Time Traveling without a Passport
And How to Make your Boss Scream FLABBERGASTED in 6 Easy Steps
Dedicated to Old_Negotiations
’Whenever you are.’
Reflecting on my first weeks of writing and some of the more bombastic things I've said, I would like to take this opportunity to explain my process of mapping and forecasting trends forward through time to bring you, dear reader, into my perspective – which is the goal of all writers, I'd imagine.
Simply Put:
Imagine all Possibility under the parameters,
Reduce through Empirical and Probable Assumptions
Apply Reality Filter,
Add your Variables,
Review Externalities across Time,
Sort by Highest Probability and Observe the Results
Make sense?
Perfect! I'm glad we took a moment to clear that up.
The next article is on Wednesday.
Cheers!
-DP
...
Hmm? Need more?
Well, if you insist:
Question:
What would it take for your boss to say the word "Flabbergasted" in a sentence? I'm, of course, assuming that you don't have one of those wacky bosses in your life who uses the word all the time already.
But consider it: What would it take? What type of situation, or series of events, would have to occur in your boss's day, or over a week, for him to suddenly enter the room and announce to you that he is FLABBERGASTED!
Interested?
Thinking Trends through Our Strengths and Weaknesses
First, we will start with Self by assessing our strengths and weaknesses. We want to determine the areas we're unaware of and evaluate the places where we are very mindful. To do this, we need to inhabit 'The Observer' mindset by creating distance between the Self and our observance through the Self. This mindfulness is what we call Perceiving Objective Reality, our most important tool. An excellent visual for this is imagining a 3rd-person video game. You gain skills, rank, and personal achievements as you play your character. Your character, from his perspective, can't view his stats, kill ratios, or core skills in the objective, because he can't see what we can see. We are observing him from a more objective perspective with specialized knowledge. (I’ll write an article eventually about Subjective vs Subjective-Objective, as Pure Objective is impossible).
Start with your education, your hobbies, your friends, your job, books you've read, your cultural background, and your community. These are the base layer of your understanding and awareness that become part of your strengths. Then we can work outwards beyond our immediate experiences, where we don't have direct knowledge or experience, such as politics, history, and the activities of other communities and countries - this is what we will call our Core Awareness and is the base layer of our self-aware position between ourselves and our greater world.
An example of this would be - you have an intimate awareness and understanding of your community, more than someone from another country who has never traveled there. Whereas you have a cursory knowledge of other nations, cultures, and their communities. We consider this a blindspot in our awareness of those specific communities, cultures, and the people who inhabit them and their relationships with the greater world. You may know of, but lack direct experience.
Taking stock of your positioning in this world allows us to create a profile of our awareness, enabling us pathways to understand our core assumptions, biases, beliefs, and methods of internalizing data. To inhabit the Observer, we must be aware of what, how, and where we observe and any filters we naturally or subconsciously apply to achieve any degree of accuracy.
Observing Your Boss
First, we want to start with the actual Target, your boss. So we're going to look at all the things that we know about your boss and what we don't know and then all the things we can assume based on collected data.
One of the immediate things we can assume safely, with a high degree of Probability, would be that your boss would know the essential 5,000 words that most English speakers know. Another thing we can assume about your boss is that he will understand different terms that aren't often used due to his job, life, education, and experiences, including industry-related jargon. An example would be if your boss were involved with a bowling league. Therefore his personal, cultural, and life experience is directly enriched by this activity which further shapes him as an individual in defining his individualistic perspective, habits, language, and notions.
Though it seems ineffectual, having this awareness helps us build a better understanding and strengthens our Core Awareness. The larger our awareness, the better our Core Assumptions and ability to plot trajectory.
Next, we need to understand the word we are trying to target: Flabbergasted.
We start by asking questions and building our knowledge of this subject. Such as:
Is this a popular word in our era?
Is it commonly used in certain circles, cultures, or groups?
What are the word's origins and true meaning, and how is it applied?
For this, an excellent resource is Google. See here:
Google is an excellent initial research point to help us build understanding and strengthen our core assumptions. Immediately we now know three things of great importance:
The word is informal and, therefore, wouldn't typically be used in a formal sentence or setting
The word has unknown origins but traces its history to at least the 18th century
The word has gained massive popularity over the last few years, with data topping around 2019
At this point, we are trying to determine Probability while building and assessing our Core Assumptions. Where the first two points would decrease Probability, the third - gaining popularity in use - significantly increases Probability. With this information, we can build a probability assumption of 3 things:
Your boss has probably already heard the word in his life at least once,
This word is present in public discourse, media, or conversation,
There is an increasing likelihood that your boss may use the word, has used it in the past, or would identify it correctly,
How we weigh these aspects against each other is performed later, so let's set this aside.
Through our awareness of our strengths and weaknesses were able to address our Core Assumptions, our understanding of externalities, and what would formulate the basis of our core reasoning and awareness.
Imagine you had a degree in Psychology, which is considered a particular strength in this situation. Given your training and experience in certain psychological aspects such as how the brain works, personality, and other critical elements we are attempting to observe in our example - this becomes part of your base of perspective. However, we also need to be highly critical and take an honest look at this assessed strength: Is your degree in Psychology focused on specific topics over others? Was it rounded through broad awareness of the subject, or was it too rounded and therefore lacked technical understanding? Perhaps some of your classes were significantly less interesting than others. Or maybe you didn't retain or are unable to recall critical details from your time in the classroom that could be elemental to our pursuit here - these should be investigated, considered, and mediated as best as we can as individuals, in order to seek the most significant degree of accuracy.
That being said, you don’t need a degree in Psychology, but in this situation, it provides a stronger toolkit. As for the rest of us, we have to work a little harder. This formation of weakness does not mean we are weak. On the contrary, it presents an excellent opportunity to seek further information to broaden our perspectives and ability to analyze trajectory through time with a developing Core Awareness.
Another strength you have is knowing your boss more intimately than a stranger would. You work with your boss, see him almost every day, and probably have witnessed him in good moods and bad. We can build a character profile from this knowledge - just like our video game example. Where you lack any information, such as your boss is a relatively private person, we would address these as known blind spots in our analysis for consideration later. Yet, this doesn't mean we don't know anything - We immediately know at least two critical things:
Your boss is human (presumably) and therefore capable of error, among other human traits
Your boss has a range of emotions, even if suppressed by professional conduct, or the appropriateness of the situation
Next, we want to observe your boss critically based on our experiences as Observers. Particular emphasis should be applied to any situation that causes your boss to break from his professional conduct. These could be moments of high stress, high excitement, or casual candor and banter. Because the word we target is informal, we need to assess along the informal within an otherwise formal setting utilizing Situational Awareness - which is the perception of an object or person within their immediate Space and Time, and their relationship to other things and people. It's essential always to remember that our world is not perfectly linear and that things are constantly changing and moving, even if that movement is nearly imperceptible.
Now that we are beginning to assess our core strengths and weaknesses as Observers, we want to bring imagination into view. Here's the point where all you dreamers out there are going to excel. The application of imagination is important, as this gives us base situations and possibilities, causes and effects, and their possible results to examine. The better your imagination, the better you can imagine the possibilities. Without good creativity, you are forced to rely more heavily on known data and immediately assumed trajectory, limiting your ability to look further into the future or assess/seek unknown externalities and black swan events.
Given our accumulated data, we need to imagine an informal setting. With Christmas around the corner, many workplaces will begin planning annual staff parties and gatherings. There may even be alcohol involved. I want you to imagine this setting and all the related elements and persons involved. Each of these elements adds influences and alterations to the scene, which is essential in our later assessment when determining the final Probability.
We can imagine everything related, the personalities and egos, the conversation, the food, and the drink. We are attempting to observe this moment, the critical moment for your boss to be free from other pressures and, ideally, to make his exclamation, with an emphasis on feeling astonished. It's here I want you to truly imagine the moment with all the knowledge we have accumulated so far. This party has freed your boss from his professional restraints.
To understand this, we begin by understanding the meaning and cause:
In order to observe your boss in the result, we can't merely imagine it, as this would be the realm of fantasy. We don't fantasize as Observers - We imagine and project with reason, forward and backward through time as necessary, seeking projected reality across a predictable trajectory with consideration of alterations. We are time travelers, and this world is our timeline. Therefore, we need to observe the events leading to his final reaction. Knowing the party and its setting, removing previous professional barriers, and including our word in your boss's vocabulary - his underlying emotional state is required to be 'greatly surprised' and 'impressed' before our final result can be observed.
If your boss is easily excited or impressed, we don't need to travel too far; perhaps, the informal event itself is enough to cause the trigger we are looking for.
Whereas, if during your assessment we determine that your boss isn't that easily impressed, we may need to observe a series of events over hours, days, or even weeks which leads to our final desired conclusion. This could be a variety of situations, conversations, or critical events. As an example:
Perhaps in the days and weeks leading up to the Christmas Party, a big deal is being negotiated with a client, and the negotiations could be better. Your boss is concerned that the deal will fall through; therefore, his emotional state is heightened by the stress and the coming holidays. Suppose we imagine a situation where this stress is maintained and built upon, such as consistent back and forth with your boss keeping him informed of the ongoing negotiations. These actions add emotional triggers and develop his emotional state beyond normal operating levels, as we analyzed previously. In that case, we can build the Possibility of the finale we already imagined at the Christmas Party. Again, given the degree of surprise required to reach genuine 'astonishment,' we also need to consider the types of stressors and triggers involved.
An example could be - During the final steps of the negotiation process, where established stressors are already imputed into his psyche from days/weeks/months prior, and he begins to believe in his mind that the deal won't happen. Perhaps even the agreement was canceled by the opposing party, much to your boss's disappointment. Disappointment is vital as a stressor here, as your boss is forced to come to terms with the potential or assumed loss of the deal, which is an excellent catalyst for surprise and, therefore - ‘an astonishing reaction within an informal setting’.
Of course, other aspects come into play while observing forward in time, and the further you attempt to look, the more consideration you must place on the externalities and variables.
In our example, we only consider one person, one circumstance, and one moment in time projected across hours, days, or a few weeks. We utilized special knowledge, sought empirical and data-driven knowledge, assessed our weaknesses, and adjusted our assessments based on what we could conclude reasonably. Then we attended a Christmas Party and observed the results.
Using that example, we looked forward toward the party and then walked back through various events, triggers, and some external elements at play. All of which can't begin to assume the other externalities - Maybe your boss had a fight with his wife before the event, or maybe your boss is planning on quitting his job next year and therefore is apathetic to the results. Perhaps your boss already has existing prior knowledge we didn't consider, such as having direct communications with the opposing party, and therefore already knew the results before we could announce them.
Time Travel is a tricky business. It requires an honest consideration of our strengths, weaknesses, and biases through a reality filter. We can't simply seek the results we desire, but we must seek the results as they are most likely to occur and critically examine each stage along the timeline to assess. We assess our knowledge and core awareness, evaluate for pivots from the projected trajectory, and constantly assess our core assumptions along the way while watching for any black swan events we couldn't predict. For example, suppose something changes at any time, which causes deviation. In that case, we must abandon our previous trajectory assumption, assess our blindspots, consider this new information and its impact on the fundamental analysis, and rebuild a new one.
Now that you are armed with great power, why not try it out? Start with small trajectories and work outward. You can take any event or situation of almost any complexity, map the variables, people, and elements, and even apply a healthy dose of imagination, filtered through Reality and Probability, to assess and reveal unknown causes or possible results. You may even discover something revolutionary.
Just remember dear reader - With great power comes great responsibility.
As always,
Farewell and Good Luck.
-Dark Philosopher
Mapping Trends
Time Travel. Over the years there have been some points of excitement, especially the 2019 breakthrough regarding scientists studying particles claiming to have sent one back in time. Its also been theorized that, with our current capabilities and enough power, we could send Electrons back in time - as Electrons experience time a little differently. One of the problems, as I understand it, is a power issue. We simply can’t generate enough, even if we had the technology. This means Time Travel might have to wait until we reach Kardashev’s Civilization Scale of 1, which scientists estimate is another 100-200 years.
In terms of civilization, that’s not even a blink of an eye.In the spirit of this, I want to share with you my endless Paradox:
One of the methods I utilize for understanding, especially complex subject matter, is Reverse Engineering. Whereby, I assume nothing is true until I can re-prove its fundamental assumptions, approaching from an elementary perspective, as a child would. It’s an excellent method of understanding and I highly recommend it. As the saying goes - “If you can’t explain it to a child, you don’t understand it.”
A number of years ago, this lead me to a strange Paradox while looking at the 3 Laws of Thermodynamics. Namely, the concept around Isolated Systems and the concept around Dissipation of Energy (Law 1) when these are in consideration of the Theory of Combustion and the theoretical properties of Dark Matter and Dark Energy.
Every few years, my paradox returns to my mind and I become consumed by it for days at a time until I get frustrated with endless theoreticals. Though it does lead me down some interesting rabbit holes in science. That being said, it’s just that - my paradox. The 3 Laws are established in Physics, as laws, and the rest is just ideas.
Makes you think though, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Nov 19/23 - See: Fi3ld G3n3ration through Sp3cial Mut-ual Induct-ance article
November 15th, 2023 - New Audio
November 16th, 2023 - Fixed Format, Layout, Signature