Hypnotized by doing iterative goal subroutines and losing sight of the actual goal

Describing a concept several ways: toward a specific long-range goal, adopting an efficient iterative subroutine heading in the general direction of the goal, but without reference to the actual goal so as to check validity of efficiency of the subroutine for achieving the actual goal, the adoption of the easy iterative subroutine could carry one past the goal and never reach it.

Or, as in taking a long trip to a small town way across country, and getting on freeway system, setting goal for maximum distance per time and focusing down to that subroutine of taking fastest road, unable to think of getting off the freeways at an optimum point to go on slower roads that actually can get to the small rural town far off the freeway system, but instead they just keep going, fixated on choosing the freeway that enables them to go the furthest in the shortest amount of time, but which never arrives at the goal.

Much of the country seems to have opted for the iterative subroutines, without also checking before each iteration's start, that it indeed gets to the goal.

For example, the automobile system's car manufacturers, are they guided by the goal of the most fully efficient means of people getting from the locations chosen by the consumer, or are they guided by making the most profit for the least effort, without reference to the actual transportation goal... even using the advertising industry to waylay the consumer from attention to the real goals but instead be fixated on style, prestige or other dazzle?

Or in the medical system, is it guided by minimizing down-time of people, maximizing up-time for the people of the country; or is it endlessly guided by the easier-seen goal of making the most money for the least effort? Losing sight of the goal of maximizing up-time of the people of the nation, and instead focusing down on the easier-arranged goal of ensuring maximum income for the health-providers, it is likely that the short vision is seen that it is chronically sick people who provide the income, not well people. Health territorial control by licensing those who are allowed to provide health care, without actual guidance of maximizing the up-time of the population, the system is locked into whatever is provided by the above-mentioned system, substituting the much different goal of maximizing profits for least effort, instead of the goal of full functional dynamic health for the interdependent population. (Or are we not interdependent?)

The fixation on the lesser subroutines, without reference to the actual big picture goal, rarely can get us to the real goals. In fact, we are at risk of losing sight of the real goals; perhaps only vaguely realizing that things are not going well, having forgotten what our real goals were.

How to fix that problem? Or have we become too fixated on the subroutines that have rewarded us with paychecks and goodies, to be able to be flexible enough to adopt the means for getting out of the subroutines when they are no longer the most efficient path to the goals of the people so they can long-term thrive?

The form of evaluation called "does it make sense"

The form of evaluation called "does it make sense" seems to sometimes be substituted for using the scientific method.

And those who do so, seem to believe that "making sense" is equivalent to doing an unbiased truly adequate scientific experiment and observing the result.

Sure, each person needs to make quick decisions in the course of daily life, based on a wide variety of past experiences and knowledge. This seems to condition us to believe that such evaluations are indeed equivalent to the verifiable facts, when something off-the-edge of expectable events is presented to oneself.

Also, sometimes the esteem, the apparent credibility of the source, factors in on the "does it make sense" evaluation.

One way that has some success in getting past these barriers is to arrange to have people actually experiment on themselves in a group setting, and then ask "did it work or not" or "what were the effects that you found."

This approach has had interesting success for gaining some acceptance of a process that "does not make sense" to the average American, a process called "Emotional Freedom Technique" or "EFT" as its easy acronym. It makes no sense that mere tapping on specific points on the face and upper body, while focusing on the memory of some disruptive event, can quickly and permanently convert the disruptive memory into just a plain memory that no longer disrupts the person's life. Makes no sense that such a simple thing could provide such a lasting benefit - might even be called a blessing - for so little effort. It is like the memory of the event clearly remains, but the memory of the disruption is just gone, following the rather rote tapping process. Actually doing the experiment is the only way to enable people to get past the "it does not make sense" barrier for evaluating the technique.

In such an experiment there is the element of "subjectivity" one would expect to influence results. Being open-minded as to what results might happen is not always easy to do.

For example, if someone is presented with a technique that easily and quickly eliminates the stress of an event on a person, if the person has a deep belief in the stored pain of punishment for wrongdoing is required to force people to be a good citizen, such a stress-removal process might be seen as opening a Pandora's Box allowing all those bad people to be bad again; thus would be seen as quite a risk, and could influence any opportunity to make an unbiased evaluation of the experiment even on oneself. Also, if one has a history of punishing others to correct their bad behavior that had been displayed due to acting out the disruptive stress stored in them, it would put a burden of wrongdoing upon the person who has been judge-jury-punisher for so long; and be seen as the actual wrongdoer instead of the esteemed authority: possibly an intolerable situation, and thus would seek to keep things just like they were, forget this EFT stuff.

Is the stored stress of pain really necessary to prevent people from being assaultive to others? And, how much of assaultive behavior is triggered by stored stress of past pain in similar circumstances - it is said that people who are abusive, were themselves abused; monkey-see-monkey-do kind of phenomena. What would happen if all those little traumas of being abused were erased as if never were, with only the plain memories left intact? Or are bullies and the greedy powerful simply incorrigible and have to be controlled by fear of more painful trauma being imparted to them to get them to fit into society? - Really?

Another interesting phenomena regarding doing "EFT" is that it works so well that the person being tapped on in the experiment tends to not remember the stress that had long been there before, but only remembers the experience as just a cause-&-effect learning experience, so what; it works so thoroughly. The "Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle" - that is, in the process of observing something, you change that which was observed - is quite strong in these experiments; that which was there before is no longer there to measure, as if the nature of reality itself has changed for the person. Third party onlookers can observe the before and after results, however.

Sometimes the effort to set aside the form of evaluation called "does it make sense," and then doing the scientific method thing, doing an unbiased truly adequate scientific experiment and observing the actual result, can be outstandingly rewarding to one's life.

April First Day

Sometimes it seems to me, afflicted with the naive connection with other people, called "Asperger's Syndrome", that they consider all 365 days of the year as open season April Fools Day re how they treat Aspies. Yet earlier in life, it seemed an aspect of just one day of the year - April 1st. In Grade School - I think it is called "Middle School" now - on that day I attempted to remember to expect other students to con me into expecting something, then the prankster would excitedly shout "April Fool!" to announce success. And they expected me to also play the game with them; but it was very difficult for me to contrive such a thing; but I think I did so a few times, maybe. In later years i read some interesting sounding technical articles in the April issue of some magazines, only to discover it was an April fools joke on the readers. When I worked at the normally very serious company doing engineering and manufacture of car alarms in the 90's, one morning I came in to work, turned on my computer as usual, and then noticed an erratic clicking sound and eventually traced it to my computer, which was dropping some random letters off the typing on the DOS text screen and the letters were piling up on the bottom of the screen; I could re-boot the computer but could not type in the command to launch the antivirus program quickly enough before some letter would be dropped out of it and so it would not work. A couple of coworkers, including my supervisor, had come in early that day to put the harmless virus on my computer and got lots of laughs when I was trying to point out I had a problem with my computer that I could not fix. And yet, there is uneasiness when recalling Jesus' rare intense admonition against saying "Thou Fool" as being a most serious no-no to do. Overall, April Fool's Day is a helpful reminder to me that things are not always what they seem to be; and sometimes even deliberately so.