When we were born, we were in perfect harmony with our heart and the world. When we enter this world, we don’t have anxiety, depression and stress. Through the process of growing up and trying to function in this world according to societal expectations and norms, we distance ourself from that perfect resonance of peace.
The spiritual journey is about making our way back to our innocence so we can connect with the peace that existed when we started. The distortion we have is that we believe when life is better on the outside, only then we will feel peaceful on the inside. We barter and negotiate with life – “When xxx happens, then I will feel happy, fulfilled, relaxed, peaceful. And so, we give away our power. For as long as this is the process, we will elude peace.
Does life rob you of peace or can you find your way back to experiencing the messiness of life from a place of peace? By messiness, I’m referring to the frustration of drivers on the road, to things not going according to plan, to life not working out the way you expect it to. Can you embrace all of it from a place of peace? When we learn how to do this, we start to become peaceful, and so we become beacons of peace for the world. The heart of you is peace! This is a genuinely power-full truth. Peace does not come from the outside. We are peace. We are love. We are light. However, there are many things that can take that peace away from you; family, work, health problems… Some factors can’t be prevented, but you should focus on the ones you can control. For instance, supplement from Kratommasters.com provide the nutrients your body needs to live a healthy life, and if you’re healthy you will have the strength to fight any other problem life throws at you.
And of course just as important: you have to watch for your own well being, you personal health. I try to exercise as regularly as possible, and watch what I eat. I even take a health
The world at the moment is desperate for peace, and our natural instinct is to fight for what’s right, but the very nature of this (even for the light workers) is still fighting. And the fight in itself is the problem. Can you be at peace with what is there? Can you BE peace, so that everybody that experiences you feels peace? Even peace when there is anger, peace when there is hatred, peace when there is drama.
When we show up to fight, even if it’s fighting for what’s right, it just doesn’t help. Fighting and peace are not the same energy.
So, the change happens when each of us embrace peace as our center. Then we become peace and can distribute peace.
An essential boundary we need is not to let anyone, anything or any concept rob us of our peace. Nothing deserves that power. The author of Man’s Search for Meaning Victor Frankl, a famous psychiatrist who endured Auschwitz, the horrific German concentration camp, a place of torture, suffering and death, said, “They took my clothes, my wife, my kids, my wedding ring. I stood naked before the SS, and I realized they can take everything in my life but they cannot take my freedom to choose how I will respond to them.” Many have captured this quote in the statement, “They can’t make me hate them.” For me, Frankl was a great teacher of peace when faced with unrelenting hardship and cruelty.
Fears of Communism during the Cold War spurred psychological research, pop culture hits, and unethical experiments in the CIA
John Frankenheimer’s classic The Manchurian Candidate built upon the idea of brainwashed GIs in Korea. (Still from The Manchurian Candidate)
By Lorraine Boissoneault
SMITHSONIANMAG.COM MAY 22, 2017
Journalist Edward Hunter was the first to sound the alarm. “Brain-washing Tactics Force Chinese Into Ranks of Communist Party,” blared his headline in the Miami Daily News in September 1950. In the article, and later in a book, Hunter described how Mao Zedong’s Red Army used terrifying ancient techniques to turn the Chinese people into mindless, Communist automatons. He called this hypnotic process “brainwashing,” a word-for-word translation from xi-nao, the Mandarin words for wash (xi) and brain (nao), and warned about the dangerous applications it could have. The process was meant to “change a mind radically so that its owner becomes a living puppet—a human robot—without the atrocity being visible from the outside.”
It wasn’t the first time fears of Communism and mind control had seeped into the American public. In 1946 the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was so worried about the spread of Communism that it proposed removing liberals, socialists and communists from places like schools, libraries, newspapers and entertainment. Hunter’s inflammatory rhetoric didn’t immediately have a huge impact—until three years into the Korean War, when American prisoners of war began confessing to outlandish crimes.
When he was shot down over Korea and captured in 1952, Colonel Frank Schwable was the highest ranking military officer to meet that fate, and by February 1953, he and other prisoners of war had falsely confessed to using germ warfare against the Koreans, dropping everything from anthrax to the plague on unsuspecting civilians. The American public was shocked, and grew even more so when 5,000 of the 7,200 POWs either petitioned the U.S. government to end the war, or signed confessions of their alleged crimes. The final blow came when 21 American soldiers refused repatriation.
Suddenly the threat of brainwashing was very real, and it was everywhere. The U.S. military denied the charges made in the soldiers’ “confessions,” but couldn’t explain how they’d been coerced to make them. What could explain the behavior of the soldiers besides brainwashing? The idea of mind control flourished in pop culture, with movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Manchurian Candidate showing people whose minds were wiped and controlled by outside forces. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover referred to thought-control repeatedly in his book Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It. By 1980 even the American Psychiatric Association had given it credence, including brainwashing under “dissociative disorders” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-III. Had Chinese and Soviet Communists really uncovered a machine or method to rewrite men’s minds and supplant their free will?
The short answer is no—but that didn’t stop the U.S. from pouring resources into combatting it.
“The basic problem that brainwashing is designed to address is the question ‘why would anybody become a Communist?’” says Timothy Melley, professor of English at Miami University and author of The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State. “[Brainwashing] is a story that we tell to explain something we can’t otherwise explain.”
The term had multiple definitions that changed depending on who used it. For Hunter—who turned out to be an agent in the CIA’s propaganda wing—it was a mystical, Oriental practice that couldn’t be understood or anticipated by the West, Melley says. But for scientists who actually studied the American POWs once they returned from Korea, brainwashing was altogether less mysterious than the readily apparent outcome: The men had been tortured.
Robert Jay Lifton, one of the psychiatrists who worked with the veterans and late studied doctors who aided Nazi war crimes, listed eight criteria for thought reform (the term for brainwashing used by Mao Zedong’s communist government). They included things like “milieu control” (having absolute power over the individual’s surroundings) and “confession” (in which individuals are forced to confess to crimes repeatedly, even if they aren’t true). For the American soldiers trapped in the Korean prison camps, brainwashing meant forced standing, deprivation of food and sleep, solitary confinement, and repeated exposure to Communist propaganda.
“There was concern on the part of [the American military] about what had actually happened to [the POWs] and whether they had been manipulated to be [what would later be known as] a ‘Manchurian candidate,’” says Marcia Holmes, a science historian at the University of London’s “Hidden Persuaders” project. “They’re not sleeper agents, they’re just extremely traumatized.”
The early 1950s marked the debut of the military’s studies into psychological torture, and instead of concluding the American soldiers needed rehabilitation, military directors came to a more ominous conclusion: that the men were simply weak. “They became less interested in the fantasy of brainwashing and became worried our men couldn’t stand up to torture,” Holmes says. This resulted in the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape program (SERE), meant to inoculate men against future attempts at psychological torture by using those same torture techniques in their training.
Meanwhile, the American public was still wrapped up in fantasies of hypnotic brainwashing, in part due to the research of pop psychologists like Joost Meerloo and William Sargant. Unlike Lifton and the other researchers hired by the military, these two men portrayed themselves as public intellectuals and drew parallels between brainwashing and tactics used by both American marketers and Communist propagandists. Meerloo believes that “totalitarian societies like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union or Communist China were in the past, and continue to be, quite successful in their thought-control programs… [and] the more recently available techniques of influence and thought control are more securely based on scientific fact, more potent and more subtle,” writes psychoanalyst Edgar Schein in a 1959 review of Meerloo’s book, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control—Menticide and Brainwashing.
Psychiatrists, as well as writers like Aldous Huxley, were aided by the dominant theory of the human mind at the time, known as “behaviorism”. Think of Ivan Pavlov’s slobbering dogs, trained to salivate upon hearing a bell, even if they weren’t tempted with food. The basic assumption of behaviorism was that the human mind is a blank slate at birth, and is shaped through social conditioning throughout life. Where Russia had Pavlov, the U.S. had B.F. Skinner, who suggested psychology could help predict and control behavior. Little wonder, then, that the public and the military alike couldn’t let go of brainwashing as a concept for social control.
With this fear of a mind-control weapon still haunting the American psyche, CIA director Allen Dulles authorized a series of psychological experiments using hallucinogens (like LSD) and biological manipulation (like sleep deprivation) to see if brainwashing were possible. The research could then, theoretically, be used in both defensive and offensive programs against the Soviet Union. Project MK-ULTRA began in 1953 and continued in various forms for more than 10 years. When the Watergate scandal broke, fear of discovery led the CIA to destroy most of the evidence of the program. But 20,000 documents were recovered through a Freedom of Information Act request in 1977, filed during a Senate investigation into Project MK-ULTRA. The files revealed the experiments tested drugs (like LSD), sensory deprivation, hypnotism and electroshock on everyone from agency operatives to prostitutes, recovering drug addicts and prisoners—often without their consent.
Despite MK-ULTRA violating ethical norms for human experiments, the legacy of brainwashing experiments continued to live on in U.S. policy. The same methods that had once been used to train American soldiers ended up being used to extract information from terrorists in Abu Ghraib, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.
“Here, then, is the brief history of brainwashing,” Melley writes in a 2011 paper for Grey Room. “The concept began as an [O]rientalist propaganda fiction created by the CIA to mobilize domestic support for a massive military build-up. This fiction proved so effective that the CIA’s operations directorate believed it and began a furious search for a real mind control weapon. The search resulted not in a miraculous new weapon but a program of simulated brainwashing designed as a prophylactic against enemy mistreatment. This simulation in turn became the real basis for interrogating detainees in the war on terror.”
While few people take seriously the notion of hypnosis-like brainwashing (outside Hollywood films like Zoolander), there are still plenty who see danger in certain kinds of control. Consider the conversations about ISIS and radicalization, in which young people are essentially portrayed as being brainwashed. “Can You Turn a Terrorist Back Into a Citizen? A controversial new program aims to reform homegrown ISIS recruits back into normal young Americans,” proclaims one article in Wired. Or there’s the more provocative headline from Vice: “Inside the Mind-Control Methods the Islamic State Uses to Recruit Teenagers.”
“I think a program of isolation and rigorous conversion still does have a life in our concept of radicalization,” Melley says. But outside those cases related to terrorism it’s mostly used facetiously, he adds.
“The notion of brainwashing, no less than radicalization, often obscure[s] far more than it reveal[s],” write Sarah Marks and Daniel Pick of the Hidden Persuaders project. “Both terms could be a lazy way of refusing to inquire further into individual histories, inviting the assumption that the way people act can be known in advance.”
For now, the only examples of “perfect” brainwashing remain in science-fiction rather than fact. At least until researchers find a way to hack into the network of synapses that comprise the brain.
“We punish other people for the same mistake a thousand times. Every time it comes in your memory, you judge them again and punish them again.
Have you ever hated someone so much you just can’t get them out of your head?
It’s kind of like when the car radio plays a terrible song while on your way to the grocery, and you find yourself humming that terrible song as you walk past shelves of cheese… and again when you’re at home putting your cheese away.
That’s what unforgiveness is—the habit of feeling tortured even when your torturer is long gone.
I confess to having a terrible song stuck in my head. For the past few years, I’ve been replaying a certain someone’s hurtful words and actions in my mind. I want to forgive and finally move on, but, holy hell, it ain’t easy.
Forgiveness feels impossible. It’s like the Rubik’s Cube of the Soul. But it’s worth the effort because forgiveness is freedom.
But make no mistake: Forgiveness is not your enemy’s freedom from accountability, but your own freedom from torture. Anger is time-consuming and exhausting, and you usually don’t realize this until after you’re finished being angry.
So lately, I’ve been trying out various techniques for releasing my twisted need to punish this person over and over again in my imagination. I’ve found these next two tactics to be much more helpful:
Reflect on what this person’s crime took away from you on a broad level. How can you get it back independently from this person?
Reflect on the important lessons you learned from the ugly situation you were in. Take a moment every day to feel grateful for these lessons.
I guess it boils down to what good old Socrates said:
“The secret of change is to focus all your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”
The only time I don’t obsess over the crimes of my unnamed “enemy” is when I’m filling my days with meaningful activities, satisfying work, and important people—when I’m building my present and future, not fighting memories of the past.
But the most important thing I need to share with you is this: Commit to traveling in the direction of forgiveness instead of judging yourself for not already being there. As long as you genuinely want to have your peace of mind back (rather than get revenge), you’re halfway there.
Your turn: What has your journey toward forgiveness been like?
Compromising certain things for living a happy life is definitely a wise decision, but sacrificing everything with the word “compromise” is not at all good. You have got a beautiful life, and the most important thing is to live your life according to your choice. Loving people, spending time with them is always an important part of one’s life. But it is far better to move on from a relationship that doesn’t grow you, serves you or makes you happy anymore.
There are a lot of people who lose their dignity and self-respect just to make others happy. But at the end of the day, they lose their confidence as well. And a low confidence person can never become successful in life.
Unknowingly, at a certain point of time, we all compromise with our dignity and self-respect without any realization. However, such practices are highly insupportable. For instance, when we start planning our day around the activities and undertakings of another person, trying to impress that person, we are losing dignity. When we start to transform just to make the other person happy, we are actually undervaluing us! This may sound weird or harsh, but in actual, this is the ultimate truth.
At certain stages, we all need to take some tough decisions, be it personal or professional; we should always keep in mind about our value as well as dignity. We must not compromise our self-respect while taking the decisions.
There are many people who will criticize this kind of thinking; they even can address it as selfishness as well. But they will never understand how worth actually you are. Never forget that it’s you who only have the ability to handle stress and deal with useless creatures accordingly. So never underestimate your values, ethics, self-respect and most importantly the dignity for the sake of others. If you keep on compromising your dignity then deep inside you are actually punching your inner confidence.
I feel proud that I’ve regained the self-respect and dignity that once I sacrificed for a useless person. According to my personal experience, I can strongly say that never ever compromise your value. Because if a person really loves you, then there will be no question of compromising anything, instead you will automatically be showered with a happy life!
If you’re on eggshells due to constant high drama, your partner may have BPD.
Caring about someone with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) tosses you on a roller coaster ride from being loved and lauded to abandoned and bashed. Being a borderline (having BPD) is no picnic, either. You live in unbearable psychic pain most of the time, and in severe cases, on the border between reality and psychosis. Your illness distorts your perceptions, causing antagonistic behavior and making the world a perilous place. The pain and terror of abandonment and feeling unwanted can be so great that suicide feels like a better choice.article continues after advertisementhttps://075b7d9d94d3bd8918009b8065ffd3a9.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html?n=0
If you like drama, excitement, and intensity, then enjoy the ride—because things will never be calm. Following a passionate and immediate beginning, expect a stormy relationship that includes accusations, anger, jealousy, bullying, control, and break-ups due to the borderline’s insecurity.
Nothing is grey or gradual. For borderlines, things are black and white. They have the quintessential Jekyll-and-Hyde personality. Fluctuating dramatically between idealizing and devaluing you, they may suddenly and sporadically shift throughout the day. You never know what or whom to expect.
The Drama
Borderlines’ intense, labile emotions elevate you when they’re in good spirits and crush you when they’re not. You’re a prince or a princess; a bastard or a bitch. If you’re on the outs with them, all their bad feelings get projected onto you. They can be vindictive and punish you with words, silence, or other tactics, which feel manipulative and can be very destructive to your self-esteem. Unlike bipolar disorder, their moods shift quickly and aren’t a departure from their normal self. What you see is their norm.
Their brains heighten the intensity and negativity of their perceptions and feelings. Their emotions, behavior, and unstable relationships, including work history, reflect a fragile, shame-based self-image, often marked by sudden shifts, sometimes to the extent that they feel nonexistent. It’s all made worse when they’re alone; thus, they’re dependent on others. They may seek advice frequently, sometimes from several people on the same day, asking the same question.article continues after advertisementhttps://075b7d9d94d3bd8918009b8065ffd3a9.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html?n=0
They react to profound fears of abandonment with needy and clingy behavior and/or alternate with anger and fury that reflect their own skewed reality and self-image. They’re desperate to be loved and cared for, yet are hypervigilant for any real or imagined signs of rejection or abandonment should you, for example, be late, cancel an appointment, or talk to someone they see as competition. For them, trust is always an issue, often leading to distortions of reality and paranoia.
You’re seen as either for or against them and must take their side. Don’t dare to defend their enemy or try to justify or explain any slight they claim to have experienced. They may try to bait you into anger, then falsely accuse you of rejecting them. They may gaslight you to make you doubt reality and your sanity, even try to brainwash you. In their desperation for caring, they often behave in ways that feel like emotional manipulation and abuse. Cut-offs of friends and relatives who “betray” them is common.
Although they try to create an intimate, romantic merger that is very seductive to those unaware, they equally fear it, because they’re afraid of being dominated or swallowed up by too much intimacy. In a close relationship, they must walk a tightrope to balance the fear of being alone or of being too close. To do so, they manipulate and control with commands or indirect maneuvers, including flattery and seduction, to reel in their partner and use their anger and rejection to keep him or her at a safe distance. Whereas narcissists enjoy being understood, too much understanding frightens the borderline.article continues after advertisementhttps://075b7d9d94d3bd8918009b8065ffd3a9.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html?n=0
Their Partners
Because borderlines are dependent, they find someone to merge with to help them. They seek a person who can provide stability and to balance their changeable emotions. Narcissists and people who act self-sufficient and in control of their feelings provide a perfect match. They’re easily seduced by the borderline’s extreme openness, charm, and vulnerability. In addition, the borderline’s passion and intense emotions are enlivening to non-BPDs, who find being alone depressing or “healthy” people boring. These partners vicariously come alive through the melodrama provided by the borderline.
The borderline may appear to be the more dependent underdog in the relationship, while his or her partner is the steady, needless, and caretaking top dog, but in fact, both are dependent on each other. It can be hard for either of them to leave. They each exercise control in different ways. Their partners are often codependent individuals who also yearn for love and fear abandonment. They already have low self-esteem and poor boundaries, so they placate, accommodate, and apologize when attacked in order to maintain the emotional connection in the relationship.
Partners become emotional caretakers. They do so sometimes to the point of self-sacrifice or enabling. In the process, partners give over more and more control to the borderline and further seal their low self-esteem and the couple’s dependency. Placating the borderline and giving them control does not make either partner feel more safe, but the opposite.article continues after advertisementhttps://075b7d9d94d3bd8918009b8065ffd3a9.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html?n=0
People with BPD need to feel loved and in control. They need boundaries. Setting a boundary can sometimes snap them out of their delusional thinking. Calling their bluff is also helpful. Both strategies require that their partner build their self-esteem, learn to be assertive, and derive outside emotional support. The relationship can see improvement when the partner takes steps to heal themselves and change their behavior.
Making the Diagnosis
Like all personality disorders, BPD exists on a continuum, from mild to severe. It affects women more than men and about two percent of the U.S. population. BPD is usually diagnosed in young adulthood when there has been a pattern of impulsivity and instability in relationships, self-image, and emotions. They may use alcohol, food, or drugs or other addiction to try to self-medicate their pain, but it only exacerbates it. To diagnose BPD, at least five of the following symptoms must be enduring and present in a variety of areas:
Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.
Unstable and intense personal relationships, marked by alternating idealization and devaluation.
Persistently unstable sense of self.
Risky, potentially self-damaging impulsivity in at least two areas (e.g., substance abuse, reckless behavior, sex, spending).
Recurrent self-mutilation or suicidal threats or behavior. (This doesn’t qualify for Nos. 1 or 4.) Around 8 to 10 percent actually commit suicide.
Mood swings (e.g. depressed, irritable, or anxious) mood, not lasting more than a few days.
Chronic feelings of emptiness.
Frequent, intense, inappropriate temper or anger.
Transient, stress-related paranoid thoughts or severe dissociative symptoms.
Causes and Treatment
The cause of BPD is not clearly known, but often there has been neglect, abandonment, or abuse in childhood and possibly genetic factors. People who have a first-degree relative with BPD are five times more likely to develop BPD themselves. Research has shown brain changes in the ability to regulate emotions. Unlike narcissists who often avoid therapy, borderlines usually welcome it; however, before recent treatment innovations, its effectiveness had been questioned, which led to stigmatization.
Today, BPD is no longer a life sentence. Studies have shown that some people recover on their own, some improve with weekly therapy, and some require hospitalization. Long-term treatment is required for maximum results, with symptom relief increasingly improving. A 10-year study showed substantial remission after 10 years. Use of medication and DBT, CBT, schema therapy and some other modalities have proven helpful.
Most individuals with BPD have another co-occurring diagnosis, such as addiction and/or depression. Acute symptoms diminish more readily than temperamental ones, such as anger, loneliness, and emptiness and abandonment/dependency issues.
Borderlines need structure, and a combination of knowing that they’re cared about plus boundaries that are communicated calmly and firmly.
Facebook released their search strategy today, the so called “third pillar” of Facebook’s future.Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook don’t get unstructured data.
Search is hard, very hard. It’s why I have always been fascinated by search, it is also one of the reasons I have a massive amount of respect for Google, beyond their annoying marketing strategy of “do no evil”, 0-10 PageRank and Android, which is a half baked mobile OS IMHO, is the fact that they have engineering cohones.
Their UX is horrible, their products are scattered (Google+, Wave).
But their search is amazing.
And search as I mentioned before fascinates me.
“Index the entire web, then, for whatever term I type into the search engine, return to me the most relevant sources of information and make sure it is trusted, timely, and relevant. Infer what I mean when I type into that little box. Make it go.”
That is an exceedingly difficult problem which, by all rights they’ve done an amazing job delivering upon.
The World Wide Web is made up of unstructured data: blogs here, websites there, forums, reviews, images, comments, stuff stuff and more stuff. When data and information is not structured it is difficult, very difficult to filter, sort and rank. Again, all things in life being imperfect, Google has delivered on that claim and passed with flying colours.
That’s why you and I use Google everyday. It’s important because it’s very very useful.
Now to circle back to my original thesis: Facebook will fail at search and here is why:
Facebook is avoiding the very real and very tough problem Google tackled head on from day one: unstructured data. Google is attempting to infer the meaning and create structure behind unstructured data.
Do I like something simply because I mention it? How does the content reflect my actual point of view? Am I an expert regarding the topic I am commenting upon?
Facebook’s solution to search is the “Like” and the Open Graph. Their structured database,which holds stores, categorizes and makes accessible everything you do on Facebook and by extension using “Login in using Facebook” through a subset of the Word Wide Web.
Facebook has structured data about our lives, all of our posts, images, comments etc in their Open Graph, a structured data set that makes claims to knowing who people *really* are, their real connections and their social lives.
These are the claims that Facebook has promised are their technological “secret sauce” on both pre-IPO and post-IPO. But there’s an issue, which gets us back back to my points about Google earlier and the challenging issues they tackled head on from day one.
However, they cannot distinguish when someone although they “Like” McDonald’s doesn’t really like McDonald’s through their unstructured sentiment, my comments about them are not indicating a positive sentiment even though I hit the “Like” button.
Using sentiment to express an outcome versus a structured data set element such as a “Like”. Google has done this from day one via Hilltop and the hundreds of iterations to their PageRank algorithm (not the 0-10 scale, the algorithmic PageRank that is Google’s IP). It’s how they rank and sort the unstructured web.
Anyhow, this blog post is already too poorly written and too long, but I find this conversation fascinating because these are the claim of amazing technologies (Facebook) versus the reality of execution (Google).
Interesting case Dan. In short, however much Open Graph’s “intelligent structured data” can be leveraged for advertising and other purposes, one cannot infer the presence of negative sentiment based soley on the absence of positive sentiment.
Put another way, this is where the absence of a “Dislike” button is something of Achilles’ heel for Facebook (and, by extension, the absence of a “-1” button in Google).
Open Graph can’t speak to what you and your friends don’t like, because there’s no mechanism for this. Both built-in Open Graph actions and built-in Open Graph objects are, at best, neutral when it comes to sentiment. Facebook may be able to see that a friend “Liked” (action) Catcher in the Rye (object) – a positive sentiment – or just “Read” (action) Catcher in the Rye – a possibly neutral sentiment, but one I’ll bet is processed (like the built-in actions “Watch”, “Listen” and “Follow”) like a “Like” by Facebook’s algorithms. It’s perhaps (unintentionally) telling that theplaceholders for built-in objects all contain content like this:
I don’t know that Google – even outside the Google+ environment and its lack of a -1 – that Google is better suited to make sentiment decisions for advertising delivery based on structured data. The exception here is review data, which is really a sentiment scale. But in order to throttle the display of a McDonald’s ad based on structured data, Google would have to know that you disliked McDonald’s – regardless of the general sentiment surrounding the restaurant – because you gave it one out of five on a review. (Of course your friends’ reviews might count if Google knew as much about you and your relationships based on Google+ as Facebook does based on … well, Facebook. In reality? Ha.)
So is Facebook delivering McDonald’s ads to you a sign of failure? As much as I’m not particularly a FB fanboy I’d have to say no: Facebook’s algorithm can’t read your mind. It might even be reasonable targeting using structured data, based on the fact that a certain proportion of your Facebook friends “Like” McDonald’s Page – which would be the equivalent of me being targeted with a Tim Horton’s ad (I don’t despise them and their deceptive advertising – I just find their coffee appalling).
Of course one could also infer from positive sentiment things it’s likely I am neutral or negative toward. If I “Like” Hitchens’ God is not Greatand Dawkins’ The God Delusion you’re probably not going to get far showing me an ad for Jesus Calling (evangelical bestseller – thanks Google). But that would take multiple levels of sentiment analysis and topical classification on top of other algorithmic gymnastics.
I recall a conversation you and I had on Facebook concerning why one should grind one’s beef, or (in my case) acquire it from cow-loving but non-vegetarian hippies. But we never expressed that in a formal way (clicked a “Like” button associated with the non-built-in object “Homemade Hamburgers”). So Facebook had the sentiment, but didn’t have structured data pertaining to it. And so you got asked about Mickey D’s.
And my thoughts:
Dan Nedelko 9:17 PM Reply
Awesome points – however what Facebook needs to be able to do with their structured data goldmine is infer sentiment and semantics from the unstructured portions of their data set.
Indeed the convenient construct is an explicit dislike, however that is an intrusive model from a user perspective.
I would then have to (as a user) explicitly identify that I indeed do Like or Dislike something in order for Facebook’s algorithm to be able to understand my sentiment.
Sentiments are unstructured notions. How I “feel” about a given subject does not always have a structured data model which is convenient for the system to process.
So – is Facebook’s idea to enforce a structure and exclude a sentiment? It seems so. From a technological innovation perspective Google assumes lack of structure and provides benefits where possible. Facebook OTOH wants to impose structure and ignore the really difficult problem, inferring sentiment from unstructured data. That’s not fundamentally a problem except that Facebook makes claims to understanding our lives and how we interact. It’s a bit of a bait and switch of claims versus reality.
“web search is designed to … return links that may have answers to the questions that you’re trying to ask. Graph Search is designed to return the answer, not links that might get you to the answer.”
Translation: We have structured data. That gives us the answer from our formal data set. Hilltop and Google suck, reference to link authority. Indexing the World Wide Web is hard. We want to make it easier by using our data not everyone else’s.
“We came up with something we think is a lot more natural,” he (Zuckerberg) said.
Translation: Natural to us is our definition of structured data. Figuring out what you mean online is hard work, we don’t want to do that. Natural means you Like something (or by extension in their Want, Listen notions etc in the open graph).
“It’s gonna take years and years to index everything,” Zuckerberg said. “There’s more content we haven’t gotten to than content we have.” Search for mobile, more languages, text posts, and Open Graph content will be coming soon. And, of course, an API is also on the roadmap, but perhaps a bit further down the line.”
Translation: Google has been indexing for years. What is open graph content? It’s your content on your site shoved into their database then made to conform so they can monetize easily while avoiding the work.
Why dealing with others’ negativity may involve dealing with your own.
What is the single biggest determinant of your happiness?
The answer to this question, as you probably already know, is not wealth, fame, beauty, or power. Rather, it is how others—particularly those closest to you such as friends, family, and colleagues—treat you. When people close to you are nice to you, you can’t help but feel happy; when they mistreat you or avoid you, you are bound to be unhappy.article continues after advertisementhttps://518d20d736b89c40eca3ab73c6547b89.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html?n=0
The reason our happiness depends so much on the quality of our relationships is that we are supremely social creatures (as revealed in this humorous video). Evidence of our social nature is all around us. We care so much about what others think of us that, as some of my findings show, we would rather experience an unpleasant event (watch a bad movie) with those who share our negative opinions about the event than experience a pleasant event (watch our favorite team win) in the company of those who disagree with us. Our social nature is also the reason why being in love is one of the most cherished experiences and why isolation—the extreme form of which is solitary confinement—is rated, by those who were unfortunate to endure it, one of life’s most grueling experiences.
What all of this means is that it can be excruciatingly difficult to deal with negative people—people who bring your mood down with their pessimism, anxiety, and general sense of distrust. Imagine being constantly discouraged from pursuing your dreams because “very few people make it big.” Or imagine being constantly warned against learning a new skill—like Scuba diving or horseback riding—because “it’s too dangerous.” Likewise, imagine being routinely exposed to negative judgments about other people (“I can’t believe you told our neighbors that you failed your driving test—now they’ll never respect you”). Constant exposure to such negativity can make deep inroads into your bank of positivity, leading you to either become negative—diffident, anxious, and distrustful—yourself, or to become indifferent, uncaring, or even mean towards the negative person.
So, how does one deal with negative people?
One obvious solution is to walk away from them. But this is easier said than done; while we could always walk away from the bartender with a bad attitude or the airline agent with an anger–management problem, we can’t walk away from a parent, sibling, spouse, colleague, or friend with a negative attitude.article continues after advertisementhttps://518d20d736b89c40eca3ab73c6547b89.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html?n=0
A more practical approach to dealing with them is to start by understanding the reasons for their negativity. In brief, almost all negativity has its roots in one of three deep-seated fears: the fear of being disrespected by others, the fear of not being loved by others, and the fear that “bad things” are going to happen. These fears feed off each other to fuel the belief that “the world is a dangerous place and people are generally mean.”
It is easy to see how, from the perspective of someone operating from such fears, it makes sense to question the wisdom of pursuing dreams (failure seems all but guaranteed) and to be averse to taking risks even if it is obvious that doing so is necessary to learn and grow. It is also easy to see why people with these fears would find it difficult to trust other people.
The fears that negative people harbor manifest themselves in a variety of ways, including:
A thin skin or the proclivity to take umbrage at others’ comments—“you look good today” is interpreted as, “you mean, I didn’t look good yesterday?”
Judgmentalism, or the tendency to impute negative motivations to others’ innocent actions; thus, guests who don’t compliment a meal are judged as “uncouth brutes who don’t deserve future invitations.”
Diffidence: A sense of helplessness about one’s ability to deal with life’s challenges, leading to anxiety in facing those challenges, and to shame or guilt when the challenges are not met.
Demanding nature: Although negative people are diffident about their own abilities, they nevertheless put pressure on close-others to succeed and “make me proud” and “not let me down.”
Pessimism, or the tendency to believe that the future is bleak; thus, for example, negative people can more readily think of ways in which an important sales call will go badly than well.
Risk aversion, especially in social settings. This leads to reluctance to divulge any information that could be “used against me,” ultimately leading to boring conversations and superficial relationships.
The need to control others’—especially close-others’—behaviors. For example, negative people have strong preferences on what and how their children should eat, what type of car their spouse should drive, and so on.
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Notice a common feature across all of these manifestations of negativity: the tendency to blame external factors—other people, the environment, or luck—rather than oneself, for one’s negative attitudes. Thus, negative people tend to think, If only people realized my true worth. If only people were nicer and the world wasn’t fraught with danger. If only my friends, relatives, and colleagues behaved like I want them to, then I’d be happy.
At first blush, it might seem paradoxical that negative people can simultaneously feel diffident about themselves and feel entitled to others’ respect and love. Similarly, it may seem paradoxical that negative people feel pessimistic about their own future and yet goad others to succeed. But of course, there’s no paradox here. It’s precisely because negative people don’t feel respected and loved enough, and don’t feel sufficiently in control of their own life that they demand others’ respect and love, and seek to control others.
Looked at from this perspective, their negativity is a thinly disguised cry for help. Of course, negative people do themselves no favors by being needy and controlling—they’d be far more successful in getting the respect, love, and control they crave if they realized how self-defeating their neediness and desire for control is—but that doesn’t take away the fact that negative people need help.article continues after advertisementhttps://518d20d736b89c40eca3ab73c6547b89.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html?n=0
A straightforward, but ultimately unproductive way of helping negative people is to give them the respect, love, and control they crave. However, this could be a slippery slope because people adapt to the new levels of respect, love, and control they get and thus, you may find yourself in the position of having to provide increasing levels of respect, love, and control to keep the negative person happy. Put differently, by fulfilling their desires, you may be creating a Frankenstein that comes back to haunt you worse than ever.
An alternative solution is to get the negative people to see the sources of their negativity and make them realize that their negativity has more to do with their attitude than with the objective state of the world. However, as I discussed in another article, people don’t respond well to critical feedback, and those feeling negative almost definitely won’t be open to listening—let alone accepting—critical feedback.
This means that there are really only three other options left. First, you can grit your teeth and accept the negativity and hope that things will improve. The second is to seek the help of a counselor or an arbiter (a common friend), and hope that a “third party” perspective will help the negative person recognize that their negativity isn’t helping anyone.
Both of these options, however, are unlikely to fix the problem. In the case of gritting your teeth and hoping that the negative person becomes more positive over time, your passivity may be taken as a sign of acceptance that their negativity is justified. Over time, this may lead to increasing demands on you and, if you fail to deliver on these demands, increasing complaints about you.
The caveat with going to a third-party is that negative people often have a way of walking away feeling even more indignant and wronged—“everyone, including my own friends, is against me!” Even if the third-party manages to get the negative person to see how their negativity is unproductive, it is unlikely to change things. This is because merely recognizing one’s negativity is not sufficient; it’s important to fix the sub-conscious thought-patterns that underlie the negativity.
This brings me to the final and, in my opinion, most tenable option for dealing with negative people. In a nutshell, this option involves three elements: compassion for the negative person, taking responsibility for your own happiness despite the other person’s negativity, and maturity in how you interact with the negative person.
The compassionate element involves rarely—if ever—advising the negative person about changing their behavior. It also involves never lecturing or preaching to them about the sources of their negativity. As already mentioned, most of us are not good at taking negative and critical feedback and negative people are particularly averse to such feedback. Now, it may be difficult for you to not react in some way to the negative person, especially if their negativity is getting to you. However, remember that “getting it off your chest” is only going to escalate the problem and is not going to fix it. It may help to remember that, while you have to deal with the negative person for only some time, they have to deal with themselves all the time. This recognition should help you respond—or not respond, in this case—to them with compassion.
The second element—of taking personal responsibility for your own positivity—involves doing what it takes to protect your own happiness. If you cannot maintain your positivity and composure, then all is lost. In another article, I had suggested some tips for taking personal responsibility for your own happiness. In a nutshell, it involves adopting a set of more positive attitudes, but that alone may not be enough to deal with a constant onslaught of negativity; you may have to take time away from the negative person regularly to maintain your composure. Of course, if you do take time away from them, it would be important to come up with an appropriate “cover story” for it—you don’t want the negative person to feel that you are avoiding her.
The final element—of being mature—involves understanding that the most reliable way to steer the negative person towards positivity is to manifest the positivity yourself. For instance, blaming the negative person for making you feel negative is not going to help; indeed, it would be particularly ironic if you advised the negative person to “stop blaming others for your negativity” if you are blaming them for bringing your mood down!
But, how exactly do you manifest positive attitudes that you want the negative person to exhibit without crossing over into being preachy or judgmental?
The trick is to act, as far as possible, like a person who is fully secure. That is, act like someone who is respected and loved by others, and in control of the important aspects of their life. This means: do not let the other’s negativity curtail your natural inclination to pursue your dreams, take healthy risks, and trust others. However, do not take such actions to spite the negative person or to prove a point; rather, tap into the space of authenticity from which it seems natural to behave in a spontaneous, positive, and trusting manner. Then, when the negative person makes the skeptical or cynical comment—as he or she inevitably will—take the time to explain why you chose to act as you did.
For instance, if the negative person warns you of the futility of pursuing your dreams, let him know that you feel differently about your chances, or tell her calmly that you would rather than take the chance and fail than not try at all. Likewise, if the negative person warns you of the dire consequences of taking what you think is a healthy risk, tell him calmly, “we will see what happens.” Hopefully—if you are calibrated accurately—you will emerge unhurt, and with enhanced skills. Over time, the negative person will recognize that, while your predilection for taking risks may be higher than his or her own, you are not reckless. And finally, if the negative person chastises you for trusting people too much, ask her calmly to recount instances in which you have been taken advantage of on account of your trusting nature. (Hopefully, there won’t be any such instances and if there are a few, it may mean that the negative person is right—perhaps you are more trusting than you should be.) You could also calmly point out what research shows: it is important to trust people to form deep and meaningful relationships. (Hopefully, you have more deep and meaningful friendships that the negative person does.)
Although it may take a long time for you to see any results, they will occur; the pace of change will likely be glacial, but whatever change occurs will be relatively permanent. The fact is, people like being around positive people, so the negative person will, even if only grudgingly, have to appreciate your positive outlook and attitudes. People also like feeling positive themselves. So, as the negative person absorbs positivity from your presence, he will like himself better, and this hopefully will lead to a virtuous cycle of greater trust in others and optimism about the future.
As you may have realized by now, dealing with negative people also takes humility. The fact that you find it difficult to deal with others’ negativity suggests that there is a seed of negativity in you. If you didn’t feel constricted or deflated by others’ negativity—if you were fully secure in how you view yourself—you wouldn’t find the company of negative people to be aversive. Realizing that you have to work on fixing your own negativity even as you are helping another person deal with their negativity will help you gain the compassion, positivity, and maturity that is needed for this tricky, but ultimately satisfying, endeavor.
Be careful, you should not try to diagnose someone on your own. An expert such as a counselor, psychologist or a psychiatrist can only determine if an individual meets the criteria of any of the personality disorders. In short, a person with narcissist personality is someone who possesses an extreme selfish or “attention seeking” personality trait that it interferes with their relationships at home, work and in social settings.
But do you know that narcissism is not an all bad behavior? In fact, a healthy degree of the personality trait makes a well-balanced and strong character.
It is, however, a negative trait when it is described as a narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). At this point, a diagnosis will require that specific criterion is met.
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