The Plight of Culture

Let me begin this post with a question:

Who is this person who keeps blogging at me? I am actually a little worried about this person. For example, she complains that her boyfriend wants to blow up a building. Let me begin by saying I do not believe that the story is true. But if it is, my advice is that it is usually a bad idea to blow something up, and it really does not matter how much C4 it takes. Dump your boyfriend and find someone healthier. He's probably not psychotic but just angry. Moving on...

Let me make this argument short. Culture is basically a collection of rules that a particular population of people identify with and follow without thinking about the rules. Generally they either worked in the past environment and do not make sense in the present day, or they are entirely functional but serve an evil interest. Some rules make sense and should be followed, but this is far from being the universal case. Culture is not a part of humanity, and it is often evil.

When people talk about diversity, assuming they are not simply racist, they are talking about celebrating the multiplicity of these collections of rules. The point is that they are all good and that we can benefit from each and every one. I wholeheartedly disagree. Every culture is a danger, and a diversity is even worse as it implies that collections of rules ought to come together for the benefit of all. Instead, culture as a whole ought to be renounced. Do you believe that people are too stupid to accomplish this? Then that is the problem, not a lack of diversity in culture. And just perhaps, if culture did not exist at all, people would be smarter.

It is even possible to speculate that culture has made people stupider over the ages. In fact, religion can be defined as a collection of rules that people follow -- do this thing at this time or believe this thing without evidence or forethought -- and religion itself is primarily an offshoot of the greater concept, culture. Culture ought to be regarded with suspicion and, where possible, outright animosity.

Why the Government is Afraid of Marijuana and Other Consciousness Expanding Chemcials

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.