Too Many Secrets

David Brin's The Transparent Society is an important book, and a fascinating read. Brin called it, he saw what's coming and wrote about how we should start figuring this out, because "light is going to shine into nearly every corner of our lives."

Brad Blanton's Radical Honesty occasionally veers into silliness, but there are some valuable gems:

The process of demythologizing yourself is begun by
bragging about all the things which, in your false modesty,
you were pretending you didn't care about. You have to go
through your vanity and the suffering associated with it. You
have to show off and be embarrassed, both of which are
egotism, and you can't skip, dodge, or get around this step.
You have to praise yourself openly rather than manipulate to
suck praise. You have to acknowledge being a secret hero to
yourself and confess the putrid vanity of all of your usual
phony self-denigration.

"Putrid vanity" is a wonderfully Zen Buddhist kind of phrase.

Radical Honesty + sousveillance is tempting, appeals to some part of me. Post pictures of my dirty laundry, of the dog poop, of the mess in the kitchen. But it's ultimately a wrong impulse.

Freud had saddled Western culture with the bizarre notion that the least considered utterances were always, magically, the truest-that reflection added nothing, and the ego merely censored or lied. It was an idea born more of convenience than anything else: he'd identified the part of the mind easiest to circumvent-with tricks like free association-and then declared the product of all that remained to be "honest." --Greg Egan, Axiomatic

I'm puzzled how cog psych people like Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely are willing to concede so much to system 1, as if that were our true nature. Heuristics are important of course, but system 2, as our higher aspirations, is the self that really counts.

Finally, not that it'll make much difference, but I'd like to publicly declare that I'm operating under Crocker's Rules. Have been for years. People still won't use it, but there it is.