Although I have never used marijuana, it always surprises me when someone who has tells me, "I don't get it. Why would the government go to so much trouble to stop me from smoking this? It has taught me so much about life and the world." Well, there you go. You've answered your own question.
The government is basically a giant gang ruled by super intelligent psychopaths, basically. The same is true of corporations by the way, and also religious institutions. And the one thing that these rulers have in common is this: they are very afraid of being revealed and of losing their power.
You hear all the time about horrible things that happen in places like Syria and North Korea, where the governments are "totalitarian". Well, the little secret is that all governments would really like to be totalitarian. Places where horror stories emerge are merely instances in which the governments actually succeeded.
So how did you answer your own question? People like you keep telling me that this drug is making you realize that things are really unfair and that we ought to change it, do something about it. We all ought to love each other and treat each other more fairly. Sure, ok, I agree. The problem with this is that power hungry psychopaths do not want you ever to come to that conclusion. And if they find out that something as simple and stupid as smoking a plant is what caused you to realize that there was massive exploitation, they simply fight the plant.
Think about it like this. Say you are a cattle rancher, and you find out that when your cattle eat a certain weed, they figure out they are being farmed for slaughter. What do you do? Well, that's simple. You stop them from eating that weed.
So is it really that hard to imagine that the government would spend more money than it would take to feed all the hungry people in the world simply to make you stop smoking that plant? No, it actually makes quite a lot of sense. You just have to understand a psychopath.
Monday, November 19, 2012
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Connectivity is Dangerous to Organization.
Almost anything that causes people to come together and cooperate, to think independently and critically, and to empathize with one another is very illegal. Anything that is simple to do that produces significant amounts of money is very illegal to all but those few who have written the law. I won't give any specific examples here, but I could not find anyone stating this idea anywhere else on the internet.
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Better than Imagined Things that Common People Cannot Afford
Well, it's worth pondering, I suppose. But if Capitalism ever develops to this extent, humanity has probably wiped itself out.
Has anyone noticed that the progression of Capitalism seems to be more and more complex and wondrous technology and less and less money in the hands of the common people? Does anyone else predict a future in which humanity has produced things heretofore unimaginable but yet no one except Bill Gates can afford them?
Has anyone noticed that the progression of Capitalism seems to be more and more complex and wondrous technology and less and less money in the hands of the common people? Does anyone else predict a future in which humanity has produced things heretofore unimaginable but yet no one except Bill Gates can afford them?
Thursday, November 1, 2012
Could Dr. Mullis Have Been Right?
Dr. Kary Mullis said, in his autobiography, that scientists were the new priests.
"Scientists who speak out strongly about future ecological disaster and promote the notion that humans are responsible for any changes going on are highly suspect. Turn off the TV. Read your elementary science textbooks. You need to know what they are up to. It's every man for himself as usual, and you are on your own. Thank your lucky stars that they didn't bother to change their clothes or their habits. They still wear priestly white robes and they don't do heavy labor. It makes them easier to spot."
Given what he later says in his most recent TED talk , we can assume he has changed his mind about ecological disaster.
"Our antibiotics are running out. And, I mean, the world apparently is running out too. So probably it doesn't matter 50 years from now -- streptococcus and stuff like that will be rampant -- because we won't be here. But if we are -- (Laughter) we're going to need something to do with the bacteria."
However, I still think Dr. Mullis may have had a point. Consider this paper, for instance:
"Academic achievement correlates poorly with clinical performance of physicians, so it is probably more important to select college students for medical school admission who will be superior physicians than to select those who will be excellent medical students."
Basically, the paper states that medical schools are pretty worthless at training doctors. The schools cannot figure out which candidates are going to become good doctors because it is poorly related to the criteria considered in the selection process. So there are two possiblilities:
1) Our educational system is mostly worthless.
2) The paper is wrong.
Having hope that #1 is not the case (although it very well could be), I decided to do some more research. Here is another source:
"Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias."
The conclusion of this paper is that most research only serves to confirm bias. While the paradox of the paper probably being biased will be left alone, it raises an interesting question about the selection criteria paper. Perhaps the result that scores and grades do not predict quality of clinical care is merely a confirmation of prevailing bias that these criteria do not predict quality.
In this case, we will be throwing away perhaps some of the best future doctors on the notion that their credentials should not be believed. Your humble author, for instance, scored a 35 on the MCAT, earned a 3.5 at a top 20 school, volunteered at a hospital, shadowed a physician, worked in a lab, was a teaching assistant in biology, and did not gain entry to medical school, despite having applied -- expensively, mind you -- to 27 different schools. Could my entire experience be the result of a bias in the minds of highly qualified, money-grubbing pseudo-scientists that academic credentials are meaningless predictors of clinical quality?
Of course, the other possibility is that our education system is worthless and that these pseudo-scientists are probably not nearly as good at their jobs as some random janitor no one knows about. Either way, the story is interesting.
"Scientists who speak out strongly about future ecological disaster and promote the notion that humans are responsible for any changes going on are highly suspect. Turn off the TV. Read your elementary science textbooks. You need to know what they are up to. It's every man for himself as usual, and you are on your own. Thank your lucky stars that they didn't bother to change their clothes or their habits. They still wear priestly white robes and they don't do heavy labor. It makes them easier to spot."
Given what he later says in his most recent TED talk , we can assume he has changed his mind about ecological disaster.
"Our antibiotics are running out. And, I mean, the world apparently is running out too. So probably it doesn't matter 50 years from now -- streptococcus and stuff like that will be rampant -- because we won't be here. But if we are -- (Laughter) we're going to need something to do with the bacteria."
However, I still think Dr. Mullis may have had a point. Consider this paper, for instance:
"Academic achievement correlates poorly with clinical performance of physicians, so it is probably more important to select college students for medical school admission who will be superior physicians than to select those who will be excellent medical students."
Basically, the paper states that medical schools are pretty worthless at training doctors. The schools cannot figure out which candidates are going to become good doctors because it is poorly related to the criteria considered in the selection process. So there are two possiblilities:
1) Our educational system is mostly worthless.
2) The paper is wrong.
Having hope that #1 is not the case (although it very well could be), I decided to do some more research. Here is another source:
"Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias."
The conclusion of this paper is that most research only serves to confirm bias. While the paradox of the paper probably being biased will be left alone, it raises an interesting question about the selection criteria paper. Perhaps the result that scores and grades do not predict quality of clinical care is merely a confirmation of prevailing bias that these criteria do not predict quality.
In this case, we will be throwing away perhaps some of the best future doctors on the notion that their credentials should not be believed. Your humble author, for instance, scored a 35 on the MCAT, earned a 3.5 at a top 20 school, volunteered at a hospital, shadowed a physician, worked in a lab, was a teaching assistant in biology, and did not gain entry to medical school, despite having applied -- expensively, mind you -- to 27 different schools. Could my entire experience be the result of a bias in the minds of highly qualified, money-grubbing pseudo-scientists that academic credentials are meaningless predictors of clinical quality?
Of course, the other possibility is that our education system is worthless and that these pseudo-scientists are probably not nearly as good at their jobs as some random janitor no one knows about. Either way, the story is interesting.
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Why kill heretics?
Religious people might kill heretics in order to protect genetically related adherents. If those adherents are made conscious of the falsity of their religious memes, they lose their biological fitness. This killing improves biological fitness as a sort of perverted kin-altruism.
Consequences of Ego
As I thought about this model, I could not help but wonder how this increased ego-tism would manifest. Hypothetically, it decreases the emotional intelligence of the population. Such emotional intelligence is not necessary because the behavior generated by the memes substitutes for communal understanding. Another way of visualizing this is that religion could lead to an increased frequency of sociopaths, as sociopaths also do not want to go to hell.
Basically, religion operates as a social technology, anagalous to eye-glasses or anti-biotics. And just like how humans with poor vision or immune systems can survive in a world with glasses or anti-biotics, humans with poor social skills can survive in a world with religion. One might even expect parts of the human social brain being diverted to other tasks, such as finding a way to provide for the billions of people created by religion's general rules of thumb.
Basically, religion operates as a social technology, anagalous to eye-glasses or anti-biotics. And just like how humans with poor vision or immune systems can survive in a world with glasses or anti-biotics, humans with poor social skills can survive in a world with religion. One might even expect parts of the human social brain being diverted to other tasks, such as finding a way to provide for the billions of people created by religion's general rules of thumb.
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Ego as a Source of Denialism
In my last post, I discussed a hypothetical model for the emergence of religion. After having talked to one of my friends about this idea, he came to the conclusion that ego is the source of denial-ism. According to the model, a genetic propensity to be egotistical evolved or increased in frequency dramatically after the advent of religion. Once the individual has invested in believing the memes, ego causes him or her not to be able to question them. Doing so would be to admit having been wrong, which is a threat to the ego.
Saturday, October 6, 2012
Denialism as a Source of Religion
Richard Dawkins suggests in The Selfish Gene that cultural memes function like genes in that they are subject to natural selection. In The God Delusion Dawkins further argues that because religious truths cannot be questioned, their very nature encourages religions to spread like "mind viruses". In such a conception, it is necessary that the individuals who are unable to question their beliefs are more biologically fit than individuals who are capable of questioning their beliefs. Thus, it could be concluded that sacred scriptures or oral traditions created a behavioral pattern that elevated biological fitness for believing individuals. Individuals who were capable of challenging such beliefs, even if the beliefs were enormously improbable, became rarer and rarer in the population. (See denialism.)
Also, any gene that contributes to denialism allows an otherwise preposterous meme to increase in frequency as long as the resulting behavior increases biological fitness. The individual simply denies that the meme is untrue, behaves as if it were, and benefits from the elevated fitness. While general intelligence and denialism are inversely related, the two are not directly related. A highly intelligent individual can become a denier, though this more rarely occurs. [15] It is worth noting that while denialism can have a genetic origin, there are other reasons someone might become a denier. For instance, a psychopath may deny climate change because he or she does not care what happens to the world or anyone else in it. However, it is fallacious to assume that all such deniers are psychopaths, and in fact, most of them probably are not. Only about 1 in 25 people in the United States suffer from anti-social personality disorder, and far fewer suffer from this malady in less individualistic cultures, such as those in East Asia. [16] One can see how a religious adherence to ideas can be beneficial to the individual by imagining, for instance, the behavioral result of denying overpopulation.[17]
Ironically, if the world ever became atheist and then if scientific evidence for the existence of God became available, scientists would hypothetically have trouble convincing a mass of deniers. More sadly, violent individuals might then commit acts of terrorism against individuals who do not ascribe to atheism. The point here is that the alternatives to be denied, sometimes referred to as heresy, are not constrained by "objective reality". They are constrained by those ideas that reduce biological fitness or undermine the integrity of the system.
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Individualism and Innovation
People who were different created all the greatest innovation in the world. So why are we still bent on checking race boxes when we apply for everything? The idea that there are groups of people who are all the same is anathema for innovation. Why do you need to be a part of a race unless you can't hack it just being human?
Socialism hates everything that is different. Almost all Chinese are Han Chinese. Almost all Japanese are Nippon Japanese. These people think similarly and all get along well together. But they are not as innovative because they reject anything that is not so similar to them. "White" people are all white but are still innovative because you are missing the point. White people are not all white. They are all very different.
I was rejected because I occupied a different mental space. Socialist thinkers gained positions of authority and started to create a world in which differentness is rejected, all the while hypocritically singing the praises of diversity. This was an evil that is directly tied to socialist thinking, and I will not forget my allegiance to the European mind. I am white because I am not white
Socialism hates everything that is different. Almost all Chinese are Han Chinese. Almost all Japanese are Nippon Japanese. These people think similarly and all get along well together. But they are not as innovative because they reject anything that is not so similar to them. "White" people are all white but are still innovative because you are missing the point. White people are not all white. They are all very different.
I was rejected because I occupied a different mental space. Socialist thinkers gained positions of authority and started to create a world in which differentness is rejected, all the while hypocritically singing the praises of diversity. This was an evil that is directly tied to socialist thinking, and I will not forget my allegiance to the European mind. I am white because I am not white
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Monogamy is Prostitution
True love is one of the world's greatest illusions. In every civilized part of the world, people are convinced that marriage is an institution of partnership, homogenized personality, and yes, love. But this is not really what marriage is about. It is about owning someone's sexual access.
The history of monogamy begins with agriculture. As soon as men's work became significantly more valuable than the woman's through the hard work of plowing and harvesting, women became subjected to male domination. No longer did concealed ovulation work as a glue to provide sex and sharing with the whole community. Now men made women into private property. Children were no longer raised in common but were the property of their fathers.
Modern marriage is sold as a life partnership between two people who love each other. Yet, it seems that marriage has not lost its historical root. It is an agreement between two people, and especially for a woman, to limit her sexuality to one person who will provide resources. The whole institution is a kind of hidden prostitution.
Prostitutes sell their sexuality for resources from men with whom they share their sexuality. They use these resources to live, eat, and even raise children. Prostitutes do the very same thing. The only exception is that prostitutes do not barter their sexuality with only one man. In effect, a successful prostitute can gain more from her work than a wife can from hers, especially when a wife's husband does not have many resources to share.
Marriage is a form of prostitution hidden cleverly behind mountains of romance novels. But it is not seen as morally corrupt. It claims to be a relationship based on love, and yet, one can love family or friends without experiencing the concept of "romantic love." So, as moral people, we must make a decision. We can believe that prostitution is as acceptable as marriage. Or we can decouple sexuality from love.
But the second option is not as horrible as it seems. When sexuality and love are intertwined, we can only truly love the person with whom we are having sex. We get this idea that it is impossible to love two people at once. However, when love is something apart from sex, we can love each other all equally, like a mother can love both one of her children and another.
The history of monogamy begins with agriculture. As soon as men's work became significantly more valuable than the woman's through the hard work of plowing and harvesting, women became subjected to male domination. No longer did concealed ovulation work as a glue to provide sex and sharing with the whole community. Now men made women into private property. Children were no longer raised in common but were the property of their fathers.
Modern marriage is sold as a life partnership between two people who love each other. Yet, it seems that marriage has not lost its historical root. It is an agreement between two people, and especially for a woman, to limit her sexuality to one person who will provide resources. The whole institution is a kind of hidden prostitution.
Prostitutes sell their sexuality for resources from men with whom they share their sexuality. They use these resources to live, eat, and even raise children. Prostitutes do the very same thing. The only exception is that prostitutes do not barter their sexuality with only one man. In effect, a successful prostitute can gain more from her work than a wife can from hers, especially when a wife's husband does not have many resources to share.
Marriage is a form of prostitution hidden cleverly behind mountains of romance novels. But it is not seen as morally corrupt. It claims to be a relationship based on love, and yet, one can love family or friends without experiencing the concept of "romantic love." So, as moral people, we must make a decision. We can believe that prostitution is as acceptable as marriage. Or we can decouple sexuality from love.
But the second option is not as horrible as it seems. When sexuality and love are intertwined, we can only truly love the person with whom we are having sex. We get this idea that it is impossible to love two people at once. However, when love is something apart from sex, we can love each other all equally, like a mother can love both one of her children and another.
Monday, February 6, 2012
Injustice Prevails
People really need to learn how the world works. I will try to explain this in sensible language. The most important contrast between the typical view and the reality of this world lies in the importance of justice. A long time ago, a philosopher named Aristotle wrote a proof showing that justice is better than injustice. Since this is intuitively true to most people, most go one step farther and assume that justice must prevail in the world. This belief is false.
People believe that justice prevails because the belief is in the interest of unjust rulers, and they have the power to make people think this. Think about, for instance, what happens when a business owner always has to look over his shoulder to ensure that employees are not stealing from him. Thievery complicates this owner's life. It is in his best interests to exploit his workers as much as possible, and he will do this to the best of his ability. But, on the other hand, he wants his workers to fully denounce notions like thievery or exploitation. Otherwise, they may try to compete with the owner! Because the owner owns stuff and is in charge, it is within his power to teach his workers not to steal.
Overtime, workers are successful because they do what the owner wants and he allows them to live. And the owner is successful because all the workers are doing things for him. He continues to be secretly evil meanwhile his workers never try to compete with him. This is how things really work.
Christianity is basically a religion that emerged thousands of years ago in protest of things working this way. However, the message of that religion was wrong. Instead of teaching workers to stand up for their own interests, it taught them to be better slaves in the hopes that they will go to fairy land when they die. I may be the first to tell you this, and if so, I hope that you learn from it. Fighting for fairness might be what Jesus wants, but that's not how you win. You should always be trying to win. So unless justice is directly in your interests and you think you can actually change things, stop fighting for it. Be evil instead. Because injustice prevails.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Do not be a nerd. Just be smart.
Lately, there has been a pleasant trending away from the iconic nerd. In the past, Americans often held positive views of what essentially amounts to neglecting social ability. They did this in favor of maximizing technical skills in mathematical and verbal reasoning. The idea that it is better to be good at something than to be related to someone who is good at it formed the root of this ideal. Nerdiness really lends itself to ideas like anti-racism, since racism amounts to over-valuing membership in a group. It also lends itself to honest hard-workingness, since social abilities can be used to take unfair advantage of a hierarchical system.
While when seen like that nerdiness has a cogent appeal, the argument is narrow-minded. It turns a blind eye to important traits and qualities excluded by the extremism of what it means to be a nerd. Being able to do a task more efficiently or even more creatively than someone else does not take into account the real necessity of the ability to organise into social groups.
As well as sometimes being unfair, group affiliation is absolutely necessary for human enterprise. Everything humans as a species have accomplished they have done so through a naturalistically unparalleled ability to work together. Most every human-made item in the typical surrounding came from a corporation, a formalized social group of humans dedicated to producing a demanded commodity or service for profit.
The ideal of a nerd is someone who would have a lot of trouble interacting in the real world. The truth is that the smart guy in high school who has no friends does not learn as much about how to get along with others as does the jock, and the nerd might never catch up. Truthfully, to the average individual, pursuing nerdiness is harmful. And for the super-intelligent individual, it is patently bad decision-making.
Nerdiness is a condition exclusively focused on a primary factor, which is however utterly dependent on less obvious factors. The most obvious factor driving success in school and in the world is intelligence. But there are no shortages of examples where some other factor besides intelligence made the difference between one individual's success and his being beaten by too many other people, called failure.
Social ability is probably the next most obvious means of success. An individual who is much inferior in intelligence to another can easily beat uninformed competition. When, as is often the case, the common teacher is not as good an instructor as third party resources, an ability to befriend the individuals who own the third party knowledge means more than being able to use it most effectively. No matter how intelligent an individual might be, that individual must be exposed to the right information in order to use his ability. Oftentimes, other people are the best sources of truthful and critical information, and those other people are not always the most easily attained contacts.
Aside from being sources of critical information, other people might even be able to create a better way to use information. Thinking together in groups has sometimes been condemned as being unproductive, but the method has many advantages. Individuals who can excel take longer to learn when teaching less capable people, but they also benefit from having access to people who can complete busy work, work that can be shared, and other tasks.
The importance of social ability begs a different question. It is not how did nerdiness ever become popular. The more specific question is how did successful people ever work together to popularize a trend causing people to lose the very same skills needed to create the trend. It was a social, cultural movement that gave birth to nerdiness. Elite children claimed to be people who had no social skills in order to bid into the mythos of the oppressed social midget who later becomes wildly successful. However, everyone from Bill Gates to Barack Obama met their achievements through countless hidden factors, some perhaps even more important than intelligence or drive.
It is not really good at all to be a nerd. The only thing it is good to be is smart. So do not lack social ability.
While when seen like that nerdiness has a cogent appeal, the argument is narrow-minded. It turns a blind eye to important traits and qualities excluded by the extremism of what it means to be a nerd. Being able to do a task more efficiently or even more creatively than someone else does not take into account the real necessity of the ability to organise into social groups.
As well as sometimes being unfair, group affiliation is absolutely necessary for human enterprise. Everything humans as a species have accomplished they have done so through a naturalistically unparalleled ability to work together. Most every human-made item in the typical surrounding came from a corporation, a formalized social group of humans dedicated to producing a demanded commodity or service for profit.
The ideal of a nerd is someone who would have a lot of trouble interacting in the real world. The truth is that the smart guy in high school who has no friends does not learn as much about how to get along with others as does the jock, and the nerd might never catch up. Truthfully, to the average individual, pursuing nerdiness is harmful. And for the super-intelligent individual, it is patently bad decision-making.
Nerdiness is a condition exclusively focused on a primary factor, which is however utterly dependent on less obvious factors. The most obvious factor driving success in school and in the world is intelligence. But there are no shortages of examples where some other factor besides intelligence made the difference between one individual's success and his being beaten by too many other people, called failure.
Social ability is probably the next most obvious means of success. An individual who is much inferior in intelligence to another can easily beat uninformed competition. When, as is often the case, the common teacher is not as good an instructor as third party resources, an ability to befriend the individuals who own the third party knowledge means more than being able to use it most effectively. No matter how intelligent an individual might be, that individual must be exposed to the right information in order to use his ability. Oftentimes, other people are the best sources of truthful and critical information, and those other people are not always the most easily attained contacts.
Aside from being sources of critical information, other people might even be able to create a better way to use information. Thinking together in groups has sometimes been condemned as being unproductive, but the method has many advantages. Individuals who can excel take longer to learn when teaching less capable people, but they also benefit from having access to people who can complete busy work, work that can be shared, and other tasks.
The importance of social ability begs a different question. It is not how did nerdiness ever become popular. The more specific question is how did successful people ever work together to popularize a trend causing people to lose the very same skills needed to create the trend. It was a social, cultural movement that gave birth to nerdiness. Elite children claimed to be people who had no social skills in order to bid into the mythos of the oppressed social midget who later becomes wildly successful. However, everyone from Bill Gates to Barack Obama met their achievements through countless hidden factors, some perhaps even more important than intelligence or drive.
It is not really good at all to be a nerd. The only thing it is good to be is smart. So do not lack social ability.
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