in the manner of Princess Leia’s grand entrance. “Help me, Obi-Wan.” Indeed, help us all. It is a step in the right direction, but mind the gap.

In the end, we should at least strive to prioritise in-person communication. At least in the movies, when they want to tell a loved one that their combatant or police officer has fallen (read: died), they do this in person. It should be telling that this also convey’s an emotional message to the audience that is often received as intended. It may cost more, but be sure to evaluate this cost against the benefits. Consider the lost benefits as well.

Hospital Hospitality

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I find myself in hospital with an infection of a wound on my foot, so I’m taking an antibiotic IV drip. Fairly trivial. I’ve never stayed overnight in hospital, but they are suggesting that I expect to be here for a few days. It’s like a weekend getaway.  

I don’t prefer to interact with the healthcare system in the US. It’s the third leading cause of death, so better off avoiding it like the plague—not the Covid because it seemed to have been a consensus view to not avoid that particular plaque.  

Of course, the United States are a healthcare backwater. Not only do they have among the worst health outcomes, but the value calculus is also the worse because the cost is higher than most. Paired with sub-par outcomes, it’s just not an activity you want to participate it.  

If you are wealthy, you can buy premium services and achieve better outcomes, but this isn’t an option for most, hence the low bang-for-buck value.  

Currently being unemployed, I’ve got no health insurance coverage because unlike the rest of the Modern world, coverage is tied to employment. Private coverage can be purchased in the insurance marketplace, but costs are either prohibitive or coverage is homoeopathic.  

I happen to live in Delaware. Of all the states I’ve ever been in and needed to access healthcare, this is the worse. It could be because I am competing against Covid victims for access, so I try to keep this in mind. In the US, healthcare is a state-run system. In fact, insurance is specifically set up to require mini-monopolies in each state. If they could have managed to finagle control to the county or city level, I’m sure they’d have done it. There could be worse states. I’m almost certain they are. I’ve lived in Texas but never required care there, but I think Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and states like that might be worse. I could be wrong.  

This said I came in through the emergency room yesterday because other options were pretty much closed because of Veterans’ Day. Not only do they have a day to celebrate the people behind the mayhem the US unleashes on the larger world, but it interferes with workaday life.  

I was at ER reception and in a room within 10 minutes—5 minutes to a triage nurse and 5 minutes to my room, where I spent ten hours yesterday. The ER staff were good in the manner that I had a good experience, especially Christopher, my attendant nurse. The Medical Doctor, who I met last was the 10th staff member I encountered. So this wasn’t a bad experience, but the parts leading up to this were.  

Speaking with the nurse, he said that I was lucky because it’s not only usually a 3 to 6-hour wait, there were no beds available, which is why I was housed in the ER all day. He told me that last week, twenty of the twenty-one available ER beds were occupied by regular patients, so they had one room to cycle through until they could discharge patients and play musical beds.  

People seem to be documenting copiously, and there is a nice patient portal for them and me to track status, appointments, test results, and so on, but they still seem to ask some of the same questions repeatedly.  

I moved into a long-stay room at about 1 AM and have been here ever since. My new doctor visited this morning and pointed out that my foot looked infected. I confirmed that had been the vector for my visit. He continued to repeat what the ER doctor had told me, so I was able to complete his sentences for him. The best part is when I told him I had no insurance. He checked to determine if he had heard me correctly. When I confirmed, he told me a podiatrist would be visiting to inspect the foot, and he exited the manner of the Warner Brothers’ cartoon Roadrunner. I swear I even saw the puff of smoke.  

So, my weekend may bleed into the workday week, and I can only hope that I don’t become another number having entered with no life-threatening condition. Unlike other Americans, I won’t ask for hope and prayers. Keep them, you may need them yourself. And I won’t rely on GoFundMe as a fallback plan, a strategy of too many Americans in a country that can’t seem to get much right when it comes to human matters. You may, however, wish me well and glad tidings.  

Justin Hawkins Gets It

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The Darkness‘ singer, Justin Hawkins, interrupts this performance in Sydney to request that the audience put their mobiles down, save for Nick Rodriguez, who he selects as the official videographer. He provides space for Nick to promote his Instagram page and directs the audience to visit there for video footage, which is in fact this video. He participated in both of (Foo Fighters‘ late drummer) Taylor Hawkins tribute performances.

Podcast: Audio rendition of this page content

Justin has had his own YouTube channel for just over a year now. He offers his own perspective on a variety of music and answers viewers’ questions in one segment a week. He seems like a bang-up chap. This was shot as part of his recent tour of Australia and New Zealand. Here, he performs their biggest hit, I Believe in a Thing Called Love (2003), a homage to Queen and Freddy Mercury.

I share this here because it’s refreshing that he cares enough about his audience to force them to be in the moment and experience the show in first-person rather than through a video lens. I am not all that hung up on the no-phones thing, and I’m not sure he is either, but he wanted to make sure that they engaged directly for at least this one song.

Even if you only view the video still on the blog, you may notice the surfeit of band members. The surplus performers are The Southern River Band, the warm-up band. I’ll just say that it is rare for a headline act to invite this. In many cases, opening acts are treated like second-class citizens. So, kudos to Justin and The Darkness.

Underrepresented Class

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Podcast: Audio rendition of this page content

I’ve just finished reading Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary, having paused The Matter with Things to put it to bed. The book is divided into two sections. The first lays down the neuroscientific base whilst the second contains expository forrays. Technically, one might argue that there are three sections as the last unnumbered chapter seems to stand alone from the second part. It’s only one chapter containing some 36 pages, so I’m not going to lose any sleep over it. But this will not be a book review, as highly recommended as it is.

I’ve been a vocal proponent of hiring neurodiverse people into certain roles. Having read the book and absorbed the rationale, it’s easy to see how it aligns with and supports some of my own experiences. In particular, I’ve noticed that many companies hire autism spectrum on the Aspergers end of the scale. These people tend to be hired into IT and programming roles—functions already having reputations for being staffed with socially awkward and low EQ individuals, characteristics of people on the spectrum. It makes sense because left-hemisphere-dominant managers evaluate this hyper-left-hemisphere-dominant cohort as assets. Without getting too deep into the territory of stereotypes, in general, this group are laser-focused and doggedly pursue tasks at hand without tiring. I’ve met plenty of ADHD-diagnosed people in these roles, too—not as many, but also employed in technology-oriented positions.

The underrepresented class are right-hemisphere-dominant people. To be fair, I’ve encountered many Creative people in Agencies, but their right-hemisphere life is separate from their left and not appreciated in the workplace. They mainly exercise their right-hemisphere life outside of office hours on personal passion projects. I’d also be willing to bet that these people are not truly right-hemisphere-dominant. Rather, they have the ability to balance and allow the left hemisphere to take over during business hours.

In some cases, these people happen to have right-hemisphere insights into a project or have some creative inspiration off hours to benefit the work of the next day. But the right hemisphere is not time-boxed. It doesn’t function on demand. In fact, it shuts down on demand, and the left introduces bootleg knock-offs. Of course, this doesn’t matter, as it is probably better than their left-hemisphere managers and clients and good enough in their eyes. I’m not convinced they’d actually recognise the right-hemisphere solution as better because the left hemisphere prefers its own tribe anyway.

If you are reading this and you are saying, “They’re running a business. They can’t wait for weeks or months for a resource to have the epiphany of a creative solution,” you’ve made my point, and you’ve presented strong evidence that you are operating from your left hemisphere as well. There’s no shame in this. The first step is to admit there’s a problem.

My point is not to antagonise left-hemisphere-dominant people or the fact that they’re at home with other like-minded people. It’s only natural. They usually find right-hemisphere types to be too eccentric for their taste anyway.

But these right- or balanced-hemisphere thinkers, not given the space for their right-hemisphere to yield benefit, are likely in a Creative function, whether in art, illustration, copywriting, or some such. They are like unicorns outside of this context.

As for me, I am at times balanced and at times left. At other times, I’m purely right, though this is admittedly short-lived and unsustainable. But in a balanced state—in a right-shifted mode—, this is where my Gestalt comes into play. One of my roles is to evaluate processes. The left hemisphere analyses in components and pieces. Taking an analytical approach, I can document that the knee bone is connected to the shin bone and the shin bone is connected to the ankle bone and so on, but this requires context, something the left hemisphere is weak at. The left hemisphere will tell us that this is the bone connexion process, as it were. But it’s more than this. It’s meaningless without musculature and connective tissue and a nervous system and a circulatory system. And we’d likely want the person to whom the bones belong to be alive. And how do these bones contribute to function and perambulation? This is a larger system thinking approach.

System thinking is a recommendation for looking at processes, but this is right-hemisphere activity. Most people asked to perform this are left-hemisphere-dominant, so they give it short-shrift.

At the end of this rant, my point is that I hear all about equity, diversity, and inclusion, but this cohort is not only underrepresented but almost nonexistent. To be fair, many of these people wouldn’t feel comfortable behind your walls anyway, aren’t likely to prefer the constraint of your walls, and they’d probably feel like outsiders. But this is the challenge with true inclusion.

Classes are a left-hemisphere operation at the start—male, female, black, white, L, B, G, T, and so on. These are left-hemisphere constructs. But since you are already stuck in this place anyway, let’s consider expanding the neurodiverse class to include right-hemisphere people.

Most Interesting

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“You are the most interesting person I’ve ever met.”

Podcast: Audio rendition of this page content

This phrase was uttered to me the other day. Before you get on about my being braggadocious or humblebragging, let me disavow that notion straight away. But first some background and context.

Philosophics is my main blog, but I contribute to many. Philosophy is my passion, but occasionally I have a day job, and I have a blog centred on aspects of that. I was trying to decide whether this belongs there or here. I was video-interviewing for a contract position at a large bank. I even got an offer, so huzzah. As is typical, I went through my qualifications and responded to questions. This position involves managing a team, so I was asked what my approach was to teambuilding outside of work. Follows is a recreation of that conversation, which takes place about 40 minutes into the call.

Them: “How do you reinforce team cohesion outside of work hours?”

Me: “Full disclosure: I’m an introvert.”

Them: “Wait what? You are the most extroverted introvert I’ve ever met.”

Me: “This is 1 on 1. My preference is to be at home reading a book.”

Them: “I find that hard to believe. You are the most interesting person I’ve ever met.”

Me: “Like the guy in the Corona ads?”

Upon later discovery, they were Dos XX Equis ads.

Me: “In the past, I’ve always delegated that to someone with an interest and who cares. As I am a homebody, I am not even aware of what might be interesting. I tend to tag along, but I’m a teetotaler, and I’m not much into darts or pool, bowling or WhirlyBall. The best I can hope for is Trivia Night.”

These are team-building activities I’ve had to endure in the past. I’m not sure dragging a team through an art museum would do much for team cohesion. It may inspire a mutiny. I could be mistaken.

I’m an older chap, so you might assume that I’m just out of touch and set in my ways. You should know that I’ve always been like this. Parties and events bore me to tears. None of it resonates with me, and much of it is centred around alcohol (in the politically correct accounts). I’ve attended many and mingled, but in the back of my mind, I just couldn’t wait to take flight. I was in the entertainment business for years, and this was the norm and expectation, so I complied, but it was never comfortable.

In any case, I think he confuses the difference between someone being interesting and someone who can spin a good narrative. I’ve always been a storyteller. Believe me, I was not trying to embellish my background, I was just answering ‘how would you handle this?’ queries and responding with past experiences to make it real.

To be honest, if there is such a thing, I am overqualified for the job—whatever that means—, so they were afraid I’d get bored and quickly exit. The last thing on my mind was to embellish anything. This role is not a stretch. In fact, I was told that sometimes the tasks would be very tactical and mundane. I responded that I’d take what I could and appreciate not taxing my brain.

As I said, I managed to get an offer out of it.