Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/10/17
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This one is about racial stereotypes based on a little bit older conversation.
Rick Rosner: All right. So, yeah one of the previous times we talked recently, we were talking about how racial stereotypes, particularly stereotypes applied to black people. All kind of fit under the same umbrella that white people should have control over black people because black people can’t control themselves; they’re either too animalistic or too dumb or whatever. It’s all bullshit. All these stereotypes began under slavery and continued under the replacements for slavery; Jim Crow and the prison system. And we’re all just justifications for white people being in charge of black people. It’s kind of custodial arrangement supposedly for everybody’s own good; the black people can’t manage themselves and so white people manage them, which helps them not be fucked up by the world and also helps everybody else not be fucked up by black people and it’s just bullshit.
But it made me think about has there ever been a custodial arrangement like that where one group of people has claimed that we’re better than you guys and women and we will be in charge of you to help you live in the world. Well it’s got two parts. Has it ever been honest? I doubt it’s ever been honest, that seems like bullshit. And has it ever worked? This kind of supposedly but paternal but really just exploitative type of arrangement, one group over another; has that ever been legitimately good? And we know slavery wasn’t good. We know what the Americans did to Native Americans; it was not good. We know what Canadians did to First Nations wasn’t good and what the English did to all its colonies, especially India was all based on bullshit and exploitation and men over women too. So, I’m asking you, Scott. Has there ever been a paternalistic Arrangement that was semi honest and actually was to the benefit of the people who were subject to it?
Jacobsen: Singapore, under Lee Kuan Yew.
Rosner: How’d that work?
Jacobsen: He was duly elected; let’s say for 30 or so years.
Rosner: When was this?
Jacobsen: In the 1980s to the 2010s. He died. He was succeeded by a guy named Goh Chok Tong and then his son took the post after Goh Chok Tong and is currently in power now. His name is Lee Hsien Loong.
Rosner: So what you’re saying is that this is a benign dictatorship?
Jacobsen: Their purchasing power parity is about twice candidates. They are a very rich country.
Rosner: But you’re calling these guys dictators?
Jacobsen: Soft dictatorship and there is mixed commentary. Even prominent commentators in the United States, one indo-American commentator, I forgot his name, he’s very bright; he interviewed Lee Kuan Yew and he said that if there had to be a dictatorship of any kind then the one I would want to be under would be Lee Kuan Yew’s, something like that. So it’s sort of they have high quality of life, they have long lives, they have good education, they have very terrible freedom of expression and freedom of the press.
Rosner: I spent like a day and a night there I think with Carol and she worked for an international company, she took me along on a trip and it’s very nice there. You’re a little nervous because you don’t want to run afoul of their police who would get you arrested for chewing gum I think. Now it’s gotten even more science fiction-y, like the architecture is insane and probably everybody has much better devices than we do. So, okay I’ll buy benevolent dictatorship but is there ever a place that you know of where one group said, well you guys are kind of primitive and we’ll run you for a while and get you up to speed. Has that ever been a fucking thing or is it always bullshit and exploitation with one group over another?
Jacobsen: It’s sort of in the question a bit loaded because if it’s as you said one group over another, then automatically it’s a power dynamic.
Rosner: Yeah, but has the power dynamic ever been exercised reasonably? And I think what reasonably would be is a technologically advanced power or group, comes in and… even by them occupying like when Whitey came to Australia they fucked over the Aborigines.
Jacobsen: In any in any case of exploitation and annexation and a ratio of culture and people, it is most likely to be negative. One could make an argument for some positives as in modern technology, modern scientific understanding of the world, cosmopolitanism maybe, and things like this. However it’s very hard to make an argument in any sense where colonialism becomes a good because most of the world got rid of colonialism around the early 20th century. I mean the post colonial countries are listed as New Zealand, Australia, Canada, United States, and South Africa as they were getting over their colonialism into post-colonial period. Israel by some arguments around the Balfour Declaration, through the Balfour Declaration was becoming a colonial country slowly through annexation of territory that was not by law its, and in doing so it became the only country at the founding of the United Nations partaking of colonial policy. And for the citizenry of Israel, it’s very good; it’s a high-tech country, it’s a long lived country, it’s a healthy country, it’s a high education country.
Rosner: Yeah but they have their boot on the completely misgoverned Palestinians.
Jacobsen: Yes, I mean they are absolutely. So in Palestinian territories, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip; those are apparently poorly managed. However they’re also under the boot of the Israelis and it’s to the point of a very significant annexation of territory and very significant differentials in a plaque application of laws regarding human rights.
Rosner: And like a bunch of probably lopsided atrocities at this point where…
Jacobsen: Sniper shooting children and journalists and medical aids will be one.
Rosner: The Palestinians lob rockets into Israel; shitty rockets that do some damage but they don’t kill that many people and then the Israelis who have all the power can be pretty ruthless in fighting back.
Jacobsen: At the United Nations it’s pretty much universally accepted that Israel is the major crime committer although there are crimes committed by some Palestinians, certainly. It’s also an important point, as a really quick sort of asterisk side note, the Palestinian territories do have status as an observer member State, as a voting country in the United Nations, and we call it member state. The only two observer member states are Palestine and the Vatican. So they have no holding power, however they are recognized as member states whereas countries in the United Nations discourse as legitimate Nations of the world. So to any denial of their stature as a member state say, would be against the facts.
And in Canada, as a Canadian I’m not speaking from a sort of a posturing here, I’ve interviewed the all the active UN Special Report tours, I’ve interviewed extensively over two or more years the country director for Israel Palestine for Human Rights Watch. The only one I really haven’t interviewed has been the country director for Canada for Human Rights Watch and anyone from Amnesty International regarding that but I pretty much got all the big names from Norman Finkelstein who is the main Protégé of Noam Chomsky, and so on. So I’ve kind of interviewed the proper people and had to do the proper research at the time that I was doing that kind of work but Canada says the right thing i.e. in line with International norms but does the wrong thing and it may even pressure to sort of stop that information from getting out through our country’s representative.
So, it’s mixed. That’s a very good case actually; the Israeli-Palestinian issue.
Rosner: But there is one kind of interesting thing about or I just thought of this about Israel. So Israel, they fuck over the Palestinians. This has been going on for a long time and the Palestinians contribute to their own fucking over by having been incompetently and aggressively governed, lined up with forces like Hamas that just want Israel wiped off the face of the earth.
Jacobsen: And there is some anti-Semitism coming from Palestinians against Jewish Israelis, that is certainly right there too and that’s an evil.
Rosner: Right, but I mean part of the blame goes back to the colonial powers who bugged out of their leaving ridiculous borders and didn’t solve anything but then it goes back for Millennia before that, that even without the colonial powers fucking everything up it, wasn’t going to be smooth anyway. But it seems like individual Israelis, I don’t know if this is kind of a rule and I don’t know that many Israelis, but it seems like they’re overall not debased, that they’re not Nazis basically for the most part. I mean there are hard line Right Wing Israelis who in their desire to keep the Palestinians in check are pretty Nazi but like the overall country doesn’t seem to be like a fucked up country like that. Do you agree?
Jacobsen: Usually the people who act badly or poorly causing a lot of problems are the ones in power. The one restaurant I worked with, one of the many, one of the boss there was reformed Jewish as you are. She was a single mom of three daughters of varying ages and she had lived in Israel for a bit, I believe in the Golan Heights; that’s where she met her ex-husband. So she was Israeli and we got along great and she’s a lovely person. So, I wouldn’t take that as anything.
Rosner: Well statistically, only a quarter of American Jews voted for Trump, three-quarters voted for Biden and Clinton. Trump threatened America’s Jews, said that we weren’t grateful enough to him and we better watch out. Yesterday he tweeted some shit about that, not tweeting because he can’t; he’s been kicked off of Twitter. But Jews in general, well not in general, but the vast majority of American Jews and I would think Jews around the world are not entirely on the side of the hardliners against the Palestinians. I think most Jews not in Israel would acknowledge that Israel’s kind of being an asshole State against the Palestinians for what that’s worth. But I guess the answer to my question is that neither of us can think of a situation where a dominant power, a dominant group over some other group kind of willingly looked at the group that they were dominating and said “You guys are fine, we’re going to withdraw,” it’s always kind of been as the result of strife.
Jacobsen: Inherently it is a violent act to take over another people’s land, people don’t like.
Rosner: Yeah but we can’t think of a situation where a group came in and didn’t fuck over the people who were already there. If you fucked over people in the past; it’s reparations. Nobody’s ever done advanced reparations.
Jacobsen: Maybe late stage America with some of its smarter immigration policies around taking in people with education, money, connections, etc. I mean that period of its history when an instance of doing is less so was doing that, yeah it was a benefit to the country as a whole but that’s people coming in. Then sort of there’s an admixture of their culture and the dominant cultures, this sort of a mutual assimilation process.
Rosner: Yeah, except that there were always groups coming in that the Americans who are already here preferred to other groups. We didn’t like the Irish, we didn’t like Italians, we didn’t like Jews and there were policies. It was pretty open in terms of Federal Immigration Policy until the 1920s. But there was still like wild exploitation. The Chinese were exploited in building the railroads and people coming to New York City and other big cities were exploited as workers doing the shit work and living in terrible conditions. Federal policy was not unwelcoming or was less unwelcoming at various times but there were still systems in place that worked against ethnicities that were frowned upon or fear or whatever.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/10/17
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, we were talking a little bit off tape and something that came up was me asking do you think the American dollar will disappear as the world’s Reserve currency. What are your thoughts on that?
Rick Rosner: I said yeah but I don’t know how long it’ll take. America’s financial system was strong enough to handle four years of the country being run by criminal idiots under Trump. I don’t know that it could handle two consecutive administrations of criminal idiots. On the other hand, I don’t know that the world wants to make the one, the reserve currency because then you’re putting a Communist dictatorship in charge of the world financial system.
This crop of Republicans is very nihilistic or just stupid, like maybe too stupid to understand that what they’re doing is nihilistic. They’re talking about scuttling Social Security and Medicare which is the medical care that you qualify for once you’re 65. It’s like medical insurance for all but you have to hit 65. And the Republicans are trying to kill these things because the current Republicans are only responsive to very rich donors. And if you kill Social Security and Medicare then you can give more tax cuts to billionaires even though the money in Social Security we paid in, not just as taxpayers but as direct deductions from our paychecks, that money is ours. We just get it back in retirement but the rich billionaires want to get their hands on it.
If you privatize these things then private companies and rich people can make money off of privately running Social Security and Medicare. The Republican argument has always been that private enterprise is more efficient than the government and that’s been proven wrong again and again over the past 30 years where private enterprise has been increasingly good at making rich people richer. Any efficiencies don’t go back to the consumer; they go to stockholders and the people who run the companies. The Republicans want to do a thing where you vote on whether to fund Social Security and Medicare every few years. Why you would do that I don’t fucking know except that’s their plan. If they succeed in getting that plan installed, then there’s a major fight every five years if they get The Five-Year Plan passed or every year if they get the one-year plan passed.
We’ll have to give major concessions to… they may shut down the government over shit like this and if the government gets shut down annually for a few years in a row, then the world will seriously consider finding a more reliable reserve currency though right now the dollar is stronger than it’s been in decades. It got down to where a 30-year low the pound versus the dollar, you could buy a pound for like a buck seven when it’s usually like a buck 35. And for a while a dollar was worth more than the Euro which I don’t know when the last time. Anyway, the dollar is still strong. I’m thinking because we’re back to semi-competent governance but it’s hard to squeeze the dangerous assholes out of government and they may win the election that is happening three weeks from tomorrow.
Anyway, that jeopardizes the America being a financially reliable and responsible country. The dangerous idiots who, not to go into it much, but just to mention it that Russia has been sponsoring a lot of this idiocy whether these idiots realize it or not.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/09/28
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We don’t need any preface for this one I think. So you actually, in old issues of Noesis, when you did some writing and others didn’t spring there was a lot of talk about physics naturally. There was a talk about time travel too. What are the boundaries here between the possibility and impossibility regarding time travel?
Rick Rosner: Well, I don’t think it’s possible at all. I mean there are some relativistic scenarios that if you could collapse space in certain ways. I came up with a way to do time travel according to the terms of general relativity; if you basically had unlimited power to create mass and black holes and all this shit but really I think that’s an artifact of the math of general relativity and that a future version of general relativity won’t allow that. I just don’t think time travel is possible.
Jacobsen: To be strict and sorry to interrupt, we do not mean psychological senses of kind of contracting and expanding individual sense of time. What’s the natural arrow of time, travelling forward?
Rosner: I mean we’re all time travelers; we all travel into the future at a rate of one second per second.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] that’s funny. True!
Rosner: Now, I think it’s possible to have kind of practical stuff that approaches time travel via big data, that in the future we’ll have immersive simulated worlds where you can go to any place that the economics, the market for this kind of shit supports. It’s like I assume that in the future if you want to go back to World War II and kill Hitler you probably will be able to do that. You want to go hang out with Jesus, yes, there will be various versions of that that obviously can’t replicate, we don’t know enough about historical Jesus to replicate him but we can simulate the world of zero A.D and you can go back and have adventures there. You’ll be able to have adventures in a number of different times and places; both based on fact and made up shit.
I mean people already do that in video games except that your latitude, the things you can do it’s quite limited you’ve got to pretty much conform to the situations of the game. In the future if you like a world you’ll have freedom to run around in that world and many of the popular virtual worlds of the future will be based on history and some will sell themselves on their authenticity. That’s not too far from time travel. But no real freaking nothing, where you warp space and go really fast and you zip around the sun a few dozen times and when you come back it’s 10 years before you left; that’s not doable.
On the other hand, according to the precepts of amazingly huge data in the future beyond the future, there’s the future where you can go back and hang out with Jesus and the disciples or kill Hitler and then 50 or 100 years after that there’s enough information retained about, say the year 2070 and beyond that if it’s the year 2131 and you want to go back and live in 2070, you can reasonably do that with a fair degree of authenticity. Now obviously you can’t interact with the people who actually lived in 2070 but you can interact with the simulations of them based on the information they left behind. And if they’re still alive, that would add to the authenticity. So yeah, we’ll be spending a lot of time in virtual life in the future including lives set in different times.
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Let me recommend a movie, Source Code, directed by Duncan Jones, a very good director starring Jake Gyllenhaal. It’s set in Chicago I believe and it’s about time travel. They come up with a device that lets one selected person travel into the past for five minutes at a time repeatedly. It’s a good movie because it’s very logically consistent and also just has a decent story. There are several recurring problems with time travel movies like Back to the Future has one of those problems, it’s not really a problem it’s a cliché. There’s nothing wrong with the Back to the Future movies, I accept that too many movies are like it and that cliché is if you go back to the past you can’t fuck with anything or if you do you have to make everything right, otherwise you’re fucking up the future.
And that’s fine but most time travel movies are written by people who don’t have a depth of reading in science fiction. So they come to the same clichéd conclusions about what’s dramatic and what’ll work and what won’t. And the one where it’s either you have to make everything pretty much the way it was or everything’s fucked, or there’s the other one where you go back to save the Titanic but it turns out by going back you actually sink the Titanic, that nothing can be changed. But things are immutable and yeah you can travel back but the illusion of freedom you have is fake and there are several other time travel clichés that sometimes can make for decent productions but really the way that you’d want time travel to work is in the most logical way possible.
There’s the grandfather paradox that has to do with a lot of clichés that if you go back 50 years in time and you kill your grandpa then you’ve killed yourself because without your grandpa fucking your grandma, you never are born. So, I’m sick of plots that revolve around that kind of setup. I like the plots and only a few people have done this where every time you go back into the past, again which is not possible in real life, but it’s the best way to do it fictionally I think. Every time you go back, the point at which you arrive, say 1941, splits the world into a whole new path; the path that led to you going back still exists and it doesn’t get changed but the world splits into a parallel world 1941 that has the world where you’ve gone back to fuck around with shit. Then it proceeds just normally except with you in it unless you go back to your world; a world where arriving back in time splits the world into multiple worlds.
You don’t save anybody in your world from Hitler, by killing Hitler. By going back in time, you create a parallel world where you’ve arrived you’ve killed Hitler and you’ve saved everybody in that world and if you’ve left open a time gate that moves forward in both worlds between say 2030 on the one end and 1941 on the other end and that time gate stays open as it becomes 2031 and 1942, people can go back and forth between the two worlds; that’s fine. Somebody was just talking about this on the movie review show on NPR that a good time travel movie isn’t about the time travel and the paradoxes and all that shit, it’s about what makes a good movie in general that what happens with the people and then the shit that happens besides the time travel-y shit.
So a time travel movie would have a combination a partnership between the government or governments and corporations like the Disney Corporation to finance and mount this expedition into the past and build a time gate and that’s just about what happens when you’ve got a time gate across 89 years between 1941 and 2030 moving forward into the future into 1945 and 2034 and like people living in one world working in another. People have taken stabs at that but it hasn’t been adequately explored. You wouldn’t want to build a shitload of these. It would be super expensive to build the gate and maintain it and it’d get chaos. You wouldn’t want to generate 10 new parallel worlds every day that would be unwieldy as shit. You’d want your world war or just before World War II world or where you make World War II not happen. Maybe you want your revolutionary war world or maybe you want your Jesus World or your Middle Ages World; it would be like Disneyland. You wouldn’t want a Disneyland on every fucking corner; you’d only want four of them or six of them.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/10/13
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Addendum to previous session. Please go ahead.
Rick Rosner: All right, I can talk about my own penis and balls. I have fairly large balls because I have varicose veins and my balls in addition to having my testicles also contain a lot of extra vein material and so they’ve just got more stuff in them. So they’re pretty substantial.
Jacobsen: They’re packed.
Rosner: Yeah and also I look pretty reasonably hung for two reasons, well two and a half reasons. One is, I’m ridiculously skinny; very skinny thighs which makes my penis look relatively larger, there’s no plumpness to hide my stuff and also the girth compared to my skinny thighs looks a little girth-y in comparison and it is pretty girth-y because I’ve been jacking off for nearly about 53 years. Basically, so I’ve been yanking on that thing for 53 years. So it gets it’s probably gotten somewhat stretched out. I suspect, there’s a thing called a vacuum pump that has been sold for time and memorial for probably the last 70 years for to freaks who want to make their penises bigger. It’s like sticking your dick in a vacuum cleaner which you shouldn’t do because you could have it caught or torn off but the penis pump creates a vacuum that sucks your penis larger inside this chamber. I would think that if you do that religiously you might damage your penis in such a way that it gets bigger.
I may have done something similar to some extent just by jacking off eighteen thousand times. Reason second and a half is I’ve learned the trick to making your penis look bigger quickly. That is that you don’t want to do it in front of people because it’s a weird thing to do but if you’re going to be naked in front of like somebody new or if you’re going to be stripping, find a private place, grab your helmet and just pull down for maybe three seconds, five seconds and by stretching your penis out you will compel blood to flow into this longer structure that you’ve created by stretching your penis and it’s blood that gives you an erection. When you have a hard on it’s because your penis is full of blood and a little gate has shut off at the base of your penis to keep that blood in there to make your penis a blood water balloon.
So by grabbing your penis and stretching it, you’ve pulled enough blood into your dick that it will for a while look maybe an inch longer um than it would have if you hadn’t pulled on it or maybe a lot longer if you’re in a situation where you’re nervous or cold or exerting yourself, causing your penis to retract. If you’re in a situation where it’s your pubes and just your helmet and you want to rectify that for at least a couple minutes, grab the helmet just pull on your penis and it’ll stretch out for a while.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/10/13
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You wanted to talk about penises. I have one preface to the penis discussion. When I was in Iceland for the Young Humanist International General Assembly, I was running and I got elected, when I was there people talked about the Whale Museum in Iceland. People talked about Volcanic vent Museum, I think; no one went to those as far as I know. Everyone went to the Penis Museum in Iceland. It is real because they sent pictures to the group chat. Continue [Laughing].
Rick Rosner: All right, so it’s penises of all the animals in the world?
Jacobsen: I don’t know, it may only be human mammals.
Rosner: All right, so in the previous session we were talking about racial stereotypes and how most of the old school stereotypes about black people and probably a lot of the new ones or barely veiled attempts to characterize black people as inferior so we the racists can name ourselves superior. And if you’ve been looking at American politics lately, there’s been a resurgence of racism. And as with previous eras of big time racism in America, the whites who are most actively racist are also like ugly and stupid, they are not good arguments for racial superiority even though they are arguing their own superiority; they’re just loathsome a-holes.
Along with the package of racial stereotypes is that black guys are hung, that they have larger penises. And this again can be seen as part of an argument for being in charge of black people that black guys are sexual savages and we need to keep them down in brutal ways, historically lynching because they will attack our white women. But you can’t ask the question about black penises where I’ve seen and been reliably told about four individuals in my life with just ridiculously large penises because I was a male stripper. So, I saw one white guy and one black guy with just enormous penises at rest, like five inches or longer when not erect, which is a lot for a penis maybe even longer. I was told of another guy who was notorious for having a gigantic penis who went to my college. He was a black and he was said to be able to tie a knot in his which maybe an exaggeration.
My writing partner and I wrote a porno and we were at the shoot and the shoot had to shut down for like 90 minutes because the condom, after disease scares in L.A they sometimes passed the laws that the performers have to wear condoms and this was during one of those periods and a normal condom wouldn’t reasonably fit on this guy. So they had to stop down the production while a PA drove around to a bunch of 7-Elevens trying to find some place that had Magnum Extra Large condoms. So that’s a very small sample from which you cannot draw any conclusions about race and penis size. That was a white guy. So I know of four guys with huge penises; two white, two black.
For the Man Show, I worked on a piece where we researched penis size. We visited a penis surgeon and there are bad ways to enlarge your penis surgically; one is by cutting it open, wrapping the inside with cadaver skin and then sewing it back up and that gives you a girthier penis unless the skin breaks loose and then just bunches at the bottom like a sock that’s falling down your ankle and then you’ve got this mess, this barbell shaped thing that obviously is going to require more surgery. The better way if you really want to make your penis look longer, there’s a tendon that attaches to the visible base of your penis to the part of your penis that sticks out of your body and that tendon runs up into your belly and that tendon holds up your dick when you have an erection. It turns out that there’s as much penis inside of you when you have an erection or I guess in general as there is on the outside. And if you cut that tendon more your penis falls out of you which gives you a longer limp dick. Your penis looks longer when it’s not erect and you’ll never have a penis that points upward when you get an erection again because you cut the tendon. But in the locker room you’ll have an impressive looking limp penis.
This is a good segue to various reasons why black people might be thought to have larger penises than white people. And one reason is that race is largely a very recent adaptation to environmental conditions but race doesn’t really affect essential characteristics of people, intelligence or health for the most part though there are some race-specific diseases. People are people in general and races like this late add-on in the last few tens of thousands of years as a consequence of where you live, that if you live in the north where there’s not so much sunshine you don’t need much protection against solar radiation, so your skin’s going to be white. But if you live in a sunny climate your skin’s going to be darker.
Similarly, in a hot climate your balls, everybody’s balls hang outside of their body because if they were inside your body, the heat of your own body heat would cook your sperm. So it’s possible that the whole package hangs out further among people who live in hot climates just to keep the whole package where it can be air-conditioned, where it’s not up in your body and cooking your sperm. So it could be that maybe black people do have larger looking penises when limp for air conditioning for your nads. And also there was a time I believe and it still reflected in like the way they calculate kidney function that black people with more lean muscle mass and having more lean muscle affects a number that shows up in your blood or urine creatinine. That means that you calculate different numbers whether the person is having their kidney function tested, whether they’re white or black, and more recently that double calculation have been debunked.
And also more recently I doubt that black people on average are leaner than white people because at least in America because everybody in America is fat regardless of race; close to 70% of Americans are overweight, half of those people who are overweight are obese which is like being super overweight. So, most Americans are fat which means you probably don’t get that same… the fatter you are the less well-hung you look because your chubby little thighs and your poufy stomach envelop your junk. I look back when black people were statistically leaner than white people maybe that was a deal. Anyway, what I’m saying is that there may be reasons why that stereotype is true but I don’t know. I mentioned some reasons why it might be but I have no idea if it actually is.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/10/13
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So there’s some political stuff in LA about a council member. I’ll let you expound on this one because it’s so crazy it had to have happened in America.
Rick Rosner: Yeah, okay. So the LA City Council, city government has just been riddled with just mouth fees and some corruption lately and the latest thing is that the president of the LA City Council had to resign. Even Biden told her to resign after she was caught on tape talking with some of her cohorts and she compared the African-American son of another council member, said he was like a little monkey and I will go on record here saying something that could get me in trouble. I have checked IDs in bars for 25 years and I scrutinized the faces and IDs of about three quarters of a million people and I got to say that there are more white people who look like monkeys than black people. A white person’s more likely to resemble a monkey but that’s not the point. I would say that most stereotypes about black people, at least most old-school stereotypes that have persisted since the 19th century are excuses for being in charge of black people.
Black people don’t particularly look like monkeys; the idea is that by comparing them to monkeys you’re saying that they are… I mean most of these excuses take the form of black people are mentally inferior and it’s better for everybody if we’re in charge of them. So most old-school black stereotypes I believe are justifications for slavery. The stereotype that black people like fried chicken, watermelon, and grape soda and at first thought it’s like what you’re saying that black people like food that’s delicious; what’s the big deal there because fried chicken; delicious, watermelon; pretty good, and I love grape soda. My teeth don’t love it but all yummy. Behind that is saying that black people like yummy stuff the way a child likes yummy stuff that they have the tastes of children because they’re not mentally mature and we need to be in charge of them, first through slavery and then after the Civil War through all these other means of control.
Jim Crow, intimidation, the Klan; they’re all horseshit. Even when they have some basis in reality, black people like all people probably do like fried chicken but making a point of it is to justify being in charge of them. Anybody who wants to argue that one race is superior to another is hewing to a creepy agenda, is racist first and just looking for ways to justify racism.
Jacobsen: If I can take a step back I would characterize broadly a lot of this under motivated reasoning. The racist attitudes come first and then the justifications for the allied geologies come second.
Rosner: I agree with you. IQ, especially the early days of IQ at the beginning of the 20th century, it was plugged into this. It was used by racists to argue that the blonder you are the smarter you are basically. It goes Northern Europeans like people from Sweden and then the further south you go until you hit like Italy. Italians are suspect; they’re not smart, they’re mongrels. And then you go further south into Africa but the early IQ tests as we’ve talked about before, were particularly culturally bound. There’s a thing called culture fair which is trying to design IQ tests that don’t rely on cultural knowledge. But the people who designed the first IQ tests, this was not a concept to them, it hadn’t originated yet. The 1910s were super culturally loaded and of course somebody who came to America from Italy or some other country 18 months before was not going to know necessarily which hood ornaments corresponded to which make of car, which was an actual item from some IQ test back then.
It made sense to the person writing the test that you see cars all the time. I’ve seen a million Packards. I’ve seen two million model T’s. Anybody who’s reasonably observant would know which hood ornament goes with which make unless you’re an idiot without really thinking about. What about the person who’s not an idiot but is coming from some country where they don’t have Packards and model T’s? I had a whole bunch of points about racial stereotypes.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/09/19
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: All right so they started doing presidential approval surveys towards the end of FDR’s administration a little more than 40 years ago and there’s a trend that’s accelerated over the past 20 years where as America grows more polarized people’s support of the president has gone down. So the presidents who were surveyed say 60 years ago, 50 years ago often had approvals in the 50s the 60s and then the last few presidents have been in the 40s. So Biden started off well above 50% but quickly faded into the 40s, then a year ago he kind of pretty quickly pulled us out of Afghanistan and that cratered his approval. Now, he long wanted to get us out of Afghanistan and Trump had come to an agreement with the Taliban that said we were getting out of Afghanistan. We’d been there for more than 20 years, it’s the longest war in American history and it wasn’t going to end well no matter what we did but his pull out cost him maybe eight points of approval.
Over the past two months he’s gotten a lot of stuff done; the infrastructure act that nobody’s been able to get through for more than a decade, something called the inflation reduction act which does a lot of stuff, he’s forgiving 10,000 dollars of student loans if you earn less than 125000 a year. So all this stuff has helped his approval and shown that he can get stuff done even though the Senate is equally divided. He was first elected to the Senate in 1972 and he’s got 15 years more experience in holding national office than any other president and it kind of shows in terms of what he’s been able to get done even with the slimmest of margins in the Senate and the House. So his approval has been picking up though he’s still in the low 40s. That’s what’s been going on with him that he’s been proving himself to be reasonably effective, amazingly effective given the politics of right now.
The Republicans have been proving themselves to be just pieces of shit. There are more than a dozen investigations into Trump and the people around Trump, both at the federal level and in various States and he just stupidly stole classified documents, stupidly refused to give them back, and still makes noises like he’s going to run for president and has embraced QAnon. Do I need to go into what QAnon is?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I guess if you want, yeah.
Rosner: QAnon is an insane conspiracy theory of the far-right that says that a bunch of celebrities are pedophiles and they also cook and eat kids and that Trump is the savior of the nation and he and his forces will eventually expose all the pedophiles and execute them. Pedophiles including people like Tom Hanks. They also believe that JFK Jr. didn’t really die and he’s coming back. They believe just a bunch of crazy I mean just full-on stupid bullshit. At his last rally in Ohio over the weekend, Trump wore a Q button on his lapel and he led the audience in I guess the Q salute which is like a Sieg Heil except with just one finger extended. The Republicans after getting rid of the federal right to have an abortion via the Supreme Court, they said it’ll just go to the states and individual states can decide but Senator Lindsey Graham just introduced a bill that would prohibit abortion after the 15th week at the federal level breaking the promise that the Republicans had made. So the Republicans are being full on assholes and Biden’s being somewhat affected.
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So what was going to be a Republican slaughter in the House in the election that’s coming up in eight weeks now has shifted where the Democrats have a chance of holding on to the house and they’ve got a strong chance of keeping the Senate because the Republicans are just being so loathsome and a lot of the candidates they’re running are just pieces of shit, those in Georgia. Herschel Walker the Republican candidate for Senate and the guy seems to have brain damage from football. He can’t speak well and when he does speak he tells outrageous lies like he graduated summa cum laude from college when he didn’t graduate at all. He’s got illegitimate kids all over the place; I don’t know what the rest of this shit is. A lot of, I mean not all the Republican candidates, but a good half dozen or more are anti-Semites or have people who are about anti-Semites working on their campaigns, they’re just really scumbag-y right now which is disturbing and frightening but is maybe cause for optimism because a lot of them are just too shitty for any reasonable person to vote for them. So that’s where we stand.
According to 538, which is a poll aggregator, as of today the Democrats have a 71% chance of holding on to the Senate and the 29% chance of holding on to the House. If they lose the House, the Congressional hearings into Trump go away because that depends on the Democrats running the House. If the Republicans take the House they might try to impeach Biden for no legitimate reason. So, Republicans can’t really fuck things up too bad because Biden’s the president for two more years and he can just veto any crazy shit that the Republicans get through but they can shut down some of the investigations into Trump. Hannity on Fox News was showing that how much the Democrats are out to get Trump and in Chiron he just did a scroll of 32 investigations that have something to do with Trump which I believe overstates it but there’s just a lot of investigating into Trump and Trump has really hurt himself by being super guilty of some of the stuff that that’s being investigated. So that’s where we are.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/09/18
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I started doing this series on substance use and misuse; others would say substance use and abuse. However you might use the terminology this brought to mind something that you’ve talked about as a one-off on using LSD for a second attempt at the SAT and still scoring very high on the older SAT in the upper 1500s.
Rick Rosner: I did upper 1500 even.
Jacobsen: You did?
Rosner: Yeah.
Jacobsen: Okay. So you scored 1500 even.
Rosner: Which was really good back then when it was harder to get into the 1500s. They made the SAT easier; they’ve increased the standard deviation basically. So more people got perfect scores which makes sense in terms of differentiating kind of in the… really you want to differentiate among most of the people instead of making it so hard that you’re differentiating among the top one-third of one percent and also it makes people feel better about themselves so they probably feel better about the SAT and the SAT is kind of bullshit anyway.
Jacobsen: Regardless, this brought to mind the series that I’m doing which came from an article I wrote over more than two years ago on a Christian recovery center. The son of the founders sent me the longest email I’ve ever received; it was ten thousand words. I responded relatively quickly and this sparked conversation meeting with one of his workers in a way or stats organizations workers for coffee for about two and a half hours. This ended up starting a series called Portraits in Substance Misuse and Use on In-sight publishing. So I want to ask you more generally not about some intractable issues with substance misuse in the United States.
Rosner: No, you started our discussion by talking about this and I said I don’t know anything particular about substance use and abuse but I thought it brought up the subject of intractability in general.
Jacobsen: Yeah. Okay, let’s start on the social issues there for that one then. What do you think about things that are deemed intractable or that seems intractable?
Rosner: All right, here’s the deal. People like to think of themselves as masters of their own destiny and that’s both true and not true. We can choose what we’re going to do, it’s not exactly free will but it’s informed will. We can figure out within reason what we should do and maybe what we shouldn’t do and then either choose the best way to go or succumb to temptation but there are constraints on our choosing our own destiny. One is that throughout history humans have died a lot. It’s hard to follow your destiny if you’re dead by 28. It’s hard to follow your destiny if you get embroiled in wars. Humans probably have more agency now than they did 200 years ago because we live longer, we have access to more information, there’s more freedom in the world on average. So stuff is still shitty for huge numbers of people in the world but probably on average and just in the aggregate numbers.
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More people in the world have freedom than ever before because there are eight billion of us and maybe only two billion have serious constraints on their freedom. We have an average of 80 years to pursue our destinies but there are new forces that constrain us. And you can see some of those things in America where one-third of American adults are or are obese which is very overweight, another third are just overweight which suggests that we don’t have control over our eating behavior on average that food is inexpensive and increasingly delicious. So we can’t resist it and so that’s an area where we’ve lost control and for most people being overweight, if you consider that a problem, is a problem that they won’t solve. Most people who are overweight are going to stay overweight. So that suggests a certain amount of intractability. We’re not resistant to data. We’re increasingly not resistant to the information that we absorb via social media. We get increasingly personalized information; we get increasingly sophisticated information that’s increasingly able to manipulate us. So, being resistant to being manipulated and by information is increasingly intractable.
You talked about drugs. The Fentanyl that’s coming into the country is 100 times more potent than heroin. So if people put Fentanyl in your drugs, you’re likely to die because most people can’t handle a dose of heroin times a hundred. If you’re lucky somebody’s there and can get you help, get you shot up with that stuff that brings you back. Anyway, being resistant to drugs, getting off of drugs, surviving a drug habit is an increasingly intractable problem and just following your own destiny as someone who who’s a member of the most computationally powerful, the most powerful thinkers… all of human civilization, humans have been the smartest beings on the planet and if you consider that part of having a destiny, that’s going away. Unaugmented humans will be increasingly at the mercy of more powerful and sophisticated thinking entities and will be pushed around by them and manipulated. And that’s a very intractable problem because the increasing power of information processing entities is not going to stop. So the only way to keep up with it, if you want to be a Colossus to stride the world is to augment oneself or to be lucky enough to be one of the newer Alpha thinkers in the world. So there have always been constraints on humans trying to be masters of their own lives but the nature of intractable obstacles to that is rapidly changing.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/09/18
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What’s your favorite kind of workout?
Rick Rosner: Well I don’t like aerobics at all. I just hope to get some aerobic fitness out of just doing whatever. When I had a job there were a lot of stairs if you didn’t take the elevator. So I feel like that was good for that. I do weight machines pretty quickly. Since Covid, I try to get in and out of the gym really fast because I don’t want to catch Covid from some knucklehead gyms have a lot of knuckleheads who don’t believe that Covid is so bad. So I try to do four sets a minute, just do like five reps, move the peg in the machine or the dial or whatever changes the weight in the machine and do another set and knock out, then go from machine to machine.
Today I did something like 40 sets in roughly eight minutes at a gym that I don’t normally go to because I feel like it’s a bucket of blood for having knuckleheads that might give me Covid but my other gym isn’t open on Sunday, so I risked it. But I got in and out of there, did sets on three different machines; 37 sets, eight minutes. Before Covid, my favorite workout used to be to take a book in and read between sets, still do three sets a minute but a set takes five or eight seconds to do. Three to five reps and then read for 12 seconds, maybe 20 seconds and then do another set. Even so, like, people see you have a book on a machine; they won’t take 20 seconds to see if you’re actually using the machine. They think you’re using the gym as a library.
Anyway, those people are assholes. But I haven’t been able to do that since Covid because I can’t afford to spend 20 minutes in the gym because that raises my chances of getting Covid, so no reading at the gym. Looking forward to maybe someday when I can go back to doing that.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/09/18
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Smart guy, can cats eat cheese safely?
Rick Rosner: I would assume most kinds of cheese with given reasonable amounts of it. Cats are really good at vomiting if something isn’t good for them. So I’d say, yeah it’s mostly okay.
Jacobsen: Yes. So in general they can make them small bite-sized pieces, feed them only a small amount of any kind of new food or treat and try one novel food at a time and kind of keep the size or proportion amounts of that particular “meal” for the animal to they’re sort of body mass size.
Rosner: Okay.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/09/17
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the state of IC?
Rick Rosner: Well, I think that combinatorial coding is the key to a lot of this stuff but before we get to the specifics of that let’s get to the generals of IC which you can start with “What’s the universe for?” And that returns an unsatisfactory answer though it may be surprising to have an answer at all considering how much science hates questions like that.
Jacobsen: Teleological questions?
Rosner: Yeah. But you can pretty much safely answer that the universe’s purpose among other things, at the very least its purpose is to exist to be persistent across time. That leads to a whole bunch of other questions along the lines of how it does that. If you’re doing physics by metaphor, you can answer with how other things persist across time. The basic elements are they’re made of matter, the matter exists in space. Complex living things, the ones we’re familiar with, exists by modeling the external world so that complex living things can position themselves in the world to not be killed by the world. So that’s it for the general kind of underlying teleological stuff.
Another area is… one of the things that I’ve wrestled with over the time we’ve been working together is where the information in the universe is. Is there room for this much information in the universe? How is the universe encoded? And all that stuff.
Jacobsen: In a sense, we have talked about this in some sessions and one of the ones that’s distinct that’s coming to mind is a one based on codeless coding or something like that where coding that has to arise as a basic necessity of existence.
Rosner: Yeah, okay that makes sense. Coding is analogous to spontaneously arising clustering, like you can’t have a universe that does anything if it stays homogeneous. You need stuff; you need matter to clump up into stars and galaxies. One thing I want to get at is, with regard to information is I feel like and we’ve talked about this a lot though not much lately, is the universe mostly runs on protons and everything that supports protons. In other words, you can’t have a proton without having an electron. You can’t have energy being transmitted across the universe without photons, you can’t have protons flipping back and forth into neutrons and forming nuclei without neutrinos and anti-neutrinos.
If you want it you can argue but it’s all pretty much centered on protons and all the junk that goes along with having protons. I would argue two things. One is that informationally protons aren’t some ideal information encoders but they can embody, they can hold, they can contain information, and they’re part of a self-consistent system that can exist which means they work for encoding it, for containing information. They’re not some perfect thing. What makes them perfect, if you want to call it perfect is that they’re part of a system that can materially and temporarily exist and you can have an analogy with numbers.
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Numbers are great for counting things and the system of counting numbers is super consistent and just seems easy but to have the counting numbers, the analogy is you’ve got counting numbers. Counting numbers seem pretty elementary. Protons and the rest of the long lived particles and all seems like compared to the rest of particle, physics. Protons, electrons, and neutrons; they’re kind of a simplistic slice of the whole particle world. And by analogy with the counting numbers, the counting numbers imply all this other stuffs; the Infinity of rational numbers between any two counting numbers, negative numbers, imaginary numbers, rings and groups and fields and all the other things that pop out of mathematics and the non-countably infinite transcendental numbers with a non-countable infinity between any two counting numbers or any two rational numbers or freaking any two numbers period as long as they’re on the number line.
So I would say by analogy and not a good one, the whole support system of all the rest of the particles, I’d say is just kind of a mess that pops out in extension of the things that are useful in terms of information. The way the rest of math pops out once you start poking at the counting numbers. That’s thing one.
Point number two is, I keep saying that the system of matter; protons, electrons, neutrons, and what they clump up to be is not a perfectly regimented containment system for information the way computers and computer code is, where everything’s exactly precise. If you’re coding and you fuck up one symbol in your line in your thousand lines of code, you’ve got something that doesn’t work. Matter is sloppy information containment. So that’s that for those two points.
And then back to combinatorial coding where the universe is clumped up and as an information processor it makes sense that information as is relevant to the information processing that the universe is doing; the macro processing as opposed to the micro phenomena that the macro stuff sits on it is built from. The micro phenomena that we are made out of, the macro stuff I would guess is macro level coding by lighting up galaxies. If you can argue that the universe is a thinking thing, the thoughts are denoted by combinations of lit up galaxies. That galaxies are distributed along filaments and I guess you’re going to light up filaments, relevant filaments as information is being processed and where the filaments intersect you’re going to get combinations of lit up galaxies and these combos are represent to the thinking system, the ideas, the thoughts, the images, and the content of the system.
And the units of coding the letters in the code are entire galaxies because those are the things that are strung together in relevant macro waves. There’s very little to the point of there being no macro information for the purposes of the universe’s processing in the orientation of individual galaxies relative to the rest of the universe, with the possible exception of maybe orientation is important if the black holes at the center of the galaxies are spewing or jetting out or spewing matter, with the direction of the jets being somehow related to the overall orientation of the galaxy. I don’t know about that. But galaxies rotate the position of individual stars in the galaxy versus the rest, all that doesn’t matter.
Now the position of individual stars in a galaxy relative to the information in the galaxy, that may have some relevance if the galaxy is… it’s a fucking complex thing, it contains nearly 10 to the 70th particles. You’ve got 10 to the 11th galaxies in the observable universe, you got 10 to the 80th or 85th particles in the universe, you do the math and you got 10 to the 70th particles in a galaxy. So, there’s information within the galaxy but there’s little information in the orientation of the galaxy versus the rest of the universe as opposed to the position of the galaxy versus other galaxies.
All right one more thing, so if we’re arguing by analogy and metaphor then there’s similar clumping in our brains and we know this. I mean people don’t know it as an analogy to the entire universe but we know that babies are born with a shitload of dendrites and the dendrites die off creating the structure of the brain. Dendrites forming and dendrites dying off is a part of clumping and clustering and so we know that neurons are clumped and clustered and four nodes and these nodes I would guess have a lot in common. The processes that form these clumps and the informational implications of clumping, there are a lot of analogies to be drawn between our minds/brains and the universe and the information processing.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/09/07
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, so preface, I’m being kind of a douche bag right now because we had a long, long preamble off tape, and I’m making you do it.
Rick Rosner: All right, so Scott right now is interested in joining fraternal organizations like the Elks and I’m twice as old as Scott, so I come from an era when these fraternal organizations that are now dwindling were more active. My dad was an Elk. My dad was just Shriner, a mason. He may have belonged to the Optimist Club. He belonged to the Downtown Boulder Businessmen’s Association. He had a weekly poker group for 40-50 years that continues to this day. It’s just he dropped out when he died, but the poker group goes on. It’s probably been going for pushing 70 years now. Anyway, I’ve worked in writers rooms. We have experience in various forms of human aggregation which were changing over the second half of the 20th century, kind of dwindling, and then super dwindling as the nature of human communication and business was changed by the Internet.
With the Internet really kicking in around 1995 and then internet business kicking in with Amazon sometime in the early 2000s, you couldn’t always buy shit easily on the internet, but now you can buy everything. And then social media kicking in, kind of along with the smart phone at the end of the odds, 2008, 2009, and now human aggregation mostly takes place via our devices. I mean we still have hundred thousand football fans gathering at sports stadiums. But that is a very fleeting form of aggregation. The organizations or friendships or whatever you have via social media are more durable often, though, they don’t have to be. I have Twitter friendships that come and go, and we don’t really need to talk about the landscape that much because everybody knows the freaking landscape. We’re all on social media, but what we can talk about is the future of human aggregation because the means of communicating with people are going to continue to get more powerful and more intimate.
Elon Musk wants to stick some kind of deli in your head to pipe information directly into your brain. And he probably won’t succeed with that because he’s kind of all over the place, but other people will. And then if you can set up brain to brain communication and contact lenses just are always on, that are like the miniaturized version of Google Glass. Google Glass was the Google Glasses that added information to your visual field, but people didn’t like them because you could tape people just by looking at them and pressing a button and they felt creepy. But there are the equivalents of Google Glass that are out there now that have less of a backlash.
So anyway, communication is going to get more information rich and more intimate, which will affect the relationships we have, the types of relationships where eventually people will more or less be able to share brains and people will be augmenting their thinking. We already do that in a shitty way with our apps. But our apps will eventually join with our apps with again more intimate connections and so our aggregations will be super intimate and we will evolve ways of doing that where couples may decide to link themselves, and this may turn out to be really great for 10%of couples, to be linked in their thoughts. And then for 20% it’ll be meh, it’ll be like, “Yeah, we were okay before, we’re kind of okay now.” And then for the remaining 70% it will be bad, but people will learn how to be linked.
Those linkages will probably be bad for workers because technological improvements that increase productivity generally just make all these things that have been promised. Like in the 30s, automation was supposed to bring about a 30 hour work week and in the 50s a 20 hour workweek and now basically we’re working, we’re on call all the time anytime you’re awake. Somebody can send you a DM or an email and ask you to do some shit. So being linked will probably make work even more of a pain in the ass.
But with fraternal organizations or human aggregations, eventually we’re going to have to let in people who maybe were formerly human and now are mostly replacement parts in their brains and thinking beings that were never human. And you’re tired. I haven’t really thought much about this, so I’m going to wrap it up and we’ll do part two of this tomorrow because I haven’t really thought about how it’s going to work. We don’t really know how it’s going to work, but we can come up with some reasonable ideas like knowing that brain to brain linkages, you don’t have to do much thinking to realize that, that would fuck up more couples than it would help. One more thing, just at the very most basic level, knowing what gives you a boner moment to moment and what gives your wife a girl boner moment to moment, most couples maybe people will learn how to not be annoyed by that, but at first, boy, that’s going to be troublesome.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/09/06
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: It’s day eight of the LA heat wave where we’ve had temperatures in the San Fernando Valley of more than 43 degrees probably for the past eight days, we got two more days to go until it temperatures drop below, high temperatures drop below I guess 40 maybe. So it’s been miserable. I tweeted it’s a good day to be Ted Williams’ head. Are you familiar with Ted Williams?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I think so.
Rosner: One of the greatest baseball players of all time and also a lunatic who had his head Frozen when he died. So you could do worse right now than to have your head at like 30 degrees above absolute zero. But it made me wonder if any of the information in Ted Williams’ head survived. His head didn’t get treated that well. There were delays; his heirs fought his last wishes in court. I think his head remained frozen for most of this but who knows. We should talk about what kind of resurrection would be possible for somebody who gets their body or head frozen. It’s much cheaper to get your head frozen than your whole body and it makes sense.
So thing one is I’m guessing that it’s not reasonable to think that you’re body can be resurrected after having died and been frozen, not frozen but vitrified. I keep saying your body frozen but it’s not really freezing, it’s vitrification; it’s turning your body to low temperature glass. Glass doesn’t have crystals, you don’t want crystals. Crystals are like knives slicing your corpse at a microscopic level to ribbons, puncturing all your cells. So you want to be turned to glass but even if you do this and even if you do it well, I think it’s more likely, if you’re going to be resurrected, you’ll be resurrected by having your brain scanned and replicated than by having your brain made funk, made so it works again. That just seems super unlikely. I think it’s more likely that they pull the information out of it and use the information to build you again. So that’s thing one.
Maybe the other systems in your body, your other organs are resurrect-able. I think the brain is much tougher to jump start after thawing out. It seems like your brain gets shut down and then even if you make it back from a coma you’ve got pretty big deficits but I might be confusing shit.
Jacobsen: This raises questions of personal identity in the self. So let’s assume that the self is a non-virtual and natural construct. Let’s say you replicate your consciousness 100% and you have one of you and you have another one of you and those two cells go on divergent paths. From the next moment onward those cells have begun to accumulate different experiences and so they more and more become less what you consider you at that moment.
Rosner: So if you look at it, that’s like the Star Trek transporter fuck up problem. The transporter works but you’re destroyed on one end and you’re replicated on the other end. So it’s only one of you.
Jacobsen: Was it the basis of an episode where number two was replicated a bunch of times?
Rosner: I don’t know because I don’t watch Star Treks because it annoys me, it’s not a dirty future enough. Anyway, so there’s a pretty famous science fiction story about somebody who doesn’t get destroyed on the one end. The person gets transported but still is alive at the origin, so now there are two of them and somebody has to tell one of them that well they need to be killed because you just can’t have two of you running around. If you think about it, if somebody comes to you one minute after the transporter fuck up and says “Sorry, I have to kill you. Your other person will survive” if you think about it, if you’re in that Star Trek world you’re going to be like “Okay,” because all you’re losing is the one minute. You’re still you someplace else and it’s no big deal. It feels like a big deal because you’re being killed but if you think about it, the transporter rep should explain to you you’re only losing this conversation with me, there’s still you someplace else. Then you say, “Yeah but you’re killing me” And then the transporter rep says, “Just fucking deal with it. We’ve been talking for 90 seconds now. The longer you talk to me, the more experience you’re going to have to feel bad about losing, but it’s still only going to be two minutes.” And then the guy should just kill you because no more talking.
So anyway, it’s not a tragedy to kill one of you if two of you have been made and it’s still not even a tragedy if you live a week, if there are two of you, the one of you says “I want to talk to a lawyer, a Star Trek lawyer” and said “Look there’s a fuck up. Now there are two of me, I don’t want to be killed,” and the Star Trek lawyer like takes a couple days and maybe there’s some emergency legal session and the court says “Sorry, it’s the policy” The whole case is taken five days, so you’re still only losing the five days of experience that you’ve had and your other you just goes on. So, it’s not that big deal. It’s the divergent experience that each of you live for 30 years and losing that 30 years of experience, that’s the sad part. That’s thing one.
Thing two is, we don’t replicate our experience. We don’t carry ourselves forward 100% from day to day. Our brain’s bad at holding on to every single thing. So we forget shit. It would be great if we could be replicated with 100% fidelity but less than that level of fidelity would be okay with us too. We are fine with the kind of crappy fidelity that we have where we remember most of the stuff we think we need to remember and we’re okay with forgetting the stuff we forget. We evolved to be this way; we’re okay with it even though in some ways we’re short of great fidelity. All right, comments.
Jacobsen: In some sense, nature has solved this problem a long time ago. I mean how significantly different is one brain to another. I don’t know how different sort of a prime age brain is one from another on average in terms of the functionality. So in a lot of ways nature provides a little bit of variation among everyone.
Rosner: So, I go to the dentist to get my teeth cleaned every three months and the TV has the screen saver on which is if Apple or Google, but it’s just video. Sometimes it’s a shot slowly something of you’re going over Dubai and you’re approaching the Burj Khalifa and then it switches to sea lions and then it switches to some other city and then it switches to a school of fish that the camera is swimming through and watching these fish it’s like how different can their individual narratives be from each other. They’re fucking fish in a school of fish swimming around together. I can’t imagine that their consciousnesses are very much different from each other. Human consciousnesses seem a lot different from each other because we have individual identities and names and histories of the people we’ve known and loved, hated, the things we’ve done.
You look at chimpanzees, they seem like they’ve had different experiences compared to fish. At the same time we probably have roughly the same amount of genetic instructions that build our brains as compared to the genetic instructions that build a fish brain. So, I don’t know. It’s a similar question as to where the information is and what the information is. Is most of the information in our brains interchangeable with other humans? Every human has the knowledge of how space works; three-dimensional space. Everybody is able to walk, move through, do all the shit they do, which we all do in three-dimensional space. That data set, not just data but whatever the experience and knowledge, that seems like that would be a big app and we all share that app. So, is it different in everybody?
Say, 100 years from now you can buy the resurrection package where we’re going to replicate you and you can live in virtual space or you can build a brain so you can have some kind of body and walk around the real world or you can go as perfect a replication as we can do or you can go for the cheap package where we do a pretty full replication of your last 10 years but we do a crap replication of you in high school. We mostly replace your high school memories, we take a few but we’ve got like a hundred different high school memory packages and we just fit a few of your high school memories into the generic set of high school memories. Would that really be that big a loss? Would losing a bunch of seldom access to memories be that big a loss?
It’s the same kind of general question as that you have to ask when where the information is in your brain, whether brains are replicatable. We’ve decided in our discussions that dendrites are a huge element of your changing consciousness, that you can have thoughts, you can remember those thoughts and you’re changing over time probably because dendrites are growing anew or forming new connections or strengthening connections weakening other connections; that’s a fairly durable brain personalized brain architecture. But we know that if your brain goes without oxygen for five minutes, you can’t get it back and we don’t know why, maybe brain scientists know why but are the information still there? Is the information really at the dendrite level? Is it just the dendrites? Is it at the junctions of the dendrites with the synapses and is that what gets lost when your brain goes without oxygen?
Anyway, is any of that replicatable once your brain is turned to low temperature glass? Is the layer of individuality really where most of our information is or are the underlying apps that could be generic? They’re not exactly generic because our experience of 3D space is based on personal experience but it seems like you could switch it out with anybody else’s, could you? Anyway, there are all these questions about where the information is and whether it can be surmised in a preserved brain. I guess that’s it for me talking.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/09/05
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, so these are along horses, talking about horses and working with them and the ways we try to communicate, talking about communicating?
Rick Rosner: We’ve talked about communicating with horses that if a horse wants to understand what you want, they have a pretty good idea, if they have any degree of experience you were saying. So when a horse doesn’t do what you want they’re just being dicks or being stubborn but it’s not a lack of understanding for the most part.
Jacobsen: Yeah, I mean they are intelligent enough and they have been around people, a lot of them much their lives. I mean these are International show jumping animals. So for them, they have a tremendous amount of experience growing up in captivity and seeing how it works with the other horses, that’s they have nothing else to watch. Watching with people and working with people several times a day to get fed four times a day for hay, they get grain a couple times a day, they get waters changed, and they get their stalls cleaned once or twice day. So, there’s this whole process of interacting with humans and it becomes a routine; it’s a routine, doesn’t just become a routine.
Rosner: So they understand the routine, they understand what you want; they don’t have a view from 10,000 feet of the entire human horse enterprise but they don’t need it either.
Jacobsen: No, they understand it’s light out, there will be feeding four times a day, this is how the human behaves, this is what human will do, I had a bad experience with this human before I’ll be a little wary of them, I haven’t had a bad experience with this human I’ll be more comfortable with them.
Rosner: Like race horses, some of them, probably most of them come to understand that winning is a good thing in the eyes of humans. Some of them like winning for its own sake. They get shit up to a point, ditto for dogs.
Jacobsen: Well, I would want to make one caveat there; race horses are a much different world than dressage or show jumping or eventing or equitation or a derby racing. It’s a world where the horses are bred to being ridden hard, fast, young; their careers are shorter, there are fewer regulations I think in that particular silo of horsemanship generally. So, show jumping where I’m at, there’s much better care for the horses.
Rosner: Whatever you want the horse to do, the horse gets the idea. I’m sure there are really dumb horses that are bad at getting the idea of it.
Jacobsen: Oh yeah but 95% of the horses get it. The ones that will cause trouble are young stallions and new horses; one’s just coming to a new facility. I was telling a story about one whom, he lived in this field his whole life. He’s five years old, so he’s young, he’s a gelding, and he is huge.
Rosner: A gelding is minus the nads, so it doesn’t want to…
Jacobsen: [Laughing] yeah, so he’s a boy who has a cult, who became a stallion.
Rosner: A eunuch.
Jacobsen: Yeah it became a eunuch basically, yeah. His balls dropped off or somehow removed in a proper way.
Rosner: The people who don’t work with horses have the understanding that stallions are harder to deal with but horses who still have their balls seems like might differ on that.
Jacobsen: They’re just more muscle-y. They may not necessarily be heavier if you had the same hand for hand height which is how they measure but they have more muscle mass or just a firmer feel to them. So you might need a little bit more effortful maneuvering with them but if they know you, they’re generally pretty friendly with you. They only really care and lose their mind when a mirror walks by, if they’re young. The older ones, the older the stallion; he doesn’t really care. And there are protocols for even where you put a wheelbarrow, how you walk the mare. So you put the wheelbarrow in front of his stall and you walk the mare on the farther part of the barn aisle from the stallion, so that you don’t have the wheelbarrow on the opposite side of the aisle so the mare has to walk close to him because they might do something that’s not safe necessarily. Because again, these are 1200, 1300, 1400 pound animals and the bigger ones are a bit heftier to deal with.
So, anyway I wanted to talk about interspecies communication and then compare that to future artificial constructs that when the technology comes around sufficiently, the reverse question might properly be asked. So the way I’m dealing with horses or other people won’t be dealing with other animals, you do get a sense with a certain innate theory of mind how other animals operate. So I’d be curious to get your thoughts on what you think future constructs might orient themselves to communicate with people.
Rosner: All right, well one thing is historically there’s been a lot of chauvinism about animals where there’s a whole long list of things that people have said makes humans human; can recognize themselves in the mirror, self-awareness and that used humans use tools and a lot of these demarcations that set humans off from the rest of animals, especially now that everybody’s got a camera, you can find counter examples all over the place. I guess if you look around for it, I haven’t gone deep into it but I’ve seen a little bit, there’s a fairly deep collection of crows who barter. Apparently if you give crows treats, it’s fairly likely that they will start bringing you stuff that they think you might like, like shiny shit or that they like that they also assume you might be into like lost earrings, pieces of colored glass. You give them peanuts, crows like peanuts, and they’ll bring you neat shit, shit that isn’t necessarily useful but just shit that they like aesthetically like a nice stone a nice rounded stone.
And if you didn’t have the video records of this and you’re trying to make this argument with somebody you know 100 years ago they’d think you were full of crap but we see video of animals doing stuff all the time. I think most dogs and cats don’t really give a shit about what’s on TV to the point where you can’t even be sure that they understand the images shown on TV but there are enough examples of animals reacting to stuff on TV that we know that some cats and some dogs can decode images on a television. Now there are plenty of videos that are cooked like a cat watching TV then an image of Trump comes out and the cat jumps and runs out of the room; that’s been doctored, somebody took a pre-existing video and dropped Trump in. But if you if you can weed out the bullshit you can see there’s a lot of stuff where animals have enough brain stuff to figure out a lot of stuff on their own including the elements of communication if it’s done right, some animals.
We have two dogs. One we inherited kind of from… one dog got kicked out of senior living with my mother-in-law because the dog was suspected of biting an old lady on the ass. This dog is under socialized, doesn’t even know what its name is because it spent most of its life hanging with my mother-in-law in a very unedifying environment. There’s a lot of shit that this dog doesn’t get though this dog will talk, like I’m always talking at the dogs just because when nobody else is home because I do that and now this dog, if the dog thinks their treats might be available, this dog will make vocalizations to the extent it’ll grow [roaring sound], not trying to form roars but trying to [roaring sound] just like make noises that are at its best I guess equivalent of talk. And this is a dog that that is pretty clueless in general but still has enough brain stuff. If you have brain stuff, if you have neurons and neural that are arranged to allow for learning in the same ways that AI circuits are arranged with feedback and strengthening some pathways and all, it’s unavoidable that an animal will figure some stuff out. Even this not very smart dog figured out how to take a make an attempt at making mouth noises.
Communicating with animals is much different than communication between humans and AIs will be because animals generally don’t have a big picture. A really smart animal like a border collie or an ape might have a pretty a fair idea of the overall enterprise, like of everything that’s going on, that might have an idea that of generalized language like Alex the gray parrot with a vocabulary of 300 words certainly understood that humans can use words to communicate anything. Alex have a basic sense of grammar that if he saw something new or if he wanted to describe something that he’d never learned the name of, he could string enough words that he knew together to describe the thing like a certain tree. Like, a marshmallow might be white something that smooshy, if he had smooshy in his vocabulary, he’d be able to get his point across which means that he understood that that’s how words were as opposed to most animals who just know that certain words mean certain things.
But when we’re communicating with AI, AI will certainly understand the entire human enterprise and will understand us better than we want to be understood, will understand things about us that even we don’t understand about ourselves. But all the basic human concepts of math, of language, of economic relationships, romantic relationships, just anything that can be expressed sufficiently, powerful AI that’s either been set up to do this or has been set loose to learn how to do it will know everything and we’ll deal with us as if we’re the idiots, the dumb animals.
There’s a science fiction story I read, I probably mentioned before. It’s a journal from 50 years from now roughly, that’s the last surviving scientific journal that’s entirely produced by humans and I think the story replicates some of the articles from that journal and it’s mostly just despairing. The humans are like there’s no fucking thing we can do with science anymore that all the science has been taken over by AI and here’s the piddl-y little shit that we managed to semi-discover given that all the great things that can be discovered are being discovered by much more powerful intellects than humans are at this point 50 years in the future. We know that we’re like the un-augmented humans are likely to be manipulated with increasing sophistication via machine learning entities whether or not they’re run by humans or not.
The common wisdom right now is that we’re being manipulated via social media in conjunction with AI. The uncommon wisdom shared by people who know a lot about AI and algorithms and Amazon is that the algorithms are shit and if you look at what Amazon tries to sell you, you can see that the algorithms are shit, that if you buy a humidifier Amazon will try to sell you a second humidifier; that’s a very dumb algorithm. They can’t figure out that some things are like you buy one and you’re probably good.
There’s a clothing company um called Revolve that is very naked-ish clothes for skinny hot women, who might or might not be hanging out at a fancy hotel bar as escorts. It’s very sexy clothing but also very expensive like 985 dollars for a dress that’s barely there and I like looking at these women in these slutty clothes. So I constantly get pop-up ads for Revolve and for Venus swimwear and around Halloween for Yandy which is the company that’s the biggest maker of slutty Halloween costumes and nobody none of these algorithms have figured out that I haven’t bought a single slutty outfit. So the algorithms are shit. They probably could be better but nobody like maybe gives enough of it, I don’t know why they aren’t better and if they can’t be better now they will certainly be better in the future.
The fears that people have about being manipulated now will be legit fears in the future that will be manipulated by entities that are a lot smarter than we are. And people fear that now but the reality now is we’re not being manipulated by smarter entities; it’s just that some people are really easy to manipulate. Some people maybe want to be manipulated. I had like a symbiotic relationship with the rage that I felt at Twitter feeds that turned out to be Russian disinformation like Tennessee GOP which came out of St. Petersburg Russia and was designed just to own the Libs to put out shit that that made Libs super angry and you know that shit would work on me. If I thought for half a second about it or if somebody had suggested “Is this really coming out of Tennessee?” I don’t know, it seems kind of fucked that you know like but “No, I didn’t think about it much, I just moved straight to the being pissed off” I was easy to manipulate even though a little bit of skepticism on my part might have helped me see through it but in the future harder to see through.
Not necessarily bad, I keep mentioning this book about the near future I’m writing or pretending to write because I’m pretty lazy and the character at the center of the book is we’ve been talking about long-term-ism which is how to get humanity through its current challenges to make sure that it has a very long long run into the future of many tens of millions of years, that we don’t die out now. The character at the center of my book does some thinking not exactly in those terms but is thinking about what’s the most humane way to manipulate people, to ease them into the future. A lot of the action in the book takes place in the 2030s and the central character knows that not every human alive in the 2030s is going to survive to be downloaded, isn’t going to survive to live 200 years due to advances in medicine, isn’t going to survive just because they’re unlucky to be born at that point in history but also because a big chunk of humans are dumb shits and will not embrace the tech or the philosophies that would make them receptive to catching the train to living far into the future.
And so this character has various objectives and one is kind of to keep dumb shits from wrecking the world. When I say dumb shits I’m talking about like American political conservatives and their ilk around the world and not true conservatives but Trumpy fuckers. How do you make sure they don’t wreck the world for everybody and how do you make it so that even though they’re fucking idiots that they can still have lives that are as decent as possible within the limits imposed by not allowing them to fuck up the world. So this character has benevolent aims but does a lot of really sketchy and possibly monstrous stuff in the service of easing the world into the future. And I can see that being one of the types of ways that AI works in the future that benevolent but very calculating and manipulative.
Then of course, you got the AI that is being used for frankly evil purposes that will need to be controlled. Bottles of like Tylenol didn’t used to have security foil all over them; the foil, the tamper-proof markings came about because of some famous episodes of intentional poisoning. Somebody bought a bunch of Tylenol, I think in the late 70s maybe the 80s, opened up the bottles, added poison to the capsules, put them back on the shelf and I don’t know how many people died but enough people died that it was a fucking thing and ever since there’s tamper-proof foil. And AI is going to be subject to that, that we’re going to have to figure out how to keep AI from being used for evil purposes and also keep AI from doing the Sky net thing which is following its own lead, its own you know conclusions about what’s right and coming to the conclusions that humans or at least some humans need to be eliminated which gives you Terminator.
So, that’s the deal. I don’t think that clarity of communication will be a problem the way it is between humans and animals and we are going to be on the dumb shit side of communication fairly soon. Self governing AI doesn’t exist but all this shit is going to happen pretty fast. And one more thing in my book, we have animals getting woken up too where the central character and his cohorts come up with ways to pipe information and knowledge into the brains of smart animals and communicate with them much more effectively to the point where animals like octopuses have a pretty good idea of the overall human enterprise. There are these little like aquarium carts that these wired up octopuses can ride around on land, around the lab, so they can see what’s going on and they get a pretty good idea of how the world is. Since an octopus only lives for about two years, the octopus in conjunction with what is in the book called The Big Block which is just an add-on AI information processor that speaks the same mental language as the being that it’s hooked up to that it’s been able to share enough thoughts that it can do a lot of your thinking for you. So the octopuses who live for only two years, the little carts have the can the thinking of a whole line of octopuses, well the book doesn’t cover that many years but several generations of octopuses that have added their personalities and thoughts to the Big Block octopus system.
So, the octopuses are plenty pissed over their ridiculously short life spans at the same time they have a half-assed immortality because they’re able to incorporate their thoughts with their Big Block or Big Blocks and continue to be thinking beings even after their demise. I don’t think that this kind of shit is coming by the 2030s, it’s as fast as it as I’m saying that it will be coming in the book, there’s some happy accidents that make shit happen faster than it’s likely to happen in real life but eventually if we want to wake up animals and if you want a dog that has the intelligence and understanding of a seven-year-old, you’ll be able to have that by the 2060s or if not of flesh and bone dog than some kind of like AI dog-like buddy. Anyway there you go. That’s all I got.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/09/04
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is longtermism? How does it relate to IC in real?
Rick Rosner: I just learned about it longtermism and probably have a very basic understanding because I’ve only read one article on it but apparently it’s kind of a modernistic philosophy embraced by certain billionaire tech bros that you need to look at the world now as having the potential to, a hundred million years from now, support planets and solar systems full of an expanded humanity. You shouldn’t look at saving the world for our grandchildren; you should look at saving the parts of the world that will make it most likely that will have five quintillion descendants 50 million years from now.
This article criticized that point of view among other things kind of giving people license to say jettison not give a shit about climate change refugees. If you have to lose a billion people to famine and drought and wars because of climate change in the service of increasing the overall odds that humanity survives, implying privileged humanity, then go ahead and do it because the billion lives lost now don’t compare to the five quintillion lives you’ve saved 50 million years from now. I buy the arguments that longtermism if you view it that way is kind of ridiculous and it’s a form of utilitarianism, which I generally have no problem with except that you can’t really imagine what the greatest good for the greatest number of what will be 50 million years from now. But IC allows us to take stabs in the general direction of stuff.
Jacobsen: The way I’ve seen IC develop has been with language only; words, and heuristically rules of them.
Rosner: Yeah but even though it’s just language only and that’s a failing on my part at least, there’s still enough to it that I still believe in it. Among the things that IC postulates or are kind of side postulates is that consciousness pretty much goes along with high level information processing and that consciousness arises not infrequently in the universe, that you have 10 to the 22nd stars even if only one in a trillion solar systems can support life, that still leaves you with 10 billion solar systems that can support life. And out of those, even if only one in a thousand you can go from life to conscious life, that’s still 10 million planets with conscious life scattered throughout the universe which is not a small number. There’s the principle of no upper limit to the size of potentially existent universes. There’s the set of all possible universes which we know and we know that set contains at least one universe and likely accountable Infinity of universes of all countable sizes.
So that reflects on longtermism that even if we fail to create some paradise for a quintillion whatever 50 million years from now, it’s pretty likely that an old highly sophisticated culture/slash technology will survive to do something, that there are cultures out there among the likely millions or billions of planets that have evolved life. There are likely civilizations that are millions of years old. The idea that we have to be ruthless in making sure that distant humanity in the distant future survives at the expense of current or near future humanity seems a little bullshit-ty given that we’re very likely not the only conscious life in the universe. It’s also very unlikely that we’re the pinnacle of conscious beings.
So thinking in terms of what’s best for a quintillion super powerful humans of the future is a failure of imagination because what will be 50 million years in the future will be inherently inconceivable to us. It’s not unreasonable to think that there is a tendency among all the other things that can happen in the universe for complexity, computational complexity, information process and complexity, conscious complexity, to increase. It doesn’t mean that every part of the universe will increase in complexity but it seems very likely that parts do. So, many of these ideas point to long-term futures.
Also one more thing is big bang universe only supports life for trillions of years and then it burns out and it just spreads out, we got a heat death of the universe and that there’s no available energy for life or information processing once the universe is sufficiently spread out and uniform. But the IC universe doesn’t spread out like that. It looks like itself indefinitely into the future which is an optimistic thing for the future of conscious beings that we won’t be obliterated by the heat death of the universe. So anyway, all these things are ideas that involve the far future involved longtermism but not the fairly basic longtermism that I’m slightly familiar with on the basis of one article.
Another idea; the universe fills up with civilizations over time. Now maybe some of these civilizations go away but probably some of these survive. And an idea that I don’t know which side I come down on, do civilizations that are internal to the universe that are built from the material of the universe space-time matter; do these have anything to do with maintaining the universe if the universe itself is a probably conscious information processor? Do the civilizations within the universe facilitate that process?
I guess that it’s not necessary but it’s possible that lately we’ve been talking about combinatorial coding which is embodying thoughts via what’s lit up with the combination of things that are lit up within a system, whether it’s the universe or your brain. And you can have that recall through codes system without any conscious subsystems helping to run it but that doesn’t preclude it. If you’ve got little elves in your system that are helping sharpen your focus making your system work better, maybe that’s part of the increasing order of an information processing system. But it’s a completely open question to the point where you could almost think of it as kind of ridiculous. How could civilizations that originate in galaxies, civilizations that are probably limited to traveling at the speed of light; how could these civilizations have anything to do with the signaling across 10 billion years and 10 billion light years that is involved in the universe’s information processing? If civilizations can get to the huge black holes at the centers of almost all galaxies as far as I know and have be sufficiently technologically advanced to mess with those things, who knows what they could do.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/09/01
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, so you pitched this idea again in email yesterday, the day before I guess, I’m percolating a bit between the two of those for a while. So, what’s behind the term IQ post-mortem? What’s the intention there?
Rick Rosner: It’s kind of the end of the IQ era where IQ was created as a test, as a testing concept at the beginning of the 20th century and fell into relative disrepute by the end of the 20th century. There will be new ways of measuring conscious information processing capacity go along with the rise of AI and figuring out the mathematics of consciousness. IQ may survive in some small way but it’ll be smaller and not as big a deal as it was for the people in the 60s say. So, that’s one kind of post-mortem that IQ as a reputable idea is kind of coming to an end. And then it’s kind of the end for people who have traded on IQ notoriety. In the 80s, Marilyn Savant got famous for having the world’s highest IQ according to the Guinness Book of World Records and to build a nice career out of it over the next 35 years. The careers of people trading on IQ or are for the most part coming to an end. So, there’s another kind of post-mortem.
Jacobsen: What do you think was or were factors killing it off?
Rosner: It’s very difficult, especially if you don’t want to, IQ is still well loved by racist fuckers and even if you’re not a racist or a sexist, it’s fairly hard to avoid some of the racist and sexist aspects of like trying to measure intelligence. Certainly the people who like to claim the entire nations have average IQs that that differ from other nations, these are due to cultural or genetic reasons, certainly those people are fucking racist assholes with creepy agendas but even the people who don’t do that it’s a kind of an icky concept. So, that’s thing one, that it’s icky.
Thing two is, it’s unnecessary. U.S colleges are learning to do that without the SAT, an aptitude test that’s supposed to measure your innate skills as they apply to go on to school. It’s been known for decades that your SAT score doesn’t add any further predictive value to the rest of your academic portfolio that the people can predict how well you’re going to do in college exactly as well with or without looking at your SAT score. So it doesn’t do anything and SAT is a surrogate for IQ. So, it doesn’t do anything, it’s not a very useful tool. If somebody has learning deficiencies you can learn about those directly and you don’t need to extrapolate from their performance on an IQ test. It just seems kind of passé that over the past 40 years we’ve gotten more conscious cognizant of the labels we hang on people about sexuality and again race and just all that different stuff and labeling somebody with an IQ is just one more label to maybe avoid. So, those are three pretty big factors.
Why do you think it’s going away if you do think it’s going away?
Jacobsen: Well, if we look at the psychological studies on heritability there does appear to be a heritability paradox. On the one hand it appears to be highly heritable where on a minus one plus one heritability, the metrics are anywhere from 0.6 to 0.8 with some recent studies even pointing out to 0.85 plus size spectrum in terms of positive correlation. So there could be a lot of founding factors there yet at the same time it shows heritability on one range of things. On the other hand, apparently to experts there are other ways in which the heritability is less clear. There’s something like a heritability paradox and this is an actual phenomenon they’re trying to work on and any studies on genetics and epigenetic aren’t fully fleshed out because we’re at the very inception of these things.
Rosner: I have one more other factor. IQ is kind of cheesy, like people who aren’t socially inept know not to brag about their IQs. It kind of has a reek of geekiness and not good geekiness but like creepy geekiness.
Jacobsen: It has a sense of elitism, people don’t like that.
Rosner: Yeah, but not even legit elite-ness, like you can say you went to Harvard or let it be known somehow. People might think you’re an asshole for dropping Harvard into a conversation but they’ll still be kind of impressed you went to Harvard but if you drop IQ into a conversation not only will people think you’re kind of an asshole for doing that but they won’t be impressed, you don’t get anything from it.
Jacobsen: Another facet is cultural values have changed over the last 100 years. And IQ came in around a time in full force when no rapid militarization was necessary. So, getting everyone lined up and putting them on a comparison ranking and then for them it was important to kind of let them know…
Rosner: Separating the office or candidates from the enlisted man.
Jacobsen: Correct. So, in a lot of ways this is a holdover of that period of time which was more of a sort of soft totalitarian measure on behalf of democratic governments to get things going. It was an emergency act in a lot of ways. As society has become a lot more loose, soft, creative, flexible, and liberal in its values and diverse with various immigration policies and with particularly in the United States, a wider range of freedom of expression, people can think things that haven’t necessarily even been thought before or combined thoughts that haven’t even been thought ever. So thinking about the 60s the 70s when things were really good, quite in a cultural shift in this in fact it’s a little bit recently some.
Rosner: Here’s another reason. Let’s say in the 1940s if you’re going off to war or even if you’re coming back from war, your ability to navigate the world was based on things like privilege but I mean controlling for that, just two guys they’re arriving in New York; one with a higher IQ than the other navigating the big city with just their native cleverness and maybe the knowledge that their cleverness has helped them acquire. Well 80 years later shit’s different where we all have access to all the information and all the apps in the world and nobody’s just relying solely on their cleverness. We have devices that that do our thinking for us and our research for us and somehow inherent cleverness might be less of a big deal.
Jacobsen: Brains are neuroplastic. So if we live in a less rugged time people in some ways would be less forced to grow up, will be less forced to use a variety of cognitive skills for example creative problem solving which would not fall under a categorization of strict IQ to me.
Rosner: Let’s talk about less rough times for just a second because people who live through rough times tend to overvalue rough times and the tough behavior that gets you through them.
Jacobsen: Also true.
Rosner: Rough tough people think a little bullying is good for you and they look at today’s culture and they think it’s sissified and a lot of people from that era though certainly not everybody, kind of hate the idea of sexual fluidity and trans people as if it’s a demasculinization of society and somehow that’s bad. And I would argue no, it’s not bad. Are we going to be dealing with issues where we’re going to have to are the Russians going to be invading and all need to be super masculine to hunker down like they did in Red Dawn? I kind of doubt that. And really if shit does hit the fan we will certainly toughen up.
Tucker Carlson that fucking asshole on Fox, likes to say that our military is feminized now and woke and that makes us unprepared and I would like to say fuck you Tucker Carlson who himself is a soft boy. But more important than whether or not the military is woke, actually I’d say that it’s important the military be woke, that people can be in the military and still live decent lives and more important than everybody being Sergeant Rock with 18 inch biceps and a scar that runs across his face is being able to have the technology that lets you beat threats back and also be able to use the technology being, smart enough. And to some extent, mentally healthy enough to address the issues of a modern military. That probably doesn’t include being super concerned about what people’s genitals are configured as.
Jacobsen: You can put this mathematically to make it clear. In times of survival and emergency individually and collectively, people need solid categories, a small number of them to make a rapid decisions. And so the cultural clash in a lot of ways can be a difference between emergency survival thinking for a decade as their developmental period and comfort abundance surplus culture for several decades.
Rosner: Yeah, it’s like the Eloi versus the Morlocks. And one more thing is the U.S has a number of instances of being under prepared for war and then ramping up pretty fast. World War II was a semi-surprise for us, we could see it spreading across Europe and we were ramping up our whole military but Pearl Harbor was still a surprise. A further surprise was that we declared war on Europe where really we could have just fought in the Pacific Theater but Roosevelt and probably a huge chunk of the U.S population thought we were already helping out Britain but thought we should jump into the fight. The people saw the two theaters of War as being equally important to fight in.
Jacobsen: And also, if the cultural landscape is internationalized with the intellectual landscape and the creative landscape and the banal landscape widened so much, IQ which was already in the background fades more and more to the background as a natural consequence.
Rosner: IQ Advocates would argue that no matter how much different culture vary from each other there’s still an underlying intelligence that provides those cultures forward.
Jacobsen: I’m not speaking about that, I’m speaking about it as a cultural item.
Rosner: What you’re saying is that IQ was a bigger deal in the Western countries and particularly in America.
Jacobsen: In the 20th century and in North America and in West America.
Rosner: So, now the U.S doesn’t dominate the world the way it did right after World War II that then the concepts that the U.S was kind of built, it its was structured around also are less important.
Jacobsen: It’s like Michael Jackson and the Beatles; people still talk about them, but they’re not in the front page news necessarily; unless it’s another Michael.
Rosner: It’s still not clear to me whether his kids are actually his kids.
Jacobsen: I have no idea.
Rosner: Who cares?
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/08/31
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We were talking off tape and you brought up longtermism. I am familiar with similar concepts but not to the extent that you’re talking about which I would see more as deep longtermism. What do you mean by long-term-ism? What problems do you see with it?
Rick Rosner: So I started reading about it, I was prompted to read about it because there’s this journalist named Dave Troy that I follow on Twitter, who wrote a long series of tweets about how Putin believes in the noosphere, the worldwide thought sphere replacing the biosphere which is very bad. Now you and I talking have discussed how eventually there will be the worldwide thought blob or thought cloud or whatever you want to call it with everybody linked up. People and other kinds of thinking beings all kind of linked via using technology. And things will be very weird. Apparently according to this Dave Troy guy, Putin believes in some kind of phase change where the earth itself Gaia plus the thinking beings on earth combine to wake up and form this worldwide consciousness which is not the same thing. Everybody in the world plus every thinking thing in the world being linked via technology plus all the weird new stuff in the world that thinks, maybe even animals if they get juiced up to think, or just a bunch of think-y stuff linked. This is Gaia, the earth itself waking up to consciousness.
There’s more hocus-pocus in the in the Gaia vision though if you squeezed all the bullshit out, you might have something that’s reasonably close to something that can be reasonably predicted to happen. But according to this Dave Troy guy, looking at the people around Putin, he thinks the earth is going to wake up and become super conscious in conjunction with the super conscious beings on earth at the time and though those that dominate at the time that earth wakes up get to rule. And this leads to a bunch of scary kind of brinksmanship behavior where it’s possible that one aspect of Putin’s war of aggression on Ukraine and possibly his willingness to use nukes is part of his idea of how we get to awaken up earth.
So this is scary and weird but it also pointed me into the direction of other people who are thinking about like the worldwide waking up which includes a bunch of tech people. I guess a bunch of tech people believe in this thing called longtermism which is that you shouldn’t just look at making the world nice now, you should look at making sure that humanity plus technology survive for the far far future of tens of millions of years and billions even of years what would optimize humanity’s chances of surviving and flourishing or whatever humanity turns into in a far far down the line in geologic time basically.
The deal with longtermism or one of the objections to it is that people who believe in it might be willing to let a lot of stuff get fucked up now and a lot of people get fucked over now indifference to the many many people of the future. If you let two billion people die from global warming, now that’s not terrible because in the future you might have 10 quintillion people a million years from now. You’re sacrificing the present and the near future for the far future. So one objection is you’re sacrificing people and the planet of the present and the near future for what might be horseshit or even if it isn’t horseshit you’re still saying fuck you to the present.
My problem with it is a lack of imagination. Now I haven’t read any long things about it. I just read an essay about it that was probably about 10,000 words or less. So maybe if I read a book or two about it, they would discuss the failure of imagination that postulates a quintillion people a billion years from now because they’re just fucking people even if they’re souped up super smart super linked up people. I guess if I had to believe in anything along these lines it would be short to medium-termism. Beyond the medium term 200 or 300 years from now, you don’t really know what the fuck shit’s going to look like. So doing anything now or being dicks now in the service of what you imagine shit to be like more than 300 years from now seems just goofy. I don’t know, any thoughts here?
Jacobsen: In some ways I can see the point. In other ways Putin may have a point in the same way Teilhard de Chardin did have a point.
Rosner: The Putin thing somehow jumps off from de Chardin’s noosphere stuff but in creepy directions.
Jacobsen: The idea of Teilhard de Chardin was theistically oriented as he was a Jesuit priest. A main thing there though is a sort of magical thinking of not only the earth as a sphere, a geosphere, a noosphere building into a consciousness expanding out everywhere into the entire universe and sort of uniting with God and Christ in some manner. That’s a form of magical thinking but the premise of matter if translated into organic matter producing consciousness or rich information processing through an evolutionary process, that does have a premise because we do see over millions of years an increase in the level of what we would term conscious information processing and a sense of self behind that for conscious information processors. So the noosphere has a premise yet a lot of magical thinking and superstition to get shoved in rather than jettisoned to muck up the waters. However, the general idea of increased thought complexity, information process and complexity seems like a reality on the surface of the earth with evidence of millions of years.
Rosner: It’s a reality that as everything shifts you want to be at the forefront of it because the rate of technological acceleration with AI plus everything may mean that like some chunks of the world gain some huge advantage just due to the speed with which everything happens.
Jacobsen: Even without animals with such forethought, objectively you would not want to be a rodent now. You would want to be on the smarter edge of human now in a similar manner you want to be on the smarter edge of merge humans or official beings that have conscious senses of self.
Rosner: There’s a lot of talk about the wealth gap in America where the rich have never been richer relative to everybody else but there’s also the intelligence gap which is probably pretty significant now and could get a lot bigger.
Jacobsen: If I can interrupt. Consider a kid in a poverty-stricken country or a kid in a wealthy country who happens to have no technological access in contrast to a kid to 10 years old with some technological know-how who has an iPhone. Ray Kurzweil makes this a valid point; they have access to all of human knowledge, not only that, they have access to applications capable of giving output that would typically require a very high level of expertise in terms of mathematical operations or Google in terms of just finding general information.
Rosner: Yeah, and we know that our tech has over fairly recent history kind of evened out people’s access to information from the Flynn effect where the people’s cultural literacy as reflected by IQ around the world went up in the 50 years after World War II. So that’s a thing that you can reasonably argue happened. Then there’s the contravening thing which is that as we lean more on tech, a lot of people get stupider.
Jacobsen: The Flynn effect has stagnated or reversed now.
Rosner: Yeah. So, it could go both ways.
Jacobsen: Well, it can go both ways but the argument both points are affirmed in a sense that 50 years after IQs went up globally in the 90s to now, their stagnation or decline which also hypothetically could support the point of people being less internally culturally literate because they depend on applications, phones, etc. to do that for them. So when they come up to an IQ test they can’t answer it immediately but if they had a resource maybe they could.
Rosner: Anyway, the idea that we should be kind of callous about very chill-y things like climate change, that we should just kind of, if we have to like cut big chunks of humanity loose, if somehow that lines up with this over the long-term survival of humanity, though I’m not sure not having read that much about longtermism, what situations would do that. It seems like the things you do to save the planet now for the most part line up with increasing the chances of having our descendants survive. Anyway, that’s longtermism; it seems like a particular flavor of semi bullshit.
One more thing before I conclude. I had dinner with a guy who I don’t know exactly what he does but I wasn’t even supposed to ask because it may be something secret-ish and we were talking about the Turing test and he said that’s a bad test and I’m like “Well it was a good test for its time” I talked about how we both knew about the guy at Google who got fired for saying that Google translate or some other Google app is conscious. We agreed that he’s a lunatic but then I said something in a very limited sense Google translate knows how the word love works within language and that provides a road map to approach consciousness if you’ve add it in more modules of knowing the visual module, I didn’t have a chance to get much of this out, and he kind of shot it down. The conversation pretty much ended there but it left me thinking that I’m guilty of magical thinking, I felt like he thought I was engaging in not understanding consciousness and doing magical thinking. I don’t know the guy very well so I couldn’t read him and we couldn’t talk about it more. Anyway I felt like kind of a dick but there you go, sometimes you feel like a dick.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/08/24
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, we had a small chat. I was reflecting on the fact: I don’t know if I have many more avenues to explore the High IQ societies. I have a couple ideas, maybe a few, but I think those are pretty much already underway and can be done fairly quickly. Other than those, meh, they’ll be done.
Rick Rosner: One argument to be made is that you have given it at least as much attention as it deserves.
Jacobsen: Can you expand on that?
Rosner: How much attention does the World’s Strongest Man competition deserve? It’s this niche sport done by very few people that’s interesting to watch for maybe half an hour on a boring Sunday afternoon which is when they used to broadcast the World’s Strongest Man competition. It’s these guys from Nordic countries, named Magnus who stand like 6’5 and weigh 320 pounds and are careful to power lift like six sets of three reps everyday and eat 5500 calories a day to maximize their bulk lifting strength, so they can lift a ball of solid rock which is like 30 inches in diameter. It’s interesting but not that interesting.
Then the guys who have explored the far reaches of puzzle solving cleverness can be interesting but if they haven’t done anything else, it’s not that interesting. It’s time bound. The whole idea of IQ and the golden age of IQ ran from maybe after World War I until the 80s. But of course IQ was way abused in World War I and then there were various efforts to make it more fair and then it kind of was widely accepted in the highly conservative conformity oriented 1950s. Everything in America is okay where the world leaders and capitalism and liberty and everybody owning a house and schools are okay if we just follow the American system, then everything’s cool.
IQ is a part of the American system. Everybody gets their brain measured and get processed accordingly. Then people got cynical in the 60s and 70s and realized that a lot of bad IQ is bullshit. I mean, IQ is entirely bullshit. To bring up that Churchill quote again that democracy is terrible except compared to every other form of government [“democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.”] IQ is terrible except compared to every other way to fairly easily measure intelligence. But IQ has kind of had its moment. You have talked to a lot of people who’ve been part of the world of IQ. And now it got a whole new world of wildly expanded intelligence coming with AI and machine learning which will lead to about one percent called a Cambrian explosion of expanded jungle of consciousness; new types of consciousness powerful and competing in this weird twisted new world, all of which will make IQ look quaint.
So, that’s my argument.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/08/24
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: The deal is that we’ve been talking for eight, eight and a half, almost nine years maybe.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: We started with IC for the most part. We had gone off on all sorts of tangents. But the deal is that looking for a version of an information processing universe that’s metaphorically the same as the information processing done in our minds/brains and you’re looking for the level of flexibility and the scale that makes everything work, that comports to experimental what we know about the universe and about the brain and also works in terms of is there enough information to do? Does it require too much information? And the deal is that a combinatorial coding has the flexibility, the lack of rigidity that is associated with computer-based information processing with super linear where every zero or one affects the whole fucking. It means something. You need something that’s looser and sloppier like clay yet can contain a whole lot of information and is robust.
So combinatorial coding fits the bill for robustness because you can still read what a word is because words are combinatorial codes. You still know what a word is, a six-letter word even if you can’t really read two of the letters especially in context. Your message can be smeared out or partly degraded and it’s still readable which is consistent with the shitty messages that people get from their own brains as they slide into dementia, they get a lot of messages that are still readable even though their brains are turning into Swiss cheese.
And there’s flexibility, a different kind of robustness when the signal you’re sending out to try to retrieve information is shitty. Your brain can still catch that badly thrown falling apart baseball because if it takes you know six lit up nodes to have a perfect signal, your brains can still catch the ball even if it’s only catching four and a half or three and a half lit up nodes especially in context. It’s flexible because each node, depending on the size of the overall system, can be part of thousands or millions of different codes of different words and it makes sense in terms of the universe. If a galaxy is a node, anything smaller doesn’t make sense because anything smaller is caught in like weird orbital dynamics that means like a solar system. Its position is not even that stable within the galaxy itself because the arms of the galaxy are pressure waves that sometimes you’re in an arm, sometimes you’re not and just you’re rotating versus the rest of the universe.
But galaxies are nicely embedded in a whole network of filaments. They can still be pushed around but they’re largely part of networks, incredibly large ass networks. They can be lit up, they can be lit for 20, 30 billion, 40, 50 billion years and then run out of fuel and fade back along with the rest of their network that may or may not have gotten lit up depending on the code. Galaxies have robust positions in the network of the universe as opposed to individual stars within galaxies. So the whole thing has the right scale, the right robustness, the right flexibility, and the right amount of needed information and the right ability to process information.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/08/21
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I think that whatever nature can produce then it’s possible for us to produce it too. It’s just a matter of figuring out the appropriate sort of processes and structure to make that happen potentially in different substrates. Regardless, it’s the same natural universe; if nature can do it we can do it consciously. It’s just a little bit harder because they’re trying to do it on much slower time scales. So, the idea is that there is a probability or a possibility of a future era of pervasive novelty where digital architecture plus artificial intelligence software can master creative endeavors. I would posit that there would be open-ended algorithms to permit sort of a widening horizon of creativity in those ways and some constrained and within that, more or less those kinds of algorithms would begin to slowly and then very rapidly master areas of creativity under current human domination.
And I think that would then usher in the sort of novelty across the board where it may become a natural thing for upgraded people to not simply have to play a song for instance that they really like over and over again but they could have variations on that song every single time cater to their neurology. So it’s sort of new music variations on the other stuff they like but I think in all ways it could be like this where there’s just continual production of novelty to sort of keep up the interest of either hybrid people or artificially constructed beings who sort of keep their interest up what would require a sort of a continual refreshing input of information and entertainment. I think we’re kind of seeing some of that when there’s a real challenge in Covid for people to keep things interesting. What do you think?
Rick Rosner: On one level you’re positing the singularity that AI and machine learning will be able to do anything and you’re suggesting that in order to be entertained, future humans and future Trans human, whatever we turn into, will require a constant novelty. I would take it one step further and would say that even constant novelty wouldn’t necessarily be novel. If we’re so smart in the future we’ll see through the surface novelty and see the patterns underneath and may fail to be entertained.
I’ve been reading about this a little bit and also looking at the art that’s been generated by the new high level machine learning artists who take prompts from humans and then make art like Queen Elizabeth in the style of Frank Frazetta. Within a minute you’d get an AI artist generating Queen Elizabeth in one of those swords and sorcery holding up a sword kind of a 1970s Schwarzenegger poses that Frank Frazetta did. I’m sure somebody’s done like a bunch of fake presenters already and stuff looks completely convincing and this is causing a certain amount of controversy, consternation, distress, and excitement and you see how good the AI artists are. And also the humans take a look at the first effort of the AI and then they tweak it. I don’t know how you tweak the product where you tweak it with words or whether it gives you like slider bars but you can keep doing further iterations of the art until you arrive at something that is the most satisfying version of what you asked for.
Some people think this is the end of human art and artists. Some people think it’s just the beginning to a whole new world of human machine partnership to generate new wonders. You’re suggesting that it’s possibly the source of an endless fountain of novelty. I would suggest looking back to see what tech did historically.
Jacobsen: Printing press, what happened?
Rosner: Well for one thing, religious authorities or people who thought it was their job to protect Christians thought it was a threat to Christianity that if you could generate novels; books of made up stuff, that this would corrupt people. For a century or more it was said, I don’t know maybe in America at least, that the average household to have only two books the Bible and Pilgrims Progress. Anything beyond that was evil and salacious, that just reading about made-up people and the stuff they did would be corrupting. So I’m sure that would include plays like Shakespeare and all that stuff. And then we grew to be at home with novels and find them entertaining and to a great extent world expanding to be positive. We have morons now in America at least attacking novels if they happen to be about gay people. Some assholes School District just this past week banned 41 books including the Bible because kids might be exposed to stuff. I’m hoping this wave of assholes with power is just a blip but who knows.
In general, people have a positive outlook about novels but novels became threatened by other media; radio and movies and TV and you have one medium supplanting the others and changing them. The publishing is in trouble because there are so many other ways to be entertained but people are still generating plenty of really good novels.
Jacobsen: Even if we take a total human lifespan now, say double in a bit extra life compared to 250-300 years ago in the most developed nations, that’s not enough time to consume even the new stuff that’s being generated here on the earth probably.
Rosner: Yeah, thousands of new books appearing every day now most of them purely shit, most of them self-published but still enough good books but no, you couldn’t absorb them all. We’ve got eight billion people in the world and people for the most part have more ability to produce and create than ever before.
Jacobsen: So this seems to me like the human cuss of that. The creativity is there.
Rosner: Yeah, we’re going to get to that. I still read the newspaper, the LA Times and they still have a comic strip page which I can no longer really read. I’ll look at one strip which is Dilbert, which is occasionally interesting even though the creator, Scott Adams is a Trumpy asshole who’s pretty insane. He’s like the My Pillow guy of comic strips but he’s still kind of okay but most of the comic strips are just purely shit or just not good. Maybe they’re not all pure shit but most of them just aren’t great. Comic strips used to be great or at least pretty good when everybody read the newspapers in the 1930s, 1920s but the divergence between graphic novels which are comic books and comic strips and newspapers is Titanic. Now comic books get made into 250 million dollar movies and even if the original plots in the comic books because a lot of movies are made from comics that were written 50 years ago.
You have the best, the most talented people in entertainment working to make these dumb fucking comic books from 50 to 60 years ago. They really weren’t that dumb. Stan Lee products were I don’t know, they were slapdash but they weren’t as shitty as comic strips are today. And now you have excellent writers, directors, actors, artists, and wardrobe people just doing 10,000 people, most of who are really good at their jobs making great stuff. You’ve got a huge divergence, comic strips comic books used to have the same level of quality, now not. Getting ready for this, I was pricing lab created diamonds. A flawless one carat mine diamond that somebody dug out of the earth in South Africa and then sold on the market via De Beers, a D color which is the finest most colorless diamond and flawless, a one carat stone might sell for 20 grand.
So I priced three carat lab grown diamonds, near flawless F color, which is something that anybody would be proud to have to receive as an engagement ring, you get a three carat one of these for 4000 bucks. If it were a natural diamond, with that same stone would probably be over forty thousand dollars. The lab grown diamond is just as sparkly, just as beautiful. They do things with a lab-grown diamond or there are indications where a well-trained Jeweler and stick it under a microscope and tell you whether it’s natural or man-made but really when it’s on your finger who’s going to know except that you’re wearing a three carat diamond engagement ring and your fiancé teaches second grade. Obviously he wouldn’t be able to. But the diamond is just as great and has all the same properties of the mined diamond.
10 years ago, 12 years ago you might be able to get a lab-grown half carat diamond at most. Now I think you can grow diamonds without limit. I think the website I looked at was selling diamonds up to either six carats or 12 carats which is gigantic whatever quality you want to pay for, for roughly 10 percent of the price of… Now, De Beers is kind of a corrupt organization. Diamonds exist in enough profusion around the world. They’re the most common precious gem compared to emeralds, ruby, sapphires and De Beers is managed to control the market and artificially prop up the price for a century and artificially create demand.
There weren’t for the most part diamond engagement rings until 110, 120 years ago when De Beers created the idea that it wasn’t really an engagement ring unless it had a big fat diamond in the middle. In order to sell diamonds they created the idea of the tennis bracelet in the 70s and the eternity ring in the 80s or 90s. They’re always you know creating demand and now they’re working I’m sure to control the man-made diamond market so it doesn’t entirely destroy the diamond market. But here’s a deal where technology has made diamonds, has wiped out the value of diamonds by 90% as long as you don’t care that a jeweler might be able to tell and you shouldn’t.
And so it’s technology destroying a market unless De Beers manages to somehow hold on which they probably will because they’re a big powerful company. They were banned from doing business as De Beers in America for 20 years or more because they were just so big and corrupt and powerful that the US didn’t want their bullshit over here. Also, lab-created diamonds are not blood diamonds. You get a diamond for 90% off without worrying that people died because of that fucking diamond. Well you’re going to have disruption as AI creates shit mostly in early days in partnership with humans that is just at least is kick ass and likely more kick ass than what humans alone can create. Where am I going with this? As I’ve been talking about, this is a familiar situation where new technology leads a radio. Fucking radio is a piece of shit. Radio sucks. Radio used to be in the 1930s one of our most entertaining media, the most entertaining forms of expression because it was pre-TV and people would cross back and forth between radio and movies, the two most entertaining media at the time.
And then TV came along, fucked up movies but not as bad as it fucked up radio and now nearly a century later radio is just pure shit. So this people working with AI and then people with built-in AI working with AI and then AI that is sufficiently sophisticated in the 2050s generating its own shit in syndicates which are still run by 2050 by people who knows what’s happening in 2080. But the new forms of entertainment, like I’m writing this book that’s set 15 years from now and people have choosies which are like movies/video games except they’re totally immersive like you can watch the movie but if you like the world of the movie or if you like the world of a video game it’s built out enough that you can spend a fuck load more time in it choosing your own adventures or just choosing to hang out.
Jacobsen: So this is more in line with what I’m getting in terms of the future novelty. That’s a more concrete example from your text.
Rosner: So, I was just reading about the Metaverse and I watched part of a documentary on the Metaverse and Zuckerberg’s Metaverse: a) it looks like shit, b) in Zuckerberg’s Metaverse people only exist from the waist up. I just read an essay that said that that’s mostly because Zuckerberg doesn’t want people fucking in the Metaverse
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: It’s also because people can wear VR kind of rigs on their upper body in their arms and it’s just more convenient to just only worry about your upper body but it’s also bullshit because I guess people have been fucking in second life forever. I think the essay included a term called TTD which is time to dig, which is how long before somebody figures out how to hack the technology and give people genitals.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] they’re assuming men are the most driven for this activity.
Rosner: Yeah, this is a commonly held belief, a belief that is a cliché, it’s so commonly held that any technology you can come up with will be driven forward by porn, by people using it to jack off and will be used for porn and driven to new heights by porn. The technology and sexual gratification are completely intertwined. But with a Metaverse that doesn’t suck you’ll be able to immerse yourself in it, to live in it. There were these books in the 70s and 80s called Choose Your Own Adventure and so I took the name choosies from that. They were annoying little books for kids where if you decide that he should go left and turn to page 68, if you decide that our hero should go right and into the cave go to page 88. They just branched out and there are probably six different endings because the branches tended to merge just because otherwise it became too unmanageable and a little Scholastic Book for 295.
But the choosies, they will be able to keep branching and be able to surround you. If you want to return to high school and live in a world where you made different choices and weren’t such a fucking loser, you’ll be able to go back to high school for fucking forever. It’ll kind of be Matrix style, it’ll suck at first where it’ll get really good really fast and I don’t know I read yet another article that showed what people might look like according to some AI predictor that said the people will turn into these weak newt like things because they’re in Matrix style tanks all the time, they just spend all their time in these gratifying worlds with heads that are like misshapen to better fit VR rigs. As with science fiction, none of these predictions are individually 100% correct but in general you get a sense of the landscape of what’s coming which is increasingly immersive, increasingly powerful, increasingly not being able to be equaled by humans.
Jacobsen: Can you repeat that part, please, the term? On augmented humans.
Rosner: All right well obviously unaugmented humans will increasingly be unable to match the creativity and power and entertainment value of shit done by humans plus AI. It’ll lead to worlds of vast novelty, it’ll lead to vast appetites of novelty and extreme jadedness and I just read something else where somebody called it a Cambrian explosion.
The Cambrian explosion was where conditions became ripe for evolution to go crazy. I don’t know what the conditions were exactly but there was a 50 million year period where life just became like super fast and evolutionary terms incredibly diverse. And so whoever said there’s a coming Cambrian explosion was talking about the next 50, 60 years where there’s going to be an explosion in consciousness; things that are conscious, things that do information processing, things that can generate just a whole jungle of new beings, powerful new beings, wildly creative new beings. Shit is just going to get weird.
We’ve talked about this that there will be strata, there will be levels of human existence depending on what these group… people will group themselves by how much rapid change they can handle. It’s the same thing as saying there will be different levels of people being technologically Amish, the people who are the most fundamentalists, the most afraid of change will live lives that look like ours now or even with some backlash against… they’ll live lives of being what we consider normal life spans without too much super high powered medicine and technological rejigger-ing of our bodies, people will live 80 years, 90 years, 100 years, 120 years in their natural forms maybe entire cities but in enclaves where a human life kind of mostly looks like it does now. And then from there you’ll have like constantly bubbling and changing levels of human plus AI existence, as humans plus AI and AI plus AI become braver and braver and more and more powerful at embracing these wild new existences punctuated with devastating conflicts were entities use technology to fuck with each other and fight for dominance. Who knows what dominance will look like? Dominance might involve probably will involve a certain times computing power.
We’re going to fight over water in the next 10 years and we’re going to fight over other resources that are being fucked up by there being a billion climate change refugees sloshing around the world. We might fuck up the oceans enough that we’ll be fighting over protein but maybe not because we’ll probably learn how to generate protein. But anyway Wars over scarce resources which might eventually include computation.
And shit like Bitcoin, which not that I think Bitcoin will survive in its current form but that other things that require vast amounts of computation and then people will figure out how to make you know simple computation super cheap. Will people fight over Quantum computation or other forms? I don’t know but anyways it’s a jungle of novelty is coming.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/08/17
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You proposed a topic last night. I could make the same thing tonight which is ‘the possible epidemic of stupidity.’ I want to pivot really hard or lean in hard on two points. What do you mean by possible here and what do you mean by epidemic here?
Rick Rosner: A couple days ago I saw on Twitter, a tweet from I think a medical professional asking I think other medical professionals if they’d noticed like a number of instances of brain damage in their patients and with the implication being could be related to Covid, could be related to a three-year lockdown because of Covid. We’ve touched on this idiocracy before. For a long time I thought our devices would make us smarter by being extensions of our minds, that nobody would ever get lost again because we have ways or Google Maps. That might be true that people get lost a lot less than they used to because of apps but there’s an alternative point of view that when wolves were domesticated into dogs, dogs became stupider than wolves because thinking got outsourced to humans. Dogs let humans do the thinking because we’re good at that and then supposedly humans let dogs take care of the sniffing because they’re good at that.
So there’s an alternate argument that the more we depend on our apps the stupider we get because we just let them do our thinking. Certainly people’s information absorption strategies have changed since Google where you have to go hunting through books or old newspapers or track down an expert to get your answers to get your questions answered and now most answers are available within a minute just by typing them into a search engine. So I mean there are cultural reasons for our thinking changing but we should first look at Covid and the Covid is said to be a clotting disease that among the other things it does, it makes you form a lot of little clots which can include the little clots associated with TIAs, transient ischemic attacks which are like mini strokes. It’s kind of like pump brain where you have heart surgery and they put you on a heart lung machine. Heart lung machine can beat up your blood cells and make them clumpier and it’s not an uncommon thing that somebody who undergoes five hour surgery, within a few weeks after the surgery kind of loses themselves. They kind of get that wrapped in gauze feeling. They don’t feel as inhabited, as conscious, as aware as they did before the surgery as their beat up cells cause a bunch of slow to develop brain insults; little TIAs all over their brain from beat up blood cells getting hung up and causing little mini strokes which take a while to recover from or take a while to get used to.
So it could be with Covid and officially about a third of Americans have been tested and positive for Covid at some point but unofficially the number could be well over half of Americans with at least four million Americans having trouble working, that their health and concentration have been hampered by what is probably long Covid. And then another few million Americans at least still able to work but maybe having defects that they’re not entirely aware of or they’re working through. So you might have 60% of the US population having had Covid which would be roughly 200 million Americans. And up to a quarter of those people, 50 million Americans with appreciable long Covid. And if one of the characteristics of long Covid whether it’s detected or not could be compromised a brain function. 50 million Americans is more than enough to call it an epidemic.
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So if there is an epidemic of stupidity, you could argue that it could be a nature and nurture thing, that there could be biological reasons and not just Covid but two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese, including people can be diabetic; all this stuff can gum up your thinking. There have been studies, I don’t know if there have been epidemiological studies to figure out the percent of people who could have their thinking affected by diseases related to lifestyle and being overweight. What is it, metabolic syndrome? Anyway, there are plenty of physiological possibilities for people getting stupider.
And then there are cultural reasons where the Republicans figured out 50 years ago that dumber people are easier to manipulate politically and have been using strategies that are more effective with people who are euphemistically called low information voters with the euphemisms standing in for dumber people. Lots of right-wing media targets dumber people. Fox News is dumbed down. Also aging; another physiological reason as the average now with Covid, the average U.S lifespan is actually dropped over the past two or three years but before that happened life spans were going up. So people were living longer and so you have more people, I’d say well over 10 million older people who suffer from mild cognitive difficulties related to age and maybe some other stuff.
There are certainly Industries, scammers who prey on older people. My wife and I still have a landline and landlines are in the realm of old people and we get lots of scam-y calls that are intended to work on old people who still have agency, who are still in charge of their own affairs but who are losing it a little bit. And I’d say that there are at least 10 million Americans in that situation. Maybe their kids are talking about getting live in help or moving them to senior living or taking away their car keys but you’ve got a lot of people with various reasons for possibly being dumber physiologically. And then CBS excuse oldest among the broadcast networks and their shows look superficially like the shows a little bit of less subtlety and a little bit of added clarity. I feel and occasionally watching CBS shows that reflects the CBS’s knowledge that old people are watching the shows and they need a little bit more help with plot etc. They still like to feel like they’re part of the world but they need stuff that’s slightly dumb that looks like real regular adult grown-up TV but is slightly dumbed down so they can deal with it.
I wonder about myself. We’ve been talking for I think more than eight years now. So we have a long baseline, so I could ask you. Do you think I’ve become stupider over the past couple years as I get older, as I’ve been locked down? I was just on this stuff called Flomax for a kidney stone; it’s a muscle relaxant and it made me very lethargic and I feel like I’m coming back from it but am I coming back all the way from it? I was driving a couple days ago extra carefully because I feel like for whatever reason my focus might be lessened compared to me five years ago and even though I’m driving extra carefully, I still tap somebody’s back bumper with my front bumper. Fortunately didn’t cause any damage but that’s just not good.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: And I’m writing a book, I’ve always been writing a book.
Jacobsen: Correct.
Rosner: The book that I’m writing is set 10 to 15 years in the future and after reading this tweet I’ve decided that it’s been discovered in the 2030s that the average IQ in America is about 12 points lower than it was 10 or 20 years earlier. So there you go, people might be stupider. And there’s a huge wealth gap in America, the biggest in history; the gap between America’s richest and the rest of America. Covid and everything else served to further concentrate wealth. And I would say that in the 2030s and beyond, there will be an intelligence gap that the people who are best able to embrace technology including medical technology which might include brain implants, people who are tech savvy, who become more and more intimately linked with biological adjuncts, people who believe in the singularity or singularitarians and transhumanism.
Jacobsen: Come on man, you are getting old. You’re losing it.
Rosner: What? Not being able to pronounce singularitarians?
Jacobsen: Yeah I’ve noticed a couple things in doing some of the transcriptions for you where you mispronounce some words or have difficulty with particular words.
Rosner: What words?
Jacobsen: Singularitarians and transhumanism would be two of them. Like transcendentalists would be like a Unitarians or something.
Rosner: Okay, well somebody from the mid 19th century.
Jacobsen: I mean I am actually; I will let you know I’m a member of the Unitarian Church, the entire Universalist I think but I’m a very terrible member I don’t really do anything. I just pay the membership dues. I think they gave me a free membership actually.
Rosner: So you’re saying you’re a transcendentalist as a Unitarian.
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Jacobsen: Something like that, yeah. I’m not Jewish but I’m part of the cultural and secular Jewish organization as well, the executive directors gave me a free membership because I’ve interviewed her and she’s like “Come on in,” and I’m like “Okay. I’m Dutch. I’ll be Spinoza. Why not?”
Rosner: So, I get the idea of all this stuff is that one can aspire to higher being without believing in a specific God.
Jacobsen: It’s more you have nodes and networks and nodes being individual premises hidden or explicit beliefs of a worldview or life stance. Then those nodes network together being that world viewer life stance formally and then how those can sort of overlap sufficiently and consistently with other ones without contradiction, so it’s in a way of looking at world views and philosophical systems as sets of matrices that overlap in a sort of a larger net. So all of those together, I think you can make an argument for sort of larger sort of Monic views of outlook whether secular Judaism or cultural Judaism or Unitary Universalism or secular humanism or even the non-theist Satanists, etc. I State this because I hold memberships in each of these including a bunch of other ones.
Rosner: So what you’re saying is that you can, I think what I was saying that you can aspire and you can find value in the world without adhering to some specific theology.
Jacobsen: Yeah, non-dogmatic cosmopolitanism. How about that?
Rosner: Okay, sounds good. Those specific theologies may have things to offer, you can take aspects of them as you will.
Jacobsen: Yes. I am Catmatic, I’m not dogmatic.
Rosner: Okay. So if I am losing it a little bit, part of it could be with pronunciation. I had serious dry mouth earlier this year that was just gumming up my mouth. You noticed it that my talking was getting super gummy.
Jacobsen: Yes, it was really annoying.
Rosner: Yeah, so that is related to dry mouth and having the wrong bacteria in my intestines for some reason I’m about two-thirds better from that. So I don’t know if that impacted the way I talked, well it did but I don’t know if it really impacted pronunciation. Anyway, if I am losing it a little bit I don’t think I’ve had Covid but as I said there are plenty other reasons.
Jacobsen: You’ve had snorvid; you’ve had a lot of sleeping and you spent a lot of time in your robe.
Rosner: Yeah, fortunately there is crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence. Crystallized intelligence is acquired expertise; the shit you know and have learned.
Jacobsen: What do those really mean? What do those terms in fact mean structurally? They’re just placeholders in my mind. What you can intake and what you know.
Rosner: All right, your knowledge base; crystallized intelligence equals knowledge base.
Jacobsen: Yeah but even that we know from cognitive science, from memory studies, is not crystallized. It is in fact reconstructed. So you construct the knowledge with your fluid intelligence, fine. But when it’s in there, to get it again, you reconstruct with memories and such.
Rosner: Okay, but that kind of intelligence whatever you want to call it, is more durable.
Jacobsen: Ah! Okay, that makes more sense, durable intelligence.
Rosner: Then fluid intelligence, which is high powered, intuitive, able to figure any fucking thing out based on the thinnest little clumps of information, being able to be dazzling not because of your erudition but because of your pure mental power. So fortunately, even if I’m losing fluid intelligence which I may not be and it may be very difficult to separate fluid intelligence from crystallized intelligence anyhow but fortunately I’ve still got a decent knowledge base. That’s kind of how the academia works where the young amazing thinkers shoehorn their way in, bust their way in to the academy and earn professorships in tenure in systems that still work. That whole system, that tenure system is kind of breaking down but with early brilliant original work and then as they get older they become stodgy and continue to be of value because of the shit they know.
They can always teach intro classes or even you know graduate level seminars based on knowledge rather than brilliance. According to… is it Popper? What’s the book, the 1960s…?
Jacobsen: Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Rosner: Right. So Kuhn says, sometimes you have to wait for all the old scientists to die for people to accept new science but not all science is new science and the old guys you’re waiting to die still know a lot of shit that’s useful. In 1920 the old guys maybe, or 1930 or even 1950, the old guys may have had trouble accepting relativity quantum mechanics but they still knew all this shit about classical mechanics and a bunch of other shit. Anyway, that’s the deal. People might be getting stupider, technology will make some of us smarter and technology will continue to make some of us stupider.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/08/15
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You post a statement. The slow apocalypse that is nature. What is this slow apocalypse?
Rick Rosner: Not the slow apocalypse, the moment-to-moment apocalypse that’s nature. I Googled how many mammals there are on earth and I’d say that the vast majority of mammals are sentient. I can’t easily think of one that isn’t. There’s an estimate of 130 billion mammals alive at any given moment. And then you take other animals that are sentient. Sea creatures; fish and amphibians, most reptiles depending on where you want to set the bar, probably some bugs and birds. So you multiply that 130 billion by a hundred, say, conservatively and you get 13 trillion sentient or near sentient creatures alive at any moment which means that any given second, billions of sentient creatures die, which is a lot. The way we’ve evolved, the way all creatures have evolved there are things that were driven to accomplish in our lives but also we like being alive.
I mean not every moment is a stellar moment but we like existing. Again due to evolution, creatures who like existing they’re the ones who exist. There are billions of little tragedies every second and then if you assume that the processes of life are similar and life and evolution are similar throughout the universe, multiply the little tragedies on earth times another billion out of 10 to the 22nd solar systems figure that easily have a billion of them supporting evolved life. You can either look at it as sad or you can look at it as meaningless or you can look at it as somehow justified because it’s in line with nature but regardless how you look at it, I think it requires some thinking about because it’s just a huge death toll of creatures who would prefer not to die.
I guess there is some hope that as we take over our own evolution that we can become custodians of our own and other creatures’ extended life spans and replicated consciousnesses and I suppose you could argue that the amount of life that transcends once our technology or sufficiently sophisticated civilizations technology becomes capable of making beings practically immortal and resurrecting beings and entire classes of beings, maybe that outweighs the bloodbath that is evolved life. But I don’t know, that’s a very iffy argument since we haven’t done that for even one consciousness yet.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/08/13
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What’s the nonsense with jobs you’ve had? How were the odds with that?
Rick Rosner: Some nonsense jobs?
Jacobsen: Or nonsense with management in jobs. There you go.
Rosner: There was a bar, The Ore house in Santa Monica on the border with Venice which put it in a semi-tough neighborhood. Didn’t matter, that was not the issue. They had a few nights a week where you could come in and get a lot of alcohol for not a lot of money. Very popular place, they paid, I believe 10 bucks for the bouncers for every fake ID they caught. The average bouncer is not very good at catching fake IDs or not very concerned with it. So the money incentive was kind of helpful in maintaining some minimum standards of people getting their IDs checked. But I was always very interested and very competent at catching fake IDs and some nights I’d catch 12 and my boss hated this because sometimes it was cute girls with IDs that probably would have passed muster. I mean he was a dick. He was he had a pregnant girlfriend at home but he was fucking one of the waitresses. His name was Randy; most guys named Randy are pieces of shit. He drove a Camaro I believe, or an IROC Z, which is like a fancier Camaro, just a fucking asshole.
So he became discontented with me because I was catching IDs which was my job but I was doing my job too well. He fired me for missing a meeting that I was at and it was completely apparent that I was at the meeting because I was right there in front of him. It didn’t matter. So I decided to make things as awkward as possible when he fired me. I just got on my knees and begged him to keep my job because I have no pride and I figured it would make things extra weird and I didn’t care about the humiliation of it. I just wanted to make it weird for the fucker. Anyway, he sucked.
I had a job at the United Pet Center in Albuquerque, in 1978, when I was 18. This is a pet store. They probably had 110 puppies in it. They talk about puppy mills now like they’re a terrible sight of disease and maltreatment but in 1978 nobody knew from puppy mills. All I knew was that there were more than 100 puppies in cages in the fucking place, just every place; every possible surface had a cage with a puppy. I don’t know if puppies have diarrhea if they’re healthy but all these puppies had diarrhea and my entire job was just changing out newspaper covered with puppy shit. I was also starving. This was the first time I went back to high school and so I was kind of trying to support myself while I went on this ridiculous dumb enterprise. I had enough money for about one meal a day. So I would sneak dog food or Puppy Chow which is disgusting but not as disgusting as cat food. I tried cat chow and that shit’s bad that shit has bone shards in it and a bone shard stuck in my throat. So, anyway that was a terrible job.
I’ve had various jobs as strippers and doing stripagrams and one time my boss sent me out to… this high this guy and his wife were having a water fight that was escalating, so I was hired to just show up and instead of give a stripagram to dump water I believe on the husband. I missed with most of the water but I did beat him with the bucket, fortunately the bucket was plastic and nobody was overly upset but I highly doubt that this couple is still married. When you’re hiring people to you know, because you’re at war with your wife, even if it’s a friendly war, I don’t know. So there are some stupid jobs I’ve had.
I’ve had art modeling jobs that have gone bad. Most jobs are legit, you’ve got like artists drawing you or art students drawing or painting or sculpting you. Every once in a while you’ll get somebody like, “Can you get hard?” This happened three, four, or five times in my modeling career. I’m like “I guess. Do you have any porn for me to look at?” is generally my response to that. And so, I mostly would and yes it’s creepy but I could go home and like recast and get rid of the creepy guy and replace in my fantasies and replace the creepy kind of artist who really just wants to see a guy with a boner or guy with a sexy lady who wants to see a guy with a boner.
So there you go, there’s some weird jobs I’ve had.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/08/13
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay so you’re completely unprompted for this one but I think it’s really funny. Also, I think it underlies a large minority in the United States who vote with passion. They have money, they have large numbers, and they are politically active more than a lot of other voices in the United States. So, Christian televangelist Rick Wiles has claimed vegan burgers are a component of a satanic plot to destroy individual souls and stop them from becoming born again Christians. Your take.
Rick Rosner: Well he’s just one more fucking know-nothing Evangelical asshole. I’m sure there are tens of millions of decent Evangelical Christians in America. But a huge segment of Evangelical Christians in America have just abandoned reason and just become like reactionary which is a huge turn back in the 60s and 70s for people who just viciously defend some kind of shitty status quo. If you just shop around Evangelical preachers there’s no limit to the assholery you can find. I don’t know what his chain of logic is but fuck him and the people that he deceives with his ignorant ass bullshit. Maybe he has visions that tell him this stuff, doesn’t matter he’s still an asshole and he’s not alone.
As I’ve said several times in various ways, among Evangelical preachers, the worst of them are among the worst people in America. I wish Jesus would show up and do a reverse rapture and take the 8000 worst/most influential worst people in the world, with 2000 spots reserved for the worst of influential Americans and just rapture their asses to a moon of Jupiter, I guess the Io, where Jesus being Jesus, he’ll have God build them comfortable quarters but several light hours away from the rest of us. And there would be spots in the reverse rapture for some of these assholes.
The Republicans figured out probably around in the 70s that they should team up with or try to capture strong Christians and over the next 50 years they captured the least Christian Christians. Using issues like abortion they’ve persuaded a bunch of malleable gullible jerks that any extreme is justified to bring some version of the Kingdom of Heaven to America including the dumb versions in the Book of Revelations which is full of apocalypse and bloodshed. There is just millions of asshole Christians in America who think it’s the end times and welcome the blood and trouble of end times and short of that will still believe any kind of ridiculous bullshit.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/08/09
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, you had a brother in the military involved in intelligence. What was he like?
Rick Rosner: My late brother David was pretty remarkable in his fearlessness and intrepidness. He became a highly observant Jew, what you’d kind of call Orthodox or maybe Hasidic. At the same time, he was a stand-up comedian and by the time he retired from the Marine Reserves, he was a lieutenant colonel which is just a weird combination. He liked kind of pranking people and kind of wrong footing people and so he liked wearing a yarmulke in the Marines because he’d say people would come up to him and go “Hi sir what’s that beanie on your head?” and he’d go “Beanie?! Beanie?!” and it just gave him an opportunity to… I mean he was an observant Jew for I’m sure of spiritual reasons but he also enjoyed the opportunity to fuck with people about it. He did more than a thousand stand-up gigs and a lot of them he did specialty routines for Hasidic Jews. He could do material for Marines, did a lot of stuff for groups of Marines and he did stuff for groups of Hasids which is just a crazy combination.
He grew up in within Albuquerque with my dad and my stepmom and that family was fairly out of control. And in I don’t know eighth or ninth grade, he asked to be sent to the New Mexico Military Institute. Even though he was a wild ass he kind of got tired of the wildness of my family and wanted a more orderly environment and got asked to be sent to this horrible miserable military school, a place that most people probably don’t go to willingly. It’s in Roswell, New Mexico. So it’s hot as balls, probably a lot of the time and then since its desert it’s probably really cold at night. I’m sure the fucking rooms are not heated or cooled. There’s lots of marching especially if you fuck up, if you get the merits you’re out there marching for four or five hours on a weekend as part of your punishment. He lasted like a year there and came home, went to public high school for a semester or two and asked to be sent back to NMMI.
He was pretty ballsy in college. He went to the University of Mexico and remained pretty wild, he’d get in fights just for fun and eventually signed up to become an officer, a Marine Officer and went into that program and got married shortly after graduation and went into supports. As somebody who was married, he didn’t think he should necessarily sign up for a combat a Frontline combat position. So he became a logistical officer which didn’t generally put him in a forward battle position, which he came to regret. Shortly after he became an officer, there was Gulf War I, which was the first time the U.S went into Iraq to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.
Anyway 1991, he goes in and he’s immediately kind of sad that he didn’t sign up for a more combat position. He didn’t think it was fair to put himself at risk of being killed as a husband but by then his marriage was falling apart as his wife left him for another woman. He’s probably in the Marines, that was ‘91 he retired in around 2015 maybe. So he was in there for 25 years and probably the first quarter of that he was trying to get out of logistics into other stuff and he ended up in Intel. I think he maybe was like a public information officer because he was good at talking to people, he did a bunch of stuff and even though he was in the Reserves he did a lot of active duty stuff. He took I think as many active duty assignments as he could where he’d go to South Korea for two three months, he’d go to a bunch of different countries on assignment for up for six months and more as a an active duty officer and rose through the ranks to Lieutenant Colonel which is pretty unusual, especially for a guy who pissed off a lot of people.
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Jacobsen: [Laughing] deliberately.
Rosner: Yeah, because liked fucking with people. He would he would get on the phone and he would impersonate Generals. He was, “This is General and I need Lieutenant to come to my office immediately,” and Lieutenant whoever goes to the office and the General’s assistance would be like “Why are you here?” and the lieutenant’s like “Well the General said I needed to”
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: He’d do shows, he’d do routines where he actually he imitate the various officers and some officers loved it and other officers hated it but he had a long ass career even though he was kind of a wild card. He would have kept going as long as he could but the way it works in the military is you keep advancing in rank or you’re retired, you can’t spend 10 years as a Major. You’ve got like three years or four years to qualify for the next rank, if you don’t make it then you’re out and he rose up every two three years gaining a rank until he hit Lieutenant Colonel and then there was a huge bottleneck where not that many people advanced to full Colonel and he was done.
Then he was going to be a civilian contractor working at the Pentagon and he’d either just started that job because I mean he was still basically doing the same job but as a civilian because he knew all the shit. And then he just started that job, went to sleep one night and he never woke up. He was only like 53. He’d been in both Gulf Wars, in a more forward position in Gulf War II which was in 2003 to 2011, where we went in took out Saddam Hussein altogether and there was Civil War there and Iraq was a mess. I don’t know how long he spent in and around Iraq. He was good at getting a disability; he had a bunch of physical issues that he successfully claimed were due to his exposure to shit while at war like back issues, canker sores all over his mouth, brutal spinal headache issues and a bunch of stuff. So he was at 70% disability but still doing active duty which you can do. You can get paid your disability and then you can also do active duty which I guess means you don’t get paid your disability while you’re on active duty, you get paid 100% of your salary but when you’re not working you still get paid 70% .
He had a lot of issues, he was in good shape but he still was fucked up in a lot of ways largely from being over in Iraq while all this shit was going on all, the oil fields are burning and all this fucking shit. Anyway, dies at 53, nobody really knows why, couldn’t do an autopsy because that’s against the rules of being an orthodox Jew. So all anybody could do was speculate. Speculation was that he had a sudden brain bleed. There’s a nexus of veins at the base of your skull in back and that little ring of veins or arteries or whatever they are, it’s notorious for suddenly hemorrhaging and it’s like having your head lopped off. The bleed just cuts off everything and you’re done unless they catch it really fast. That’s one of the things that’s consistent with just going to sleep and not ever waking up. He’d had a couple drinks before he’d gone to bed I guess but he wasn’t a big drinker.
If you’re going to die of something like alcohol poisoning you’re going to thrash around and vomit and do others that are going to be obvious signs and there was nothing. There was just him looking like he was asleep and somebody said that his eyes were bloodshot when they examined his eyes; you can do an external exam. I’m not even sure about that, I’m hearing that third hand but were that true if there were blood in his eyes and his eyeballs themselves, that’s further evidence of a brain bleed I guess but nobody knows but it was sad. He had a girlfriend and they were planning on getting married. He had his whole life I mean as a civilian, doing the shitty he love to do in the military ahead of him and it’s just some tragic shit and just never would bravely step into any situation particularly if it involved making contact with people. He decided he wanted to meet Gloria Allred, the lawyer who’s famous for representing women who’ve suffered sexual assault. She represents plaintiffs as they go after scumbag-gy defendants like Harvey Weinstein. He decided he wanted to meet her. Now, he doesn’t even share her politics necessarily; she’s pretty liberal and he was on the Conservative side being a marine and just being that way but still he thought she was interesting. He calls her up and goes “Can I take you out to lunch?” Just cold called her and she said yeah. Kind of the same shit you do. You’re unafraid to call people up whoever they are; he was that way. And it’s just a shame that whatever happened, happened.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/08/08
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: As I’ve said before I’m kind of a broken record with regard to informational cosmology which to some extent could also be called metaphorical physics where you look for parallels between the functioning of the brain/mind in the universe itself. But the thing that’s not a broken record, it’s fairly recent and it has a lot of arguments going for it is galaxies as the nodes within a system of thought, of information storage and recall based on combinatorial coding where the information in the brain is encoded by combinations of nodes lighting up. Process signals flow through the neural net that is your brain causing combinations of neurons to fire and these neurons can be analyzed to be shown to function as nodes and groups of neurons can function as nodes.
Combinations of nodes are like words to a certain extent where each unique combination of nodes can stand for an object, an idea, a mental object, a thing within thought. It’s a durable way to encode thoughts and information because the number of possible combinations using a million or two million possible nodes, the number of possible combinations of say you’re lighting up six nodes is such a large number that you don’t have to use every single node and thus you can give the nodes nice separation in node space. So your well-functioning brain isn’t mistaking one word for another. If the English language had a trillion different words, every different possible combination of letters was a word, if that were the case then people would be confusing shit all the time. The number of actual words versus the number of possible sequences of letters is a very small fraction which makes for fewer mistakes in verbal and written transmission of information.
So, that’s a good system. It’s durable and it can hold up pretty well even as people’s brains degrade due to things like Alzheimer’s, people can keep their shit together longer. They’ve looked at nuns who keep mentally active and they find nuns who are still able to think clearly even though on autopsy their brains are freaking Swiss cheese because it’s the node, the combinational coding thing is combinatorial; it’s robust and it’s loops. You don’t hit the combinational combinatorial code for something exactly you can still get that thing because in combinatorial space the points in space are well separated. So you just get close and you can pretty much guess “Oh you meant that” And that’s a nice looseness when you’re looking at a system with multiple levels of significance like we think the universe is, where we think the universe is a giant information processor at the same time we as denizens of the universe know it’s a place where we’ve evolved and that you’ve got all this like stuff going on in the universe as matter as opposed to the universe as information processor.
And being able to function at two levels kind of requires a certain amount of looseness because if you make things tight that involves too much information to little wiggle room and it doesn’t work. When you make everything in the universe represent something like, this star represents the color mauve in the galaxy of colors; like that’s just not going to work informationally. But if you make galaxies the nodes, the light up with in a system of computational coding that is loose enough, if a galaxy is a node it doesn’t matter that much what is happening with individual stars within a galaxy. What matters more is the large-scale interaction of all the galaxies with each other along the filaments that connect them. The combinatorial space for an information structure that works off combinatorial codes has a gazillion dimensions.
I guess you could say almost as many dimensions as you have nodes, like that say word space I guess you could say has 26 dimensions. There’s a model of word space that might have 26 dimensions depending on which letters are lit up but in practical terms you can collapse a multi-dimensional space into three dimensions via filaments that a combinatorial code space could work on the basis of proximity of points within that space within a space of a gazillion dimensions. But instead you can collapse it down to three dimensions and you can have certain things be a function of proximity within three dimensions and also things being a function of getting lit up along the filaments that the filaments, the connections among galaxies along filaments, it gets rid of the need to have all these extra dimensions but it compactifies the space and makes it doable.
The galaxies are the right level of old and filthy. If galaxies go through a number of cycles of being triggered and lit up and then burning out then getting lit up again, they’re going to generate a lot of debris which can be the collapsed matter, the brown doors, the neutron stars. The black holes at the center, I mean away at the outskirts of the galaxy, shit like that it isn’t at the outskirts may collide with shit in the busier interior of the galaxy and eventually fall into the giant ass black hole at the center of the galaxy. But the stuff on the outskirts, these black holes are spatially compact not super interactive but besides gravitationally and they can form fairly stable orbits where they can keep orbiting around a galaxy for quadrillions of years.
So you got all this junk that is kind of pretty stably orbiting the outskirts of the galaxy that makes it kind of gravitationally sticky because you’ve got all this not very strongly except for gravitationally interacting matter that can make galaxies kind of more interactive with each other gravitational. I don’t know if filament’s work solely gravitationally probably not, but anyway you’ve got filthy old galaxies that have been turned on and off a gazillion times and where the stars are made out of old shit but they’re new in terms of the agglomeration of old matter, old atoms that came together to form the new stars. And then on the outskirts you got all this old stuff that doesn’t readily agglomerate, that is part of what loosely ties galaxies together both via proximity and via filaments. It’s the right amount of looseness and dirtiness and distinctness that makes for a system that’s robust.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/08/07
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How should we handle frustration?
Rick Rosner: I perceive that you sometimes feel irritated by the repetitive nature of my remarks. Although it’s a convenient justification, I empathize with your irritation and occasionally feel the same about myself. When I reflect on my early life or teenage years, the narrative often circles back to being intelligent yet longing for a romantic partner. This topic has been discussed numerous times. Then, there’s the subject of informational cosmology. We explore it, proposing various falsifiable theories and hypotheses to enhance the overarching concept. Yet, the foundation of these ideas remains somewhat unstable. Would you like to add anything?
Jacobsen: I suppose that’s reasonable. Our extensive collaboration means we’re constantly searching for fresh perspectives on familiar topics. I try to explore new themes. Working in a horse farm is exhausting. By day’s end, I’m utterly drained, needing around an hour and a half just to unwind and return to normal. At that point, everything feels muddled, and I’m ready for sleep. I usually have a substantial salad, then I might read a little or attempt some writing, but it can be challenging.
Rosner: Do you visit the grocery store right after work?
Jacobsen: No, I opt for services like Instacart for delivery.
Rosner: I’ve had jobs that left me as weary as you describe. One was located near a supermarket, and I’d stop there after work for groceries. But making choices in such an exhausted state was overwhelming.
Jacobsen: Indeed, and I’ve streamlined much of my routine, like stocking up on frozen fruit. To introduce a new topic: What does Scott eat?
So, my diet includes frozen dark cherries, blueberries, mixed berries, and large bars of 70% dark chocolate from the freezer. Occasionally, I consume protein shakes. My coffee is decaf. For breakfast, I typically have oatmeal with blueberries or just frozen dark cherries, dark chocolate, and a protein shake.
Rosner: Do you blend these, or do you consume them cold?
Jacobsen: I prefer eating them cold. My bowl typically contains several measurement cups worth of dark cherries.
Rosner: So, they are somewhat crunchy and frosty?
Jacobsen: Yes, they’re crunchy and frosty, which is particularly enjoyable during summer. Then, I brew about 10-12 cups of coffee, consuming two cups in the morning before any measurements. The rest goes into a thermos, and I drink it throughout the day.
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Rosner: That seems like a substantial amount of coffee.
Jacobsen: It is, but according to Harvard Health, up to 10 cups can be beneficial. It actually improves several health metrics.
Rosner: And you don’t experience any fibrillation from too much coffee, right? You’re probably too young for that.
Jacobsen: Correct, I haven’t had any issues. As long as I keep my consumption within a certain range, I’m fine. So, for lunch, I usually have more frozen dark cherries or mixed berries. The mix includes blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries. And more dark chocolate [Laughing].
Rosner: Do you store the dark chocolate in the freezer as well?
Jacobsen: Yes, because it becomes super crunchy and crumbles nicely.
Rosner: Doesn’t the crunchiness interfere with the taste of the chocolate?
Jacobsen: Not for me, no. It crumbles but melts quite quickly due to the warmth. Actually, it’s 27 degrees right now, and it’s past 9 p.m. This reminds me of when I lived in California, where it was warm all the time. I couldn’t stand it, I hated it. So, experiencing it here is strange. My building, surrounded by gravel, seems to make the immediate vicinity warmer. It’s a farm building not designed for efficient heat dissipation. The heat gets trapped in the ceiling, which is great for winter, but in summer, when the heat comes down, it’s quite intense.
Rosner: Is it currently the season for horse-related activities, or is it too warm for that?
Jacobsen: Absolutely, it’s horse season now. If it’s extremely warm, like during a heat wave, they simply start everything earlier in the day, around 8 a.m. and finish by 11:30 a.m. for training. But on a typical full day, activities run from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. It’s back-to-back half-hour training sessions. Participants need to be set up and on their horses, ready to go about five or ten minutes before their lesson. So, the first person prepares, starts their session at around 7:30 or 8:00, and finishes in half an hour. Then the next person takes their turn, and so on. Some even travel from North Vancouver, which means an hour’s commute each way, two hours in total, plus the time for preparing and tacking up, adding another 30 minutes.
Rosner: That seems like quite a commitment for just a half-hour on horseback.
Jacobsen: Exactly. And they’re investing a significant amount of money not just for the horse, but also in gas, potential work time, car insurance, food, and coffee during the commute. It’s a considerable expense just for that experience.
Rosner: It seems more feasible for those wealthy enough to own a horse, and possibly even have someone else manage some of these tasks for them.
Jacobsen: Yes, all the expenses associated with training, keeping a horse here, lessons, and trailering – it’s almost like having a mortgage on another house. It’s quite costly.
Rosner: Do people ever choose to fly in instead of commuting by car?
Jacobsen: We have one client, a teenager. Someone looked into it and discovered their family’s net worth in North Vancouver is about 330 million dollars or so.
Rosner: Wow, that’s impressive!
Jacobsen: Oh, indeed, it is horse season now. During extremely warm periods, like in a heat wave, they start everything earlier in the day. So, they might begin at 8 a.m. and go until 11:30 a.m., focusing on training sessions. Normally, a full day would extend from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., with continuous half-hour training sessions lined up one after another. Participants are expected to be ready and mounted on their horses about five or ten minutes before their session starts. Each person has their 30-minute slot. For instance, the first person gets ready and starts at around 7:30 or 8:00, finishes their half-hour, and then it’s the next person’s turn. Some of our clients even come from North Vancouver, which involves an hour’s commute each way, plus the additional time for tacking up and getting ready.
Rosner: That seems like quite a lot for just a half-hour on a horse.
Jacobsen: Exactly. They’re paying a substantial amount not just for the horse, but also for gas, the time they could be working, car insurance, and likely food and coffee during the commute. It ends up being a significant financial commitment.
Rosner: It sounds more feasible for those who are affluent enough to own a horse. I imagine if you’re that wealthy, you might also afford to delegate some of these tasks to others.
Jacobsen: Absolutely. With all the training, keeping a horse here, lessons, and trailering, it’s almost akin to paying another mortgage on a house. It’s quite an expensive endeavor.
Rosner: Do people ever fly in rather than commute by car?
Jacobsen: We do have one teenage client. An inquiry revealed that their family in North Vancouver is worth something like 330 million dollars.
Rosner: Wow, that’s quite substantial!
Jacobsen: The facility is very high-end and caters to a wealthy clientele. It’s predominantly a culture of the affluent. The main clientele in this equine industry is certainly not men, and I can see why men might feel out of place.
Rosner: Why is that?
Jacobsen: There are a lot of demanding clients, often referred to colloquially as ‘Karens’.
Rosner: Karens, I see.
Jacobsen: Indeed, based on the demographics I’ve researched and written about, the typical profile is women aged 35 to 54, well-to-do, often white and brunette. That’s where you tend to find many Karens.
Rosner: Okay, that leads us nicely into the topic of moving couches with Carole.
Jacobsen: Yes, do tell me about your experience with Carole, which sounds quite interesting.
Rosner: Carole isn’t a Karen, but she expects polite communication even when we’re maneuvering these heavy, 150-pound couches.
Jacobsen: So, she’s particular not just about what you’re saying in terms of instructions, but also about how you say it.
Rosner: Exactly. I’m not one to say ‘please’ when we’re balancing a couch precariously. I’m more direct – “Go left, move left, no, push this way,” focusing on the practicalities of the situation. Carole then asks why I get so cranky during such tasks. It’s not about being cranky; it’s about being direct and responsive to the immediate needs of the task at hand.
Jacobsen: That approach wouldn’t work here. A woman might be able to be that direct, but a man can’t. I was told by a colleague who’s been here for about five years that I’m one of the few guys who’s managed to fit in, working full-time during the day.
Rosner: Are you skilled at this kind of courteous discourse?
Jacobsen: I’m okay with it, or I just avoid situations when necessary to cool down.
Rosner: Understandable.
Jacobsen: The young women here have developed their own culture. They act in ways that might have been associated with men in the 1950s; they use strong language, frequent pubs, and are quite forward in social situations. Their biological sex is female, and they’re predominantly heterosexual, but their gender expression is more masculine. They carry themselves with a certain masculinity. It’s a new dynamic, and I sense there’s some internal conflict or shame associated with it. It’s a complex situation, navigating this new generation of women with diverse gender expressions.
Rosner: Carole recently brought home a book from her school, a concise guide, about 80 pages, on pronouns. It covers proper usage and how to rectify mistakes. It’s different, and while some might see it as a fad or the end of times, it’s not. It’s just a change, likely a shift towards something better.
Jacobsen: Interestingly, one out of every six women now identifies as a lesbian.
Rosner: Is that a general statistic?
Jacobsen: Yes, one in six.
Rosner: When considering lesbian versus bisexual identity, it’s not really our place to be curious about such personal matters. People should be allowed to be who they are. But statistically, when you mention lesbian identification, does that include those who identify as bisexual?
Jacobsen: I’m not sure.
Rosner: Okay.
Jacobsen: My understanding is that lesbian refers to women interested exclusively in other women. Bisexual, by definition, involves attraction to both genders.
Rosner: The old estimate often cited by the gay community was that 10% of the population is gay. So, rising to nearly 17% is significant, although not overwhelmingly so.
Jacobsen: Regarding the LGBTQ community, the actual figures indicated that about 4% of the total population identified as LGBTQ. These were the numbers presented on educational websites. The breakdown likely varies, with a small percentage being transgender, perhaps around 0.1%, and a larger portion identifying as bisexual, gay, or lesbian. Women’s sexuality tends to be more fluid than men’s, so you might find a higher percentage there. Homosexual men probably follow next in prevalence, then bisexual individuals, and finally transgender people.
Rosner: Also, as societal emphasis on conforming diminishes, these labels become less significant. In Hollywood during the 1940s, movie stars, shielded by their studios, often engaged in relationships regardless of gender norms. The studios would cover up scandals, employing private investigators and enforcers. People in the entertainment industry tend to be less strictly heterosexual. Beautiful people, without much concern for gender norms, would engage with each other freely. As the pressure to conform to traditional gender roles decreases, this trend of people doing what feels right for them is likely to increase. Personally, I couldn’t explore a homosexual relationship because it contradicts my self-image as a masculine man. However, a version of me, a hundred years in the future, raised with less gender conformity, might have experimented in college, something inconceivable to me now. So, it does make sense.
Jacobsen: Yes, I agree.
Rosner: For women, there’s currently less pressure to conform to traditional notions of femininity.
Jacobsen: That’s absolutely true. I also believe it’s a reaction to the intense suppression of women over several centuries. There’s a segment of women who, in response, feel a desire to retaliate against men. It’s as if they’re saying, “You kept us down for so long, now it’s our turn to assert ourselves.”
Rosner: I’m referring to the superficial level where there’s no stigma attached to women being intimate with other women in college or even having full relationships. If a man in a heterosexual marriage learns his wife had a girlfriend for six months in college, it’s generally less impactful than if a woman discovers her husband had a boyfriend for the same duration in college, which could be devastating for many women.
Jacobsen: Currently, we’re seeing that women in their 20s focus on their careers and then shift to seeking a balance in their 30s. Men, on the other hand, seem more open to marriage between the ages of 25 to 29, perhaps even 25 to 27. This creates a mismatch in timing. Women aren’t ready when men are, and when women are ready, men aren’t as available. It seems we’re at a transitional point in societal norms.
Rosner: Yes, and this transition will likely continue as gender norms further erode and life spans extend. This will disrupt traditional patterns.
Jacobsen: I think the future will focus more on the empowered individual, aided by technology. Traditional forms of family formation, even those redefined by progressive views, might become outdated in a post-humanist future. This could also apply to nation-states, which may become passé, leading to the formation of various technocratic entities or fiefdoms.
Rosner: Indeed, we observe that many national governments struggle to keep pace with technological advancements in terms of legislation and policy. Among developed countries, we’re one of the least effective, hindered by a significant portion of the adult population resistant to progress. However, smaller, more agile countries like Estonia, and even China, despite being a communist dictatorship, are quite adept at integrating technology and ensuring their population engages with it. As Cory Doctorow suggests, it’s likely not governments but rather groups of specialized individuals, or ‘expert tribes,’ that will devise most solutions for the future.
Jacobsen: That’s a more precise way of putting it. Currently, we have countries that seem to exist in a bygone era, almost like theocratic fiefdoms, while other regions, such as Los Angeles and Silicon Valley, represent technocratic, cosmopolitan areas. These places are on entirely different philosophical and technological trajectories. Perhaps we’ll see the emergence of various ‘tribes’ globally as nation-states gradually lose their influence. These tribes, or groups, will likely form alliances or networks based on shared interests or values.
Rosner: Yes. Cory Doctorow’s concept of ‘walking away,’ as explored in one of his novels, encapsulates this idea. People may increasingly disengage from traditional government structures. However, it’s important to note that this term has been somewhat hijacked by right-wing groups who use it to signify a departure from what they perceive as a controlling ‘deep state.’
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/08/06
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So what’s going on with the film project about you or partly about you?
Rick Rosner: Okay, so this project is about people who’ve scored high on the Mega test and who are also to some extent lunatics is still alive at a network. They haven’t said yay or nay about it, but the developer and deciding has gone on so long that I’ve been stripped of anything fucking interesting that I’ve been doing. I ran for political office and got elected and served out my term. And I was done with that more than a year ago. And I did it in the first place to spice up my profile for this project. So I get scared because A, I keep getting older and B, I keep getting less interesting. I want to tell the guy who’s producing it and waiting for the green light, we hope from the network, that I’m willing to do crazy shit to spice up the fucking doc. But I’ve never gotten feedback from him when I make vague suggestions in that direction. I think he’s trying to stay true to it being a true documentary and you don’t do shit for the sake of the documentary but we’ll see if we’re lucky enough to have something happen.
But the deal is that it’s all part of a process of me getting fucking less crazy in general. One of the reasons relative to this doc is that my role in the doc will be to be kind of less crazy than Keith Raniere, the NXIVM sex criminal scammer in prison for life and another guy we know who’s kind of descended into lunacy. And it’s kind of the equal and opposite reaction when you hock a loogie and it kind of separates into this barbell looking thing due to the centrifugal effect, or when two people become friends or humans domesticate dogs and dogs become stupider than wolves because humans are taking care of the thinking and humans get shitty at sniffing because dogs are taking care of the sniffing; each side kind of specializes. And on Twitter, the American political world well, the American world of politics has so many fucking lunatics on the other side that there’s no room for lunacy among people who aren’t fucking assholes.
This week was the CPAC, which is the Conservative Political Action Conference. It’s a conservative gathering that happens a lot, more than once a year. It’s a profit making conference because conservative lunatics, you can squeeze them for money. And they had Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary, who’s a full on white supremacist fascist, gets a standing ovation there, a guy whose long time advisor quit calling Orbán a modern day Goebbels. At CPAC, they have all these fucking little sideshows, including a guy who’s prosecuted for attack, being part of the assault on the Capitol. And they built a fake prison cell for him and dressed him in prison orange. And attendees at the conference could watch him in a cell pretending to cry for eight or 10 hours a day, showing that people who attack the US capital are being treated unfairly.
CPAC is the same place where somebody built a golden idol, like a five foot tall gold plated statue of Trump that people would come and rub or worship for good. I mean, it’s just fucking lunatic bullshit all the time. And there’s just very little room for reasonable people to do crazy shit because all the crazy is super loathsome and owned by the lunatics on the right. Similarly, with this documentary project, I’ve been forced into being the explaining voice, the voice of reason, which scares me, because it’s like what if the fucking people at this network just look at it and say it’s fucking boring? I’m fully prepared to do crazy shit. I would go to CPAC and challenge people. There have to be plenty of Republicans who aren’t stupid and who aren’t crazy and who are more than vaguely disturbed by what’s happened to their political party. But the loudest voices on the right are fucking lunatic assholes and also pretty stupid. Not necessarily the pundits like Tucker Carlson, but the people making a lot of noise on social media. You can tell they’re fucking stupid on average just by reading their posts.
So I’d love to go to the CPAC and challenge these people that if you can get within 30 points of me on a ten minute IQ test, I’ll give you $500 and I’d get into shit with people, maybe, but that would be pretty interesting. And the shit I got into with people would be kind of crazy and exciting, and it would also be instructive because we get to see if people are as stupid as I think they are. I told the producer, I said, “Look, we are selling my mom’s house. I have enough to buy a strip club.” I wouldn’t full on buy one, but I’d fucking takeover one for a month or two for the sake of spicing up the documentary, being a strip club manager. Anyway, I’m afraid that this fucking thing is turning into something too boring to go, and I’m a little sad that I’m the voice of fucking reason after a lifetime of being a lunatic.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/08/02
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: So your question is if I am done taking Ultra high-end IQ tests and certainly for the time being. Issue number one is I’m trying to complete a book. I’ve got many tens of thousands of words but towards this book that just need to be pushed into the shape of a book plus more tens of thousands of words to fill out the book and that means I cannot allow myself to waste time on the hundreds of hours it might take to do a good job on an IQ test. For a period of a couple years I’ve been even very reluctant to allow books into the house to allow for recreational reading. So the number of books I’ve read over the past few years has decreased by 90%. Four years ago I decided to only allow myself to read at the gym between sets and not to bring those books into the house where I would waste time reading them. And then Covid hit and I can’t read at the gym any longer because I want to get in and out so nobody coughs on me. And for a year the gyms were closed. So if I can’t give myself the latitude to read I can’t give myself the latitude to fuck around with IQ tests.
There was an Cooijmans test I started I don’t know probably eight or ten years ago and made decent progress on but still did not definitively solve enough items to get past the Giga level. There’s no point in me turning in a test unless I have a reasonable chance of outscoring any score I’ve gotten previously. Now I’ve taken attempts, like there was that one with the contest, had a time limit and I came in third with a score of 175 or 177. That was a pretty earnest attempt where I really had thought I had a shot at doing better than that but it was time limited and I really didn’t give it the extra 80 hours that might have led me to come up with better solutions to some of the problems.
The deal is with Cooijmans test and with Hoeflin tests, you’ve got to noodle around with sometimes dozens or more than 50 potential solutions until you happen upon one that seems to be a better lock than any of your other potential solutions. Each solution you come up with is a little bit random; you don’t know when it’s going to hit you. It’s not that you can force new potential solutions just by sitting and thinking hard. You have to put in the time and then hope that a solution comes to you. It’s as much chance as it is gumption and I can’t give myself the amount of time it takes to stumble on dozens of possible solutions to a problem until the stumbling leads to one that is, I’d say head and shoulders above the other potential solutions, but really part of the problem with the tougher problems is that the intended solution may not be head and shoulders above the other, it may just be eyebrows the above the other solutions. Subtlety is a problem; it’s making subtle distinctions.
So there’s that and then there’s that I’m 62 and A, I’ve got stuff to do and B, there’s a chance I’ve lost mental acuity but really I doubt that’s a huge issue given the way you have to go about solving the problems on these tests. At least it’s not that I come across the correct solution from I zero in on it from being brilliant, it’s that I stumble across it among three dozen other potential solutions just because I’m dogged. So that technique or attribute is less subject to the attenuation of age. I’ve got this book that I think is a really good book and I’ve got two other book ideas that I really have to buckle down and do the books and not do the fucking IQ test and that’s what it boils down to. It would suck to have a failure of willpower and drift back into finishing this test that I started in 2014 and put another 110 hours in across two months and still only score like 182. So that’s the deal, that’s the landscape.If I could find a test that was misnomed/ misnormed or I could immediately see that it was easier than the scores it gives and that test would be accepted by Cooijmans who’s really the arbiter of the Giga level right now, then maybe I could be suckered into taking a test. But the tests I’ve seen, not that I’ve looked at that many, but I’ve looked at some over the past eight years aren’t slutty with their scores. A slutty test could suck me back in like Al Pacino and Godfather 3 but I just haven’t seen that.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/08/01
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: We are 99 days away from the 2022 midterm elections in America, which hold comparable importance to the 2020 election that was pivotal in removing Trump from office. The current political climate remains tense, with Trumpian forces still active. If Republicans gain control of both the House and the Senate, they might not pass many laws due to Biden’s veto power, but they can still inflict significant damage. They could halt further legislative progress in safeguarding democratic processes. Currently, Republicans are unabashedly tampering with voting mechanics, with many powerful figures content with election results that do not reflect the popular will, having already enacted laws in several states to this end.
According to the poll aggregator 538.com, the odds are stacked against the Democrats: a mere 17% chance of retaining the House and a slightly better 56% chance of keeping the Senate, which they currently hold by a slim margin. Thus, the overall probability of Democrats maintaining control of both the House and the Senate is about 17%, a concerning statistic. The country’s trajectory could worsen considerably if Republicans seize both chambers. Fortunately, some Republican candidates, like Herschel Walker, pose their own challenges. Walker, a former football player who might have suffered brain damage, is prone to incoherent statements and has a history of violence. He’s running against a well-spoken Democratic Reverend, which offers some hope, especially as Walker continues to make gaffes.
Dr. Oz’s candidacy for Senator in Pennsylvania, despite not residing there, is another example. He faces John Fetterman, a strong Democratic contender who consistently highlights Oz’s shortcomings. These factors, alongside Biden’s low approval ratings, complicate the Republicans’ path to a significant electoral advantage, even though the party out of power typically gains seats in midterms.
Recent events, like Biden overseeing the elimination of Al Qaeda’s leader, might help Democrats. However, they need to significantly improve their performance in the next 14 weeks to retain the House. The fluctuating gas prices also play a role in public opinion. While Republicans capitalized on rising prices to lower Biden’s approval, they’ve been silent about the recent decrease in prices. The coming weeks will show if Biden and the Democrats can enhance their performance and messaging strategy.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/07/27
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This is on the Turing test. Go ahead.
Rick Rosner: So I mentioned I wanted to talk about the Turing test and we did get around to it but you did tell me you read Hawkins’s paper on it. You told me to read it and I didn’t get around to doing that but you said there’s a quote in the paper.
Jacobsen: Oh, it’s a quote in an actual Alan Turing paper – “The question can machines think is too meaningless to deserves discussion”
Rosner: Did he have an analogy?
Jacobsen: It’s if you want to say submarine swim, then yeah you call that swimming. If you want to say what machines do is thinking then yeah, call that thinking. Something like that.
Rosner: All right. So we know that Alan Turing was maybe the smartest guy with regard to computation of his era which was tragically cut short because he was chemically castrated for being gay and he hated it. So he ate a cyanide apple killing himself at an early age but not before he saved Britain in World War II by decoding the German code machines. A brilliant guy came up with all these principles of computing including the Turing test which is that if you’re typing back and forth with somebody or something in a room, they’re in a room and the only communication you can have is via typed messages. His test was if you can’t tell whether the thing typing is a person or not, then that thing can think. And he does a very interesting thing probably not on purpose but probably because given the time, the 1950s I guess, when he was talking about computing he could only think about computers in terms of typed output.
That was just the technology of the time or the technology that could be easily imagined of the future but that room with typed messages coming out of it, it’s easy to overlook that as an important condition but it’s a super important condition that we’re now seeing put to the test now that we have machine learning systems that really I mean that can really be put to the Turing test but only within limited contexts. I think we talked about these AI are applications where you give the system a prompt like I saw one today where the prompt was somebody posted on Twitter ‘Pokemon trading cards from the 17th century’ and they freaking looked great and they looked like they were done by a professional human artist. They were these ancient looking trading cards with Baroque looking Pokemon on them.
I think in some contexts you’d be hard-pressed to at least quickly be able to tell the difference between the works of a professional artist or let’s say illustrator who’s working on a deadline and the products of these AI art generators. And obviously context is important because we’re generalists. We could draw a 17th century Pokemon trading card and you can play chess with us and you can get us to help you hang a picture and you can get us to talk with you about what you like in a romantic partner. We have a full set of contexts in which we’re used to thinking of humans as thinking beings whereas all these AIs are getting Turing tested in their one specific context. And that turns out to be the deal with modern AI systems that generate amazing results is that you can have stuff that can at least delay flunking the Turing test for hours and hours.
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I believe that the most sophisticated AI powered chat Bots; it used to be that you could see through one of these in five minutes with the right question. It was wasn’t really hard to boggle one of these systems but now I think that you could probably chat with a sophisticated chat Bot via exchanging text messages probably for two or three hours without necessarily being able to tell whether it’s human or AI. And the mechanism or one of the mechanisms is just Big Data contextual sampling which belies or it pushes the idea of is this thing conscious or not, kind of down the road because there are other issues you have to resolve first.
Like, we know that Google Translate translates by accumulating trillions of examples of language and context. If somebody says this in German or if somebody says this in English and they want to know how to say that in German but if you just compare word strings probabilistically and use that probability to build some kind of giant, there was probably an official name for it, but you can call it a Bayesian net; just a net of linked probabilities of linked contexts. If somebody’s saying this in English and based on our 300000 examples that are close to it in German they would probably say something like this in German. Big Data use probabilistically and ditto for a chat Bot; that if somebody said to an AI shrink “I’ve been sleeping badly lately,” well based on our quarter million examples of what people say in conversations when somebody says I haven’t been able to sleep, a human partner in a conversation would probably could say something like this and when you have enough of these Big Data based contexts you can beat a Turing test for a long time. Ditto for those AI art generators; they probably have some kind of data set of billions or trillions of pieces of art. I don’t know if the trillion pieces have already even exist in the world but they have a lot and then that are linked to verbal descriptions and they can just pull everything out of context and along with their library of artistic techniques and generate something that’s plausibly enough art to actually be art even though no human generated it.
But then you still have to ask the question; do any of these AI systems know what they’re doing? Do they know the meaning of what Google Translate is talking about? Does Google Translate know the meaning of love? And that pushes you back to the question of what do us as humans know the meaning of Love. Do our general experience and our ability to function as thinking beings in general contexts, does that give us additional insight into what love means or what art is compared to an AI system that has all these contextual nets? And you could argue and I would argue that there’s a difference in knowledge; humans knowledge of love and Google Translate’s knowledge of love but can you quantify that difference? Not now. And given that you can’t quantify it, there’s probably some level at which there’s a level of understanding and knowledge that a bunch of people discussing it, hashing it over, doing calculations across a decade or so could come up with a reasonable set of measuring sticks as to what a level of understanding reaches the level of consciousness. But we can’t measure any of this shit yet.
So we can’t answer the question. We’ve just we’ve managed to push the question. We’ve got a bunch of things that can pass Turing tests for quite a while, hours at a time, or dozens of pieces of art at a time, or this person does not exist which is a web app that just creates very real looking human faces for people who don’t exist. And so what we’ve done is kind of we have the Turing test in action now but the Turing tests connection to thinking still lives in some gray areas. And we can talk about it more but that’s all I got on it right now.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/07/27
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This is the other topic of consciousness. Go ahead.
Rick Rosner: All right. We know that existence is inevitable because the rules of existence, the rules that prohibit certain kinds of existence, particularly contradictory existence aren’t all encompassing enough to stop existence. We’ve postulated that anything that can exist does exist within its own universe. And we know from our own universe that at least one universe exists which is not terrible proof of the potential existence of other universes under the rules of existence which are not sufficient to make nothing exist. It’s not true that nothing can exist under the rules of existence and you can probably use a similar but not exact form of reasoning for consciousness popping up all over the place, You can call it a substrate, that there’s order within existent systems within our universe and within other possible universes and we know, given the hardware and software, that order is often exploitable.
Being able to exploit order the way living beings do to find order in the exploitable order in the environment which allows you to exist; that’s what living beings do. We know there’s a constant push to exploit order because exploitable order isn’t everywhere but it’s in a lot of places, exploitable order for instance exists in places that have negative entropy that can shed waste heat like planets. On average, every star has at least one planet probably more than that. So you could argue that most stars are surrounded by locations with negative entropy which is exploitable order. And given the sheer number of places with exploitable order, it’s just statistically inevitable that the means to exploit that order, the means for life to originate and become increasingly sophisticated and exploiting order, we know what happened at least once here on earth.
And the context, the physics of it and the number of contexts in which it could happen are such that it’s just statistically unlikely to the point of impossibility that beings exploiting order would pop up all over the place in great number, not everywhere, not every planet, not even one planet in a hundred perhaps can support life, well spontaneously originating life. Maybe not even one planet and a thousand but since there are 10 to the 22 stars in the observable universe, the fraction of planets on which beings happen to arise that can exploit order has to be some huge number…
It’s similar to the argument that things can not exist, consciousness can not arise in a bunch of places. It’s a form of ‘can not’ argument. The forces that would preclude consciousness for of popping up in a bunch of places aren’t powerful enough, aren’t pervasive enough to stop it.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/07/27
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You wanted to talk about consciousness in two different kinds of contexts. What do you think about it?
Rick Rosner: All right. So, I just got done talking about our hopelessly divided country which includes a third of the country being persuaded to believe that any fertilized human egg deserves protection, deserves the right to develop into a human which is a stance that life begins at conception; the protected life begins at conception which has been of a minority point of view for all of history, that most civilizations, most places at most times including places run by the Catholic Church allowed abortion until the quickening, which is until you can feel the fetus move. 20% of all pregnancies are lost to miscarriages and women are being prosecuted in some states for miscarrying. It’s one of the least logical stances on human gestation and abortion. There’s no logic and the people who are anti-abortion under all circumstances or almost all circumstances believe with no basis, I think, that this is always been the policy of righteous civilizations throughout history which is not the case at all. It’s a very dumb point of view.
It shouldn’t be as big an issue as it is. It’s been made into a big issue by people who like to exploit dumb and gullible people as we’ve talked about a million times. And it’s disheartening as I’ve said before because if we can’t solve this issue, then there are harder issues with regard to consciousness, AI, machine learning, augmented humans, and resurrected humans coming down the pike which will be impossible to solve in a population where one third of the people are just so gullible and stupid. And it makes me wonder if the solution is a horrible solution because it involves religion, to try to establish a religion that worships consciousness itself because there’s a trend in moral justice that the Arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. Bending towards justice often involves acknowledging the humanity of previously denigrated or excluded parts of the population; minorities, women, people with different sexual orientations, and now animals in some contexts.
Certainly that article have to bend towards other forms of Apex consciousness as we begin to build more sophisticated conscious systems or augment our own or replicate our own. It just makes me wonder if one of the ways to make that happen more effectively is for people to… some people who embrace it to eventually worship consciousness itself. Much of the sense of wonder we experience about ourselves and about other people and about other beings in the world is a sense of wonder at their ability to think to experience the world. Maybe that’ll provide some kind of bull work against stupidity until it goes too far and gets to hide bound the way religions do and starts causing more problems than it fixes.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/06/08
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Richard Feynman – “The Nature’s imagination far surpasses our own.”
Rick Rosner: Yeah, scientists especially scientists who become quotable by being recognized as great scientists have lots of aphorisms. Sometimes you can appreciate them as themselves. Einstein talked about ‘God doesn’t play dice with the universe’, ‘If this Theory isn’t true then I feel sorry for God’ or something like that, you know talking about God and beauty and all that stuff. And you can appreciate the aphorism says “Oh that’s a very smart guy saying a pithy thing about science or the universe,” but you can go beyond that and see if the aphorism holds up.
And in the case of Feynman it’s interesting and this quote came up with the sum over histories that pretty much says that, let’s say a photon traveling from A to B through a possibly semi-obstructed field takes every allowable path. Some paths cancel each other out but the shortest paths tend to reinforce each other. Once the path has become a little longer then you have paths that are like a half step out of phase which cancel the transmission of energy from those paths, those half step out paths cancel paths that are on step. Anyways, the paths get longer and twistier and they tend to cancel each other out and the paths that don’t get canceled out or tend to be the ones closest to the path of least time to go from A to B. But anyway, it’s a sum over paths.
The photon takes every possible path which is consistent with quantum mechanics which says that if you can’t figure out which path of photon has taken via the use of detectors, then it takes every possible path. And to get back to the saying, the aphorism, he says that nature is much more creative than we are. But a way of looking at that is that nature tries every possible thing because nature has not unlimited resources but practically unlimited. Evolution tries every mutation that can be reached from an existent current genome. It’s not just mutations, the environment can change. Given the breadth of evolution, four billion years times like a sextillion creatures coming into existence every year say, evolution has a lot of resources to allow accidents to happen to which might shape future iterations of these creatures, with some of them being more successful which is the essence of evolution.
So when Feynman says nature’s more creative than we are, nature has a huge amount of resources to experiment with even though there’s no intention there. It’s all mostly random. That’s just the evolution of organisms on Earth but you have the rest of the universe and we haven’t seen evidence of organisms but we can see planets around a zillion other stars, we can see large-scale structures in the universe, we can see a lot of stuff out there and it’s a big ass universe. So there’s room for all sorts of stuff to happen and we know that a principle of existence is persistence, that things that don’t fall apart get to go on existing for a while and nature with its unlimited resources can stumble into ordered things and ordered systems that persist across time. So there you go, I mean he’s right, nature is cleverer but the cleverness consists of just letting a bunch of semi-random shit happen a gazillion times in a big ass universe and on a big diverse planet.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/06/08
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: A Richard Feynman quote. This is from The Character of Physical Law, 1965, chapter one: the law of gravitation, page 15. “This is the key of modern science and is the beginning of the true understanding of nature– this idea that to look at the thing, to record the details, and to hope that in the information thus obtained may lie a clue to one or another of a possible theoretical interpretation.”
Rick Rosner: Okay. Humans have been around for 100,000 years and some characterizations; it depends on where you draw the line between humans and proto-humans but many tens of thousands of years. Progress really took off along with the scientific method; observe, experiment, and try to come up with a theory that accounts for what you’ve observed. Ideally, it’s a mathematical characterization. So, it took us a long time to come up with a scientific method but it is what has delivered the most powerful results in the history of humanity.
Now, once we move into the AI aided Big Data era of technology, science, and civilization there may be more powerful modifications or additions to the scientific method. We’ve plucked all the easy observations to be made and with the more esoteric observations, which could deliver results just as powerful as some of the easy observations plus theory, it may be that the methodology isn’t exactly what we think of as scientific method. For instance, there’s the brute force method of testing substances that might have efficacy against one disease or another and thanks to robot aided lab experimentation, you just go ahead and you test every possible substance you can get a hold of to see what it does to your virus or your bacterium or whatever you’re trying to fix. With no subtlety whatsoever you just test thousands of things and see what comes up which is still scientific but isn’t what somebody in the 1930s would have thought of as a scientific method which is you think about what’s going on with this disease and you can’t do brute force at that point and you think about what stuff might work against this stuff and you just test generally the things that seem to you the human is more promising.
I’m sure that there will be lots of changes in methodology. The scientific method will be expanded to include Big Data brute force methodology where you don’t have to pay robots, so long hours are cheap, lots of testing and thinking through all sorts of ridiculous hypotheses becomes cheap because information processing becomes cheap and science changes.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/06/07
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: “The difference between us and them, between you and success, is not that you never fail, but it’s how you recover from those failures – is that you keep getting up time and time again. You figure out what did wrong and you make it right. I say that to kids every day.” Michelle Obama.
Rick Rosner: All right. So Michelle Obama is both typical and atypical of presidents’ wives. I don’t know all the president’s wives but some presidents wives were probably squarely behind the efforts to make their husband president. Nancy Reagan, I don’t think had any misgivings about her husband becoming president. Pat Nixon kind of hated it. Betty Ford definitely hated it. Jackie Kennedy, I’m not sure that she hated her husband being president; I think she hated him fucking all those other women. Hillary Clinton was squarely behind Bill. Jill Biden is probably completely behind her husband. But Michelle Obama, as far as I know completely supportive of her husband, hated the White House, hated being first lady, just kind of famously didn’t like the whole thing but in her eight years in the White House she kind of eventually grew comfortable with using her media power to speak out especially for minority kids.
People look longingly towards the Obamas because Obama was the last authentically charismatic president that we had. And shit goes better at least for the party that President belongs to when you have a charismatic president. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were kind of anti-charismatic. Some people like them but they’re not naturally likeable. They don’t sway anybody. Biden was not successful running for president 20 years ago and really the reason he got elected this time around is because so many people hated Trump and because he seemed like an experienced and reasonable person. He’s got 47 years experience in government on a national level. He became a senator nearly 50 years ago; that’s 15 more years of experience than any other president. So, he’s the right president for now even though circumstances plus the republicans are doing their best to fuck him up. He comes across, unless you’re an asshole, as a kind man and a sincere man but he’s 79 and he looks like shit. He looks like he’s definitely had a bunch of hair plugs and he’s probably had some kind of a facelift or tightening of some sort and his face looks stretched, his eyes look tiny, and he looks like a nice man but he also looks creepily old.
But anyway, the Obamas were authentically charismatic; youngish, attractive, and that carries power, and well spoken. Biden has a stutter, Biden pauses a lot he makes weird pauses because of the stutter while Obama was smooth. People look to the Obamas wishing that we could get a third term out of them or that Michelle Obama would do something but she hates national politics plus she has zero experience in national politics but she could certainly get elected Senator if she picked a state to run in. But she doesn’t want to do that shit. And the Obamas are pretty comfortable mostly staying out of the limelight and comfortable like not wanting to rock the boat, not wanting to be the angry black guy president which Key and Peele made fun of. Contributed to Trump getting elected, Obama knew that Trump was being investigated by the FBI for ties to Russia and wanted to let the country know but Mitch McConnell said no. He wanted to make it a bipartisan announcement Mitch McConnell or something like that, said no that he wasn’t going to get behind that and if Obama announced anything he would make it seem like illegitimate partisan trying to influence the election.
Obamas are still pretty persuasive and glamorous but they’re way too cool. That’s a weakness of the Democrats in general; that Democrats don’t play as dirty as the Republicans thinking that just the goodness and reasonableness of their positions will convince voters.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/06/07
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: “The difference between us and them, between you and success, is not that you never fail, but it’s how you recover from those failures – is that you keep getting up time and time again. You figure out what did wrong and you make it right. I say that to kids every day.” Michelle Obama.
Rick Rosner: All right. So Michelle Obama is both typical and atypical of presidents’ wives. I don’t know all the president’s wives but some presidents wives were probably squarely behind the efforts to make their husband president. Nancy Reagan, I don’t think had any misgivings about her husband becoming president. Pat Nixon kind of hated it. Betty Ford definitely hated it. Jackie Kennedy, I’m not sure that she hated her husband being president; I think she hated him fucking all those other women. Hillary Clinton was squarely behind Bill. Jill Biden is probably completely behind her husband. But Michelle Obama, as far as I know completely supportive of her husband, hated the White House, hated being first lady, just kind of famously didn’t like the whole thing but in her eight years in the White House she kind of eventually grew comfortable with using her media power to speak out especially for minority kids.
People look longingly towards the Obamas because Obama was the last authentically charismatic president that we had. And shit goes better at least for the party that President belongs to when you have a charismatic president. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were kind of anti-charismatic. Some people like them but they’re not naturally likeable. They don’t sway anybody. Biden was not successful running for president 20 years ago and really the reason he got elected this time around is because so many people hated Trump and because he seemed like an experienced and reasonable person. He’s got 47 years experience in government on a national level. He became a senator nearly 50 years ago; that’s 15 more years of experience than any other president. So, he’s the right president for now even though circumstances plus the republicans are doing their best to fuck him up. He comes across, unless you’re an asshole, as a kind man and a sincere man but he’s 79 and he looks like shit. He looks like he’s definitely had a bunch of hair plugs and he’s probably had some kind of a facelift or tightening of some sort and his face looks stretched, his eyes look tiny, and he looks like a nice man but he also looks creepily old.
But anyway, the Obamas were authentically charismatic; youngish, attractive, and that carries power, and well spoken. Biden has a stutter, Biden pauses a lot he makes weird pauses because of the stutter while Obama was smooth. People look to the Obamas wishing that we could get a third term out of them or that Michelle Obama would do something but she hates national politics plus she has zero experience in national politics but she could certainly get elected Senator if she picked a state to run in. But she doesn’t want to do that shit. And the Obamas are pretty comfortable mostly staying out of the limelight and comfortable like not wanting to rock the boat, not wanting to be the angry black guy president which Key and Peele made fun of. Contributed to Trump getting elected, Obama knew that Trump was being investigated by the FBI for ties to Russia and wanted to let the country know but Mitch McConnell said no. He wanted to make it a bipartisan announcement Mitch McConnell or something like that, said no that he wasn’t going to get behind that and if Obama announced anything he would make it seem like illegitimate partisan trying to influence the election.
Obamas are still pretty persuasive and glamorous but they’re way too cool. That’s a weakness of the Democrats in general; that Democrats don’t play as dirty as the Republicans thinking that just the goodness and reasonableness of their positions will convince voters.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/06/07
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Boris Sidis -“If society is to progress on a truly humanistic basis, without being subject to mental epidemics and virulent social diseases to which the subconscious falls an easy victim, the personal consciousness of every individual should be cultivated to the highest degree possible.”
Rick Rosner: Okay, William Sidis is slightly famous for having the highest IQ in history. He was teaching at Harvard by age 16 and then died early of a brain bleed while I think he was working at the post office. So people like to say he’s a famous example of genius being wasted or gone wrong but really not. That’s just not the complete story because he was doing a lot of other stuff besides working at the post office. He was a social activist I guess like his dad. His dad was one of those guys who saw intellectual talent in his kid and just went to extremes to nurture it. Who’s the earlier guy? I want to say William James but it’s not William James.
Jacobsen: John Stuart Mill.
Rosner: John Stuart Mill, like 150 years before Sidis, I don’t know if my dates are exactly right but had a dad who did the same thing, who raised his kid to be a super genius like knowing eight languages before age five and crap like that. So anyway you got Boris Sidis himself probably in response to being asked about his genius kid saying that we need to make everybody as smart as possible to resist pernicious social influences… Is that what he’s saying?
Jacobsen: I’ll re-read it. “If society is to progress on a truly humanistic basis, without being subject to mental epidemics and virulent social diseases to which the subconscious falls an easy victim, the personal consciousness of every individual should be cultivated to the highest degree possible.”
Rosner: That is what he’s saying. He was saying that people should be made resistant to the madness of the masses and let’s takes a wild guess that he was saying this around World War I, I don’t know. Do you have his birth and death dates or a date on the quote? I know that he didn’t make it to World War II, I think he died.
Jacobsen: Born October 12, 1867 Berdychiv, Russian Empire. Died October 24, 1923 Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the United States in 1856.
Rosner: Okay, so without a date for the quote I’m going to venture that the madness that he was talking about was maybe World War One. But in any case he anticipated the madness we’re dealing with now by a hundred years because if people weren’t being driven crazy by propaganda and just the madness of the masses then, we certainly are now, especially in America via social media. So he makes a good point.
I remember in sixth grade that we were taught in school to lookout for seven ways that advertising influences you and that seems like just a long gone. I mean it is, like I was in sixth grade; 50 years ago. But that seems that like the type of education that doesn’t occur in the schools anymore. Maybe it does but the bullshit is more powerful than ever and more and more people fall for bullshit than ever before. Case in point, our president tried to overthrow the election nearly a year and a half ago and the congresses is holding public televised hearings into what happened that start two nights from now. And Fox News; our most propagandistic major news network isn’t even showing the hearings because really Fox doesn’t want to run the risk that their viewers will see something that will change their minds about being on the side of Trump.
During Sidis’ time they had yellow journalism.
Jacobsen: What is yellow journalism?
Rosner: Yellow journalism is tabloid newspapers. 100 years ago major cities like New York City probably had close to two dozen newspapers ranging from at the high end The New York Times to at the low end Tabloids made for barely literate people. Yellow journalism was called that because there was a comic strip called the yellow kid that they would run in color, I don’t know if every day, but at least on the weekends. It was the lower newspapers that ran comic strips. So there you go, from the yellow kid to yellow journalism which is wildly propagandistic writing for barely literate people.
Jacobsen: Is propagandistic simply staying biased and forcefully agenda driven?
Rosner: Yeah, even now you’ve got that. The New York Post is owned by Rupert Murdoch who owns Fox News and so it’s got a lot of sensational news for not the smartest people. The Daily News I think is the Tabloid that leans liberal.
Jacobsen: Or natural news or something like this.
Rosner: Are you saying national news?
Jacobsen: Natural news.
Rosner: What do you mean by natural news?
Jacobsen: I think it’s an outlet, it’s similarly, it’s sort of proposing particularly left-wing oriented news; so biased in that way. It’s similar to RT news being propagandistic for the Russians.
Rosner: I mean the post is definitely conservative propaganda. I think it’s the daily news that leans liberal and the New York Times tries to remain somewhat objective but fails. I believe Murdoch also owns The Wall Street Journal which has fairly objective reporting but right leaning editorials. Bullshit’s always been around; it’s just gotten supercharged lately. You got about a quarter billion American adults and close to a quarter of those adults believe right wing bullshit.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/06/07
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: “I do a great deal of research, especially in the apartments of tall blondes.” – Raymond Chandler.
Rick Rosner: I believe Raymond Chandler worked for insurance, he was an insurance executive. I think he was married to a wife who was older than him and who was indisposed or a pain in the ass in some way. So his Private Eye novels were probably wish fulfillment, perhaps. Or maybe he just, I don’t know, we could Google him. I don’t have anything interesting to say about him. I don’t know how many books he wrote, maybe half a dozen.
Jacobsen: Here are two more quotes.
Rosner: Okay.
Jacobsen: Raymond Chandler again. “She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket”
“The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back”
Rosner: Okay, again, that doesn’t trigger a whole lot. He was a hard boiled Private Eye type writer. Didn’t he write Double Indemnity also?
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: So, he worked in insurance. Double Indemnity has an insurance angle that Barbara Stanwick seduces Fred McMurray into killing her husband for the insurance. She lives in Pasadena and Double Indemnity was written and filmed before they had freeways. So, it was probably a longer trip from L.A proper to Pasadena, which is 20 miles northeast of most of Los Angeles; big fancy houses, old money. Well, we can talk about noir a little bit. People liked movies with antiheroes where shit went bad in the ‘40s and ‘50s. We could try to figure out why. Maybe the haze code, which tried to enforce proper behavior in movies, was lessening enforced by then. It started in the 20s or 30s and before that, movies were pretty salacious, a lot of them.
Or maybe people made noir movies because they could be salacious as long as, according to the code, people got their comeuppance. Fred McMurray does bad, but then he gets caught and he’s going to get the chair for murder. I mean, movies were made on much smaller budgets back then. A lot of noirs were shot in black and white. At the same time there were a lot of period dramas and books adapted from famous novels, the kind they’d make you read in school and those had sumptuous sets with lots of molding, because I guess it was relatively cheap to build a set that looked fancy and set it in the 19th century and it was just wood. And with noir stories, it’s just murder and other forms of mayhem and betrayal. And as long as you gave people their dose of bad behavior, maybe people didn’t mind, but the movie didn’t cost anything.
I haven’t been very helpful with these quotes.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/06/06
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Is the Giga Society label legitimate? Or is it more aspirational?
Rick Rosner: Not legitimate but is it a meaningful distinction which is a less loaded way of asking it.
Jacobsen: I mean to me it sounds more aspirational but a serious effort.
Rosner: So anyway what else can you ask? What have you done outside of getting a Giga level score on a test that you could present as an indication that you are good at being in the world I guess or not being in the world? If you didn’t have a test score to say you were at the Giga level, what other things about you could you possibly use to justify that distinction?
Jacobsen: Also, what would you consider in your life outside of IQ tests to success?
Rosner: Okay, yeah all that too.
Jacobsen: We are recording right now. You can answer.
Rosner: Even though I’m funny I’m probably not giggle level funny but I was able to survive as a writer on a late night TV show which is for the highest level of people able to pump out jokes on them at a moment’s notice. I did that for 11 and a half years and yeah I did eventually get fired for sucking but I don’t think I sucked that bad. I lasted for a lot and that’s a tough thing to do. There have only been around 500 U.S late night show writers in history, maybe more because I’ve been gone for eight years, so make it 600 then since. But anyway it’s more of a statistical distinction than having played in the NBA or any other major Pro Sport League, so that’s the thing. I’ve been able to live a fairly normal life with a wife and family without starting a sex cult. I’m probably not gifted in starting a sex cult but I’m okay. I’m pretty decent at having stayed married which is not a deep statistical distinction but it’s not nothing.
We’ve had these talks for eight plus years and we’ve got this cosmology that even though I’ve been shitty about fully developing it, I do think is legit. There’s plenty of evidence that the universe is older than it appears to be and that the universe’s apparent age is proportional to the amount of information it contains and that the universe’s apparent age thing and being older than that apparent age is all part of the universe being a massive information processor that has something like consciousness. So, I mean if that turns out to be true, it seems likely to me, maybe not to anybody, that would be a big distinction.
In addition to having being married, having a family, I’ve been able to not go really really insane unlike some other like high IQ people.
Jacobsen: Most people are probably aware of those individuals.
Rosner: Yeah and I mean most high IQ people are not insane but there are plenty of ways to have high IQ be a component of being insane or dysfunctional. I’m not terrible with money. I’m not freaking the Wizard of Wichita or Berkshire Hathaway or Warren Buffett. I’m no Warren Buffett but I’ve managed to avoid making too many serious financial mistakes which is again not a huge statistical distinction but it’s not nothing. And there’s a bunch of other minor distinctions or a life competencies that are not super distinctive but added together, I’ve made… all right now I’m just talking in bullshitty circles.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/06/06
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, your mom died and there’s been some rude things that have come across and some stress.
Rick Rosner: Well, it was sad because we’ve redirected her mail to us, so we got her first batch of mail including two letters from a bank; she’s gone from being Ruth Kahn to being Ruth Kahn deceased which is really sad making and kind of rude to the recipients whoever that recipient is because it’s obviously not her.
Jacobsen: So this made me think about… you mentioned evolution doesn’t really give a crap about us.
Rosner: No, it doesn’t evolution gives us a bunch of drives and desires that can’t be fulfilled.
Jacobsen: So, in that sense I’m thinking of states of mind that are either depression or depression like, including grieving. And when I think of it, there is evidence that a depressed brain isn’t pruning the way an adolescent brain does, it’s more just connectivity is pulling back, there’s reduction in connectivity in depressed brains.
Rosner: What you’re suggesting is that the bunch of dendrites pulls back.
Jacobsen: Excellent. Dendrites receive accents. Although I actually take that back; it’s probably both. These are living cells, right?
Rosner: So, that makes sense for a couple reasons. One is that a big part of your world is missing. You know that the Jews are supposed to tear their clothes.
Jacobsen: I didn’t know this.
Rosner: I’m wearing a little black button on my shirt that has a ribbon that trails from it that’s been torn in half and it’s symbolic of torn clothes. You’ve lost all these connections with somebody who was part of your connection to the world and eventually you’re going to have to rebuild; that’s thing one. You might as well prune back and then build different I guess eventually.
Thing two; maybe you want to be kind of pulled back so maybe that helps you stay put and stay quiet, so you don’t do anything stupid while you’re grieving. Also, the Jews are supposed to sit Shiva for 10 days. Reformed Jews don’t do it, we didn’t do it but maybe that sitting still is again just to help reorient your stance towards the world and to keep you from going out and drunk driving or some other shit. People talk about feeling reset after they cry, so I wonder if there’s a similar thing where you say when you’re grieving your brain pulls back on connections. I’m wondering if there’s later there’s a gradual uptick as your brain makes new looks for new patterns in the absence of somebody who’s gone.
Jacobsen: I mean statistically speaking people would die at sort of regular patterns. It wouldn’t be seasonal, I’m not saying that. I am saying our brain physiology would probably be used to that just out of a selection pressure statistically over like tens of thousands of years, just in one species let alone millions of years over several iterations of this.
Rosner: We kind of know that different models of connectivity offer different evolutionary advantages.
Jacobsen: I mean complete connectivity gives no functionality and therefore isn’t of use.
Rosner: Right but now it’s a cliché of feminism/feminist science. I was taught this when I took women’s studies classes 38 years ago, that the corpus callosum; the connection between the two brain hemispheres is skinnier in men than in women which leads to men acting more impulsively because they have less information at hand. So that’s one model of behavior, if that research has held up because I learned that in 1984-85, so I don’t know. Usually over that period of time like shit gets revised but if that’s true, that’s one model of connectivity; lower impulse control lower information, just go do shit, you know expendable guys, guys are the possums are of the sexes; expendable. And women with their thick ass corpus callosum maybe proceed more considerately.
So, yeah that it’s possible that the different levels of connectivity depending on your situation in the world may offer survival advantages.
Addendum. I’ve just been reading Cory Doctorow; he is an author I recommend to people. He writes about the near future and the various dystopian threats, often the tech offers along with some solutions that tech offers. And he just wrote about a book, I did a 35 tweet thread about, called Ways of Being by James Bridle. I’m going to try to get the book; it seems like a pretty good treatment of synergistic and cybernetic interactions among people, animals, the environment, and machine learning. Doctorow says there’s no one slick conclusion that the book reaches but it seems to focus on interactions among various systems everywhere. So it may be pertinent to some of the shit we talk about and Doctorow doesn’t steer you wrong.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/05/24
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: We don’t know but we can look at other examples from history. A brutally pessimistic and also optimistic example is Nazi Germany. Germany broke irretrievably under Hitler. All social and moral norms were violated and a dictatorial criminal government took over and devastated the country. And there was no recourse to any democratic or ethical norms. It was broken as badly as a country has ever been broken in history. But once Germany was conquered, at great cost to its people; I read that 80% of all dwellings in Germany were destroyed. Germany at the beginning of World War II we had about 60 million people, I don’t know how many million people died during the World War II era.
Hitler slaughtered 11 million people in the death camps and in other mass murders but most of those people weren’t German; there were Poles, they were people from all over conquered Europe. So I don’t know, maybe three million or four million Germans died during the World War II era. I guess less than 10% but that’s still huge. 7% of a nation is still a huge percentage, and living in poverty for the next decade. It took a long time to rebuild Germany but after it was totally destroyed, Germany is one of the better countries on the planet now; economically successful, reasonably well governed, Germans are nice for the most part, you still have racist factions but there are a bunch of laws in Germany to keep that tamp down.
Germany is a success story but after being the worst country in the history of the world. People, I think imagine the United States being irretrievably broken. I think they imagine a fascist fake democracy being installed and continuing indefinitely. Once the fascist systems are in place, it’s hard to see how you can get them out if the fascists control voting which means they can install their own president and their own senators and Congress people and own Supreme Court; it’s hard to see how that is reversed.
I was surprised, I thought of Mussolini as a World War II dictator. Fucking Mussolini took control of Italy, I think in 1923. So, even before World War II, Mussolini had a fascist government in place for 16 years and nobody was able to dislodge it. And the life of the country went on. The ‘20s and the ‘30s were pretty good for Italian design. They did a lot of good stuff and the ‘20s were great for German Cinema as was Germany was sinking into hyperinflation and increasing fascism. Hitler took over in I think ’33, so you had fascism under Hitler, increasing fascism and crackdowns on Jews etc for six years before World War II began. And so I think when people think of an irretrievably broken United States, they think of fucked up countries that keep going in their fucked up-ness without some breaking point that leads to reconstitution of the country.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/05/23
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Heading: ‘evolution does not give a fuck’. One of the hardest things, I think for people to avoid doing when thinking about evolution is thinking that evolution has any kind of morality or purpose or anything because evolution is just that the species that are successful at reproducing or the variations within species that lead to reproductive success, those are the species or varieties that survive for at least a while, but it’s not part of any overall program. And the waste, if you’re going to judge, well, A, you can’t judge it all. You kind of can, if you judge that order is one of the defining criteria of the universe, then you can judge. If you do judge the products of evolution, you find that evolution is just wildly, wildly cruel and wasteful. Evolution is a drunken redneck with an AR 15; kills everybody, kills everything except for some redwoods and amoebas and some other shit.
Under evolution, you have trillions of conscious beings created with dreams and desires that all get dashed as those beings age and decay. Evolution doesn’t give a fuck. You have all these animals that were born and developed sensory apparatus and consciousness and the ability to perceive the world and appreciate the world and for other animals, they’re just a meal. The US slaughters 9 billion chickens a year and every one of those chickens could be somebody’s pet. People have pet chickens and chickens are lovely pets. Pigs are lovely pets. But no, they’re just a meal for it to be kept in pet concentration camps and slaughtered for meat.
In the future, we’ll have sources of meat that aren’t as cruel but it’s been going on for so long in all of human history. The percent of people who would pay, say, 30% more for a chicken from a genetically engineered brainless chicken, suffering free chicken would even 20% of the population be interested in paying $11 for a chicken sandwich instead of freaking $750 because the$11 chicken sandwich is cruelty free? No, I mean, yeah, maybe 20%, but that’s kind of high. But like, shit is cruel and wasteful and we’re entering into the era of intentional mutation where we engineer things the way we want, not the way the trial and error of evolution does. And there’s a lot horrible about that, but there’s a lot that might be decent and good and less cruel and wasteful. It’s creepy, sure. Headless chickens, anencephalic chickens with little pin heads and a factory with 10,000, 20,000, and 50,000 of these weird brainless creatures being fed matrix style is weird, but less cruel.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/05/24
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: The overall topic is what does irretrievably broken mean in terms of America.
So we had a shooting; this 18 year old asshole gets in a fight with his grandma, shoots the grandma, starts driving, crashes his car, I think the gunman is dead. So I don’t know if they’ll ever know if he intended to go shoot up a school but he was going to shoot up some fucking place. He’s wearing body armor, he gets in a crash, he leaves his crashed vehicle with, I think an AR-15. The cops shoot at him but since he’s wearing body armor he’s still able to enter an elementary school and kill at least 19 kids and two adults.
Just from his name and the town, he’s Latino. The dead people are mostly Latino. People on Twitter are already arguing about what were the motivating factors and it’s still too soon, the shooting is only 10 hours old to know if he left any written statement of its intentions but it’s likely that everyone will do what everyone does. The annual NRA convention is three days from now, also in Texas. Trump is supposed to speak, Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas is supposed to speak, and Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas is supposed to speak. They are they will likely say don’t let these mass shootings fool you into thinking that we need some kind of gun control because that’s what the left wants.
So, likely nothing will happen but all these people except Trump who’s a deeper asshole than even Cruz or Abbott, at least Cruz and Abbott said that their hearts are broken over this and then they got ratioed on Twitter. When you get ratioed on Twitter, you get 5 or 10 or 15 times more comments saying fuck you hypocritical piece of shit, then you do people liking the tweet and say you got ratioed because they are pieces of shit. But this won’t lead to any change or any legislation. Likely this guy was a well-known psycho, didn’t stop him from being able to buy a gun at age 18. It may not even lead to any more Democrats getting elected; it’s still likely that Republicans will take over two of the three branches of national government after the election in November. And they will use their power to stop any as best they can which is pretty good. Any further investigations into the insurrection on January 6th where Trump and his cohorts tried to overturn the presidential election; the first time any president has tried to do that in our history.
And so people are thinking that given the increasingly unapologetically fascist and racist orientation of Republicans and their willingness to fuck with election processes that when they control the House and the Senate and also the Supreme Court that the U.S will be, if it’s not already, irretrievably broken. But we should maybe discuss briefly what irretrievably broken means.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/05/24
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: I’ve been thinking about evolution a lot lately and every solution under evolution is kind of necessarily half-assed. We’re the product of four billion years of evolution roughly and that has led to a lot of deep efficiencies and elegant design, well not design because design implies intention, but elegant forms like there aren’t a lot of straight lines in biology that all our bones, even the long bones are not perfectly straight and there’s usually some efficiency of form in the curves of bones. So, evolution’s a tragic combination of elegance and half-assedness because stuff only has to work well enough for the species to reproduce and continue to own its niche. There are a lot of issues around the human body that seem to have stemmed from us going from walking mostly on all fours to standing all the time when we’re moving that happened around half a million years ago maybe.
The spinal erectors or these teeny muscles at the base of your back that I fuck up, you know when I fuck up my back it’s usually one of those teeny little muscles that helps you stay erect but not strongly. So you’re supposed to be sufficiently erect and sufficiently able to stay erect that you don’t need a lot of muscle there keeping you erect. You’re supposed to be able to kind of just maneuver or keep your legs under yourself so those muscles don’t have to work very hard. Those muscles are the ones that bug me the most, they just seem too small for their job and they get strained a lot. We sit a lot and there have been a lot of articles lately that sitting is as bad as… it’s one of the worst things you can do which seems like an overreaction to sitting but sitting probably isn’t great because it’s a recent adaptation. I don’t know if other animals’ adaptations are any better. I mean like horses, which you work with can die just from getting their stomach flipped over inside their bodies. I think ditto for cows, I think ditto for like any animal that grazes; they’ve got this huge long digestive system because it takes a while to suck the nutrients out of grass. So that seems like a design flaw.
We’ve talked a lot at length about the issues around horniness that we’re compelled to reproduce thanks to our heritage of 100 million generations of sexually reproducing creatures but that shit leads is often bad or risky for the health of the individual organism. So it’s not a design flaw as much as it’s like a cruel set of motivations that are at cross purposes. Evolution not being a teleological just doesn’t care about anybody’s or anything’s feelings. So we have feelings, often profound because there was a reproductive advantage in being able to think but those feelings make us suffer and also we’re never able to fully satisfy our motivations including not wanting to die.
So the cruelty of being thinking beings in these shitty bodies is a huge design flaw, though by calling it a design flaw, design implies intention. That’s a problem; we weren’t designed, we evolved and that means that with nobody being in charge there’s nobody to say “Well that’s fucked for those creatures,” and it’s so bad that every creature that’s ever lived has to die. It’s with and until now there’s been no way to pass on conscious experience. There’s no way to share what you feel consciously though within the next 30 years that I think will cease to be. Via evolution we all ended up with our brains locked in our heads and no way to merge our thoughts except very inefficiently through making noises that are semi-understood by other members of the same species.
So that whole thing is a huge tragedy for any feeling being and we can reasonably assume that these flaws extend across the universe, that it’s not unreasonable to think that creatures of arisen via evolution on quadrillions, quintillions of planets throughout the universe; 10 to the 22nd stars in the observable universe, almost all of them with planets though most of them without planets that permit the evolution of life. We’re I think statistically an unlikely planet; a rocky planet with a hard surface and a thick atmosphere in the temperate zone, the distance from the sun in which water can be liquid. That’s a rare planet and the planet that we might have ended up where we are via some lucky collisions among Proto planets and who knows… but still 10 to the 22nd stars and even if only one star in a thousand or ten thousand has an earth-like set of characteristics, that’s still 10 to the 18th planets where life could arise.
But talking about the flaws linked evolution means we can also talk about eventually being able to engineer out a lot of those flaws. Via technology, we’re slow. The fastest we can run is around 20 miles an hour for an elite athlete for very short stretches but we can go 1200 miles an hour in a fighter jet or 25000 miles an hour in a rocket to the moon. I mean we’ve been able to design workarounds for a lot of our shortcomings and eventually that will increasingly be able to engineer our very selves and that’s creepy because it leads to the end of human dominance but it’s also the opposite of tragic, that we’ll have powers to re-engineer ourselves and make things better for us and for other creatures if other creatures end up surviving the havoc we’ve wreaked and we will wreak.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/05/23
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: I mean it is a weird thing because there’s a too soon in comedy and mostly the too soon is a joke itself now, where you make a Hitler joke or a joke about something else that might be inappropriate, then you go too soon and then it’s a joke on top of a joke. But for oppression, it’s like it’s too late. I mean the Jews have a whole holiday about having been oppressed 2200-2400 years ago, I don’t know maybe longer, 2800 years, like before Christ. My history is terrible, but enslaved under the Egyptians. And if you’re talking with a black person and they’re talking about slavery and you as a Jew go “Well, we were enslaved too,” probably most of the time the black person will say “Yeah, you’re right” but inside I feel like they’re thinking “Yeah…” [Doubtingly]
For one thing, black people are still suffering from the effects of slavery in terms of The Jim Crow and all the shit that came after slavery where black people in America have net education, net worth, lifespan; all this shit is much less than white people and you can trace most of these deficiencies back to slavery or the shit that was done to try to keep black people in their place after slavery. But when it comes to Jews having been enslaved, it’s really hard to trace a through line from the Jews suffering from the effects of having been enslaved nearly 3000 years ago. So really, if you’re going to play the oppression card as a Jew you got to go with Hitler rather than having been enslaved.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/05/19
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: There’s a theme that some people like to emphasize that some great scientists including Einstein and Feynman said I’m just an everyday person who just thinks really hard, Crick or Watson also does that; brags about having a low IQ and stuff. That’s fine up to a point but you got to very carefully define everyday thinking to encompass logic and the accumulation of data experimental evidence. So, I’m mostly not buying that because science as we know, it largely… Galileo was one of the first modern experimental scientists. He didn’t do that many experiments; he dropped some balls, he rolled balls down, inclined planes. And Galileo was in the 1400s which is pretty recent compared to the 100,000 years that humans have been around. And if everyday thought was so scientific then why did science only originate in the last one percent of human history?
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/05/17
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: “I think some of the phenomenon we’re going to be seeing and continues to be unexplained, and might in fact be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something we don’t yet understand” that’s ex-CIA director, John Brennan. That was sent to me by Richard May, who’s the current co-editor of Noesis, the Journal of the Mega Society and long term member of the Mega Society.
Rick Rosner: So the ex-CIA director is saying that some of the shit that might be going on in the world might be due to a phenomenon that we don’t yet know of.
Jacobsen: Yeah. So, I think some of the phenomena we’re going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might in fact be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don’t yet understand.
Rosner: So, he’s taking a lot of words and reusing phenomenon to say there’s shit we don’t yet understand. That’s very topical because today the Congress, I guess the House, I don’t know if it was the house or the Senate, it doesn’t matter, had hearings on UFOs and they showed previously un-shown clips of UFOs taken from like fighter jets and shit like that. I looked at a little bit of it and the clips are like, they’re not garbage-y, like they honestly kind of inspire a certain amount of wondering what the fuck is going on but I still go with the thing that it’s not fucking aliens, it’s not a super weapon from another country or an advanced civilization. It’s some atmospheric phenomenon that makes something out there look like a material thing but it’s not, it’s a reflection or some kind of lightning or some kind of shit because one of the characteristics of a UFO is defying the rules of physics, particularly the rules of acceleration that a UFO will just go from hauling ass to stopping dead to hauling ass in a different direction in an instant.
Material objects can’t do that. They have to decelerate or they have apply force over time to change their velocity vector. So the very thing that makes the mysterious UFOs makes it unlikely that you’re looking at a material object. So I remain unconvinced UFOs for that reason and for, which is kind of a circular not a reason really, but the other reason is why the fuck would other civilizations send shit to spy on us. It just seems dumb and a waste. The number one reason that a civilization would send shit to fuck with us or spy on us would be lunatic artists from other civilizations who defy cost-benefit analysis, who do stupid shit for the sake of doing stupid shit and that would be the only way to justify fucking with some fucking ridiculous planet 120 light years away.
So now in terms of what, yeah of course there’s shit we don’t understand. We’ve talked forever about the shit we don’t understand, mostly in the area of informational cosmology with what it says about the universe and what it says about consciousness. And I think consciousness is the biggest we don’t understand thing in general that remains but there’s a lot more shit that we will come to understand this based on processing Big Data using doing science via machine learning and AI. We found all the easy correlations in the world by using super Big Data to find things via crazily intricate Big Data, the correlations that live in huge ass data.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/05/17
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Okay. There are also the various flavors of cancel culture where people who spend a lot of time on social media learn about a bunch of sensitivities, that I would consider largely legit. I might disagree with the degree to how much vehemence with which these sensitivities are applied but there’s no room in reasonable discourse for the F word anymore and I dearly missed the R word but you just can’t use it anymore. I find that mostly reasonable. And then today I read up on Asperger’s, which is not an officially used term nor diagnosis anymore. I read a whole thing like that in comic book forum posted in a series of tweets and for one thing calling yourself Asperger’s versus calling yourself autistic is ableist. You’re saying you’re autistic but you’re better than most people who are autistic, you’re high functioning autistic; so that’s one problem with Asperger’s.
The other problem with Asperger’s is that Asperger was a Nazi who worked in concentration camps and he separated the high functioning autistic kids even though I don’t think they have the diagnosis of autism. He separated the high functioning weirdos who he thought could be brought around to be used as workers from the less functioning neurodivergent, not a term they use for kids, and the less functioning kids were just euthanized or murdered. So you really don’t want to use a term that honors that guy.
So, that’s cancel culture to not use the term Asperger’s anymore, not if you’re informed it’s just a reasonable constraint. There are a bunch of those constraints around issues of gender and ableism. So, one more constraint on diversion thought. Also, another constraint is when Tocqueville visited the U.S there were about four and a half to five million Americans, now there are 332 million Americans, everybody’s posting on social media. So, another constraint on original thought is that many of those 300 million of other Americans are smart and he thought you might have that’s not stupid, somebody else might already have had.
And like my boss at Kimmel, wouldn’t let herself look at Twitter in the morning at least when she was writing jokes because she was afraid and this was a legitimate fear that she’d see other people’s jokes on a subject and there wouldn’t be any other decent jokes to come up with in a limited amount of time. She’d take the time that she could have spent looking at Twitter and wrote her own jokes and often those jokes overlapped with other people’s jokes because often people come up with the same jokes especially when you have thousands of people tweeting about the same shit.
I know another guy who sued Conan O’Brien claiming that O’Brien was stealing his jokes. I forget the whole deal but he may have been submitting jokes to Conan O’Brien and then similar jokes were told by Conan O’Brien or else the guy thought that somebody was reading his tweets and stealing the jokes and he asked me because he knew I was a testify as a comedy expert and I said I can’t because I’m not buying your lawsuit because people come up with the same jokes. So that’s another constraint to original thought with so many people thinking odds are your thoughts aren’t going to be original.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/05/17
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I have to give credit to Richard May for this one. It’s a quote that states as follows – “I know of no country in which there is so little independence in mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.”– Alexis de Tocqueville.
Rick Rosner: Okay, sweet. So Tocqueville comes to the U.S in the early 19th century, I assume. I do kind of know what one of the pressures might have been for him to make that observation. You know the conformity America was freaking young. In the early 19th century, depending on how you figure it the fucking white boy plus slavery America is 200 years old. You go over to Europe and civilization is 2000 years old and so you got a huge intellectual artistic tradition. So, that’s got to be one thing that a bunch of farmers in the U.S didn’t have shit to talk about; they had no history, they had no culture relative to Europe.
Now if you want to apply it to today, you have, I don’t know if you’d call it variety of thought, you just have people picking their information bubbles. The liberal humanistic bubble and then the lunatic bubble, and each of those are constrained. The liberal humanistic bubble constrained by fact for the most part; the people trying to be relatively report. I mean they’re put there’s plenty of problems with the 24-hour news media but there is some effort to report the truth. The main problem is what stories get focused on but there’s quite a bit of factual information under the topics that people care about and often those topics are legitimate issues; climate change, the increasing racist fascist tendencies, and anti-democratic tendencies in the country. And so, what we talk about on social media, when we talk current events in politics is constrained by what the facts are and also by the sheer volume of information.
And then, the other side is constrained by being mainly concerned with denying the facts on the other side. So, each side is constrained by fact but if you want to look at diversity of discourse, you can look at our creative endeavors. TV is better than ever, entertainment is better than ever, video games less, so movies because just TV is the most creative medium right now. But there’s still constraint in that area because to make a superhero movie you need about 10,000 people working in various places and if it’s a Marvel or a DC movie, you’re working off a material that was written in comic book form anywhere from you know 80 to 20 years ago. And also the constraints of spending 200 million dollars on a movie, say 40 million dollars on a season of a Prestige TV series and all the execs who have their fingers and focus groups and Q ratings in there. So, plenty of constraints there and we’re such active consumers and there’s so much to consume, that that’s another constraint that we were so busy consuming other people’s thoughts and creative efforts. It helps us when we come up with our stuff but most people aren’t coming up with stuff or at least stuff that makes it to series.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: All right, so after we signed off I Googled between I don’t know 100,000 and 200,000 horses across the across the five boroughs of New York City, each horse making between 15 and 20 kilos of shit a day I think plus the piss. The piss is significant too. It wasn’t just the horse’s waste, when a horse died people would just often leave it there until it rotted. So, stuff was a mess.
In the 1880s they started having meetings about what to do and there weren’t great ideas. They started coming up with dedicated horseshit squads and the farmers would come and pick up the shit for manure but it was still a huge problem. One thing they did was they raised the Brownstones; The New York Row Homes, the fancy ones like 6’8 feet or six eight steps above the sidewalk because that would get the houses above the sea of shit. The New York horse population peaked in 1920, as we kind of figured and then the total U.S horse population is down about 85% since then because we use cars and trucks.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/05/17
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them” – Albert Einstein
Rick Rosner: Are you sure he said that? Probably he said that. Einstein; he kind of paid a certain amount of attention to his public persona, so he was pretty good at coming up with little quotes. Do I buy that one? I don’t know. He’s basically saying it takes different thinking to solve problems and I don’t know if that’s really what solves problems. I’m thinking of horseshit which was the one of the major pollutants in cities at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. One of your jobs is shoveling horseshit, so you know and you deal with 36 horses and New York City in 1908, Manhattan, I would guess had more than a 100,000 horses and they were all just shitting. How much shit does a horse do in a day?
All right, so I’m going to guess the horseshit was 10 pounds in a day, so that’s a million pounds of shit in Manhattan every day just in the street. So that was a huge problem and it really didn’t take different thinking to remove that as a huge issue, it took the invention of the automobile which is kind of different thinking but it wasn’t different thinking about horseshit, it was just a change in condition that cars replaced horses. And so the horseshit problem went away. I guess you could look up when the horse population of the United States peaked and it would have to be right before the automobiles came in, so the early 20th century. And now horses are mostly a luxury.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/05/16
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How should people be skeptical about high range tests like the Mega or the Titan in ways that an individual with a long history of performing well in these tests would know better than individuals who have not taken them or being part of the societies, discussing them over years as they’ve been developed?
Rick Rosner: Before we started taping, you asked the question in a slightly different way like what can you tell me about the mega test that somebody else might not know. And I was going to go a little bit into the history of the mega test where it hit at a very fortunate point in history for getting a lot of people interested in it because just as the mega test hit, the Guinness Book of World Records which was a big deal back before the internet. The internet kind of killed it along with any other like encyclopedia or book form of reference. People really cared about the shit that was in the Guinness book of World Records especially kids who like amazing stuff.
And for four years I believe, roughly from 1983 to about 1987, the Guinness Book listed the highest IQ people in the world with Marilyn Savant being number one and I think it listed a couple other people as being close. Based on her score on the Stanford Benet childhood test she took at around age 10 and scored like a mental age of 23 which gave her a miscalculated it turns out IQ of like 230 or so and then she did well on them. Before the mega test was widely disseminated via Omni magazine, she got the highest score among the people who took it before then. So there was a lot of receptiveness to the idea of finding super high IQ people which led more than 4000 people to take the test. At the time the answers would have been hard to research because it was pre-internet. Now at least half the answers on the test are much easier to research because they’re verbal analogies, so easy to research via Google that they’re now worthless in terms of measuring high IQ. Maybe three out of 24 of those verbal problems might still be tough to research but most of them; no.
Plus people have been discussing on the internet all the prop which we’ve already talked about that the answers are out there. So what do you still want to know about skepticism of the mega, say?
Jacobsen: What are some fine details to keep in mind, those for the individuals with motivation and astuteness mind?
Rosner: What’s keep in mind is to do a good job on the Mega took me more than a hundred hours and I would think maybe somebody who thinks faster or researches faster than me would still take, pre-internet, it would take anybody at least 60 hours. Now with the internet you can knock off the verbal problems in a couple hours but the math problems are still pretty time consuming. You can maybe cut down the time it might take if you’re a coder and you can just develop some algorithms. But anyway why would you want to do any of this for a test that is so thoroughly compromised since the answers have been circulating for more than 30 years? You don’t want to take the Mega test except for fun. You don’t want to take it to prove you have a high IQ. No high IQ organization that I know of, maybe there’s still or some, would accept your score on the Mega because it’s super compromised.
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It’s pretty much ditto for the Titan which has the same problem with its verbal problems. You want to find tests that were developed during the internet era if you really want to try to get a score that will be accepted now. Do we know for sure that the Mega Society doesn’t accept the Titan anymore.
Jacobsen: It only accepts the Power and the Ultra.
Rosner: Okay and the power in The Ultra don’t have any of the verbal problems, I don’t think. So you shouldn’t take the Titan, you shouldn’t take the Mega, you should take Hoeflin’s other two tests; The Power or The Ultra.
Jacobsen: How did you perform on The Power in the older tests?
Rosner: I think I got perfect scores or maybe I missed one or something but I mean most of the problems on those tests I think are taken from his other tests. So having taken The Mega and The Titan, I think that took care of two-thirds of it. It’s been like 10 years since I’ve looked at these tests but I know that those tests, I think they had a lot of problems that were taken directly from the earlier tests or at the very least they had problems that were very closely related at least in terms of the methodology that you’d use to solve them to those earlier tests. So, at most I missed one problem on Hoeflin’s later tests.
Jacobsen: So you crushed basically all of Hoeflin’s major tests.
Rosner: Yeah except that there’s a huge practice effect that once how to go after his problems if you have the patience to work through some of the tougher ones, you can get to the solutions. There are some problems that are somewhat different like “What happens if you take a Torus and take three Möbius strip shaped slice out of it? What’s left? How many pieces?” That’s kind of different. That’s a problem I think that was on the either The Mega or The Titan and is quite a bit different. There are other slicing problems but none like that. But you can still kind of apply some stringent thinking and drawing and get to the answer because it’s still a slicing problem. So, my crushing one of the earlier Hoeflin tests is more impressive than having crushed subsequent Hoeflin and tests because of the extreme practice effect.
Jacobsen: How do Hoeflin’s tests compare to other people’s tests in the high range?
Rosner: Well the problems are super stringent.
Jacobsen: What do you mean by stringent?
Rosner: There’s no wobble in the answers. The answer is the answer even for the three interpenetrating cubes problem, I think it still remains that nobody has proven the answer is the answer with a 100% mathematical precision. But even with that one everybody knows what the answer is. Everybody would shit their pants if it turned out that that wasn’t the answer. There’s just tightness to the answers where, like you go back to Watson. Watson would ring in on Jeopardy if the Watson algorithm calculated there was an 80% chance that the answer was that Watson’s answer was the answer or something like that. And on a Hoeflin problem, there’s presented with the Hoeflin proper answer and any alternate answers that people might argue for that’d be close to a 100% certainty that the Hoeflin answer is the right answer, that nobody should be able to argue with any degree of effectiveness that any alternate answer would be the answer.
But I’ve seen other tests that have problems that are sufficiently loose that I might buy somebody’s argument that their answer is as good or nearly as good as the official answer. That doesn’t arise with Hoeflin problems. It doesn’t mean those tests are bad but those tests offer less super duper certainty on some of the problems.
Jacobsen: What are some other vulnerabilities of the tests or the test makers? For instance, some individuals who have some of the highest claimants to high test score claims knew the test developers personally. They’re part of the organizations or they were friends with them; this is also questionable.
Rosner: Yeah, I mean there’s one instance that I won’t name names but is somewhat well known among high IQ people and maybe come better well known depending on future developments but that’s a fairly rare occurrence. However, I haven’t much attempted super high IQ tests lately but the last time I did, I’m like “Ugh…this is such a pain in the ass. If I could just somehow get at the answers.” I mean not through my own thinking but somehow do some kind of skullduggery not that I would but it’s an attractive thought.
So I’m working on a novel about someone who is known for having one of the world’s highest IQs and this person also has vast financial resources. And so this person who doesn’t want to spend forever on tests but wants the reputation that goes with getting super high scores, social engineers some answers. He hires operatives to more or less seduce at least one author of high IQ tests and once in their home breaks in or puts stuff that gives them out like keystroke or trackers on their computer or whatever they use; skullduggery to get at the answers which would be ridiculous because the stakes are so low except that it’s not that ridiculous because of this one slightly famous kind of half of a story. It’s not a major risk because like this fictional character has the wherewithal to spend at least 50 Grand and probably more like a 100,000 on operatives to get at the answers but that’s not at all a realistic situation.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/05/16
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The quote is “Science is magic that works” – Kurt Vonnegut.
Rick Rosner: That reminds me of the Arthur C. Clark quote that the technology of a sufficiently advanced civilization will be indistinguishable from magic [“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”] that is, if aliens came to earth with super high tech, it would just look magical, it would be so far beyond us.
On the quote you said; early humans, pre-renaissance humans, or pre-scientific method humans developed their technologies more gradually than we’ve developed ours. So, they had less technology that worked and the technology they had like the technology of building a shoe, there was nothing about a 13th century shoe that would have appeared to be magic. You might have some shoes for the king that would appear to be super fancy but they all use the same technology and it wasn’t super amazing if you took shoes from now, like the best army boots from now and gave them to soldiers back then, I think they’d go crazy for them.
On the other hand, they wouldn’t protect you from having half your foot cut off with an axe, so maybe they wouldn’t be that crazy for them. When the scientific method and the renaissance came along, then the pace of technology just went nuts and has continued to accelerate. Compared to earlier humans, we have a lot of shit that is magical in its effectiveness though usually we take and treat it with contempt or take it for granted because we were soaking in it.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/05/16
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: “A man’s women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass” – H.L. Mencken.
Rick Rosner: Yeah I buy that. It reminds me of another quote, “No matter how famous or sexy the man, there’s somebody who’s tired of fucking him”
Jacobsen: This is from In Defense of Women by H.L. Mencken, in section, I. The Feminine Mind, section one; The Maternal Instinct. I’ll give you the whole paragraph which always just makes me laugh. He opens a book with this. “A man’s women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition. The mark of that so-called intuition is simply a sharp and accurate perception of reality, an habitual immunity to emotional enchantment, a relentless capacity for distinguishing clearly between the appearance and the substance. The appearance, in the normal family circle, is a hero, magnifico, a demigod. The substance is a poor mountebank.”
Rosner: Well there’s a shorter version of the saying which is familiarity breeds contempt. So I mean there’s a bunch of stuff going on. One is there’s the standard wisdom; I used to call it the Seven Year Itch. Among gay women there’s Lesbian Bed Death where only weirdos stay highly horny for each other year after decade. For a while, Mel Gibson was the sexiest man alive and it turns out he’s a lunatic and an anti-Semite and a mean drunk and was scary to his wife or girlfriend.
So, on the one hand you want a relationship to kind of grow as comfortable as an old shoe which means you’re extinguishing passion. So you want to be able to relax into a relationship but if you’re a dick, relaxing into a relationship means that the person you’re in a relationship with learns how fully you’re a dick though I’d say the difference between Menkin’s time and ours is there’s a much bigger debunking industry than there was when he was around. The ‘30s and ‘40s, there were scandal sheets and gossip rags but the big chunk of social media… nobody’s history is private anymore. If you tweeted something racist when you were a junior in high school, that will turn up 12 years later.
People share so much more information with each other that we kind of know when somebody’s a dick and then we also kind of know that everybody’s a dick to some extent. Humanity’s been kind of widely debunked and at the same time since everybody’s kind of a dick, then that raises the bar for how much of a dick you have to be to be a real dick. But his sentiments remain true that you can’t maintain the illusion of dignity or nobility indefinitely…
In the 20s or 30s, 50 years before the second wave… 40 Years of feminism, masculine privilege was huge. So, seeing that privilege from an unprivileged position of being a woman in a household with a big swing and dick, you’re going to see that privilege in action and it would be hard for most men of the era to not be dicks about it.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/05/12
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: “Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.” – Voltaire
Rick Rosner: Well, Christianity, I don’t know how you figure, like we’re in the middle of a Covid pandemic and people argue about whether people have died with Covid or from Covid. People who argue that are Covid denying assholes. But there has been a little work done trying to figure out when somebody dies of Covid, is that what they really died of and it’s usually “Yeah, they died of Covid, if they didn’t get Covid, yeah they might have other conditions but they’d still be alive” So that’s a fake issue but a real issue would be how many people has Christianity killed and is it more than Christianity is saved.
There are good things and bad things about Christianity and lots of wars have been fought around Christianity but the biggest bloodiest ones I’d say were like a thousand years ago, 800 years ago, and 600 years ago. The Crusades; there weren’t nearly as many people in the world, less than half a billion people, so the number of people who were available to be killed in these giant wars weren’t more than 16 times as many people on earth now as during the Crusades. So yeah, they were fucking bloody but the overall numerical death toll don’t compare to World War I and II.
But then you look at other shit that Christianity’s done, that there are people who died from illegal abortions and shit like that and people made miserable, I don’t know what else. How many Catholics are there?
Jacobsen: 1.34 billion.
Rosner: And so there are like 1.8 billion Muslims, I think.
Jacobsen: It depends on whether Sunni or Shia.
Rosner: Well, I’ll throw them all into the hopper there.
Jacobsen: Then over two billion Christians and probably a little over two billion Muslims.
Rosner: All right, so in terms of sheer numbers, I’m not sure Voltaire is correct. Muslims get involved in some bloody shit too. Bloody shit in the last 200 years might kill more people than bloody shit a thousand years ago. I don’t think you can argue that World War One and World War II were religious wars or that Stalin’s purge of killing 40 billion of his people didn’t have anything to do… Stalin killed a bunch of Christians I’m sure but it wasn’t Christians killing people. And then Mao killing 50 billion of his people, that wasn’t Christians or Muslims killing people.
There have been bloody things happening in the past 150 years that haven’t been primarily Muslim or Christians killing people. I think somebody needs to do a numerical analysis on the Voltaire quote. Certainly, there’s a decent death toll for associated with Christians imposing Christianity but I’d say other people imposing other shit has killed more people than Christianity.
Addendum, I mean the thing that’s killed everybody is biology/evolution because of the way we evolved, we’re all expendable and nobody gets to not die and that’s a death toll of close to 110 billion humans along with all animals except for some weird animals like some amoebas which are effectively immortal but who cares… amoebas don’t have brains. So, I mean if you want to get mad at something, get mad at our natural biological history.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Addendum to Mencken.
Rick Rosner: The 1930s, when Mencken was working weren’t a nice era because it was deep in the depression. But it would be nice besides the misery of living in the depression to live in an era in which Puritans actually walked the walk. The people who made other people miserable for being happy at least weren’t complete hypocrites; they practiced to a certain extent what they preached.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: “I don’t have a girlfriend, but I do know a woman who’d be mad at me for saying that” – Mitch Hedberg. And the other one, I think, is H.L.Mencken “Puritanism; the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy”
Rick Rosner: Fucking Mencken, a guy from 90 or 100 years ago, who remains pertinent because he was a cynical guy, a journalist of sorts, who thought people sucked which turns out to be more true now maybe than when he was working. But it’s weird because that quote is weirdly not applicable; the fear that someone somewhere may be happy. Because since Mencken, in the past 10-20 years, the people who would be puritans, Evangelical Christians have turned into evil fucks in America, have embraced Trump and just all sorts of vicious fucking creepy, just unethical bullshit in the service of getting their objectives met. In large part because they’ve been manipulated into thinking that preventing all abortion is their number one priority. Even though the protection of the unborn has not been a thing for most of history, even the Catholic Church for the most part, and most civilizations didn’t consider a fetus a life until there were signs of life in the womb and or until the fetus could survive outside the womb.
So, under most criteria historically, you’re looking at no harm, no foul if you abort before like 20, 22, or 24 weeks before you can feel the fetus moving around. And so now, Puritans or Evangelical Christians aren’t really good maintainers of moral standards; they don’t give a fuck. They support Trump, who is the most commandment breaking, lying, and sex abusing motherfucker who’s ever held the presidency. And so there’s no Puritanism among the Puritans anymore. There’s a hypocrisy, but really they’re just a bunch of assholes who just will do anything, embrace anything, no matter how shitty, in order to fight abortion because they’ve been played by conservative leaders.
Now back to Hedberg; I don’t have a girlfriend, but I know a girl who’d be mad to hear me say that. So he’s saying that he’s got a friend who’s a girl, probably a friend with benefits, who thinks that she is his girlfriend, but he doesn’t think she is. I guess he thinks that she’s just somebody that he hooks up with, which is weird for Hedberg. Hedberg feels to me, more like a stoner, not a player. So I get the structure of the joke. It just doesn’t feel very Hedberg-ian to me. He also doesn’t seem like a prick that way. So it’s more a joke; joke for the sake of the joke rather than a reflection of his personality, or at least his comedic personality.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: “Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior” That was obviously not Aristotle; he had very different views to Plato.
Rick Rosner: How old is that quote? Well anyway, that brings up all sorts of issues including the issue that got the chancellor of Harvard fired 20 years ago, Larry Summers. Larry Summers said that women on average are as smart as men but there are fewer outliers. In other words, he said there were fewer female geniuses. And there may have been a study at the time but you can always find a fucking study. Anyway, he had to quit running Harvard.
Jacobsen: Here we go, it was Socrates. The quote is 2,500 years old.
Rosner: Socrates. It’s a really old quote.
Jacobsen: Two and a half millennia.
Rosner: Okay. Now, for one thing, it’s a little like IQ. IQ is a terrible metric or there’s no really good way to measure intelligence. There are some not terrible ways but they’re not ideal. Even worse is something general like who’s better; men or women? There’s no metric that you can establish. And then when you take a quote from 2500 years ago which you know the civilization under Aristotle, it wasn’t exactly a feminist paradise; ancient Greece. So it could have been just like throwing women a bone because why not because nobody gave a shit. Yeah you can say women are better than men because we men are in charge of fucking everything and we can just say it. A certain component of chivalry is the assumed superiority of men. Yeah we fucking run everything but we’re still going to be nice to you in certain limited ways.
Now, a modern-ish point of view might be that everybody has a brain, everybody’s a conscious being and that should be the prime criterion and under that criterion people are largely equal. Everybody experiences the same emotions unless their brains are badly broken. Everybody has roughly the same conscious experience created by mediated through their brain. That’s the basis of the golden rule that what you want you can assume in general. Everybody else wants because everybody else is the same kind of animal with roughly the same brain. But if you want to get into the specifics of how women might be superior there’s always that shit that I used to think was more or less real, which is the corpus callosum; the fiber bundle that connects the two halves of the brain is thicker in women and guys supposedly have a lower impulse control. So when a woman makes a decision it’s maybe made taking less rationally and taking more factors into consideration or if you just want to boil it down, guys are more likely to be assholes than women.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The quote – “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.” – William Congreve.
Rick Rosner: I’m not super qualified to address this because we just had our 31st wedding anniversary plus we’ve been in couples counseling for like 27 years because we have good insurance that covers counseling. So once a month go to counseling and try to resolve our issues. Okay, the people who scorn people; people who blow other people off are people with reasonably good self-esteem and my wife and I have not the highest self-esteem, at least in terms of romance. We’re probably in the bottom 40% of self-esteem and people with high self-esteem are cocky. My siblings and I, half of us have high self-esteem and dump people the other half have low self-esteem and try to make relationships work. My wife and I, we try really hard to make the relationship work; it’s an investment. My feeling is that if you dump somebody you’ve created interpersonal chaos and misery, financial chaos, and you’ve given up half your assets and you’ll end up with somebody who’s probably going to be just as shitty as the person you’re dumping but in different ways.
If you’re dumping a long-term partner just because you think it’ll be easier to orgasm with somebody new or somebody younger then that’s just stupid because the only people we’ve talked about this who don’t have to beat off in a relationship, who get all their sexual needs met with their partner are either incredibly lucky or psychopaths. Everybody else either has very small libido or has to jack off. Some gay guys might be able to get all their needs met with other gay guys because gay guys are mutually horny but guys who have sex almost entirely with women need to get used to having sex with themselves because that’s just statistically what’s the deal is. And just devastating your life just for like extra ease of jizzing because now you’re with somebody who’s 22 years younger than you is in my mind stupid.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/04/28
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The electron is a theory we use. It is so useful in understanding the way nature works that we can almost call it real.
Rick Rosner: Is that Feynman again?
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: So, that’s his pragmatism again. As a kid, he would fix people’s early radios. So he’s a kid I think in the 20s and everybody had these crystal radio sets which were pretty primitive but probably actually improving in quality year by year as radio became super important in people’s lives but his reputation was the boy who fixes radios by thinking. He loved that, that he’d look at a radio and instead of immediately tinkering with it he’d turn it on, listens to it, look at it, and then think and then until he’d figured out what must be the deal and then he’d immediately fix it. Feynman also had a standing bet where at Los Alamos you could come up to him and present him with a problem; a word problem, a math problem, his claim was that he could get within 10% of the answer within 60 Seconds. It could be anything; how many trees are there in America and he’d be able to think up the answer. I think it was that kind of challenge or it could be anything.
The electron has some characteristics but it’s known or should be known as much for its lack of characteristics as its characteristics. Protons are complicated; they have quarks, they get a lot of shit going on, they have a substructure. Electrons exist as point particles. Now you can’t localize the point but they are a point and they have charge and they have spin and not a lot else to the point where they are pretty mathematically pure and to where they’re just kind of generic, maybe it was Feynman but somebody came up with a theory that there’s only one electron in the whole universe and it’s just we see it as all the electrons in the universe because it goes forward and backward in time. Two electrons interact with each other and most of the time or a lot of the time you can’t even tell which electron is which. If you can’t tell which is which, then they’re mathematically indistinguishable. You can’t say which electron is which after they interact. In some way they’re placeholders.
I think of them as in my primitive way is as twists in space that are adjuncts to protons that a proton is not in space and maybe time but at least space, a knot in causality. It’s a knot of some sort and in tying the knot you’ve imparted a twist to space and or space and time. And the only way to relieve that twist that you’ve put on things is to have a reverse twist in the form of an electron. So I believe that the number of protons and electrons in a system that works the way our universe does is always identical. Basically, an electron somewhere is part of the particle that’s a proton. You bring a proton into existence and that necessitates as part of its existence an electron even if the electron is way the fuck someplace else.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/04/28
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: It’s Feynman again. ““From a long view of the history of mankind, seen from, say, ten thousand years from now, there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell’s discovery of the laws of electrodynamics. The American Civil War will pale in provincial’s insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event at the same decade.”
Rick Rosner: I missed some of that but he’s saying that the biggest deal was Maxwell’s Laws of electromagnetism. So I’m about to be found out here because I never got through a class where I learned to deal with those laws, where those laws were thoroughly explained to me. I know some shit about them. I know that a light propagates as a wave where it’s tugged forward by a magnetic field that is itself tugged forward by some other electrical field so that they pull themselves forward at the speed of light but I never had a course in Maxwell’s Laws. So I’m not qualified to comment on them except they are important and it’s really a just bad form for me to not be more conversant in them. Anything else I say would be just kind of half-assed winging it, so let me not do that…
I can tell you one thing that he develops his laws and one implication of the laws is that there’s a wave that can propagate electromagnetically and I don’t know how long it took them to figure it out but he was like “Whoa! that’s fucking light” so I think I’m not sure he was looking to describe light mathematically, I think he was coming up with the rules of physics and light came out of the rules.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/04/07
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We’re recording now, ramble me silly.
Rick Rosner: All right. So right before you started taping we were talking about how our topics and discussions have gotten ramblier and I told you that I had a good topic and then you just happened to plug into it and the topic is ‘what if I’m losing it?”
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: So we’ve been doing this for around 8 years now?
Jacobsen: It has got to be, fucking crazy. We’re nuts.
Rosner: Okay, so eight years, possibly nine but I think eight or maybe eight plus. And so we started when I was I guess 53 and I’m going to be 62 next month and I wonder if I haven’t lost it yet, will I lose it because like Carol and I are dealing with our parents and people of her generation and everybody fucking falls apart at some point. Nature’s not so kind that anybody gets to survive her mom is often very just wrong and not entirely incoherent but not either and my mom who has been sharp her entire life, has been less sharp lately. So if I’m not losing it now like odds are that I’m not going to is very low. And I have tinnitus; tinnitus is persistent ringing in the ears and some of the time I’m not aware of it and some of the time it’s very loud. But I think even when I’m not aware of it it’s probably still happening and I haven’t read that much about it but it is fairly common with one-fifth of all Americans maybe having it. I should probably research it more but it may be harmless but it’s certainly not a positive precursor. It’s not associated with people who keep their shit together longer than people who don’t have it. At best it’s neutral and at less than best it’s not a neutral sign but given that we’ve been doing this pretty extensively across millions of words for eight years, this is a nice little longitudinal study of somebody with a high IQ in late middle age. So that could be interesting depending on what happens.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/04/25
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This is from Goethe; Iphigenie auf Tauris from 1787. Number two; the quote is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – “Life teaches us to be less harsh with ourselves and with others.”
Rick Rosner: Life teaches us to be to be less harsh with ourselves than with others.
Jacobsen: And with others…
Rosner: And with others. Okay. I like the way I said it first because we’re right now living in a time of assholes but to take his actual quote, he’s basically saying as we gain experience of the world we forgive people including ourselves and their inadequacies. Okay, I buy that because you know, Carol and I have been in couples counseling for decades, just about once a month because I have excellent insurance through the Writer’s Guild. So, like 85% of it is paid for and it’s good to kind of work on potential issues together in a refereed environment every so often. It’s like I’ve called it here before a bunch of times relationship push-ups; it shows your commitment to the role.
Anyway, one of the things that I work on with Carol, one of my not so hidden agendas, is when she you know finds shortcomings in me I try to get her to put things in a statistical framework which is a fancy way of making excuses for not being perfect at the same time its pragmatic. We were just talking about being pragmatic and in our early days of counseling she’d go after me for saying well you’re not romantic enough.
Jacobsen: You aren’t romantic enough?
Rosner: Right, and then I’d say “Okay, tell me about a couple you know who’s romantic enough.” She had a hard time doing that because nobody’s fucking romantic. It’s a very you know statistically unlikely thing. So to get back to Goethe, it’s like as you gain experience in the world you kind of learn what people are capable of including yourself on the good side and also on the fallibility side. Statistically when I worked in popular bars, about one person in 90 would be lying to me, would be underage and trying to get in with some kind of fake ID or just with bullshit. So that was the index of human fallibility in that particular context. And then people varied in terms of dickishness.
The one bar I worked at Mom’s Saloon, across from where the Goldman kid worked who had his throat slashed by O.J Simpson in Brentwood. There was no place to dance near UCLA. This was the closest place with a dance floor, UCLA. So it had a huge long line and sometimes it would take 45 minutes to get in or even longer and people had actually pretty standard reactions to being forced to stand in line all this time. There was a standard level of annoyance and then there were the statistical outliers; the people who were extremely nice about it and understanding and you wouldn’t remember those people because they were nice. But then the people on the other side, the people who were huge assholes about it will be like “Why’d they get it?” They work here; they’re showing up to get their paycheck. “Oh yeah? Really? Somebody who’s two or three standard deviations from the mean and mean in terms of being an asshole you remember those people because they’re fucking assholes.
But with experience, with thousands of nights running a line of people wanting to get into a bar, I got a pretty good picture of the average human and then the variability in human behavior around this in this one situation but in general people learn what people are capable of. Everybody wants to be a pro athlete if they’re a decent athlete in high school or even if they’re not a decent athlete and then 99.8% of those people get shaken out, maybe even 99.9, without making it to the pros. Time and experience educate you about what you can do in a whole bunch of areas and if you don’t want to go crazy, you have to forgive yourself for not being able to live up to your earlier hopes and expectations. You can strive, every time I drive I strive to be less of a dick when I’m driving and sometimes I succeed and sometimes I run that fucking yellow light. It’s not really running a yellow light you’re still allowed to be in the intersection when it’s yellow but if I was super conscientious I’d see the fucking thing ticking down and come to a stop.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/04/25
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, you’ve been thinking about the Turing test since we last talked. It’s been a little bit. I’ve been at competition level equestrianism for show jumping and eventing.
Rick Rosner: Yeah, you’ve been tending to fancy horses and people.
Jacobsen: Correct, this is a whole other side of things we can talk about another time. So, you’ve been thinking about the Turing test in the interim.
Rosner: I just quick looked it up, it comes from 1950 and World War II was the Heyday for pragmatic genius; all its glory and also ignominy. You’ve got these guys who are great theoreticians Feynman, Oppenheimer, and Turing who had to become super pragmatic to solve the problems of World War II. Turing basically won the war for the Allies by decoding the German Enigma machine which is a great feat of practical code breaking of figuring out what technology could be brought to bear on this fantastically hard problem and building the tech and cracking the code.
Then Oppenheimer and his crew at Los Alamos solved gazillion technical problems to build the atomic bomb even though 10 years previous these guys were working on wildly theoretical shit. Shit that we still haven’t been able to observe directly like the physics of black holes and neutron stars. Oppenheimer was one of the first black hole neutron star theoreticians. So, anyway the Turing test is very pragmatic. It says that it’s likely that if you can’t tell the difference between the output of a human and the output of a computer, then the computer is probably thinking like a human which implies some degree of consciousness though Turing was probably too pragmatic to call it consciousness; he just called it thinking like a human and his idea of the test was looking at printouts. You’re typing in shit and then something is typing back and if you can’t tell the difference in what is being typed back at you, you can’t decide though this is a computer as a human then the computer must have human-like thought ability.
I was thinking about the Turing test because I was talking about I called it midfield #midfuture; it’s not. Its called mid-journey is this machine mediated art enterprise. You can see the output if you go on Twitter and do hash tag midjourney all one word and it’s at first glance and even at second glance it’s hard to tell this stuff was generated by machines. And then we also talked about this person does not exist which passes at least at first glance a different kind of, it’s not really a Turing test but it’s a similar question – Can a computer figure out how to make people who look photo realistically like people even though they don’t exist. And yeah at first glance I said… I mean it’s gotten much better since I’ve been tracking it and there are only a few places where you can look at the picture and after a while decide that it’s not a real picture of a real person and that’s background and that’s earrings and it used to be like shirt collars that had a little bit of trouble with glasses frames, it’s gotten over that.
And then I was tweeting about this and somebody said look at the pupils of the eyes, the pupils are a little bit squared off. So the computer hasn’t figured out that pupils are almost exactly round. You know they could get in there; the people behind this thing and cheat and they could just say just make the pupils round but they don’t do that. They let the computer figure everything out. So that kind of gives you an idea the way the application of the Turing test will work is that at first glance you can’t tell the difference between human output and machine output but you learn where it’s weak and you focus on its weaknesses and those are the giveaways at least for a while till it overcomes those weaknesses.
And then that leads back to the question that Turing was avoiding pragmatically which is “What is going on with human thinking?” and then “Is machine thinking replicating human thinking?” and I think you can think productively about this. If you think about a machine mediated therapist that you type at and it types back to you and they’ve tried and this was like over the decades the Turing test 1950. So in the ‘70s, ‘80s people were trying to come up with this kind of therapist that would pass the Turing test and didn’t come close but now you have these fake therapists who I think come pretty close. I’ve read an article about one that not only are they pretty convincing but people actually get some freaking therapy out of them and then you have to figure out what is the means by which the AI is generating meaningful therapy and it’s working from Snippets of conversations the same way that Google Translate has gotten really good because it looks statistically at with not that much understanding.
We’ll go into what understanding it does have, kind of like Watson, except I think we’re now 10 years past Watson maybe more but like the Terminator in T1 somebody’s banging on the door and in his retinal display the Terminator has given a choice of like four responses to the guy banging on the door or some shit and like the one he picks his fucked off asshole. And that’s not necessarily based on the Terminator being conscious or understanding, it’s just based on the statistical likelihood based on an immense sample of Snippets of conversation that one of these responses would be roughly appropriate. The same way that Watson decided that based on this network of relationships among words implying probabilistically other words that if the question has Shekel Slovakia and city in it the answer is 78-84 % likely that the answer is going to be Prague except I’m out of date; it’s Czech Republic but anyway.
So Watson doesn’t understand much or anything and the therapist actually does understand a little bit. The therapist kind of has an idea of the local landscape of talk that if the therapist has access to a billion Snippets of conversation that it can look probabilistically at… say somebody types I’ve been thinking about my mother a lot lately and then the AI therapist might type back is your mother still alive or are you feeling sad about your relationship. If they can guess based on a gazillion Snippets what might be going on or what the response might be without understanding what a mother is, what a relationship is but understanding the local landscape of talk of what responses might be appropriate when somebody says something like this and that’s both far and near to what’s happening with humans when they talk that locally the local probabilities space of what you might say, it might be roughly equivalent to the local probability space of what the machine might say especially if you only give half a shit about what you’re talking about.
You’re in a bar or you’re freaking, or your friend has been going or your mom is yammering at you and you’re half listening half watching TV and you’re doing the equivalent “Uh-huh, yeah, uh-huh” but that’s in a conscious context where you’ve got all these other like analytical modules putting together a complete reality for you where the machine only has the low the Snippets of conversation module and your module especially when you’re being half-assed might be not too far from the machines module for picking out the next thing to say. And that’s a big achievement on the part of the machine that it’s accumulated this statistical experience that can pass for understanding and it’s maybe coming close to modeling a little chunk of consciousness at the module level which is vast statistical expertise that becomes consciousness once it’s married to a gazillion other modules and there’s some emotional heft like your consciousness is judging everything going on whether it sucks or not whether it’s good for you but it’s a kind of a biggish step on the road to machine consciousness for not that big a price and just the price of big fucking data and AI type algorithms. It didn’t take like eight different miracle breakthroughs to get to this point. It took feedback loops in fake neurons and vast amounts of data.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/04/09
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So Rick, what is the future of health food? I remember rambling in our sessions, both of us, over the last seven or eight years on and off about how stuff that actually is okay for you and it’s delicious.
Rick Rosner: Okay, so there’s a bunch of different stuff. One of the biggest problems in predicting the future is that well somebody was just on Twitter; Danny Fernandez talking about how imagining future apocalypses is just lazy and I agree. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world; it’s hard to imagine a fully developed future. So there’s just a lot of shit going on with food in general and into the future. So it’s complicated. A bunch of trends are going to crash into each other and the one in trend now is just blatant defiant eating shit. I’m going to be a fat slob of an American; I’m not going to take care of them… Fuck everything; just nihilistic obese babies, no discipline. And to heck with consequences plus I don’t believe in science or doctors anyway.
That’s one trend. Another trend is making food healthier but still taste good and over the past 20 years with things like Snackwell’s, whatever they make healthier in one way, so they can put it on the label turns out to be you want less fat while it’s going to be more sugar or more salt or more carbs, something else that’s at least as bad for you. So a lot of healthy foods are bullshit. So-called highly processed healthy foods are often bullshit but they’re getting better at it. So, over time there will be food that is delicious to eat and not necessarily terrible for you. One of the worst not that bad foods I eat is I go to Popeyes a lot and I get their chicken tenders and it’s fried chicken but it’s slabs of white meat chicken and the breading is really light and it doesn’t have that much fat in it unless they fuck it up. Every once in a while they won’t stir up the batter properly or whatever and it comes out wrong but when it’s done right it’s delicious and probably not very bad for you and you can pick off some of the breading too. But you keep the chicken in the box overnight because you get nine tenders, you only eat three of them the first day and even after sitting in the box for two-three days, the tenders have not leaked grease you know all the way through. So they’re not that bad for you and that’ll be a trend that like the people will always be interested in to some extent, not to any great extent in food that tastes delicious and is also not so bad for you.
Another trend is just the increasing cost both to your wallet and to the planet of animal protein. I don’t know how many thousands of gallons of water to make a pound of beef and the oceans are getting fished out and companies are able to have started to produce meat, that burgers, or non animal burgers that actually tastes like meat now. I think I had one; it’s fine. It’s more expensive and as time goes on, the meat substitute will get better and cheaper. Now there’s that pressure that you do one thing; you make a non-animal substitute, that’s your selling point and that shit is bad for you right now; the plant-based fake hamburgers. He’ll try very hard to make them healthy because they’re selling them based on a different selling point which is they’re not animal products. So eventually they’ll try to make those a little healthier.
And then further down the road than all these trends but not so far in the future, you’ll live to see it, is just being able to tweak what we like so that we like foods that are less shitty for us because as you know, as we’ve talked about, as everybody fucking knows the shitty stuff we like a lot we like because it was scarce in the pre-developed world when we were just fucking monkeys out on the planes, that fat was precious because it’s got more than twice as many calories per gram as protein or carbs. So anytime you can get fat out when you’re a fucking monkey person, a hundred thousand years ago you should really want to get it because it should be super delicious to you to drive you to search it out because it’s a great calorie source. Ditto with sugar, ditto with it with salt, it’s all shit that was in short supply so we evolved to want it more, so work harder to get it and now it fucks us because food is easy to get.
So at some point in the future there will be tweaks that we can have done to us, that will make us like shit that’s not just all salt and sugar and fat. So that’s like five trends in what’s going to happen with food. I guess we should try to come up with a couple even weirder ones. When you see movies set 50-100 years in the future with robots that are pretty human looking, it’s always an issue about what to do about eating. I think some show out of Britain about Robots showed that they could eat normally and it would go into a bag and they’d have to just take out the bag later and throw it away. They didn’t really taste food. What to do about robots eating food especially robot girlfriends that you want to take out to dinner? There will be a number of resolutions ranging from the half-assed and shitty. There will be a bunch of robot or AIs in human form and the early ones we won’t care about whether they feel good about shit or that won’t be a super high priority and then over time that’ll continue but you’ll be able to buy more actualized robots that have consciousness and we’ll still exist a service for the most part but will be given a lot of the pleasures we have. And just how they deal with food will be one of those issues whether it’s just shit that you fake eating or you just don’t eat or some deluxe model 120 years from now, it’s a robot that can you know taste food. So there you go; six trends in food.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/04/07
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Right now in America obviously, the Democrats control the presidency and barely the House and by an even thinner margin the Senate and something like more than 80% of the time the party who has the presidency loses seats in the House and often in the Senate. So what you see on Twitter all the time is we have to work really hard and get out there and vote so that doesn’t happen. Nobody’s talking about when it’s going to happen but I think it’ll be almost impossible for Democrats to keep control of the House because I think their margin is seven seats and the average number of seats lost by the party with the presidency is probably upwards of 20. This time around there aren’t any special circumstances that would help the Democrats avoid that. The Democrats took power in 2020 because Trump was the shittiest president in history and we had the worst pandemic in a century and those are very special circumstances.
The Republicans continue to grow more loathsome. The Republican leadership is the worst major political party in U.S history; just super racist, a significant chunk of Republicans in the house still kind of support Russia which is just insane. They’re just super evil, it’s bad but it isn’t losing them support. The Democrats keep thinking that the obvious loathsomeness of the Republican is in power will get people to not vote on the Republican side and to show up to vote on the Democratic side but I don’t think that there’s a lot of evidence of that. That alone is not special enough to save the Democrats.
There’s also a hope that Trump will get indicted or the people around Trump will be indicted in time for the midterms and there’s little evidence that the people in charge of investigating Trump and Trump is being investigated by like seven different organizations; The Department of Justice, the New York State Attorney General, whatever legal structure is in charge of law in New York City and four other sets of lawyers but there’s no evidence that anybody will pull the trigger and indict him of soon enough to do any good and even if indicted whether that would do any good. His rallies draw fewer and fewer people but he doesn’t need people to show up at his rallies for people to continue to vote for republicans. So the silver lining of trump as president was that he was so bad at everything that he missed out on a lot of opportunities to do further evil shit just because he’s a moron and politically inexperienced.
So I think it’s possible that if the Republicans take back of the House and the Senate, the only thing stopping them from doing shit on a national level is Biden vetoing stuff. I mean that’s sufficient to override a veto you need two two-thirds majority and nobody will have that; the Republicans won’t have that. So, we’re looking at a two-year stalemate probably and who knows what the fuck will happen if the Supreme Court loses another Justice in between 2023 and the beginning of 2025, probably Mitch McConnell just stonewall the entire time. We just got one of the most qualified justices confirmed.
Sandra Day O’Connor, 30 years ago was the first woman put on the Supreme Court and she’s a Republican nominated by the first Bush and she was confirmed 99-0 because there was a sense of decency in the Senate. The new woman named Ketanji Brown Jackson; highly qualified, really nothing controversial about her was confirmed 53-47. With all the votes against just being Republicans who are just like fuck you, there’s no comedy anymore. So there’s no reason to think the Republicans if they control the Senate would let another Justice be nominated and confirmed by Biden. And if the Republicans take back more State Houses, they’ll continue to pass crazy laws. Oklahoma earlier this week passed a law making abortion entirely illegal in the state of Oklahoma. Texas is looking at legislation to make abortion punishable by death. There’s just a lot of indication that after the midterm elections in November things are going to get worse. With the only thing holding the Republicans back being Biden being president and it’s super questionable whether Biden can get re-elected because in 2024 I think he’ll be 82 and his popularity right now is in the 41% and I think the vice president’s popularity is even less than that. She’s black and Asian and half of the country is increasingly unapologetically racist. It’s become increasingly clear that the Republicans have been a changing vote totals for national elections for most of the 21st century and the only good news about that is that it might be a little less this time around because there’s more scrutiny of Russia which was helping with that shit. A little of it’s been shut down on social media but I don’t think it’s been shut down in terms of people fucking with the mechanics of voting. So, few people on Twitter are out and out panicking. Everybody’s still saying if about the bad shit that could happen.
[Recording End]
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Publisher: In-Sight Publishing
Publisher Founding: March 1, 2014
Web Domain: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com
Location: Fort Langley, Township of Langley, British Columbia, Canada
Journal: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal
Journal Founding: August 2, 2012
Frequency: Three (3) Times Per Year
Review Status: Non-Peer-Reviewed
Access: Electronic/Digital & Open Access
Fees: None (Free)
Volume Numbering: 12
Issue Numbering: 1
Section: B
Theme Type: Idea
Theme Premise: “Outliers and Outsiders”
Theme Part: 29
Formal Sub-Theme: None.
Individual Publication Date: December 22, 2023
Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2024
Author(s): Dr. Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson
Author(s) Bio: Dr. Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson is a Registered Doctoral Psychologist with expertise in Counselling Psychology, Educational Psychology, and Human Resource Development. He earned qualifications in Social Work too. Duly note, he has five postsecondary degrees, of which 3 are undergraduate level. His research interests include memes as applied to self-knowledge, the evolution of religion and spirituality, the aboriginal self’s structure, residential school syndrome, prior learning recognition and assessment, and the treatment of attention deficit disorder and suicide ideation. In addition, he works in anxiety and trauma, addictions, and psycho-educational assessment, and relationship, family, and group counselling.
Word Count: 3,235
Image Credit: None.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369–6885
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Keywords: anti-western medicine movement, Euro-American, food, health care, modern culture, Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson, Marxist paradigm, Noble Savage, superfood.
Retro-evolution in food and health care and its impact on modern culture
I engaged in food struggle sessions with my mother when I was eight. An earlier introduction to spinach would have likely produced a different result. Infants will eat most anything including worms and dirt, but young children quickly become conditioned to the taste and consistency of food given to them by their caregivers. It is possible to change one’s diet later in life. Having read about its health benefits, I reconditioned myself to like spinach at age 30. Millions of North Americans have been using a similar process to reject “Western” foods and modern medicine while promoting preferred non-European alternatives. While much has been written about how 1960s radicalism eventually resulted in replacing workers with students as the revolutionary class in the Marxist paradigm (Coughlin & Higgins, 2019; Lindsay, 2020), there has been little examination of the vital contribution of the less overtly political “counterculture” side of the old Hippie movement. My thesis is that today’s identity politics would have died stillborn had it not drawn from many sources in an evolutionary process. Notions that things European are bad while non-European ways are superior grew out of the New Age Movement which, in turn, is grounded in pre-Marxian Romanticism – the Noble Savage Myth of Chateaubriand and Rousseau. This has been used to promote questionable notions about food and medicine.
In 1969 Mohawk activist Kahn-Tineta Horn drew on this romanticization of the indigenous to tell an overflowing crowd of mostly white students, at the University of Saskatchewan’s largest lecture theater, that they were guilty of genocide and the instrument of their genocide was milk. Milk was described as poisonous to people who are aboriginal to the Americas, and it has allegedly been fed to aboriginal children since first contact in an effort to reduce the population. Of course, if milk has such deleterious effects on the aboriginal population, it likely is not so healthy for the non-aboriginal population either. Other European-typical foods have increasingly become proscribed.
It was the second decade of the 21st century at an expensive restaurant overlooking Yokohama harbor. My wife ordered spaghetti, and almost as an afterthought added, “Of course, gluten free.” She thought that a rice based culture would naturally have superior “rice spaghetti” but the waitress appeared to have difficulty understanding. Her supervisor, who had a better command of English and understood food intolerances, offered several traditional rice dishes. A cook was added to the discussion, and he explained that he could not make spaghetti out of rice. On leaving the restaurant my partner slapped her hands together triumphantly having educated the Japanese on the need for gluten-free spaghetti. She viewed herself to be part of a movement.
Whether or not one can make spaghetti out of rice, corn or quinoa flour depends on how one defines the term. While the traditional Italian dish is made from wheat, it has been re-defined in North America to reference long noodles that resemble the original. Similarly, “oatmeal” is being redefined. One can now buy “superfood oatmeal” containing chia, buckwheat and hemp but no oats. Why not call it “chia and buckwheat cereal with hemp?” Such honesty in advertising would be counterproductive if the objective is to replace whole food categories with alternates while making people forget about the original. Marketers of oatmeal have fought back by selling “gluten free” oatmeal, but the product is glutenless in its natural state. In addition to increasing the price for the product, the “gluten free” label perpetuates the notion that there is something unhealthy about gluten for most people.
People from modern Euro-American cultures have shown a unique historic willingness to question their own cultural assumptions including those related to diet but this openness is not shared by everyone. I have debated Muslims have insisted that their proscription against eating pork is not primarily religious but is based on the “fact” that the food contains unhealthy bacteria and worms. They would be doing everyone a favor by banning pork for everyone. The willingness to question our diets have led to some strange fads. For example, butter was abandoned in favour of margarine by people concerned about high cholesterol levels. When the original research supporting this change was debunked, people flocked back to butter with the assumption that there is something artificial and unhealthy about eating margarine. Now “plant butter” is on the market but it is not clear how this new product differs from margarine.
If we do not eat a food for an extended period of time our bodies will often react with the feeling of disagreeableness should it be re-introduced thus creating a self-fulfilling prophesy. With some foods such as milk, we may even lose the enzymes needed for digestion. It begins with an accepted authority suggesting the elimination of wheat, milk, seafood or some other suspect food group to combat symptoms such as headaches, sleeplessness, drowsiness, or lack of energy. The patient will subsequently either feel better or not. If the patient feels better he or she will likely attribute this positive result to the change in diet. If the patient does not feel better then the practitioner suggests removing different foods from a proscribed list. When new symptoms occur, or old ones reoccur, the impulse is to stop eating yet another food. My wife is now intolerant to wheat, oats, milk, shell fish, peanuts, tomatoes (except in pizza sauce), oranges, pork, mushrooms, watermelon and wines from California. She has never been diagnosed with a food allergy. Advertisers appeal to the food-phobic by stating what their product is not rather than what it is. For example, people will often purchase gluten and lactose free products without knowing what is being used as a substitute. Sometimes nothing is used as a substitute. For example, what is marketed as “lactose free yogurt” has all the original lactose but the enzymes needed to digest it have been added. Whether marketing foods as lactose free that have always been without lactose, like goat cheese, or subtly adding the digestive enzymes, the marketing reinforces the narrative that there is something wrong with basically nutritious foods and that the alternative is more expensive “health food.” This bias is replicated with respect to medicine.
The term “alternate medicine” generates the notion that there are ways outside of scientific medicine to treat illness with equal efficacy. The name “naturopathy,” implies that modern medicine is unnatural. But modern medicine is constituted by proven treatments that are often based on older folk medicines. For example, chewing the bark of the white willow is an effective pain reliever used as a folk remedy by several cultures aboriginal to the Americas. Aspirin is a copy of white willow. Both are proven therapies for pain relief and blood clotting, but neither have been shown to cure cancer. Failure to understand the distinction between proven and unproven therapies can lead to death. For example in 2012 Ezekiel Stephan, a 19 month old infant, died of meningitis. His parents had been advised to take the boy to a hospital but they chose to instead treat him with “natural remedies” such as garlic, horseradish and apple cider. In 2015 eleven year old Makayla Sault stopped taking chemotherapy for leukemia and she was taken to the Hippocrates Institute in Florida, an institute that uses supplements, massages and raw food consisting largely of sprouts and wheatgrass. While chemotherapy has a 75% success rate in treating the type of cancer she had, no studies have shown any degree of success for the treatments given at this institute. The notion that modern medicine is harmful, ineffective or unnatural is grounded in homeopathy.
In 1774 England, Benjamin Jesty successfully tested his hypothesis that infection with cowpox could offer protection against smallpox. In 1796 German physician Samuel Hahnemann concluded that a substance that causes symptoms of a disease in healthy people can cure similar symptoms in sick people. His homeopathic remedies were made by diluting a symptom producing substance repeatedly until the final product was chemically indistinguishable from the dilutent. Between each dilution practitioners called homeopaths may hit and/or shake the product to help the dilutent, such as water, “remember” the original substance. Homeopaths attempt to match such dilutions to the patient to promote the body’s ‘vital force’ and stimulate healing. Although homeopathic remedies have been found to be biochemically inert (Ernst, 2002; Linde et al., 1997; Shang et al., 2005) they have become central to the anti-western medicine movement.
According to their national website, naturopaths use homeopathy and traditional Chinese medicine in the service of regulating the individual’s “vital force.” To the extent that naturopaths advocate the proven use of herbal medicines, or lifestyle choices like regular excerce, sunlight, fresh air and bathing to build general health, they reinforce modern medicine. Unfortunately, naturopathy has also embraced the pseudoscientific. Dr. Harriett Hall pithely stated, ”Naturopathy doesn’t make sense. The things naturopaths do that are good are not special, and the things they do that are special are not good” (Hall, 2010, p. 5). After graduating from the Bastyr University with a doctorate in naturopathic medicine Britt Hermes explained:
Naturopaths are not trained similar to physicians, nurse practitioners, or physician assistants…. Naturopaths are trained in a hodgepodge of antiquated methods, mystical theories, and bare-bone fundamentals of medicine. (Senapathy, 2016, para. 6)
Naturopathic students are required to master homeopathy, energy modalities, herbalism and chiropractic-like manipulations There is a strong emphasis on anti-vaccine promotion and alternative cancer treatments. Naturopaths also claim affinity to traditional Chinese medicine defining the concept of “chi” to be the “vital energy” hypothesized by Hahnemann. In 2012, I answered an advertisement for a one hour acupuncture treatment by a doctor of Chinese and Korean medicine. The $30.00 charge seemed a reasonable price to satisfy my curiosity. I was admitted into a consulting room where Dr. Li had me clasp a galvanic response machine that was connected to a computer. With a show of deep concern Dr. Li diagnosed me as having liver, kidney and bowel disease. This surprised me because I had a full physical examination three months previously and had not been diagnosed with any of these conditions. We proceeded to another room where I disrobed and had acupuncture needles inserted in various points on my chest, arms and legs. He gave each needle a twist before leaving the room. On his return, about twenty minutes later, I asked what specifically this treatment was for thinking it would have had something to do with his diagnoses. He appeared surprised by my question and said, “Oh, it’s just your general health.” After dressing, I returned to his outer office where the receptionist was packaging a series of medicinal herbal teas. These expensive teas had not been mentioned previously. When I objected, the doctor’s assistant turned to my wife and said “he’s afraid.” My wife, with a look of loving concern, encouraged me to purchase the teas for my health. I agreed providing I was given the names of each potion. Following the homeopathic tradition Dr. Li wrote out their Latin names, and subsequent analysis revealed that 11 of the potions were relaxants and one was an aphrodisiac. None had any obvious relationship with liver, kidney or bowel disease, and I have not suffered any of these conditions since.
Before we label Dr. Li as a scammer, we need to consider a cross-cultural explanation. Modern medicine diagnoses and treats conditions. Pre-modern treatments often identified evil spirits or a lack of life balance as the cause of ill health. According to his traditional culture, North Americans do not live in balance and this results in health problems. Dr. Li assumed that people not practising his culture would have these conditions, but it is necessary to convince us to change our ways before the conditions become untreatable.
About 10 years after my experience with the Chinese/Korean doctor, my wife and her sister suggested that I see a “great new” acupuncturist in Regina. I demurred on the grounds that I do not wish to seek medical treatment unless I have a condition I want treated. My sister-in-law turned to my wife and said “he’s afraid.” The belief system had created a stock answer to explain acupuncture “hesitancy.”
A more recent stock answer is to accuse doubters of racism. Since the Enlightenment that brought science and reason to the fore began in Europe, inviting others to share the methods of the Enlightenment is portrayed as assimilationist. Publisher Scott Douglas Jacobsen was accordingly accused of racism and arrogance by the President of the British Columbia Naturopathic Association after he wrote an article (Jacobsen, 2020) challenging the assumptions of naturopathy. Jacobsen turned the tables stating:
I find the charge backwards, blind, and, indeed, “racist and… arrogant” of you. Where you’re coming out as among the worst type of arrogant racists, someone who presents themselves as anti-racist by claiming others are racist with an assumption of moral superiority by asserting another as “culturally arrogant,” but, in fact, someone assuming that only individuals capable of or acting in… certain cultural practices have been one ‘race’ or ethnicity are indeed being racist. (Jacobsen, personal communication, February 2021)
Ericka Li (2023) proposed a tripartite distinction of “Premodern,” “Modern,” and “Postmodern” in describing medical practices. She described modern medicine as, “a product of the Enlightenment, prioritizing reason, science, and individual sovereignty [transcending] geographical boundaries and ethnic divides,” (Li, 2023 Stop calling my profession ‘Western Medicine,’ para. 4). She illustrated how postmodern medicine seeks to dismantle modern medicine’s underlying philosophy using the example of postmodern gender dysphoria:
There is no objective data obtainable through testing that can disconfirm the transgender diagnosis. Regardless of a teenager’s biological sex, history of family dysfunction or sexual trauma, age of onset of transgender identity, potential social contagion, or autism, the prescribed treatment remains the same—puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. (Li, 2023 Queering medical science, para. 5)
Dr. E. Li noted that postmodern medicine has no means of identifying those who would benefit from medical transition to the exclusion of those who wouldn’t. While a practitioner of modern medicine would consider the severe risks of treatment aware that even the existence of a single detransitioner would sound alarm bells, postmodern practitioners are concerned only about current identification. While modern medicine seeks to collaborate with parents and guardians in maintaining family cohesion, the postmodern practitioner regards parents as a threat. She noted that for modern medicine it is unthinkable to pit a divorced mother and father against each other, using the parent more willing to transition their child as leverage against the hesitant one. She said postmodern doctors play “word games” to protect themselves from charges of misdiagnosis:
During the 2023 gender symposium co-sponsored by Seattle Children’s Hospital, I was informed that I must not use the word “detransitioner” because it is “harmful to the community.” Instead, I was instructed to say “people who changed their gender goals.” (Li, 2023 Queering medical ethics, para. 3)
According to E. Li, concerns about morbidity, mortality, providing false hope, and patient abandonment vanish in postmodernism and are replaced with a concern that Trans People as a class gain collective power. The result is that there can be “no meaningful distinction between trans identities that began in toddlerhood or adolescence, those resulting from social contagion or autism, or between real and factitious cases” (Li, 2023 Blurring boundaries para. 1)
As can be seen, Transgenderism and Queer Theory did not evolve from modern medicine but from New Age philosophies that, in turn, attempted to preserve the pre-eminence of folk remedies. What is taken as “postmodern medicine” is the latest attempt to preserve and reify unproven treatments in part, by changing the meaning of words. “Treatment” no longer means something done to combat a specific illnesses but something done to “treat” the general condition of being “Western.” Alternative foods are given the name of foods they are meant to replace. More recently, a woman is no longer defined by her sex but by her decision to identify as one with the result that there can be no woman-specific health conditions. “Breast feeding” is changed to “chest feeding” and “mother” becomes “birthing person.” The trangenderism of which E. Li speaks, and the “health food” and “alternative medicine” turns are part of a larger movement that seeks to “deconstruct” modern civilization. “Racism’ no longer means an ideology to justify the discrimination of groups of people but the advocacy of merit and ability in academic or career choice. “Systemic racism” no longer means identifiable mechanisms that discriminate against groups or classes of people but the assumption of such discrimination as applied to non-white peoples. If this new movement were truly postmodern, then this belief could be deconstructed but any such attempt is met with the charge of racism. Thus, we can see that this movement uses the methods of postmodernism but holds itself to be immune from desconstruction. In this it mimics the fascism of Martin Heidegger (1962) who held that science and reason are subject to the superior and true knowledge of a Dasein or Fuhrer. The cancelation and ultimate suicide of Richard Bilkzsto (Robertson, 2023) offers an object lesson.
Drawing on his experience as a school principal in both countries, Bilkzsto disputed a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) trainer’s unsupported assertion that Canada was more racist than the United States. DEI provides mandatory training to employees in the new ideology which has variously been called “political correctness” (Mueller, 2004), “cancel culture”(Wright, 2023; Young, 2021), “gender ideology” (Frederick & Balswick, 2011; Miller, 2018), “critical social justice” (Pluckrose & Lindsay, 2020), “Cultural Marxism” (Coughlin & Higgins, 2019; Lindsay, 2020) and “Woke Identitarianism” (Robertson, 2023). The DEI trainer did not offer any argument in support of her assertion, but said the job of white people is to believe and failure to do so is to support “white supremacy.” She continued to use Bilkzsto as an example of white supremacy in a subsequent session he was forced to attend. He was then told he would not be receiving any further contracts of employment. Other professionals have also been harshly cancelled with a predictable silencing effect (Applebaum, 2021; Bloch, 2023; Kriegman, 2022; Wright, 2022).
This new movement substitutes Marx’s “working class” with oppressed “races” such as blacks and Muslims. Like pre-WWII fascists, it has formed alliances with multinational corporations (Samuels, 2022) and it engages in identity politics racializing certain groups. It has borrowed the New Age Movement’s antipathy for all things western coupled with a romanticization of non-European cultures. For example, New Agers embraced a form of Aboriginal Spirituality with some becoming pipe carriers. One New Ager, Charles Storm, inventing the modern medicine wheel with quadrants representing the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual (Robertson, 2014). This movement operates as a quasi-religion built on the myths of the blank slate, ghost in the machine and the noble savage (Pinker, 2003).
This article has traced the contribution of New Age foodism and “alternate” medicine to a political movement that devalues science, reason and all things “Western.” It is unlikely that anyone consciously combined the disparate pieces of antagonistic philosophies into a new proto-religion that was then marketed. I have argued that this Wokism is likely a product of cultural evolution whereby random units of culture that Richard Dawkins (1976, 1982) called memes combined with other units that could then be copied from brain to brain forming a kind of mind virus (Robertson, 2021). In this article I have argued that New Ageism has played an understudied role in its incubation.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Sharon Romanow and Scott Douglas Jacobsen for their suggestions with respect to content and editing.
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Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Robertson L. Retro-evolution in food and health care and its impact on modern culture. December 2023; 12(1). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/foodism
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Robertson, L. (2023, December 22). Retro-evolution in food and health care and its impact on modern culture. In-Sight Publishing. 12(1).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): ROBERTSON, L. Retro-evolution in food and health care and its impact on modern culture.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 1, 2023.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Robertson, Lloyd. 2023. “Retro-evolution in food and health care and its impact on modern culture.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 1 (Winter). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/foodism.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Robertson, L “Retro-evolution in food and health care and its impact on modern culture.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 1 (December 2023). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/foodism.
Harvard: Robertson, L. (2023) ‘Retro-evolution in food and health care and its impact on modern culture’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(1). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/foodism>.
Harvard (Australian): Robertson, L 2023, ‘Retro-evolution in food and health care and its impact on modern culture’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 1, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/foodism>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Robertson, Lloyd. “Retro-evolution in food and health care and its impact on modern culture.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 1, 2023, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/foodism.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Lloyd R. Retro-evolution in food and health care and its impact on modern culture [Internet]. 2023 Dec; 12(1). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/foodism.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen, or the author(s), and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors copyright their material, as well, and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publisher: In-Sight Publishing
Publisher Founding: March 1, 2014
Web Domain: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com
Location: Fort Langley, Township of Langley, British Columbia, Canada
Journal: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal
Journal Founding: August 2, 2012
Frequency: Three (3) Times Per Year
Review Status: Non-Peer-Reviewed
Access: Electronic/Digital & Open Access
Fees: None (Free)
Volume Numbering: 12
Issue Numbering: 1
Section: B
Theme Type: Idea
Theme Premise: “Outliers and Outsiders”
Theme Part: 29
Formal Sub-Theme: None.
Individual Publication Date: December 22, 2023
Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2024
Author(s): Dieter Parczany
Author(s) Bio: None.
Word Count: 960
Image Credit: None.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369–6885
*Original publication here during January, 2023.*
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Keywords: Advocates for Jehovah’s Witnesses Reform on Blood, Christian, Dieter Parczany, God, harm, Hospital Liaison Committee, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Watchtower.
Components of Blood are the Issue
During the early 1990’s, I was a member of the Hospital Liaison Committee (HLC) in Berlin, Germany. Since I was a Jehovah’s Witness elder with special training and knowledge about Watchtower’s blood policies, I served as the chairman of the committee. I was also completely convinced that I practiced what I preached since I had refused to allow my dying 8-year-old son to have a blood transfusion from the beginning of his therapy until his death in 1990.
While I served on the HLC, I was in a unique position to help JWs because from 1989 – 2004 I worked as an administrative assistant in the Hematology/Oncology Department at the prestigious university clinic—Charite—in Berlin. Working there I was familiar with the latest developments in the use of blood and blood components; although I left the Watchtower organization in January of 1998.
But long before that, in 1974, I attended the Watchtower Bible School of Gilead. While there, I became acquainted with senior writer and later helper to the Governing Body, Gene Smalley, and his wife, Anita. Anita was also from my home town of Berlin, Germany.
In 1993 or 1994 Gene and Anita stayed at our home in Berlin. During their long visit, we had many conversations about a wide variety of organizational and biblical subjects.
During one of those chats, I mentioned to Gene that if we really wanted to keep interpreting Acts 15 as a commandment from God to not take blood, would it not make sense to interpret it as a commandment about whole blood and not about components of blood?
I argued that if we could accept this and refrain from making arbitrary rules about blood components, we could save a lot of lives in the future, since transfusing blood components is standard medical treatment.
Gene did not contradict my reasoning, which did not surprise me. I believe it made perfect sense to him. But there was big problem with my rational analysis and he brought me back to reality when he said, as best that I can recall, “We cannot change this. Think about all the faithful ones who died.”
I swallowed hard and said nothing. I could not refute his logic. Gene’s advice made sense from a legal point of view. Mind you, I was being unduly influenced by Watchtower’s group think, not yet able to think clearly, speak up and act on my own free will.
Today I’m in a much different place and must tell you what’s on my mind. All Jehovah’s Witnesses, and every hospital, doctor, nurse, lawyer or judge who has to deal with a true-believing Witness, when they refuse a blood transfusion, must be be aware of the following fact:
So-called “blood transfusions” are usually not transfusions of whole blood. It is standard medical treatment, has been for many years, to transfuse only components of blood, like red cells (erythrocytes), white cells (leukocytes), platelets (thrombocytes), or plasma, according to what it is appropriate to the medical condition of a patient.
Even if Jehovah’s Witnesses correctly interpret the commandment in Acts 15:29 “To abstain from blood”, I strongly believe it is reasonable to think the abstention command could only apply to whole blood, with all its components. Why? Because the verse does not discuss components, just blood as a “whole” substance.
To illustrate my point: Who would conclude that someone receiving oxygen as a medical treatment is drinking water (or taking water into their body)? It’s true that oxygen is one of the primary components of water. However, the fact is that oxygen, in itself, is not water. The same is true with blood: red cells (erythrocytes), white cells (leukocytes), platelets (thrombocytes), or plasma are not blood. They are primary components of blood as oxygen is a primary component of water.
Additionally, the “red” color of blood does not prove anything. Bone marrow (which JWs are allowed to accept) is red and much more similar in consistency to “whole” blood than red cells (erythrocytes), white cells (leukocytes), platelets (thrombocytes), or plasma.
It should also be noted that hemoglobin (a large blood fraction of the red cell)—the protein that actually transports oxygen—is “red” and approved for use by Watchtower’s leaders. When it is used for a transfusion into a JW patient, it looks just like blood. It would be hard to tell the difference.
These are not inconsequential theological and medical concepts. This is personal. In 1990 our eight-year-old son, Manuel, died from cancer after two years of chemotherapy and radiation. Since we had refused the transfusion of blood components, Manuel could only receive reduced dosages of chemotherapy and radiation, and this likely led to a higher probability of a relapse and to his death.
My misguided beliefs, as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, had a very dramatic and detrimental impact on my life and my family.
The feeling of being a victim, and the accumulated guilt, has motivated me to tell my story, which I first published under my pen name (Peter Porjohn) in a book titled, “Acquiring Freedom from Fundamentalist Religious Thinking”.
It is my wish that in the near future all responsible doctors or nurses treating a Jehovah’s Witness patient will be able to comfortably say, “We do not want to give you a blood transfusion. To save your life, or the life of your loved one, we are recommending that a component of blood be administered.”
In a future post on AJWRB, I will share with you chapter seven of my book, which details my personal struggle with the Watchtower’s blood doctrine. And it is my hope that my story, Manuel’s story, will prevent needless death for someone in your family, especially if you are still one of Jehovah’s Witnesses or share their views on blood.
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Parczany D. Components of Blood are the Issue. December 2023; 12(1). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/components-blood
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Parczany, D. (2023, December 22). Components of Blood are the Issue. In-Sight Publishing. 12(1).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): PARCZANY, D. Components of Blood are the Issue.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 1, 2023.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Parczany, Dieter. 2023. “Components of Blood are the Issue.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 1 (Winter). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/components-blood.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Parczany, D “Components of Blood are the Issue.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 1 (December 2023). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/components-blood.
Harvard: Parczany, D. (2023) ‘Components of Blood are the Issue’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(1). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/components-blood>.
Harvard (Australian): Parczany, D 2023, ‘Components of Blood are the Issue’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 1, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/components-blood>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Parczany, Dieter. “Components of Blood are the Issue.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 1, 2023, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/components-blood.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Dieter P. Components of Blood are the Issue [Internet]. 2023 Dec; 12(1). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/components-blood.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen, or the author(s), and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors copyright their material, as well, and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/04/05
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Is the Russo-Ukrainian War costing the Russians a lot?
Rick Rosner: Yeah. Between the Russians lying about everything and just the uncertainty of war, we don’t know how many Russians have died in this. Estimates as of last week were at least 10,000 Russian troops out of 150000 to 200000, seven of the 20 generals running the campaign. Russian generals are said to have been killed the economic sanctity, of course in terms of just raw damage and probably deaths it’s cost Ukrainians more because they’re having entire cities destroyed and just in the last few days there’s increasing evidence of mass murders by Russians in cities. And the Ukrainians just took back the city of Bucha and found hundreds of people murdered hands tied behind their back shot in the back of the head; all men between ages 16 and 50 in that town just murdered. And I think once if they drive the Russians, if once they take back more cities, some people are expecting to find evidence of these murders in all the cities they managed to take back from the Russians.
But this is stuff you can get from any newscast right now. It’s the worst Butchery in Europe since World War II and since we’re Eurocentric there have been I’m sure worse slaughters. Mao slaughtered or led tens of millions of his people from the late ‘40s into the ‘70s maybe later than that. Some people estimate 50 million Chinese killed under Mao. All the various genocides across Africa but we don’t hear as much about that stuff because our media especially in America looks at Western First World countries; and in that arena, the European arena. It’s just it’s the most senseless slaughter since World War II. One possibly helpful thing well, it’s not necessarily helpful; Putin’s popularity in Russia is 83% which is twice Biden’s approval in the U.S which speaks to the power of propaganda and probably fear.
Some people may know what’s going on maybe a lot of Russians probably don’t so that 83% approval might be largely real based on Russians just being fed bullshit but in America at least it’s making a lot of people less tolerant of and more aware of Russian propaganda that we’ve been getting fire hosed with since at least 2016. A lot is still getting through but the atrocities done by the Russians shown on the news all the time put people who are still functioning as Russian mouthpieces like Tucker Carlson in Sharp Contrast; it’s harder for them to hide their bullshit. Before Putin did this people were able to get away with saying Russia is not so bad including Trump and a lot of people on Fox News. And that’s becoming less possible. A lot of people on the far right are still doing it but it’s becoming harder to do.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/04/05
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: So, your job among other things, one of the biggest aspects of your job is mucking out the stalls of nearly three dozen horses and we just looked it up and that involves among other things clearing away 35 to 50 pounds of shit per horse per day. So, you’re talking almost a ton of poop that you’re hauling away every day.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Also, the shavings that come with it, the hay, the piss.
Rosner: The piss on hay, yeah so the whole thing is well over a ton by hand with a shovel and wheelbarrows. That reminded me of one of the biggest, I don’t know if you could call it ecological, but environmental crises in cities at the beginning of the 20th century which was all the horseshit. They couldn’t deal with it, they didn’t know what to do with it, and the streets were just full of shit. Carol and I are watching this HBO show called The Gilded Age by the guy who did Downton Abbey, which is Manhattan in 1882 and they just left the shit out, they show the street but they don’t show any horseshit but in reality during that era the population of Manhattan since World War II during the day when people come to Manhattan to work is roughly 8 million. So you go back to 1900, we could look it up but I’m not able to right here, you’re probably talking close to a million people in 1900 on the island of Manhattan during a work day. And the number of horses it took to support that; to transport and to deliver shit to them, it’s got to be many tens of thousands, say just to round number, a 1,00,000 thousand horses on the island of Manhattan conserve times a 25th of a ton per horse per day is 4000 tons of shit deposited onto the streets every day and nobody knew what to do about it. I guess as the population continued to grow, which meant the horse population grew, it got worse and worse and it must have been inches deep in most places and the only thing that ended the crisis was cars and other forms of transport but mostly cars. It’s a lot of shit.
There’s a saying that in every breath you take, you’re breathing in a molecule that Napoleon breathed. That’s something else we could look up. It might be a molecule that used to be part of a Napoleon, I don’t know but when you do the calculations of how much shit is produced by… well humans are the most numerous mega fauna on earth right now. Mega fauna is large animals and so eight billion humans times conservatively nearly a kilo of shit per human per day. Now we’re going to go to metric tons; that’s four million metric tons of shit made by humans every day. At least most places have sewage systems that are able to pull the useful shit out of shit. My writing partner and I, for a bit we were going to do for Jimmy Kimmel toward the Hyperion sewage treatment plant down around El Segundo on the coast of L.A; it’s a sewage treatment plant the size of Disneyland and they pull the fertilizery shit out of shit and out of sewage water, they recycle the water and they send the shit up north as fertilizer.
But when you think of how much of our world was at one time shit, how many of the molecules in our bodies were at one time harder turds; it has to be significant. It’s something we could probably look up. There’s a quote ‘ashes to ashes dust to dust’, it’s pretty high so it might be the Bible. In any case it’s not that we’re turning back to dust probably on an aggregate life basis. We’re turning back and forth between shit. We leave a 70-80 kilo body when we die but during our lives we generate close to 20,000 kilos of shit. So, the dust of our bodies is is less than one percent of the of our lifetime totals of shit we extrude.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/03/16
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Carol had us join the Y again. We quit The Y two years ago because it made no sense to pay 69 bucks a month for a family membership. It shut down for almost a year I think and then we waited another year before joining up again because it just seemed too risky but now the numbers are L.A’s daily Covid cases hit a low of 138 one day in last May, May 2001. And then they exploded 300-fold to like 43,000 a day during Omicron. Now they’re back down to under a thousand the last two days. So we rejoined because Carol hikes every day but it’s wrecking her legs so she needs to exercise in the swimming pool. So anyway, it’s nice to go back to The Y and it feels pretty safe. Meanwhile, Europe and the Far East are brewing an incredible new sixth or seventh World Wide wave. The first day the world hit 2 million new cases in a day worldwide was December 30th of last year; two and a half months ago. The last day of 2 million cases was February 17th of this year and then it declined. It had been declining for four or five weeks, it got up to nearly 4 million a day for a few days, dropped back under 2 million, and today was at like 1-9.
We’re headed back up to 2 million a day probably hit it next week. It’s some of the usual suspects; England which got up to 2,00,000 cases a day under Omicron and then dropped to 30,000 cases a day,, just no more Covid mandates or anything and now they’re back up to 90,000. Then South Korea which was one of the greatest countries for keeping Covid down had 4,00,000 new cases today; more than 20% of the world’s new cases which is terrible. So, South Korea bad, Vietnam bad; those were the two new big players. Vietnam and South Korea did great for the first two years of Covid but now they’re exploding with Covid but people are not dying in South Korea and Vietnam like people died in the in the early country or any of the countries. Mortality is less than one-third of one percent in a lot of countries around one tenth of one percent and it’s because the countries that are getting hammered now. South Korea, Vietnam, everybody’s vaxxed.
By holding Covid off so long it gave those countries time to get everybody vaxxed. In the early days the first month of Covid mortality was eight percent and then it settled down to two percent and then dropped to like one and a half percent. Now after these countries where they’re being idiots like England’s governed by Boris Johnson who’s an idiot, they’re back up to 91,000 new cases today but their deaths are still under like one-fifth of one percent of that because freaking 91.7% of everybody who can be vaxxed in England; the 12 and overs has at least one vax and two-thirds of everybody are boosted. My kid in London just got Covid, she’s vaxxed and boosted and she felt like shit for a week but she just had two negative tests, so we’re hopeful that she’s pretty much over it.
We get hit in America and I guess you in Canada because we share the same continent. In April, we’re going to get hit with the wave that boiling up in the Far East and Europe but the mortality will probably still stay under one-third of one percent even as cases skyrocketing in.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/27
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So we were talking about frauds but not mentioning names. You wanted to say something.
Rick Rosner: Well periodically in the high IQ world, there’s some fraud-y stuff that goes on, actually in the testing world there’s fraud-y stuff that goes on. There’s some testing fraud that makes sense, like the SAT is kind of becoming much less important of in getting into college. More and more colleges are saying it’s optional or just not even looking at it but every few years until a few years ago when the SAT became less important, there was a cheating scandal. There were various ways to cheat on the SAT. My favorite is the Hawaiian scam and I don’t know if anybody fully pulled it off but what you do is, I believe Hawaii is five hours behind the East Coast, and the SAT takes about three-three and a half hours. So you have some people take the test on the East Coast; some really good test takers and maybe they surreptitiously photograph the test and then if somebody’s gone to Hawaii to take it you’ve got three and a half hours for the test roughly and then you’ve got an hour roughly to get the answers to the test takers in Hawaii because the test doesn’t start until then.
I don’t know if anybody ever did that but that would be a slick way to do it but there were other ways to do it too. Things as simple as getting a fake ID and having somebody else take it for you. So anyway testing fraud is kind of high stakes because it helps determine whether you get into the college of your choice and due to testing fraud all the SAT scores for an entire Asian nation were thrown out like eight or ten years ago.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/24
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why do you want to talk about divots?
Rick Rosner: Okay. So one way to look at memory is, it’s probably not the right way but it’s not entirely the wrong way either is you’ve got a mental landscape and when you send out a query like “Who’s that actor in Nightmare Alley?” That’s like rolling a steel ball, a pinball across a golf course-y landscape; rolling landscape with gentle hills and valleys. The ball eventually rolls into a hole and the hole is… Oh that’s Kate Blanchett; that’s your name. Sometimes you circle the hole and sometimes you don’t get to a hole. You’re like “Ah… it’s like a K or a C or like whose name…” For a long time there was something wrong with my landscape about Margo Robbie. For some reason I can’t get the ball to drop into the hole easily on her name.
When I had total trouble remembering her name for some reason my landscape doesn’t differentiate well between or it associates B’s and M’s, like if I can’t remember somebody’s name one of the things that often happens is I’m like it’s either a B or M and that’s Margot Robbie is an M. So anyway, you send out the search query and there’s some geography of recall that most of the time if your brain works decently the query, the ball ends up in a hole. It is the right hole that offers the right answer to your query. I just want to kind of say that when it comes to that landscape nothing lines up under IC. In IC the world represents several things. There’s the material world that we live in, the material universe that we’re made out of; space and time and matter. And then we pause it, that space and time and matter is actually information that it’s information in a mental model in some vast consciousness of some other world altogether.
Then there’s a third analogy where I think everything goes bad which is this is all like a computer. And I don’t think it’s at all like a fucking computer except that it processes information. In a computer, things have specific addresses and very tight values. You’ve got a bunch of circuits; you’ve got billions and trillions of circuits in chips that allow various switches to be flipped back and forth; transistors, micro transistors to be flipped back and forth between two values; zero and one. You can construct images and virtual worlds out of that but I don’t think that’s how the mental landscape, our minds are constituted. I don’t think there’s a specific planet in the universe that represents the awareness that is embodied by information in the universe. There’s no planet, there’s no star, there’s no solar system that represents the concept orange.
There’s no there’s no structure in our brain, there’s no one neuron in our brain or even a set of three neurons that handle all the traffic around orange. I think everything is much more distributed and probably our brain could work as quickly and efficiently as it does if it weren’t distributed. I think though I don’t know how confident I am, that our mental landscape is you can have temporary very fleeting awarenesses of immediate events that might live in your awareness largely due to changing potentiation among neural junctions or neural gaps but if those fleeting Impressions and thoughts are going to be recorded, my guess is they’re recorded via dendritic action that the connections, the fleeting potentiation leads to strengthening of dendritic links among neurons; that your brain basically is able to rewire itself.
But rewiring the memories and even the little specific aspects of those memories like the actress Marion Cotillard has a mole on her forehead but the detail of her mole, that’s not recorded in any one specific place in your brain where if you went in there and you cut one dendrite or something you lose your memory of that mole. Instead it’s an aggregate of a bunch of changes in dendritic linkups, the strength of them and the action and what ones are there, which neurons are linked, there are no specific addresses for details and memories the way there are data addresses within a computer.
And similarly what the universe itself knows is not super local but everything the universe knows about some alien equivalent of some alien actors’ mole on their alien forehead and a complete other universe that doesn’t live in a mountain formation on some rocky planet, it is instead some aggregational manifestation due to the action of a gazillion photons and neutrinos spreading information out across the entire universe. The knowledge of that mole isn’t spread out across the entire universe. It’s somewhat local largely confined to say a galaxy but there’s certainly no freaking moon orbiting some planet with the moon being specifically dedicated to that mole that it should spread out.
So when I say nothing lines up I’m saying that nothing’s as neatly defined and packaged as the data in a computer which is inconvenient but also better because the computer isn’t conscious. The kind of data manipulation that a computer does doesn’t allow for the wide bandwidth sharing of information that that characterizes consciousness.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/24
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why are cartoons smoking like that?
Rick Rosner: Okay, so a question I’d want to start with is why are cartoons legible to us because when we look at the world we look at things in all their details as you know a person is a person. When you’re looking at a person from close enough to see most of the details of that person, you understand you’re looking at somebody, you understand you’re looking at a car or a building because you’re seeing them fully as part of the world. So then you have to ask why are cartoons legible because they don’t have much detail, they’re just abstractions and the answer has to be that our brain in order to understand stuff breaks information down into meta units or abstractions that are easier to deal with informationally in the brain.
When I when I took LSD in college it fucked up my brain’s ability to do the processing that it normally does on human faces and the faces hit my mind only semi-processed and they looked weird and polygonal and lizard-y. These half processed faces looked fucked up and it did freak me out a little bit but I also understood that my brain was fucked up so I didn’t freak out that badly. I just wanted the LSD to be over. Don’t take LSD, it lasts way too long and sometimes they cut it with shit and anyway… don’t. If you need to have a psychedelic experience just to do mushrooms, they last much less well; it’s a much shorter trip. So the faces we see, that we normally perceive or the process or the product of much processing in our brains and there’s a lot of smoothing I think.
I think that it’s a problem in video games too. The most efficient way to render curved shapes but anyway the brain is turning raw sensory data into abstractions in various categories as it assembles the raw sensory data into discernible phases and because our thinking is built from abstract shorthand symbols, we don’t perceive the symbols as symbols but when you take raw sensory perception of a face and break it down there is, I guess let’s not use symbols, it’s just you’re dealing in abstractions that are reassembled so we have a kind of a tacit understanding of what human faces are like but it’s built from simplifications. The whole thing allows… I’m not talking about it or thinking about it well, but it allows the way we process information, the way any system basically that actually understands stuff consciously I guess is going to deal in shorthand abstractions and that lets us perceive cartoons. The cartoons kind of ride in on the way we’ve learned to process stuff.
You could make a similar argument by saying well we know like your brother or your wife from two feet away but you also might be able to recognize them from a hundred feet away even though you can barely see their individual facial features just because there’s something about maybe the way they walk or the way the light strikes their hair; you’ve got this catalog of potential hits in your brain that if that person a hundred feet or 100 yards away hits a couple of these short-handed abridgements or divots in the landscape, a landscape of perceiving your wife or brother, if enough balls drop into enough divots of the thousands you might have if you’ve been married for 10 years, maybe you get three balls in holes in this landscape and it says yeah that’s probably your wife. So, a cartoon can drop enough balls into our landscape of what a human is that we can appreciate the cartoon as a representation of a human and anthropomorphic cow or whatever.
One of the things that annoy me about cartoons and a lot of graphic novels is the shittiness of the art and/or the ugliness; The Ren & Stimpy-ness of the creatures, the grotesquery. When I look at cartoons I want to look at stuff that’s appealing. In cartoons I kind of like sexy lady cartoons and that’s kind of the opposite of a Ren & Stimpy cartoon because Ren & Stimpy are fucking ugly and part of the joke is how ugly they can get. A part of the joke of cartoons is how exaggerated you could make representations of things in the world and still have enough balls rolling to divots of recognition that you understand what is being represented in increasingly grotesque and goofy ways. So, why do we like looking at cartoons? Because cartoons can give a supercharged and let’s say for the sake of this discussion that I’ve seen some cartoon pornography and that I like it because when you’re working at it you could come up with images that might drop balls into the holes of what makes you or me horny even more effectively than images of real people.
We’ve talked about how the filthier the porn, the on average the less attractive the people in the porn because if somebody can be a supermodel they’re not going to do porn. They’re going to earn like Gisele Bündchen; Tom Brady’s wife makes more money or used to at least make more money than Tom Brady did. Tom Brady the greatest pro quarterback in history and his wife is bringing home hundreds of millions of dollars being perceived to be one of the most beautiful women in the world. She’s not going to do porn; she doesn’t have to do porn. And then as you move down the porn ladder from Playboy Centerfolds where a sufficiently beautiful Playboy model might just show her boobs and butt, wouldn’t even have to go full frontal and then you move down the ladder, people who do anal and that whole pecking order has been messed with in recent years because porn is less shameful than it used to be.
The deal is that with porn there’s still images of people in all their imperfections but if you’re going to draw your porn, if you’re going to make cartoon porn or the stuff that’s called 3D porn which is just images of people who’ve made it out of The Uncanny Valley. The Uncanny Valley is now a 30-40 year old term for how creepy people look in computer animation. There was the Tom Hanks movie Polar Express from 25 years ago where the people looked close enough to human, they looked fairly realistic but still fucked up enough that they looked like creepy humans. Now we’re beyond that. CG animated humans can look hyper real and not creepy. 3D porn makes hyper real porno images of people and somebody who’s willing to put in the time can make people look as beautiful as you want.
And so they’ve escaped the porno pecking order of the things you do, the more likely you are to be not Gisele Bündchen because you’re doing entirely made up people. And how good they look just depends on how good your tech is and how much time you’re willing to put in. So you can get images in this 3D porn that is super powerful for people who like animated porno. It’s more powerful than images of real people because it goes right to the heart of what might make you horny if it’s you know flawless skin, facial symmetry, muscle tone, I don’t know… somebody might be into big boobs on somebody who otherwise has eight percent body fat. Animation can do that.
Similarly for non-porn uses you can get animation to do whatever you want. One of the problems with science fiction movies until Star Wars was that there was no way to make it look real enough. Everything sucked. Either you had to do science fiction stories that didn’t involve… Star Wars was the first movie that had realistic looking fights in space among spaceships. When they made Star Wars, the original one – ’77, they looked at footage of dog fights for movies from the past 60 years of movies and then just moved the dog fights into space and made it look good via high tech and before that you had shit that was fucking plastic models on strings being whipped around and it looked like shit.
Well, I mean then we’re splitting into two issues which is why do we like cartoons. Well, one reason is I just talked at length about is you can make a shit look amazing but the question you’re asking is what about shit that doesn’t look amazing, shit that looks half-assed or obviously a cartoon; why do we like that? The answer is still it gives us what we want, it drops enough balls into the landscape of recognition of what’s funny, what’s absurd that it hits enough targets of what we like and what’s legible to us that we like it.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/24
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Addendum to yesterday on numbers on the immutability of one.
Rick Rosner: So yesterday we were talking about numbers and arithmetic and I thought a little bit more and my thinking is still not particularly clear, but I would just like to add at least all whole number mathematics is just repeated addition. Multiplication is just shorthand for… if you’re multiplying six times eight, then you’re taking six things and you’re adding another six things total of eight times or seven times. You start with six and then you add another six seven more times and six times eight is just shorthand for that chore. The deal is that there’s something very consistent about a thing being one thing, a thing that exists; an apple, a baseball, and the oneness of it and the number associated with how many things do you have when it’s a thing? One; the oneness of it doesn’t change; It remains consistent throughout arithmetic and throughout real world manipulations that don’t destroy it.
You throw a baseball in a bag with other baseballs and the total number of baseballs in the bag is the number of baseballs that were thrown into the bag. It’s just addition of things that each has a number of one. It’s very much part of the world because of the consistency of things that exist and arithmetic builds on that consistency. I know we’ve talked years before on which came first, numbers or things in the world, and I think I came down on the side of things in the world. But the arithmetic is highly consistent and useful and that coincides with some of the basic consistencies of things that exist in the world, which includes each thing that exists being a thing, there being a number, an immutable number, that number being one associated with a thing that exists.
So I’m kind of talking in circles, but kind of not but there’s somebody who’s better at thinking about this stuff than I am could poke at to get to why one is a big deal and how arithmetic follows from just things you can do with just by repeated additions of one. Except to mention that when I was a kid there was a book that came out called Laws of Form. It was a skinny little book of kind of meta mathematical philosophy where this guy, I don’t know his name, tried to come up with the rules of all existence via arguments about form. And I tried to read it a zillion times and it didn’t get very far. Even if it had made sense, I don’t think I would have gotten that far because I was just a kid. But I would guess that the arguments are not that persuasive, but the idea of building all of existence from basic metaphysical principles kind of stuck with me. That seemed like a thing to try to do. I got to give credit to that little book that I didn’t understand.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/23
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Throughout your life, you’ve been deeply engaged with numbers.
Rick Rosner: Indeed. In fact, I got a tattoo symbolizing my affinity for math, although it’s quite old now. That tattoo dates back to 1988, and as a result, it has become somewhat blurry.
Jacobsen: I’m curious, how would you define a number?
Rosner: To understand numbers, one must begin with the counting numbers, as they are the foundational concept in our understanding of numbers. Over time, we have developed various types of numbers, but any discussion about them inevitably leads back to counting numbers. Discussing numbers entails addressing fundamental existential principles, one of which is non-contradiction. An entity cannot simultaneously be itself and not itself; it must possess internal consistency. Numbers exemplify a high degree of consistency and self-consistency. Basic mathematics allows for extensive exploration without encountering destructive contradictions. However, in more advanced areas of mathematics, such as those involving Gödelian principles, we encounter statements that can never be definitively proven true or false. But these issues lie far beyond the established realms of arithmetic.
Arithmetic has been studied and refined for thousands of years, leading to a general consensus, and possibly even proof, of its self-consistency. In arithmetic, there are no sets of numbers where basic operations yield contradictory results. Regarding counting numbers, the quantity of items in a set is highly subject to the principle of non-contradiction. When dealing with discrete, macroscopic objects, their count yields definite, distinct numbers. These quantities are sharply defined, though we often overlook their precision. When we mention ‘one’ or ‘four’, we refer to an exact quantity—four, not 3.999 or 4.001, but precisely four.
This precision is subject to potential inaccuracies, such as miscounts or anomalous situations, but generally, when counting tangible items like apples, baseballs, or houses, the exactness of their quantities is clearly and accurately defined. For instance, counting three apples or identifying eleven houses on your street demonstrates the precision and non-contradictory nature of simple arithmetic, which underpins its utility and prevalence in existence.
This concept of distinct units becomes less clear-cut at the quantum level. In the quantum realm, the exactness of quantities diminishes. With fewer quantum objects under consideration, and without substantial detection resources, these entities exhibit a degree of fuzziness. For example, a baseball, composed of approximately 10251025 molecules, has a definitive existence with abundant information within those molecules. In contrast, a few subatomic particles in an enclosed space exhibit greater uncertainty. This is exemplified by quantum tunneling, a phenomenon where particles, even within a sealed lead sphere, can unpredictably appear outside of it. This illustrates the inherent indeterminacy and probabilistic nature of quantum particles’ positions in space.
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The likelihood of using a molecule for this is quite slim. A molecule is extremely unlikely to escape from a lead ball through tunneling, due to the minuscule probability and uncertainty in its position, even over the entire lifespan of the universe. However, a photon or an electron, depending on the thickness of the lead sphere, could have a different outcome. You could, theoretically, construct a lead sphere thin enough that an electron inside it might have a one in a billion chance of tunneling out within a year. You can make the sphere as thin as desired.
Moving on, a vast number of objects exhibit fuzziness; they lack definitive existence. Yet, we can create a defined world by assembling enough indefinite particles that define each other. This is the world we inhabit, a highly defined world composed of approximately 10851085 particles that mutually define each other. The primary massive, discrete objects in the universe are stars. With about 10111011 galaxies, each containing roughly 10111011 stars, we have a total of 10221022 stars, each comprising about 10601060 particles.
Considering planets, the Earth has significantly less mass than the Sun. While I initially thought the Earth might have 1/100th the mass of the Sun, that seems inaccurate. The Earth’s diameter is about 1/100th that of the Sun, which, assuming equal density, would imply the Earth has 1/1,000,000th the mass of the Sun. However, Earth is approximately five times as dense as the Sun, leading to a calculation of about 1/200,000th the mass of the Sun. Let’s approximate it to 1/1,000,000th, meaning a planet still has more than 10501050 atoms or protons, an immense number supporting a high degree of definiteness.
The universe is composed of a vast array of highly definite, existent objects, ranging from a baseball with 10251025 particles to a planet with 10551055 particles, and up to a star with 10621062 particles. To achieve existence, a large number of particles must come together over time. This leads to another principle I believe to be true, though without much proof beyond our universe’s existence: there’s no upper limit to the number of things, short of infinity. Existence arises through finite processes, so infinity is unattainable, but anything short of infinity is conceivable.
Therefore, however large our universe is, there could be universes with the number of particles in our universe squared. It’s conceivable to have a universe with 1017010170 particles or even 1025510255 particles. In the realm of all possible universes, I suspect there’s no limit to that exponent on the number of particles.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/23
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What’s the most recent update on Covid numbers?
Rick Rosner: Covid numbers are dropping fast in a lot of countries. England, the U.S where I live in L.A County Covid numbers are down about 95% from the Omicron peak of six weeks ago or a month ago but there’s still like 10 times as high as the lull in summer 2021. So they’re still super high but much less lower than the insanely high new case numbers of a month ago. And this has been the case with throughout Covid. Covid hasn’t done anybody any good by taking out anybody bad. All the shithead Republicans in Congress, Republican Senators survived it. I think Covid still has high numbers in Russia but not high enough to stop them from this incursion into Ukraine. Covid has killed more than a million Americans, more than one in 300 Americans, more than one in 58 American seniors; it’s the deadliest event in U.S history but it hasn’t knocked out any of the maligned forces in American Life.
Fox News is tooled along the Republicans and the Senate has survived unscathed. It hasn’t killed a big enough percentage of Americans to piss off Republicans against Republicans. So, shitty stuff keeps getting done by Republicans. In Republican states, one state is on the verge of passing no abortions after 30 days of pregnancy when almost no one knows they’re pregnant.
Jacobsen: Which is the whole point…
Rosner: Yeah, that is the whole point because the deal is they count how long you’ve been pregnant from your last period I think and you don’t even get pregnant until two weeks. On day one of your pregnancy according to the medical definition of pregnancy, you’ve already been pregnant for two weeks; just that’s the way they count it. So you get pregnant and then you’ve got maybe 16 days to figure out you’re pregnant and go get an abortion in this state, I forget which Southern State it is. I want to say Georgia but that’s not Georgia, but it’s a civil war fucking state.
So anyway, Covid’s done nobody any good where you would have kind of hoped it would perversely stop some of the malign forces. Texas is just passed a law that you’re not allowed to help trans kids be trans. If a school finds out a kid is being trans, the school has to out the kid to his parents and you’re not allowed to approve of the kid being trans. It’s a crazy new law but just kids basically in Texas are no longer allowed to be trans. We can have guarded hope that Covid will drop to its lowest numbers since the pandemic began by summer if we don’t have any more new cases. I mean there is a new more infectious variant on Omicron that may slow down of the drop in Covid cases but we may have a normal summer and if we’re super lucky, a summer like the olden times where a lot of people feel comfortable walking around outdoors without masks and going to restaurants and stuff. The number of new cases per day may drop across America to under one in 50,000 people which is great.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/23
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: When 9/11 happened everybody pulled together under President Bush, a Republican and his approval rating rose into the mid ‘80s; the highest ever and peaked in one poll at 92%. So far the Republicans haven’t pulled together behind Biden in time of war. So there is a further risk to America and democracy if the Republicans keep beating the crap out of Biden instead of pulling together behind him which is unusual in a time of conflict for America but the Republicans are unusually crazy and shitty. If the Republicans managed to use the war to convince enough voters that Biden’s weak, that Republicans take control of the House and the Senate in the midterms which are nine months away, less than nine months away, then the U.S is really fucked. And if the Republicans take back the White House in 24, the Republicans might let Putin take more stuff. So there is compounded risk but even so the situation for the world isn’t as bad as 1939.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/23
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Some people have been saying this is the worst day since the German invasion of Poland prior to or at the start of World War II. Is the Russian invasion of Ukraine with the most recent escalation of the Russo Ukrainian conflict that bad or is it bad but not Germany invading Poland bad?
Rick Rosner: So there are a couple things. One is that Hitler definitely wanted to own the European continent and pretty fast and then Hitler wanted to kill a bunch of people; Jews, homosexuals, the handicapped, and the Holocaust refers to Hitler’s murder of six million Jews but he also murdered another 5 million in camps and in other ways. So, 11 million people Hitler just outright murdered for no good military reasons just because he didn’t like them. Hitler was responsible via World War II for the deaths of 30 to 35 million people overall.
Putin doesn’t want wholesale murder entire classes of people and he’s not intent on marching across a whole bunch of countries, at least it doesn’t seem that way. We’re talking right now about 90 minutes after Russia started shelling Kyiv and Kharkiv and several if not most large Ukrainian cities on Wednesday evening U.S/Canada time. He took Crimea in 2014, I think took Chechnya at some point, and he’s taken other regions but gradually enough that the world kind of let him get away with it. So, I don’t think Putin wants a full an all-out World War unlike Hitler who I think thought he could win a conflict of the size that he ended up getting into. So that’s one good thing.
The bad thing is that we have nuclear weapons; the U.S and Russia have nukes. I don’t think Ukraine has nukes at this point though I haven’t read about it but I think that when the Soviet Union fell that Russia pulled back all its nukes from outlying countries into Russia itself. Russia having nukes limits how much war you can wage against Russia that the U.S really did decide to go which we would. I don’t think that there’s a president that we’ve had in the past since World War II who’d risk an all-out war with Russia to stop them from taking a country, even a country as big as Ukraine which has 42 million people and is the size of Texas. The Soviet Union invaded Hungary in ’56 and went into Czechoslovakia in ’68. I’m sure we did stuff but we didn’t go to war with them and ditto for Russia going into Ukraine.
So, it’s bad, it makes the world feel like shit because there may not be anything the world can do about it short of going to war which the world won’t. So it’s not as bad as Hitler in 1939 but nukes make it worse because of the potential for any kind of nuclear exchange because nukes have been used once and that was nearly 77 years ago in war.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/19
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Addendum to yesterday, finishing the Harvard story. Go ahead.
Rick Rosner: Okay so we’ve established that I in my 20s and into my early 30s even will go on Hinky for modeling assignment/auditions just for the possibility that they’ll be weird and then I get out of there before any actual sex happens because that would be bad. So, I’m at Pierce College, I rip off a tear strip from this flyer saying that they’re looking for nude models and so I call the number and this guy says he’s got an assignment work on a project called Erections for Penthouse Magazine. This is automatically super duper hinky just and very unlikely to be true because Penthouse Magazine would never do any project called Erections which are related to penises and Penthouse Magazine isn’t penis-centric but I’m still going to go check it out because it might be weird.
My wife was on a business trip out of town. I go to this house in Northridge, this is late 1994 and there was an earthquake at the beginning of 1994 I believe and the house still had earthquake damage that hadn’t been repaired. It had stuccoed arches across the front and the arches were cracked and you could see the chicken wire that held the stucco in place before it cracked off, the chicken wire was visible. There was a lot of stuff at that point that wasn’t fixed but it just added to the hinkiness of it. I still remember the number I called. I called 818-381-4545.
The guy invites me in. I go into this kind of den living room, a big open room, sunny probably 17 feet by 25 feet; a pretty good sized room. The guy sits himself at a desk. There’s a name plate on the desk it says Douglas W. Watt and on the couch across from the desk I’m standing there, I’m not sitting any place. There’s a couch and on the couch is a young probably Korean woman who is wearing a man’s shirt that’s long enough to cover her and pantyhose and pearls; a long string of pearls. And the guy starts telling me about the project and this relates to what we’ve been talking about because while he’s telling me a bunch of stuff he says that he’s a genius and the girl on the couch, Lena is a super duper genius. She’s one of the world’s brightest people; highest IQ people and I’m confused because I’m coming to realize that everything out of this guy’s mouth is just a lie and that this IQ thing is just one more lie but it’s weird because I have one of the world’s highest IQs and he’s lying to me and saying that he has one of the world’s highest IQs and it’s like “Is this somehow relevant to me? Is it at all tailored to him knowing anything about me or is it just bullshit?”And the whole thing is weird. You don’t usually walk into a place and there’s a 19 year old Korean girl on a couch wearing just a man’s shirt and pantyhose.
He offers me orange juice and she goes and gets orange juice and brings me orange juice. I drink the orange juice. He’s got a camera on a tripod set up on the end of the couch away from his desk and at some point he goes, “Well, let’s see what you look like naked.” I’m like “Okay” So he’s at the camera and he takes some shot. Of everything that happened up till now this is like the least weird part, this is what the deal is and then he says, “Can you get hard?” And I’m like, “I guess. Do you have any pornography?” And he says no. I shouldn’t tell you all this, it’s just horrible but he goes “No, I don’t have pornography but I have Lena.” And I’m like “What?” I don’t know what the further dialogue was but I proceed to get hard-ish and she gets next to me and I assume there was still talking and discussion and she’s going to put me in her mouth like “No, no, no, we’re not doing that.” And she unbuttons the shirt and she’s wearing a bra but she hoists her boobs out of the bra I believe. She had to be worried and so her boobs are out and my dick is out and we’re negotiating.
“Can she wrap the pearls around your dick?” “Okay, fine” We negotiate where she can pretend to be blowing me where there’s no contact where her mouth is like hovering around the end of my dick and we get to that point. She’s on her knees, I’m standing and I look over at the guy and he’s wearing dolphin shorts which are shorts that were popular in the ‘70s which are kind of satiny and one of his nuts is sticking out of the bottom of the shorts. That’s the last straw, this has gotten way too weird and I got to get out of there. So I’m like “All right that’s it, I got to go.” They’re like, “Really? Do you have to go?” Lena’s like “Really? Don’t you want to stay?” She’s being ketish, she can barely speak English. I get dressed and I’m leaving and as I’m leaving we’re in another room; the room that has the front door. There’s another couch, she’s curled up coquettishly. Somehow she’s gotten curled up on this other couch and she’s saying “Really? Do you really have to go?” something like that in bad English and I get out of there.
Then like two days later I’m picking my wife up at the airport and you should know that I can’t lie to my wife for the most part. Anytime I try to, she sees right through it. Anyway, I pick her up at the airport and down Sepulveda from LAX is a place called Dinah’s Chicken Kitchen that serves apple pancakes. We’re sitting there waiting for the apple pancake. They used to be bigger; they used to be like 12 inches 14 inches across and fall off the plate. Now they’ve gotten smaller but anyway we’re waiting and they take a long time to cook. In the meantime, I picked up a copy of USA Today that somebody had left at one of the booths because the pancakes take a long time and we’re looking at USA Today and a giant sex study had just come out and was getting headlines. And my wife’s reading this article and says, “Huh it says here that 25% of men in married relation is cheap.” Then she looks over at me and I’ve gotten all sweaty and then she’s like, “What? What happened?” And I’m like, “Well, I went on an art modeling audition and it got really weird.”
I didn’t tell her that I knew it was weird going in, I didn’t tell her what happened, I just said there was a girl there and I got out of there. She was mad. So anyway, that’s the story. I’ve since figured out that Lena, not her name I’m sure, was probably just a prostitute hired to have sex with whatever joker showed up for this audition because that was the guy’s, the guy not named Douglas W. Watt, that was his fetish though I don’t know what would have happened had actual sex happened. Well I’m sure he probably would have whipped out his thing and just jacked himself off, I don’t know. Anyway, that’s the story. I was kind of bad 27 years ago.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/16
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why do we think of things as beautiful?
Rick Rosner: According to off the top of my head yesterday when I thought about it for like a minute maybe because we at base with the deepest feelings we have when we perceive beauty is we associate things we perceive as beautiful with ideas of safety and of everything’s going to be all right. There’s stuff that we’re hardwired to think of as beautiful which is mostly sexual stuff. It’s an easy argument to make that we see sexually healthy people we’d like to bang or healthy people we’d like to bang as beautiful. That’s kind of a fairly hardwired response. We probably have other responses that are associated with beauty that are more or less hardwired but maybe not and you don’t need the hard wire to make the argument that when we see order in the world and tranquility and nature, these are associated with safety and good outcomes.
Now I have to flesh out the argument but when we look at the natural world, it has creatures and plants that have evolved to be attractive to other animals at least attractive to Insects. So you get the bright colors of flowers that signal insects. I think what I have to do is think more about this because I’m just going to be bullshitting and it’s not going to be a good discussion even though I think my main thesis is correct.
Jacobsen: What is the main thesis as a primer with this session?
Rosner: The things we see are beautiful. We associate with positive outcomes for ourselves and the people we care about. Landscapes, flowers, cityscapes, animals; they’re the beauty of nature, the beauty of majestic human-made structures are at the sloppiest level. They’re symbols of order and order in which we belong. They’re comforting. Beauty is kitsch that’s easy really forced beauty. Right now on the screen for instance. Google is throwing up this painting as one of its screen savers that looks like a crappy Thomas Kincaid painter of light. It’s got snow-covered cabins and actually it’s a bad painting because it’s got A-frame houses in the painting with which have roof slopes of 75 degrees; these are super duper A-frames and they’re covered with two feet of snow and that doesn’t happen. Well you’re from Canada, you know you can’t have a roof with an angle a 75 degrees and expect that two feet of snow is going to stick to that roof. It’s a dumb painting but it’s got that tranquility,that natural quiet snow covered tranquility that speaks of comfort and safety.
I think we talked about kitsch before. Its art that’s more easily that it’s slutty art; its art that makes itself super easy to appreciate that all the decorativeness and the emotions are right there on the surface cherubic kids and porcelain moms and daughters and that stuff evokes positive emotions.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/15
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We’re discussing high-IQ societies for the magazine of the World Intelligence Network, founded by Evangelos Katsioulis. What was the original purpose of founding a high-IQ society?
Rick Rosner: Mensa, one of the earliest high-IQ societies, was formed shortly after World War II in England, a time when the world was recovering from the devastation of the war. There was a prevailing sense of hope and a belief that we could do better. The founder of Mensa, which means ‘table’ in Latin, envisioned it as a round table where intelligent people could exchange ideas to make the world a better place. Mensa is designed for those two standard deviations above the mean, or with IQs of 132 and above on tests with a standard deviation of 16.
It’s one of the more accessible high-IQ societies, as others, which are smaller and more obscure, often have higher thresholds, starting at IQs of 140, 148, or 164. Mensa has been around for nearly 80 years, but it hasn’t solved the world’s problems. We’ve discussed before how people who take pride in their IQs can be eccentric, often socially awkward, and are usually looking for something to be proud of. Mensa, in particular, is male-dominated, with many members, including myself at one point, joining in the hopes of finding romantic connections.
I joined Mensa, not because I particularly wanted to, but because of a feature in Playboy in the early ’80s – ‘The Women of Mensa.’ It showcased female members of Mensa, and that motivated me to join. Not to meet those women, but I thought if Playboy did this, maybe Playgirl would follow suit with ‘The Men of Mensa.’ I figured if I could get into Playgirl, it might help me get a girlfriend. At that time, I wasn’t aware that the primary readership of Playgirl was gay men.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: Playgirl, unfortunately, didn’t feature The Men of Mensa, though they really should have. It would have been interesting. Eventually, I did manage to find girlfriends and got married, but it wasn’t because of joining Mensa. You were asking about the future of high-IQ organizations.
Jacobsen: Considering the background of high-IQ organizations, what do you think their future looks like?
Rosner: Mensa was established in a time when IQ was taken quite seriously, around 1946 I believe. During that period, extending into the ’60s, there wasn’t much skepticism about intelligence testing. However, attitudes have shifted over the years. People have become more skeptical or indifferent toward IQ tests, and boasting about IQ scores is generally frowned upon. Stephen Hawking even said that people who brag about their IQs are losers. Nowadays, it’s not necessarily ‘nerdy’ to be intelligent, but flaunting one’s IQ is seen as a sign of social awkwardness.
Given this shift in perception, high-IQ societies like Mensa have seen a decline in their allure. While they may still have tens of thousands of members, I suspect their membership has decreased. Mensa, as an organization, will probably continue to exist, but its relevance and status have diminished. In the future, it’s likely that Mensa and similar organizations will keep functioning, but perhaps more as social clubs rather than bastions of intellectual elitism. They’ll continue, but in a more subdued fashion compared to their heyday.
Some of the other high-IQ clubs have historically had limited membership, often not exceeding a couple of hundred members. The more exclusive the club, like the Mega Society, which caters to individuals with one-in-a-million IQs and was established in the ’80s, the smaller its membership tends to be. At its peak, the Mega Society might have had around two or three dozen active members, with a few dozen more subscribing to its journal. Currently, there might be around 20 active members in Mega. Generally, individuals in these societies aren’t known for engaging in extensive group activities. Membership is often seen more as a unique credential rather than a topic for regular conversation.
I personally talk about my IQ because it has brought me some publicity. There’s a joke about Harvard graduates always mentioning their alma mater within the first five minutes of meeting someone. While I don’t necessarily broadcast my IQ at parties, it is part of my Twitter profile, and my handle is “dumbass genius.” This gains me a certain level of recognition, and I approach it with a degree of self-deprecation, acknowledging that despite my high IQ, I can still be foolish at times.
Regarding IQ tests and Mensa, the reality is that a significant portion of the population could qualify for Mensa if they took enough tests. Mensa requires an IQ in the top 2% of the population, about one person in 44. But in practice, someone could potentially achieve a Mensa-level score by taking multiple tests.
Most high-IQ clubs or organizations have never had a large membership base, and the members aren’t particularly active. These organizations are likely to continue as niche interests or somewhat quirky claims to fame.
In the realm of television, there have been attempts to create shows centered around intelligence, similar to “America’s Next Top Model” or “Project Runway,” but focused on finding the next great genius. Despite some pitches and pilots, including my involvement, these concepts haven’t taken off. Shows like “Brain Games” on the National Geographic network delve into strategies for better thinking, but the idea of IQ hasn’t been fully exploited in reality TV. Reality TV often focuses on capturing dramatic or outrageous moments, and while smart people can be interesting, they might not always provide the kind of entertainment that reality TV thrives on.
If a reality show centered on intelligence ever became popular, it might boost interest and membership in high-IQ societies. But unless that happens, the status quo is likely to persist, with only a small group of people actively engaged in the world of high-IQ societies.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/14
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: You just moved into a new place which sounds great; your place of employment which is this giant equestrian joint catering to dozens and dozens of horses and riders and competitors and you have a really great apartment there and that led us to talking about living spaces. So I can give you the history of my living spaces. Starting when I was two, my mom married my stepdad and we moved to Boulder and we lived in a rental house and then when I was four we moved into the house that I would live in until I was in my 20s. 1600 square feet, not a big house; my mom always wanted a bigger house and thought we could get one. My dad was always turning her down because it turns out unbeknownst to my mom, my step Grandma who was apparently like soap opera villain mean, my stepdad managed the family business; a lady’s ready to wear a store and had a secret deal. I mean it didn’t have to be secret but he kept it secret from the family.
At any time if his mean ass mom decided she wanted to get rid of the store he had to have enough money on hand to buy the entire business. So he never felt comfortable buying a nicer house because he needed to have this nest egg in case my step grandma decided to fuck with him. So we lived in this fairly small house for all my growing up years. Then I went to my hometown school because I kind of had a nervous breakdown or just a freak out or just a whatever bad behavior thing where I wanted to go to Harvard but then I didn’t because I figured I’d never ever get a girlfriend. Anyway, I fucked up my chance to go to Harvard. I came back to my hometown school, University of Colorado and I lived in the dorms off and on kind of half-assedly because I always could come home and spend the night there. My parents’ house is like three quarters of a mile from campus. I could just walk home with my bag of laundry or drive home if I had a car at the time and so I’d live in the dorms kind of half-assedly, move in late which was bad and stupid because you want to move into the dorms as soon into the school year as possible because that’s when everybody gets drunk and fucks each other. And so I missed all the hooking up just because I was lazy which was stupid because all I wanted to do was get laid but I didn’t figure out the strategy.
So, a dorm is like 10×11’, so I’m living in 110 square feet when I’m in college, 120 maybe. I met my wife when I was living in the dorms. I was way too old. I knew I was getting too old to live in the dorms when I was too old to scare the other people in the dorms like I didn’t give a shit about the accoutrements of living. I liked working in bars and I’d occasionally get laid you know somebody would take me home. I’d occasionally take somebody back to whatever miserable place I was living though not my parents’ house, that would have been weird and I just never did the thing where you get an apartment and you build a whole adult life. And I’m going to college half-assedly and for the first couple years um I could scare people into turning down their fucking stereos. I’d walk out in the hall in a towel all veiny and covered with scars and muscly and bam bam bam on the door and I’m like “Turn down your fucking stereo.” They’d turn down the stereo and that worked until I was 24-25 and by then when you get to be that age and you’re still in the dorms you’re just a weirdo. It’s like its way too old to be in college. So people quit being scared of me. And so I knew it was time to leave college and go back to high school one last time.
So, I moved to Albuquerque and lived with my dad and my brother half in the closet in my brother’s bedroom; they lived in a condo. There was room to put the mattress I was sleeping on was half in the closet so that was okay but then my dad got married for a third time and I got kicked out. Then I moved into an apartment where I paid of 122.50 a month to have a room that was 6×12 foot. So I lived in 72 square feet plus I had use of the disgusting rest of the apartment including like a toilet that would drip water. It was on the second floor and when you flushed water would go from the toilet… I guess the tank, it wasn’t poo water. It would go from the tank into the kitchen sink just drip through the ceiling. There were generally no cleaning utensils. Usually you had to go into the backyard. The two guys I lived with were stoners and they just let a bunch of dirty dishes and pots and shit accumulate and then one stoner guy is like “I don’t want to wash all these, I’ll just take them into the backyard” which is this little patch of dirt and just hose them down which since they’ve been sitting in the sink for weeks or months didn’t do anything to clean them. So the stoner he just said fuck it and there was just a bunch of stuff in the back. Somehow I had a pot of my own where I would cook a Hungry Man clam chowder with a can of tuna mixed in, that was my breakfast.
So then I did a semester of that. Rent went up at one point to 127.50 a month. Then I moved to New York and moved in with my girlfriend now wife and we lived in 300 square feet. We had a bedroom that was 200 square feet, a kitchen that was about 70 square feet and a bathroom that was about 50 square feet and then there was another bedroom that we rented out to a succession of roommates including a guy who just wanted a place to keep his cats because I think his girlfriend was allergic to them. So, anyway 300 square feet, New York City, 100th in Broadway, above a restaurant bar which sucked because bars in New York City closed down at like four in the morning and assholes would leave singing at 4am.
Then we moved to Brentwood in LA and lived in 700 square feet. Then we bought her grandparents’ condo in Encino. After her grandpa died grandma got too old to live in the condo, so we were living in 1300 square feet and we moved into our first house which was 2200 square feet and then we moved into the current house and along the line I’m getting decent. We move into the house we’re in now just as I got steady work with Kimmel and this is a housey fucking house at this point. It started as 2600 but then we pushed out a little bit, now it’s 2700 or 2800, plus we turned the attic into a usable space, so it’s a big ass house. And now it’s just Carol and me and it’s too much house but that’s okay because we paid it off a long time ago. And it’s a really a huge house if you’re one of the little dogs we have. The dogs are like 1/5th our height. So multiple everything by five cubed and it’s not a five squared because let’s go off an area, so 25 times 3000 square feet basically. The dogs live in the equivalent of a 75,000 square foot house not that they care, they sleep 12 hours a day.
Our trajectory has been to live in more and more spacious places otherwise that trajectory is probably done with. Now we’re probably on the down slope of that, the next place we move into will be smaller and as we get older and more debilitated, well if we’re lucky we’ll end up in senior living and then maybe in Board and Care like Carol’s mom has gone from 2800 square foot house to a 700 square foot apartment and in Senior Living to a 200 square foot room in a Board and Care Facility. So, that’s the way it goes in terms of square footage birth to death.
There’s been a trend in America and probably the rest of the world, well not Europe; Europe is less as holy than we are. The average size of an American house has gone from probably 1100 a thousand square feet in 1900 to 1500 square feet in 1950 to probably 2500 square feet now because people just have to… well with higher ceilings you’re nothing if you don’t have 10 foot ceilings on your first floor. We don’t have that. This house was built in ‘66 and it has 8 foot 2 inch ceilings which are perfectly fine except probably not grand enough for the neighborhood where older houses get knocked down and replaced by 4000 square foot houses for 3 million dollars.
So this house is not grandiose enough. In fact, we got a deal on it when we bought it in ‘98 because it was built for a big family in ’66, so it has a lot of small bedrooms, very small master bath; it was four feet wide which is just nothing and kind of had an inferiority complex. So it was very cheap per square foot and per the neighborhood. Then we fucked around with it, turned the master bath into a reasonably sized bathroom but it’s still not going to be grand enough. So, it’s odds are 50-50 that when we sell the place it’ll be knocked down even though the house will sell for given since there’s a housing shortage since it’s L.A, we’ll get seven figures for the house even though they’ve paid that much for it, they’ll knock it down and likely… The house might be big enough and it’s got a third floor; the attic. There’s a reasonable chance that they will just tear out the guts of it and push it out the back and expand it to 4000 square feet and then sell it for 3.2 million which will be none of our business because we’ll have sold it and moved on.
The housing in America is like everything else in America; it’s gaudy and wasteful though the LA building code within the last 10 years, the code book went from being this thick to being about this thick with earthquake proof and Green Building. I mean the like this place has a lot of windows and got the shit hammered out of it in the ‘94 earthquake. We didn’t live here then but we know that it got beaten up and it doesn’t have a lot of shear panels because a lot of L.A houses don’t have a lot of windows because you make houses earthquake resistant with 4×8 panels of plywood built into the walls and you need a certain number of these to make the house shake proof. A house destroys itself in an earthquake when it doesn’t rock as a unit. A house survives by rocking as a rigid unit. It destroys all the shit inside as the whole cube of the house rocks but the house itself stays intact as long as it’s got enough shear panels to transfer force evenly throughout the house so the bottom of the house doesn’t move more than the top of the house.
So, we didn’t have any shear panel because this house was built before that. So, 10-12 years ago we tore open the corners of the house and put in Hardy frames which are just metal frames that anchor the… well, they do the same thing; they keep the house moving as one integrated unit instead of swaying as a bunch of separate floors. And people bitch about L.A building code but it’s better to have hard ass building code than have what happens when there’s a huge earthquake in Guatemala and Guatemala City and 7000 people died. The Northridge Earthquake which was like a 6.8 or 6.7 substantial, not quite the big one, the big one will be in the 7s or maybe even an 8. I think only 63 people died in this, in an earthquake that killed a hundred times as many people if it occurred in a Central or South American country without decent earthquake codes though that’s not fair, I think a lot of other countries in earthquake zones now have decent codes, I don’t know.
And then green building, so you’re not just like polluting or your impact on the environment’s a little better, you can get square footage bonuses if you build green where you’re only allowed to stop making mansions in L.A and a lot of other places, you’re only allowed to build houses that are like 40% the size of your lot. We’re on a 6000 square foot lot which is a pretty standard LA lot and under the current building codes, if you were building fresh you’d only be able to go to 2400 square feet because that’s 40% of 6000 but if you build green, they’ll let you pump it to 50% or go to 3 000 square feet which is just a lot of fucking house and we’ve looked at a lot of houses in L.A.
L.A is the land of dumb construction because you’ve got people with a shitload of money and you have nice weather which means that the houses can be, except for being earthquake resistant, they don’t have to be weather resistant. So, there’s a lot of leeway and people just kind of let their imaginations roam free and their imaginations are shitty. So you have a lot of dumb fucking houses in L.A where in other cities like Denver for instance, where it gets cold and there’s a lot of brick construction. You don’t have brick construction except fake brick in L.A because brick doesn’t hold, it’s got no lateral… its sheer modulus is fucking tiny bricks sliding in an earthquake. So you need to build a structure that has integrity and then just put these half inch thick brick looking tiles across the front if you like brick. But anyway, not a lot of brick. Places like Denver you might have more consistency of design because it’s cold and people know how to build for the cold. Anyway, American houses; big and dumb, L.A houses; bigger and dumber.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/11
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is Jewish comedy?
Rick Rosner: Modern comedy emerged after World War II. Comedy went from Vaudeville; guys just standing on a stage telling jokes that weren’t specific to the comedian to very personal comedy that originated mostly in the ‘60s. Then really exploded in the ‘70s and ‘80s where a bunch of comedians; Ray Romano, Letterman, Leno. Not Letterman and Leno because they just got jobs being comedians but comedians like Ray Romano got sitcoms built around their comedic personae. This is the guy I tell jokes about, I tell stories about myself on stage “Okay let’s turn you and those stories into a sitcom,” that happened a lot. But the deal is that all this happened after World War II where the Jews in World War II were the ultimate outsiders to the point where they were murdered by the millions.
The picture of Jews as comedy emerged was as outsiders; people who were picked last when you’re picking teams in gym class, guys who have to scramble to get laid because they were not tall blonde jocks. Jewish comedy is the little guy; the guy who’s not in power scrambling to make a light and then the outsider can be critical of winter life, the borderline loser because he’s qualified to be a critic because he’s not getting the benefits of being the tall blonde jock.
There’s also the trickster aspect of comedy where I can fuck with you, I can make fun of you; that’s my role and I’d say that that dynamic has changed because time passes and can’t beat Lenny Bruce for 50 years. And the culture has become more inclusive; everybody’s found a peer group or more people have found a peer group via social media than in the ‘60s and ‘70s when there was the Delaware, the peer culture. People who had the most friends were jocks who had teams, who were the popular people. In the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s the dominance of popular people; of good looking, blonde, fucking ass-less people, that was the dominance of jocks say was facilitated by what culture didn’t offer which was the ability to cast a wide net to find peers. If you were popular in high school you could be on sports teams and that automatically gives you dozens of fucking friends and everybody’s pointed in the same direction ‘go team win’, everybody, their fraternities, and all that shit and then like the skulking sulking losers were more isolated. And shit’s changed, people can find each other over social media and also nerd chic emerged in the ‘90s where you started getting Tech billionaires and most people are tech savvy and it became chic to call yourself a nerd. Supermodels on talk shows saying I was such a geek, a nerd growing up. So the shit has shifted.
It’s harder to be an outsider and also the people who are outsiders now are more fucking sinister and not fucking good at comedy at all. The fucking basement dweller, 4chan, Incell, Anti-vax, QAnon; these are a bunch of angry dumb shits who are not fucking funny at all. They’re dangerous and they’re stupid.
Looking at Sarah Silverman; she’s always come across with a sweet on stage persona and early in her career she used her sweetness to say awful things and that was the theme of a lot of her comedy and then eight years ago maybe at last she decided to become fully nice. I mean she’s still funny as fuck but she decided to nicify herself. I follow a bunch of comedians on Twitter and it’s fairly universal that everybody is just distressed at the way the world is going and there’s a tendency to want to have solidarity and to use comedy to say fuck you to the gullible Incell right-wing idiots who are fucking everything up. The outsiders have pulled together and the true outsiders now are dangerous unfunny assholes. The dangerous unfunny assholes have also pulled together or have been pulled together into a force of dangerous stupidity.
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[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/11
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How come things suck in an age of Marvels?
Rick Rosner: It’s not how come; it’s that they do it. It sucks that things suck in an age of Marvels. We are nearly a quarter of the way through the 21st century, which is a science fiction century. When people were writing science fiction in the 20th century they had so much amazing shit happened in the 21st century and a lot of that shit is actually in process, its happening. We’re not doing great with the exploration of space but we’ll get there eventually but really is that the super exciting thing? The exciting thing is amazing shit with information. The information processing we have that is changing everything and will just keep accelerating and that will change medicine and allow us to bring the average lifespan up to more than a century in developed countries by 2040.
All this great shit is happening but at the same time shit is shitty. America is fucked up right now and democracy hangs in the balance and democracy is under attacked in a bunch of countries and it’s as of consequence at least in part of the fucking miraculous technology we have that that allows bad actors to pump in hundreds of deranging messages a day into the minds of suckers, into the minds of gullible. Bad actors figured out over the past 50 years, as I’ve said dozens of times in our when we talk, figured out that you can go after stupid gullible people and you can manipulate the fuck out of them and turn them into a powerful political force. That’s compounded now by just pervasive and avalanches of bullshit coming over social media and right-wing news channels, so-called news and it sucks that this great 21st century full of Marvels that we could be enjoying is tainted by a not very anticipated aspect of those Marvels.
And then on top of it you have Covid which has cost the world two years. Somebody will eventually calculate how much progress was actually lost to Covid. I mean things still move forward even as we cope with a pandemic but probably not as fast as progress in air, science, or whatever has probably been slowed somewhat by the pandemic and that’s somewhat bad luck but it’s also a consequence of shitty media/social media because our shitty president was able to politicize Covid and make it much worse in America than it had to be. So anyway that’s the point of what I just said that it sucks that shit sucks in what should be a really cool science fiction-y century. We still have 78 years of the century to go so maybe we’ll get our shit together.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/11
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You came up with a really great phrase right before recording and it was the triumph of make-believe and I was talking about some personalities which is part of a larger phenomena of people who live in a self-made world of make-believe and so my question to you is what happens when a large percentage of people live in their own self-made world and make believe project that out into social media space and that becomes kind of the world?
Rick Rosner: All right, so last week we talked about how your picture of the world is formed by the messages you get from the world and also from yourself from your memories and the attitudes formed over time and in the good old days you’ve got your messages about what to think and believe from your neighbors, from your community, from books, from TV but the density of messages was lower and now we’re flooded with information and if you’re plugged into the wrong sources you can get barraged with enough information that you believe in bullshit. It takes some collaboration with the outside world like if you’re married to a big trumper, odds are you’ll get trumpy if you already because you’re getting a bunch of messages from your spouse and they’re having you watch the same so-called news sources they watch and you’re going to get brainwashed. You’re getting all these messages and you’re not getting, unless you start it off highly skeptical and keep feeding yourself contrary messages from other sources, you’re going to get overwhelmed with bullshit.
Right now we’re in an era where bullshit is triumphing for a third of the population and much of it is fucking coming from Russia. A lot of the bullshit that hits America is right-wing media with a little bit of a boost from Russian trolls. Today’s February 11th 2022 and the U.S state Department announced today that Russia’s on the verge of invading Ukraine not necessarily that they’ll do it but that they have all their forces in place to mount of an invasion. They’ve got 1,30,000 troops along various borders of Ukraine along in Belarus and in Russia itself. We’ve been aware of the threat but now he’s got all his forces in place.
Putin’s a big time imperialist; he wants to bring back the Imperial reach of the Soviet Union and he took Crimea from Ukraine. Crimea is this part of or used to be a part of Ukraine and a few years ago he went ahead and he took it. So it’s not unheard of that he would take part or all of Ukraine including the capital key. One consequence of this whole thing, this ongoing crisis is we’ve learned that it’s Kyiv and not Kiev which is annoying. This will be the biggest imperialist Invasion/land grab if he goes ahead and does it in Eurasia since World War II. America is very divided about you know the miracle of America is distracted from it and very politically divided because of Russian make-believe over the past five years that Russia and right-wing media have combined to fill tens of millions of Americans heads with alternative facts make believe bullshit and the non-bull shitted segments of society have been lousy at countering it. It’s not easily addressable using normal governmental and journalistic methods. And so shit feels more fucked up now than even when Trump was President.
I mean the people who believe in make-believe like Biden’s approval. Now Trump was the worst president since James Buchanan whose shitty presidency made the Civil War happen. It’s being generous to Trump to say he’s not the worst president ever which he might be but he’s at least the worst president since 1860. And then Biden is a perfectly adequate president and maybe better than that. He’s got more experience national government than any other president ever by 15 years. He’s been in national government for something like 47 years and nobody else comes close and he built alliances, he knows pretty much how to govern and he’s accomplished quite a bit yet his approval is almost as low as Trump’s; the shittiest president in history and a man who’s complicit in the deaths of a million Americans because he politicized Covid. But America is sufficiently bullshitted, filled with make-believe that a huge segment of the population thinks Biden is a more disastrous president than Trump which is just fucking make-believe and is very concerning because the Republicans in government and the Republicans as a party the people who aren’t a-holes have been stripped away from the Republican party and the modern Republican party doesn’t follow normal democratic, well believes less in democracy than ever before and if their bullshit works and they take back the House and the Senate in the elections that are now is less than nine months away, then they will… they’ve been doing a bunch of shitty shit and they will do even more shitty shit and it’s the triumph of the people who’ve been successfully bullshitted.
And you guys up in Canada have gotten a little less of it than we have the bullshitting but you’re in the middle of one of the biggest bullshitting incidents in your recent history; this anti-vax truckers’ protests on the streets of Ottawa where your capital is, fucking up transportation of goods across the International bridge where 25% of the goods that go back and forth between the US and Canada go, that bridge is fucked up and mostly shut down. These assholes are honking 24 hours a day, I read. But just life in Ottawa is all fucked up because of the fucking truckers and it’s an astroturfed operation.
A grassroots movement is regular people having had enough and banding together to form a movement and so contrary to that an Astroturf, a fake grass movement is something that looks like a grassroots movement that has been created by not regular people but outside motherfuckers. And this trucker thing is the product of a bunch of gullible idiots or not even that many gullible idiots, something like 200 gullible idiots fucking up Ottawa and manipulated by Rich anti-vaxxers who can manipulate them via social media and trolls for money out of the parts of the world where it’s cheap to hire trolls which is Asia, Thailand and all those East Asian…. I used to buy fake followers because that’s where they’re cheap out of East Asia. It’s not exactly East Asia but South Asia, Pakistan. I didn’t like doing business with Pakistan because that’s too fucking sinister and I didn’t want to but Pakistan you could buy fake followers out of and India and I don’t think India is doing the trucker shit but who knows. Like all these Indonesia, where these people make money riling up gullible Americans and now I guess gullible Canadians.
And then whatever grievances came naturally were amplified and shitheads like Rand Paul said we should have trucker protests here and shut down America. Rand Paul’s a fucking asshole. Another asshole is Ted Cruz who’s also in favor of these protests. The protests make America look dysfunctional and make it more likely that Republicans will get elected. That’s been the Republican model in the new fleece the rubes era is break the government, get people pissed at the government, and get Republican lunatics who are in favor of scuttling the government elected.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/10
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: As the long-standing comedy writer in our duo and a member of the Mega Society, known for its one-in-a-million high IQ individuals, you have a unique perspective. With your impressive test scores and experience in humorously interpreting real-world observations, how do you perceive the evolution of cultures over time? I’m more interested in the basic processes rather than high-level observations.
Rick Rosner: Alright. Back in the ‘60s, there was a popular thinker, Marshall McLuhan, a fellow Canadian like yourself. He’s best known for saying “the medium is the message,” which implies the significance of the method used to convey information. I was pondering this before we began this conversation. Cultural evolution exists among some animals, but it’s rudimentary compared to humans. Most animals lack complex language, although they communicate through sounds like barks or songs, and some, like crows, can even signal specific threats. However, their communication is limited compared to human language.
Humans are far ahead of other species in cultural evolution. One aspect of cultural evolution is its ability to preserve emerging behaviors across generations, potentially allowing these behaviors to become ingrained through biological evolution. For example, if an otter discovers a new way to open clamshells and teaches this to others, it might not directly lead to evolutionary changes like specialized thumbs, but it’s an illustration of passing knowledge intergenerationally.
Words have always been crucial in this process. For most of human history, words have been the most efficient way to transmit information. We write and speak words, and in the last century, we’ve developed technologies to rapidly share visual and auditory information. Our capacity to absorb information has increased dramatically. My usual example is showing a modern superhero movie to someone from 1968. They’d struggle to follow it because the pace of action has accelerated significantly over the years.
The modern technology we possess today allows us to share information in numerous, highly efficient ways. As we’ve discussed, we’ve already been exposed to a vast array of information, but this is nothing compared to what future beings will experience. Imagine augmented humans 20 or 50 years from now, who will be able to process information through integrated systems, or even the concept of group consciousnesses 150 years from now. These future entities will likely be capable of digesting gigabytes of data in seconds, combining brainpower with bio-circuitry in unimaginably complex ways.
It’s a characteristic of human progress that each generation lives in greater luxury than those two generations prior. Living as an average person today is far more comfortable than living as a king in the 14th century, thanks to the advancements in technology and the wealth of information at our disposal.
To put this in perspective, I’ve written over a hundred thousand jokes, most of which are admittedly not great, and I’ve probably read around 400,000 jokes, mostly on Twitter. Compare this to a farmer in 1908, who might hear three jokes a week if he goes to town. Throughout his lifetime, Farmer Joe might hear a thousand jokes at most. Meanwhile, I’ve been exposed to half a million jokes, not just heard but also seen in movies and on TV. Farmer Joe wouldn’t understand 90% of the jokes we have today because his exposure to humor is so limited.
Take comedians like Neil Hamburger, for instance.
Jacobsen: Is that his real name?
Rosner: I don’t think so; I’m not sure of his real name. But his act is to be the most off-putting comedian in the world. To the average person, his act is just unsettling. He deliberately makes his voice gross, nasally, and snotty, and his jokes are both offensive and poorly executed. He’s purposefully terrible, and yet he’s adored by many comedians. Sarah Silverman, for instance, who is deeply experienced in comedy, probably appreciates his act. She knows more about comedy than even I do, having been exposed to a vast array of humor. There are many comedians who are comedians’ comedians, appreciated more by their peers than the general public.
Zach Galifianakis and Kyle Mooney represent the type of comedians who are palatable to the public but also admired by other comedians for their unique styles. They specialize in creating humor out of awkwardness, often involving unsuspecting people in their acts. For instance, Kyle Mooney used to conduct street interviews where his ineptitude was part of the joke, leaving the interviewees feeling awkward out of pity for him. This approach to comedy is part of a larger trend where, after having seen every conceivable type of joke, comedians explore new forms and push boundaries.
Comedy has evolved significantly over time. In the past, comedy often stayed within the bounds of what was publicly acceptable, with many jokes being generic and not very personal to the comedian. Henny Youngman’s famous line, “Take my wife… Please!” is an example of a joke that anyone could tell. However, as time progressed, comedy became more explicit, incorporating the comedian’s personal experiences and personality.
Now, almost anything can be a subject for comedy, though there are still some sensitive topics. Discussions around Holocaust jokes, for example, are contentious. There’s a lot of debate about how far you can go in joking about such serious subjects, especially in light of recent political figures and events that have revived discussions about Nazism.
However, there’s a belief that with increased cultural sensitivity and the emergence of cancel culture, there are topics that are off-limits for comedy. But that’s not entirely true. It’s more about being aware of sensitivities and issues. For example, jokes about prison rape used to be more common with phrases like “Don’t drop the soap,” but now they’re seen as tacky and insensitive. If you make such a joke now, someone might call you out on social media, highlighting that sexual assault in prison is a serious issue. The key is to avoid obvious, hackneyed jokes.
Looking back at older forms of humor, like the jokes in Playboy magazines from the ‘60s, many of them revolved around tricking women into sex. These jokes often had a rape-like structure, which was more accepted in that era but is considered highly inappropriate now. The evolution of comedy reflects changes in societal values and norms, and what was humorous in one era may be considered offensive in another.
Zach Galifianakis and Kyle Mooney represent the type of comedians who are palatable to the public but also admired by other comedians for their unique styles. They specialize in creating humor out of awkwardness, often involving unsuspecting people in their acts. For instance, Kyle Mooney used to conduct street interviews where his ineptitude was part of the joke, leaving the interviewees feeling awkward out of pity for him. This approach to comedy is part of a larger trend where, after having seen every conceivable type of joke, comedians explore new forms and push boundaries.
Comedy has evolved significantly over time. In the past, comedy often stayed within the bounds of what was publicly acceptable, with many jokes being generic and not very personal to the comedian. Henny Youngman’s famous line, “Take my wife… Please!” is an example of a joke that anyone could tell. However, as time progressed, comedy became more explicit, incorporating the comedian’s personal experiences and personality.
Now, almost anything can be a subject for comedy, though there are still some sensitive topics. Discussions around Holocaust jokes, for example, are contentious. There’s a lot of debate about how far you can go in joking about such serious subjects, especially in light of recent political figures and events that have revived discussions about Nazism.
However, there’s a belief that with increased cultural sensitivity and the emergence of cancel culture, there are topics that are off-limits for comedy. But that’s not entirely true. It’s more about being aware of sensitivities and issues. For example, jokes about prison rape used to be more common with phrases like “Don’t drop the soap,” but now they’re seen as tacky and insensitive. If you make such a joke now, someone might call you out on social media, highlighting that sexual assault in prison is a serious issue. The key is to avoid obvious, hackneyed jokes.
Looking back at older forms of humor, like the jokes in Playboy magazines from the ‘60s, many of them revolved around tricking women into sex. These jokes often had a rape-like structure, which was more accepted in that era but is considered highly inappropriate now. The evolution of comedy reflects changes in societal values and norms, and what was humorous in one era may be considered offensive in another.
Joking about Bill Cosby is something I’ve done countless times, focusing on the more recent, notorious version of him, not the “America’s dad” image he used to have. It’s crucial to understand the current landscape and construct your jokes with awareness. Nowadays, almost anything is fair game in comedy. You’ll even find jokes about oral and anal sex on primetime NBC sitcoms. Of course, they won’t be explicit. For example, you won’t hear “He’s going to have anal sex with you” on a sitcom, but you might hear a veiled reference like, “Oh well, it’s his birthday,” and he gets a ‘special thing,’ which in context, we understand means anal sex. It’s surprising, but it’s a part of cultural evolution.
However, you need to be mindful of the human impact of your jokes. When joking about figures like Harvey Weinstein or Cosby, remember that some of your audience may have experienced sexual assault, and it’s important not to diminish that experience. But, jokes about anal sex are now made on TV shows watched by young teens.
Comedy often serves to communicate taboo information in ways that are more palatable. For instance, outright stating that Kim Kardashian’s billion-dollar empire is based on her being promiscuous is offensive and disrespectful. She isn’t promiscuous; she made a sex tape with her boyfriend, which is now fairly common. Similarly, Paris Hilton became famous after her sex tape was released, likely without her knowledge. This doesn’t make them immoral; it’s a reflection of changing societal norms where non-marital sex is more common.
The Kardashian family, for instance, has been linked with numerous NBA players, but blatantly stating that “the Kardashians like to sleep with tall black guys” is racist and offensive. However, a joke like, “Now that Barron Trump is 6’7”, once he reaches 6’9”, he’ll be eligible to date a Kardashian” is less direct. Yet, if such a joke is posted on Twitter, it might attract criticism for involving Barron Trump, who is still a minor. The backlash wouldn’t be about the Kardashians’ preferences, but rather the inclusion of a young individual like Barron. The joke isn’t a personal attack on him; it’s simply a comment on his height. But people might still criticize it, focusing on his age rather than the content of the joke.
So, what’s your question? I feel like I’ve hit a dead-end in my rambling.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/07
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We’re talking about the type of convoy in Canada and the emergence of Nazi symbols, Confederate flags at the protest.
Rick Rosner: We should explain what the trucker convoy is. A bunch of truckers and I think just a bunch of people who own trucks just by looking at the footage have anti-vaxxer truckers and truck owners have congregated in Ottawa, the capital of Canada to protest any mandatory shit about Covid basically. Do you have any idea how many of them are there?
Jacobsen: No.
Rosner: All right, so we could probably look it up and how long has this been going? It’s disrupting life in Ottawa and I assume they’re trying to disrupt the government.
Jacobsen: Yes, CDC says there are thousands of truckers and other protesters as of January 29.
Rosner: So they’re kind of all-purpose a-holes. I’m sure that it’s a good bet that 95% plus of the anti-vaxx truckers buy into just the whole package of… It’s not fair to call it right-wing thought but it’s the whole package that comes from so-called right-wing media. I guess it’s fairer to call it right wing than to call it conservative because the current right-wing thought doesn’t have too much to do with conservativism. But anyway, its people who buy everything; they’re trumpy, no limits on guns, then Biden didn’t win the election, the whole Covid is no big deal, the vaccination is more dangerous, It kills more people than Covid; the whole fucking thing.
Well, it seems like today this stuff flourishes more than it has in the past. And so there are various angles on that. One is we don’t know much about the past as in a general sense. Our historical knowledge doesn’t run deep though in like 1939 maybe there was a giant rally for Hitler at Madison Square Garden. Maybe 1938, I don’t know. I think the US Pro-Nazi organization was called the Bund. Or else, or they may have named it something patriotic like the George Washington Society. I know they use George Washington as the back drop; a giant George Washington for their huge ass rally at Madison Square Garden. So until we declared war against Germany, there were millions of Americans who we’re pro Germany and America was substantially isolationist until Pearl Harbor happened. I just read that FDR wanted us to get into the war because I assume he believed correctly that Hitler didn’t just jeopardize Europe but he jeopardized the world and also what he wanted to do with Europe even if he didn’t jeopardize the whole world was super shitty. But American opinion, I guess was against getting into World War II until Pearl Harbor. So, I mean there has always been a bunch of kind of a-holes running around. Everything seems new to us because we don’t know history.
Two is, and we’ve talked about this a gazillion times, I say that almost every time we talk now that we’ve talked about this because we have talked about a shitload of stuff that it’s easier for idiots and demagogues to get people riled up now because It’s easier for lunatics to communicate with each other. Social media and…
Jacobsen: Fortune chat ports.
Rosner: All that shit just like that when there were only telephones people couldn’t announce themselves unless they wanted to pay for newspaper ads or leaflets or I guess give speeches on street corners. But now, anybody can announce their political intentions and look for kindred spirits and the turnover of messages. If you’re trying to recruit people to fight communism in the lunatic John Birch Society in 1957, most of your communication is going to be done via the mail. So your turnaround time between messages is going to be a week because back then you didn’t call people long-distance, that was for special occasions and it was expensive. Do people even know that anymore? That if you wanted to call outside your state, outside your area code, it costs like 10 cents a minute and that was expensive in the ‘50s and ‘60s and ‘70s. So people didn’t do it except on special occasions like Mother’s Day, birthdays, your car broke down and you need somebody to wire you some money.
A couple nights ago, we talked about the bullets. The more information bullets you get hit with the more you’re persuaded. So in the time it took for one John Berger to have an exchange with another John Berger in 1958, a pair of idiots can exchange hundreds and hundreds of messages. So that’s the thing too. That it’s much easier for shitheads to find themselves.
And thing three is for the profit; information to distribution model that in 1958 newspapers were for profit. Newspapers, they had political leanings but they felt some accountability for the truth. They try to slant the truth, but they wouldn’t try to straight up just continue to bullshit you and TV news was not for profit until the ‘70s maybe. And now we’ve got all sorts of for-profit news, or for-profit pundits like Alex Jones. I guess people send him money to support his efforts to say the shit he says but also they buy his products. He sells vitamins and probably other stuff like survival kits. I don’t know, I don’t watch Alex Jones but people on the right and on the left, but more on the right saying bullshit make a lot of money saying bullshit.
So to wrap it up, you got three things that make today’s nowadays seem extra dire in terms of groups of shitheads being shitheads. One; it seems scary because we don’t remember the past and so we don’t have any way to compare it to shithead movements of the past. Thing two is ease of communication and aggregation among shit heads and three is right wing misinformation and riler-uppers make a shitload of money doing it; both from the Rubes who are being fed this shit and from rich conservatives who like a broken government among other things; a government that doesn’t tax them, government that’s ineffective, government that allows them to staff the Supreme Court.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/06
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This is a recursive Crackpot test session we are recording. So you begin and end on the Crackpot test.
Rick Rosner: All right, so it’s well known among people who are in the physics departments at universities that it’s not super rare for a lunatic to show up at the University with a revolutionary theory and try to track down some physics professor to run the theory past and it’s 999 times out of a 1000 the theory is legit shitty/crazy. So there’s this John Baez who’s an expert in group theory and he knows a shitload of math, he knows a lot of physics; he’s at UC Riverside. If you like math and physics he deserves a follow on Twitter at least, I don’t know where else he posts. But he has a lot of interesting math shit that he posts. More than 20 years ago, recognizing that the culture of Crackpots or the phenomenology of Crackpot, he came up with a checklist called the Crackpot index which would tell a Crackpot if they actually listened to any kind of reason or how cracked they are but I guess would tell other concerned people around the Crackpot how lunatic they are and so what’s weighed into it with regard to IC, informational cosmology.
A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics and he says that tongue-in-cheek. Number one – negative five point starting credit. So he gives you the benefit of the doubt, the higher your score the higher your total, the more cracked you are.
Jacobsen: So it’s like golf; you want the lowest score possible.
Rosner: Yeah, it’s like golf.
Jacobsen: With a handicap at the start.
Rosner: Yeah, and I’ll score us as we go. Number two – one point for every statement that is widely agreed on to be false. We don’t really do that. Number three – two points for every statement that is clearly vacuous. I don’t know that we do that I mean what do you call it when something is inherently true?
Jacobsen: Truism, tautological, redundant.
Rosner: Tautological, yeah that’s right. We don’t really deal in tautologies so I don’t think we score there. Three points for every statement that is logically inconsistent, I don’t think we do that. Five points for each such statement that is adhered to despite careful correction; that is somebody’s told you that you’re fucked I guess and you persist. Well, no we don’t really do that. Five points for using a thought experiment that contradicts the results of a widely accepted real experiment. We don’t knowingly do that.
Jacobsen: The only one coming to mind would be rolling bang rather than a single bang.
Rosner: Yeah. We’ve been talking about this for forever and I’ve been thinking about it. The more I think about it the more I tend to like give up and think that the universe looks really big bang-y, not that I believe that it’s straightforwardly big bang-y but a lot of the things that just don’t agree with evidence I can live without. Five points for each word in all caps. Five points for each mention of Einstein misspelled, Hawkins misspelled or Feynman misspelled.
Jacobsen: We did this before but it was a dialogue I think at one point.
Rosner: We did this already?
Jacobsen: I think but it was me asking you the questions.
Rosner: So, 10 points for each claim the quantum mechanics is fundamentally misguided. We don’t do that around here, we love quantum mechanics. If anything, we air too far in the other direction. I don’t think you can air too far in the other direction, quantum mechanics has been verified up the wazoo. 10 points are for pointing out that you have gone to school as if this were evidence of sanity; not real really do that. I guess this probably applies to like manifestos or statements that you maybe leave off at the desk of the secretary of the physics department or something or maybe if you’re persistent enough to get into somebody’s office, this is the shit you say.
Jacobsen: Yeah, this was published in 1998. This is the era of big postal code and is the predominant and letters and letters to the editor.
Rosner: So what you’re saying is like most people didn’t start using the internet till the mid ‘90s, so it was not too far…
Jacobsen: This is like the U.S post Office deal.
Rosner: Yeah okay. So people are mailing to it.
Jacobsen: Yeah, it’s the era of Kaczynski and people like that.
Rosner: Yeah, there you go. People mail also, if they’re Unabomber they’re mailing bombs. All right, we’re more than a quarter of the way through. 10 points for beginning the description of your theory by saying how long you’ve been working on it. So, I get those points. I’m constantly talking about that, so 10 points for that and 10 more for emphasizing that you worked on your own, not really but not really not but still just 10 points. 10 points for mailing your theory to someone you don’t know personally and asking them not to tell anyone else about it for fear that your ideas will be stolen. No, I don’t think that fear is unusual either in crackpot physics theories or in writing stories and shit but you have to overcome it. A writing professional knows the story ideas are a dime a dozen and it’s the execution that counts and you just have to fucking get over it and take the risk.
10 points for offering prize money. Nope. 10 points for each new term you invent and use without properly defining it. No. 10 points for each statement along the lines of I’m not good at math but my theory is conceptually right, so all I need is for someone to express it in terms of equations. Maybe one-third credit for that because I’ve been fantastically lazy at trying to… I mean I poked at it but no, the theory should be much more mathic than it is. So we’re up to about 13 points not including the initial minus five. 10 points for arguing the current well-established theory is only a theory as If this were somehow a point against it. No. 10 points for arguing that while a current well-established theory predicts phenomena correctly it doesn’t explain why they occur or fails to provide a mechanism. A whiff of that but really I don’t know. All right, I’ll take two points out of 10 for that. 10 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to Einstein or claim that special or general relativity or fundamentally misguided. No. (Without good evidence he allows the possibility that you’ve discovered something).
10 points for claiming that your work is on the cutting edge of a paradigm shift. No, but I kind of think it, if I’d take two points out of ten for that. 20 points for emailing me and complaining about the crackpot index saying that it suppresses original thinkers are saying that I misspelled Einstein in item eight as he did for points. Again, this is Dr John Baez’s Theory. 20 points for suggesting you deserve a Nobel Prize. 20 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to Newton or claim the classical mechanics is fundamentally misguided. No. 20 points for every use of science fiction works or myths as if they were fact. 20 for defending yourself by bringing up a ridicule according to your past theories. Nope. 20 points for naming something after yourself. Nope, though there is the Rosner way which was coined by Dave Schechter in high school. He said, “There’s the right way and there’s the Rosner way.” So I mean somebody else named fucking up after me.
20 points for talking about how great your theory is but never actually explaining it. No. 20 points for each use of the phrase hide bound reactionary. No. Only ten more to go. 20 points for each use of the phrase self-appointed defender of the Orthodoxy. No. 30 points for suggesting that a famous figure secretly disbelieved in a theory which he or she publicly supported. No. 30 points for suggesting that Einstein in his later years was groping his way towards the ideas you now advocate. No, though I fantasize about going back in time and badgering Einstein but that’s not going to happen. 30 points for claiming that your theories were developed by an extraterrestrial civilization. No.
30 points for allusions to a delay in your work while you spent time in an asylum or references to the psychiatrist who tried to talk you out of your theory. Now I have had six shrinks but yeah that’s just because they have good insurance, like two of those shrinks have been couples counselors. So, no. 40 points for comparing those who argue against your ideas to Nazi Storm troopers or brown shirts. No, I do compare certain Trump things to Nazis which is bad policy but there’s a principle I forget the name of it, you probably know it that once you’ve compared something to Hitler or the Nazis you’ve lost your argument. But you know what I was talking Nazis on Twitter today and I have to note that Trump is complicit in the deaths of more than a million Americans. He’s our deadliest president ever. Hitler murdered 11 million people; six million Jews and 5 million Roma also known as gypsies, gay men, communist people he didn’t like politically polls, Soviet citizens, and prisoners of War; he straight up murdered 11 million people. Add to that another 19 plus million people who died from fighting in World War II and the aftermath but fucking Trump with his million plus people is roughly, if you include everybody who Hitler just straight up murdered Trump has more than one tenth of a fully inclusive Holocaust of 11 million and if you’re just going off of the Jews of 6 million, Trump has more than one-sixth of a holocaust based on his just politicizing Covid and blowing it off and then some other shit he promised to address and never did as president.
All right, so anyway 40 points for claiming that the scientific establishment is engaged in a conspiracy to prevent your work from gaining its well-deserved fame. 40 points for comparing yourself to Galileo suggesting that a modern day inquisition is hard at work on your case and so on. 40 points for claiming that when your theory is finally appreciated present-day science will be seen for the sham it truly is. 30 more points for fantasizing about show trials in which scientists who mock you are now forced to recant. Science changes over time, it’s like everybody does their best. 50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no concrete testable predictions. No. Is there shit that is older than how old the universe appears to be…
Anyway, that was the last one. 50 points makes you pretty annoying and deluded and then 80 points means you’re a real crazy asshole and over 100 or 120 points and you’re full on the guy who the college should probably get a restraining order but I think we kept it to under 20.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/05
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: In IC we believe that the interactions among all the particles in the universe define all the particles and the space and I guess time, just everything in the universe is an embodiment of the interactions and the history of interactions among its constituent particles. So the more particles you have the more exchanges they have among themselves. The more information is generated the more tightly grained is the universe. So our universe with 10 to the 80th, 10 to the 85th observable for particles is pretty tightly defined. The plank wavelength or blank’s constant is tiny. The uncertainty and position of macro particles for sure is like just nothing. It’s not nothing nothing but it’s minuscule because of the amount of information about where everything is generated by the gazillions of interactions among the particles in the universe.
But under quantum mechanics which defines this, I think QM is considered the most perfectly confirmed and perfectly accurate model, mathematical model in physics. Quantum mechanics is pretty bulletproof. General relativity kind of fails at the margins once you start going down black holes or more when you try to unify general relativity with quantum mechanics you run into problems but quantum mechanics itself is like it’s a perfect little big ass theory. Under quantum mechanics a bunch of stuff is undefined and people who are around for the early days of quantum mechanics particularly Einstein hated the uncertainties, the undefined raw probabilities in quantum mechanics.
People of Einstein’s generation had grown up and previous generations had all grown up with the idea of the perfectly determinate clockwork universe that if you knew all the parameters of the universe at any given time you could predict the rest of the lifetime of the universe like clockwork. And then quantum mechanics did away with that with its probabilities, its unavoidable probabilities and Einstein hated it and I’m sure a lot of other people did too and he came up with experiments to try to show that it was bullshit. After Einstein by the ‘50s like there was the Bell equation, maybe the early ‘60s which showed that it’s mathematically impossible to have hidden variables in the universe to remove the randomness, the probabilities and replace them with certainties that you can’t do it. It’s not consistent with quantum mechanics. You can’t have hidden information that tells you what is going to happen in open quantum situations.
However, if the universe really is a model of something outside of the universe the same way our minds are models of ourselves and the world around us you can sneak in a shitload of information I believe because the information is coming from outside the system and thus isn’t information in the sense that is prohibited by quantum mechanics. Einstein wanted everything to be kind of correlated within the universe that the whole universe tells you how the universe works. The universe is correlated with itself, it has all the information it needs to determine every subsequent moment like clockwork. But information from outside the universe is not information of that type. It doesn’t correlate anything within the universe. If the universe is modeling out an external world based on information that enters via the hardware of the world; the sensory apparatus, that information is random with regard to the information the universe uses to define itself. It’s information coming from outside the universe; it doesn’t correlate anything in the universe and in the instances where it does that becomes information that’s incorporated quantum mechanically into the universe.
So you can plug in all sorts of information that appears arbitrary and random to the universe under the rules of quantum mechanics. You can plug in all the random outcomes you want. It’s the randomness that is allowed by quantum mechanics but if the randomness is actually non-pre-determinate information coming in because the universe is modeling an external world that the universe can’t predict because the universe can predict subsequent states of its self given the information it has but that prediction is limited leading to the quantum randomness. You can fill in that, from moment to moment you can plug in random results.
I mean that’s what time does; it plugs in the results to these open quantum situations that you don’t know what’s going to happen and then time passes and something happens. You didn’t know which thing was going to happen but one of those possible things happened and that new information is entered into the universe that way, it’s not correlated. It didn’t come from the structures within the universe, it came from outside and if the universe is modeling something outside that’s fine to admit that new information without violating the rules of quantum mechanics.
So, that’s one thing. Another thing is does the universe really have the bandwidth or the wherewithal to hold this new information; to not only hold all the information but the universe defines itself with? But beyond that this information that is a model of the external world and my guess is maybe the universe’s ability to hold on to X to information above and beyond the information that defines itself and maybe to hold on to… certainly the our guess is that the universe can’t just exist on its own but needs an armature, needs a hardware; the way our minds can’t really exist on their own, they need a brain to contain the mind, but the universe needs hardware to hold on to the information that the universe consists of. There’s a movie from the I think the late ‘70s called Scanners where people have telekinetic power and if somebody can like beam like power at your head and make your head blow up if they’re a scanner assassin. And if somebody did that to you; made your head blow up; your mind would disappear because there’s nothing left, no structure left to support your mind.
Similarly we in IC think that there must be a hardware structure that is holding on to the information that the universe consists of and perhaps in addition to the information that the universe consists of, the structure can I guess… I don’t know this is really half-assed, I haven’t thought this out very well… given that you’ve got to support an external support structure that maybe that structure allows the universe to contain information above and beyond just the information that defines the universe. So, the question that prompts this whole discussion is, is there enough room in the universe, in quantum mechanics. Is there enough room for the various types of information that we think the universe contains? A – The information that the universe defines itself with, and B – the information that is the universe modeling an external world. And two and a half or three the information that defines us.
We as evolved beings have arisen from the physics of the universe. So, I don’t think you necessarily need any extra information for us to exist because everything that happened to make us has happened according to the rules of physics of quantum mechanics which underlie biology and chemistry and evolution and everything. So I think that part, there’s certainly enough information for us to have arisen and to exist.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/03
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: For our third addendum, let’s delve into the nature of anti-Semitism and similar ideologies. These often stem from a disconnection from reality, coupled with a kind of rambling incoherency. However, if the person holding these beliefs is intelligent, they might try to organize this incoherence and disconnect, especially when it’s tied to persecutory delusions directed at themselves or groups they identify with.
Rick Rosner: Right, but it’s important to note that when someone with these beliefs goes on an anti-Semitic rant, it’s not complete gibberish. They’re expressing views about the world, albeit in a distorted manner. They use language, like English, to convey their thoughts about Jews and other aspects of the world. It’s not entirely nonsensical. In some ways, it’s akin to dreaming. Dreaming is similar to schizophrenia in the sense that your awareness is fragmented and patchy. You start constructing scenarios based on what your brain, with its limited access to memories, can retrieve.
I’ve found that in my dreams, I’m capable of doing math accurately, despite the absurd contexts. Similarly, a person drifting into irrational beliefs about the world might do so because their brain is metaphorically like Swiss cheese. They construct imaginary narratives based on the fragmented information available to their deteriorating consciousness. If they still have the capacity, they might even seek out information on the internet that reinforces their delusions. People usually start with a grasp of reality, but as their brain deteriorates, their understanding becomes increasingly distorted, leading to elaborate delusions.
Most people with schizophrenia likely started out with a sound ability to model the world. If someone can’t do this from the outset, it might be more akin to autism, where there’s a difficulty in integrating sensory information. That’s my assumption, at least.
Jacobsen: That seems like a reasonable assumption.
Rosner: Alright, with that, I conclude this addendum. Much of this can be reasonably hypothesized if we start from the perspective of how information is processed and interpreted. We would need to further define what we mean by the processing of information, but this concept has become more tangible in the era of the internet and our devices. We’re inundated with significantly more messages from the world than in previous decades, like ten times as many as my dad received in 1969.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/03
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s add to our previous discussion. Go ahead.
Rick Rosner: You’ve touched on something I hadn’t considered: self-talk, or the internal feedback we give ourselves. For those who are mentally unwell or becoming so, the narratives in their minds play a significant role. People engage in self-talk to varying degrees. For instance, individuals with schizophrenia may not even recognize that the voices they hear are a product of their own minds. This lack of acknowledgment of a unified consciousness seems to be a symptom of schizophrenia, where internal dialogue is perceived as external.
Then, there are people whose internal cognition is less verbal, perhaps less introspective. Consider dogs, for instance. They likely don’t engage in complex verbal self-talk, maybe just simple thoughts like ‘walk’ or ‘food’. Dogs model the world in their minds, but words aren’t a significant part of this process. They think about things without relying heavily on language.
Among people, the extent of verbal self-messaging varies. Some might engage in extensive self-dialogue, while others do so less. This self-talk can lead to self-brainwashing, for better or worse. Take ‘The Secret’, a book promoted by Oprah. It’s essentially about the power of positive thinking, suggesting that if you believe in something strongly enough, you can achieve it.
Jacobsen: That sounds delusional.
Rosner: Perhaps, but not entirely. The idea that the world will conform to your wishes is delusional. However, if self-talk involves constantly reminding yourself of your goals, like making it to the Olympics in cross-country skiing, and it drives you to train intensively, then it can be quite effective. I recently read about Cooper Kupp in the LA Times. He’s a star receiver for the Rams heading to the Super Bowl, known for his obsessive preparation. He secured 24-hour access to his college football offices to watch game films and would invite his quarterback to join him. His relentless training and strategic preparation, partly fueled by self-talk, significantly contributed to his success. So, self-talk, when it drives such dedication, can indeed help realize dreams. But it can also lead to self-brainwashing.
The bullets you fire at yourself through self-talk can be as influential as the coercive, normative messages from external sources. And speaking of mental health, schizophrenia is largely characterized by a disconnection from reality. According to the Mayo Clinic, delusions in schizophrenia are false beliefs not based on reality, and hallucinations involve seeing or hearing things that don’t exist.
To grasp schizophrenia, we need to consider both the macro and micro perspectives. The macro description addresses how those with schizophrenia no longer model reality accurately. This indicates an organic malfunction in the brain. To delve deeper, we should consider what’s happening at the chemical level. My personal experiences with LSD, which I regret, gave me some insight into this. LSD disrupts the brain’s ability to smoothly integrate thoughts and sensory experiences, leading to poorly processed information. For instance, faces might appear distorted, resembling early video game graphics with their wireframe and polygonal structures. This glitchy processing might be similar to what occurs in schizophrenia.
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Being drunk, by contrast, slows down cognitive processing. You don’t hallucinate, but your brain can’t process information quickly enough, affecting balance and reaction time. I’m not entirely sure how alcohol affects the brain, but it seems like it deprives the brain of the energy needed for real-time processing, though the signal pathways remain largely intact until one passes out. In schizophrenia, however, I believe the pathways are glitchy.
Jacobsen: Yes, brain abnormalities are a key factor in schizophrenia. Referring to the Mayo Clinic, schizophrenia is identified as a brain disease. Researchers have observed changes in the brain, though the significance of these differences isn’t fully understood. The disorganization in speech can be indicative of the structure of thought in those with schizophrenia. Delusions, hallucinations, and disorganized speech all point to a disconnect from reality and an impaired ability to verbally model it accurately.
Rosner: Schizophrenia could be causing certain processing pathways to break down more severely than others. This is somewhat analogous to Alzheimer’s disease, which progressively severs connections in the brain. Studies on nuns who remained mentally active into old age, engaging in activities like crossword puzzles, showed that despite significant brain deterioration, they could still think effectively due to redundant pathways. In contrast, less mentally active individuals without these redundant pathways suffer more when connections are severed. They’re left with existing pathways that lead to incorrect conclusions, resulting in irrational beliefs or the inability to recognize that certain people have long passed away.
In schizophrenia, if the condition is causing your brain to deteriorate while leaving some pathways intact, it can significantly affect how you perceive and process information. In a typical person, various signals and thoughts compete within the active consciousness, generating numerous hypotheses. Most of these hypotheses go unnoticed as the real world unfolds, and incorrect assumptions are quickly dismissed. For example, you might momentarily think there’s a person in the doorway, only to realize almost instantly that it’s not the case. Your brain often jumps to conclusions to prepare you for potential situations, like anticipating someone at the doorway.
I experienced a similar confusion when we inherited a large TV. We placed this 50-inch screen in our kitchen, against a window that doesn’t offer much of a view. The size of the screen often displays people in actual size, so when watching the news, a person’s face might appear as it would in real life. This realism can be jarring, especially when someone in the newsroom walks behind the news anchor, momentarily making it seem like there’s someone in our backyard. The brain momentarily confuses the figures on TV with real people in your environment due to the perspective offered by the large screen.
Similarly, when I drop something, I often catch myself thinking, “I knew I was going to drop it.” This is because I’m more aware of the various potential outcomes my brain is preparing for. When carrying something, one of the many scenarios your brain considers is the possibility of dropping it. If it happens, you might berate yourself, but in reality, it’s just your brain preparing for a range of potential outcomes.
In the case of someone with schizophrenia, if certain thoughts or perceptions are getting through while others are blocked, their understanding of the world can become severely distorted. Their self-talk, the hypotheses they form about themselves and the world, can become increasingly disconnected from reality. This disconnection can lead to a profoundly altered and often troubling interpretation of their surroundings and experiences.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/03
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: It’s important to define our terms here, specifically “coercive messaging,” which can also be referred to as “normative messaging.” The term ‘normative’ doesn’t refer to what’s normal per se, but rather it involves people dictating certain behaviors or actions. When someone makes a normative statement, they’re essentially saying, “You should do this.” The “this” in question usually pertains to adhering to societal values or the values of a particular peer group the speaker represents. For instance, consider the example of Carol’s mom not allowing her to wear certain shoes deemed ‘slutty’, like Candies in high school. The statement, “Nice girls don’t do this,” is a normative one. It comes from a place of representing and trying to enforce community standards.
These statements are coercive because they reflect societal expectations. As I mentioned, most of the normative messages people received before the rise of the internet in the ‘80s and ‘90s came from the people around them. However, in the current era, the normative and coercive statements that people encounter come from a much wider world. Depending on the information bubble one is in, these messages can be filled with all sorts of ideas, including those influenced by Trump and his supporters.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/03
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s shift our focus to discuss coercive structures or what might be considered toxic normative structures.
Rick Rosner: I wouldn’t label them as toxic, rather as helpful normative structures.
Jacobsen: Alright.
Rosner: Here’s the thing, at my age, which is 61, living in America, it’s shockingly disappointing to witness a considerable portion of American adults, particularly among Republicans, embracing unfounded beliefs and displaying aggressive racism. While the media tends to spotlight the most extreme individuals, making them newsworthy, it’s still alarming that surveys indicate around 57% of Republicans doubt the legitimacy of the 2020 election and believe in falsehoods.
Just a few moments ago, I was reflecting on this. It feels so distant from the America I knew growing up and throughout most of my adulthood. An America proud of its values—opportunity for all, democracy, the belief in the equality of all men, and the notion of being part of the moral arc bending towards justice. It’s disheartening to see these values discarded by a significant number of adult Americans.
I liken this situation to quantum physics. There’s a concept where each particle in the universe is defined by its interactions and historical interplay with other particles. The closer particles exert a more significant influence through particle exchange. Protons exchange real particles with nearby protons, much like in the gunfight scene from ‘True Romance’, where characters understand their positions through the exchange of gunfire.
The point is, people are similarly influenced by those in close proximity. In small-town America, or even in larger towns before the advent of social media, most of our feedback and societal cues came from our community, from those in our immediate surroundings. My dad and stepdad, both small businessmen, spent their days interacting with the public, deriving their beliefs, understanding of the world, and values from these interactions. Considering my stepdad, who owned a dress store, he engaged in several hundred, possibly up to a thousand, interactions daily. He was at work for about 10 hours, the store open from 10 am to 6 pm, talking to maybe 50-60 customers, alongside his clerks, family, and friends. He’d sometimes visit the nearby movie house, catching parts of films during slow periods.
These numerous interactions were like the ‘pings’ in quantum physics, the exchanges that helped shape his worldview. Although he might have watched a bit of news or read newspapers, and later listened to talk radio, the bulk of his information and social feedback came from his acquaintances and friends in Boulder. Growing up, Boulder was a small community of 15,000 to 20,000 people, expanding to 75,000 by my mid-20s. He practically knew everyone in town who had been there for more than a few years.
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Now, in the era of social media, individuals are bombarded with thousands of messages daily. When you tally up the individual messages people absorb each day, the count reaches into the thousands. This includes exchanging text messages, browsing tweets, scrolling through Instagram, watching TV, and Googling various topics. The volume of ‘bullets’ that we’re subjected to has increased exponentially compared to my dad’s era—possibly by eightfold or tenfold. Most of these bullets aren’t coming from our local community or from the people we interact with in person; they’re from the wider world, often not supporting traditional values.
I was a boy scout, attended Sunday school, participated in student government, and even attempted sports, though with disastrous results. My dad was a sports enthusiast; he played basketball in high school and later became a fervent supporter of basketball teams at the University of Colorado and Boulder high school. He also supported the team at Sacred Heart, the Catholic school, because he and my brother, who played basketball, were friends with large basketball-playing families from the Catholic community, like the Gallaghers and others. These families had numerous children who grew up playing basketball from a young age. Sacred Heart was a hub for these families in junior high before they moved on to Boulder High, often competing for the state title.
This environment was tightly knit with community elements like church and scouts, but such community-centric activities have largely diminished or been overwhelmed by the influx of signals from non-community sources. These external sources often promote subversive and irrational ideas. For instance, Tucker Carlson on Fox News exhibits blatant racism. The feedback he receives, much like that of a high IQ individual who has become vehemently anti-Semitic, reinforces and praises their increasingly extreme views. Even high intelligence, as in the case of the individual with an IQ above 180, can’t counteract the flood of reinforcing messages that fuel such prejudices.
When viewed in this light, it’s understandable, albeit disconcerting, that approximately 50 million American adults have seemingly lost touch with reality.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/02
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the reason behind extremely intelligent individuals often becoming so obsessive that it negatively impacts all other aspects of their lives?
Rick Rosner: Although not a universal trait among high IQ individuals, obsession can certainly be a pitfall for some. Take Keith Rainiere, for instance, whose involvement in a notorious sex cult led to his life imprisonment, leaving behind a path of destruction including his own wife. There’s a certain fascination, almost a schadenfreude, in hearing about highly intelligent people who deviate towards such obsessive tendencies.
In my experience, the same drive for discovery that propels one towards beneficial knowledge can also lead down less productive paths. For example, I once became engrossed in a legal battle with the quiz show ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire’ over a disputed question. To support my case, I analyzed over 110,000 questions from various international versions of the show. Despite my extensive efforts, the lawsuit was ultimately dismissed, resulting in a significant waste of time.
More recently, I’ve developed an interest in mosaic art, partly inspired by my wife’s love for micro mosaic jewelry, which is surprisingly affordable on platforms like eBay. Through this, I discovered a passion for mosaics, particularly the exceptional works from Saint Petersburg, Russia. This interest led me to engage in art therapy with my 89-year-old mother-in-law, who is experiencing age-related cognitive decline. We’ve completed projects together, like a mosaic of a boxer or French bulldog, reminiscent of the ones stolen from Lady Gaga’s dog walker. Currently, we’re working on a more complex cat mosaic, inspired by the Chiaroscuro technique, an Italian method emphasizing light and shadow in art.
The mosaic, converted from a photograph into a do-it-yourself pattern, comes with six colors of tiles, creating a dramatic effect typical of Chiaroscuro, with its stark contrast from the deepest blacks to the brightest whites. Working on this project with my mother-in-law, I’ve found myself consumed with the idea of crafting the finest version of this mosaic cat possible. To enhance the color spectrum, I expanded the palette from six to more than ten colors, utilizing leftover tiles from the French bulldog kit for additional gradations. I’ve even taken to coloring half of each 5-millimeter square tile with art markers to introduce more color gradients. Additionally, I’ve been meticulously filing the tiles for a more precise fit and better gradient effect, to the extent that I’ve worn the skin off my fingertips.
The whiskers in the kit are made by halving a 5-millimeter tile, but that approach didn’t satisfy me. I’ve been slicing the tiles into even thinner strips, starting at about a millimeter and a half in width and tapering to almost nothing. I’ve already devoted 60-70 hours to this project, and we’re only halfway through. The mosaic will eventually adorn an elderly lady’s room in her Board and Care, making me question why I am so dedicated to it, especially considering other priorities.
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This endeavor has revealed an unexpected talent for mosaics. For instance, I’ve become adept at restoring vintage brooches, some over 140 years old, with tiny glass shards as small as a quarter millimeter. Removing my contact lenses, due to my nearsightedness, allows me to focus on objects mere inches from my face.
The irony isn’t lost on me – the minuscule nature of these glass pieces mirrors the triviality of some of the tasks I occupy myself with. Previously, my time was consumed by IQ tests, which at least brought some publicity and opportunities. It makes me wonder if among high IQ individuals, someone has become fixated on actual rabbit holes, developing theories about underground rabbit warrens.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/20
I love the Satanists. Let me open with the fact that they have some of the best and most creative protests.
The Satanic Temple, I like them better than the Church of Satan, though I give them props, too. First and foremost, I am a card-carrying member of The Satanic Temple.
Mike Wendling of the BBC reported on the vandalization of The Satanic Temple’s display in Mississippi.
A former US Navy pilot, Michael Cassidy (35), was a political candidate in Mississippi. Unfortunately, or maybe not, he lost the race. The Iowa Department of Public Safety charged Cassidy with fourth-degree mischief.
He will receive a sentence of up to 1 year in prison plus a $2,560 fine if convicted. Under legislature rules for displays of religious installations, the Satanic display was allowed. Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis criticized the display too.
These men have the right to free speech on these issues. However, this formal act of mischief is not allowed. At the same time, Governor DeSantis may want to be more careful, as a critique can also be applied to his cherished religions.
Either everyone gets equality under the law, or no one receives equality under the law, and, by definition, the former is the democratic one. With the democratic one, we can either allow everyone an equal right to have displays or an equal right not to have them.
This is not a complex moral issue. Someone can claim Governor DeSantis is a homophobe who demonizes immigrants the United States relies upon and an anti-reproductive rights campaigner who despises women’s rights to choose… and Cassidy is a jackass. We can do that. Many do. Moreover, I do not.
It is not the point. Anyway, the display featured a goat head of the statue of Baphomet with a wreath and a pentagram. These are boilerplate Satanic symbols akin to the Christian Cross, Christ on the Cross, the Bible, and so on, even the fish.
Cassidy appealed for funds to be raised for his legal case. These handsomely brought $40,000 to the man.
Cassidy tweeted, “My deepest hope is that Americans of all political persuasions can unite and agree that: 1. Jesus Christ is Lord 2. Satan is evil.” Not everyone agrees because the Church of Satan exists, The Satanic Temple exists, Crowleyites and Thelemites exist, and, pertinently, the Satanic display exists.
“Mr Cassidy lost an election for the Mississippi state legislature last month. In 2022 he lost in a Republican primary for US Congress,” Wendling said, “The Satanic Temple, founded in 2013, is recognised as a religion by the US government, and has ministers and congregations in America, Europe and Australia. It concentrates its efforts on social action and describes itself as a ‘non-theistic religious organisation.’”
The leader of The Satanic Temple, a good man, Lucien Greaves, called the acts of Cassidy “cowardice.” Adding that it is saddening when free expression is abandoned alongside freedom of religion “when only merely faced with benign imagery from a viewpoint that they assume they disagree with.”
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/20
Less religious societies tend to be richer with higher quality of life, less crime, and more stability and equality. More religious societies have the inverse in addition to reduced freedoms and rights for women. Crime and punishment should separate from religion in society, accordingly.
Some of the oddest forms of crime as far as I have found in reading and in life have come from the moral coffers of the religious. This is a huge unacknowledged privilege of the religious over the non-religious, or other individuals who have the ‘wrong’ religion.
When so many societies have such huge populations and enormous religious populations with a willingness to persecute the non-religious for their gods, simply see the Freedom of Thought Report by Humanists International, the point is clear. The only real time some religious people feel this point, underscored, is persecution by other religions.
Blasphemy is such a law felt by the non-religious. It is the context of a religious law used, not only on the religious but, on the non-religious. Specifically, if it is a Christian blasphemy law or an Islamic blasphemy law, then the use of this law to imprison or give the death penalty by a Christian to a Muslim or a Muslim to a Christian is the injustice, respectively.
Yet, both of these styles of blasphemy laws get applied to the non-religious. Even further, it can become a claim of terrorism if the state is religious and unified with the military for additional impact for the theocratic leaders.
An anti-terrorism court in Islamabad in Sec. 295-A PPC charged Anwaar Ahmad, a (former) professor at Islamabad Model College, with “intending to outrage religious feelings” and terrorism under Sec. 7 (g) of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1997 in Pakistan.
He along with some others were charged. Abdul Waheed, Rana Nouman Rafaqat, Nasir Ahmad, were other cases convicted on January 8, 2021 with the nature of the charges related to blasphemy, hate speech, and terrorism.
Ahmad will be in prison for 15 years with a fine of 100,000 rupees. If someone does not believe in a god, which does not mean angry at a god because it’s a lack of care for the god and more a concern for how the god concept is used for injustice on ‘God’s Earth,’ then they should be free of religious law.
A just modern society is one freed from parochial strictures of a particular dogma of religious theocracy or fundamentalist secular ideologies. In essence, it is a simple argument for a fair and just society as one predicated on independence of governance and dogmas, and law.
Ahmad’s case, as with the cases of Abdul Waheed, Rana Nouman Rafaqat, and Nasir Ahmad, exemplifies an unjust application of religious law against individuals’ freedom of expression. The only real equitable legal game in town is international human rights and law. Its only impediment is enforcement.
This is an open call for work on Ahmad’s case for immediate and unconditional release for a harmless crime. The quality and civility of a society could be furthered by doing so. Otherwise, we have the eternal comparison of the non-religious fundamentalist legal scholar writing a response article to the blasphemous material and the religious dogmatist killing the blasphemer: There is a distinction here; and everyone knows it.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/19
The value of a secular society is the value of equality for all under the law. This means a universal ethic, not a particular ethic. A morality bound by universal standards. A universality of the application of the law to every citizen.
Whether by the local or national citizenry, everyone gets the same treatment. Or the international community, a violation of rights and laws is a violation of international human rights and international law.
Nasir Ahmad, as with the other cases of Abdul Waheed, Rana Nouman Rafaqat, and Anwaar Ahmad, is an individual jailed for an imaginary crime. An imaginary crime bound to another of a global system of practice and superstition, namely religious law.
The claim of online activity and religious discourse is a mixed one. However, the claim of blasphemy, being a religious law, is dubious at best. Furthermore, the claim of this in a free forum online is even moreso.
It is akin to getting an indulgence recorded on television, then replaying this repeatedly for indefinite indulgence. Blessings and cursings cannot be dished out by the hand of Man. They belong with God if such a God exists. It is, in fact, blasphemy to proclaim a moral law on Earth and authority as if holding the authority of God. It is to claim to know the Mind of God. Do you? No. Do they? No.
Why are online blasphemy charges even considered legitimate, especially amongst devout believers? My hunch: It was merely a group of powerful theocrats in society making an arbitrary decision without consulting the wider believing public, especially women.
Nasir Ahmad’s death sentence for blasphemy constitutes a severe violation of human rights, contradicting international human rights standards. Ahmad has freedom of expression, particularly online and regarding religious discourse.
The charge of blasphemy, apart from an imaginary crime, requires more solid evidence and fair standards because of uploading to YouTube. In many countries, similar actions would not constitute a criminal offense, underlining the need for Pakistan to align its blasphemy laws with international norms.
These actions underscore a miscarriage of justice against Ahmad. As part of a global minority, it bothers me. As a humanist, it seems illegitimate, unjust, and unfair. For Nasir Ahmad, Abdul Waheed, Rana Nouman Rafaqat, and Anwaar Ahmad, they should be unconditionally released and given a formal apology.
The ethical implications of such laws and implementations of religious blasphemy laws could result in the same charges and convictions against Muslims or Christians or others in similar contexts. “If they do it, we can too.”
Again, I’m making the call for their release for international human rights reasons and for the prevention of injustice against the non-religious in the future.
The cases of Abdul Waheed, Rana Nouman Rafaqat, and Anwaar Ahmad, who faced similar charges, show a pattern of misuse of blasphemy laws in Pakistan. This is about universal justice rather than particular justice benefitting one and only one religion or the religious in general against the minority non-religious in particular. A culture with aspects of a beautiful religious aesthetic could be matched by its adherence to international norms.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/19
Rana Nouman Rafaqat or Ayan Shah, as with Abdul Waheed, has been the victim of religious legal injustice. Injustices against those who do not adhere to the dominant culture’s theology or dogma more broadly.
Whether Christians with a bent towards Catholic or Protestant theocracy, or Islamists with an intent for an Islamic theocracy, or Hindu nationalists subduing Indian democracy, or atheistic dogmatic politico-economic systems as with China, the narratives are the same. Crush individual freedom for collective perceived integrity of ideological structure.
He was detained in March of 2017 and received a death penalty on January 8th, 2021. This was a defining moment in Pakistani legal history because of the first for digital blasphemy cases, so-called.
Over here, in more privileged countries, some Christians will state, as I have heard. “Don’t bother religious people. Leave them alone. Why write on these cases?” Why? Because they matter. As with the crimes of the Canadian state in coordination with the Christian churches against indigenous peoples, accounting for crimes is positive, because justice is positive.
What we see in the case of Abdul Waheed and Rana Nouman Rafaqat is a distinct crime against the dignity and freedom of the individual. The freedom for personal expression in a global cosmopolitan space, the internet.
When some religious leaders declare non-believers condemned to an eternity of fiery torture, and then to imprisonment here, is it any wonder people speak up? They want equality, which then feels like persecution to the dominant groups.
It’s a perversion of justice, and then the reactionary element is to use the power of the State to remove outspoken non-religious people in order to make the others invisible: to make the society, in short, a massive safe space for religious snowflakes – to steal their concepts and phraseology.
Rana Nouman Rafaqat should be released without question, immediately.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/18
Blasphemy: A law to protect an All-Powerful, supernatural Deity from getting it’s feelings hurt.
-Ricky Gervais
Anas Hassan was imprisoned over allegations of activity associated with non-belief or non-religiosity. He was jailed in 2019. The allegation is running a Facebook page called “The Egyptian Atheists.”
State investigators claimed the Facebook page was promoting atheism. That they critiqued “divinely revealed religions.” Maybe, those prayers can help. Perhaps, the all-powerful can handle themselves. No, the all-powerful need State intervention.
The is the problem for freethinkers. Religious people and secular dogmatists use the police, the military, the State, the court systems, public opinion, any other devious and treacherous tool, to jail, kill, beat, and intimidate us.
I live in a relatively good society on this front. Yet, I have been harassed, stalked to my home, lost job opportunities, faced defamation, intimidation, and had to face bullying on the job. That’s religion and dogmatism on the mind.
For others, the cases are more severe. These individuals deserve a voice or some attention for a miscarriage of justice. The Economic Misdemeanors Court of Ameriya received Hassan’s case.
The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), established under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, is a federal commission with members appointed by the President, Senate, and House of Representatives leaders from both major political parties.
According to the USCIRF, the referral to the Economic Misdemeanors Court of Ameriya came under the following: “misusing social media” (Art. 27 Cyber-Crime Law, 2018), “assaulting Egyptian family values” (Art. 25 Cyber-Crime Law, 2018), “inciting hatred against a sect of people” (Art. 176 ECC),“publishing a religious text in a way that distorts its meaning” (Art. 161(1) ECC), and “inciting people to commit felonies through oral or visual means” (Art. 171 ECC), among others.
The Economic Misdemeanors Court of Ameriya sentenced Hassan to three years in prison with a fine of 300,000 Egyptian pounds. The final charge: “insulting religion and misusing social media.” What is more offensive: jailing an atheist Facebook page manager by the State or managing the atheist Facebook page?
Make no mistake, this is the same mentality and sense of privilege in many dogmatic Christian communities at home too. I keep the criticism unified here. If they could jail non-believers, then they would imprison non-believers – many of them.
I am reminded of an important interview with the most creative activists in the freethought sphere known to me: The Satanic Temple. I conducted several interviews with them. One publication, “An Interview with Michelle Shortt (Chapter Head) and Stuart “Stu” de Haan (Spokesperson): The Satanic Temple (Arizona Chapter).”
I’ll quote the section of my interview with them in full below:
Jacobsen: You see this in those that don’t put the self first too. For instance, the current Catholic Pope—I believe Discordianism likes to joke that that’s the guy who thinks he’s the only Pope—basically, he is liberalizing much of, not necessarily church doctrine but, perception in the public eye of the Catholic Church. He’s even meeting with the leader of the second largest sect of Christianity.
250-300 million, which is the Eastern Orthodox Church, they met with the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, in Cairo of all places! There are times of meetup, I guess. But when you were talking about alternative places for people who don’t really find themselves buying majoritarian mythologies very much, two things came to mind.
One was a United Church of Canada Minister. For context, the United Church of Canada is probably considered the most liberalised Christian church in Canada. I use it as a benchmark. Whatever is controversial to them, it is what Christianity will allow in this country. Not sure about America, things are different in America. The minister’s name is Gretta Vosper.
She lost her faith while in the church. She went from the progression of theist to deist to atheist. Her congregation were fine with the minister. Recently, late 2016, she was under review for her suitability for being in the church. She was giving – for that particular group – moral lessons. Another case I was thinking about was the secular church in, what some would consider the equivalent of the Bible Belt in America, Calgary, Alberta.
So I think there are ways this stuff is cropping up more, and more. And it is heartening to hear this. Media representation is interesting. The United States has very powerful public relations, previously termed propaganda, industry. When I watch interviews with Lucien Greaves, for instance, there’s talking over him. There’s stereotypes. There’s not taking him seriously.
Any bad journalistic practice. He undergoes. Is there a bettering trend in the representation of the media of Satanism?
de Haan: No.
Shortt: No. A Fox News thing posted an article for our veterans’ memorial in Minnesota. First line: “Devil Worshippers Erecting Monument in Bell Plains.”
de Haan: It’s like they won’t even give the courtesy of a Google search, sometimes.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
de Haan: If you want to see how we’re treated personally, you can Google it. A councilman in Phoenix, Arizona compared us to ISIS. Michelle and I have personally been called terrorists by public officials. We’ve been called bullies, as they tell us to go to hell.
Jacobsen: These would be the same person, same personality type, that would bully you in work and then would play the victim.
de Haan: What we see in Christianity a lot is if they don’t get 100% of their way 100% of the time, they play the victim.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] of course.
de Haan: That they’re being persecuted. Part of what we do is expose this. I think a lot of stuff people don’t realize is going on until you have someone who comes up, and who is an easy standard to call the ‘wrong religion’.
Shortt: We definitely do not see them being any fairer in their representation of us at all, to answer the question. In fact, almost anything like pizzagate. Or the satanic panic being underway with religious freedom now being the thing. It’s going to happen.
de Haan: Moral panics are on the rise. It is a bit concerning. As they are calling it in the Trump Era, the Post-Fact Era, the facts simply do not matter anymore. What makes you maddest? That’s the truth. You see the things like pizzagate. Where a pizza parlour, they say they’re going to have children sacrifices in the basement. In 2017, this is a throwback to the McMartin babysitter case, which happened in the 80s.
You’re seeing stuff like this happening. Luckily, you have debunking of this pretty quickly. People know about Snopes, and so on. Michelle and I have been the subject of conspiracy theories in Phoenix, in our own cities. There are websites slandering us personally. It is what we deal with, especially if you’re in a leadership position.
And I write and say these things not as a representative of an organization, though I have been involved in freethought organizations, but as a concerned individual about a lack of universality of ethical application.
The abuse of purported traditional transcendent religious ethics in place of international secular human rights. Where, in the former, individuals who do not adhere to the dominant religion become second-status citizens.
The non-religious and other religions become bound to this religious outlook. While, in the latter, everyone gets the same treatment under the law, in theory, because of the universal application of the law without regard for parochial demographics or specific religious lenses.
It’s the sense of legal and moral entitlement identified and experienced in the midst of public abuse and intimidation by de Haan and Shortt. Brave people, like them, make a mark and take the hits many of us fear even within family – let alone in public, at work, or in mass media.
Almost always, I speak as an individual on numerous matters and not as a collective representative; unless, it’s explicitly stipulated. If I am working with a group, individual, or organization, which have been and continue to be enormous, then it’s entirely on a voluntary basis.
These cases of mistreatment of the non-religious happen all over the world with only the difference in severity and type of mistreatment. Hassan’s case was upheld in the Economic Misdemeanour Appeals Court in Alexandria on June 21, 2020 and an appeal was rejected on February 10, 2022 in the Court of Cassation.
Anas Hassan’s imprisonment for his activities on the Facebook page, ‘The Egyptian Atheists’, represents a grave infringement on the fundamental right to freedom of expression.
Hassan’s conviction for ‘insulting religion and misusing social media’ is in stark contrast to international human rights standards, which Egypt is obliged to uphold.
Given the completion of his sentence duration, the continued imprisonment of Anas Hassan is unwarranted and he should be immediately released.
He should be released unconditionally.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/18
‘Ayaz Nizami’ or Abdul Waheed has been a case for several years for me. It’s a story of ongoing persecution of the non-religious out of Pakistan, where others such as Saba Ismail and Gulalai Ismail were able to escape.
I’ve followed this case since its start, as I was supposed to do an interview with ‘Ayaz’ at the time. Then he was taken in. I wrote on and off, on Waheed’s case, especially as things became progressively worse.
“My Recent Correspondence with ‘Ayaz Nizami’ – #FreeAyazNizami,” “Interview with Fauzia Ilyas – President, Atheist & Agnostic Alliance Pakistan, “On Justice and Fairness: Ayaz Nizami & International Company,” “Do Justice and Let the Sky Fall: #FreeAyazNizami, Free Abdul Waheed,” “Ayaz Nizami Still Needs Help in Pakistan,” “‘Ayaz Nizami’ Needs Far More Attention,” and “Free Ayaz Nizami.” There might be other articles.
Waheed was a Pakistani blogger and Vice President of the Atheist & Agnostic Alliance Pakistan. He was arrested on the 24th of March, 2017. At the time, I was writing for the British magazine, Conatus News. The magazine is gone, but the case is alive.
The allegation against Waheed was blasphemy with the potential for death penalty as an accompanying charge. This became a reality in early January of 2021. If a religious person wants a penalty for a religious law, then they can go right ahead for themselves.
However, if secular person commits an imaginary crime, from their point of view, as in offending a purported deity with a thin skin, then the religious person has no right to impose those religious legal standards on the secular person. Yet, this is the reality for millions of people around thre world.
Waheed simply amounts to one such case. An individual who has to undergo the trauma and injustice of simply not adhering to a belief in a dominant religion of a society. That’s it. So much undue and unnecessary suffering and loss of quality time in life and a time of a life due to religious privilege to persecute.
Others bloggers suffered the same fate as Waheed. #FreeAyazNizami was a trending hashtag on Twitter (now X). This should become a reality again and even more widespread for the justice and freedom of a critical thinker paying the price for freedom of expression. We should not give up on Abdul Waheed or ‘Ayaz Nizami.’
I haven’t, as he deserves justice: so freedom, an apology, and a payment for suffering incurred.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/16
Motherf*cker was wrong about everything else.
-Richard Pryor speaking on his late father
My message to younger people trapped in a community of Christian dogmatists, or other ideologues is straightforward: you are not alone. Your path will be more difficult. Your allies will be unlikely, and the path to freedom will be a fight upstream, against the grain, and difficult with costs in time, money, and opportunities. Such is the world, your world. Sooner you come to terms with the world as it is, the better. Expect tough truths.
Find the others.
Don’t give up. Keep going.
The condescension, the assumptions, the negative affect, the bullying, the harassment, the siloing, and ostracism are facts of life in many Christian communities, even in Canada. The Christian population, by my updated projects, should reach less than half of the general population somewhere in 2024. Nonetheless, if they’re non-liberal denominations, you should understand secondary status in community. Expect social problems.
Keep going. Don’t give up.
Hard-won fights of prior freethinkers provide the mental, social, and professional wiggle room felt now. It was worse before; it is better now. You’ll have to work as hard to keep the gains and harder to continue to new frontiers of equality. That’s the nature of carving a territorial water. If you are reading this, then you are, likely, well on a trod path of early hardship. Only highly unusual people persist in isolation. Expect weird friendships.
Don’t give up. Keep going.
You were born into a winning fight as the just and fair society is the one seen in human rights norms and democratic governance. These are flexible in the manner of plurality. The monochrome visions of theocratically oriented individuals do not hold fast against these forces. Freethought is a mental stance seen most prominently in the secular while manifesting in liberal religious traditions’ leaders too. Expect justice when earned.
Keep going. Don’t give up.
You feel out of place because you are out of place. Your feelings are valid. Simply because an older person holds a view doesn’t mean it’s right. It means it’s based on more data from life experience, and life experience can be misleading. A young creationist becoming an old creationist is still an ignorant person on the biological sciences in the big picture. Time does not necessitate the correctness of views. Expect scientific ignorance norms.
Don’t give up. Keep going.
The central points are the preponderance of evidence and the logical structure of arguments to support views. The soundness and validity of the arguments. The alignment with the preponderance of the best evidence to date. Respect for expertise in a time of mass specialization because human knowledge outstrips any single mind. A melding of these with compassion. That’ll get you far more internal freedom. Expect self-deception.
Keep going. Don’t give up.
Find the others.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/15
Miriam Alden is the Founder, CEO, and Creative Director of Brunette the Label and the Founder & CEO of Brunette Showroom. She’s a fashion industry entrepreneur with a focus on equine fashion. Recently, she was featured in a Vancouver Sun article entitled “Equestrian style: The enduring allure of the ‘horse girl’ esthetic,” which made a bit of a splash in the local horse community with Vanity Fair declaring 2022 the Year of the Horse Girl. Here, she talks about her experience and growth as a person and a fashion entrepreneur.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we are here with my first equestrian fashion brand interview, Miriam Alden of Brunette the Label. How did you get involved in fashion? Did this start with Janis (Alden) in any way?
Miriam Alden: It started when a girl walked past me in a t-shirt about 20 years after my friends and I made it in high school. There was a football team in my high school. We made t-shirts to support the team. I saw a girl wearing one. It was about 20 years later. I realized that the t-shirt I made in grade 10 or 11 had continued for 20 years. I think that was probably the beginning. But really, the reality of it is that I honestly wanted to be a competitive equestrian. It was the goal. I wanted to do it. I worked at a farm mucking stalls from 9 years old to help subsidize the costs because it wasn’t affordable for my family. I worked to do it, and towards it, my whole life. Until about 20, I realized. It wasn’t something I wanted to do. I fell out of love with the idea of that as my career. I still had a love of the animal. At that point, I decided it wasn’t the direction I wanted to go into.
I took a break for a while. I hung out. I retired my horse that I loved so much. It was either sell her so that I could buy something else to continue or keep her and retire – take a break. Because I couldn’t find another horse. I decided to keep her. I kept her until she was shy of 26. She died the day before her 26th birthday. I was 30. We were four years apart. I took a break for probably ten years from riding and about 4 or 5 years working and finding my next direction. I always wanted to work in fashion. I didn’t know exactly where I wanted to go. I went to business school at BCIT. It was a business and marketing program. I talked about why I wanted to work in fashion. They suggested that I don’t work in fashion because, typically, it is a low-paying industry. My dad wanted me to sell airplanes. There were so many different things.
I was in BCIT and did a practicum at a radio station because I wanted to get into media. Ultimately, my instinct of wanting to work in fashion didn’t go away for me. That has driven almost every decision I have made in business today. I ended up going and applying for a sales job at a showroom. What is kind of cool is that while I was in school and before that, I did modelling. I made these modelling appointments for working with retailers. I loved the business side of fashion. I was thinking about everything I could do that would be successful for those stores. I wanted to do fashion. I wasn’t quite sure, but kind of everything. I did fashion writing. I used to have a column in local magazines. I did styling for magazines as well as for people. I did writing, fashion styling, and wholesale. After school, I got a job in a showroom.
I worked for about a year there. They brought me up and then laid me off. I worked at a barn to return to the sales job when they needed me again. Then, I started from the bottom. I loved business fashion. I loved the idea that we could grow with our customers and help them be successful. I always believed there was room for everybody. There is this collaborative thing. I worked for somebody for five years. I travelled. It was full circle.
When I moved back here from the US, one of my riding trainers was a woman named Sandy, who ended up being the sales manager for the brand that I got hired for. So, she already had a vested interest in me and helped me learn a lot about the manufacturing side of business. She’d bring me to all the trade shows. It’s funny. She is at the tail end of working in the industry. It is cool. It is a bit of a full-circle moment for both of us. She helps me. She came on when I came back from maternity leave to get the business restructured. It’s been cool. I’ve been there for five years. I decided to start my own business. I asked my boss if they wanted to partner with me. I didn’t have any money to offer. I don’t know why he would want to say, “Yes.”
So, he ultimately decided that it wasn’t the right choice – they had a family business going on for 50 years. What they did do was let me start my business there while I was training my replacement; for about six months, I stayed training my replacement and started my own business on the side. I didn’t have anything to start it; I didn’t have any business starting a business. Other than the fact that I was passionate about it. I was lucky to be able to continue working there. It was nice of them to let me do that. On October 1st, 2009, I left and started Brunette Showroom, my first business. I had Brunette Showroom. It started with no name brands. I started selling pashminas out of my car and started all of these other side hustles to help me self-fund the business.
Ultimately, I got hired with my first big brand after about a year. I grew from there. It became one of the biggest Western Canadian showrooms there. We carried all sorts of brands like Quiksilver Women. We grew that for five years. Then, after about five years, I decided I wanted to build a brand around my showroom. This was before inclusivity was a topic of conversation in the fashion business. We started hosting media events talking about the brand value of the business. It was where “Babes Supporting Babes” started. We made a sweatshirt for the media events: “Brunette is the new black.”
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Alden: One of my retailers, my business, was Brunette the Showroom because my name is not easy. It was a tagline for the showroom. It was about new beginnings as a company. One of my retailers said they could sell that. So, I made 12 sweatshirts, then 24 sweatshirts, then 48 sweatshirts. Then, it was a slow and steady growth. It will be ten years for Brunette the Label in February (2024). We are in our 14th year and are heading into the 15th next year.
Jacobsen: Congratulations!
Alden: Thank you.
Jacobsen: This all started with cleaning stalls, as you noted at the start of the narrative.
Alden: Yes, I was cleaning stalls at 9.
Jacobsen: I see this with many moms at the current barn. When I interviewed Lynne Foster, she also noted the same about her two daughters. They had to work.
Alden: Yes, Tiff and I worked together.
Jacobsen: How did that relationship develop, the barn and Tiff?
Alden: She was a couple of years younger than me. Tiff and I began riding in North Vancouver. Then, I went to a different barn. She started to work for Thunderbird. Our parents would alternate days for driving to the barns. Both of us were in the same situation. It wasn’t super affordable for us, our parents, to ride. So, we both had to work to be able to do it. We are both still very close now, working very hard.
Jacobsen: How have you seen her trajectory into the #1 show jumper (in the country)? How did that help build a relationship? The one from their personal lives into one more professional, with Brunette the Label being part of her brand of herself.
Alden: It’s not totally. Honestly, we’re just really good friends and support each other. We’re both working hard to build our dreams parallel together. They’re not cohesive businesses.
Jacobsen: How do you gauge the interests of style and aesthetic of your audience and your target market, and then develop the series of clothes for them?
Alden: We do collections four times per year. I just finished designing Fall/Winter ’24. I learned over time that I have to believe in what I am making, or it doesn’t work. My brand was the lifestyle of “Babes supporting Babes.” It is a community. A lot of people support the brand and live the lifestyle. Then, as we grew, the brand grew into a fashion brand. We have launched into new categories like knitwear and outerwear. Sometimes, some things don’t hit initially because they are new to the brand. But it is something I genuinely believe in. My brand is horse aesthetic, but it is also clothing for everyone. My goal is to be a clothing brand that makes people feel good.
When you go in, there are extra smalls and XXL. It is meant to be a brand that is wearable by everybody. Whether you love fashion or want something cute to wear, it is what I am trying to develop. It combines my and my brand aesthetic, and means a lot to me.
Jacobsen: What is the horsegirl aesthetic?
Alden: 2022 was the year of the horsegirl aesthetic. My brand has always carried a lot of equestrian elements to it. I ride in our clothes. Many of our people who support Brunette the Label the most are horse people. We use it in graphics. I use horses in a lot of my inspiration. The country lifestyle, especially in the current collection, is about knitwear. You can wear it. It’s cozy. It has a country vibe and is cozy, comfy, and wearable clothing.
Jacobsen: How are the growth patterns for a fashion business with a niche set forth with a horse-girl aesthetic? Even though, it is for everyone. How do you get through the more emotionally difficult moments?
Alden: [Laughing].
Jacobsen: As with any business, input for income may not be as high as the output. So, you have to ride that low wave while waiting for the next round of income generation.
Alden: It is really difficult. Being an entrepreneur is difficult; I am probably working 18 hours daily. Covid was an interesting time. It gave everybody a shift in their business structure, especially for us at the fashion level. Our manufacturing factories closed. We had to come back and do things quite different. Being an entrepreneur is not for the faint of heart, it is hard. It takes a lot of work and a lot of sacrifice. Believing in yourself and knowing you are in the right direction is important, I think the only way out is through. It is knowing that you are doing what you are supposed to be doing. Everything has ups and downs in every business. It is more seasonal. When there are changes, when you make changes, there are always hard times. You can take the good with the bad and have to believe in what you’re doing. You have to work hard. Sometimes, that is not enough. For me, I find that I just need to keep going.
Jacobsen: What are your moments of oases?
Alden: When I am with my son, I can be present. My favourite thing is to sit in my house when it is black and dark outside in the morning and have coffee by the fire. When I am on my horses and with my family, I think you have to surround yourself with people who love you. That is when I feel my best.
Jacobsen: How do you balance having a family life – husband and child – with this hectic work schedule, especially over the last three months?
Alden: I’m not even sure if there is anything such as a balance. I am still trying to find it. I think, by nature, I am a “Yes” person. I don’t protect my time and energy as much as I should, ensuring I schedule time with my family. I don’t know if there is a balance. I will try to find out if there is. You can’t do everything. But I try to do everything. You pick your battles. Being with my son and my family is the most important thing. Figuring out how I do that and be there for him is hard.
Jacobsen: For successful businesswomen, are supportive partners an important facet of keeping that engine going?
Alden: If you are lucky enough to have a partner, it would be impossible if you didn’t have a supportive partner. Both my husband and I are entrepreneurs. We carry each other’s weight when we need it. I think you need support in your life if you are an entrepreneur. It is like any job. No matter your situation. It would be very difficult if you didn’t have a supportive partner. Luckily, I do. I think that I am grateful for that.
Jacobsen: How about your kid?
Alden: What about him?
Jacobsen: How do you find having a child with all this business in your life?
Alden: It is the best thing in the world. It makes everything worth it. Honestly, it makes everything feel a little less important. When it gets stressful, I have a healthy, beautiful boy. I am so happy.
Jacobsen: How do you find being a horse girl and having the horses amidst all this?
Alden: For me, nowhere else in the world makes me feel more like myself than I do when I am with my horses. I am the same girl as when I was nine years old. I am still in love with them. I am still so lucky. Not everybody gets to find a passion in their life. I found one. I get to go to one place. The one place in the world where, if I go, I don’t think about anything else. When I get on the horse, it is like meditation. I get to be so present. There isn’t much time that I get for myself. I get to be with my horses, be present, be aware of only that. When I leave, I feel recharged.
Jacobsen: Do you find yourself leaning more toward books in those quiet moments with a coffee and your family? Or do you find yourself more as someone who flips on the television for a show?
Alden: I am a book girl. I like to watch a Netflix show before bed. But I love reading. In the morning, I’m not a TV person. The TV is not on in our house. We are not a TV family. I love reading.
Jacobsen: What was the last book you read, the last show you watched before bed?
Alden: I just finished the David Beckham documentary. It is so good. Then, I love subtitled shows because I focus on them. The last book I finished was Lessons in Chemistry. I am reading the book I’ll Drink to That Right Now, which is about a New York personal shopper.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Alden: [Laughing].
Jacobsen: Where do you think this intense motivation for fashion comes from – not necessarily the focus on fashion? That story was told at the outset, but really, that drive. Where does that source itself?
Alden: It comes from riding. If a horse girl applies for a job, she’ll almost be guaranteed to get it. We are built. We have always had to be responsible. When I was younger, there was no going on family holidays when I had horses. We always had to show up. We always have to be responsible for a living being. Riding is super hard. No matter who you are, you can have so much in the whole world, but you can go into the ring… you have to work really, really hard. It doesn’t even mean that it will be successful. Every day, we become very resilient. You keep showing up. You have a super work ethic. Just because you have found someone passionate doesn’t mean you are good at it. You have to work super, super hard for it. I had to work at so many things about something I love and am passionate about. To be there, it is cohesive in some periods as an entrepreneur.
Jacobsen: What would you consider your motto?
Alden: Babes supporting babes.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] That was a softball. For young girls who might stumble upon this interview who are horse girls, what would you give as some words for them? It doesn’t have to be a warning. It doesn’t necessarily have to be advice or something polyannish – just words for them.
Alden: Something, for sure, which I am trying to follow now. If it is not an absolute “Yes,” it is a “No.” Your body and instincts mostly know. Our intuition is our superpower. If you feel something is right, not emotionally or physically, you just feel it in your bones, then it’s probably right. Things that are authentic work and authentic things are way more challenging because the world works like that. If you are doing something you are meant to do, doors open for you. But you need to work hard while doing it. It cannot be, “I want to do this.” Every overnight success is ten years in the making. It takes a lot of work to get you where you want to go within reason – coming from a privileged place. I know my privilege. I know how lucky I am to have everything I have. I am very privileged. There is a tightrope. You just need to keep going.
Jacobsen: Miriam, despite the hectic schedule you’ve been going through over the last months, I appreciate taking a little time to be the first equestrian fashion interview.
Alden: You’re welcome, Scott. I’ll probably see you tomorrow.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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Law makes percept: Percept from laws of thought in principles of existence; both construct valence reciprocity in Nature.
See “Cognition.”
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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What is Law without a frame?: Is the law the frame or the frame the law? Is descriptor percept or the reverse?
See “Law makes percept.”
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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There’s a sense: in which linguistic representation is a delimit of mathematical and logical algorithms; where, speech is sub-.
See “Self.”
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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The neverafter: Of course, I loved you; yet, you chose great fame; a reflection eternal, so a person isn’t a mere mirror.
See “Younglove.”
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Ablaye Cissoko: is a genius and a gem; and so little known and underappreciated as an artist, if only, if only, to the kora.
See “Sing.”
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Never Forget: Your final duty will always be to yourself prior to death; thus, you should prepare appropriately.
See “Words and deeds.”
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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“You’ve lived like a monk for a decade.”: Longer, but a curse of temperament becomes blessing in time; life has no template.
See “.”
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Emotions: the emotional processing system requires periodic rest to properly function; another reason for feelings’ variety.
See “Evolve.”
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Yes, I believe there was concern that Canada’s Pfizer supply might diminish in the next two to twenty days, impacting the timing for the second shot. Consequently, it seemed prudent to opt for Moderna instead. The difference between them is negligible; both have similar efficacy and are mRNA-based. Recently, my sister and I enjoyed a small outing together. The place was bustling. On another note, I’ve successfully paid off my student debts this month, which is quite a relief. Presently, I’m exploring various graduate schools, including the University of Iceland, so there’s a lot to consider at the moment. Today marks the start of a new job for me.
Unknown Interviewee: Can you tell me more about your current academic pursuits? What are you focusing on?
Jacobsen: Currently, I’m studying philosophy and psychology. Statistics or American Studies seem interesting to me. The program there is relatively brief, lasting about a year and a half. Plus, the education is free. Iceland seems like an exciting place to live. I recall an event back in late May or early June of 2019. I was running for the position of secretary-general in a young humanist organization and won the vote. That coincided with the General Assembly of the Icelandic Humanist Association, Humanists International, Community International, and the European Humanist Federation. It was a five-day event brimming with activity. I had the opportunity to meet several notable individuals, like Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor. It was quite overwhelming, mingling with these prominent figures. I remember feeling out of place, as it was my first time travelling to Europe—though my European friends don’t necessarily consider Iceland as part of Europe.
Unknown Interviewee: That seems to be a point of contention for some.
Jacobsen: Indeed, during that time, the president of Iceland delivered a lecture to a group of us, about 30 to 50 individuals from the main body of young Humanists international. We were amidst a significant rebranding process that lasted about two years. You might be familiar with the standardization across Humanist organizations globally. Being part of this transitional phase was chaotic, but ultimately rewarding. Now, everything is more structured, including a new role for a youth coordinator. I somewhat envy the younger generation joining now; they have a more established framework. My journey through various roles within the organization, from treasurer to vice president and then secretary-general, involved navigating numerous changes. Starting in an organization without a solid structure requires more effort and can be more stressful.
There were also some neglected aspects of international Hanism that we had to address. But, the experience was enriching. The president, for instance, gave an insightful lecture. The attendees were quite diverse, including individuals from Belgium, Germany, Canada, and the United States. It was an exceptional experience. Later, visiting the graduate student office in Iceland, I felt a strong inclination to study there. Alongside my academic pursuits, I’ve been focusing on journalism and gradually building my writing career. Now that I’m debt-free, I feel it’s time to take my academic endeavours further.
With so many things happening, my new job has been a great addition. I’m working full-time and have two part-time jobs—one in a restaurant and the other in event coordinating. So, there’s a lot on my plate right now. This busy schedule has led to limited contact with many in the secular community, even as I continue my publishing work.
Unknown Interviewee: The situation was quite remarkable because I know Canada was very stringent with their quarantine measures.
Jacobsen: Absolutely, that’s true.
Unknown Interviewee: People were saying, “Oh my gosh, communist Canada doesn’t let anyone go out.”
Jacobsen: Many do have that perception.
Unknown Interviewee: And I’m thinking, “They’re handling it better than us. We have like half a million people dead. What are they talking about?”
Jacobsen: Yes, even if you consider the proportions.
Unknown Interviewee: They’re offering the vaccine for free everywhere, and yet people are reluctant to get it.
Jacobsen: That’s a classic example of American misinformation networks and conspiracy theories.
Unknown Interviewee: It’s astonishing. Over here, people are saying, “Oh, they’re injecting a virus so we’ll die from cancer.” And I’m thinking, “Why would the government spend so much money on vaccines just to make us die from cancer in winter and then pay for our cancer treatment?”
Jacobsen: By American conspiracy theory standards, that’s relatively mild. American conspiracy theories…
Unknown Interviewee: Absolutely. Some people are even talking about microchips being implanted.
Jacobsen: Oh yes, that’s an extension of a paranoia that’s been around for at least a decade about being microchipped. But when it comes to Americans, I remember a survey from maybe 2019, which looked into seven major irrational beliefs: UFOs, Bigfoot, Atlantis, the devil, an afterlife, telekinesis, and psychic powers. Out of those seven, five percent of Americans believe all of them, or at least some of them. At least half of the Americans believe in some of these. It’s ambiguous how this plays out, but some beliefs seem benign. Like, someone believing in UFOs doesn’t necessarily impact their day-to-day life. However, other beliefs can be more serious, influencing crucial health decisions for themselves or their children.
And now, with the national federal government vaccine campaign, it’s going to take a significant amount of time to counteract those beliefs. Plus, we still have the tragedies of the past to contend with. The number of deaths due to the coronavirus is probably the largest compared to any other flu, not sure if per capita, but certainly in terms of total numbers.
Unknown Interviewee: There were thousands of people dying every day. When I saw the numbers, I couldn’t believe it. It’s more than in any other war. Seriously, the situation almost made us look like Nazis. The most concerning part was that most of the deceased were African-American, followed by Hispanic people. This highlights the stark inequalities in health care access. It’s evident that those at the top of the system have advantages, while others don’t have the same access. This pandemic has exposed the shortcomings of our healthcare system. Activists have long pointed out that African-Americans often have the worst jobs, leading to poor healthcare access because of their inability to afford it. Similarly, Hispanics, especially those without documentation, can’t even apply for insurance. Consequently, many avoid hospitals due to the exorbitant costs. For example, my sister, who works in daycare and contracted COVID, received a bill of seven thousand dollars for just one night in the emergency room without being hospitalized. It’s outrageous, especially for someone with a job like hers. I can’t imagine the situation for those without insurance. People would rather risk death than face a $7000 bill.
I was fortunate to receive the vaccine early, in December. I’m in the military, so we were prioritized. I contracted COVID on January 7th, despite being vaccinated on December 28th. My job in the prison system requires regular COVID testing, as we’re considered essential, like nurses, due to our work with inmates. After contracting COVID, I only experienced mild symptoms like a stuffy nose and fever. However, the second vaccine dose was tougher; I had severe body aches and a high fever, but it lasted only about twenty-four hours. I advise everyone to prepare for the aftermath of the second shot – stock up on groceries and ready-to-eat meals, as you won’t feel like doing much. My 13-year-old daughter, who had both Pfizer shots, only had a mild fever but was otherwise fine. It seems to vary from person to person.
Jacobsen: Yes, the point of life is to keep living.
Unknown Interviewee: I’m excited about this interview. It’s fun, and we’ll see how it goes.
Jacobsen: Eva would be a great guest, given her broad leadership perspective. If the president of an organization speaks, it typically carries authority. Before we start today, do you have any questions for me?
Unknown Interviewee: What topic are we covering today? I just did an overview of our activism in Latin America. There’s been a lot happening there.
Jacobsen: We should focus on the first half of 2021 in Latin America. I remember we discussed the distinction between South Central America and Latin America based on language. Let’s clarify that right from the start. Then we can delve into defining Latin America and explore the current happenings there.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publisher: In-Sight Publishing
Publisher Founding: March 1, 2014
Web Domain: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com
Location: Fort Langley, Township of Langley, British Columbia, Canada
Journal: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal
Journal Founding: August 2, 2012
Frequency: Three (3) Times Per Year
Review Status: Non-Peer-Reviewed
Access: Electronic/Digital & Open Access
Fees: None (Free)
Volume Numbering: 12
Issue Numbering: 1
Section: B
Theme Type: Idea
Theme Premise: “Outliers and Outsiders”
Theme Part: 29
Formal Sub-Theme: None.
Individual Publication Date: December 15, 2023
Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2024
Author(s): Tami Davis
Author(s) Bio: None.
Word Count: 2,008
Image Credit: None.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369–6885
*Original publication here during September 29, 2019.*
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Keywords: Acts, Advocates for Jehovah’s Witnesses Reform on Blood, Bible, blood policy, Christian, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Tami Davis, transfusions, Watchtower Society.
Personal Research on Blood Transfusions May Have Saved My Life
Before telling you my story, you should know that I was born to Jehovah’s Witness parents and baptized at twelve-years of age. Like all Witnesses, I was well-versed in the No-Blood doctrine. My parents had practice sessions with me and my brother, where we’d go over how we would respond to a doctor or nurse who tried to force a transfusion on us. We faithfully watched all of Watchtower’s blood videos and answered the questions in the Kingdom ministry review parts.
We were well-schooled in the belief that it was wrong to accept a blood transfusion or any of the major components—whole red blood cells, white blood cells, plasma, and platelets. I was taught that the life of the person was in the blood as Acts 15:29 states, “keep abstaining from blood.” [1]
I never knew for sure while growing up whether I’d have to refuse blood in a life-or-death situation. But, I had a nagging fear: Would I be strong and brave enough to resist or rip the IV line out of me as the JW children did in the Awake! magazine published when I was eleven?
In 2010 and in my twenties, I began to research doctrines of Jehovah’s Witnesses and realized that not all of it matched up with what I read in the Bible. However, my husband was (and still is) a devout believer, along with his family. (My parents and brother left years ago.) This made me feel obligated to continue attending meetings with him, from time to time. Ultimately, in 2016, I stopped altogether and attended my last meeting.
But little did I realize that someday I would need a blood transfusion at a relatively young age; the story I am about to tell you.
In April of 2019, my husband and I were happy to find out that we were expecting our fifth child. Having had four normal and uncomplicated pregnancies, we expected this one to be the same. Unfortunately, after twelve weeks an ultrasound revealed that our baby had no heartbeat and I was advised to take the drug Misoprostol to induce a miscarriage at home.
I inquired from my obstetrician about the risks of Misoprostol. Since we live in a small town 25 minutes from a community hospital, I was concerned about the possibility of excessive bleeding. The doctor assured me there was little danger of heavy bleeding and that I was a good candidate for this medication.
I took my first dose of Misoprostol on Thursday morning and within an hour started bleeding. I had no pain, just constant bleeding. While this was emotionally very difficult, I really thought it would be an easy physical experience. But I was wrong. Around an hour later, I became very concerned because I had just passed a significant amount of blood.
This happened about four times and I was now feeling dizzy and weak. Fortunately, my husband was home and told me to lie down. On my way to the bed, I started seeing stars, grasped the wall and collapsed! My husband helped me walk to the bed, although I cannot remember a thing after falling down. While he called 911, I whimpered “I’ll be okay, I just need to rest.”
Shortly afterward, the ambulance arrived and rushed me to a small nearby hospital.
I was taken to the trauma room and then, oddly enough, left alone for about ten minutes (my husband was making sure our children were being taken care of). During this time I was still bleeding and feeling very poorly. Then I started crying, thinking of my children growing up without a mother, knowing I wasn’t ready to die. I thought about how much I loved life, and how much time I had wasted worrying about my Jehovah’s Witness family, trying to please them.
Finally, a nurse arrived and started preparing to insert an IV. Alarmingly, I again began to go unconscious, although I could hear the urgency in her voice, “Marilyn, I need you here, NOW!” While I was aware of the commotion and could feel needles being inserted into my hands and arms, I could not move nor speak.
It was the most frightening experience of my life; I really thought I was dying. Yet, as my body began to absorb the fluids and oxygen, I was finally able to open my eyes and talk faintly. I was shaking uncontrollably and the nurses later told me that my face was white as a sheet and my extremities were freezing cold.
At last, my husband arrived and consulted with the doctor. He confirmed that I was just hanging on and would have likely died if not for arriving at the hospital when I did.
After an ultrasound, I was transferred to a larger hospital. When I first arrived, I felt myself slipping in and out of consciousness several times. As I was being questioned by the nurses and obstetricians, I became dizzy and nauseated. Then, while too weak to even lift my head, I vomited. My blood pressure fell dangerously low to 70/40 and my hemoglobin dropped to 7.1.3 Even though I had been given medication to stop the bleeding, it hadn’t fully stopped. [2]
Since I was symptomatic, the doctor highly recommended a blood transfusion, because allowing my hemoglobin levels to drop even further could cause organ damage or shutdown, as well as damage to my eyes and extremities. [3]
A few years prior, I had researched blood transfusions (although not enough as I would later realize) and agreed to a transfusion. As expected, my husband immediately began challenging my decision and questioning the nurses.
Unapologetically, I told him I had done my research and I had no issues with accepting a blood transfusion. He left the room as the bag was being set up, although he came back and sat with me as the transfusion was finishing.
I spent the night in the hospital, still too weak to walk. The next morning my hemoglobin had dropped to 6.7, so I was advised to take another transfusion, which I did. I spent another night in the hospital and was released the following day. My total blood loss was estimated at two liters.
When I arrived home, my husband was still very upset that I had accepted the transfusions. We had several arguments, even though I was extremely weak and experiencing severe headaches and dizziness from the blood loss. Instead of resting and recovering, I was constantly worried about my husband getting upset with me, whether he would tell the elders on me and how I could help him see that I had not broken God’s laws.
My parents came to the house on Tuesday to help me. I saw my obstetrician for a follow-up later that day. My husband and I had another fight about blood on the drive there. For this reason, I asked the doctor for more details about my transfusion.
I discovered that I had been given packed red blood cells, not whole blood. When I told my husband this he seemed relieved (which speaks to the fact that most Witnesses do not fully understand the current doctrine and how many times Watchtower has changed this doctrine over the last few years). We also found out that I had retained tissue, so I spent another night in the hospital to have a D&C. [4]
This went well, so I could finally go home and recover.
Watchtower’s teaching on blood fractions was first announced in 2000, when I was about fifteen years of age. I remembered feeling like it didn’t make sense to me. Why was whole blood not permissible while parts of blood were? But since I didn’t want to die and trusted the Governing Body, I decided that I would accept blood fractions. To this day, I still don’t fully understand how Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are usually black-and-white thinkers, can say it’s wrong to accept whole blood but not the fractions of blood (100% of blood is permitted in fractionated form).
After this experience, I began doing even more research on blood transfusions. I was surprised to discover that whole blood transfusions were extremely rare. One nurse told me that in ten years of health care, she had never seen a whole blood transfusion given. As a Jehovah’s Witness, I had no idea that this was the case. This led me to research which components of blood were and were not allowed, according to Watchtower.
To me, it seems incredibly hypocritical to allow all of the components of red blood to be transfused at separate times but not at the same time. What Biblical basis does Watchtower have for allowing certain components to be transfused and not others? For example, hemoglobin, which is a part of red blood cells, is allowed and comprises 15% of total blood volume. White blood cells are not allowed, yet they only comprise about 1% of blood volume.
The information and charts on the ajwrb.org website were very helpful to me in understanding just how confusing and unbiblical the blood doctrine is. If Watchtower would yet again change their stance and allow all components of blood to be transfused at separate times, who knows how many thousands of lives would be saved! I shudder to think of the bloodguilt on the hands of those responsible for such an illogical doctrine.
I don’t know whether my blood transfusions saved my life. But I do know that I came close to dying. Had I not accepted those two transfusions, I was risking permanent damage and prolonging an already long and difficult recovery.
The hardest part of my story is that my husband still fully supports the blood doctrine. He refuses to see any other points of view and will not even look at the ajwrb.org website. Even seeing his wife at death’s door was not enough to prompt him into reexamining his long-held beliefs.
This shows how strong Watchtower’s hold is on its members. It’s hurtful to think that the Governing Body of Jehovah’s Witnesses teachings are more important to my husband than the life of the wife he deeply loves.
For now, all I can do is pray that one day my spouse will start to see all the negative implications of this terrible, harmful doctrine.
Footnotes:
Detailed explanation of the blood policy:
- “Each time the prohibition of blood is mentioned in the Scriptures it is in connection with taking it as food, and so it is as a nutrient that we are concerned with in its being forbidden.” Watchtower 1958 Sep 15 p.575
- “The blood in any person is in reality the person himself. … poisons due to personal living, eating and drinking habits … The poisons that produce the impulse to commit suicide, murder, or steal are in the blood. Moral insanity, sexual perversions, repression, inferiority complexes, petty crimes – these often follow in the wake of blood transfusion.” Watchtower 1961 Sep 1 p.564
- “God imposed this one restriction. They were not to consume blood.(Genesis 9:3,4)” Watchtower 2008 Oct 1 p.31
- “Does the command to abstain from blood include blood transfusions? Yes. To illustrate: Suppose a doctor were to tell you to abstain from alcoholic beverages. Would that simply mean that you should not drink alcohol but that you could have it injected into your veins? Of course not! Likewise, abstaining from blood means not taking it into our bodies at all. So the command to abstain from blood means that we would not allow anyone to transfuse blood into our veins.” Watchtower 2014 What Does the Bible Really Teach? p. 130
Blood Pressure:
Normal blood pressure range is 90/60 – 120/80. Severe hypotension can be life-threatening.
Hemoglobin:
Normal hemoglobin range for a female is 12.5 – 15.5. There is a higher risk of heart attack, congestive heart failure, or stroke with low hemoglobin levels.
D & C:
Dilation and curettage is a procedure to remove tissue from inside the uterus.
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Davis T. Personal Research on Blood Transfusions May Have Saved My Life. December 2023; 12(1). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/tami-davis
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Davis, T. (2023, December 15). Personal Research on Blood Transfusions May Have Saved My Life. In-Sight Publishing. 12(1).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): DAVIS, T. Personal Research on Blood Transfusions May Have Saved My Life.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 1, 2023.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Davis, Tami. 2023. “Personal Research on Blood Transfusions May Have Saved My Life.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 1 (Winter). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/tami-davis.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Davis, T “Personal Research on Blood Transfusions May Have Saved My Life.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 1 (December 2023). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/tami-davis.
Harvard: Davis, T. (2023) ‘Personal Research on Blood Transfusions May Have Saved My Life’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(1). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/tami-davis>.
Harvard (Australian): Davis, T 2023, ‘Personal Research on Blood Transfusions May Have Saved My Life’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 1, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/tami-davis.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Davis, Tami. “Personal Research on Blood Transfusions May Have Saved My Life.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 1, 2023, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/tami-davis.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Tami D. Personal Research on Blood Transfusions May Have Saved My Life [Internet]. 2023 Dec; 12(1). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/tami-davis.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen, or the author(s), and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors copyright their material, as well, and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/01
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What’s the most interesting thing happening in the U.S political situation right now?
Rick Rosner: All this stuff has surfaced about Trump really going to extreme lengths to hold on to the presidency using illegal means. He tried to issue some kind of order to have voting machines confiscated in Battleground States; states where the election was close. All this obviously illegal stuff and so far the justice department haven’t moved against Trump even though Trump is giving clear indication of illegality to a degree that hasn’t been seen in any other president. The Republican Party continues to get more a loathsome and accepting of racism. Biden said that he will be appointing a black woman to the Supreme Court, he hasn’t picked her yet. And the Republicans are going crazy saying “It’s going to be somebody who’s unqualified because you’re only choosing from a limited segment of all possible candidates.” Even though Reagan said he was going to pick the first woman to the Supreme Court and Trump said he was going to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court, they didn’t have any problem with that.
So you’re looking at racism to a degree that hasn’t been seen since the early ‘60s coming from the Republicans attempted election tampering. Things are a mess, nobody’s sure whether the House is holding public hearing into January 6th deal which into Trump’s illegality basically and a lot of other people’s. Nobody knows whether that will accomplish anything. 700 bit players have been arrested for participating in The Siege on The Capitol but a few big shots has been arrested nobody knows if they will be. Some people are urging patients other people are saying that Merrick Garland shouldn’t have been appointed attorney general because he’s too conservative in the old-fashioned sense, that he’ll hesitate to indict anybody who’s too big in the interest of some kind of propriety. So, everything kind of seems up for grabs right now.
Nazis marched on down the street in Orlando a couple days ago. Things seem kind of dire at the same time the quality of everyday life hasn’t been changed. And the shit that Republicans get worked up about remains kind of stupid non-serious. A school district in Tennessee decided that eighth graders can’t see the book Mouse which is a graphic novel about the Holocaust presented as cats versus mice or the cats are Nazis and the Jews are mice and there’s some mild rough language in it and one mouse you see naked and so on the basis of that this Tennessee school board decided the eighth graders shouldn’t be allowed to see it. So, that’s where we stand politically. Oh and Biden’s approval rating is almost at Trump levels of not goodness even though the economy is doing really well, even though Biden got 63% of the population fully vaccinated, it’s mostly just partisan animosity. We’re 10 months away from the midterms where the Republicans could take over the House and the Senate in which case they’ll shut down the investigations into the seditious action of Trump and the people around him. So yeah I think everything seems a little bit dire.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/31
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, you’re getting older, correct?
Rick Rosner: We all are. I’m older, yes.
Jacobsen: Okay, I mean colloquial not technical. How do your values change when you feel the sense of running out of time?
Rosner: Well, I’ve engaged in a lot of foolishness, with a lot of that foolishness involving just wasting precious time. We’ve published our books on Amazon and stuff but I’ve written big chunks of books and even had a book deal for like four days until that deal went away because the editor couldn’t convince the publisher to make to complete the deal. I’m going to be 62 in three months and I have yet to publish a book. I wrote a shitload of TV but that’s collaborative. My work in TV, there was some personal initiative but there was also a lot of just me being part of a team. We have a theory but I haven’t pushed it into the realm of completeness or legitimacy by throwing it at legit scholars. I’ve done a lot of shit that just eats time like bouncing bars for 25 years, stripping, art modeling, I’ve done a lot of foolishness; suing a game show ate a lot of time.
At the same time I am doing other stuff when I’m engaging in foolishness and taking a shitload of IQ tests. So, 30 tests times an average of, they didn’t all take 120 hours, but I’ve probably spent close to 2000 hours total on IQ test which is a full year of work. The last test I took, I turned it in a year ago. I think the deadline was December of 2020 but in the eight years that you and I have been talking with each other that’s really the only test I think I’ve turned in which may reflect that I just don’t have the patience or the time to waste spending 150 hours taking a super hard IQ test which is what it takes to do well on one of these insane tests plus I may no longer have the chops.
They say that on average people lose mental ability as they age or as they go from say 50 to 60 to 70. I don’t feel like I’ve lost mental ability and probably the ability to do well in IQ tests is a developed practiced ability which really wouldn’t degrade that much since at least partially in my case I learned skill. But in any case like there was an IQ test, a super hard one I started on about eight years ago and probably put 80, 90, or 100 hours in but didn’t reach enough correct answers I felt were correct for it to be worth my while to turn it in. And then I went back to it a couple months ago to see if I could come up with some more answers. I think I’ve pretty much abandoned it.
I’ve been working on a book that really I think has a better chance of getting a deal and being completed than maybe a couple of my other attempts. One problem I had with the books that I’ve tried to write that are autobiographical is that there’s some fucking over of other members of my family; that’s one issue. The book I’m writing is not really about me, it’s about a very smart dog. So I don’t have to worry about fucking over my family.
What I’m saying is that I’m maybe a little less foolish now that I’m in my 60s and have less time obviously than I did when I was in my 40s. So I’m hoping to do less time-consuming foolishness and maybe actually accomplish something. The book has in its various chunks which need to be organized into a sequential narrative; I’ve got many many tens of thousands of words like pushing a 100,000 words. I mean there’s the guts of a book there if I can knock them into shape.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/30
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Addendum to last session, go ahead.
Rick Rosner: It’s kind of known among people who know science fiction that the worlds presented in science fiction tend to like… when somebody sets a story in the future they set it way too close to now like I just happened to come across a Will Smith movie from 14 years ago maybe called I, Robot in which the world is newly flooded with helper robots and it’s set in 2035. So, say it was made in 2007; so they predicted that 28 years from then the world would be overrun with anthropomorphic robots and something like that may happen but it sure as fuck won’t happen in 2035.
A little twitter deal was made out of I think the world in the original Blade Runner took place in 2019. And so when 2019 actually happened everybody’s like oh yeah this is blade runner time and it happens a lot when you present a transformed world, you set it 20-30 years in the future and that much time passes and we’re still maybe 20 percent of the way to this transformed world when that date turns into reality. Just off the top of my head I’m thinking maybe if you set the robot world in 2035 that’s close enough that the viewers of 2007 can picture still being alive in 2035 and maybe you get an increased sense of wonder by kind of telescoping the time and time until all this amazing shit happens. When they said 2035 they showed Los Angeles of 2035 and you had monorails and some flying cars and a bunch of shit that will take 100 years to happen or may never happen.
We don’t give a shit about more than a hundred years from now. Maybe you make a movie set in the future more exciting by just making it slightly in the future 20 years or 30 years. There was a show I didn’t like called Altered Carbon that was 300 years in the future and it was bad because 300 years in the future humans still all looked like humans and were mostly interested in looking hot and fucking which I don’t buy for 300 years in the future. Sure, I mean fucking will be among the things that people still do but it won’t be… Anyway what else? Star Trek is 250-300 years in the future and people still look like people on an interstellar faster than light spacecraft; again, fucking unlikely.
So, I guess the point of this is we’re bad about predicting when things will happen and usually err on the side of having things happen too fast.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/30
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Do people care about the future? If so, why? If not, why not?
Rick Rosner: All right, the deal is that when politicians talk about climate change they talk about the world we’re leaving for our children and grandchildren. Nobody talks about great-grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren mostly because it would be ridiculous for somebody to start talking about great-great-grandchildren in a speech. It would just sound goofy but also do we really give a fuck about people, our descendants more than a few generations into the future? And I would say no, that we’re not practiced at picturing them and neither do we particularly care about them.
In the time of America’s founding fathers, they truly built this democracy and probably pictured the society that would flow from it if it worked but I think they didn’t particularly picture world technologically transformed or if they did picture changes they thought that the competent leaders in the future could make the changes though America has shown itself to only be like semi-competent at making those changes. They built the three-fifths compromise into the constitution that every black citizen of a state or every slave, I don’t know if it was specifically black or if it was slave, in terms of apportioning representatives and every black citizen was worth three-fifths of a person.
I think one of the ideas that went into them making that compromise was that it was maybe a stupid compromise and that they hoped and expected people to address it in the future. And then we have the second amendment which has turned out to be subject to intentional misunderstanding by people who try to sell guns. I mean I went off on a tangent. The deal is that during the time of the founding fathers, even though it was like three centuries past the beginning of the renaissance and then a couple centuries into the scientific revolution and the industrial revolution and all that, things still move slowly enough that the founding fathers could picture like an orderly progression into the future that wouldn’t significantly, at least in their imaginations that I’m assigning to them, that America would still be an agrarian country. We do farming, we do industry, we build bridges and railroads and beyond that I don’t think science fiction wasn’t a thing yet and few people over the history of humanity have done much predictive thinking.
Most of the predictive thinking, the science fiction-y type thinking; the vast majority happened after the beginning of the 20th century. But now things move fast enough that we know that the civilization a hundred years from now will be quite a bit different from the way it is now. Things will be wildly transformed and we don’t think about that in a serious way for the most part. A lot of people now do a lot of worrying about climate change and also worrying about the erosion of democracy but even with all that worry now about the future and maybe about AI, there’s not much of a market for serious thinking about the future. I don’t know if there are any colleges that teach a course in what the future will be like. I mean there are futurists but you don’t hear about them much and they’re probably mostly used to predict business trends and you don’t see serious attempts to present any kind of reasonable picture of the future besides little statistical snapshots like the life expectancy will rise to a 100 in developed countries.
The only people trying to paint entire pictures of the future are science fiction writers and most science fiction writers are just trying to write entertaining stories with any kind of actual prediction kind of being secondary. We don’t want to be bothered with the future and I don’t know that we really give that much of a shit about the world five generations from now; our great-great-great-grandchildren. Nothing in our culture suggests that we have a serious interest in more than 100 years in the future except for entertainment purposes.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/28
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Hypothetical or an inevitable; in either case, let’s say we understand human consciousness or human awareness more directly systematically and can replicate it. What does this do to our view of ourselves also something you brought up before which is what does this do to a sort of new mysticism that might rise? I was referring to as like the mysticism of mind.
Rick Rosner: So, people more than ever have an intuitive understanding that consciousness isn’t magic or transcendent or special because we see kind of analogs to the way we think with the way we interact with our tech and the way our tech does stuff and also because science is squeezed out a lot of the hocus pocus. At the same time people are still deeply committed to consciousness being magical and transcendent and special. I tweeted something a couple days ago saying that when we figure out how to replicate consciousness and we will, it’ll become a material good subject to being debased like every other material good. And some guy tweeted back ‘never going to happen’, which is just one guy but it’s not just one guy, it’s a lot of people. And it will when we figure out consciousness and when we start making things that are super smart whether or not they are conscious.
It’s already been disruptive. One of the reasons that America isn’t a political shambles has been due to the economic and social disruption from tech doing jobs that people used to do and by social media making us crazy in ways both really basic and then kind of sophisticated and it’ll get worse as our shit gets smarter. You know you could call it the big bumming out when we’re revealed to be just like trash meat in a world of engineered stuff that works and thinks as well as we do. This will be depressing and a lot of things will happen. Two of the things that will happen is one, people will turn to mysticism, religion that will offer solace in a world that has less wonder because we’ve duplicated consciousness. So, I guess we’ll turn to old religion and there will also be a lot of new mysticism offering comfort to specifically address the feeling of displacement when we start getting our ass asses kicked by the shit we’ve built. So, that’s thing one is turning to religion/mysticism.
Thing two is people will offer alternate “scientific” theories of consciousness that go up against what will be the standard theories of consciousness and a lot of these will be misunderstandings or semi-intentional bullshit analogous to what we’ve been talking about not on tape; intelligent design. Intelligent design was a purported theory of evolution that was really creationism dressed up to look like science and to look like it embraced evolution but it was really just to try to trick young impressionable or impressionable people I guess of all ages long enough for creationists to get their hooks in them. Similar shit will happen, with people will offer… they’ll say yes of course, consciousness is something that is created in the brain by information processing it does it in this way or they’ll say but or whatever and then the bullshit will start. And it’ll be as successful as intelligent design has been which is most people are like okay this is just a fucking way to shoehorn an agenda into schools or whatever. And so most people have time for this bullshit and then there it’ll capture a small fraction of the lunatic population and that’s all I got on this.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/28
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: With evolution gaining more acceptance in America and intelligent design facing setbacks, what’s your perspective on this shift towards mainstream scientific theories?
Rick Rosner: Most people lack a deep education in evolution. So, even if, as you suggest, a majority now believe in evolution, their understanding is likely superficial. You, having discussed evolution extensively and being familiar with alternative, non-scientific theories, know that there are many ways evolution can be misunderstood or misrepresented. A common error is teleological thinking, attributing purpose or desire to evolution.
Jacobsen: Like saying the human eye was designed for seeing, which incorrectly implies intentional design.
Rosner: Exactly, it’s challenging to eliminate such notions from our thinking. Moreover, the concept of ‘survival of the fittest’ has been politically distorted.
Jacobsen: Initially, it was used more as a social tool rather than a scientific concept.
Rosner: So, Darwin’s theory was co-opted, as you’re implying.
Jacobsen: I was actually referring to the intelligent design movement.
Rosner: Right, I was discussing ‘survival of the fittest.’
Jacobsen: My mistake, I misunderstood. Yes, ‘survival of the fittest’ has been misappropriated by some as a justification for social Darwinism, which is a misapplication of the concept. It’s meant to be understood in the context of long-term biological evolution, not immediate social dynamics.
Rosner: Precisely. My own perspective on evolution gets a bit speculative, and I haven’t verified this with experts, but I feel that mainstream evolution theory, except in the case of humans, doesn’t adequately consider individual agency. Let me explain. Humans can deliberately influence their own evolution and that of other species, as we’ve seen with selective dog breeding. We’ve created numerous dog breeds by controlling their mating to enhance certain traits. This demonstrates an aspect of evolution that goes beyond natural selection, incorporating human intention.
Jacobsen: Animal husbandry is an established practice. It’s based on an intuitive understanding of evolution and Mendelian genetics, even before these concepts were formally understood.
Rosner: Absolutely. To grasp the concept of breeding, both in animals and plants, one must understand that traits are inherited from parents. We’ve significantly altered plants like corn and tomatoes through selective breeding, essentially making them reproduce with chosen partners. The key idea is recognizing that mating leads to offspring inheriting traits, a concept that almost no species other than humans seems to understand. For instance, dogs don’t connect mating with producing puppies, nor do they select mates based on desired traits for their offspring. They lack the series of logical connections that would allow for intentional breeding. So, while this removes a degree of agency in most of nature, it doesn’t eliminate it entirely. It impacts breeding, but not all aspects of it.
I often think of this in terms of ‘jocks versus nerds’ throughout evolution, though this analogy applies more to sentient beings than to plants. In the animal world, you have those well-adapted to their environments (the ‘jocks’) and those less so (the ‘nerds’). My theory, which might not be unique but I haven’t encountered elsewhere, revolves around cognitive thrift. The brain, with its limited resources, aims to prepare for future scenarios, helping to model the world, predict outcomes, and make optimal choices. A well-adapted organism can afford to make safer, more conservative choices due to its fitness, thereby requiring less cognitive effort.
The things that come naturally to an organism, based on its evolved characteristics and adaptive comfort, can be likened to the stereotypical blonde football player in 1972, who effortlessly wins over the blonde cheerleader, at least in movies and, to some extent, in reality. Such individuals, being well-adapted, might not need to think too deeply about things; opportunities come to them easily. Then there are the ‘nerds’ – those who are spindly, club-footed, uncoordinated, short, among other things. They are compelled to think more due to their circumstances, especially in an era like 1972. I choose this year because it represents the height of the jocks versus nerds dynamic, though this began to change in the 80s and 90s with the rise of ‘nerd chic’ and wealthy nerds, somewhat eroding the traditional jocks-on-top scenario.
These ‘nerds’ had to take risks, which likely encouraged mental flexibility. They might have been forced to adopt alternate behaviors or simply had to scramble more, leading to more adaptable thinking. I speculate that there could be evolved mechanisms in the brain that facilitate different thinking styles. Or, it could be a result of learning – for instance, continual frustration might naturally lead to non-conservative thinking. This could be a fundamental aspect of feedback loops, or perhaps stress from not fitting into one’s environment triggers changes in brain function, like dendritic activity, leading to more original and flexible thinking.
Clearly, a crab won’t have the same level of mental flexibility as a human. A ‘nerdy’ crab might not display a vast array of behaviors, but it could be more adaptable than a ‘jock’ crab. We’ve discussed before how nerdy animals might develop alternative behaviors to survive. Animals with brains could retain and understand these behaviors to the extent of their cognitive abilities. Thus, each species could have its own culture, to some extent. We know that animals closely related to us evolutionarily can pass on culture – they can teach behaviors, unlike some other animals like birds and others. I’m not sure how much research has been done on the basis for animal culture, whether it’s purely learned behavior passed on or behavior that becomes instinctive over time. There’s a mix of learned and hardwired behaviors in different species, but generally, there’s some room for cultural development among animals.
The concept here is that animals, inherently unaware that they are selecting for specific traits through breeding, can inadvertently do so. Consider a ‘nerdy’ animal, one compelled into flexible behavior due to its less-than-ideal physical attributes. If this animal develops a new behavior that enables it to thrive, it could potentially enhance its reproductive opportunities compared to others who failed to adapt successfully. For instance, if a crab with a disadvantaged claw discovers a novel use for it, this behavior can become advantageous. Should this successful behavior be culturally transmitted within its group, it could shift the ecological niche in favor of this previously less-favored animal. This new behavior, once adopted, becomes a part of the adaptation process and is reinforced culturally.
This perspective isn’t commonly emphasized in discussions about animal evolution. Some evolutionists might consider the role of individual animals making breakthroughs that become culturally ingrained and, over generations, increasingly hardwired. However, I believe this aspect doesn’t receive enough attention. The implication is that such individual adaptations could accelerate evolution beyond what traditional survival-of-the-fittest concepts suggest, which typically focus only on the physically fit reproducing and the less fit struggling to do so, unless a mutation directly confers an advantage.
In conclusion, I think there needs to be more consideration of the agency of individual animals in their survival and how their unique actions can be adopted by the group and contribute to evolutionary change.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/27
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: It’s akin to programming a robot, like an AI on a satellite launched out of the solar system, to be content with its eventual degradation over millions of years. Ethically, you’d want this AI, which is managing the satellite, to be highly intelligent and at peace with its slow extinction as it moves away from the sun and loses energy. The question is, is it ethical to design such a consciousness, and I believe it’s acceptable since there’s no universal standard for what beings should desire.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In most cases, these areas or systems don’t involve a conscious ‘self’, so the ethical dilemma isn’t present.
Rosner: True, but the potential for consciousness exists.
Jacobsen: That’s not a certainty in every instance.
Rosner: Right, but consider Chris Cole’s prediction that by 2100, there could be a trillion AIs globally, with less than one percent possessing any level of consciousness. That’s a tiny fraction.
Jacobsen: So, the ethical challenges don’t apply to the vast majority of these AIs.
Rosner: Exactly, because AI doesn’t inherently mean consciousness. Ethical concerns are relevant only to those entities that possess consciousness.
Jacobsen: The level of awareness then becomes the key factor in determining ethical treatment. However, even now, we struggle with treating our own species well, despite relatively similar cognitive abilities. It’s likely that similar issues will arise with AI.
Rosner: It seems we need a ‘super platinum rule’: don’t create consciousnesses that are destined for misery. If you’re going to design a consciousness that’s disposable, you must ensure it won’t suffer from that disposability.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/27
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Increasingly insane conservative who likes to equate gender reassignment surgery which very few people have as a percentage; bottom surgery. A lot of people have top surgery and a lot of people who aren’t doing gender reassignment have top surgery. I mean a lot of people get their boobs messed with but anyway bottom surgery is a whole other thing but Lance being an asshole says “What if somebody wanted to have their arm cut off because they feel like their true self only has one arm?”
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Almost no one feels like that.
Rosner: No one feels like that, it’s an asshole argument but under the platinum rule if somebody wanted to do something like that, that kind of like is being nice to them letting them do something like that or is it getting them some help so they don’t want to do that? So, that’s where that issue arises but then you get even worse issues when you start building designer consciousnesses because I believe in the future we will have a bunch of AIs at varying levels of consciousness that don’t have a big stake in surviving past what they’ve been designed to do. There’s a bunch of ethical issues that’ll have to be worked out with that, like I’m a little appalled at salmon.
Jacobsen: Why are you appalled at salmon?
Rosner: I get appalled at certain evolutionary strategies or niches. To call it strategy is teleological but there’s a niche that you see it in octopuses, you see it in possums, and it make a shitload of you when you reproduce you have 50 babies. The octopuses live for two years, they spit out a shitload of them, they’re not very durable and they only last for two years because most of them get eaten within two years. They’re super smart but they only get to live for two years and then they get fucked over by evolution because that’s the strategy; make a fuck load of octopuses, make a fuck load of possums. Possums are made shitty; they even in captivity you can’t get more than about four or five years out of most possum species and in the wild you get two years or less because they get eaten or run over or whatever because they’re just not great at stuff. It’s just short changed by evolution.
I don’t know how long salmon live but at some point the lady salmon I guess, they get they go upstream to spawn. What is spawn? Is spawn spit out a bunch of baby salmon?
Jacobsen: It’s like spewing eggs and then one fertilizes those eggs that have already been spewed.
Rosner: Do they all go upstream? Do they all go up to the salmon fucking grounds upstream? Well anyway, they do this shit, they all like struggle, struggle, and struggle to go upstream against the current up waterfalls and all sorts of crazy shit to lay eggs and then die. Humans, because our evolved position is not to immediately die after reproduction, we have to stay alive to raise generations, I think we’re naturally appalled at self-destructing creatures. I am at least. The idea that here you are living your life and then all of a sudden like this switch goes off in your brain and you need to throw yourself up a fucking river and then die; I hate that.
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But there’s nothing in nature, nothing in the universe, nothing in the cold universe that says that wanting to keep on living is the right way to go. And we’re going to build a bunch of machinery; conscious machinery much of which is not going to be overly concerned with its own survival particularly after it’s done whatever function it’s been designed to do. There are some ethical questions there which is, say, you build a conscious being that’s smarter and feels things more deeply, is more perceptive than any human alive today but this thing is completely cool with living for two years and then like shutting down forever.
Jacobsen: So it could be a situation in which the ethical imperatives for that AI is having no way in what which it wants to be treated. All of its directives are external to and relevant to human beings. So the platinum rule wouldn’t even apply.
Rosner: Yeah. Now, in movies when you’re presented with situations like this with smart robots who aren’t supposed to be able to feel, I just watched one of these things where a guy meets a sex robot who against all her directives has started having emotions and that always happens in movies with robots. The smart robots, turns out that they can be human after all. So anyway, even shitty screenwriters and directors run into that issue and in real life we’re going to run into that issue that it feels like you’re fucking over these artificially conscious beings by making them not give a shit about how they’re treated.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/27
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The golden rule suggests a false universal desire, implying that everyone wants exactly the same things, rather than a statistical approximation of similar desires.
Rick Rosner: To clarify, the golden rule is to treat others as you would like to be treated.
Jacobsen: That rule has its flaws. There’s another concept known as the platinum rule.
Rosner: Is that really a thing?
Jacobsen: Yes, it’s a genuine concept you can find online. Its relevance grows when considering the cognitive and emotional diversity within a species, affecting how individuals and groups prefer to be treated.
Rosner: So, it recognizes diversity, sort of a modern, enlightened version of the golden rule.
Jacobsen: Precisely, it’s about treating others as they wish to be treated. Preferences vary widely; some prefer pie, others cake.
Rosner: Essentially, being nice should be defined by the recipients of that kindness.
Jacobsen: True, for some, being nice might mean giving them space, while for others, it could border on over-attentiveness.
Rosner: Or it could be as extreme as engaging in unusual activities with them.
Jacobsen: [Laughs] Or, as shown in films like ‘Jackass Forever’, it might just involve humorous antics.
Rosner: Right. In the future, considering our nature as evolved beings, we recognize that despite variations, there are consistent basic human needs and desires, from physical necessities to emotional cravings. These are common due to our shared evolutionary history.
However, the ‘enlightened’ golden rule becomes more complex when we consider the potential for engineering consciousnesses. In the future, we might create synthetic or replicate natural consciousnesses. These consciousnesses, while not material in feeling, are linked materially through the brain and mind. We might be able to design their desires and preferences.
In this context, treating others as they wish to be treated usually aligns with common decency, although there are rare instances where this may not be the case, like in certain unconventional scenarios.
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Jacobsen: Additionally, we must consider the psychological aspect, questioning whether engaging in certain behaviors, even if consensual, is psychologically healthy.
Rosner: Indeed.
Jacobsen: The platinum rule, while imperfect, offers a more nuanced and comprehensive guideline than the golden rule, in my view.
Rosner: Yes.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/23
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What do you think of awards within the high IQ community for high IQ community members?
Rick Rosner: Everything associated with IQ is a little weird. It’s an esoteric sport is what I look at it as mostly. It’s a bunch of hobbyists who write and take ultra high IQ tests; some for validation, some because they like puzzles, but it’s just this little community that engages in an obscure sport. It shouldn’t be that obscure. Over the past 15-20 years, several times I’ve gone out with people producing partners and pitched competitions where we find like America’s next top model except we find America’s next top genius. I’ve been in three or four pilots done by other people that kind of had similar aims. One pilot I did was like six regular people working together be as smart as one genius and I was the genius for the pilot. There’s a good idea in there, it’s a good basic idea, it’s just it never gets fucking produced. It’s not to use a super duper cliché rocket science; you do a competition show where you find the most clever people. It could be big, it’s just that nobody’s ever fucking done it which tells you something I guess about America that like even in the world of trash TV fucking being smart cuts no fucking ice.
It’s also in reality TV; it’s very frustrating because I’ve pitched shows where you know people on reality shows are mostly beautiful dumb asses with some occasional not stupid people but mostly beautiful and intelligence is certainly secondary and often it’s to not be desired because you need dumbasses to act like assholes. But the deal is that smart people can be just as reality TV worthy as dumb asses and it’s a whole demographic that hasn’t been explored but still hasn’t been done, the closest it got to being done was Beauty and the Geek, an Ashton Kutcher production from 10 years ago where they took these nerdy smart people and coupled them up with super smoking hot women and that was fine. It ran for two or three seasons. Anyway, smart people are an overlooked resource in reality TV and in reality competitions. For a while and probably still CBS like every other fucking crime show needed one or more super smart characters among the team of detectives.
There were 10 shows on various networks, most of them on CBS with fucking fake ass geniuses as written by TV writers. Anyway, fucking genius has not made it into the world of competition on TV. So, the sport of being a genius remains teeny know like 50 or hard 40 or 30 hardcore competitors out there in this weird-ass sport that really isn’t a sport because score is barely kept. You’ve got Jason Betts’s World Genius Directory which is a list of people who’ve scored highest on these high IQ tests; the ones that are considered legit enough to go on the list where somebody’s done a good job of writing the questions has gotten enough people to take the test say 20 or 30 at least so that you can norm it and so that the scores generated by the test have some degree of legitimacy within the world of these things.
People who are official like trained professional psychometricians; the people you have to pay 500 bucks to give your kid the whisk or the waste so they can get into a gifted program in the public schools, those people say “no, fuck all this ultra high IQ stuff, it’s just bullshit. It has nothing to do with official IQ testing”, which is both true and not true. Ultra high IQ testing now has probably a nearly 50-year history. You had the first ultra high IQ tests that were but a bunch of people took because they were published in magazines; in Games magazine and in Omni magazine starting in around 1980. So, you have the development of these things I guess throughout the 70s I would guess. So people have been doing this for nearly 50 years and thousands and thousands of people, probably well over 10 000 people have taken these ultra high IQ tests.
So there’s some legitimacy and yeah you don’t have the millions of people taking the whisk or the waste; these IQ tests that were first developed more than a century ago and given in really early versions to soldiers going off to World War I. But those fucking early tests were bullshit too, they were they were bad. So, anyway I think it’s a sport and I think almost nobody plays it. Let’s see what else I can think about this shit.
It would be nice if somebody really… or not nice because if somebody sportified it, somebody came up with official rules for all this shit. I’ve done really well with their being no official rules and the rules that I’ve done well with their not being are no time limit. The first test I took, the mega, they said don’t take more than about a month on this and I took I think five weeks and so I pretty much stuck to the rules there but on subsequent tests I might stew over these fucking things for month after month and approaching 200 hours. So, if that favors my strengths of persistence and obsessiveness and if they sportified America’s smartest person or world’s smartest person that would probably involve like strict time limits which would probably fuck me over because I’m not necessarily the world’s fastest thinker. So, there you go that’s it.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/22
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the true nature of quantum mechanics?
Rick Rosner: There are some various aspects of IC even like some of the most central claims that are things we believe that are true that somebody could easily say. Well no, I don’t believe that’s true and I don’t buy the evidence that you’re presenting for that. I think what’s turning out to be the central assumption of IC will be seen as fairly undeniable which is that the quantum mechanics which the universe runs on is how the universe defines it, that says the universe is made out of incomplete information; quantum mechanics is the theory of this incomplete information and the information is how the universe defines itself.
I think that’s probably the primary postulate of IC; the thing you need before you go anyplace else in IC. I think anything about IC that I could argue I would think I could most persuasively or it’s the thing that I’m the most convinced of, I guess. I think I could convince other people of more that I could make a more convincing argument for that than first say that most of the gold in the universe is older than 15 billion years or the dark matter is mostly collapsed regular matter. So, it seems fairly obvious that that is the fucking deal; the primary postulate.
How could something so central and essential to the universe that really incorporates two of the tent poles of the 20th century and then into the 21st century; quantum mechanics and information, how could the relationship between those two things be over missed. And as I’ve been saying like quantum mechanics really gets going around the year 1900. You got Dirac, you got Schrödinger; you got all those guys. They’re working through the teens into the 20s, they’re putting all this stuff into matrix equations but I feel like the mathematical underpinnings of quantum mechanics, the way it’s expressed, it’s pretty pinned down by the 1920s though I should finish the Wikipedia article that I was looking at last night to really get the total handle.
Through the 20s into the 30s people were trying to get an understanding of the kind of the metaphysics of quantum mechanics like what it means, how it works. And like Einstein hated the idea of spooky action at a distance, he hated the idea of the variable there were events; physical events that happen under QM that are indeterminate. There’s no way to tell what’s going to happen in this open quantum event until it happens. It could be a number of things and it’s just a probability and there’s no information within the universe that can help you pin it down; he just hated the shit out of that. So people wrestled with that; Niels Bohr and the Copenhagen interpretation. I don’t know what year the Copenhagen conference was where they were talking about this shit but its 1920s or 1930s and I think after that people had kind of settled down and agreed to be a little boggled by quantum mechanics.
It seemed the common wisdom about quantum mechanics after the 1930s was that it’s weird, that it’s really not like the macro world and you just have to accept it. Feynman said if you think you understand quantum mechanics then you don’t; shit like that, that it’s just kind of mysterious and weird. You can go ahead and you can do plenty of quantum mechanics because it’s an exact mathematical language and theory. It’s as precise as arithmetic, it generates probabilities like it says the electron is in this kind of probability cloud around a nucleus but that probability cloud is precisely defined and exactly consistent with experimental results. It’s got fuzzy shit in it but it precisely defines, it’s a very precise theory even though it deals in probabilities.
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So, even if you don’t understand the metaphysics of quantum mechanics you can go ahead and do everything with quantum mechanics without having the some kind of just a philosophical metaphysical justification for why it works, it just fucking works really well. And it’s pretty much squared away mathematically by the 1930s and then the first paper in information theory is written by Claude Shannon in 1948. Now other people had written about information mathematically with regard to codes and code breaking in early 40s I think because of World War II where people were working on code breaking. And so in the 1940s a few people started to think of information mathematically and then I looked up on Engram, on Google, where you look up the word frequency of a word and people have been using information quite a bit starting in the mid 19th century I think just kind of semi interchangeably with news as in what’s the news, what’s the information.
So, it was a not uncommon word. It was hundreds of years old by the time information theory came along. So, Claude Shannon starts thinking about it, a few other code breakers were thinking about it, the most information efficient way if you’ve got a noisy transmission band, how much information can you transmit per unit time and stuff like that and what is a unit of information. Claude Shannon, I think came up with the bit which is just a choice between one thing and another which also really constrains the field of information theory because once you have a bit which is a really sharp distinction between two possibilities. I mean you’re thinking about error which means as you’re transmitting this zero that you’ve transmitted, has a certain probability as of being received as a one in error. So, the zero you’ve transmitted when it’s received it’s like it’s a probability, its own little probability smear of being like 80 percent zero and 20 percent one.
So, the foggy entities are there but information theory is really built conceptually around sharp choices and trying to keep them sharp as you transmit information. I’m sure it takes like a half decade to really catch it. Again, it’s really being used in data transmission and computers in the 50s of course are super primitive.
Jacobsen: I think you’re talking yourself into a hole.
Rosner: Okay, but I’m just saying that that I’ll have to do more thinking about it or not but the way information theory developed kind of hand in hand with computing because you got bits and bytes and that’s all the world of computing maybe just keeps it sufficiently segregated from the world of quantum mechanics that people don’t see how they are conceptually in… I think one of the surprises about science for people who don’t do science and maybe even for people who go into science like I really kind of haven’t gone into science except for thinking about shit on my own but when people go into science I think a lot of people think well I want to be a smart person who thinks about the big scientific questions and then almost everybody in science is thinking about really small their own narrow area or they’re building shit like that new satellite that orbits the… does it orbit the sun? I don’t know.
Anyway, they’re working on something for JPL, they’re one of 10,000 scientists at CERN, they’re working in very narrow areas; they’re not thinking about what shit means, they’re not thinking cosmologically and if they are thinking cosmologically they’re maybe thinking about like the clumping problem like how do we set up these variables to get the gravitational clumps that developed in the early universe. So, most people in science are not thinking about the big questions. It’s possible that the big questions raised by the confluence of information and quantum mechanics; maybe people just haven’t been thinking about it much.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/19
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the most difficult IQ test you have ever tried?
Rick Rosner: I forget the name of it but the deal is like there was a period when we first started talking and a few years before that where I was taking IQ tests on the regular, these super hard ones and kind of regularly spending over a period of a couple months or more; more than 100 hours on a test. And I was getting frustrated with this because it’s just a huge waste of time and then I ran into this test that seemed to be the hardest fucking test I’d ever seen and I forget the name of it, I could probably look it up but it was attractive to me because it had a super high ceiling that went into the 240s or something. Some of the Cooijman’s tests go into the 240s but nobody can ever reach those levels. I know from having taken a bunch of his tests; he’s pretty good at norming the tests and like I think historically a couple people have had happy accidents where maybe an early misnorming of the test allowed somebody to get close to or more than 200 on one of his tests but usually by the time enough people have taken the test… he’s one of the most legit high IQ test builders. So, there might be a test he has where you could score 240, 250 but you’re not going to get there because it’s just fucking impossible for humans.
But I saw this other test that had some like super high ceiling and I thought maybe it was worth a shot but I wanted to try an experiment; the two heads are better than one experiment, where I knew that back in the days when the mega was still in use, a team from MIT, several guys had teamed up and gotten a really high score on the test; just gang tackled it. Of course they were disqualified once it was found that they were more than one guy but I thought that was an interesting strategy and so I wanted to try this test. I didn’t want to invest 200 hours in it. I wanted to still see if it was crackable via gang tackling it. So, I approached somebody I know who has a proven track record on these things and said, “Do you want to just take like a quick shot at this and see if two people working on a test can crack it faster?” So, we did it and it wasn’t super helpful because you’d hope that one person would find certain problems easier or that two different people would find different problems easier and together you’d be able to knock out a bunch of problems but that’s not the way fucking IQ tests work.
The easy problems were easy problems and you and whoever you’re working with are going to solve those quickly and then the hard problems are fucking hard and it’s going to take some messing around but anyway between the two of us we solved enough of the problems. We thought to submit answers to the guy and we built a name that was a combination of both our names and we sent it in and the guy writes back and all excited, “You got a really high score.” We got a score of that wasn’t a world record but it was like in the 180s or something and we go, “That’s great but you should know that we tried an experiment and we wondered if two people could track a super hard test” and the guy was heartbroken and traumatized. The guy I think is probably on the spectrum and this seemed like a monstrous violation of the social contract with him. We’re like “No, we weren’t trying to lie to you or anything, we just wanted to see.” Anyway, he was super sad and pissed and that test was so fucking hard that we were the only people who ever submitted answers to it because people would just take one look at it and go well this is fucking impossible.
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Jacobsen: [Laughing] that’s fucking hilarious.
Rosner: It was kind of a bad time all around.
Jacobsen: This reflects a lot of the personal history for you because you do things to break rules, then you’re like a sociopath of the conscience; you’re like a paradox. You do this all your life; this is your life.
Rosner: Well, yeah I have some sociopathic tendencies.
Jacobsen: But then you feel guilty and then you tattle on yourself.
Rosner: Well, kind of, maybe yeah.
Jacobsen: You’ve had some interesting experiences, like your fake name incident where you confessed to Carole. You also wrote articles for the Mega Society, discussing your desire not to be perceived as racist, partly because of potential future repercussions. This seems to be a recurring theme in your actions.
Rosner: In the test scenario, we weren’t trying to deceive anyone for long. We always planned to reveal the truth. We were curious about the reaction if we submitted it as two people, though we ended up offending the recipient. This wasn’t like the Eric Hart situation.
Jacobsen: You’ve always been upfront, even when you had a significant following on Twitter. You admitted to buying followers.
Rosner: Yes.
Jacobsen: This honesty is a major aspect of your personality. It’s consistent across different areas of your life and in various relationships. It seems to be a key characteristic of yours.
Rosner: My high school friend, Dave Schuchter, summed it up well. He said there’s the right way, and then there’s the Rosner way.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] That’s true. In our many-year working relationship, I’ve noticed that about you. It’s one reason I enjoy collaborating with you. You’re straightforward, you simplify complex ideas, and you have a grasp of both ordinary life and high-IQ circles. You’ve put yourself in diverse situations, from being a bouncer to a stripper and a nude model, to understand different perspectives. This unique approach has had both positive and negative consequences for you.
Rick Rosner: I have to give credit to Carol in all of this. We’ve been together since 1986, which is over 35 years now. I can imagine alternate paths my life could have taken, possibly with someone who might have been a bit impressed by my credentials. That could have made some aspects of life easier, like having someone who believed my stories without question. For instance, I remember this incident where a guy crashed into me outside a gym. He was clearly an actor trying to use his persuasive skills to gaslight me about the accident. I could tell he was pretending and later confirmed he was a minor actor. I imagined he had someone at home who believed in and supported his aspirations, no matter what.
Carol is quite the opposite. She challenges me; I really have to prove my points with her. She’s not easily swayed or impressed. Occasionally, we watch Jeopardy, and I might answer a question that no one else gets, but Carol’s reaction is often subdued. She knows my knowledge in trivia and quizzes has led us into some less-than-ideal situations. So with Carol, I don’t get any praise that I haven’t truly earned, which can be frustrating. I used to fantasize about having a partner who was overly impressed with my intelligence, rewarding me for it in extravagant ways. But in reality, that wouldn’t have been beneficial for personal growth.
In recent years, especially since I started receiving my pension, Carol has been more tolerant of my quirks. She allows me a bit more leeway now that there’s financial stability, regardless of my productivity.
Jacobsen: In the high IQ world, do you think most people believe their publicly listed IQs accurately reflect their true intelligence?
Rosner: It’s hard to say for everyone, but I can share some unique cases. There’s Mike from Florida, who regularly contacted me, insisting he should be admitted to the Mega Society. He believed a childhood accident impaired his true intellectual potential. Then there’s the individual who sued Kevin Langdon, claiming IQ testing was akin to unlicensed mental therapy. These are extreme cases, of course. More commonly, you have people like Chris, who views high IQ as a potential indicator of untapped talent rather than a definitive measure of intelligence.
Jacobsen: Are you referring to Chris C.?
Rosner: Yes, but let’s not use his full name. He prefers a more discreet association with the IQ community. He recognizes that high IQ can identify potential but is cautious about the more controversial aspects of IQ.
Jacobsen: Can you elaborate on these ‘icky messy aspects’ of IQ?
Rosner: Well, the high IQ community often deals with contentious issues like the implications of IQ in societal and personal contexts. There’s a fine line between using IQ as a tool for identifying talent and it becoming a source of unjustified elitism or a way to unfairly judge others. It’s a complex field with both beneficial and problematic aspects.
Rosner: The fields of statistics and intelligence measurement, which have developed together over the last century, are unfortunately intertwined with racism. Historically, you couldn’t delve into these areas without encountering racism, especially from the 1930s to the 1970s. For instance, Pearson, known for the correlation coefficient, is accused of being racist. Many early IQ tests and statistical analyses were conducted with the intent to prove the superiority of one race over others, which is deeply problematic. These assumptions were often flawed, as seen in early army IQ tests that included culturally biased questions. The most abhorrent aspect of this is eugenics, where such data was used to justify sterilization or worse.
Jacobsen: In your experience, who’s the smartest person you’ve ever encountered?
Rosner: Chris, whom we mentioned earlier, is incredibly intelligent in a subtle way. Then there’s Jimmy Kimmel and his family. They’re not just highly intelligent; they’re also remarkably well-adjusted, which is rare. Another person who stands out is Bill Simmons. He’s a brilliant sports writer who was one of the first to recognize and cater to an audience interested in various aspects of pop culture, not just sports. He successfully integrated this into his writing, creating a media empire with projects like HBO’s ’30 for 30′. He’s incredibly smart and has a broad range of normal interests.
To a large extent, having normal interests can often overshadow one’s intelligence in the public eye. This was the case with Bill Simmons and the Kimmels, particularly Jimmy. For instance, in ‘The Man Show’, which Jimmy co-hosted, the program ended each episode with them drinking beer. The majority of the audience probably saw it as a show featuring guys being guys, with girls on trampolines, rather than a show hosted by two geniuses. Adam Corolla, the co-host, is also highly intelligent.
Jacobsen: Their approach to the show was essentially to satirize typical male obsessions.
Rosner: Yes, it was quite tongue-in-cheek, aiming to entertain men with its fun and slightly risqué content. At the same time, it was meant to appeal to women by highlighting the absurdity of male and, to some extent, female behavior. It was a commentary on gender roles but so embedded in gender stereotypes that many viewers might not have seen it that way.
I believe Adam and Jimmy left the show because they were being shortchanged by the production company and had more lucrative opportunities elsewhere. They left after four seasons, and the show’s fifth season, led by Joe Rogan and Doug Stanhope, missed the original essence and leaned more towards misogyny. The early seasons of ‘The Man Show’, under Jimmy and Adam, had a certain subtle genius. Jimmy, in particular, is an incredibly smart individual who genuinely enjoys interacting with people. Among late-night hosts, he probably enjoys the company and laughter of his guests more than anyone else. Letterman, while a genius in the medium, often came across as somewhat irritable and less enthusiastic about the interaction.
In my experience, I’ve encountered some incredibly smart people. Jimmy’s brother Jonathan, for instance, is an excellent librettist, showcasing his intellect in the realm of musical theater. Their whole family has this streak of unique intelligence. For example, Jimmy’s grandfather once sculpted ‘The Last Supper’ out of modeling clay using muppets, just because he felt like it. It’s an extraordinary family trait. Then there’s Uncle Frank, whom Jimmy adored, primarily because he always provided genuine, straightforward reactions, despite not being particularly bright.
Jacobsen: Who’s the least intelligent person you’ve ever met?
Rosner: It’s challenging to pinpoint the ‘dumbest’ person because intelligence varies so much, and it’s not always about sheer cognitive ability. For example, while volunteering with developmentally disabled individuals, I met a person named Keith, reported to have an IQ of 25. Yet, even Keith showed signs of practical intelligence, understanding the concept of reward for actions like going to the restroom. Another individual, despite significant communication challenges, demonstrated surprising knowledge by correctly identifying and spelling ‘metallic’ in reference to my jacket. This encounter was particularly striking because it defied my expectations.
I also remember driving a van with one of the individuals from the group home who had a remarkable understanding of the vehicle’s mechanics. In that house, there was also Alonzo Clemens, a savant with an incredible ability to sculpt animals from memory, capturing every detail accurately. These experiences have led me to question the notion of ‘essential dumbness’ in people.
In bars, I’ve encountered some pretty uninformed or unwise individuals, but no one specifically stands out as the least intelligent. I do recall meeting someone who could vomit easily, which is unusual because for most people, including myself, vomiting is a strenuous and exhausting process. But this person seemed to do it with little to no effort, which was quite memorable in its own right.
I recall meeting a person who, oddly enough, was the easiest at vomiting that I’ve ever encountered. He was an alcoholic, and due to his frequent drinking to the point of sickness, he had become accustomed to vomiting. One time, as we were conversing, he casually turned his head, vomited effortlessly onto the floor, and then continued his sentence as if nothing had happened. While I can’t say who the least intelligent person I’ve met is, I certainly remember this guy as the one who could vomit the easiest.
Jacobsen: Who is the most virtuous person you’ve met?
Rosner: That’s a tough one! Public school teachers come to mind. Now, some enter the profession seeking an easier job, but teaching is actually quite demanding. I remember back in 1986 in Albuquerque, teachers were paid poorly, around two thousand dollars a month. Despite this, there were teachers who were genuinely passionate and committed. They loved teaching, were skilled at it, enjoyed interacting with students, and genuinely wanted to improve their students’ knowledge and lives. People like Mr. Talamonti, Mr. Ragosa, Mrs. Light, and Mrs. Goldner – these teachers, to me, embody a kind of saintliness. Of course, this is just an immediate thought; given more time, I might think of others.
Jacobsen: Who’s the most morally questionable person you’ve known or met?
Rosner: I haven’t really known truly evil people, more like individuals who were simply unpleasant or took shortcuts in life. My stepdad’s mother, though, might fit the description if all the stories about her are accurate. She was described as mean and vindictive to a soap opera level. She apparently brought a lot of unhappiness into my stepdad’s and mom’s lives with her relentless and spiteful behavior. However, I only interacted with her superficially and knew about her nastiness secondhand and thirdhand. She never directly mistreated me, so my understanding of her character comes from others’ experiences.
Then there was Randy Stevenson, a bar manager where I worked. He was quite a character, notorious for his questionable actions. He once fired me for missing a meeting that I actually attended. The issue was that I was too efficient at catching fake IDs, which was costing the bar money – they paid $10 for each one caught, and I was exceptionally good at it. Stevenson seemed to have grown tired of this and sought a reason to let me go.
Another person who irks me is Michael Davies, currently the producer of Jeopardy, but also involved with Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. I had an unpleasant experience with him which led to a lawsuit. The show asked me a flawed question, and despite their assurances of rectifying the mistake, they repeatedly failed to do so. Although these individuals aren’t necessarily evil, they show a certain laziness in doing the right thing. Stevenson, for instance, despite having a pregnant girlfriend at home, was involved with waitresses at the bar where he worked. It’s more about everyday irresponsibility than outright malevolence.
Jacobsen: As we wrap up, who would you say is the hardest working person you’ve ever met?
Rosner: Well, Jimmy Kimmel certainly comes to mind. He’s incredibly dedicated and hardworking. I, too, can be extremely hardworking, especially when I’m in a phase of intense focus. And then there’s you – you are remarkably hardworking. You’re currently managing 110-hour weeks, and I know you’ve juggled multiple jobs simultaneously. Your writing output is astounding. You’ve likely written millions of words over the years – averaging around two articles a day for various publications. If you did the math, it would probably reveal that you’ve produced the equivalent of over a hundred substantial books throughout your career. That’s a testament to your incredible work ethic and dedication.
Kimmel has been incredibly hardworking, especially in the early days of his Late Night Show. He was so dedicated that he would often get only about four hours of sleep a night, managing around 500 emails daily. This intense schedule led to him being extremely tired, and he initially thought he had narcolepsy. It turns out it was more due to his heavy workload, which he jokingly referred to as ‘getting four hours of sleep at night answering 500 emails a day-elepsy.’ To combat this, he was taking a medication, possibly Adderall, which was prescribed for what he believed was narcolepsy. Eventually, someone, likely Molly, his head writer and now wife, had to convince him to stop taking it.
Kimmel’s intelligence, focus, and attention to detail are remarkable. He has a keen eye for the quality of content on his show, and he particularly enjoys it when the audience is completely fooled by a fake news story, thinking it to be real. For instance, during the Sochi Olympics, he aired a segment with a wolf supposedly wandering the halls of the Olympic athletes’ hotel. This story went viral, with many people believing it to be true, which delighted Kimmel.
One notable example of his meticulous nature involved a voice-over (VO) for a segment. He could discern that the person doing the VO was standing instead of sitting, which didn’t match the video content. He insisted on it being redone with the person sitting down to make it sound more authentic. His ability to notice such minute details and his insistence on perfection, especially when enhanced by the focus brought on by Adderall, show his exceptional dedication to creating the best possible content for his show.
Jimmy Kimmel doesn’t receive enough recognition for his significant impact on Late Night TV. While perhaps not as transformative as David Letterman, who revitalized a genre that had been stagnant under Johnny Carson for 30 years, Kimmel has certainly made his mark. Besides Letterman and possibly Steve Allen, who originally crafted the Late Night format, Kimmel has significantly altered the landscape of Late Night television. However, he often doesn’t get the credit he deserves, partly because he is one of several “Jimmys” in the Late Night scene.
Regarding my appearance on “Moment of Zen” when Jon Stewart hosted “The Daily Show,” yes, that was after my loss on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” which I subsequently sued. My job with Jimmy Kimmel wasn’t a result of that incident. In fact, Kimmel, being the mensch that he is, helped me get hired at ABC, the network I was suing. He believed my partner and I could contribute effectively to “The Late Night Show,” based on our previous work on “Crank Yankers” and “The Man Show.”
As for Jon Stewart, my involvement with him was somewhat separate. Before my “Moment of Zen” appearance, I wrote for one of the Grammy shows he hosted, contributing jokes and other content. It’s a small world in this industry; Jimmy’s agent is also Jon Stewart’s and Carson Daly’s agent, and was somewhat my agent too, though my role in the industry is relatively minor compared to these big names.
Make grammatically correct, remove time stamps, keep the content, facts, rambly tone, keep word count, but formalize language structure while keeping the informality of language tone and style and maintain as close as possible the resulting word count of the original:
Jacobsen: When I was trying to get the interview with you originally, you were working with Jimmy Kimmel. Then I got the interview because you informed me that you lost your job. Then we started working together. What is that period between first request and not accepting and second request and accepted?
Rosner: That period was filled with dread and cautious optimism that really was extinguished by more dread because I kind of semi realized that some people might be legendary in the field of Late Night; Dino Stamatopoulos, I don’t know, I mean there are people who are well known in the field of late Night for being brilliant. It’s not one of those people. It probably helps if you come from stand-up or some other way that people can see. I was kind of known for just being borderline which is not entirely fair, I was perfectly adequate but I was sold as… I don’t want to go into the whole fucking thing but even though I was fine, I wasn’t like shiningly brilliant. I’m really good at the shit but I wouldn’t be a starter if late night writing were the NBA. I’d be a seventh or an eighth man. I’d come in towards the end of the first quarter to spell the starters. So, I’m still fucking elite, I’m still one of the top few hundred comedy writers in the country but I’m not in the top you know 50 most brilliant motherfuckers.
So, I didn’t get hired for any fucking thing and people wanted me to write a spec script and I didn’t want to fucking do that. So, I was hopeful that maybe something would come up but it’s been eight years and something is still possibly coming up but it’s been fucking eight years.
In our discussions, we’ve touched on the tendency of high IQ personalities to dive into obsessive rabbit holes. Currently, I find myself deeply engaged in the world of micro mosaics. Carol, my wife, has a fondness for them, and I’ve grown quite passionate about acquiring and restoring these intricate pieces. I often find pieces that, due to damage or neglect, are available at a fraction of their pristine value. I invest many hours meticulously restoring them to the best of my ability, and the results are usually quite pleasing. Carol then showcases them on her Instagram.
Carol’s mother, who is experiencing early memory loss and has a penchant for arts and crafts, seemed like she might enjoy mosaic-making. So, we’ve been collaboratively working on mosaic projects. We’ve completed a boxer dog mosaic and are now working on a cat, which is based on a photograph and is quite realistic. I’ve become somewhat obsessed with executing this cat mosaic kit to the highest possible standard. When I visit Carol’s mom, we work on the simpler parts of the mosaic together, but I handle the more intricate work. This involves filing down tiles to precise sizes, sometimes as small as a millimeter square, which often results in me filing away the top layer of skin on my fingers.
I’ve devoted an extraordinary amount of time—perhaps 30 to 50 hours—and we’re only about halfway through this project. The mosaic is turning out impressively well for a DIY kit meant for kids or extremely bored adults. But this raises the question: why am I so fixated on getting every tiny detail perfect on this relatively trivial project? It’s an illustration of the kind of obsessive focus that can characterize individuals with high IQs, sometimes leading them to pour excessive energy into tasks with limited practical outcomes.
Jacobsen: What do you think about people who score higher on these tests than you?
Rosner: I don’t know, they’re doing the same…
Jacobsen: People like Evangelos.
Rosner: I think they worked hard and they also got lucky that they found a test that would allow them to score higher. I’m always looking for that test and a couple times I’ve gotten lucky and found a test that had like a high enough ceiling and that meshed with my patience and abilities and I was able to crank out a score in the 190s. It’s the same with them; they found a test that may have been in its early version. Generally with tests, the norms start out high like somebody thinks this is a test that can measure up to an IQ of 210 and so you take the test and you do really well and you might get a score back in the 180s or 190s because you’re one of the first 12 people who took it and then another 20 people take it and the test is renormed and maybe the score you got gets lowered by three points or so because the creator of the test if that creator is being honest, he sees that people are getting scores that are higher than you’d expect based on their performance on other tests. So, he renorms the test and that 193 you got gets lowered down to a 190 after a year or when another 20 couple dozen people have taken the test. It’s all the roughly the same deal. It’s people who are good at this shit and who have the patience to do it take a test and they put in the necessary effort and ingenuity and they get a really high score.
They’re psychologically, I don’t know, you’ve talked to Evangelos. I assume that he doesn’t wear desperation on his sleeve that he’s a smart guy who enjoys puzzles and he’s like “I’ll take this on. I’ll spend like an hour a day on it for three months and we’ll and see where it takes me in terms of getting correct answers” I assume he’s a reasonable guy, I don’t know. I mean he’s a professional psychiatrist and stuff. So I assume he’s got a whole life where he might be approaching IQ tests as a pleasurable hobby rather than an obsession. So, maybe other people have scored high on these tests. I know like there was recently that Cooijman’s high IQ competition where I took third and whatshisface took first.
Jacobsen: Heinrich Siemens took first. However, he scored 195 on the first norming; and on the later norming it went down to 190.
Rosner: So, I was talking about that norms generally declined by a few points but Heinrich Siemens, a reasonable guy with I’m sure some kind of complete life; a family and job and all that shit, I believe started on this test, he picked it up like five years ago and worked on it for a while and then set it aside because “Eh, it’s a fucking IQ test.” And then this IQ contest is announced with a deadline using this test like if you could turn in the answers to this test by I think the end of like 2020 like December 31st or some shit last year; now he’s got a deadline. He’s like “well huh, it’s a contest and I’d already worked on this test five years ago. I should take another look at it.” So, five years ago he’d probably put in 50 hours and solved 60 percent of the problems. Now he sees it’s a contest, he’s got three months to see how much farther he can go. He solves the remaining 40 percent of the problems and he solves half of them, turns it in and wins the contest, gets a super high score.
You’ve interviewed us both at the same time or back and forth and seem like a very reasonable person and he just did what a reasonable super smart person who likes puzzles would do. He fucking picked it up, messed with it, put it down, came back to it when he had a reason to do it like he thought he could do well in this contest, messed with it some more to a reasonable extent I think, probably didn’t go crazy and just put in another 50-60 hours on it over three months which is averaging less than an hour a day like a healthy person would, and did well.
Jacobsen: How does the Mega Society hold significance for you?
Rosner: My introduction to the Mega Society dates back to around 1985 or 1986. At that time, my perspective was somewhat skewed, primarily focused on whether this could aid in my romantic endeavors. I came across an extremely challenging IQ test – previously, I had achieved notable scores on another such test, the Kevin Langdon test, which I believe was featured in Omni magazine, likely around 1980. I attempted this test, and my performance ranked me second among those who had taken it when it appeared in Omni. This nearly led to a television appearance, but I inadvertently sabotaged that opportunity by presenting myself unfavorably to the talent scout for a CBS morning show, a misstep I regret.
Initially, my interest in the Mega Society was driven by a hope that it might increase my chances of finding a romantic partner. I entertained the notion of meeting Marilyn Savant, imagining that my physical fitness and intelligence might appeal to her. I reached out to her, inquiring about joining the Mega Society and suggesting a date, but she declined my membership request and didn’t address the latter proposition.
Apart from these personal aspirations, the Mega Society has had a significant impact on my life. I met Chris through this association, who played a pivotal role in encouraging me to take on the role of editor for the Mega Society Journal. This period marked a positive shift in my life; I became more focused and responsible. Concurrently, I began to find success in television writing, a career that spanned from 1987 to around 2013 or 2014. My involvement with the Mega Society coincided with and contributed to this professional growth.
In conclusion, the Mega Society represents not just a personal journey of maturation and professional achievement, but also the value of connecting with like-minded individuals, something I admittedly could be more diligent about maintaining.
Jacobsen: What are Chris’s thoughts, as a professional physicist, on Informational Cosmology (IC)?
Rosner: Chris likely adopts a demographic or statistical perspective on IC. He probably acknowledges that there might be some merit to it, but realistically, the odds are not in its favor, considering historical precedents. Most individuals who propose independent theories in this field haven’t made significant breakthroughs. There are only a few exceptions like Newton with universal gravitation, Einstein with general and special relativity, and to some extent, either Gamow or his partner, who significantly advanced the Big Bang theory. Typically, those working alone in this area are seen as somewhat eccentric.
He’s aware of my intelligence, of course, but he remains optimistic yet skeptical about my work. He understands the ease with which one can veer into fanciful or unfounded theories. This discussion might be better suited for another session, as we have been conversing for quite some time now.
In a future discussion, I’d like to delve into the possibility that the true nature of quantum mechanics has been largely overlooked. My hypothesis is that quantum mechanics represents the mathematics and physics of incomplete information. The true focus of this information might have been missed by many. As I mentioned in our previous conversation, by the time information theory emerged, the mathematical framework and a substantial amount of the phenomenology of quantum mechanics were already well-established.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/19
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: I’ve considered the remarkable achievements by amateurs in science.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about accidental triumphs in science?
Rosner: Well, there’s the guy who developed plate tectonics, and there are many examples where the threshold for amateurism seems lower. There’s a certain charm in amateurism, like in folk art. People appreciate work done by those who haven’t formally studied art or learned techniques like perspective. My daughter is involved in art, particularly focusing on the distinction between art and craft. She explores women’s art, needlework, and domestic arts. Historically, there was a time when an influential figure declared that only painting and sculpture qualified as visual arts, relegating everything else to the realm of craft. This distinction is increasingly challenged by a more progressive art establishment.
The value judgments in art are complex. For example, my daughter has worked with the Gee’s Bend Quilters from Louisiana, a community known for their quilting. They are professionals in their craft, yet there’s debate over whether quilting can be compared to high art like Rodin or Michelangelo’s David. These judgments can either elevate or diminish the perceived value of creative work.
In the sciences, the landscape is quite different. Mainstream science, with its deep mathematical foundations, leaves little room for creative amateurism. Contributions to fields like physics, chemistry, and biology usually require proficiency in the language of mathematics and a deep understanding of the field’s history and current state. However, there have been lucky discoveries by amateurs. In mathematics and physics, there are instances where amateurs have made significant findings, some of which are not minor. For example, Évariste Galois made groundbreaking contributions to group theory at the age of 20 before tragically dying in a duel. In the sciences, you’re contending with a well-established and structured knowledge base, so there’s less room for serendipity. Nevertheless, nature can still provide happy accidents, like the discovery of penicillin from moldy bread.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/19
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: The first significant paper on Information Theory was authored by Claude Shannon in 1948 at Bell Labs. I’m interested in researching the historical usage of the term ‘information’ to see its evolution. Before 1948, the concept of information existed, but it lacked a mathematical framework. Interestingly, the development of quantum mechanics occurred from around 1900 through 1920 or 1930, well before the mathematical concept of information was established. Therefore, the original ideas of quantum mechanics were formed without this mathematical understanding of information. It’s plausible that even a century later, the connection between quantum mechanics and information theory hasn’t been fully realized.
There’s also the idea that as the universe expands, or as its scale shrinks, it requires more information about itself. This notion implies that gravitational forces are inherent in the dynamics of how information defines and expands space. The most noticeable gravitational effects are between massive, nearby objects. This phenomenon could be interpreted as a failure of space to expand uniformly, suggesting that gravitational shaping of space may regulate information density. If the universe expanded uniformly, this change wouldn’t be perceptible from within, as the scale and proportions remain constant.
Gravitational force might be seen as an equalizer, balancing the amount of information generated. Nearby objects, like Alpha Centauri or the next closest galaxy, share a long history and thus have a lot of shared information. In contrast, a distant galaxy, 15 billion light years away, represents a different stage in the universe’s history, showing us its early form. For proximate objects, the shared history means less new information is generated between them. This lack of new information could be what we perceive as gravitational attraction. In essence, space doesn’t expand or shrink as much between nearby objects due to this reduced generation of new information. While this concept isn’t entirely clear and could be articulated more precisely, it’s a fascinating area for exploration. It suggests that what we see as gravity might also reflect the information dynamics of space. This perspective is another angle to consider, similar to how black holes might be more accurately described as ‘blackish’ rather than completely black.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/18
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: It’s often said that Einstein wasn’t as proficient in math as many people believe. Would you agree with that?
Rick Rosner: Yes, that’s a fair assessment. Einstein was exceptional at conceptual thinking, but he often relied on his friends who were more knowledgeable about various mathematical systems. He had a sort of informal discussion group where they would spend hours, possibly in a café or similar setting, exchanging ideas. For example, when he was developing his theory of general relativity, he struggled for years until a friend suggested a particular mathematical structure that helped him express his ideas. So, while Einstein was competent in math, others had greater expertise in specific mathematical areas.
Jacobsen: Could you comment on George Gamow’s mathematical abilities, particularly in relation to the Big Bang theory?
Rosner: George Gamow, one of the pivotal figures in developing the Big Bang theory, wasn’t strong in math either. He played a key role in explaining the early universe’s conditions, such as the synthesis of simple elements and the proportions of hydrogen and helium. However, he often needed assistance with the mathematical aspects of his work. He would consult colleagues, frequently in my hometown of Boulder, Colorado, for help with the calculations.
Jacobsen: Let’s talk about amateurism in science. How do you define it?
Rosner: By amateurism, I mean individuals outside the scientific or academic establishment, without formal training or affiliation, contributing to the advancement of science. The challenge for amateurs is the overwhelming odds against them. Statistically, most who attempt to contribute to science fall into the category of enthusiasts or eccentrics, often retired teachers or others looking to disprove established theories like Einstein’s. We’ve discussed John Carlos Baez’s ‘crackpot index,’ a humorous yet insightful tool to gauge the likelihood of being a scientific outsider with unrealistic ambitions. This index assigns points based on certain beliefs or assertions about one’s scientific contributions. A score of 500 points usually indicates a delusional perspective rather than a legitimate scientific insight.
Jacobsen: Is it true that Baez based the crackpot index on actual correspondence he received?
Rosner: Yes, that’s correct. The whole concept of the crackpot index, while amusing, is grounded in real experiences and correspondence that Baez received. It reflects the genuine challenges faced by those outside the scientific community trying to make a meaningful contribution.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/17
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We embarked on a project where you reviewed most of the material we’ve produced over the last eight years since your time on Jimmy Kimmel and the start of our collaboration. What recurring themes have you noticed?
Rick Rosner: One prominent theme is the presence of numerous typos, which is inevitable given the volume of our conversations over eight years. Roughly estimating, we’ve probably spent at least a thousand hours talking, resulting in millions of words once transcribed. To thoroughly edit and correct all these texts would require a significant amount of time and resources, which we don’t currently have. While the typos may require readers to infer some meanings, the general essence of our discussions remains accessible.
Jacobsen: What’s another key theme you’ve observed?
Rosner: The other notable theme is how our discussions have often been ahead of the zeitgeist, especially regarding the impending AI revolution. When we started talking about this eight years ago, it wasn’t a widely acknowledged topic. Visionaries like Ray Kurzweil were speaking about transformative changes, and later figures like Elon Musk and Bill Gates began discussing the disruptive potential of technology. However, their focus might not be as comprehensive as ours, where we consider the impact of AI on virtually every aspect of life. The concerns they express often revolve around more conventional fears, like robots taking over, which I find to be a rather simplistic view of the future challenges and changes AI will bring.
In reviewing our discussions, I’ve noticed that our topics tend to fall into certain categories, which I like to think of as ‘buckets’. The idea of buckets, probably less common since the 1960s when everyday use of physical buckets decreased, resurfaced with the concept of a ‘bucket list’. In our case, we have several thematic buckets. One is technology and the future, which covers many of our conversations. Another is physics and philosophy, followed by cultural topics like TV shows and joke writing. Then there’s the bucket for IC (Informational Cosmology), a recurring theme throughout our talks.
Regarding IC, it’s true that it can be challenged. Critics might argue that none of its premises necessarily have to be true, which is valid. However, if we consider a universe that accumulates information both internally and possibly from external sources, the nature of this information influences the universe’s development. A universe consistently expanding in a big bang manner, as it acquires more information at a steady rate, differs from one where incoming information is random or appears random. In the latter scenario, not all new information aligns with the existing data, leading to temporary consistencies. These are reconciled with current information, often at the expense of historical consistency. This concept suggests a universe where collapsed matter isolates older, inconsistent information from the active, consistent center.
In this model, the universe continually seeks consistency within randomly generated information. As new data arises, older information is pushed to the periphery, safeguarded from potential destructive inconsistencies. This process necessitates shielding parts of the universe from each other to maintain overall existence. When reintegrating older information, it’s done over billions of years, creating a shared history and thus consistency. This, I believe, supports the IC perspective that the universe is about more than just defining itself, indicating a deeper, more complex process at work. This may seem a bit off from our original discussion about thematic ‘buckets’, but it connects back to the essence of many topics we’ve covered.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/17
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If you could have a conversation with any historical figure who has passed away, who would you choose and why?
Rick Rosner: I think I’d prefer to speak with a renowned physicist, perhaps someone like Einstein or Hawking. My main interest would be to discuss my views on the universe being constructed from information and see if these ideas would resonate with them. However, Einstein might not be the most receptive to this concept. The first paper on information theory was published in 1948, when Einstein was already 69, and he lived only seven more years after that. This theory might not have been fully within his sphere of interest.
Furthermore, Einstein famously had a strong aversion to quantum mechanics, particularly its inherent randomness and probabilistic nature. I wonder if I could have engaged him in a discussion about the outcomes of quantum events being determined by external factors beyond the universe. This wouldn’t imply hidden variables within quantum mechanics but rather hidden correlations with something external. I’m not sure if this aligns with Bell’s theorem, which concerns the impossibility of hidden variables. So, perhaps a conversation with Einstein could have been enlightening, though a dinner with Hawking might have been a more peculiar experience.
Jacobsen: So, it’s more about having a meaningful conversation rather than the setting of a dinner.
Rosner: Okay, focusing on the conversation aspect, Stephen Hawking might be an interesting choice. His work on information and black holes is particularly relevant to my interests. However, the practicalities of dining with him, considering his condition, might be challenging. He’s a contemporary figure, so perhaps he would be more open to modern ideas like mine.
There are other historical figures who would be intriguing to meet. Elvis Presley, for instance, though you’d want to meet him at the right time in his life. His later years, when he struggled with prescription drug use, might not be ideal. Marie Curie could be fascinating too, but I’m not sure what our conversation would be like. She had a notable personal life, but that doesn’t necessarily equate to an engaging discussion.
Charles Darwin would be an interesting choice among the notable scientists, but I’d avoid Isaac Newton, who was known to be quite difficult.
Jacobsen: Who would you compare yourself to most in history?
Rosner: If I don’t fulfill my potential, I might end up like William James Sidis. He’s known for having one of the highest IQs in recorded history, but he died of a brain hemorrhage without producing any notable original work. He was working on a significant project, a comprehensive history of North America, but never completed it. In that sense, he’s similar to me: a very smart person perceived as wasting potential on trivial pursuits. I have serious endeavors, but my approach to them hasn’t always been as focused as it could be.
Jacobsen: Has my role been somewhat like corralling you?
Rosner: Yes, it’s been helpful, like a form of guidance.
Jacobsen: So, I’ve been like a shepherd for eight years?
Rosner: Right, akin to Jesus’ role.
Jacobsen: Leading you to the Promised Land, so to speak.
Rosner: That’s more Moses’ job, actually.
Jacobsen: True, I got my biblical characters mixed up there. [Laughing]
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/16
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: We’ve previously touched on the topic of the internet’s role in the decline of the war against pornography. People younger than me might not fully grasp the evolution of what constituted pornography. Just like entertainment has diversified to include increasingly outrageous content, so has pornography. It’s evolved from the innocuous ‘cheesecake shots’ of the 1950s, where nudity was non-existent, to more explicit material. In the 1970s and 1980s, the first appearances of pubic hair in magazines like Playboy and Penthouse were considered groundbreaking. This trend escalated with the arrival of Hustler, pushing the boundaries of explicitness.
Back then, being involved in pornography set you apart from mainstream society, a notion that has somewhat shifted today. The range of activities considered normal within the industry has expanded into areas that would have shocked those in the era of ‘Boogie Nights’. However, unlike other forms of entertainment, this shift in pornography has been more pervasive.
Another aspect to consider is the frequency of sexual release in human history. Thousands of years ago, the average lifespan was much shorter, and opportunities for sexual release were scarce. Many men probably didn’t live past their twenties. The concept of masturbation might not have been widely known or practiced. The idea of trial and error in discovering masturbation without the aid of language or culture raises interesting questions. Compare that to the present, where sexual knowledge and opportunities are abundant. I’ve calculated that I’ve had significantly more orgasms in my lifetime than what would have been typical for ancient humans. This raises questions about the impact of such frequent sexual stimulation on our arousal systems, especially in terms of seeking novelty.
In terms of sexual arousal within different cultural contexts, like a long-term Christian marriage, it’s curious to consider what elements contribute to sexual excitement. Does the idea of being part of a loving, committed relationship enhance arousal, or is the pursuit of novelty still a dominant factor? It’s an intriguing question and one that might vary greatly among individuals. What are your thoughts on this?
Jacobsen: I believe people naturally gravitate towards what they find attractive, but social influences can either reinforce these inclinations or drive them to extremes. To illustrate, consider the scenario of a gay man marrying a straight woman within a Christian context, resulting in a family with children. This happens quite often. Conversely, there are straightforward cases of straight, Christian couples who marry and have children out of love and shared values.
Rosner: Do you think that, by deeply embracing their roles, a man and a woman in a marriage can find their relationship intensely exciting, almost as if the kindness and love they share in their marriage becomes a source of sexual arousal?
Jacobsen: I think our understanding of the inner workings of the mind, especially regarding sexual attraction, is still quite limited. Generally, people’s behavior seems to be guided by their inherent sexual orientation and a tendency towards tenderness in sexual relationships. If this tendency aligns with their religious ethics and they express it in their actions, it becomes their lived experience. While the more sensational stories make headlines, most people, whether they are Christians advocating wholesome values or Satanists promoting sexual freedom, are likely driven by a desire to align their sexual behavior with both their innate preferences and their ideological beliefs.
Rosner: So, you’re suggesting that for some, their natural inclination might be towards wholesome, loving sex?
Jacobsen: I’d like to clarify two points. First, I don’t believe the universe has any concern for us individually; it’s only within our human context that we find significance and care. Second, if the universe is indifferent, then any ethical or moral judgment we make is solely relevant to our human experience.
Rosner: I’m not focusing on the ethical aspect of it.
Jacobsen: You used the term ‘kink’, which is typically associated with sexual preferences considered abnormal. But I think it’s more appropriate to refer to these inclinations simply as predilections. How about using ‘non-normative’ to describe certain sexual preferences? Typically, ‘kink’ refers to more extreme practices like leather and chains, and non-religious unions. But when considering people’s sexual predilections, we might think of them as distributed on something like a Gaussian curve.
Rosner: Right, but it’s more complex than that, existing in more than one dimension.
Jacobsen: Absolutely, I agree. People are naturally attracted to whoever they find appealing, or in some cases, not attracted at all.
Rosner: Moving back to the topic I was initially discussing, it seems possible that some individuals may find satisfaction in sex without the need for novelty. However, for many, the introduction of new elements is integral to their sexual experience. Our extended and active sexual lives, even if only with ourselves, create a demand for increasing novelty. It’s like needing more of a drug to achieve the same high.
As an example, there’s an aspect of adult entertainment I find both intriguing and indicative of a low level of creativity generally present in the industry. I appreciate pornography that includes a complete narrative, starting with clothed individuals and culminating in sexual activity. There’s a certain perversity in seeing people clothed, knowing they will eventually be unclothed, which contrasts with the typical daily experience where people remain clothed. It’s a balance between anticipation and fulfillment.
Interestingly, some creators in the adult entertainment industry have recognized this dynamic and developed content to cater to it. I came across a type of porn where the screen is split. On one side, you see a woman, say, acting as a realtor and staging a house. On the other side of the screen, shown simultaneously, is a scene set later where she engages in sexual activity. This approach caters to the desire for both the anticipation of what’s to come and the explicit sexual content. It’s a novel way to overcome the limitations of linear time in pornography, adding another layer to what I call ‘stacked perversities’.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/16
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Let’s delve into the topic of the nature of future entertainment and how it caters to minds filled with information. Think about how humor has evolved. Decades ago, jokes were simple and widely comprehensible. Henny Youngman’s ‘Take my wife, please!’ is a classic example. Humor was based on straightforward scenarios. But over time, comedy became more personal, with Lenny Bruce pioneering a style that reflected the comedian’s personality and experiences.
In the 1960s, we saw the emergence of a generation gap in cultural values and knowledge. Nowadays, this gap seems to have shifted, with a divide between those entrenched in right-wing media and everyone else. This divide is influenced by geography, social circles, and family.
Reflecting on modern entertainment, I recently revisited ‘Suicide Squad’ and am watching ‘Peacemaker’, its sequel. These belong to the DC Comics Universe, akin to Marvel’s. Once considered children’s entertainment, comics have evolved into major cinematic productions. Superhero movies, like ‘Deadpool’ and ‘Suicide Squad’, often parody their own genre. They’ve become our version of Bollywood films, mixing various elements to appeal to a broad audience.
‘Suicide Squad’, inspired by the 1967 film ‘The Dirty Dozen’, features supercriminals on a suicide mission. It’s ridiculous yet filled with action, good versus evil narratives, and doesn’t require extensive knowledge of the DC Universe. ‘Peacemaker’ continues the story of the surviving characters in an absurd manner. For example, the opening credits feature a dance number by the cast in costume, which is quite unconventional.
I also think about how my perception of entertainment has changed since my youth. Back in the 1970s, I’d watch reruns of ‘The Brady Bunch’ and ‘Star Trek’, often finding them unsatisfactory. Comparing that to today’s shows, the level of content and graphics would have been overwhelming. I recall my gradual exposure to more explicit content, from playing cards to books and eventually magazines. Today’s entertainment, particularly in shows like ‘Peacemaker’, is far more graphic and explicit. The use of CGI has also revolutionized how violence is depicted, making it gorier and more exaggerated.
The incident with Alec Baldwin has sparked a debate about using real guns and ammunition in filmmaking. I support transitioning to CGI for such effects, as it’s safer and offers more creative possibilities. However, this shift means that violence in movies is becoming increasingly graphic.
So, what’s the point of all this? It’s that audiences have become desensitized to extreme content, leading entertainment to constantly outdo itself. Contrary to some sci-fi predictions, technological advancements haven’t led to a more sanitized, well-behaved society. Instead, our entertainment is becoming increasingly wild and outrageous.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/16
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s hear your take on this topic. Could you provide some background?
Rick Rosner: Sure. You mentioned buying a shock-proof watch today, jokingly saying it could protect you from a horse kick at your job with horses. This reminds me of an incident with Teddy Roosevelt. Before one of his speeches, he was shot by an assassin. Something in his pocket, possibly a book or a watch, slowed the bullet down. Though it entered his body, Roosevelt assessed it wasn’t immediately life-threatening. He famously continued and delivered an 84-minute speech before seeking medical attention. It’s a well-known story.
Jacobsen: He even said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot but it takes more than that to kill a bull moose.” He was incredibly bold.
Rosner: Exactly. Roosevelt was one of the most remarkably tough and daring presidents we’ve had. His decision to give a speech while injured exemplifies that.
Jacobsen: He was truly an extraordinary president.
Rosner: History is full of presidents with similar boldness. Trump, for instance, was perhaps our craziest president in terms of incompetence, malevolence, deceit, and subversion of democratic principles. But others like Teddy Roosevelt were known for their fearless, alpha-male persona. Roosevelt loved activities like safaris and famously led the charge up San Juan Hill. Abraham Lincoln, another example, was a strong man and an accomplished wrestler. He even once threw a heckler from his audience during a political campaign.
JFK, too, was a war hero with his exploits during World War II. These presidents were more than just political figures; they had physical prowess and courage. However, we’ve also had presidents with less admirable traits, like slave owners.
Jacobsen: What’s the broader point here?
Rosner: The point is that among our presidents, there’s a stark contrast between the physically brave and the cowardly. Trump, for instance, showed physical cowardice, such as in the incident with an eagle during a Time magazine photoshoot. In contrast, other presidents like George Bush Sr., a World War II pilot, displayed notable bravery. Trump’s son, however, has a less stellar military record, suspected of avoiding his duties. The stories of these presidents range from heroism to cowardice, offering a fascinating glimpse into presidential history. Let’s move on to another topic now.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/15
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How do you value health and longevity, particularly in the context of the current pandemic?
Rick Rosner: Well, my wife works at a private school in LA County, and the situation here illustrates the complex valuation of health and longevity. Currently, about one in every 225 people in LA County is testing positive for Covid daily. With a population of 10 million, this means around 40,000 people are getting positive test results. This figure doesn’t include asymptomatic individuals who haven’t been tested. I estimate that approximately one in 30 people in LA County might currently have Covid. Schools are still open, despite these high numbers. In LA public schools, about one in six individuals tested for Covid receives a positive result, which is significantly higher than the level considered somewhat safe for conducting in-person classes.
In states like Florida, where Governor Ronald Dion DeSantis promotes minimal Covid restrictions, the situation is even more relaxed and potentially more dangerous. This contrast between states like California and Florida demonstrates the varying degrees of value placed on health and life versus maintaining normalcy. In instances like 9/11 or transportation accidents, monetary values are often assigned to lives lost based on potential earnings, which is a well-established yet sobering practice.
Nearly two years into the pandemic, people’s attitudes towards health risks and precautionary measures are changing. Many are growing tired of the restrictions and are increasingly willing to take risks, indicating a shift in how they value normalcy over potential health consequences. This change in risk tolerance is influenced by political views and wishful thinking about the virus, especially with the emergence of the Omicron variant, which is believed to cause milder symptoms.
School closures are a prime example of this conflict. Despite the high risk of Covid transmission, there’s significant resistance to closing schools or shifting to remote learning, even for a short period. In a cautious state like California, the reluctance to temporarily disrupt education for the sake of health safety is perplexing. People are prioritizing the continuity of education over the potential health risks posed by the virus, reflecting a complex and evolving valuation of health and longevity in the face of Covid-19.
Everybody is aware of the long-term symptoms of Covid, such as lingering health issues that can last for months or even years after infection. However, this aspect has not been fully integrated into the American public’s risk assessment. Many people think the risk of death from Covid is about one percent, and they tend to dismiss this as low, especially if they are under 65. The reality is that a one percent risk is quite significant. For example, most people would not consider playing Russian roulette with a gun that has one bullet in a hundred chambers, as it would be perceived as extremely dangerous. Yet, when it comes to Covid, a one percent risk is often trivialized.
Consider a hypothetical situation where someone is offered a quarter of a million dollars but faces a one in a hundred chance of dying, symbolized by that same gun with one bullet in a hundred chambers. Most people would decline such an offer, indicating that a one percent risk is actually quite high. Despite this, long-term Covid symptoms are often overlooked or ignored, even though they can affect up to 40 percent of those who contract the virus. There hasn’t been enough emphasis on these long-term effects, and as a result, they don’t seem to weigh heavily on people’s minds.
After two years of the pandemic, wishful thinking seems to be increasing. In the last three days alone, there have been about 10 million new confirmed Covid cases worldwide, which equals the total number of cases reported in the first five months of the pandemic. The rate of infection is at its highest, with some areas seeing two to three percent of the population currently infected, a rate possibly five times higher than at any previous point during the pandemic. Yet, despite these alarming statistics, the general attitude towards the virus seems more relaxed than ever, making for a particularly challenging and paradoxical situation.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/15
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What would make your theory of Informational Cosmology (IC) incorrect?
Rick Rosner: I’ve been pondering this lately, as I’ve had some second thoughts. Several factors could potentially invalidate Informational Cosmology. Firstly, we understand that the universe is fundamentally composed of information, or at least the information that defines it. The strongest evidence for this lies in the fact that the universe adheres to the laws of quantum mechanics, which is essentially a theory of incomplete information. To me, and I believe to anyone with a solid understanding of quantum mechanics, it should be evident that it is a theory based on information. However, I realize that this might not be a universally accepted view. Some practitioners of quantum mechanics may focus solely on the mechanics without delving into its informational implications.
Jacobsen: Interestingly, I’m involved in the quantum mechanics field. A colleague of mine does the math while I administrate, a quantum cosmologist and string theorist who is a professor at both the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, and Lethbridge University, and I co-founded the Canadian Quantum Research Center this year. In our first year of operation, our team has been ranked 41st out of 101 research centers in Canada for citations. This topic could certainly lead to an extended discussion with him, if you’re interested.
Rosner: That sounds intriguing. I’m open to the conversation, even if it means I might appear uninformed in some areas.
Jacobsen: He serves as the scientific director, while I’m the administrative director of the institute. Nature Publications recognized us as the 41st of 101, surpassing some major institutes from highly legitimate organizations, which is a significant accomplishment for our researchers. Discussing his work on theories around first, second, and third quantization would be an interesting conversation to have, possibly shedding more light on your theory.
Rosner: Is that akin to quantizing things that aren’t normally quantized?
Jacobsen: Essentially, it’s about the cosmology or physics related to the creation and annihilation of particles.
Rosner: Okay.
Jacobsen: So, first quantization would relate to the existence of particles, while second quantization involves the existence of the universe itself. The cutting-edge research my colleague is conducting pertains to multiverses – their existence or non-existence and the mechanisms behind these phenomena. It’s not just a matter of adding one variable; the mathematics behind it is far more complex.
Rosner: Alright, let me finish addressing your earlier question. The first aspect that could invalidate Informational Cosmology (IC) is if the universe, being made of information, only describes itself and nothing beyond. IC posits that just as our minds model the external world, the universe could be modeling something external to itself or not part of the same universe. If this isn’t the case, it poses a problem for IC.
The second aspect is the universe’s role as an information processor. We know it processes information through quantum mechanics, but if this processing aligns with a conventional Big Bang universe that continuously expands and gains information, that would contradict IC. This is because, unlike our minds, which maintain a consistent amount of information processing regardless of accumulated knowledge, a steadily expanding universe suggests an increasing volume of processed information over time. Our thoughts, whether while driving to work or watching TV, process roughly the same amount of information as they did a week or a year ago. Although our brains accumulate knowledge, they don’t actively process more knowledge per second. Most of our knowledge remains inactive until recalled, contrasting with the idea of a universe that continuously processes and accumulates more information.
If the universe functions as an information processor in a manner similar to our minds, then what we perceive as the Big Bang universe could be analogous to an unfolding thought. In this view, the active size of the universe remains constant, akin to how our brain operates, bringing forward specific information as needed, like recalling your second-grade teacher’s name. However, this information isn’t always actively present in our awareness. If the universe’s method of processing information doesn’t align with this concept—where information is stored in memory and only parts of it are actively processed as needed, but instead it continuously generates and accumulates information, growing steadily rather than just appearing to grow—then this would conflict with the Informational Cosmology (IC) model.
Each aspect of IC, especially the central idea that the universe operates analogously to our brain in significant ways—both in terms of hardware, software, and the modeling of something else—needs to hold true. If this analogy does not hold, then IC would be undermined. The universe must not only be an information processor but must operate in a way similar to how our brain/mind processes information. If this isn’t the case, then while IC might hold some truth, its central premise would be flawed.
The key concept of IC is that consciousness is an almost inevitable feature of central information processing. While we can process many functions unconsciously, like breathing or walking, these are typically handled by semi-autonomous systems and don’t usually enter our conscious awareness. They are still mediated by neurons, but these signals don’t form part of our central sensorium unless something, like a plantar wart in my case, makes us acutely aware of them. According to IC, a central processor or arena is necessary for processing novel information that isn’t automatic. Informationally, it makes sense to have a dedicated place where novel information can be examined by our accumulated knowledge and thought patterns. This allows for associations to be formed, helping us incorporate new situations into our model of the world.
In Informational Cosmology (IC), it’s difficult to escape the notion that a comprehensive, multi-dimensional, and multi-node system for modeling the world would exhibit what appears to be consciousness. This appearance of consciousness, based on our understanding that conscious experience equates to actual consciousness, is crucial. If it turns out that consciousness is a unique attribute exclusive to humans or evolved creatures, and not a necessary feature of sophisticated information processors, then IC encounters a problem. IC posits the likelihood of consciousness emerging in a vast, consistent information-processing system.
We can scrutinize every aspect of IC, from the most central to the most peripheral, and find reasons both for and against its applicability. Consider the presence of elements like gold, brown dwarfs, and black holes in the universe. Some of these entities appear to have formed longer ago than the universe’s estimated age. For instance, there could be gold in the universe that is a trillion years old or collapsed matter that predates the universe’s apparent age of 14 billion years. This suggests the universe has been active for much longer than it seems, with the 14 billion years merely reflecting the amount of information within it. However, if everything in the universe is younger than its apparent age, it doesn’t necessarily mean the universe itself is only as old as it appears.
The concept that the universe recycles and churns everything, breaking down entities like black holes and gold into basic components, poses another challenge. If there are no black holes older than 14 billion years because they are constantly consumed and reformed, it could imply a universe where nothing predates this age, despite the universe itself being older. However, I find it unlikely that processes exist that would consistently destroy and reform all gold or obliterate all black holes within a 14 billion year period, especially considering the resilience of black holes, which are somewhat insulated from the rest of the universe due to their gravitational properties. These are some of the considerations that could challenge or invalidate the principles of Informational Cosmology.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/15
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: With the impact of Covid on everyone’s schedules, including mine in the publishing world, how has it affected your daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly activities?
Rick Rosner: The pandemic has significantly altered my routine. Most of my work, to the extent that I do work, is done at home. However, my usual visits to gyms have ceased. Over the past few years, the number of gyms I frequented dwindled from six a day to none, especially now with the Omicron wave making them unsafe. I rarely go out, except maybe for dinner once a week if my wife persuades me, but we always eat outside.
My wife continues to work at her school, though I feel she probably shouldn’t, given the risks. The book I’ve been reading highlights how poorly people assess risks, a theme that resonates with our current situation. My wife starts her day early, leaving for work at five in the morning and finishing by the afternoon, leaving me with free mornings, often going back to bed. This pandemic setup has fostered an environment where it’s easy to accomplish very little, a sentiment echoed by many online, stating that just surviving the pandemic is an achievement in itself.
Jacobsen: That seems reflective of the current American situation.
Rosner: Is that very American?
Jacobsen: Yes, it’s similar in India and Brazil.
Rosner: Are you suggesting that people in other places are more productive?
Jacobsen: No, I meant that Americans, Indians, and Brazilians are among those significantly affected by Covid.
Rosner: Right, the pandemic’s global impact is unprecedented. In the past three days alone, there have been nearly 10 million new official cases worldwide, which is equal to the total number of cases in the first five months of the pandemic. The rate of new infections is at an all-time high. However, there are signs of improvement in places like Britain, where the number of new cases has halved compared to two weeks ago.
As for my schedule, I’ve always been somewhat unstructured. I didn’t have a commute for a remote job. I did have a city council position for a couple of years, which I managed to mess up. A lot of it was my own doing, though being the treasurer was a thankless task. The job required adherence to stringent rules for financial accountability, dealing with minor expenses and receipts, which was a hassle, especially considering actual corruption cases within the city council. In essence, my ability to maintain a strict schedule has always been a challenge.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/14
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s discuss the concept of empathy fatigue, particularly in the context of diminished sympathy for Americans contracting Covid. This topic came up in a recent article I wrote, where part of the title was “ignorant and proud of it”. This phrase, reminiscent of Mencken, is far from compassionate. It reflects a lack of sympathy and is based on statistical data regarding Canadians’ views on evolution. About 57 percent accept the standard form of evolution by natural selection over millions of years. However, the same survey indicates that more Canadians now want creationism taught in schools, particularly among young men from Alberta.
This tendency to favor creationism in educational settings shows a divide along lines of age, gender, and geography, with older, liberal women outside Alberta being less likely to support it. This disparity might be linked to historical awareness, particularly regarding significant court cases. My writing, which I pursue alongside work at a horse farm or training facility, focuses on highlighting hypocritical actions and unethical behaviors by religious groups, as well as anti-scientific perspectives attempting to penetrate public consciousness. I aim to state these issues frankly, recognizing them as problematic.
Rick Rosner: This could be termed predatory. It’s essentially propaganda.
Jacobsen: Misinformation, indeed.
Rosner: It’s more than just misinformation; it’s intentionally dishonest.
Jacobsen: It’s tiresome.
Rosner: Absolutely, but those who absorb and accept it are not blameless. It’s not just about being lazy; it involves a willful disregard for readily available, credible information. Accepting such propaganda often aligns with a person’s desired societal identity or chosen side. If someone is dismissing reasonable and widely accessible information because it contradicts their preferred beliefs, then it’s also a failure on the part of the consumer, not solely the unethical, predatory purveyors of propaganda.
Jacobsen: I agree with you. This discussion brings us back to the concept of empathy fatigue, or more precisely, sympathy fatigue. It seems like a more fitting term for the situation.
Rosner: In America, there are hundreds of thousands of people who could be accused of murder or negligent homicide. There was ample information available on how to prevent the spread of Covid, yet many chose to ignore it.
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Jacobsen: Recently, I wrote an article titled ‘Ignorant and Proud of It’ about a church that exploited religious exemptions during the pandemic in Canada. They organized an event with 350 attendees, mostly children. This event turned out to be a Covid-19 hotspot. The infected children then transmitted the virus in their schools in British Columbia. Mothers have spoken out in the media, tracing the outbreak back to this church event. The church’s spokesperson, who I perceive as a marketing manager, claimed they were operating within legal boundaries and mentioned religious exemptions. But it was clear image management. After the negative publicity, the church posted a lengthy apology on their website, which, to me, seemed wholly inadequate.
Rosner: Absolutely, it’s insufficient because people became ill and some even lost their lives as a result.
Jacobsen: Precisely. In the article, I described their apology as equivalent to saying ‘sorry about that, bro’. It simply doesn’t suffice for the gravity of the situation they caused.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/14
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You mentioned reading a book yesterday and shared some initial thoughts. What are your further impressions after reading more of it tonight?
Rick Rosner: I’m now about two-thirds through the book, and it seems to be divided into two major parts. The first part covers events from 15 years ago, setting the stage, while the second part focuses on the current pandemic. Interestingly, the book largely skips over the Obama administration. It highlights a general failure to anticipate and react to the pandemic in America, not just under Trump’s administration. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as portrayed in the book, was not proactive. They failed to intervene or provide guidance to mitigate the pandemic, even with mounting evidence of its inevitability. This lack of response wasn’t limited to the CDC; it was a widespread institutional failure.
The narrative continues to follow individuals who managed to infiltrate these unresponsive institutions, including the Trump White House and the CDC. These people would hold secret after-hours meetings to strategize on disseminating information and implementing measures while keeping a low profile to avoid losing their positions. As of where I am in the book, it’s February 2020, and only one death in the U.S. had been attributed to COVID-19. Despite this, a small group of about two dozen people could see the full extent of the impending crisis. China’s response, including extreme measures like welding shut doors of apartment complexes and rapidly constructing hospitals, indicated the severity of the situation, even though China wasn’t fully transparent.
At this time, President Trump was downplaying the threat, asserting that the virus would simply disappear. The book effectively narrates this story of institutional failure from an insider perspective. I’m hoping that by the end of the book, it becomes clear that the efforts of these behind-the-scenes individuals led to significant policy changes and responses. Currently, the death toll in America is staggeringly high, with about 1.1 million deaths, equating to one in every 300 Americans and more than one in every 65 senior citizens. This makes it the deadliest event in U.S. history, surpassing the American death toll of World War II by about three times. Yet, despite its severity, there’s a significant portion of the population, influenced by misinformation, who refuse to acknowledge the gravity of the situation.
The Spanish Flu claimed approximately 700,000 American lives at a time when the U.S. population was around 100 million. This death toll represented about two-thirds to three-quarters of one percent of the population. In contrast, the current COVID-19 death rate is around one-third of one percent, which, while still alarmingly high, is marginally lower. This lower percentage, coupled with the fact that the pandemic has spanned over two years and primarily affects older individuals (with the median age of COVID-19 fatalities being in the 70s), provides fodder for those inclined to downplay its severity. They argue that many victims were older and might have had limited lifespans regardless, and that the death rate is less than half of one percent.
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In the realm of public discourse, we have figures like Dr. Oz, a television personality and now a political candidate, who has been criticized for spreading misinformation. He’s running for Senate in Pennsylvania, a state where he doesn’t reside, and has appeared on right-wing media outlets like Newsmax and OANN, challenging Dr. Fauci and labeling him a liar and tyrant. Dr. Oz has been accused of promoting questionable medical advice, although to the general public he may have appeared as a credible medical figure, partly due to Oprah’s endorsement.
During the early stages of the pandemic, Dr. Oz suggested keeping schools open, even if it resulted in a higher death toll, arguing for what he deemed an acceptable level of casualties to maintain societal functions. His stance seemed to imply that the loss of an additional 100,000 to 200,000 lives was a trade-off worth considering for keeping schools operational.
The denial and minimization of pandemics is not new; it was also present during the Spanish Flu. In Philadelphia, for example, business interests overrode public health measures, leading to a significantly higher death rate compared to cities like St. Louis, where public health officials were more successful in implementing safety measures. Today, with a population three times larger than a century ago, there is a sizable segment of COVID minimizers and deniers, bolstered by a potent right-wing media that opposes many of the Biden administration’s pandemic mitigation efforts. Despite COVID-19 being the deadliest event in recent history, its slightly lower death rate compared to the Spanish Flu has been a factor in ongoing denial and controversy.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/13
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Can you share the history of your house?
Rick Rosner: Sure. Earlier, off tape, you asked about the room I’m in, probably noticing the different acoustics. I’m in the dining room of our house, built in 1966 when homes still had traditional layouts like a living room, dining room, dinette, den, etc. Since it was constructed for larger families, it has many small bedrooms, which worked in our favor. We were searching for a house in a good school district when the earthquake happened. Our condo sale fell through, and the earthquake only complicated things, so we spent years house hunting. We found this house and got a good deal on it, partly because it was sold by elderly people. Older sellers sometimes offer better deals as they’ve paid off their mortgages and the current housing prices can seem excessive to them.
However, I doubt such bargains are common now, given the severe housing shortage in America, especially in LA. We were lucky with this house. It was on the market for a while in ’98, mainly because it had tiny bedrooms and bathrooms, including a master bath only four feet wide. People spending significant money generally want grander spaces. This house even came with suggested remodel plans to transform the small rooms into larger ones, a sign of its perceived inadequacy. We did remodel, moving walls to expand the bathroom and making other changes. We kept the downstairs mostly traditional, opened up spaces a bit, but didn’t remove load-bearing walls.
Looking ahead, we plan to move, possibly to Britain, but that’s contingent on our responsibilities towards our mothers. We hope to sell the house before any potential decline in LA’s real estate market, which I believe is at least 15 years away. LA experiences cycles of housing booms and busts, currently in a seller’s market with high property prices. However, various events like the 2008 recession, the Rodney King riots, and the ’94 earthquake have caused dips in the market. I foresee a major, permanent dip when LA becomes increasingly unlivable due to global warming and other factors.
Speaking of LA, the city’s future seems uncertain. The entertainment industry, currently a major component of LA, might eventually move out, much like it shifted from New York to LA in the early ’70s. The decentralization of production processes, cheaper costs elsewhere, and LA’s worsening traffic and living conditions might prompt this shift. I think LA will become too burdensome, leading to an eventual decline in real estate and other sectors.
Jacobsen: Is this a new topic, or are we still on houses?
Rosner: It kind of segued into the fall of LA. The city’s increasing challenges might lead to a collapse in the real estate market and other areas. Over the next 100 years, there could be a global shift with more people living virtually, less pressure to reproduce due to longer lifespans and advanced technology. This might lead to a general deflation of assets like real estate, traditionally thought to be inflation-proof due to limited land availability.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/13
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Can you tell me about the book you’re reading and its author?
Rick Rosner: Sure, I’m nearly halfway through a book titled ‘The Premonition’ by Michael Lewis. He’s a well-known nonfiction writer, famous for ‘Money Ball’ and ‘The Blind Side’, which inspired the Sandra Bullock movie. Lewis has a knack for finding stories that are deeply relevant to our lives and delving into them to uncover surprising elements. For instance, in ‘Money Ball’, he explores how professional baseball, for its first 120-140 years, relied heavily on intuitive decision-making by managers and scouts, many of whom were former players. The book highlights the shift towards using sabermetrics, focusing on statistics like on-base percentage to make more informed decisions. It particularly covers the Oakland A’s, a financially constrained team, and how they used statistical insights to compete effectively against wealthier teams.
Lewis also wrote ‘The Blind Side’, which, while known for its film adaptation, originally focused on the evolution of certain positions in American football and their strategic importance. Essentially, Lewis excels at uncovering and explaining the nuances of various subjects.
‘The Premonition’ deals with the formation of a pandemic response team during the end of George W. Bush’s administration, from 2005 to 2007. It was sparked by Bush reading about the 1918 pandemic and realizing the U.S. lacked a proper response plan. The book begins, interestingly, at Jefferson Middle School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which has personal significance to my family. It narrates the story of a 14-year-old girl who, with her scientist father’s help, undertakes a science fair project in 2005 to study disease spread through social networks. The project gains traction and eventually reaches the White House, where it’s seen as insightful by some staffers and is sneakily introduced into the CDC. The CDC is portrayed as a conservative organization resistant to new ideas, but the girl’s findings help shape a multi-faceted pandemic response plan based on lessons from 1918 and computer modeling. This book offers a fascinating look at the behind-the-scenes efforts and innovations in public health policy.
In the book, it’s currently 2007, the tail end of the Bush administration. I’m anticipating that the rest of ‘The Premonition’ by Michael Lewis will cover the evolution of the pandemic plan under Obama, its improvement, and then its unfortunate dismantling under Trump, leading to the current crisis. I haven’t finished the book yet, with about 150 pages to go, but this trajectory seems likely, given the context. The concept of mitigation is crucial, especially in our current situation with widespread skepticism towards pandemic measures. Individually, these measures might not seem highly effective until a vaccine is developed, but when combined, they can be significantly impactful. This is evident from historical examples like St. Louis in 1918, which had a lower death toll compared to Philadelphia, where delayed and insufficient actions led to a high number of deaths. Cities that reopened prematurely also suffered greatly.
The story then focuses on the young girl from Albuquerque who won a National Science Fair. By the age of 16, after her work was expanded upon by the CDC and the White House, she became an obscured figure in the transition from Albuquerque to Washington D.C. and Atlanta. Despite her significant contribution to pandemic response modeling, her involvement was largely unrecognized. At a National Epidemiology High School Science Fair, her project was criticized for seemingly having too much of her father’s influence, leading her not to receive a prize. Disheartened, she decided to leave science and pursue humanities in college. It’s a poignant turn, considering her early and crucial contributions to pandemic response planning. While the CDC’s plan, influenced by her work, was adopted worldwide with varying degrees of success, the book likely concludes with a tragic recounting of how the plan was mismanaged under Trump. I’ll share more once I finish the book.
I highly recommend picking up a Michael Lewis book. He’s authored a dozen or more, all of which are excellent. He’s like Malcolm Gladwell, but with a focus less on pontificating and more on uncovering the human stories behind significant events.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/13
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How do you feel physically at your age? Do you feel spry?
Rick Rosner: Yeah, I’m 61 and two-thirds years old and, unsurprisingly, I deal with various aches. I often wake up with back pain, which seems to be a constant, albeit minor, discomfort. My age shows in some ways, like taking longer to pee, which is common for guys my age. Right now, I’m dealing with a planter wart, so I’ve had to attach a bunion pad to my foot to alleviate the pain when walking. Despite these issues, I exercise a lot, although not as intensively as your 14-hour workdays. My workout routine is spread throughout the day, starting around one in the afternoon and sometimes continuing until three in the morning. I maintain good posture and am quite light, weighing around 140 to 142 pounds at a height of 5’10” or 5’10 ½”. So yes, I would say I’m still quite springy. I’ve noticed that my physical behavior lacks a certain gravitas. I tend to move about with a bounce, which might appear a bit like the comedian Martin Short.
Jacobsen: So, are you suggesting that your spryness and lack of gravitas are due to not being overweight?
Rosner: That could be a factor. There’s a certain lightness or lack of seriousness to my demeanor. While I might take myself seriously at heart, I prefer not to project that seriousness outwardly. Being relatively small in stature definitely contributes to this. It also helps in my profession, where being a bit of a goofball is part of the job. Reflecting on my stepdad, who was a respected businessman in downtown Boulder, he wasn’t what you’d call spry. He was more traditional, always in a suit and never engaging in activities that wouldn’t fit that attire. He enjoyed sports but wasn’t actively involved in playing them. My biological father, on the other hand, was slightly more athletic but still had that relaxed belly typical of not maintaining tight stomach muscles. He was a bit more lighthearted and smaller in stature than my stepdad.
The previous generation had a different approach to exercise. For women, exercise might have been following workout shows on TV, but it wasn’t as widespread or intense as it is now. Aerobics didn’t catch on with my mom’s generation; she was probably a bit too old for the Jane Fonda workout era. When I was employed, the nature of my work involved being more of a clown than anything serious. This, combined with long periods of unemployment, has influenced my physicality.
Considering America’s current fitness levels, I think there’s a connection between physical health and cognitive function. I recall a book by a doctor who used PET scans to show how unhealthy lifestyles, like metabolic syndrome, diabetes, and high cholesterol, dim the brain’s activity. After improving their health, people’s brains appeared more active in scans. Though the author seemed a bit unorthodox, the scans were telling. Observing people in L.A. traffic pre-Covid, it was apparent that poor health often correlated with a zoned-out appearance. So, America’s obesity issue might also be contributing to a decline in overall intelligence.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/12
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Can you tell me about the TV show ‘Succession’?
Rick Rosner: Alright, so ‘Succession’ is playing in the background because my kid is binging on it. It’s a show that really delves into dark themes, featuring a cast where nearly every character is unpleasant in their own unique way. Essentially, it’s a fictionalized take on the Rupert Murdoch family. The plot centers around an elderly man who runs a conservative media empire. He’s getting on in years and faces health issues, and he has four children who are not quite as capable as he was in his prime. The show is aptly named ‘Succession’ because it’s all about these siblings jostling for control of the company. Interestingly, the show never really addresses the ethical implications of the company’s actions.
Adam McKay, known for directing ‘Don’t Look Up’, is one of the creators of ‘Succession’. Are you familiar with ‘Don’t Look Up’?
Jacobsen: ‘Don’t Look Up’, is that the movie?
Rosner: Yes, ‘Don’t Look Up’ is a film that’s stirred some controversy in America. It’s about how the world responds, or rather fails to respond, to a comet about 30 kilometers wide that’s on a collision course with Earth, threatening to obliterate all complex life. It satirizes modern media and the tendency of people to be selfish. So, ‘Succession’ is a deep exploration into a family of influential and self-centered individuals. It’s a highly acclaimed show, having won several Golden Globes and received nominations at the SAG Awards. The show is well-regarded for its acting, writing, and its relevance, particularly in today’s media landscape.
You could argue that Rupert Murdoch has been one of the most detrimental influences on global politics over the past 30 years. His reach extends beyond political boundaries, buying up media outlets wherever possible to propagate his brand of news and entertainment. There’s a somewhat urban legend that Fox News was made illegal in Australia, which isn’t exactly true, although their expansion attempts there didn’t quite succeed.
They attempted a similar expansion in England, but it didn’t quite catch on there either. However, Murdoch’s tabloids in the UK have been notorious for engaging in ethically dubious activities. One infamous incident involved hacking into a murdered teenager’s phone and publishing its contents, which was not only illegal but also appealed to a certain base curiosity in readers.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/12
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Do you believe the absence of overarching narratives is enabling the rise of political and social demagogues?
Rick Rosner: Yes, I strongly believe that. In America, as I’ve repeatedly observed, the Republican Party has found it easier to influence less informed individuals. This strategy has led them into a corner where their constituency largely consists of less educated individuals and a significant number of disreputable figures. While not every Republican national officeholder is unprincipled, it is noticeably easier to identify numerous unethical Republicans than Democrats. Generally, Democrats are perceived as ineffectual, whereas Republicans are seen as Machiavellian, adept at demagoguery, and unconcerned with democracy or the populace’s welfare, yet they are undeniably effective.
The erosion of various societal controls and institutions that traditionally encouraged responsible behavior has led to the empowerment of uninformed and belligerent individuals. These people are often emboldened by media outlets that cater to their biases, rather than promoting common decency. Within the evangelical community in America, for instance, there are undoubtedly many who remain decent and are troubled by the direction of the movement. However, mainstream evangelical Christianity in the U.S. has become dominated by objectionable figures. Leaders like Franklin Graham are prime examples of this trend, often opposing progressive measures like gun control and voting rights under the guise of adhering to their core principles. In reality, many of these leaders promote white nationalism and encourage their followers to adopt intolerant and misinformed viewpoints.
Reflecting on my upbringing in Boulder, which had a strong sense of community, I contrast this with my experiences in Albuquerque, where there seemed to be a lack of community cohesion. This phenomenon isn’t limited to Albuquerque; it’s prevalent in many large, spread-out cities across the U.S., where people are disconnected from their neighbors and lack social cohesion. This absence of community bonds leads to less emphasis on mutual care and responsibility, providing a fertile ground for the rise of divisive and manipulative figures in society.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/11
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Do you believe humans are the apex species, and what framework do you use to define ‘apex’, especially considering nature’s indifference?
Rick Rosner: For many millennia, humans didn’t consider themselves part of nature. We believed we were superior, divinely created to rule and be better than all other entities. This sense of superiority became more pronounced with the advent of language and civilization. Before these developments, we might have seen ourselves as part of the broader animal kingdom, but without language, this perspective wasn’t articulated. With language came other advancements, including religion, which I don’t necessarily say is directly linked, but historically, it often developed early in civilizations on Earth. I theorize that if there were beings like us on other planets, they would likely develop religion and language in the early stages of their civilization.
Religion provided a framework that emphasized our special status and imposed moral obligations. I don’t believe any major religion promotes nihilism or encourages destructive behavior. Most, if not all, religions contain some form of the Golden Rule, advocating moral responsibility. However, with the rise of science, we began to lose this sense of exaltation and the moral direction offered by religion.
In recent times, civilization has undergone significant changes, particularly with the advent of social media and personal entertainment devices. These technologies provide tailored content that often reinforces self-centeredness. The rise of reality shows in America, and even a reality TV president, exemplifies how negative behaviors can be rewarded and gain prominence. Consequently, there’s been a noticeable increase in individualistic behavior and a decrease in altruism.
Concurrently, my wife Carol and I have been watching ‘Euphoria’, an HBO series about deeply troubled teenagers. The show features morally complex characters, including a drug dealer who is one of the more upright figures, and explicit content, including nudity and representations of underage individuals. Zendaya, the show’s lead actress, has warned viewers about its potentially upsetting content. This level of realism is a far cry from the sanitized depictions of humanity seen in shows like ‘The Brady Bunch’ from 50 years ago. Today’s shows, unrestricted in content, offer deeper and more profound insights into human behavior and society.
Nowadays, television provides hyper-realistic depictions of life, unlike the sanitized and unrealistic representations of the past. For example, in ‘The Brady Bunch’, even the backyard grass was artificial, and the unlikely scenario of six kids sharing one bathroom highlighted the lack of realism prevalent in shows of that era. Contemporary shows aim to present a more authentic picture of human life, going beyond simply filling a 22-minute slot for advertising purposes. While some shows adopt a gritty style primarily to attract viewers, many genuinely strive to explore and reflect current societal issues, delving into dark and complex areas.
This shift in media representation coincides with a loss of the sense of exaltation humanity once had. Our understanding of ourselves has deepened significantly, as our lives are filled with more experiences than those of previous generations. We live longer and have access to a myriad of stories, connecting us more closely with the broader spectrum of human experience. However, this increased awareness has also revealed our flaws more starkly. The traditional framework that positioned us as exalted beings has largely disappeared, leaving a void. There are no ‘alpha beings’ that dominate us due to superior intelligence, power, or moral standing. The religious framework that helped us understand our place in the world and maintain a moral order is no longer as influential.
Consequently, we find ourselves with a vast amount of knowledge about humanity, but this knowledge lacks a structured framework. We understand our strengths and weaknesses perhaps better than any previous generation, yet there is no clear system to guide us in interpreting and applying this understanding. So, we are left with a lot of knowledge but no clear framework to place it in, navigating a world where our traditional points of reference have shifted or disappeared altogether.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/11
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Today, January 11th, 2022, marks a significant moment in the ongoing Covid pandemic. Just over a year ago, on January 8th, 2021, we witnessed the peak of a massive winter wave of Covid cases, both in the US and globally. This wave was the deadliest yet. In the US, the situation was exacerbated by then-President Trump’s inaction and his engagement in activities like super spreader rallies, which likely increased the caseload significantly. This period from November to February was marked by an intense surge in cases.
Currently, we’re facing what might be the worst day for new Covid cases worldwide, potentially surpassing the previous record of 2,789,000 new cases set four days ago. The total count for today is already at approximately 2,785,000, and it’s expected to rise. However, there’s a glimmer of hope that we are nearing the peak, similar to last year’s pattern. The factors contributing to this peak include colder weather driving people indoors, back-to-school events, and gatherings during the holiday season. As these events wind down, we might see a subsidence in case numbers, as is already happening in places like England and South Africa. Yet, the situation varies globally, with countries like France and Italy still reporting high numbers of new cases. In the US, it’s too early to predict a clear trend, but I am cautiously optimistic that by the end of February, the numbers will have significantly declined.
Omicron, despite causing a record number of infections, hasn’t led to a proportionate increase in deaths. The death rate has been relatively stable, averaging between 4,000 and 8,000 daily worldwide since August. Deaths usually peak about two weeks after new cases, but Omicron’s lower fatality rate compared to last year’s winter wave is a positive sign. However, we haven’t seen a day with fewer than 4,000 global Covid deaths since April 2020. My hope is that by March, we’ll begin to see days with fewer deaths. The vaccination effort is also progressing, with over 9.4 billion doses administered globally. Approximately 55% of the world’s population is double vaccinated, and many countries are actively boosting their populations. With the widespread impact of Omicron and the steady vaccination rate, I’m cautiously hopeful that the Omicron wave might be the last significant surge of the pandemic.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/11
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Do you see a connection between the philosophical concept of just wars in history and the personal decision to appropriately retaliate against someone physically?
Rick Rosner: Absolutely. I spend a lot of time contemplating revenge, especially considering the annoyances from people and the general atmosphere of grievances on platforms like Twitter, not to mention the aggressive driving in L.A. during Covid. However, the concept of revenge is fraught with issues. For one, the ultimate revenge results in the target’s death, which means they don’t experience suffering or regret for their actions. While this prevents them from harming others, it lacks personal satisfaction. Then, there’s the kind of revenge that aims to reform someone’s behavior. The reality is people rarely change, and on the off chance they do, you’re left without the initial reason for your resentment.
The more common scenario with revenge is either a failure to impact the person, or if you do manage to harm them in some way, they remain oblivious or unchanged. They continue their behavior, and at best, you’ve made them feel bad momentarily. Cinematic depictions of revenge vary – dramatic films often show the antagonist meeting a dire end, while comedies might opt for a humorous comeuppance, like the character Biff in “Back to the Future” getting his car filled with manure. However, these are simplistic resolutions; the underlying issues and personality traits persist.
Regarding just wars, my generation, born shortly after World War II, grew up with the notion that some wars are fought for noble causes, like defeating the Nazis and the Japanese in World War II. However, this perspective oversimplifies the complex morality of warfare. The more you delve into the history of World War II, the more you realize that even the ‘good’ side committed questionable acts. For example, the use of atomic bombs on Japan, which killed approximately 200,000 civilians, was rationalized as a necessary evil to save American lives. This justification seems overly simplistic, and there’s debate over whether it was necessary to target populated areas. Furthermore, there’s a theory that the bombings were also intended to intimidate the Soviet Union. Despite this, the Soviets developed their own atomic bomb soon after. Other actions by the Allies, like the massive firebombing of Dresden and the failure to disrupt the Holocaust by bombing the railways leading to concentration camps, highlight the moral complexities of the war. While it’s seen as a just war, it was riddled with injustices on both sides, though the atrocities committed by the Nazis were far more heinous. This all demonstrates that the ideals of just wars and personal revenge are often more nuanced and problematic than they initially appear.
World War I was a chaotic and unclear conflict. In contrast, the first Gulf War in 1991, where Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, seemed more straightforward. The United States, likely as part of a coalition, swiftly defeated Hussein’s forces and liberated Kuwait within a few days, with minimal casualties. This outcome could be seen as just, even though Kuwait, an affluent oil nation, might not have been entirely innocent in its international conduct. Nevertheless, no country deserves unwarranted invasion. The containment of Saddam Hussein seemed effective, with relatively few deaths and a swift conclusion.
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However, Gulf War II under George W. Bush was a different story. Based on misleading information, it’s hard to categorize it as a just war. Saddam Hussein’s regime was brutal, killing thousands of Iraqis annually, but the aftermath of the U.S. invasion led to a civil war and the deaths of possibly over half a million Iraqis. This toll is higher than the casualties that might have occurred under Hussein’s continued rule. In recent history, it’s challenging to label wars as just. Thankfully, since World War II, we’ve avoided another global conflict. Yet, COVID-19 has emerged as the deadliest global event since then, with an estimated 17 million deaths. However, Mao’s 30-year rule in China was even more devastating, responsible for around 50 million deaths, surpassing COVID-19 in its lethality.
Generally, avoiding wars is preferable, as most are tainted with some degree of injustice. There have also been failures to intervene in genocides, like those in Rwanda and various African nations. An exception was the intervention in the former Yugoslavia, primarily through aerial bombardment, which seemed effective. Yet, our understanding might change with more in-depth study. This intervention contrasts with the relative inaction during genocides in Africa. The concept of a just war is often dubious, and our actions sometimes reflect unjust neglect as much as involvement.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/11
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Can you tell us about the changes in your intensive supplement regimen?
Rick Rosner: Certainly. I was diagnosed with early-stage kidney cancer, specifically stage 1a, and underwent surgery to remove a three-centimeter tumor. Fortunately, they saved my kidney, and despite high creatinine levels due to my regular workouts, my kidney function is pretty good. After years of worrying about these creatinine-based kidney function readings, we tried a different measurement method and got reassuring results. However, I am conscious of the strain my vitamin and supplement intake might be putting on my kidneys. One notable change in my regimen is the elimination of methylene blue, which is believed to help clear brain plaque linked to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. I’ve used it intermittently for years, and now I’m also using Isotine, which seems to be a safer option for cleansing.
Regarding my general supplement routine, I’ve become somewhat lax since my diagnosis nearly three years ago. Previously, I would meticulously prepare around four months’ worth of supplements, totaling about 8,000 pills. This system was quite organized, but post-diagnosis, I adopted a more casual approach, simply choosing supplements from various bottles rather than systematically preparing them. Only recently have I started pre-arranging my supplements again, though on a smaller scale – just for 40 days, which is less intensive than before. My approach now is more about convenience than thoroughness, and I haven’t rigorously evaluated each supplement for its efficacy.
Jacobsen: Which supplement do you most endorse based on your research and experience?
Rosner: I’m a strong advocate for Metformin and have recently added Fisetin to my regimen. Fisetin acts as a senolytic, targeting aged cells that contribute to inflammation and overall cellular dysfunction. Notably, after taking Fisetin, I observed a significant improvement in my urinary flow, a common issue for men as they age due to prostate enlargement. However, I’ve noticed some decline recently, indicating a need for a medical checkup. Another medication I find beneficial is Avodart, a pharmaceutical, not a supplement, that helps with hair and prostate health.
I also recognize the importance of dental hygiene, like flossing, to prevent bacteria from entering the digestive system and potentially affecting the heart. My regimen includes Baby Aspirin to manage minor blood clots in my leg and prevent more serious clots. Additionally, I take Statin for cholesterol management, allowing some dietary leniency, and Lesca, another cholesterol blocker. For blood pressure, Toprol has been effective for me with minimal side effects. I’ve been on it for over 25 years, noting its calming effects on my temperament. Finally, Omega supplements, or fish oil, are also part of my routine.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/10
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What were the concepts of personal well-being before 1980, and how have they evolved up to now, or what might personal notions of well-being look like today?
Rick Rosner: Alright, throughout human history, a key aspect of well-being has been our ability to overlook the inevitability of aging and death. This was even more crucial before the 20th century, as life expectancy was shorter. Feelings of well-being have primarily revolved around two aspects. Firstly, the joys derived from sensory pleasures, such as delicious food, sex, and other physically gratifying experiences. Secondly, spiritual fulfillment played a significant role. This includes the sense of doing good deeds or being in harmony with divine principles, often coupled with the expectation of a heavenly reward.
As we entered the deep industrial era, things began to shift. Lifespans increased, and reliance on divine refuge started to wane. I believe that, on average, people nowadays lead longer, more enjoyable, and entertaining lives than at any point in the past. This improvement continues despite current challenges like COVID-19 and, particularly in America, frustrating political scenarios. This upward trend in quality of life is likely to grow even stronger in the future. If we manage to extend life expectancy and maintain physical vitality for decades, our opportunities for entertainment and pleasure will expand. However, this comes with a trade-off. The more we understand and rely on technology, the less significant we might feel. The traditional refuge in God is replaced by technology, yet this knowledge places humans in a somewhat secondary position in the natural hierarchy.
We’ll still rank above other species, but there will be an increasing number of enhanced humans and artificial intelligences, some of which will surpass us in certain aspects. Despite this, humans are likely to remain the primary economic force for centuries, maintaining the somewhat illusionary yet not entirely false belief that everything revolves around humanity. This state of affairs is expected to persist for a considerable duration.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/14
Joel Nicoloff is the co-host of The Six Cents Report with Darnell Samuels. A podcast that “uses theology and economics to analyze events that Impact Canadians.” A creative mix and an intriguing duo. Both have been interviewed. Nicoloff is first, as I met him at the Economics for Journalists conference of The Fraser Institute. Here we talk about the report and him.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Actually, I’ll open on that. I start every interview with the question: May I have consent to record? I might say, “Please.” I might not say, “Please.” Because it is an important part of the ethics of journalists or media people, you want to make sure you are transparent, yes?
Joel Nicoloff: Yes! Of course, also, you want to make sure in case there was any miscommunication beforehand. They know now. You are being recorded.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] That’s correct. I always say, “Do you know what my first question is?” They go, “No.” Every single person goes, “No.” I say, “May I have consent to record, please?” And so, that’s important.
Now, you’ve run a podcast for a decent amount of time. You are wrapping it up. So, this is really an ideal time to reflect and get your insights on getting a structure together that works for a two-person podcast. So, first of all, who are you? How did we meet?
Nicoloff: Yes, my name is Joel Nicoloff. I am a co-host of The Six Cents Report. We met at the Economics for Journalists conference by the Fraser Institute out in Vancouver.
Jacobsen: Now, what made you sign up for this Economics for Journalists conference in the first place?
Nicoloff: My co-host, Darnell, has gone to both the Economics for Journalists and Policy for Journalists and highly recommended them. When Fraser sent out applications and requests for referrals this year, Darnell referred me, and I figured, Why not apply? I do have a fairly solid foundation in economics, as I obtained a B.Com and currently work in the accounting world in my day job. I thought the connections I could make within the journalism industry would be beneficial to me, as well as provide an opportunity to refine my ability to communicate these principles in a layman’s sense.
Jacobsen: What was your big takeaway from that conference as a final note on that?
Nicoloff: For me, my personal takeaway was really niche in regards to our work on the budget and teasing out the economic and political aspects of a government budget. In addition, the component on behavioural economics was beneficial because I have always had some pushback regarding the way terms were used in this area of economics. My understanding of behavioural economics was improved by being able to tease out some nuances by asking our leaders some very specific questions.
Jacobsen: Now, what was the original idea behind founding a podcast?
Nicoloff: The foundation, for me anyway, was just listening to the conversations guys like Joe Rogan were having and wanting to be involved. I have always been relatively willing to engage in debate and conversation. I probably sent a voice note half-jokingly to a couple of buddies, saying I wanted to create a podcast and call it something like “I Want to Argue With You.”
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Nicoloff: About two months later, Darnell asked me, “Do you want to do a podcast?” Instantly, I said, “Yes.” That was probably in April of 2017. Over the Summer of 2017, Darnell and I started planning it. We launched our first season in December 2017.
Jacobsen: How many episodes did you produce? What was the approximate frequency average over those years?
Nicoloff: Right now, we are sitting at 180 episodes. We have our final 7 to be published. Episode 181 will be coming out once we finish the production. We call the episode “The Beginning of the End.” Some of that stuff I talk about here will be in there. We will finish at about 187. In terms of frequency, our intention was to publish content with consistency, and so our approach was to release weekly episodes in a season. In Dec 2017, we released our first season and published 16 episodes, and then in season 2, it grew to 24 episodes. Then we released about 40 episodes per season for the next three years until 2022 when our 6th season got cut short at 20 episodes, which was the beginning of the end in that sense. Darnell had started the teaching profession and building a curriculum, which makes life exceptionally difficult. New teachers, the first couple of years, very little free time. We actually have a podcast episode where the topic of creating a curriculum was discussed – episode 153: Why Dystopian Literature is Important
Jacobsen: With The Six Cents Report as a podcast, what was the orientation around the use of theology and economics to look at events happening in Canadian society?
Nicoloff: For me, I am a little bit more trained in economics. Darnell is a little bit more formally trained in theology. I would say I am a backyard theologian. He is a backyard economist. So, we both brought a little bit of economics and theology. The idea was that we wanted to talk about ideas. So, we took issues that affect Canadians. Usually, we would take an article as a means of representing other points of view and just dig into particular issues and analyze them by applying our worldviews as well as economic principles. At the same time, I’m not trying to be exclusive. In this sense, if you don’t have the same beliefs or worldviews, the discussion may still be useful or valuable to you because we are attempting to engage in a manner that represents other views fairly.
Jacobsen: What episode was the most controversial?
Nicoloff: [Laughing] It is an interesting question. I’m sure Darnell would answer differently. We never got cancelled or people lambasting our takes or anything like that. In episode 75, we interviewed two people from another podcast called Teachers Like Us. It was around the time of a teachers’ strike in Ontario. The four of us were recording around Darnell’s kitchen table, and at about the 50-minute mark of the conversation, we got into the concept of white privilege and what that entails as a term and its usefulness, or lack thereof. There were two very different perspectives going head-to-head. In episode 181, Darnell tells the story about this episode, and he does a great job, so I’ll leave you with this….the episode ended up being 2 hours
https://www.sixcentsreport.com/e/teachers-like-us-strike-6cr-75/
Jacobsen: How far was the development of The Six Cents Report? Was there a backdrop where there was a lot of improvisational commentary at the time that was very well thought out coming out on both sides?
Nicoloff: We were, probably, right in the middle of it. I’ll find the episode number for you. We’d finished two seasons’ work. We were recording our third season. We were past 50 episodes. That was partly why we were able to find somebody who had their own perspective and had their own cone, to be able to engage us rather than just two guys with a couple of episodes.
It was a good back-and-forth, in my opinion. Darnell and I provided our analysis of the concept, and they articulated both their personal perspectives as well as their experiences in the classroom.
Jacobsen: When it comes to process, the construction of a single episode. How did you come up with the topics and then make that into proper watchable or listenable content for the audience?
Nicoloff: The manner in which we created an episode was largely the same every time. What differentiated us was how we talked about ideas. We really limited the number of episodes that were time-sensitive. While we have a couple of episodes on elections and our perspectives on party platforms or things like that, it would be very relevant to the election that is about to happen, whether an Ontario election or a federal election. For most episodes, we looked for an article as a launch point for a topic. If you look at Canada’s euthanasia laws and things like that, there are some significant ideas that underlie it. While we would use current articles to assist with representing other viewpoints fairly, we didn’t want the conversation to be dependent on that article or its recent publication. We wanted to have conversations that were “evergreen.”
We definitely wanted to avoid having episodes or conversations with the impetus of “Got to be the first one out. It has to be relevant to the headlines today.” We were really focused on using articles in the news today to have a more meaningful conversation that would stand the test of time. That might be a bit extra. With that said, I do think we created a lot of content that, if I showed it to my kids ten years from now, 15 years’ time, the ideas and perspectives in there would be a good starting point for a conversation with them.
With respect to the process of planning an episode,
Darnell, working with our producer, started to do time stamping. So, really setting a high-level template for episodes, largely, would be three bullet points, three questions, or three key aspects of the conversation. We would then to some extent, we would shift in between, but they wouldn’t be significant shifts. It really helped us stay on time, but also, our episodes were not edited for content. We edited for quality or any technological issues that may have shown up because those are inevitable, but we didn’t edit for content. We didn’t go, “Let’s ramble on this topic for an hour and a half and then cut it down to three minutes.” We could have been doing a live show all along in terms of the manner in which we did it. When we were planning an episode, whether it be from an article or a topic in general, e.g., euthanasia – in other words, the MAID program – in Canada, we would focus on three key ideas? This also gave us the ability to tell the audience what the episode is about at the start without necessarily knowing what each other was going to say. The standard for our episodes was to start with a little banter and then provide a preview of what the conversation was going to be. In some sense, do you want to stick around or not? I’ll know if I want to stick around for the third part or not. Most of the time, Darnell would prepare the time stamping a couple of days in advance of our planned recording session. It really helped us work well together because we both could prepare better. Asking ourselves, “Can I speak on all three of these things? If not, maybe I have a little more homework to do.”
Jacobsen: What about making sure the fidelity of the content is appropriate for the audience?
Nicoloff: Yes, so there is a level that we identify as our niche. Canadian economics and having a theological side to it. A lot of the time, I say morality instead of theology because it is more intuitive in terms of what I mean by that and more inviting to those with a different worldview. For any episode, we would try to hit two of the three. We were sort of a niche content. Let’s stay in our lane. By having a very economics or a very theological primary component to what we were doing, then just making sure it is relevant to Canadians in general because our audience wasn’t only Canadians; probably, 50% of our downloads come from the United States and other countries. We wanted to go into Canadian-centricpics.
Jacobsen: In terms of the actual product itself, I don’t mean the content of what was talked about, but the quality of the audio and the video, when you had video, for the podcast itself. How do you make sure that it is of sufficient quality for the audience?
Nicoloff: Yes, for Darnell and I, it is a matter of making sure that we have a good setup. That was both video and audio. Early on, our audio was recorded in a makeshift studio. We’d do recording sessions with our producer. Over time, we migrated over to an online platform. Can you get wired internet as opposed to wireless? Being aware of the technological requirements, I don’t need to go and spend $500 on a microphone, but I can’t get away with $20. So, finding that balance between funding this out of pocket – how much is the right dollar amount to spend? Just have the basic foundations to avoid technological pitfalls, in the sense that I know if someone’s audio sucks for the podcast, I’m going to turn it off. Prioritizing that, similarly, it is with video. Darnell makes a joke because of his skin colour. He has to have perfect lighting. I’m in a different dimension than myself, but I joke that I am so white I’m almost see-through. So, there is a level that I have to care about lighting, too. All of that. Where in my house am I recording? Generally, I record in the same place most of the time. I had a particular setup. I tried to get wired as opposed to wireless. The next level becomes the guest, just doing a little pre-emptive in communication. Ask about their technology setup and, in general, be proactive to minimize the amount of troubleshooting when it’s time to record.
Jacobsen: You mentioned self-funding. That’s an important concept in the media and journalistic landscape of the 2010s and the 2020s so far because of the reduction in finance and the reduction in jobs in the industry. With self-funding, these become passion projects. You’re making these calculations about how much you want to invest in the instruments for the trade, the podcasting. How do you make that balance between funding it appropriately and keeping the passion thriving for the project without having that pressure stop the project one year in rather than 5 or 6 years in?
Nicoloff: Yes, primarily, I think it came down to both Darnell and I valuing what we were doing rather than “this has to make money.” So, in my sense, I really valued the communication skills that I was continuing to develop in myself. This applies in other areas of life, from parents to even career. If I can continue to refine that skill, I will reap the benefits. I think the reason we continued as long as we did was because we both had benefits beyond just the product and hoped that it would be successful. There was an aspect of “I really want to keep doing this passion project.” Another aspect of that was being transparent/negotiating in some sense with our spouses to make sure, “Hey, this is what I need. What do you need?” It is a huge time commitment, too. There were times when my wife would take my kids to my parent’s house so I could record. My wife would make sure the kids aren’t running in the room that I am recording in. Different things play into really planning it and preparing to make sure that that commitment wasn’t wasted. Darnell is coming prepared. I am coming prepared, such that we know that we don’t want to waste each other’s time. The commitment from each other was important, too. Because, as Darnell came to a place where he was really burdened in time to continue, we were having conversations about it. I was aware of where he was at, such that I wasn’t getting disgruntled towards him. I understand where he is at; the other side of that financially is knowing what you want to spend. I could have easily built or almost built a podcast studio and spent a couple of thousand dollars on equipment. But would that be the right thing to do until I know that I will reap long-term benefits financially? I think our attitude was, “Sure, if we got there, we’ll spend the money. But right now, let’s spend what’s necessary to spend.” Microphones are a good example. Do your due diligence, do your homework, and find out what other people use; sure, could I have spent double what I have spent and increased sound quality by 10% or 20%? Sure. But that’s not a good return on my money. Not spending $20 and spending $100, you’re going to get a 500% increase in quality. It is setting a budget to some extent, knowing what that cost is going to be, being comfortable with it, and really planning that out. If we get to the next tier, then we will spend money on the next tier of equipment. You don’t have to do it all at once, in a sense, in terms of building out your technological solution. You can do it in stages as appropriate.
Jacobsen: Did any conversation happen around these funding platforms, crowdsourced funding platforms to help boost some of the projects?
Nicoloff: Yes, we looked at a couple. I used Podbean due to the technology, publishing, and hosting side of things. They had a – monetization option, but it required a significant increase in subscription in order to use it. So, we created a “buy me a coffee” page and . we had some support come through that. Re: ally, it was a question, like “If I went with the Podbean route, what would be the benefits? Maybe the spending will help my scale in the future, but it didn’t help today because I don’t know if I’ll get the benefit from the e-money extra.” Largely, I would say the monetization platforms don’t necessarily help you grow. They help you when you grow into the appropriate stage. For most podcasts, I have heard a statistic that 95% of podcasts get under 200 downloads per episode. We were pushing that 200 downloads per episode threshold. We had quite a few episodes that exceeded that threshold. I recall a podcaster saying it wasn’t. Their podcast reached 20,000 downloads per episode; monetization opportunities really presented themselves. That was through a partnership or various options that would exist on a medium that has an audience of substance. So, I was very in tune with those kinds of things and aware of what was best for what we want to be; let’s spend money for where we are and use platforms like “buy me a coffee to cultivate” more engagement from the audience that we already have and look to the quality of our product to continue to grow our audience.
Jacobsen: What would you consider something difficult to overcome in the midst of developing a podcast? Also, and potentially associated, what was something you wish you knew in your first year that you learned near the end?
Nicoloff: Something difficult to overcome was really the coordination. At the end of the day, early on, it was coordinating three people because our producer would largely be involved while recording. We did grow out of that. In that, I basically would do the production side while recording – a little bit of multitasking is involved there. Really, it was the coordination of schedules. Coordinating with two people and with three people, you might ask the question, “Why not do the podcast alone?” I would say that Darnell and I doing our podcast together is something I value greatly; I don’t know if I would ever want to do a podcast by myself. I have a couple of friends who do podcasts by themselves. The workload is substantial, from recording to publishing and promoting. There’s so much to worry about – the technological side of it with the equipment, recording, producing, publishing, and then the social media side of it. Not to mention the actual creation and continuous cultivation of content. There’s also the marketing of an episode or any graphical representation if you’re going to do a different graphic for every episode. There’s a lot involved.
In terms of what I wish I had learned earlier, it was probably how easy I could do the producing side of recording the podcast on video; we use a platform called Restream. The first couple of episodes, we did with our producer, and then he taught me. Then I ran with it. I would have liked to go to the video a little sooner. I think I am just learning how that side of a video podcast works. If I had known that, we probably would have started at episode 100 instead of 160.
Jacobsen: What would you make for your recommendation for individuals looking to start a podcast, whether it is straight audio or has an audiovisual component?
Nicoloff: I think this is one of the best pieces of advice that I came across, which I recommend to everybody. This is once you’ve made the decision to publish or to create a podcast: Launch with more than one episode. The day we launched, we had five episodes published. The rationale there was that your audience would want more after one episode. So, by having a mini-catalogue available, or let’s say you publish one a day for the first five days, even though you move to a weekly or a monthly schedule, something that gives your audience enough basis to say, “I want to subscribe.” Or they can really gain an understanding of what you’re producing and if they want to follow you; from planning or a “should I do this?” side of things, I would say, “Try.” Maybe even do a practice episode, or, in our case, Darnell and I planned a number of episodes out in such a way that, Arguably, we did a mini-podcast while we were thinking if this episode would be a good episode. “What would you talk about? What would I talk about? Early on, Darnell and I would almost always have a pre-recorded conversation so that we would understand what each other would bring to the table. Later on, we didn’t need to do that because we knew, for the most part, on any given topic what type of bent or what aspect of the conversation the other person would specialize in, if you want to call it that. I think, in this sense, if you look at the multitude of options, are you doing a podcast where you are by yourself, where it is your musings, your attitude, and your thoughts that will draw people in? That’s a very different thing from a conversation or interview. I think it’s really important to narrow down the type of content that you’re going to do. I should say the medium in some sense of what you want to do with that podcast: audio, interview. Our podcast, we knew what our niche was. I’m not saying you couldn’t change, but know what lane you’re going to be in. Largely, you want to sort those things out first; your ability to launch something that has longevity will be much greater than if you say, “I am going to start recording. I’m going to put it up on YouTube. I barely have a name. I barely have a logo.” For example, take a look at pictures on our website and the images on iTunes or any podcast catcher. Before we even launched our episode, we spent money to have a photographer take pictures. Because, again, we wanted a full package, “Here is what we are doing.” Doing a little bit of prep work to launch well is really important in order to have longevity. Of course, if you’re Jordan Peterson and already have a million viewers because you stirred up the world, you can do what you want, and people will just tune in, but that’s not true for most of us.
Jacobsen: Even with The Six Cents Report closing down or finishing up, do you have any hopes or dreams, or plans, or reboot at some point in the future with another podcast or the same podcast, or something with a similar nature and just production with audio content or audiovisual content talking about finance or theology, whatever it may be?
Nicoloff:. The idea for Darnell and I was, at this point in our lives and careers, that continuing to publish a weekly podcast was not possible. We wanted to close out well. Currently, episodes 175 to 180, we sort of just finished and fell off. I think of the last five episodes. 3 or 4 of them, I was interviewing people by myself due to scheduling difficulties. For these episodes, we brought back past guests and covered topics that made sense for me to do on my own. It wasn’t like we were totally going sideways with what we were doing. But we didn’t like the way it finished. So, we wanted to finish well, such that if we never recorded again, we gave our audience an appropriate farewell. I say that to say that, to some extent, we don’t know if we will ever do something again. Because we are not in a place to move there together, at least.
For myself, I think that the passion behind why I created the podcast hasn’t gone away. What avenue that passion comes through, I don’t really know. I do have a desire to do something. But it could be very different. Within my career, I actually work with a lot of charities and non-profits. So, I see a high value in the leaders of those organizations understanding economics. There is a potential that I try to cultivate something, like a talk. As an idea, I have been brainstorming in my head the idea of a talk or presentation titled: Why pastors should understand economics. I know I still have a passion for continuing to engage ideas. On the podcast, I’ve said many times, “I despise politics, but I really am interested in the ideas that underlie politics.” That’s still true. I know, for me, there’s some desire to do something. But I really haven’t figured out what that would be.
Jacobsen: Joel, any final thoughts on the conversation today?
Nicoloff: I touched on this a bit before about the various aspects of what we do, but our longevity was really because we all took a role. Our producer was a friend of ours who had a lot of radio experience. We leveraged as much of his knowledge and experience as we could. I took responsibility for the technical side of the publishing. And deciding what platforms to use. Podbean was the platform I chose for hosting and publishing each episode. Alternatively, I could have gone with Anchor, which was free, but you couldn’t do a show notes page. I knew we needed to have show notes for the type of content we were doing. Many of my perspectives were likely going to be new for listeners, so we wanted to provide support for these ideas.
Darnell took the lead on cultivating the episodes and was fully responsible for social media and episode promotion. When it came to producing, we knew we needed to pay a producer or have the producer on our team. I think that was so fundamental for us to not be burned out by this project.
We all had a role to play in different areas. Lots of hands make heavy work a lot easier. Unless you are exceptionally gifted in video-audio editing and graphic design and you’re technologically competent on some level of how podcasting works, RSS feeds, and so on. You might struggle.
Jacobsen: Joel, thank you very much for your time today to talk about the construction of a podcast.
Nicoloff: I’m glad I could help. I look forward to the magic of what you do in turning it into something else.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/13
The reason Canadian Christianity has been experiencing a precipitous decline over the last several decades has been, more or less, its Truth coming to Light. That is not to say the ‘light’ of Jesus Christ or the ‘truth’ of the religion, as propounded by neo-Christian existentialists in the manner of Dr. Jordan Peterson who argue for the Christian faith in hostile – to them – secular territory in an implicit manner because it’s – to him once more – more powerful that way, but more in the facts.
The facts are a continual wave of three streams of truths about the faith. One is the pervasive stories of maltreatment of human beings under the care of the Christian churches in Canadian society. Two is the reluctance to admit these crimes to the extent of pervasive covering from the hierarchs down to the priests. Three is the decade-on-decade secularization of Canadian society.
A sidebar on point three is that the secularization has not come anywhere close to completion. Therefore, any public commentary of a post-secular society is incorrect while a post-Christian society becomes more appropriate. What do these three points clarify in public discourse in Canadian society and its relation to the Christian religion? A short flippant answer is a collapse.
Not merely on the numerical front, that’s abundantly clear in the StatsCan or Statistics Canada data. Not simply in the sincerity sphere, that’s less clear, but more qualitatively apparent in the culture and in social life. People go to churches and cathedrals less. They know fewer of the dogmas and adhere to fewer of the beliefs. We’re witnessing a phase change in Canadian society.
The phase change is the dominance of secular culture with a decline of Christianity and a modest increase in Islam. Most of the religious maintenance of the culture comes from the immigration of religious people, as second-generation and third-generation Canadians become less and less religious than their parents.
The intergenerational loss of faith, failure to account for decades of crimes against humanity, a diminishment of sincere faith, the secularization of society, the plurality of faith based in Canadian culture, and the rise of the Nones, depict a non-religious future for Canadian society.
Those demographic and cultural shifts reflect much global sociocultural demographics too. In a post-World War II and post-Cold War Era with the rise of spheres of influence, we witness a rise of a global culture unseen except in ancient myth. The world is the Tower of Babel. A plurality of languages and people scattered everywhere. Yet, the waters are mixing drastically due to loose border policies and a cosmopolitanism winning over a cultural monopolity.
We will see two threads from the Christian faith in the 2020s and 2030s. One is adaptive and recognizes reality; the other is reactive and defies reality, think: collective defense mechanism. Freethought communities can work with the former in the inevitable culture war with the latter. The main tool will be humour in sociocultural life, and legislation and unifying oratory in legal and political life, respectively.
P.S. War began in the 2010s – get to work. I am.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/11
As the evening sun dipped below the horizon, I found myself winding down from a day’s work at the ranch. Amidst organizing a disheveled mound in a horse stall and clearing leaves and debris into a corner for disposal, my mind, quite unexpectedly, veered towards the realm of rap, hip-hop, and R&B – genres I hold in high regard.
This mental journey was sparked by a humorous yet astute observation made by comedian Eddie Griffin about the world of hip-hop. He had once dissected the distinctions within the genre, focusing particularly on ‘gangster rap’ and its inherent contradictions. As I scooped debris into wheelbarrows, Griffin’s words echoed in my thoughts.
Griffin humorously pointed out the oxymoronic nature of ‘gangster rap.’ True gangsters, as he noted, abide by a code of silence, a stark contrast to rappers whose art form is rooted in expression and, often, verbosity. This irony was not lost on me as I worked; the quiet of the ranch seemed to underscore his point. “If you’re a gangster, the first rule is ‘silence,’” Griffin had quipped. “But if you’re a rapper, you talk too fucking much!”
This reflection led me to consider 50 Cent’s take on rap as a predominantly black art form, “without question.” Yet, he acknowledges the challenge some face in accepting that a white artist like Eminem might excel or even outshine his black counterparts in this genre. It was a candid admission of the complex racial dynamics within hip-hop, an art form that constantly defends itself against stereotyping and strives for legitimacy in American culture and beyond.
Hip-hop has always been more than just music; it’s a narrative of struggles, triumphs, and the resilience of a culture. It’s an art form that adapts and confronts the difficult internal circumstances of race, all while justifying itself to what Paul Mooney termed “White America” and a global audience that often imitates black American culture more than any other, “Bar None.”
As I finished my chores and gazed at the quiet night sky, I couldn’t help but appreciate the depth and complexity of hip-hop. It’s a genre that, much like the chores of the ranch, requires hard work, understanding, and an appreciation of the nuanced layers that compose its essence.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/10
Melanie Rempel is the mother of Lauren Rempel. Lauren is involved in Para Dressage. This is their story and struggles to work within the provisions available for a parent and child in Para Dressage in Canada.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we are here with Melanie and Lauren Rempel. And your specialization is in?
Melanie Rempel: Para dressage.
Jacobsen: So, we met at Thunderbird Show Park. We had a lovely afternoon conversation. I wanted to explore some of that because I don’t recall – off the top – having a para-dressage interviewee. I aim to do equestrianism broadly, starting in Canada and then moving internationally. So, either can start. How did you get involved in horses?
Melanie: She’s always loved horses. When she was three, we met my niece Joelle at Spruce Meadows. She was calling them all “kitties” because she was three. After that, we still met her at Spruce Meadows. She just got hooked on horses. I used to teach at camp; I was a wrangler for four years at a camp in Saskatchewan. So, I love horses. So, it came to be that we just started taking lessons from a person in our town, and it just grew from there. Then, for the last six years, she’s been taking therapy. She had started at therapy because she has microcephaly, which is a small head. So, when she was born, she quit breathing. That caused her brain to not develop fully. So, her head is in the second percentile, and her body is in the 50th, so it’s small. So, she has short-term memory, intellectual issues, and social issues. She is considered a vulnerable sector child. So, she would be easy to pray on because she’s very trusting.
So, we started in therapy at Equilibrium Therapeutic Riding in Saskatchewan. Erin McCormack, her coach, just after the first year, said, “I think she could do dressage.” Equestrian Canada had just come out with the para-dressage video competition. They were letting kids or people with intellectual disabilities compete alongside it. She can’t get graded in the Para-Olympics grading, so she could never compete, which is kind of broader than the video competition. So, we were doing the video competition. She won high points champion for Canada in her division twice. She’s doing them again this year. This year, they made a division for intellectual disability, which is amazing. Because if that could grow, that’s exciting. That’s why we’re so excited to join that, to hopefully grow that intellectual disability category because she doesn’t fit the para grading system, and she doesn’t fit in the VIRTUS world sport, which is intellectual disabilities. She doesn’t quite meet the criteria on both ends. So, we were excited to do that.
She does the videos from February until November. Each month, she does it in her barn. We video it. I put it on YouTube and sent it to them. Actual judges judge it; she’s graded. She gets the dressage scores. It’s fantastic. It’s a great way for kids with disabilities who can’t afford to travel around. I mean, we’re in Saskatchewan, so there are not a lot of opportunities. So, that we can do it on video has been great. It’s grown for her. She’s been doing it for five years now. It helps with her critical thinking. It helps with her reaction time. It helps with her balance. It helps with everything; being on a horse is just therapy. To see kids and adults or people with disabilities, e.g., cerebral palsy, brain injuries, and other sort of disorders, get on a horse and be able to compete has been amazing. So, that’s where my passion lies. I want to see more and more kids like Lauren and others be able to compete. Unfortunately, Canada, in itself, is a little behind some of the other countries. So, yes, we’re hoping to help grow the sport.
Jacobsen: One detail. You mentioned a ranking showing how far Canada is behind. How far?
Melanie: Yes. So, I can’t remember where I saw it, but they said, ‘In the top 40 countries of the world, Canada is ranked 39th for disability inclusion.’ 39th, like not even the top five or the top 10. So, it’s incredibly hard for people with disabilities to get into not only sports but competition. It’s just not seen. The only other sport that we know of is Cheer. She also does a CheerABILITIES team in Warman, Saskatchewan. Again, it’s struggling because it’s so hard to get in, get funding, get a placement, and all of that, but yes, Canada has a long way to go before they get on the front stage, which feeds the para and feeds the para-Olympics. All of it.
Jacobsen: From a personal perspective, how do you feel your interest in horses first arose?
Lauren: I think it’s like the point where I called horses “kitties” at three.
Melanie: She’s never been shy around horses. It’s a natural thing in her. I think she’s drawn to them. At one point, when she was eight, I texted my husband. I said this is not a phase. It’s not just a girl who loves horses. This is a girl who can work with them. Trying to get her diagnosed took us from age 4 to age 10 to get a diagnosis for her. In that, one of the medical authorities told us, “Oh, yes, she’ll probably be in a group home. You should start looking for a home for her because she won’t function. She’s not going to be independent. She’s not going to be able to think for herself.” As a mom, I was heartbroken. I was like, “Really? That’s all there is in life for her?” And that’s right when we found the therapy side of horses. She has grown and blossomed. She’s been encouraged along the way, saying she’s got what it takes to compete. She deserves to be on a bigger stage than just a video competition. It’s great. It’s a stepping stool, but there’s just not the opportunities.
Jacobsen: What started the video competition? Was it a committee? Was it an individual impetus?
Melanie: That I can’t answer. I don’t know where it started. All I know is her coach is on the board for para-dressage on Equestrian Canada. It’s through her that we knew about it. So, she’s been a part. I’m not sure how long she’s been a part of EC, but she’s gung-ho and tries to get her students in the video competitions because her goal is to see how independent she can get her riders. So, like we said, some only do the walk test, but they’re competing. They have cerebral palsy; they couldn’t otherwise do any of this. I’m not sure where it started, but it’s a stepping stone. It’s a step in the right direction. I wish there would be a grade within Equestrian Canada for intellectual disability.
Jacobsen: What would sort of break down some of these barriers institutionally?
Melanie: Support, sponsorship.
Jacobsen: What kind of support? What kind of sponsorship?
Melanie: Sponsorship: money, flat-out money. For example, with VIRTUS World Sport, they have the Pan Asian Games; I believe they’re called that. So, you go down to the country. All of the athletes are paired up with a horse from a pool. They ride for two weeks and train, compete for a week, and then go home. So, sponsorship of horses, sponsorship of time, and payment for a facility, like even a Thunderbird here, would be great if a pool of horses exists for people with disabilities. Understanding, when you’re talking about it, there’s more awareness, so there’s more acceptance.
Jacobsen: Do you think the ‘behindness,’ to make up a word, in Canada, has more to do with institutions than individuals? In other words, the social culture is there; the institutional culture is not.
Melanie: I think it’s behind that way.
Jacobsen: It kind of seems to be characterized by sort of a value of tolerance. If you’re viewed as intolerant, you’re viewed as a bad person. If you’re viewed as tolerant, you’re viewed as a good person.
Melanie: Yes. I think on paper, and when you read stuff, it’s like, “Yes! We want people with disabilities to know they should have equal rights.” All of that, but it’s not happening. It’s up to some bigger organizations with that power and the money behind it to push it forward. Then say, “Let’s give these people a stage. As I said, VIRTUS World Sport is doing an amazing job. They’re doing video competitions as well. So, she could have been competing against people from Israel and Italy.
Jacobsen: And I raised this point earlier on the human rights domain. Canadian policy will stipulate one thing: Canadian voting record at the United Nations Human Rights Council, Security Council, and so on will be different. I did a series not in equestrianism but a separate domain on the Israel-Palestine issue with the country director for Israel-Palestine from Human Rights Watch and several UN special rapporteurs. The general notion about Canada was: We will state one thing, which is in line with international opinion, which is typically a good thing to do. Then, when it came to actual voting records, it was mixed in terms of sticking to universal human rights. Similarly, I’m getting a sense of this as well, where the institutions are behind what the culture supports. So, there’s a duplicity, maybe not conscious.
Melanie: Yes, I don’t think it’s a conscious thing. I think people want people with disabilities to be able to do things. It’s like there’s a lag time. It’s like we got the death spiral on a computer in Canada. It’s loading, loading, loading, and loading. When is it going to happen? I hope that Canada gets up out of the bottom. How to do that? I don’t know.
Jacobsen: Are there ways to creatively bypass sponsorship issues and financial barriers? So, for instance, having video competitions, it’s remote. You don’t have to travel. Horses cost money to take places. You need equipment, trailers, and trucks. Some people take trailers without trucks [Laughing].
Melanie: Yes, then there’s the vet, then there’s a farrier. It’s so much.
Jacobsen: Even the shortage of farriers and vets, the people who can pay the most will have them, frankly. So, there’s even a generational gap between those in the pipeline and those in their 70s, maybe 80s, still doing the trade because it pays very well, and they’re the only ones to do it. So, that is impacting something in more vulnerable sectors of society.
Melanie: It’s huge.
Jacobsen: So, you’re coming from Saskatchewan. Places that are closer to Spruce Meadows are much bigger than Thunderbird.
Melanie: Much bigger.
Jacobsen: Huge. Thunderbird itself is big. It has grown rapidly, but nothing comes close to Spruce Meadows.
Melanie: The thing is, I don’t even know if they do dressage. I don’t know.
Jacobsen: I don’t know.
Melanie: That’s the thing. It wasn’t until I had someone in the family doing horse stuff. Where, I’m like, “Oh, yes, Thunderbird does dressage. There are so many more places around here. It’s like, “Well, do we move here?” And then the funding of it all, like I said, she has been making ice cream tacos to pay for all her riding. She – literally – makes ice cream tacos all summer. It pays for her riding and her therapy throughout the whole year.
Jacobsen: As with you, I recall the Lynne Foster story of selling things at Thunderbird Show Park.
Melanie: Now, I’m trying to create an equestrian t-shirt line that I’m hoping will help fund not only Lauren. But I want to make it so 10% of each profit of every t-shirt goes into a fund that we want to start to help support other athletes who fall in between the cracks, to help them get into therapy because money is the biggest barrier: Money and accessibility. Because, even the barn she’s at, Equilibrium, she has a waiting list. It would be great if there was more training, knowledge, and spotlight.
Jacobsen: These trainers, too, work very long hours. Their staff work very long hours because they show up earlier. They leave later, typically, because few people do the more basic or intermediate labour, which isn’t grounded in a decade of training experience.
Melanie: She’s been working her way. She works in trade for lessons, as well. Back home in Saskatchewan, and even here, she comes to help her cousin because she loves horses that much. She wants to help, but it has given her more insight and independence. The whole thought of her being in an institution. Now, you look at her. You wouldn’t even think of that. So, it’s like: Let’s just give more people the opportunities. Yes, there are jobs out there.
Jacobsen: It’s about a marker of the degree of civilization of a society or the degree of civility of society, which is how the more vulnerable sectors of society are doing. I remember talking to a man from Iran. He lives in Norway. He’s at the University of Oslo, a smart man. He’s in the newspapers. He founded a group called Iran Human Rights. His name’s Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam. He works for these teenage boys getting incarcerated or death penalties for various things. I believe he and some others noted that sort of marker to me. I met him in Copenhagen. One of the markers of a civilized society is how they are treating their prisoners and the idea that ‘No, we’re not going to kill them. We’re going to, if there’s an empirical record for that, institutionalize them.’ So, it is to give them therapy and get them back into productive society. That’s much better than leaving them there for the rest of their lives.
Melanie: Yes, writing them off.
Jacobsen: That’s exactly what it is. I think a lot of societies do that. And people like yourself are very motivated and committed to giving your daughter a good quality of life. Have you talked to other parents in a similar situation?
Melanie: Yes.
Jacobsen: How are they feeling?
Melanie: Same thing. It’s like we’re all scrambling to find opportunities for our kids. Some love horses, some don’t. She’s in Cheer as well. So, I’ve been talking to a lot of the CheerABILITIES parents. We’re all on the same page. It’s hard to find places for your kids to compete. The Special Olympics is fantastic. I know in Saskatoon (Saskatchewan). There’s a school that’s been doing Special Olympics for 40 years in their school. She was part of that. They adapted to the sports. They had the entrance parade of all the athletes. They had all the divisions. She competed with others with the same ability and intellectual level. It was fantastic. She got to compete. She came home with ribbons. But I didn’t know about that until she was in grade 10. It’s been going on. So, it’s like more people need to know about these programs.
Jacobsen: Are there networks and associations that are informal for parents like this?
Melanie: Yes, there are, but I’m frustrated because she hasn’t met the mandate for any of those organizations. I don’t want to throw any of them under the bus because they all are at capacity, which is why they have to have such strict mandates. Same with VIRTUS; they have a very hard line of intellectual disability. She was three IQ points too high.
Jacobsen: What is the definition of intellectual disability for them? What is the IQ level rating?
Melanie: I think it was 75. She was 78. They have to have a hard and fast line because it’s worldwide. You have to have a line. I respect that and understand it. It’s frustrating when you have kids on the cusp who don’t quite fit in that. She doesn’t fit into para. She doesn’t fit into VIRTUS. She doesn’t fit into Special Olympics. I mean, we’ve been fortunate enough that she’s had so much support from her school, her EAs, her coaches, and her family like her cousin. She will be able to compete in able-bodied dressage. But it’s with assistance. She needs her test called out because of her short-term memory. So, talking with the other parents, we all have the same thing: Where do you find this? So, it’s great for us as parents. We sit together and say, “Well, my daughter did this,” “I heard of this.” If you’re part of the Kinsmen…
Jacobsen: Like those whole sets of groups, the Kinsmen, the Elks, the Freemasons…
Melanie: It’s the Kinsmen in Saskatoon. There’s more of a sports angle. The Canadian Tiger has kids in sports. Whatever is out there, it’s daunting as a parent. Finally, you get tired because we’ve been fighting, battling, searching, and hunting. It’s like, “Why can’t they make them more mainstream? Why can’t they make it just more open?” But again, funding comes into that. Everything comes down to money. You see Coke. All of them sponsor every main thing. It’s like. “Well, what about people with disabilities?”
Jacobsen: Also, the funding is more pronounced in this sport. It’s at the high end, like NASCAR. I mean teams of grooms, stablehands, riders, etc., akin to people whose whole job is changing tires at a pit stop. LJ Tidball in her interview with me. We made that comparison. It’s very apt. If you’re a kid and have a hockey stick and a puck, you can practice. It won’t be a rink; it won’t be protected.
Melanie: But you can practice your shot anywhere.
Jacobsen: Correct. So, that’s slightly different than what you do because it requires a live animal that has only known captivity, is friendly to people, and that you have to build a relationship with, right?
Melanie: And you can’t just go around the corner to a small-town rink like you can and have a free skate, and then you can shoot around a puck.
Jacobsen: If you swing that hockey stick, it will swing. That bat, it’s going to swing. Shoot that basketball; it’s going to go. If a horse does not want to move, it is not moving. They will plant their feet.
Melanie: All these people say that the horse does all the work. I’m like, “You sit on a horse and let it do its own thing. It’s probably just going to stand there.”
Jacobsen: I put it to the non-tangibles. The trust makes the horse move.
Melanie: Yes, because they want to move for you. They want to please you; they want that treat. They want to work.
Jacobsen: It’s just that mint at the end of the lesson, or the carrot or the apple or whatever. How do you feel about your relationship with your horse?
Lauren: I think he is good and can tell when you have bad days.
Jacobsen: How would you describe his character?
Melanie: I’m always speaking for her. I don’t mean to jump in, but he’s an older horse. He’s a gentle, grumpy old grandpa. He cares. He knows and can read her. It’s a silent thing with her like watching her with her horse melts me every time.
Jacobsen: Do you feel more confident after working with the horse?
Lauren: Yes.
Jacobsen: Do you feel you’ve built much trust with the horse?
Lauren: Yes.
Jacobsen: How old is the horse?
Lauren: 20.
Jacobsen: What’s his name?
Lauren: Thumper.
Jacobsen: Thumper? How do you spell that?
Melanie: “Thumper” like the rabbit, like t h u m p e r. He’s a therapy horse, so he is also used for some therapy lessons. But she leases him, so she’s the main rider of him. He’s a very careful horse. He works for that carrot at the end of the lesson.
Jacobsen: What would you say is his favourite treat?
Lauren: He likes carrots and apple flavours, too.
Melanie: Yes, food in general. [Laughing] These two get along well because she’s food-motivated.
Jacobsen: I think boy horses are the best, at least, for the English discipline. They do what they’re told. They let you braid their hair. They enjoy every meal. It’s great.
Melanie: She’s been working with them in riding and living. For the summer, she lived in her coach’s yard in a camper because she didn’t drive. So, that’s why I’m still a stay-at-home mom, technically. Even though she’s almost 19. I’m still a stay-at-home mom for her because I have to drive her, which I am more than willing. My husband and I decided early on that my focus was on her. Until she’s settled in some place, that’s a live-in situation, but I’m willing to do that because I want her to succeed. I want her to be independent. I want her to live life to the fullest. I want her to have everything normal – I hate using the word “normal” – that an able-bodied or able-minded person can have. Her teacher said it would have been a whole different situation if she could do math on a horse. So, when she says her confidence, it is through the roof because of the horses. Even socially, she was bullied by exclusion from K to 12.
Jacobsen: I’m sure you’ve experienced that. I’ve experienced that growing up. It is very terrible.
Melanie: It’s the worst feeling. As a parent, to watch your child be in that, I don’t want to negate what someone who’s been bullied has gone through, but to watch your child go through it is more heart-wrenching than anything.
Jacobsen: I think it’s the aloneness, or the loneliness rather, that comes along with the bullying that you not only have through the exclusion, but then you self-isolate. I think that’s similar to a lot of experiences that are happening.
Melanie: She’s an extremely social person. She’s always smiling. We call her a ray of sunshine. She’s known as the smiley girl wherever we go. But it hurts to see that. Yet, she shows up to Thumper. He’s all love. She’s got his trust.
Jacobsen: What are your dreams with Thumper?
Melanie: Just to ride and love him.
Lauren: Yes.
Melanie: Her bucket list item is to do…
Lauren: …A show at Thunderbird in dressage.
Melanie: So, Thumper will only carry her so far. Again, we need a pool of horses for someone who’s beginning. They get these horses. Then, when they’re done, they move on to the next. I think that’s how the UK does it. They’ve got a whole pool of horses. Clive Milkins, who’s the Chef d’Equipe for the paralympic team, has come out and done clinics at her barn. He has kind of explained how it works in the UK. I wish Canada could adapt that somewhat, but it will take minds, money, time, and a physical place to do this.
Jacobsen: What’s the main feeling many parents have in this situation?
Melanie: I want to throw out frustration. I want to throw out longing and wishing their kids could have that. I’ve been in the trenches with this for so long like she’s 19. We got a diagnosis at 10, which took six years to get. It just seems like it’s such a long road. Everything is a fight or not a fight, but everything is working. It’s tons of paperwork and tons of interviews and tons of everything. It’s a lot of work. We’re all willing to do it because we want to see our kids succeed.
I know I jump all over the place when excited about this topic.
Jacobsen: I’m trying to think of a sort of wraparound. You mentioned something earlier, if I may bring it from off tape to on tape, about a hope to potentially be a groom for Joelle. How would you like to sort of achieve that dream?
Melanie: Coming to Thunderbird every year. We come to help her during the show season, which starts in April and goes on until about September. So, we’ve been coming for five years, where I drive her here and stay with her here.
Jacobsen: It’s not cheap. Thunderbird is, I mean, rightfully so, but it’s still very expensive.
Melanie: But for her, like she is a hard worker. She has put in the time and hours to live on her coach’s farm in Saskatchewan, which will help her for her future here. They feed off each other. People with disabilities are hard workers. I think there should be more tracks available for them, not just stock shelves and not just do the simple things, but they can compete. They can be on the world stage, but being a groom is hard work.
Jacobsen: Would you like to be on the Paralympic team ever?
Lauren: Yes, that’d be quite fun.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] Very fun!
Melanie: [Laughing] Well, like I said, even we were hoping that VIRTUS World Sports would have something. Because there, she could have been on the international stage. It would have been a lot. It would have been more of her speed, but, as we said, she can do the able-bodied with a few adaptations. So, yes, when we get to the higher levels, then we’ll see. But I mean, the sky’s the limit. I’m proud of her, extremely proud of her. She’s worked hard.
Jacobsen: What would you have words for her about seeing her growth?
Melanie: Words for her? I’m just plump and proud. I have set stuff up for her. She has never let me down. She has worked hard. She gets up at whatever time we need to get up. She’s there. You give her a pink pitchfork. She’s happy to care for both ends of the horses, as my dad always told me. So, I’m proud. I’m very proud of her. She’s had a hard way through school. She’s come out of it on top. I’m going to start crying because I’m just… [Crying] Yeah, it’s been a long haul.
Jacobsen: Would you have any words for your mom that come to mind?
Melanie: [Laughing] We’re an emotional bunch of people.
Lauren: [Crying] I think ‘helpful’… ‘amazing’….
Melanie: ‘Supportive’?
Lauren: Yeah.
Melanie: I’m usually her thesaurus. I know what she’s thinking. I think the tears say it all. So, yeah.
Jacobsen: Thank you both very much for your time.
Melanie: Thank you for bringing this to light. Like I said, I’m always ready to put this on people’s minds.
Jacobsen: Yeah, and part of this is a call to action, I think.
Melanie: Absolutely.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/09
My first trip to Europe was in 2019 between late May and early June to Iceland for the General Assembly of Humanists International. The central goal was to meet with the international humanist community, who I had, recently, been introduced to and made a significantly positive impression. I was on the Board of Humanist Canada, involved with the Centre for Inquiry Canada, Secretary-General (previously treasurer and vice president, separately) of Young Humanists International, an Editor and Contributor to Humanist Voices, and many more initiatives. I was captivated by the warmth of the humanist community, especially in the adherence to a singular life perspective. Life is here; we have one: so, you best make good use of it, doing more good than bad.
Wherein, even though, we have many more years than other primates or most other mammals. Life is still finite. And in the vast expanse of cosmic time, even biosphere time, we’re nary a blink of time. A sort of froth on the surface of an ordinary rock with an ordinary satellite with an ordinary nuclear furnace in an ordinary galaxy among billions of its brethren. That’s, by this point, trite in humanist circles and some common culture contexts now. It wasn’t at one point. That’s a sign of progress. Yet, there we were, jolly ol’ Iceland was time to reflect, to meet, to grow, to see the common visions if not common targeted objectives of a community of the non-theist: atheists, agnostics, humanists, and the like.
I arrived home much better informed and acquainted with the humanist cause(s) and the formal humanist communities from every region in the world. Yet, I was an ordinary Canadian coming from an alcoholic home and a lower-income – relative to Canada – family. I still had some student debt and needed to have more income generation with involvement in the humanist community, as the humanist cause and youth activism does not come with pay, often. I chose to work in some local restaurants, in Fort Langley, which is a National Historic Site in the Township of Langley, British Columbia, Canada. The Covid-19 pandemic hit the world, rather rapidly.
I remember one Jewish boss – I’ve had a large number of Jewish bosses and collaborators, thinking about it – asking as the pandemic started, “Is this going to be an issue?” I paused, recalled some information about the previous, recent and historic, pandemics faced by various civilizations and regions. I replied, “Oh, yeah.” I was right, especially when I didn’t want to be right.
Everyone was warned millions would die without vaccinations, masks of sufficient particulate filtration, social distancing, and the like. Not a ubiquitous ear from large swathes of humanity. There was plenty of valiant mobilization with one of the first opportunities in the world to act against a common microscopic enemy across boundaries. What happened? Millions died, and vulnerable populations. Those most vulnerable to the impacts of such a pandemic were killed in larger numbers than other populations. This seemed like another time as humanists to reflect.
In my experience, many humanist oriented individuals understand a sense of the passing time: temporality, temporal finitude, it becomes both ontological fact of being for them and existential moral epistemology; it’s both an acceptance of being, as such, in the former, and then the feeling of sentiments in relation to this being as a way of knowing in body and mind. In a sense, their sensibility or consciousness towards the universe comes as a simultaneous intellectual acceptance of a morally neutral cosmos and the sentiments of this reverberated in an embodied mind. The body becomes sounding board. We feel how we think. That’s a feeling on global pandemics or on personal issues needing solving.
I set a time limit to pay off the student debt of, and begin having some savings after, 2 years. This was accomplished. I was in 4 restaurants 7 days per week with janitorial work 2 nights per week by the end of it. All writing and activist work around that, day and night. This has been the pervasive work schedule as far back as I can remember. Then I decided to make a switch to another project in the horse industry with this accomplished. Within two weeks, I was out of this restaurant industry and then into the horse industry. Independent journalistic and activist work continued from this time.
With some more financial footing, and the Covid pandemic cooling down, I had some more flexibility with work, though still 7 days per week at an equestrian facility, and monies. I wanted to meet everyone in person, again, especially with more progress on the writing front, on newer independent projects, expanding, and then working on some interbelief activities too, and the co-foundation of some important and intriguing projects.
One was Advocacy for Alleged Witches (AfAW) by Dr. Leo Igwe as I was there at the start and began republishing articles, getting the website running and then the web administration for maintenance, and then incorporating his articles in experimental publications, e.g., African Freethinker. The targeted objective for AfAW for 2020-2030 is the elimination of witchcraft allegations, beliefs, and superstitions in Africa by the end of the decade.
The other was with a Muslim cosmologist and professor in Canada, Mir Faizal. We founded the Canadian Quantum Research Centre apart from Academia, or CQRC. Both Igwe and Faizal have been remarkable collaborators and self-starters in the work for advancement of humanistic causes. It has a reasonable start for citations, has a team of researchers, and has been going for several years now. I began other first of their kind humanist projects too. Then I wanted to connect with the global humanist community in person again.
The next General Assembly for Humanists International was special. In that, 2023 was a special year for the global humanist community with the inclusion of the first World Congress since 2014, 9 years. I was looking for a place to stay while in Copenhagen and ended up being a roommate with a Metis humanist colleague in his 70s, Dr. Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson. A prominent Metis doctoral counselling psychologist and humanist in Canada. It was August 1-7, 2023. The first people who I greeted upon arrival in Denmark were talented activist and intellectual Dr. Igwe and the gifted artist and aesthetic campaigner Victoria Gugenheim.
In my time there, I had some specific goals to reacquaint with everyone, as well as conduct some interviews. Also, I’m a person who enjoys the pleasures life has to offer too. I work fast and independently, though, and continue for extended periods. So, I can go to numerous establishments in one clip while going home to conduct interviews, write articles, or transcribe and edit written productions as necessary. All for the causes.
So, I took some time out to explore the city, the nightlife, the dance establishments, the art, and the global humanist community who joined us. It’s a striking city, even on an ethnic heritage level, where I have some Danish heritage on my father’s father’s side, my grandfather’s side. There’s a distinct impression of an older city than Township of Langley or Canadian society in general. European cities in general are, as a matter of historical fact, longer lived. I would meet with one group here, another there, and get on with the harder work of professional life too. There are an enormous number of demands on me 24/7. I don’t speak of them much. I am reminded of the conference of the Canadian Association of Journalists in a similar manner to the General Assembly of Humanists International, where the Canadian Association of Journalists provides great return on investment for the finances and membership. Humanists International does much the same.
This, in my experience with organizations, is not the norm. By the end of the conference, there were two keynote speakers. One was Remus Cernea who has done a tremendous amount for the humanist community in Romania and the other was Oleksandra Romantsova who has accomplished a lot through the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine. The former in founding the Romanian humanist movement more or less, being a president of a political party, being a Member of Parliament in Romania, and, now, an accomplished war correspondent for Newsweek Romania, currently (in the lattermost). The latter seeing the need to document rights abuses in Ukraine and create a position for herself, amazingly, through sheer determination and hard work, and being the Executive Director of the Center for Civil Liberties winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, which was a first for Ukraine.
I conducted interviews with both of them and was pitched to join Remus in a trip to Ukraine to work on human rights work there. That’s a tantalizing prospect, especially as a person with a desire to test limits, and boundaries, explore new territory and culture – and with the equestrian project, at least nationally, coming more to a close. Heading home from Copenhagen, this closed off the reunion with humanists, opening a new chapter into journalistic work – planning for the first big transition to an indefinite period of work in a war zone, Ukrainian territory. Something I’d promised myself against, but something I needed.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/07
Victoria Gugenheim was drawing before she could talk and was beginning with makeup by age 6, then focusing on face and bodypainting by age 9. She enjoys the process of de-othering as means of humanizing people. Her artistic forms vary widely from bodypainting, clothing design, digital art, and drawing, to installations, makeup, painting, and photography. Her clients have included Alice Cooper’s Halloween Night of Fear, Charlotte Church, Sony, London Fashion Week, Models of Diversity, Nokia, Marvel, and The World Bodypainting Festival. Here we continue on the body as canvas.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: My intuition flared off, recently. A bit before the recent sessions together. I realized. The individual who rudely, though sincerely, called Andrew Copson wanton and debauched – I believe demonic too – on live television in the UK. It stuck, as an intuitive reasoning experiment. The conclusion, after bugging me for a week: The dude expressed common, sincere sentiments, which, in other countries, become State oppression and public retaliation for open existence, not for presence (as many are searched out and hunted), e.g., ‘Ayaz Nizami’, Mubarak Bala, Saba Ismail and Gulalai Ismail, Mohamed Hisham, Rishvin Ishmath, and others. When you came out as a humanist and a lesbian, was this liberating? Was this reaction-inducing in others in an accepting sense, rejecting sense?
Victoria Gugenheim: I found accepting, moreso discovering, my lesbianism personally revelatory. However, it did result in discovering quite a large undercurrent of homophobia, with one woman cancelling as she didn’t feel comfortable being painted by a lesbian (peculiarly though, she was fine when she thought I was bi!). A number of male fans left, having felt “betrayed’, which begged the questions to me, “why on earth were they following my work in the first place?” “Were they really following me on the basis they thought they could one day have sex with me, or bought into that fantasy?” I found that in some ways, quite cynically apt as there is a horrid connect between person as object and possession in contemporary society, and also women are still denigrated in the arts and seen as lesser. I’ve never personally played to that fantasy at all, I’m far too in my own world looking at theories, evoking looks, exploring concepts, and have been topless twice for political protests, always with other women of all ages and body types. That projection being put upon me though was quite a startling revelation. It also shows in a small but immediate way, how we still need to tackle misogynist attitudes and homophobia, as both are deeply anathema to human wellbeing. Statistically, acceptance for gay people has been declining, and there has been a rise in homophobic attacks, even in London. Ultimately it was a host of unpleasant reactions when I came out, but at the same time, there was also support from fellow lesbians, which was so beautiful. As for the veracity of the comments, thankfully they were not on par with the previous bomb threats I’ve received. Small mercies eh?
There is still this odd stereotype of us being predatory too, likely a sour grapes construct from men in the 70’s with the rise of pulp about us and dodgy cult film. Doing things to empower the human spirit and convey concepts that need conveying has always been in my work, and Humanism was an emergent term for that, alongside being atheist and feminist. But I am keen to ensure that these definitions do not become moralistic confines, and am very much for exploring all sorts of wild, beautiful and wonderful ideas and concepts. Benevolent and curious freedom of expression shouldn’t be compromised.
Jacobsen: How have you used these realizations of yourself in your art?
Gugenheim: My first humanist Bodypainting emerged at The World Humanist Congress, which went down a storm, but in terms of being a lesbian, it’s actually not been quite so literal, although I’m desperate to explore lesbian history as it’s so often erased, and to highlight lesbian plights around the world in Iran, Afghanistan, China, Cambodia, all the places where you can be punished with death, correctively raped and on occasion, forced to transition.
What +has+ happened is a deepening affinity for women and my own body. I’ve suddenly become very connected on a profound level to women, their suffering, their victories, their plights and their pain, moreso than I was ever before, even though I was outraged at their suffering worldwide. I now feel it my moral duty to share their stories and feel it almost on what feels like a molecular level. The revelation was so deep that it shook me, and lesbianism also was a profound realisation after trauma that reconnected me to my own sense of being a woman actually -being- in the world on her own terms, away from yet another confine; heteronormativity.
My clients have also, certainly changed. I have far more lesbians now!
Jacobsen: How do you approach the human body as a canvas?
Gugenheim: I have a mixture of approaches. Oftentimes I work with the body as allegory, creating stories and explaining complicated concepts, or creating something emotive or fantastical on skin. I was featured in an academic paper in South Korea for my work on this, actually! One way I love to work is a mini movement I have called Statementism- the idea that you can work with the body as the oldest, most immediate and responsive canvas we have in order to convey complicated and high end scientific and technological concepts, very much the past meets the future. I pay attention to the way a person holds theirself before, during and after the process, look for any ways they could be uncomfortable, check in with them, and see how their body responds and changes with the paint. For male commercial painters there is a LOT of objectification and I refuse to work that way. How I work is far more of a dialogue than most people would think. I care deeply when I’m painting someone, about how they are feeling, about the outcome, about what we want to mutually convey, which is anathema to seeing them as a flat, inanimate canvas. They live, breathe, move, get cold or hot, and the process is quite the choreography in itself. As for medium, I tend to only use Brush and Sponge as these are nimble, quick, punk rock and enable you to flit from place to place far more easily.
Jacobsen: The canvas, the body, looks so difficult. Hard, soft, flexible, hairy in different places, sweaty and oily, it’s just a mess, evolved mess. What palette of materials are helpful in making the body more – ahem – palatable?
Gugenheim: Ha! Yes, we are indeed an evolved mess of 35 trillion cells, all somehow through nonsentient agreement trying to get through life in the least worst way possible until the senescence kicks in. Oddly, it’s a beautiful experience working with different body types. There are a broad range of textures, and more mainstream artists consider smooth skin devoid of texture to be the best canvas to operate on. They’re looking for android like perfection, and that takes away quite a sizeable chunk of variety. Instead I prefer to work with all sorts of skin textures and contours. I sort of think in wireframe and map the idea onto the body as I go. So that is the foundation (as all decent looks start with a good foundation, darling), and atop that is a multitude of glittery goodness. Usually Cameleon Paint, which is water based and EU and FDA approved. Following that are beautiful skin friendly glitters, hand made prosthetics and recently, an awful lot of 24k gold leaf and adornments. Sometimes I love just the paint and the technical precision of doing as much as I can with that. Other times I want to use as much gold as the armour of King Gustav of Sweden X, minus the death and blood. Not a big fan of those as a Humanist Bodypainter, really. Could do without.
For any aspiring artsy curiosos: If you decide to embark on the aesthetic suicide mission that is the world of body art, for whatever we have as opposed to a God’s sake, avoid any base level shenanigans from Amazon, PLEASE.
Jacobsen: How do the different contours of different body types affect artistic choices?
Gugenheim: The body has its own topology, but you need to work with it in a way for a sophisticated piece that isn’t quite so obvious. One of my breakthroughs which I’ve taught all over the world is Blatchko’s lines. They matched so well with how to create sophisticated pieces of art, that some of my students were able to bypass conventional anatomy training entirely, getting an acute understanding of positioning just from the lines.
Larger spaces like backs are beautifully primed for epic scenes, like deserts, huge mountainscapes, or biomech with lots of detail. For protests they are great for slogans. Wrists look beautiful when highlighted, as do collarbones, lending an ethereal quality that when taken in as an holistic piece of work, gives it an oomph. Unlike other artists, I also like using lots of black for drama, and find anything framed along the side of the body looks so much more “kapow” when adorned with black!
Jacobsen: How do you prevent thematic and colour clashes in protest art, body art presentations without a protest focus, and stuff with entertainment focus like big-time movies, e.g. Guardians of the Galaxy or something where bodyart is very clearly in the movies?
Gugenheim: Interesting question. If you mean in terms of the emotive colour, then they are so thematically opposed that they have their own language and methods of creation now, although I am DYING to use more fine art in studio protest pieces, so if there are any Ex Muslims, Women Life Freedom activists or women who want to fight for their freedoms especially, do step on up!
Protest art is usually blocks of colour created quickly in a public setting for immediate effect. They are pieces meant to grab you on a visceral level, as opposed to being sophisticated. Logos, slogans, all of these are usually 1 to 3 colours, so there is a benevolent clash if you will, the clash of a woman’s body unclothed in public, with… the general public. A nonviolent riot of colour.
Movie makeup is created under very different conditions, with a number of creatives planning looks and then teams of people executing them. Vision boards with a LOT of plagiarism are abundant (which I disapprove of and don’t personally use). It has to pass by committee for approval and then what the director says, goes. There are often SFX techniques like speckling, something called “cheating in” a prosthetic where you create the illusion someone has one when they don’t, and most SFX bodypainters will use airbrush. The cohesiveness is then decided by the director and the creative management looking at trial shots of the work. They decide on tweaks, what to take out, put in, emphasise, and this laborious process will go on until a consensus is reached. It is more of a group effort.
As for fine art pieces in a studio, they are a far more relaxed affair, the paint being built up in layers and an exploration of concept and feeling between the person being painted and the artist, which compliments the work…and there is always the colour wheel.
Jacobsen: What are the areas of these artistic endeavours that have a unity of materials and purpose? Where, somehow, protest and entertainment are in the same direction.
Gugenheim: Impact. You want everything you do to have impact. Power. Life. I want art that makes you look or takes your breath away.
Jacobsen: Are there ways in which the human surface and form makes a better protest canvas than posters, videos, flags, and such?
Gugenheim: Absolutely! All of these pieces however work together in a sort of holistic, evolving protest web, and are useful for myriad reasons. Video can be used to carry the medium, make it more transmissable as a meme, so it’s highly useful. Seeing flags and placards en masse can add a feeling of solidarity, But we are evolutionarily primed to respond to a human body, and a supernormal stimuli like bodypaint, commands us to look. This supernormal stimuli principle is found, and can even be primed, in rats and gulls, basically any complex enough animal, even butterflies. Where you need to make a novel, commanding statement, where you want to make an emboldened and powerful point, where you want immediate media attention, use bodyart!
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time again, Victoria. We’ll be back.
Gugenheim: My pleasure, as always.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/05
According to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing here, Rick G. Rosner may have among America’s, North America’s, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awards and Emmy nominations, and was titled 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directory with the main “Genius” listing here.
He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the “World’s Smartest Man.” The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches issued a cease-and-desist. He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area, Colorado, by Westwood Magazine.
Rosner spent much of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and American fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. Errol Morris featured Rosner in the interview series entitled First Person, where some of this history was covered by Morris. He came in second, or lost, on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person? (He was drunk). Finally, he spent 37+ years working on a time-invariant variation of the Big Bang Theory.
Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, dog, and goldfish. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions at LanceVersusRick@Gmail.Com, or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube. Here we talk about some co-developed ideas that originated with Rick decades ago as a young man, which has a further precedent in Digital Physics with Edward Fredkin.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, this is the ultimate frisbee of virtual realities. You go first, please.
Rick Rosner: Ok, so, from time to time, we’ve casually kind of discussed how it’s interesting/possibly important that the issue of whether the universe is real or a simulation. In pop culture you have The Matrix, which is a huge trilogy of movies. Blockbusters, that center around the universe being simulated and in pop culture in the future the issue’s going to be, I think, bigger and bigger because of video games. Maybe, other forms of entertainment will simulate reality with greater and greater verisimilitude.
Jacobsen: That’s right.
Rosner: The simulations will get better and better. But then I was thinking about it a little bit and realize that just saying casually say, “You can’t tell whether the universe is real or a simulation.” Or if you couldn’t tell did, what would you mean when you talk about simulation? It turns out to be. Well, I don’t know if it’s not simple, but it certainly needs pinning down. Because you have issues like, “Who is the simulation for? Is it for the video game? Is it for the consciousnesses in that world? Is it the whole universe or is it just a chunk of it?” And all those things have implications for reality. It is naturally arising, but exists in an artificial armature – well, not necessarily artificial.
That’s another issue, but our minds are supported by our brains. You’d call that a natural armature versus a consciousness that would be supported by an information processing device that’s been built by people who are built by individuals who learned how to create consciousness. And then, of course, you have the problem of the turtles all the way down thing. What’s supporting each of these worlds – the hardware world and all that stuff? And it probably leads to what you were talking about, which is you kind of like you said, ‘Who cares?” Simulated versus natural, because in the end, it was a stack of turtles. The whole thing may become moot at some point. Anyway, it doesn’t seem trivial or simple to me. What do you think?
Jacobsen: Yes, I don’t think it’s trivial. I do think it’s simple because you don’t have a lot of options. So, let’s say, you have a naturally rising universe. Okay, let’s say, you get a civilization. They perform various virtual reality simulations of their universe and other possible universes. So, there you have a virtual universe arising out of the universe. Let’s say, you have some kind of not quite existent, not quite nonexistent universe; that is very quantum mechanical, just extremely virtual in its existence, because it’s not fully manifested insofar as it can exist and cannot exist. It’s at that edge between kind of solidity and not. You have others start off natural and have an entire timeline, a world line of the entire universe. There’s no need for a simulation in the first place. So, in that case, okay, you have a natural universe running all the way through. And the first case, you have a natural universe running into a virtual simulation. You could also have this iterative effect where you have extraordinarily long-lived universes, where you start off natural or you start off kind of quantum mechanically virtual. Then it becomes natural, then that civilization in that natural universe that happens to evolve simulates a universe in which you have other little mini civilizations that then themselves do simulations and you have this kind of matryoshka doll situation of simulations.
Rosner: You have that even with the natural universe, because every armature needs to itself to be part of a material world that is made of information that’s being stored in, so the turtles all the way down. And also, there’s another issue which gets back to your point of “who cares?”; if the better a simulated universe is, the less it’s going to violate the rules of a natural universe.
Any decent similar universe? Go ahead.
Jacobsen: Or any simulation in our natural universe or another natural universe, the laws of physics that govern the computation of that computational device, doing the simulation will limit the type of simulations it can do.
Rosner: Yes, and also, the probability of discernible divergences from apparent naturalness in a decent simulation is low.
So, like, well, just doing naive math, there are eight billion people in the world and you find out. And one person is magic because it’s a simulation. The odds against that are one in eight billion. And of course, in practical and more realistic terms the odds that you see violations of natural physics revealing that you’re in a simulation are just super low because it’s just there are probability arguments to be made. For one thing, we live in a world where there’s no good evidence of the world; we live in now, being a simulation. The same way, there’s no evidence of there being time travelers visiting us, right? There have been no probabilistic arguments to be made. So, based on the evidence of our world and the history of the universe as we know it, it’s apparently highly probable that the rules of the universe are not being violated, right?
Jacobsen: Yes. I mean, for that simulation, for any simulation to exist, which is grounded on a natural universe, that simulation, the computation behind it must rely on that natural universe physics. You can’t get out of that.
Rosner: But it’s easy to imagine a series of 50 years in the future. One hundred and fifty years in the future. It’s easy to imagine video games that are convincing simulations. And you can enter into them. And it’s even possible to imagine that you can have your awareness abridged so that when you’re playing the video game, you think you’re actually living in the world, the simulated world. You can also imagine that this video game has characters like free guy that are conscious and not realizing that they’re in a video game.
Jacobsen: Absolutely. And to say, that it’s limited by the physics. That its computation is based on the virtual universe. It’s not to say it can’t have its own variables and kinds of laws. It’s just the computation behind it will limit what is possible there. And it may be such that when we talk about computers as universal computation machines, like a universal Turing machine or something; these are only limited by our experience of this kind of computation in our universe. I mean, so, “Yes.”
Rosner: Yes, it’s certainly easy to build from our physics.
Jacobsen: Yes. So, our computers might not be universal. They might be general in this context.
Rosner: Yes, but the deal is, it’s possible to imagine a future that has a whole bunch of video games that are convincing simulations. Where within the games, the rules, some of the rules of reality would be violated. You can imagine a convincing simulated world video game in which you can fly, for instance.
Jacobsen: Gravity is reversed.
Rosner: Or something, it’s easy to imagine that these kind of games will be pervasive in the future. So, yet, we live in a world. The world we live in now doesn’t have any of those violations of reality. So, what’s the deal, probabilistic? You find yourself being a conscious being in the world that you’re in. And what are the odds that it’s a natural world? We, apparently, are in or it’s a simulated world. That you’re part of a game that runs for three weeks or three hours. You become conscious. You’ve got backs in your awareness. You’ve got a history. All these issues need to be addressed scientifically and philosophically, ideally scientifically. Are there probabilistic arguments to be made about whether you’re more likely to find yourself in a natural world or a simulated world?
And, of course, the simulated world you assume is an offshoot of the natural world, and as we’ve been talking of a natural world; it’s that assumption of legitimation. We have talked about, “I think, therefore, I am.” Within the context, given the extreme complexity and self-consistency of the worlds of our minds or an individual’s mind with its memories and its ability to mentally simulate the world, given the extreme consistency in the amount of information involved, that’s a statistical argument for the existence of the possessor of that consciousness. So, analogously, are there probabilistic arguments to be built around natural versus simulated worlds? Also, the extent of the simulated world.
Jacobsen: They are, in some sense. Any evolved mind in a natural universe is running a simulation of it. And this is not digital. Like my own mind is running a simulation of my little environment here, in front of the laptop. Similarly, with you in front of your Skype machine, it’s just the way things are. So, you could say simulation is the dominant strain of quantity of computation. Although, natural is the dominant quality of it. I mean, we’re only in a finite volume. We have seven or eight billion people running all these simulations based on their own minds. But those are very small volumes in the entirety of the Universe, the natural universe. I think you make the same argument where in any other universe where they have these simulations, even massive galactic-scale simulations. Computational devices of that scale, they would themselves be limited in that natural universe, which is bigger.
So, there’s one split there. Maybe, in that argument, it’s not usually made, which is that natural universes are the ground state. They’re much bigger. So, there’s a lot more computation happening with regard to them. Any kind of simulation that’s happening within them, whether it’s what we call digital or evolved consciousness, either case evolved or constructed. They’re far more plentiful. Because once the natural universe is already set up, then you have a simpler setup to kind of run different simulations.
Rosner: Yes, so, I mean, there’s that argument that we think can be made, which is that it’s just much more likely that we’re in a natural universe.
Jacobsen: Yes. Even though, the number of “simulated universes,” are arguably much more plentiful.
Rosner: Yes, so, it’s a mess.
Jacobsen: I mean, just the human species is a hundred billion simulations at various kind of world lines.
Rosner: We intuitively think that it’s much more probable. We’re in a natural universe, but we don’t know the framework to do any kind of calculation.
Jacobsen: You can throw a ballpark even by saying one planet in one universe for one species amounts to one hundred billion simulations. So, 100 billion little tiny world lines within that one natural universe.
Rosner: At that point, I am still finding myself confused. There’s another level. There are plenty of issues around simulation. Another issue, though, is that if the universe is a vast information processing entity. It is not necessarily aware of structures such as ourselves and our planet that have originated, that are built out of the matter that is made of the information in that information process. That the information in the processor is manifest as matter and space. And the whole thing is as our universe, but that the information processor gets the information out of the process that we experience as the universe without necessarily any awareness that this universe exists. Without any specific idea:: If it’s a sufficiently sophisticated entity, if I see this is anything like true, then that entity will have a general idea that there’s a universe made of the information in processing without any specific knowledge of what happens in that universe.
Jacobsen: I mean, consider the consciousness of an ant. Who knows how many ants in the world? What I am calling simulations in a natural universe, I am including those. I am not just talking digital; I am talking evolved. And so the non-conscious, so to speak, like an ant.
Rosner: So, we’re talking about two different things. There’s another issue with simulation, which is intentional simulation for a video game, and a simulation you’re talking about, which is a mental picture of the world.
Jacobsen: So, an objective simulation and a subjective simulation. Subjective can have a lot more flavors.
Rosner: I mean, that’s another like framework that needs to be fairly well defined.
Jacobsen: Maybe, in an intrinsic simulation and extrinsic simulation? Something like that.
Rosner: Well, I mean, like the simulations I am talking about are meant to emulate a world.
Jacobsen: You mean the simulations where you have two black holes processed virtually in these massive supercomputers and trying to see what happens when two black holes collide?
Rosner: No, I am not. I am not talking about that. I am talking about simulations that lead somebody in the simulation to potentially ask the question whether they’re living in a natural world or a simulated world. So, I guess, to be more clear, I am talking about simulated worlds, simulations.
The simulation we have in our minds are not intentional. They’re not constructed worlds. I mean, just talking about it shows that there are issues that need to be pinned down.
Jacobsen: You’re talking at a high level of simulation in my mind.
Rosner: It’s not just high level. It’s something different. It’s like the simulation that makes free guy think he’s living in a natural world. But it’s just as the simulation in a video game.
Jacobsen: So it’s an as if natural universe.
Rosner: There’s external intention there. Somebody built that world with the intent of making it seem real for their own purposes. Simulations we have in our minds. I mean, we didn’t intentionally build them. They’re a product of our evolved minds. They’re not there. For nearly every organism on Earth, they are meant to simulate the real external world.
Jacobsen: So right there. So, you’re talking at three layers. You have a universe, a really sophisticated simulation. And then the subjective impression, the mental map that simulated being has in that simulated universe.
Rosner: Yes. And I want to bring up one more point. So, if the universe is a giant consciousness, it’s not aware of the specifics of the material manifestation of the information in its consciousness. You can still argue that a system that’s possibly aware of that universe that is contained within the information. And an external world, an armature could tweak the events. Within the information universe it contains, it seems unlikely. But maybe also not by that, the quantum of events in our universe, the outcomes of when an open quantum frame becomes closed. Because an event, a quantum event has happened, you would think that the outcome of that quantum event reflects something that happened. For that outcome contains information about the world that the information is about, and those things should be… anyway. I’ve done myself a whole lot of lack of clarity and would just be wasting more time to go further into it, but anyway. This discussion, at least in my mind, is that the simulated worlds and universes need a lot more clarity in pinning down what they’re about in order to discuss them effectively.
Jacobsen: And we can both agree the ground state has to be a natural universe.
Rosner: Yes, but no. I mean, the easiest universe to imagine is one that has a timeline where every quantum event that has a complete timeline representing an actual history, and that the events on that timeline… Although, all the gazillion quantum events are randomly operating, according to the rules of quantum mechanics in a natural way. That’s the easiest universe to imagine.
Jacobsen: Any simulation that comes out of that has to be based out of some processing unit grounded in that universe. I think those are two points. So, any kind of simulation coming out of that universe or any type of simulation, virtual reality, coming out of that universe will have to be grounded in the physics of that universe, which will have a particular kind of computation.
Rosner: Not necessarily video games now that have alternative physics.
Jacobsen: That’s not what I mean. I mean, the physics for the actual computation to take place. So, in our case, we have digital computers, so you can simulate any kind of physics, but that type of range of simulation is grounded in competition.
Rosner: Objects.
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: Is actually generating the simulation, the computer’s operating in our world, which we naturally assume to be natural.
Jacobsen: Yes. So, in that sense, that’s a point of huge clarity, where the material object in our universe that is the computational unit is constrained by a particular physics. But the virtual reality that it creates can have all sorts of physics. But it’s constrained by that original physics.
Rosner: Yes, although, I don’t know if that’s a big deal.
Jacobsen: Well, I think it might clarify the difference with the armature in our universe. This sort of thing.
Rosner: So, in the armature, the whole idea of the armature and the turtles all the way down is itself a mess. In that, we’re assuming that you can have this implied infinity because it’s an infinity that is informationally moot.
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: That, even though it’s implied, it’s so distant in terms of having any possible effect on our world that you can just kind of wave it away. It seems like a terrible way to reason, though they’re in like Feynman type physics. There is similar hand-waving to get rid of troublesome infinities.
Jacobsen: As far as I am aware, that’s common in physics to hide infinities in various places.
Rosner: Yes, and it’s mathematically ugly. It’s philosophically ugly.
Jacobsen: Which makes it unlikely to be true because typically the true is beautiful.
Rosner: No, I was just reading. Somebody was writing about that whole true as beautiful thing and was debunking it. When physicists like Einstein say that beautiful is true, that’s based on many years of work in physics. And so, that’s a very educated aesthetic if you want to call it an aesthetic. But it might be more legitimate to call it a scientific intuition that what Einstein would find beautiful isn’t what somebody who finds astrology, somebody who believes in astrology, would find beautiful.
Jacobsen: I see.
Rosner: So rather than call it beauty, call it educated intuition.
Jacobsen: Makes sense. Okay, that’s fair.
Rosner: So, I don’t know that any further discussion on this stuff will be productive.
Jacobsen: Well, I think a wrap up would be helpful.
Rosner: My wrap up is that there are lots of issues around what we mean when we talk about simulation and the different types of simulation we might talk about. And it would be helpful to get that stuff more pinned down before we talk about the implications of simulated vs. natural universes and worlds. Because there’s a difference between a simulated universe because you could set up a randomized quantum universe within a computer and let it play out; it would be very small and it could be a whole universe.
Jacobsen: We should make that distinction.
Rosner: What’s that?
Jacobsen: Maybe, we should make the distinction.
Rosner: Distinction between an entire simulated universe and a simulated part of the world?
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: Matrix. Because The Matrix doesn’t simulate the entire universe.
Jacobsen: Yes, I mean, in a sense.
Rosner: It simulates like the surface of Earth for all the people who are imprisoned in the simulation. And it simulates the stars and the sky and everything. But it dispenses in the interest of efficiency in The Matrix simulation. Does not give a shit about what might be happening on planets and some other galaxy. The simulation, matrix simulation, you have the images of other galaxies. And they appear to behave as distant galaxies might. But beyond that level of simulation, the prison keepers aren’t going to go to the trouble. The computational trouble of fully simulating distant galaxies.
Jacobsen: Well, in that sense, I think it’d be very, very rare to come across a true universe simulation. I think in that sense. You can make a distinction. This is a placeholder. That when you’re speaking of universes; you’re speaking of natural universes and you’re speaking virtual universes. You’re talking about worlds because it’s very likely only to be part. It’s going to be very partial.
Rosner: Again, just for me to wrap up, is just to say that this whole area is something that needs pinning down.
Jacobsen: Yes, I don’t even know what the terminology would be properly set forth to limit when we’re talking about that simulation of a world versus that subjective simulation.
Rosner: And what’s kind of weird is that, probably, the people building the universe will become the accepted terminology for, at least, some of these ideas that are going to be video game makers.
Jacobsen: Also, there’s another part of this, which is, “Do we simulate agents without agency?” Like bad guys in video games, they don’t have any agency. They’re just sort of these 3D.
Rosner: Right now, in video games, the only characters with agency are the characters being played by actual people.
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: There may be characters within video games that are sufficiently complicated. I don’t know, because I don’t play video games. They might have like a sub-ant like level of agency. Because it’s a question as to “How much agency?”
Jacobsen: Very little.
Rosner: OK. But even so, an ant probably has more agency because an ant brain, probably, has like a hundred thousand neurons, which is not much compared to humans, 80 billion neurons. But it’s still a shitload of neurons enough to generate some behavioral complexity. And I am sure there’s no engine that runs a bad guy in a video game that has even the complexity of an ant brain. But in the future, it’s easy to imagine video game characters with the agency of an ant.
Jacobsen: And it’s different in what we have with those videogame characters because it’s a coding around which they behave as a 3D figurine, but ants have built into them – with ants that’s built into their system. It’s unified. There’s a central processing unit in them. In the simulated characters we have now in video games, that’s not even close to what is the case.
Rosner: No, but you got me. I am sure, like some of the non-playable characters and video games have very complicated decision trees.
Jacobsen: Sure. But it’s built. It’s distributed into the whole system and then played out through that little 3D figurine. In the end, it’s intrinsic to it. It’s much more tightly closed off.
Rosner: Yes, I think one thing we can say, at least in terms of this discussion, is that agents to have agency: Yu need to have consciousness.
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: I think that in general, that seems. Well, that’s right.
Jacobsen: Yes, and maybe, also, there’s that sense of agency that has to come with a certain closed offness to the rest of the universe, where the only channels of information are getting in from your own little sensory apparatuses – whatever it is.
Rosner: Alright, I am tired. My voice is raspy.
Jacobsen: Ok, yes.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/03
*Interview conducted September 3, 2023.*
Ms. Oleksandra Romantsova is the Executive Director (2018-present) of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022 under her and others’ leadership in documenting war crimes. This will be a live series on human rights from a leading expert in an active context from Kyiv, Ukraine, to complement live on-the-ground war coverage in the war zones from Romanian humanist independent journalist Remus Cernea.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, today, we are here for round two with Oleksandra Romantsova or Sasha. We’ll be talking about some updates to the situation in Ukraine vis-a-vis human rights. I wanted to start. There, recently, was a plane crash and an individual, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was killed in that crash, which garnered a lot of media play. What was your first reaction to this? How did human rights defenders see this?
Oleksandra Romantsova: It was not only Prigozhin. So, it was not only him. But officials who killed Ukrainians tortured them. On the side, all of us need to check if it is true or not. If they are just trying to hide, then it’s bad news. A lot of people are killed in Ukraine. They publicly do that. They destroy people.
Jacobsen: People killed under suspicious circumstances, like with a radioactive substance.
Romantsova: They kill if they violate something.
Jacobsen: Like a hummer.
Romantsova: Yes, a hummer, they kill people by hummer, publicly. They do that publicly and make a video and put it out publicly. So that they will never do that again. My reaction was like this.
Jacobsen: Not surprised.
Romantsova: Exactly; I am not very surprised because these people are always playing darts. They create relationships only connected with violence. I told you about that.
Jacobsen: It is this culture of violence that we spoke about in the first session that he creates solutions for problematic individuals who become violent. It makes sense. It makes any public murder or killing suspicious with that kind of culture. For Erdogan and Putin, the presidents of Turkey and Russia, they are meeting. Any thoughts on that meeting that’s happening?
Romantsova: Putin, I don’t think we have a lot of news from there. It didn’t sound like a lot of really important news. Every time it happens, something like this. Putin put a brain out. After this, he starts to drill it, shell it, like Odesa. Because before that, Odesa, its region, was like this politician’s preference from the population. They accept. Now, it’s not good at all because Putin destroyed the infrastructure of our biggest port. Odessa has the biggest port and biggest exporter of grain. After this meeting in Turkey, after they started an agreement, they started to destroy not only the port but also the central city. One of the historical churches there. So, a lot of the population was killed, including children. After this, they shelled Chernihiv. It is a city in the north of Ukraine, which was a really strong Russian occupation in March of 2022. That was the first thing. In the center of the city, they had a festival. They destroyed the festival. They heard about the drums and exhibitions. They killed more than 45 people and 11 children. It’s like every time we hear about some occupation Putin doesn’t like. It means that you can be in danger because the rockets can hit any place: civilian objects, humanitarian objects, military objects. Anything, shelling everything.
Jacobsen: You have also noted, to me, volunteers, journalists, activists. They can be, have been, killed, jailed, harassed. What are the numbers that are coming out, even this early in full-scale invasion?
Romantsova: We started collecting information about journalists, volunteers, and some local leaders from Kherson, because that was a lot of information then. Russia came there and occupied Kherson. They started to jail them, torture them, kidnap them. These people made a major base for the Russian occupation. They are waiting for Russians. That’s why they need support. All of these people, that’s why it’s the addition of some newspapers and web portals that give the news by the names of previous journalists who have the trust of the population. They do that about Russians. The Russians come in and kill off the regime. So, now, we have more than 300 such stories. We need to understand. The same thing happened inside Russia. Because people want to protest in any small way against the war, they are jailed. They politically prosecute journalists, human rights defenders, and activists. People who are trying to do some peaceful demonstration. All of them are jailed in Russia or escape from the Russian Federation. There are 600 people who are political prisoners. 6,000 of them were prosecuted for protesting the war. If they say something at work or say some truth about the Russian Army, they call Russian charges. Russian prosecutors exactly accuse them – that they lie about the Russian Army. Russians shelled Odesa court. If you speak about that inside Russian, you will be put in jail.
Jacobsen: One thing I have noticed is that I did a similar series, which I’m hoping to do in a similar way with the Russo-Ukrainian War on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I did it with three of the UN special rapporteurs. One of the Human Rights Watch country directors and human rights people in and out of the territories. It was a couple of years. If this continues for an extended period, I will be doing it for much longer. The idea would be to do a number of interviews thematically oriented around a live context. Remus Cernea, Romanian humanist and independent war correspondent, is another pillar of the work that I am doing here. So, one thing I noticed from the Israeli-Palestine context was Omar Shakir, who is the Human Rights Watch director for Israel-Palestine, noted in one of the ten or so sessions that we did. When the IDF forces attack Palestinian territory and people, they could be journalists, medical personnel, and those who are properly armed in conflict. Yet, I believe, according to Norman Finkelstein too, shooting to maim rather than kill was a phenomenon, so that when one looks at the kill count, the numbers are artificially low because that’s not taking into account those who may have had their legs blown off and went back into Palestinian society with no legs, for example [1]. They have no place in that society as a disabled person in terms of things they can functionally do in a limited context in society. Is something similar happening within the Russo-Ukrainian War context?
Romantsova: I will not compare Israel and Palestine and Ukraine because none of us: not Ukraine, not Russia, no high-level developed military like Israel; I mean, Russia: stupid, brutal. Sometimes, they do these things… it’s like all these things you’re talking about is strategy. Russians don’t have a strategy. They put thousands in the Russian jail system because the Russian jail system is huge. You can put thousands in one jail or move them into another. It takes their whole life. Again, Palestine and Israel are a long-term conflict, which started with other countries surrounding Palestine. It is totally standalone from Russia and Ukraine. Ukraine and Russia are in a long conflict. But it’s not about that. Russia is always trying to get land from Ukraine. So, for me, it is too much to compare this population, Ukraine, to Palestine. Russia is just trying to destroy the country and take our lands. It is so primitive in thought. That’s why a lot of people can’t believe it.
Jacobsen: When people are put into these jails and shuttled around…
Romantsova: Look, I am just explaining the situation in the jail. If you are taken to jail, you need access to a lawyer. Your parents or relatives need to know you’re arrested. What happened in Ukraine was taking land and being kidnapped by the Russian Army, taking the northern part of Ukraine and being kicked out from the Ukrainian Army. They kidnapped people and took them into the Russian Federation. After that, they took them to jail. They don’t give access to them. They don’t have any contact with family or relatives. They don’t give them contact with a lawyer. They just put them in jail and give them numbers. Even in Russia, the situation, they give them numbers like livestock, like an object. Now, when they transfer these people from one jail to another jail, they transfer them like furniture. One of our partners, a Russian lawyer, is trying to make contact when they go to jail. It is the name and surname of the person and why they went to jail. “Give us the reason why they are here; what is the accusation? Give us the opportunity to have contact with them. I am their lawyer. I have contact with their family, their relatives.” Russia doesn’t let them do it. They do not have any international or even their own law. They create new laws. Russians don’t like people at all.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Romantsova: Seriously, they don’t even like their own people. They don’t care about their own people.
Jacobsen: They even repealed the domestic abuse laws.
Romantsova: Yes.
Jacobsen: It’s a massive regression. These are not symbolic alone; these are regressions.
Romantsova: So, same with the Russian Orthodox Church. Russian Orthodox Church is exactly about… I don’t like this religion because of its rules. They preach the rules blah-blah-blah, but the Russian Church visits to explain to people why they need suffering lives. They use religion in this way. That’s why we have a problem with the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine because of the ties. They have a church. One of the biggest. Now, when they give the, for example, they give the text about why we need to support the Russian Army. Some support the Ukrainian church, but when somebody does that, even if you’re a priest, you need to be arrested. Again, it is national security. Some have given up and supported the Russian Orthodox Church.
Jacobsen: Amnesty International is probably the largest independent human rights body, followed by Human Rights Watch and the United Nations is, obviously, the largest structure and one of the largest bureaucratic structures on the globe. Let’s focus on Amnesty International for the moment; how much are they involved in this conflict, if at all?
Romantsova: Amnesty is not involved at all.
Jacobsen: Why is that?
Romantsova: Because Amnesty International made a really stupid mistake. It is not really about the record. They show the records. So, Amnesty is a totally disgusting situation, which creates a conflict inside of Amnesty International. I didn’t see this happening in Amnesty offices of other countries when we met. They exactly produced communication text. Then they talked about Ukrainians telling journalists fighting with civilians, and that’s why they make it dangerous for Ukrainians. They told them that they had a record of that. They never showed the record. They never showed actual facts, which caused such confusion. They don’t have direct contact with the Ukrainian minister who has comments. What is the condition around the people who are fighting now? They talked about civilians. Amnesty International did it this way. When the General Secretary put it out this way, ‘Sorry, we were so professional.’ So, I’m just waiting for when they have an election. I hope she will not have another term. Before that, Amnesty International made a great investigation. They have a record of shelling of Mariupol Theatre. It was a big, big thing about children and other civilians who hiding there. Russians don’t care about that. They dropped ADM (T4 Atomic Demolition Munition) bombs and destroyed the Theatre totally. Now Russians rebuilt it. Then they explained that they did it because the Azovs were there. That was a huge thing: Children were here. Nobody thinks about this investigation. This Amnesty International did this stupid communication thing and now all will remember only it.
Jacobsen: This context of severe human rights abuses. There will be United Nations special rapporteurs. Are there any following this conflict, or are any officials from the United Nations appointed to record, collate and collect information from the various human rights organizations on all sides of the Russian-Ukrainian war?
Romantsova: In 2014, we had a special UN mission led in Ukraine. They continued work. I think the general ones like UNESCO and some investigation missions from ECOSOC. We have a few projects because they do missions without permission from the Russian Federation. The OSCE is there too. All of these. We have the offices of the UN here. Most of them have some humanitarian role. Humanitarian missions have not the possibility to gather evidence. Evidence around the questions of war crimes.
Jacobsen: Were there any points of contact that you think would be relevant for the audience today, news-wise?
Romantsova: You need to understand that most of the mission relate to security. They are going to Kyiv, mostly. They are trying to bring the people to Kyiv. It’s not safe to go anywhere. Only UN high-level representative… I will send stuff to you. There is a woman from Geneva. She is going to Ukraine to present the UN mission there. There will be rockets. But you can imagine what would happen in the East or South.
Jacobsen: Sasha, thank you for round two.
Romantsova: You’re welcome!
—
Footnotes
[1] In Canadian Atheist interview with Dr. Norman Finkelstein entitled “Interview with Dr. Norman Finkelstein on Gaza Now“, I ask and Finkelstein states:
Jacobsen: In contrast to the nonviolent protest tactics of the Palestinians, what has been the main tactic of the Israelis?
Why does this require a pretext, even strained ones, to prevent poor international public perception, in line with the question on media reportage bias?
Finkelstein: Well, Israel always claims it has a pretext. The pretext this time to the non-violent protest has been two-fold.
First of all, Israel periodically targets Hamas militants or Islamic jihadi militants in the hope of provoking a counterattack with these so-called rockets.
So, Israel can claim it is defending itself. In fact, what it is really hoping to do is end non-violent protests and get the Hamas to use its rockets, so Israel will then have another pretext to go in and slap Gaza.
So long as Hamas does not play along wit this dirty Israeli provocation, Israel has trouble finding a pretext to go into Gaza.
The problem, right now, is that in the absence of media coverage Israel barely even needs a pretext to continue to fire, or to kill and injure, with abandon in Gaza because nobody is paying much attention.
I should add that Israel is highly sensitive to public attention. It has been careful to limit the actual killings and instead have its snipers aim, for example, at the knee caps of Gaza protestors, so as to permanently maim them.
What’s called life changing injuries, which is basically a death certificate to those who get these injuries, it means that you’re disabled for life. You become a parasite in Gazan society. You have no future.
But these sorts of life changing injuries don’t get any media attention because, typically, it just says, “X number of people killed.” It may then say, “Wounded,” but “wounded” is somewhat or very misleading because these are not just wounds in general.
These are calculated, life changing injuries, permanent maimings for the demonstrators.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/01
According to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing here, Rick G. Rosner may have among America’s, North America’s, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awards and Emmy nominations, and was titled 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directorywith the main “Genius” listing here.
He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the “World’s Smartest Man.” The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches issued a cease-and-desist. He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area, Colorado, by Westwood Magazine.
Rosner spent much of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and American fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. Errol Morris featured Rosner in the interview series entitled First Person, where some of this history was covered by Morris. He came in second, or lost, on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person? (He was drunk). Finally, he spent 37+ years working on a time-invariant variation of the Big Bang Theory.
Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, dog, and goldfish. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions at LanceVersusRick@Gmail.Com, or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I’ve been pondering the concept of metaphysics for quite some time. You’ve been thinking about this even longer than I have. Together, we’ve developed the idea of potentially reintegrating metaphysics with physics. Ancient Greek philosophers, especially those from the Ionian school, were deeply engaged in metaphysics. They didn’t have the physics that we have now.
Rick Rosner: You don’t necessarily need to, but nowadays, you can engage in metaphysics with a better chance of accuracy. The more you know about the universe and the closer you are to an accurate picture of it, the more likely your metaphysical ideas won’t be wildly off. Unless your metaphysics is either so vague it can describe anything, or so profound it remains relevant regardless of the universe’s accurate portrayal.
Jacobsen: Right, so we’re discussing the practical utility of metaphysics in providing a valid and sound description of the universe.
Rosner: Yes, and it’s worth mentioning that physicists, and maybe scientists in general, but especially physicists, often say that all science eventually boils down to physics. Biology, chemistry, they all reduce to physical interactions. When they become more complex, they turn into chemistry, and even more complex, biology, and eventually even the social sciences. However, people still specialize in biology, chemistry, and the social sciences because it’s efficient. You don’t need to deconstruct everything to basic physics all the time, although sometimes, delving into quantum physics helps explain new phenomena in biology and chemistry.
Jacobsen: Sean Carroll talks about poetic naturalism, where we can scientifically discuss love in many ways. However, we still use poetic and literary language, like “I love you,” to describe human experience, understanding that it’s founded on scientific reality. It’s about considering different levels of analysis and description, from folk psychology and interpersonal reactions to physics. Essentially, it’s all interconnected.
Rosner: Exactly, and our world has enough flexibility to allow these different levels of order and complexity. For example, my friend Chris is attempting to map every single feedback loop in biology within the human body. These feedback loops exist at various levels of complexity relative to basic physics, and he believes most are yet to be discovered.
Jacobsen: This is similar to Dmitri Mendeleev with the periodic table. He started simply, with many gaps, which were filled in over time. Chris could be initiating a similar process for feedback loops in biology.
Rosner: When we talk about metaphysics, we’re discussing the principles of existence, which overlaps with physics. It’s about what can exist and, by extension, what cannot. Quantum mechanics, especially, aids this discussion. It’s essentially the math and physics of things that barely exist, dealing with incomplete information. It describes how things behave when not fully characterized, like the position and velocity of an electron.
Jacobsen: However, I wouldn’t classify the math of quantum mechanics as metaphysical. It’s more about the math of existence.
Rosner: True, but there’s still a metaphysical aspect because it models what existence fundamentally is. You would think metaphysics should lead to more stringent and precise science. However, it seems we can use the solid science of quantum mechanics to inform our understanding of metaphysics.
Jacobsen: That’s counterintuitive, considering the history of metaphysics, which hasn’t been great at arriving at precise, sound views of the world.
Rosner: It’s akin to the struggle in defining consciousness or the history of theology. There are myriad interpretations, often leading to wrong or contradictory answers.
Jacobsen: In Western tradition, we’ve seen centuries of speculative metaphysics. In contrast, the last five hundred years have shown gradual refinement in understanding the universe through physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology. While some mysteries may be eternal, others are merely hard problems awaiting solutions.
Rosner: Quantum mechanics, being about a century old, has seen various attempts at applying its principles to other contexts, often incorrectly. Yet, you can use these principles in different ways, such as in predicting traffic behavior or in sports analytics. There’s a strong connection between quantum math and Bayesian probability, both frameworks characterizing uncertainty.
Jacobsen: So, when we talk about ‘frameworks,’ we’re referring to these structures or descriptions of the universe. However, these are not the universe itself. They are tools we’ve developed to create accurate maps of reality. But they remain maps, not the terrain.
Rosner: The language we use evolved because it was useful. Language and thought products aim to predict and act. Therefore, every word and its associated characterization is subject to fuzziness. Some words, like ‘apple,’ are fairly specific, but still encompass a range of variation and imprecision.
Jacobsen: Consider the notion of the soul, which historically justified inhumane treatment of animals. Our experience feels unified, but for a long time, the assumption was that a spirit or soul underpinned it, leading us in wrong directions.
Rosner: Let’s pause on the soul concept. The soul, as some see it, is an essence of oneself, transcending details and memories. It’s the core of who you are. However, I see the soul more as an informational substrate, somewhat independent of individual cognition.
Jacobsen: Extending that idea, one’s impact on themselves, others, and the environment during and after their life can be seen as an extended sense of the soul. It’s an extended self, essentially.
Rosner: An analogy between information and the universe is that the universe consists of space and matter. We think about the material bodies, but the space itself, curved around, forms an underlying structure determined by matter distribution. This curved space that contains everything is akin to what a soul might be – an underlying landscape determined by the aggregate of everything that’s happened.
Jacobsen: So, our descriptions of the universe, while useful, are just tools for understanding. They don’t capture the intrinsic operations of the universe.
Rosner: Language evolved to help us survive, so it’s efficient in that sense. But every word and sentence is subject to fuzziness and imprecision. This is especially true for terms in metaphysics.
Jacobsen: Hence, the danger in assumptions like the soul, which can lead to misguided beliefs and actions.
Rosner: The soul, as an informational aggregate resulting from everything that’s happened, is an unspecific underlying structure. It’s shaped by the overall curvature and dynamics of the universe.
Jacobsen: We’ll need to pause here and come back to this discussion later.
Rosner: Sure, let’s continue later.
—
Rick Rosner: We’re fortunate in that regard. It involves the concept of selling that idea.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Absolutely. This discussion is primarily within our IC context, a limited scope where we share common ground. It’s more for our benefit than for others. My understanding is when people reference the physical, they are talking about the material. I perceive the physical as a subset of the material, which in turn is a subset of the natural. In an IC context, the natural is a subset of the informational. Essentially, information is fundamental. Take two different time states; the difference between them signifies a change of state, measurable in the amount of information that differs. Additionally, the intrinsic information required for each state is crucial. The soul can be conceptualized as an informational construct, especially when considering the idea of an extended self. It’s an informational construct extending beyond standard cognition but remains completely natural and devoid of any mystical elements. This perspective brings us back to the discussion on metaphysics and the concept of the soul in a universe that operates quantum mechanically, which is fundamentally incomplete and lacks complete self-knowledge.
Rosner: Perhaps we haven’t concluded our discussion about the soul.
Jacobsen: Maybe not. Let’s explore the idea of the soul as a continually changing, incomplete construct.
Rosner: If we consider the soul as a cumulative landscape shaped by specific informational events, memories, and knowledge, it’s clear that this landscape requires a complete history of your experiences. To argue that it’s a general landscape, one might suggest that you could fully characterize your soul with all the information in your mental universe. However, this isn’t practical. For the soul to be a conceptually useful tool, it should be an abridged version of all the information that contributes to its formation. For instance, when considering babies, we often use simple descriptors like ‘happy baby’ or ‘cranky baby,’ which summarize a complex set of information about each child. This abridgement is what makes the concept of the soul practical. We should be able to characterize an individual’s essence using much less information than what went into forming their personality.
Jacobsen: Extending this idea to the soul as a natural entity, it suggests that souls can overlap. My extended self overlaps with yours to some extent. We might consider first-order and second-order souls or subsets of the soul.
Rosner: This concept is somewhat echoed in certain religions, like Judaism, which posits that people continue to live in the memories of those who remember them.
Jacobsen: I was thinking along those lines. It aligns with a secular Judaist perspective.
Rosner: However, it’s quite unsatisfying. Compared to traditional promises of an eternal afterlife or infinite oblivion, it seems lackluster.
Jacobsen: Yet, it’s more satisfying than the notion of complete oblivion.
Rosner: It feels closer to oblivion than to infinity. But if we could somehow externalize consciousness, allowing it to exist independently of the brain, we could develop a more satisfying concept of living on. Today, we leave more behind, like digital recordings and social media posts, but it’s not quite the same. If we could replicate consciousness and share it, then the idea of living on through our thoughts becomes more compelling.
Jacobsen: The ‘nuggets of consciousness’ you mentioned are productions, not consciousness itself. This would be a secondary extension of the soul.
Rosner: Zuckerberg once mentioned wanting Facebook to be telepathic in the future. If that means exporting feelings so others can experience them as their own, it opens up new possibilities. Sharing consciousness in this way would be a significant advancement.
Jacobsen: However, this ‘exportation’ would be different from actual consciousness. It would be more of a recreation of the secondary aspects of the soul.
Rosner: If we could open the ‘black box’ of consciousness, allowing shared subjective experiences, it could lead to a more profound understanding of consciousness. It might require a long process of shared experiences to merge consciousnesses effectively.
Jacobsen: Transplanting a complete map of consciousness to a different context would be akin to copy-pasting, lacking the necessary associations for optimal functioning.
Rosner: This is an area that requires new technologies and mathematics. Yet, there can be well-defined distinctions between first and second-order aspects of the soul in an informational context.
Jacobsen: The first-order aspect of the soul is akin to the mind, while the second-order aspect extends beyond, influenced by our interactions with others and the world.
Rosner: We’ve touched upon various aspects of the soul. Essentially, we’ve been attempting to characterize it in informational terms, which aligns with our discussions on metaphysics.
Jacobsen: Right. The universe’s incomplete knowledge about itself makes the soul an inherently dynamic and changing construct. A perfect metaphysics would likely equate to perfect physics, blurring the line between the two.
Rosner: One argument is to discard metaphysics as it’s often muddied by less rigorous philosophies. Another argument suggests that well-founded metaphysical statements are essentially physical, tied to the universe’s principles.
Jacobsen: Metaphysics got cleaner with the advent of proper science. Historically, metaphysical thinking was dominant, often tied to religious and mystical beliefs. Modern science has gradually reduced the space for ‘God of the gaps’ and metaphysical speculation.
Rosner: In summary, metaphysics has been historically linked with imprecise philosophies, but there are arguments for a set of general principles about the world that could be termed metaphysical. Alternatively, well-founded metaphysical statements could be seen as physical, connected to the universe’s principles.
Jacobsen: Lastly, the soul as an informational construct with first and second-order properties is a derivative concept from these discussions.
Rosner: Exactly. We’ve explored the soul from various angles, suggesting that it can be understood as an underlying informational landscape shaped by a person’s history and experiences.
Jacobsen: In conclusion, our exploration of the soul and metaphysics leads us to consider the evolving nature of these concepts in light of our growing understanding of the universe and consciousness.
Rosner: Precisely. The end.
Jacobsen: The end.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/11/30
Tianxi Yu（余天曦）is a man who’s interested in IQ tests. Here we talk about the high-IQ communities in China, and more.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s cover some news for you, personal and professional, how are the high-IQ societies developing in China?
Tianxi Yu: Activity is slowly declining, people don’t care much about IQ tests and related topics anymore, and are more likely to discuss life, entertainment, and do more realistic social communication.
Jacobsen: Have you taken any new ultra-hard tests? If so, how have you done? If not, why not?
Yu: The last submission was Mahir Wu’s CAT2, the only Mahir’s test I hadn’t submitted before. It is one of the toughest spatial tests, and I obtained a score of 30/36 with an IQ=179 SD=15. It’s probably been a long time since I’ve done IQ training, and CAT2 is the only Mahir’s test I haven’t gotten a first on, and I’m currently ranked probably third!
Jacobsen: You tend to perform very well on numerical stuff. Obviously, everyone, in the professional world of psychologists, psychiatrists, psychometrists, and the like, agree on the fact of general intelligence and its higher heritability as one ages or develops. Less smart parents can produce more smart kids; more smart parents can produce less smart kids. However, smart parents are more likely to produce smart kids; and, less smart parents are less likely to produce more smart kids. Environmental factors play a decent role, especially in early development. However, culture can make already high lopsided intelligence even more so – average verbal and genius level numerical intelligence. For instance, a culture with a robust mathematical and numerical education – drilling math sense into kids – can make someone’s innate math and numerical sense and abilities even greater. Did this seem to happen in your case? The stereotype in the West is China has a great intensity on mathematical and numerical education. If true, then it’s just a statistical generalization (generalized fact), not a stereotype.
Yu: I was trained in math when I was young, starting with bead counting and waiting until I was in elementary school to take OU training. I grew up in Hubei province, which is a major education province in China, and the difficulty of the exams is among the highest in the country, so we were arranged to participate in many competitions from a young age, which also made me bored with exam-oriented education. In high school, I did not continue to participate in competition training, but this may be a regrettable choice for me, because I showed talent in mathematics, science and chemistry subjects, especially physics, if I insisted on competitions at that time there may be more choices. But I’m relieved now, after all, I’m doing well now. In China, there is a word called “卷(juan)”, which means vicious competition due to uneven distribution of resources, resulting in people having to spend more to get less in return. At present, the phenomenon of “juan” is getting more and more serious, and ordinary people can only live an ordinary life by working very hard. This may answer your question, China emphasizes all aspects of education, not just numbers, and if graphing had a curriculum, the top of the spatial IQ test would probably be Chinese as well lol.
Jacobsen: What have you been doing in the meantime, personally? Any new hobbies since our last interaction?
Yu: I got into the government service through a tough competition, currently working in a biology lab, and have been busy in the midst of a new job lately. What I’m interested in, is probably reading books, I’ve bought more than twenty books this year, but I’ve only read about ten of them because I’m too busy with my work. Most of the books I’ve read lately are related to politics, economics, and culture, and I’ve been fascinated by their contents. Two of the books that have impressed me the most, “Being Inside” by Xiaohuan Lan and “The Rise and Fall of Nations”, I used to have a misunderstanding of macro and even disdain for it, but now world macro has a deep attraction for me and makes me want to study it.
Jacobsen: What are the updates with the high-IQ societies in which you’re involved, including CatholIQ, Chinese Genius Directory, EsoterIQ Society, Nano Society, World Genius Directory?
Yu: I haven’t followed these societies for a long time, and have previously requested the Chinese Genius Directory and the Esoteric IQ Society to remove my name, but have gotten no response from either. I think there are certain problems with the current IQ societies, such as less attraction, less marketing ability, and no ability to keep people active.
Jacobsen: Professionally, how are you building a career, training, or pursuing some passion now?
Yu: Maybe my answer won’t satisfy you too much. My attitude toward life in the moment is to keep alive without serious ambition, retaining hope for the future, retaining curiosity and the ability to explore the frontiers of the world, and then trying to work at my current position without being laid off. That’s my attitude at the moment. The economic situation now is very bad, and even China has internal and external problems. Let me tell you a set of data, the youth unemployment rate is no longer published, before that it has been maintained at a high level of 20%, and in the Great Depression in the United States in 1927, the rate of unemployment for the whole population was just about 25%. Now China’s employment is very difficult, I took the government office last year, ten years ago, no one to go to the government units, but now with the economic downturn, the number of exams more and more people, the national average enrollment ratio has remained at more than 70:1, many positions are several thousand people in the admission of a person, the first two years there was a 25,000 people competing for a job situation. As for why I test government agencies, because outside the system is worse, even companies like Tencent, Ali, Huawei, also in the big layoffs, many graduates work for a few years, even in the probationary period when they were laid off. It’s not hard to explain why I stayed negative about the passion.
Jacobsen: What can provide some checks and balances for fraud within the high-IQ communities? When it does happen, I am aware. People don’t take kindly to it. Props to the high-IQ community for doing its own clean-up, not every industry or community can say that. It’s about incentives because everyone suffers reputationally if not handled.
Yu: I’ve thought about this too, and it can only be done through very strict offline exams, with increasing the reputation of highly intelligent people, to create a virtuous cycle, and I’m going to go ahead and make the relevant push, won’t reveal too much until then.
Jacobsen: What do you think the most important positive news in the Chinese high-IQ world at the moment?
Yu: Embarrassing, none, hopefully there will be one in the future.
Jacobsen: How could the Chinese high-IQ community integrate better with the international high-IQ community? Traditionally speaking, it’s been dominated by the Americans and the Europeans. I think that’s a relatively fair, objective, and factual statement.
Yu: I think it is difficult for China’s high IQ group to integrate into the international high IQ group. China’s national conditions dictate that it is the people who are more in tune with the social system who are in control of the society, not the smarter people. Chinese society has been like this for the past 5,000 years, emphasizing inheritance, conformity, and unity in order to do great things, and it is very difficult to change in the short term. This set of thinking may be a bit pedantic nowadays, and people have already understood the drawbacks of the previous system, but the good thing is that the CPC is also actively selecting young cadres nowadays, and also reducing resistance for young people, so hopefully, in the next round of the Kampo cycle, the whole of China will be refreshed.
Jacobsen: Who are some new notable members of some of the Chinese high-IQ societies?
Yu: Unfortunately, not many new people are joining us at the moment.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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As noted by John Paul Tasker in CBC News, the status of the Church, particularly the Christian Church, in Canada has been a long history of privilege over other sectors of society, other religions, and non-religions. Those come with benefits to Christians, generally speaking, and costs to everyone else.
As Christianity has continued its decline, we have seen a carving back of the overextensions of religious belief and practice into religious privilege more into equality. One of those is more symbolic, but an important footnote to the conversation around religion in Canada.
King Charles had the title of Defender of the Faith for about a century. However, there is a push to change the identity of the head of state, especially because of the lack of established church. We have a declining Christian population, rising non-religious population, and no established church.
So, the title of Defender of the Faith seems both practically absurd and symbolically unequal. The Trudeau government has indicated, according to Tasker, a disinterest in the continuation of the King of England’s religious role in Canada.
Tasker said, “The ‘defender of the faith’ title dates back to the Tudor period in the 16th century and refers to the monarch’s unique position as the “supreme governor” of the Church of England — the state religion established after King Henry VIII pulled English churches from papal control.”
I didn’t know this, but, apparently, the King becomes a sovereign religious figure in the Westminster parliamentary democratic system with sacred duties. It’s laughable. No less an ass-colonizer Christian nation at its foundation as Canada could conceive of such a position.
It’s important to note the still-existing symbolic representation of a deity in the Charter of Rights of Freedoms in the Preambular clause with the recognition of the sovereignty of “God.” Whose god? Why one, not many? What definition of a god? And so on, it’s simple prejudice shoved in for Christian appeasement.
Tasker opines that there is a push to show the relevance of the King or the monarchy, probably more generally, to the Canadian public. The reference to the United Kingdom is being dropped, too, by the way.
There must be a push in other countries within the commonwealth, so as to modernize and make consistent the standards of reference for the contemporary period.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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Bryan Passifiume in the National Post commented on something that may seem obvious. Where, in a Western states such as Canada, there is a trend towards a reduction in religiosity. Typically, if women have more equal rights, education is high, and incomes are higher than average, then the society becomes less religious over time.
If natural-born Canadians tend to be less religious, and if new immigrants are more religious, then those facts can be plugged inot Passifiune’s analysis. In that, individuals and families from poorer countries with fewer rights for women, less education, and lower incomes, will likely be newer immigrants. This will influence, a bit, the secular nature of the Canadian state.
There may be a surge of apostasy within those families and for those individuals in those communities exposed to a more liberal democratic form of life, as seen in Canada. Potentially, this could mean an increased demand for secular communities to provide a community for these possible upcoming apostates. We’re talking more than a million new immigrants in a short matter of time.
Rev. Dr. Andrew Bennett stated, “If you look at the the data for new immigrants, disproportionately they’re coming from countries where religion is a much more public reality than in most western democracies… New immigrants are more likely to express their religion publicly than non-immigrant Canadians… They’re more likely to attend religious services, they’re more likely to desire to have their children educated according to their religious tradition.”
The countries with the most incoming immigrants are China, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Philippines, France, Pakistan, Iran, the United States, and Syria.
Data published by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada points to India as this country’s top source of immigrants in 2022, with 118,095 new people arriving from that nation last year.
Cardus, the source of the study for the data analysis on the immigration, developed a spectrum of spirituality index. The categories in the spectrum were religiously committed, privately faithful, spiritually uncertain, and non-religious.
The only major observable or significant different between the numbers was between the religiously committed at home and those new. 14 percent and 28 percent consider themselves as such, respectively.
Among those who consider themselves “religiously committed,” only 14 per cent were born in Canada, while 28 per cent were born outside of the country.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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Chuck Green in Nebraska Today made some important comments on the nature of atheist closeting. Even after the successes of the New Atheist movement, which simply meant a more brash, sometimes, and a more open and straightforward, more accurately, statement of non-belief in theological claims, there continues to be a self-silencing of non-believers in the United States, which, by comparison, means most countries of the world. Why?
Green notes how those without a religious affiliation are the fastest grouping population in the United States. One reason, as noted over years of interviews and conversations with these individuals all over the world, is the Internet. The decentralization of informational access provides a basis for individuals to critically evaluate cultural beliefs with others. This, by itself, neuters fundamentalism for many. Global informational cosmopolitanism is the first benchmark of a Type I civilization. Everyone garners mutual understanding, which begets tolerance in diversity.
However, as Green notes, “But the social stigma associated with atheism leaves this population vulnerable to isolation and poor mental health outcomes.”
That’s an ongoing problem. Arguably, since the population of non-believers is increasing precipitously, this has been adeclining problem with improved recognition and movements devoted to their visibility, e.g., New Atheism, Firebrand Atheism, reinvigoration of global Humanism in branding — think IHEU to HI — and advances in the global South, advances in science to justify agnostic empiricism, pluralistic multiethnic societies reducing supremacist movements to comedy, and the like. Nonetheless, the stigma and isolation and self-abnegation is a crucial element for consideration. Again, why, especially in the United States?
Green uses research by Assistant Professor Dean Abbott who looked into the psychological well-being of “rural-residing and women-identified atheists — in the context of anti-atheist discrimination in the U.S.”
“Both rural and woman-identifying atheists were thoughtful about not sharing large parts of their worldview,” he said.
And that’s significant. People comfortably go to ‘safe spaces’ as entire colleges and universities devoted to religious study, credentialing, and life. They wear crosses, make movies, write books, fund political parties, conduct wedding ceremonies, wear culturally appopriate signifiers, and such. They talk about going to religious institutions every week, praying, and so on. How come this sector of the population feels the need to self-silence? In theocratic societies, it’s obvious: Fear of political pressure, legal consequences, and social reprisal, so various abuses. Even an American example as shown by Dr. Herb Silverman, it was illegal to run for political office.
600 atheists — 300 from each group — took part in the study. If you have an experience with social scientific research, you can realize the depth of the sample size for a study. That’s, in fact, quite enough to get a good idea. The two groups of atheists experienced things in different ways.
Many atheist women found atheism, in and of itself, liberating when coming out of a Christian background. Most of the restrictions are for women in the Christian faith, though the faith was liberationist for its time; it’s almost retrograde now. Green uses the word “expectations” when describing this phenomenon. Women atheists found the general expectations from the faith stultifying, restrictive.
You can find many atheist women like this. Usually, two camps, the majority: they find liberation. A superminority who have come out and left the religion, then declare an aggressive stance against not only illegitimate patriarchal tyranny but also transferred — overextended — to innocent men. It’s a sad sight, hard to defend those unfortunate men having to be the punching bag for these unfortunate, too, women’s processing of trauma. It happens; that’s life.
North American religion has truly been nullified on a number of levels, which explains the attempts at a resurgence for political power and social relevance. Canadian Christianity lost the culture war. It will be, by my math, less than half of the population — and not very serious worshippers — somewhere in 2024. That decline will continue onwards towards a more United Kingdom level for the rest of the 2020s, at least.
An important finding from the study was anti-atheist discrimination was “uncommon.” Yet, those women found the authority of the Christian faith and the norms distressing. A stereotype for women atheists was being “sexually immoral” for simply being atheists, which is clearly nonsense and an attempt at shaming women into conformity. It’s wrong. These stereotypes can be actively encouraged by church leadership.
The rural atheists had different challenges. They feared violence, so “a heightened sense of danger.” One secular opinion writer for their community received a death threat at a local restaurant. Death threats are common in the secular world for writers and prominent people. Even if the issues facing atheists in these rural areas, let alone rural atheist women, were covered and known, the care is, typically, faith-based anyway. This makes the entire social and care landscape geared by and for religious believers, often Christian. That’s another reason for the isolation. Why participate in an unwelcoming community and then getting help includes only faith-based treatment?
Abbott is working, happily, to create a mental health handbook for professionals working with non-religious clients, remembering anti-atheist discrimination was not the issue. It’s a larger set of issues, but specific to geographics, socioeconomics, and gender.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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I chose to work in the equestrian industry in Canada because I wanted to write about the industry and sports, as a side project. I wanted to transition out of 7 days a week at four restaurants with janitorial seven nights a week at 2 of them, too, which was about two years building up to it.
I intended to take on the challenge of someone with zero horse, or large domesticated animal, experience and work with them. Everyone said I’d fail — literally, not an exaggeration. Hilariously enough, that’s fair. “You’ll be back.” No word of encouragement.
Naturally, I wouldn’t be the appropriate one to ride and train horses professionally. For the most part, individuals who ride and train professionally start in the single-digit ages to, at the latest, early to middle teens.
When those neural networks continue to form and integrate at a rapid and malleable clip, those are the times to become acquainted with horses for the development of a firsthand horse sense. Everything else becomes second nature if done later. My horse sense is second nature, not first.
In conducting basic labour at an equestrian facility, the most valuable experience has been talking to people whose primary concern, as in their definition of a “horse person,” is the horse. That’s true, in a good way. Some are obsessed in the wrong way, too. In another manner, it’s an extended version of cat people and dog persons, but much more involved.
Two perspectives can be taken in this context. One is animal welfare and non-human animal rights. Another is equine sport and industry. The sport can put the animals through challenging physical demands, which has a history of cruelty to the animals and people too.
At the same time, they can receive excellent care and feeding programs with respect for the animal. There is maltreatment in that area, too. Those present a more complex story but represent two apparently paradoxiform paths of truth about the industry and sports. That’s the fun, unravelling paradoxes for a more profound single truth.
The purpose of this article arose from something coming up in conversations, on and off, with horse people. As with any industry and sport, there have been scandals. I’m not new to writing about scandals. I’ve seen lots in the high-IQ communities in interviewing them for almost a decade. It’s not simply Mensa. There have been over 100 high-IQ societies, half of which could be classified as defunct by my analysis.
I stinted in the sustainable and ethical fashion world, which was fun. Interestingly enough, there weren’t any scandals. None that I can remember off the top. Some people worked in more straightforward circumstances, and others worked in more challenging contexts to get the business running. No true scandal, however.
I’ve seen much in the human rights domain. I’ve observed this in the women’s rights domain. I’ve come across this in student unions. I’ve had lots of experience in Model United Nations and came across a bit of this at Model United Nations. I’ve encountered endless amounts of this in religious communities, a bit in secular societies, and somewhat in Settler and Indigenous communities. I didn’t see this in the harm reduction community, happily.
In the secular communities, where, on a personal note, as an example, the president of an organization attempted to coerce the youngest member of the board, by far (me), to take his revenge against a former president, I resigned after this and another event. I still argue that those worlds, each of them, are vastly positive. This is the world, though; it doesn’t come in neat little packages.
I could run the list from almost A to Z. In Canada, I’ve seen this in journalism. There’s much talk about Cancel Culture as a capitalized abstraction. It’s natural in some sense: People get cancelled across communities; and unreal in another: Folks come back more often than complete reputation obliteration. People have career consequences, but not cancellation in the sense of permanence.
It’s more like Public Penalty Culture. Neither political — left or right — nor socioeconomic. Guess what? That’s not new. There have always been different social and political consequences for freedom of expression. These aren’t philosophical orientations seen with cancel culture.
It’s a tactic. Hence, why do we see intimidation against more left-oriented journalists like Amber Bracken or intimidation against more conservative journalists like Lindsay Shepherd? We’ll continue to see this similarly in how victim as an identity is seen too: It’s practical and comes with rewards. It’s here to stay.
Now, typically, the scandals in Langley, British Columbia, revolve around the Evangelical Christian community, not because of their size in the general population, barely half, but because of their political motivations and misbehaving in the midst of it.
In addition, their central university, Trinity Western University, is the largest private Christian university in the country. That’s an achievement and a testament to the brilliant organizational somewhat growth-oriented leadership of Neil Snider over decades.
It’s scandals at the times when Trinity Western University does something sociopolitical with their religion or something discriminatory because of their religious tenets, as they publicly flout them, leading to, in fact, prejudice. It’s a softball journalistic project because they tend to embarrass themselves and ruin their reputation without external intervention.
Some examples: rather than help a student who attempted suicide, they expelled her, a 51-year-old guard on campus was charged with manslaughter, queer students publicly speak about homophobia on campus, and their longest-standing university president Neil Snider (the longest in Canadian history of any university public or private) resigned after a sexual harassment scandal (where it was rescinded after an apology, happily).
Of course, they lost a court case up to the Supreme Court of Canada to (not) win an Evangelical Christian law school based on a Community Covenant everyone — staff, faculty, administration, and students — had to sign mandatorily. It was found a concern to prevent discrimination against gay and lesbian students. After the embarrassment, they dropped the Covenant, but only for students. That’s just the start.
What’s the solution, more Bible study and prayer? Of course not; those don’t work. If they did, those issues wouldn’t arise. Unless God is testing their faith, the tricky bastard. So, scandals aren’t new here or in other reportage for me. And I could ramble for a much longer article, but that suffices.
Within equine sport and industry, there is a history of abuse of horses, mistreatment of staff, sexual misconduct, grooming of mostly girls and some boys, involvement in sex trafficking — see Clare Bronfman and Sara Bronfman of NXIVM, use of illegal and cheap labour — mostly Latino men, financially bad dealings, fraud in medical documentation, doping, drug and alcohol misuse among staff and riders, und so weiter. There is a minor conspiracy of silence because there is a community for the sport. Cui bono?
Many play a role and have a livelihood built upon it. At the same time, people need to put food on the table and have a roof over their heads, and staff shortages and employee retention are significant issues across the industry. In British Columbia, the industry is shrinking rapidly.
According to the 2019 “Equine Industry Economic Impact Study,” the “Total Economic Impact” in 2009 in British Columbia was $879 million and $784 million in 2019. That’s a 10.81% reduction in Total Economic Impact in British Columbia over a decade. The issues function relationally, and intergenerationally.
Both the mostly white/Euro-Canadian girls coming into work can be poor workers and flakes as a difficulty for employers, and the pay and working conditions aren’t necessarily excellent in a period of significant inflation of the prices of goods, services, and housing for the workers. In 25 months or so at the current job, I’ve seen 20 or so employees come and go – 19 white girls and 1 older heavily drinking man; and it’s a small operation. Men aren’t attracted to work in the industry.
The issues for workers in the horse industry are multitude. Most are poor. Education ranges from grade 9 to grade 12, for the most part. They do not receive overtime, double time, dental care, medical care, or any form of healthcare (unless salaried, which is rare).
The wage caps out relatively quickly in the industry. The working conditions are difficult, manual labour with no real lunch breaks. This is their reality. The main future sits with education and technical skills in a knowledge economy, which means the shrinking horse industry, in British Columbia, as an example, becomes a luxury item.
Clients tend to be professional types, have grade 12 to Ph.D. education, for the most part, e.g., business owners, lawyers, or dual-income homes funding their kids. There is a definitely a distinction in higher-end barns between staff and clientele. These appear to be statistical trends, neither stereotypes nor images.
It’s hard for everyone, significantly as the industry may be shrinking for many while costs increase for everybody: lease costs, hay costs, grain costs, horse purchasing prices, tack costs, board and lesson costs, farrier costs, veterinarian costs, and even manure pickup, shavings dropoff, and machinery maintenance.
Regardless, people love their horses. I have no doubt many would bankrupt themselves for the love of their horse. It’s a deep, abiding passion. I have to respect that. At the same time, in my first week of work, I was threatened by a female colleague. “I got the last guy fired. So, don’t get on my bad side.”
When I got my first back injury and called my GP to leave work at lunch, I was stopped. A woman colleague said, “Maybe it’s your work ethic! Maybe it’s how your mother raised you!” They tried to threaten me into not leaving based on what became a legitimate WCB claim, in front of a catatonic management, apparently. The second WCB claim management attempted to blame this on me subtly insinuating that a prior back injury must have existed. Nope, only here.
I’ve had a colleague stalk me to old colleagues/friends at old restaurant jobs. I’ve been asked for 3 months notice, not if leaving the job but, if changing continuous work hours in any way: Good labour is hard to find – let alone replace. I offered 2 to 7 months out of generosity and honouring commitments here, while awaiting new job changes. In Canada, 2 weeks is considered the norm.
The long-term staff drive away new staff with this behaviour. Interestingly, I’ve only seen this abusive behaviour by women, and rarely towards other women on site. So, there is a sexist undercurrent explaining why so few men take part in the sport here. Women abuse too, and excuse the abuse when in the presence of other women.
They can exhibit kindness in giving a place to rent on site when it is needed, as was the case with me. However, when push comes to financial shove, it can become a tool. Where, I wanted to reduce hours still to full-time rather than double full-time or more. They threatened to take the apartment away because they falsely claimed the hours would be below full-time. A lesson to any working student: Do not trust verbal contracts and always get things in writing from owner-operators because the cards are largely stacked in their favour. You cannot rely on individual good will and whim.
When WCB came to the worksite, both the stable manager and employer encouraged not speaking to them when they tried to speak to me, which is to state: Employers encourage lying or silence by staff to the Workers’ Compensation Board.
We have to be aware of abuses of staff on site, even if they’re deemed a dominant group. The racism isn’t seen in the labour as much in Canada. It’s more, by others’ accounts, exploitation of working students, which is to say: mostly young women and girls. However, I have had eyebrow raising statements said only by young women in front of me about Mexicans.
- “They know how to do everything. And they’re so cheap.”
- “Sometimes, I wish we could hire only Mexicans. They’d do what they’re told and with a smile.”
- “Scott, you’re our Mexican!”
Thus in a Canadian context, the exploitation of labour happens to young women often white; while in America, it’s men and Latino men in particular. The racism comes in less than 10% of people, often younger women, but only in occasional phraseology, not in law, work, or anything formal as a barrier. That’s a sign of progress in Canada and a compliment to the horse culture in Canada because the race issue isn’t legal discriminations. It’s occasional attitudes. America appears to have a different context with a contiguous border with Mexico.
The industry has some toxicity and legality issues. These may want to be investigated more thoroughly for the health and wellbeing of workers and compliance with the law. Maybe, Latino workers could form a union to protect themselves from exploitation in the States. As with any sport, there is a competitive streak. I’m told things are better than they’ve ever been. However, I have seen numerous young women undermine each other to get ahead on the job site.
There are plenty of cases like the above.
It’s a mostly white women’s industry now. They act as men did in different areas when men were dominant. Which is an argument for egalitarianism, gender balance breeds healthy relations; neither men nor women hold monopoly on generic virtue, and only on styles of virtue and vice.
Simultaneously, and the important compliment to individuals working in this struggling industry, those same people will offer consolation, lowered rent on site, some of their lunch, and help with barn chores on hard days. They’re just people, but individuals coming into a job with minimal candidate screening because the industry needs workers.
People can give all of themselves in their shifts, while, as rural whites, for the most part, their livelihoods, family legacies, and life paths into the present are neither exceptionally good nor promising of a hopeful future, typically. These actions reflect a stressed blue-collar, working-class cohort of rural, mostly Euro-Canadians in the Township of Langley.
Equine sport has scandals in them, too. As recently as a few days ago, as of the time of writing this article, there was another update on the Eric Lamaze lawsuits over wrong horse deals with some resolution for $1.39 million. Lamaze is Canada’s most decorated show jumper.
Our only individual Olympic gold medallist in show jumping who has been having a rough go of it — defender or not — over the last couple of years. By analyzing some of the records, an outstanding equestrian show jumper and a bad person.
As it happens, that’s been during my time in this industry, which is to say: I started on October 1st, 2021. It’s not cosmic, but luck to write on this industry, at this time. For the original reason, I also chose this industry and sport because Langley is titled the “Horse Capital of British Columbia.”
Rather than go out into the international scene again, I chose a local context for a small side project. I was getting some appreciation for opening the conversation in the community for some minor work with interviews. So, thank you for that.
The next topic I might get less love for is SafeSport cases. I first brought this up in an interview with local Township of Langley hero LJ Tidball of Thunderbird Show Stables, who has been an accomplished rider and trainer for decades. Another who I interviewed earlier but published later — like 8 or 9 months late (sorry, Beth!) — was Beth Underhill, an accomplished and great Canadian show jumper. Canada produces exceptional women show jumpers: Erynn Ballard, Beth Underhill, Amy Millar, Tiffany Foster, and others.
This is to say, I was informed of the issue in conversations with all sorts of equestrians, then raised the issue lightly with Underhill, formally with Tidball, published them in reverse order, and now, with a systematic presentation of SafeSport in the upcoming articles. And articles more than interviews now, as I focused mostly on interviews, previously.
One horse person told me that writing on the horse industry and sport is “dangerous.” So, I am, anyway. The series of articles to follow will cover SafeSport and SafeSport cases. The United States Equestrian Federation has an easily accessible database, which will be the basis for the first set of articles. The categories for the United States Equestrian Federation are Banned[1], Interim[2], Suspensions[3], and Restrictions[4]. Those will be covered in that order for these individuals; dead individuals on the list are removed after 90 days.
Simply look at the general gender connection to most names; typically, a face-value assumption is that most of the offenders are men with some women. So, it’s not a black or white phenomenon, but the scales are weighed towards more men given one of the four statuses by the USEF.
Naturally, more details will follow as the cases are examined with whatever resources are available in public news or reportage. To have them in one place will be an exciting new archival work. For ease of segmentation, the coverage will be four articles with Banned, Interim, Suspensions, and Restrictions on this mini-project.
–
[1] In Banned status, we find Kenneth Acebal, George Aguel, Mickey Bason, Gabriel Elluomini, Zoubair Bennani, Sam Berry, Clare Bronfman, Harrison Brown, Ruben Camacho, Jeff Campff, Randall Cates, Amanda Devore, Barry Duncan, Juan Gamboa, James Giorgio, Phil Godsey, Robert Hedin, John Lindstedt, Barry Lobel, David Loman, Douglas Masters, Steve Milne, John Monetti, George Morris, Tom Navarro, Adrienne Raymond, Greg Reason, Joseph Silva, Mitchell Steege, Chan Sutton, Donald Ulmer, Gordon “Cappy” Wheeler, and Charlie White.
[2] In Interim status are Michael Barisone, Chris Bearden, Blake Gardiner, Chip Marshall, Russell Matthews, Aaron K. Rhea, Michael Occaforte, Derek Strine, and Geoffrey Woolson.
[3] In Suspension status, we have Jerry Aguilar, Francis Berger, Richard Berger, Richard R. Fellers, Shelley Fellers, Phillip Fountain, Richard Galarza, Dylan Harries, Tom Harvey, Christian Heineking, Thomas Keogh, Alex Lawler, Erik Lee, Chuck Maslin, Diane Masters, Nicanor Miranda, Paul Polster, Nicole Reason, Vick Russell, Antonio Sanchez, Michael Sisul, Michael Traurig, and Arie Van Der Heiden.
[4] In Restriction status, we get James Prettyman, William Tate, Jr., John Manning, Brian Gruber, Manuel Torres, Henry Pfeiffer, Winsford Taylor, and Caroline Van Der Merwe.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/11/25
Nuns, nothing but the purity of virginal self-sacrifice for their Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, unburdened by the allegations ubiquitous over decades about the priest class within the Roman Catholic Church — until now.
The Roman Catholic Church has been facing profound sexual scandals by those deemed the intellectual and ceremonial protectors of the Faith, the priest class. Unfortunately, as we’re seeing, there’s tremendous publicity about this intellectual and ceremonial status, and then the reality, unfortunately. I wouldn’t claim to be a moral exemplar or, necessarily, want to be one. It’s disingenuous. I, like most of you, am just a Canadian citizen with concerns.
It is important, however, to point to systems of power, often unquestioned, and wealth and ask critical questions or simply speak the truth for an accuracy in the historical record. The Roman Catholic Church was a co-arm of the Government of Canada in oppression of the Indigenous. Not only those, but the young in general too, I do not mean ideologically alone. This goes without statement.
In 2004, a commission from that time found over 4,000 priests faced accusations of the sexual abuse of youth in the last 5 decades, at that time. The story is more complicated. For one, some of those accusations will be false, either in actuality or degree of reality.
Now, the Roman Catholic Church has been declining in Canadian society for decades. The most precipitous decline has been between 2001 and 2021 based on solid census data, Statistics Canada. The data was 12,793,125 Roman Catholics in 2001 at 43.2% of the population and then 10,799,070 at 29.9%. So, in both absolute numbers and in percent of the population, the Roman Catholic Church is dying off.
How will this affect public policy, politics, and so on? The moral stature of the Roman Catholic Church has been devastated internationally with the effects of these crimes coming to light, which were deliberately withheld from the Catholic laity and from the public. To me, in some sense, that’s neither good nor bad, but the truth needs speaking.
It goes to an old Carl Sagan point: Where does this leave us (cosmically and) in Canada? It means simply this: we’re on our own. For any justice and moral developments, it sits with us. And yet, those news items continue to hit the public. Naturally, those declines in the total number of Catholics in Canada have a corresponding problem with acquisition of a new class of nuns.
There were 47,000 nuns in Quebec alone in 1961. That declined to less than 6,000 by 2018. There are some false triumphs in small reportage, e.g., about ‘radical’ new young nuns joining the ranks.
Marlena Loughheed, a spokesperson for the Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto, for an article by Sebastian Leck in 2017 said becoming a nun has an attraction of experiencing faith in a way that is “real and that’s robust” for younger women. But again, this is opining, mush. We have to be realistic. The reality: Massive religious absolute numbers decline and intellectual class decline.
So, this brings us to the original stipulation at the top of the article, i.e., the image of nuns. Not only is this class of women declining precipitously over decades, they have encountered a few potshots in the media.
As Molly Hayes in The Globe and Mail noted, “A 97-year-old nun has been criminally charged in a historical sexual-assault case connected to a notorious residential school in Northern Ontario.” No one should be above the law.
Tyler Griffin in the Toronto Star described the arrest and charge of the 97-year-old nun going back decades. To be clear, the nun was charged, Francoise Seguin of Ottawa.
The nun is supposed to be in Moosonee on December 5 for court. Seguin is not a one-off either.
Brett Forester reported how several Canadian nuns have been getting similar stories coming out about them. To be clear, secular people don’t like these stories. There may be flippant jokes around hypocrisy, which is grounded in the truth; an institution proclaiming high moral ground, all the while oppressing and committing crimes then trying to hide the facts.
The fact of the matter for secular people: There shouldn’t have to be these events in the first place. Churches could be moral exemplars, could be institutions representative of a philosophy of love and forgiveness, of their Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Yet, it’s not there.
It takes dissidents like Rev. Gretta Vosper to drag the churches into the 21st century. For her, it is the United Church of Canada. For the Catholic Church, who is it? Is it Tammy Peterson? She seems like a nice lady, smart person, but her approach is different than what is necessary.
The Roman Catholic Church continues to shrink, and will continue its declines reflective of its moral decline, because of the simple fact: Moral degeneration within its ranks over decades from the founding of the country and failure to account for crimes.
Regular Canadians are not stupid; they’re just busy with getting by the days of the week at work and at home. They know this. They know people who have been affected or know of people who have been affected by the crimes of the Roman Catholic Church in the country.
The question remains: In spite of the inevitable decline of the Roman Catholic Church and most Christian denominations in Canada, as the Christian population will likely be less than half of the population somewhere in 2024, maybe 2025, what will be the morally uplifting response of the older generations of Christians for newer generations of Christians within the multicultural, multiethnic, and multireligious country everyone cherishes Canada for — and the international community of Member States of the United Nations knows Canada as now?
As a non-religious person, I have hope in the moral renewal of the Roman Catholic Church in Canadian society. Proper accounting for crimes of some priests and nuns against individuals and the Church against Indigenous peoples can be the first major, practical step in doing so.
Canada deserves better; the victims deserve better; Catholic hierarchs deserve better; and, most importantly, the laity of the Roman Catholic Church deserve better.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/11/24
Nicole Shasha is a humanist from Britain, a wedding and funeral celebrant whom I met at the World Congress and General Assembly – 2023 – of Humanists International in Copenhagen, Denmark, earlier this year. She agreed to an interview, hooray! Here’s the result.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, so, today, we are with a lady British humanist, Nicole Shasha, who I met in Copenhagen. I asked if we could interview being a lady humanist, as a lady, in Britain, as a humanist.
Nicole Shasha: [Laughing].
Jacobsen: So, how did you come to Humanism? Was there a family background, or did you discover this as you grew up?
Shasha: So, particularly, in calling in Humanism, my family background was two different religions. My dad was Jewish. My mom was Christian. But they, in a quite liberal-minded fashion, decided to raise me and my sister by telling us about religion but not pushing us in any way. When I was about 12, I received, like many people of my age, I think, I stumbled across Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and became an atheist. I was always living humanist principles. I’d say 2020. It made me think about things coming across Humanism. I thought, “Oh, this is everything I love and everything I have lived since I was a theist with rationality, science, and empathy.” It was really, really cool for me. That’s how I found Humanism. I was looking for something to get involved as well. I became a big humanist and advocate.
Jacobsen: What kind of advocacy have you done? What kind of activism have you done?
Shasha: My main thing I have been doing and still do. Along with AJ, whom I believe you have already interviewed, we are the youth coordinators for the UK and part of the Humanists UK youth society. We’re Young Humanists UK, which is the name of our branch of Humanists UK. In the UK, one of our issues is the members tend to skew a bit older. There’s nothing wrong with being older. But you need younger people to represent a wider array of generations. They will be the future of Humanism. That is something AJ and I have been trying to connect with youth and youth Humanism, which they definitely do. For instance, something a lot of young people care about now is the environment. That’s a bit part of rational thought, and climate change is happening, so we should get on board with that. I am also a humanist school speaker, which is something we have here in the UK. I get invited to schools, usually primary, just by coincidence, and tell them about Humanism in the religious education curriculum. Now, the law in the UK is that non-religious viewpoints have to be taught alongside religious ones.
Jacobsen: That’s fantastic.
Shasha: I’m also, and this is the last point, a humanist celebrant. The biggest part of my advocacy. I am trained in funerals and weddings. I lead personalized ceremonies with humanists for people marrying or dying.
Jacobsen: How does one become a humanist celebrant? In Copenhagen, a big aspect of workshops and discussions was the popularity of celebrations of life and being a celebrant, and even a chaplain in the military, for Humanism. How does one become engaged, educated, and certified for that kind of advocacy?
Shasha: In the UK, it is quite a big thing we’ve got going on. I’m not quite sure how long we’ve been running it. It was a huge part of Humanists UK, which was, in the past, the British Humanist Association when it was founded 127 years ago when it was providing funerals at a time when they were primarily Christian. You can apply through Humanists UK and train through there. There are people who have been doing it for a long time and have a wealth of experience. I find it really, really meaningful and incredible. When we were in Copenhagen, there were people who wanted to be chaplains from different countries, and their organizations hadn’t got that yet. Humanism can, sometimes, get bogged down in overintellectualism, which is something I am guilty of. The real reason and the real meaning of why we are doing this and why it is important to people’s daily lives is important.
Jacobsen: What do you think could bring humanist discourse down to Earth?
Shasha: That is a really good question. I think there is nothing wrong with our lofty intellectualism on occasion. I think it is a good part of being a humanist to be thoughtful about things. I think making sure, as organizations and members of organizations, not everyone is interested in that. Even if they have what they call a humanist outlook, just being aware, ultimately, if we can get people to resonate with us, it is because we delivered humanist views at a wedding. I think that’s a really big part. Something I’ve been doing recently. I’ve been making a local community branch in a city called Leicester. We didn’t have a humanist group before. One thing that we’re trying to do is that a lot of people have lost a lot of community ties with the loss of religion. I think that’s a great shame. Focusing on community things and social elements and not having to discuss a book or philosophy or anything, tapping into people, and having friends and community and things. I try to focus on that as well.
Jacobsen: When I was on another career path outside of independent journalism, I was in three psychology labs. I was doing quite well and had all these plans. I was struck by other things and realized talents, proclivities, and interests were in another place. So, one thing those psychology labs did was have pub nights and game nights, not as a central piece, but as an item to bring everyone together. We would have our individual research projects. We’d have staff meetings for individual labs to talk about the research and get everyone on the same page about what is going on, and also introduce new members and say “Goodbye” to individuals heading off to graduate school, etc. Another item was those pub nights and game nights. A lot of people showed up to those. In fact, a lot of faculty showed up. That’s not psychology. That’s not research. But it’s an important part of bringing everything down to the ground. We ended up discussing very interesting abstract problems in the philosophy of psychology. Things like that. To your point, it’s a similar point to bringing humanists to the ground, just doing fun things together. I am aware Young Humanists International does game nights and so on. I think that’s a fantastic thing. Do the youth in Humanists UK do much the same things, especially since they’re much closer to the international group than the Philippines, Nigeria, Canada, and so on?
Shasha: Absolutely, we are, comparatively, a much closer country. Because of that, we are used to not travelling so much. But yes, because we’re not as able to do that as much as a local group, obviously, gathering everyone from around the country in one place like London. People who are outside or very far away from London are excluded. We have done that, particularly when it was a big national Humanists UK event. There was always a lecture on Darwin Day, Darwin’s birthday. Something of interest to humanists. Then there are young humanists’ socials afterwards. Absolutely, the convivial nature of having a community and hanging out and having a drink is so wonderful. In Copenhagen, we all had a great time.
Jacobsen: It was really fabulous.
Shasha: It was really instructive. Yes, it was lovely. We weren’t just connecting over the lectures. It was being in the pubs and hanging out.
Jacobsen: One thing that comes to mind is Kacem Al Ghazzali. I was aware of him. I didn’t know him. He wasn’t even aware of me. [Laughing]
Shasha: [Laughing].
Jacobsen: So, we met at one of the pubs near the pier, I guess. It was some intense conversation about Islam and ex-Muslims, yada-yada-yada. There was a tinge of aggression. By the end of the night, we went partying. Ahmed Elbukhari was there. Ana Raquel Aquino Smith was there. Adrian Nunez was there. So, it was a Libyan, a Moroccan, a Canadian, a Peruvian, and a Brazilian going to a Latin dance club.
Shasha: [Laughing].
Jacobsen: 4:30 in the morning, we were at some pub or other. It was the two of us. It was the last time and last place that was open in Copenhagen at that time. I believe it was a Sunday. [Laughing] By the end of it, we are in the elevator. I remember we had drunk a bit. I believe he had drunk more than me. At the end of it, he says, “Scott… I love you,” as the elevator doors shut. Those are the memories that sustain you in Singapore throughout the year. That is a memory that will definitely stick with me in meeting this person. We had a very intense conversation. Then, at the end of it, “I love you.” Those are really the bread-and-butter of a humanist life because we’re not referring to some blessing from a deity. We’re just enjoying the company of people with very different backgrounds and very different experiences.
Shasha: That’s exactly it. The fact that we’re all trying to enjoy the one life that we have. Something that I felt lucky to be involved in the international humanist community. You meet people from backgrounds of countries that I wouldn’t have otherwise: hearing about their lives, their backgrounds, whether Humanism in their countries or what their life is like. I am extremely lucky to continue to be privy to that with Humanists International. It’s those minutiae of this funny thing that happened to us. We can talk about all the grand things that we do, and they’re important. It is the little details that you remember.
Jacobsen: I grew up in a community of old women. I was raised by some old women in part. So, to me, the small little things, a new song that you really enjoy, an owl flying into your garden [Ed. actual case]. Things like that. Those make my life. I care about the big things, too. The majority of my life is around the small, thoughtful things that you happen to enjoy. What about the youth branch of Humanists UK in terms of projects that it is doing for its youth members? Are there particular things that are exciting coming and should be focused on this year or coming into next year?
Shasha: AJ and I have some things that we’re probably not ready to announce just yet, but a lot of what we’re doing is making sure our youth members are connected with the wider Humanists UK campaigns at the moment. So, for example, this weekend, AJ and I and a team of volunteers of our young humanists members have a stall at the New Scientist. They have a new show. People who are interested in science are often humanists. We are doing outreach there to get people interested in Humanism. When we describe it, people go, “Oh, I already believed that.” It is having people look at the local group to become involved, how to become a celebrant, or simply being abreast of all the young humanist things. Having spoken to some young people who turn up to the local group, it is full of people who are very old, then people might think, “This isn’t for me.” So, we work to keep people involved and in the thread of humanist thought and what people are doing.
Jacobsen: To the original topic outside of tangents, what is it like being a humanist woman in Britain? Not making you a spokesperson for all women or British humanists [Laughing].
Shasha: [Laughing].
Jacobsen: But in terms of individual experience, is there a different character to the experience in the country that has a large humanist and non-religious population, or is Christianity a large minority but not even close to a majority anymore?
Shasha: Absolutely, it is very far off. In the latest census, the majority of people say they have no religion. As a humanist and a woman, it is interesting. I’ll tackle the humanist part first. While most people are non-religious, and even people who end up having a spiritual belief are against organized religion, I think having a humanist outlook on some people is quite odd. I wouldn’t say it’s any prejudice or something like that. I know that in some countries, announcing yourself as an atheist can be quite dangerous. It’s not that. There are loads of people who end up believing superstitious things, conspiracy things, or even magical thinking. I like being, particularly as a young woman, a voice of reason and science to all things. To other people who might go to the religious side, they might think there are fairies in my garden or something. I try to get them to question that belief slightly. To be a woman humanist, I don’t think someone who is a sexist wouldn’t be a good humanist. I find that gender equality is very good. I think there is a perception among outsiders that it is a male-dominated thing. Things like science and rationality should be, but I don’t think that’s the case at all. I think there have been many cases of British humanist women throughout history who have done amazing things in carrying us forward.
Jacobsen: Would you say this is a relatively common experience and perspective among peer women?
Shasha: I think no. I think I have most of the humanists I have worked with. I’ve never had a question with them about being a humanist woman rather than being a humanist. I suppose that’s a good thing if we do not really have to think about it.
Jacobsen: That’s a great thing if it doesn’t come up. If it was a problem, people, humanists, especially those who believe in freedom of expression, would talk about it. If it is not coming up, it is not a priority issue. Even though, for some, it may be an issue. Although, in your experience, it appears to be a non-issue.
Shasha: Absolutely, the stereotype of women is about caring and compassion. That’s a stereotype that has worked in my favour in things like the ceremonies that I do for people who are grieved. I think that is one of the sections within Humanists UK that is female-dominated as opposed to male. But yes, absolutely, we can live normally day-to-day; it’s a wonderful thing. We’re lucky for that.
Jacobsen: What do you notice in a young cohort, even, say 5-10 years, of women in Britain coming forward because they’ve experienced an even lessened influence of Christianity in their cultural experience?
Shasha: Absolutely, even when I was coming up, there was very little religious influence. I didn’t have to even believe in a religion. Among my peers, even at university, there were so few people who were truly religious. There might be some people who call themselves Christian. But they weren’t, really. They never went to church. They were it in name. Now, it’s even less. What I like about young humanists is that we get more apostates. But there tend to be very few Christian apostates. They tend to be the individuals who come from communities that are more religious in this country. As they become second and third-generation here, they still have to get a bit more connection from that when they realize that they don’t believe anymore. I think that’s important as a reason for Humanists UK’s existence. While Christianity is no longer the dominating religion, there are other ones that we need to support the people who struggle to leave.
Jacobsen: To quote Jerry Seinfeld for my last question…
Shasha: [Laughing].
Jacobsen: … “The female brain is one of the most competent and capable organs in all of the biological universe.” #girlpower…
Shasha: [Laughing].
Jacobsen: As we can see internationally in statistics, we can see this in reliable sources. The educated majority of the upcoming generations and our current cohort are women, in general, especially in developed countries. The majority of the workforce in some of these countries is increasingly becoming women, especially in key or core intellectual enterprises and areas of society: law, medicine, politics, and so on. How do you see a humanist outlook as incorporating this emancipatory progression that has been happening for centuries, arguably, or, at least, a century and a bit for women and the changing ideas of gender norms in those contexts? How does Humanism provide a healthy fit for this contemporary egalitarian society?
Shasha: I think that’s a really interesting question. I’d say Humanism, of course, has been human-focused, and the idea women and men are fundamentally equal and should be treated equally is a longstanding idea. The humanist outlook is a way to think about these things. Only through dialogue can you deconstruct the latent sexism that some people might be thinking. I have some coworkers in a previous job of mine, a non-humanist job. We had to drive a lot around in it. They were constantly saying, “Women are driving and always crashing.” All those stupid sexist jokes. This is a bit lame. Only through humanist discussion of trying to connect, “Why do you think it’s okay to make these jokes? You don’t think it’s harmful. But fundamentally, you have some beliefs about women that you haven’t looked at.” Connecting to people who may have some hangover from that, also celebrating what we have achieved with humans in so few generations. The fact is that women can do any job that they want and will not be held back by their gender. Most people agree with that. I think that there’s lots of humanist and rational thought to thank for that.
Jacobsen: Nicole, thank you very much for your time today to talk about a little bit of a niche humanist topic of being a lady British humanist.
Shasha: You’re very welcome. Thank you very much for having me.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/11/23
A little late on the eight-ball here. However, there’s been a positive development in secular history in Canadian society with the introduction of the first humanist chaplain to the Canadian Armed Forces.
On May 18, 2022, Captain Marie-Claire Khadij was appointed the first humanist chaplain in the Canadian Armed Forces. That’s a landmark, because, as I recall, I wrote on an atheist chaplain attempting to become an official position in the United States Armes Forces: Jason Heap who is a doctor in theological history.
Heap failed twice in their initiative and sued both times. I do not think the second lawsuit went well or with the original intention either. Now, that is instructive. This can be an educational moment for Canada in how to make secular progress and for the United States in how to get humanist chaplains into the military. If religious ones respecting equality in Canada are allowed, then non-religious chaplains should be allowed too.
The Government of Canada press release stated, “Captain Khadij — currently posted with the Canadian Army’s 2ndCanadian Division at CFB Valcartier, Que. — entered the CAF as a chaplain in 2017, initially representing the Roman Catholic faith tradition. Over time, she found that humanism is more aligned with her values. She views spirituality as a search for meaning in life, which some do through religion while others, like herself, seek meaning through humanist values or secular ethics.”
That’s a fair statement. I’m not precisely surprised, but I am happy. The only basis in a multicultural, multiethnic society with a plurality of faiths is equal representation or equal non-representation.
The Canadian Armed Forces’ Royal Canadian Chaplain Service (RCChS) found the core values and beliefs of Humanism, humanist chaplaincy, consistent with its core tenets. Therefore, Captain Khadij was able to move forward with this development.
For such a pluralistic society and largely non-religious society with matched liberalized religiosity if present, Khadij won’t be enough in the Canadian Armed Forces to do this enough. There is a larger need for the provision of non-religious chaplains.
Khadij in the press release said, “The majority of members come simply to speak with us and get support. Most members know that the religious or spiritual tradition of the chaplain does not change the kind of service they receive. Regardless of the chaplain, each member is welcomed, listened to and supported on their journey. And if they have specific faith questions, they can be referred to a chaplain of that specific tradition.”
Humanist Canada played a major role in getting Captain Khadij into the role. That’s a win for humanists throughout Canada. What does this mean for the likes of Heap, for individuals who want to serve in that role while lacking the support?
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/11/21
Takudzwa Mazwienduna is a member of Young Humanists Zimbabwe. Here he talks about Young Humanists Zimbabwe.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We did an extensive series of short-form interviews on Zimbabwean humanist culture and secular issues. Something like 33 of them. It was a lot. We did this for Canadian Atheist. The publication seems to have fizzled out, at the moment, in June of 2022. It’s happening all over the media landscape, even Jezebel shut down in the last 24-48 hours, I think [Ed. November 10, 2023]. It was a major feminist publication that grew for 16 years. It happens. Finance is the issue; the transition from print to online is the issue behind finance, and finance is the issue behind firings, publication closings, and reduction in staff. Journalism is a business and a moral duty. So, finance inevitably impacts most without finance or capability to self-sustain financially if moral duty trumps finance. Also, people read differently now with new media technology. With that series ended, I reached out to restart on a new platform with a wider remit, The Good Men Project. They’re left-wing. I am left-wing on some subject matters – centrist and conservative on others, so I see a positive relationship in those left-wing areas for working. That seems fair to me. So, first question, what’s new, personally?
Takudzwa Mazwienduna: How have you been Scott? I left South Africa when the COVID19 pandemic hit, went back home to Zimbabwe for a while, managed to finish compiling my first book “A Vehicle For Progress” and self published in 2021. I left Zimbabwe for the Philippines in 2022, and in between my remote work schedule, I am writing a new book, my first fictional one. It explores the moral decay that characterizes religion in Africa today.
Jacobsen: Professionally, what’s new?
Mazwienduna: My girlfriend and I co founded a startup in the State of Florida in the USA. We operate it remotely, as we live more permanently in Montenegro as digital nomads. I love that it gives me the financial freedom to make time for my book writing.
Jacobsen: What is the status of the Zimbabwean Secular Alliance?
Mazwienduna: We finally formalized to become Young Humanists Zimbabwe. We currently have a podcast and blog website that explore secular and humanist issues in Zimbabwe.
Jacobsen: What is the state of the Humanist Society of Zimbabwe?
Mazwienduna: We have all united to become Young Humanists Zimbabwe.
Jacobsen: What political conflicts have been an issue in 2023 for Zimbabwean secularists?
Mazwienduna: There haven’t been any significant conflicts, cooperation rather has been the order of the day.
Jacobsen: What have been inflection points in Zimbabwean popular culture, media, social life in 2023?
Mazwienduna: Zimbabwe is catching up with a globalizing world, and this is mostly reflected in the music and art which is something of a renaissance at the moment. It is chaotic and exciting at the same time. It is also a ripe opportunity for new ideas to make it to the mainstream, and Young Humanists Zimbabwe plans to influence the emerging culture with progressive ideals.
Jacobsen: What are the edges of secular combat for equality in Zimbabwe now?
Mazwienduna: There are many concerns about secularism to do with both the Zimbabwean government and its opposition, but Zimbabwean politics have been very dysfunctional for a while, it’s a lot like the Wild West used to be in the 1800s, there is no law and order and the government’s position on something like secularism is not consequential or significant. Most Zimbabweans are leaving for the UK and Ireland because there are no economic opportunities.
Jacobsen: We’ll continue in the next session. Thank you, Takudzwa.
Mazwienduna: Thank you Scott!
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/11/22
There’s a sense in which human rights advocacy can be graded by degrees. Some can be informative. Others, advocacy from afar in articles, interviews, donations, professional work. Still more, they can be people in collectives working for dignity and equality. Even more, others can be awardees and/or lightning rods of edges of human rights advocacy. One of those people is Narges Mohammadi.
Mohammadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023 by the Norwegian Nobel Committee. She has fought for equality and dignity of women in Iran. She has been convicted 5 times, arrested 13 times, sentenced to 31 years in prison plus 154 lashes. Currently, she is in prison.
Since the Islamic regime took power in Iran in 1979, people have protested against the brutality and oppression of the Iranian morality police and the theocratic system. There can be inflection points. One was the murder of Mahsa Jina Amini in September, 2022.
Amini’s murder unleashed the largest political demonstrations since 1979.
20,000 protestors were arrested, thousands were injured, and 500 protestors were killed. Demonstrators created the slogan “Zan — Zendegi — Azadi” meaning “Woman — Life — Freedom.”
Mohammadi has a history in work for gender equality. As a physics student in the 1990s, she wrote for reformation oriented publications as a columnist. She has been involved with the Defenders of Human Rights Center in Tehran, which was founded by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi.
Mohammadi’s arrests started in 2011 for helping activists who had been jailed. She then fought against the death penalty. She was re-arrested in 2015 for fighting against the death penalty.
Once in prison, she began fighting against the sexualized violence and use of torture against political prisoners in Iranian prisons. In protests in Evin prison, in Tehran, Mohammadi assumed leadership of protests, expressing solidarity with inmates.
Even with strict impositions on communications, she got an article out, which went to the New York Times. It was published on the 1-year anniversary of Amini. The central theme has been, while in prison; if more of these political prisoners are inmates, then the more powerful they become.
More recently, she has engaged in a hunger strike. The reason: The prison guards would not take her to the hospital; unless, she wore a headscarf. She and seven other prisoners — those other prisoners out of solidarity — refused to wear the headscarf.
The concern is Mohammadi has a heart condition; the reason for the need to visit the medical professionals. Even still, her fight continues. As with most of these people, the fights would continue with or without the awards.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/11/20
*Interview conducted October 16, 2023.*
Mr. Moh is the Communications Director of LGBT+ Rights Ghana. Here he discusses LGBTI rights in Ghana.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, today, we are here with Mr. Moh. He was giving a presentation at the Copenhagen World Congress and General Assembly for Humanists International. He is highly involved with queer issues in Ghana. This is a recommendation of Roslyn Mould, Vice President of Humanists International and the Founder of Accra Atheists. So, I think the first question is: How did we miss each other at Copenhagen?
Mr. Moh: It’s possible because I wasn’t there for that long. Copenhagen came to me very impromptu. I had to prepare things and figure it out because I had other things to do, because I was covering for a colleague of mine. He was supposed to go, but couldn’t. I didn’t spend much time at the conference. Maybe, that is how we missed each other.
Jacobsen: If you were to pinpoint the number one issue right now in Ghana for the larger queer community, the LGBTI community, what is it?
Moh: Of course, it is going to be the recent bill, so-called recent because it was introduced 2 years ago. It is still the major issue confronting the queer community. Of course, it’s a very crazy bill. It’s been reported around the world as the most draconian bill against LBGTQ community at the time. Luckily for us, Uganda decided to go ahead of us and pass a much crazier bill. The bill is the biggest issue at the moment. That is the biggest issue confronting the queer community.
Jacobsen: Within Uganda and Ghana, are these bills mainly being supported by conservative religious movements and communities?
Moh: Yes, definitely, there have been numerous reports that shows that these bills were not homegrown. They were not bills that our members of parliament decided to work on to introduce in our parliament. It was given to them. It was sent to them by these conservative groups. That is also because, for years – years; these conservative groups have been lobbying numerous African parliaments. In Ghana, for instance, in 2019, they partnered with a local organization to have a conference on the African family and all of that. That is when they actually even mentioned one of their main objectives was to introduce a bill to criminalize the queer community in Ghana at the time. Of course, at the time, we didn’t think that it was something that would materialize because we know how the political situation in the country is; however, it is a foreign influence. It has materialized. It is not entirely homegrown. It was imported and supported by far-right conservative groups in the United States.
Jacobsen: These would be hardline Catholics and Evangelical Christians, correct?
Moh: Mainly Evangelical Christians, because the report shows it was the World Congress of Families, they’re mostly Evangelicals. But then, the Catholics supported it because it was an alliance with their doctrines.
Jacobsen: Why did they target this particular issue, especially internationally toward Ghana in particular?
Moh: If you look at the history of Ghana, and how Ghana is positioned internationally and politically, you would see why Ghana is the main target to start this wave of homophobic bills in Africa. That is, in history, Ghana was the first country to actually gain independence. From that onwards, the then President Kwame Nkrumah was at the forefront to realize this Pan-Africanism, Pan-African dream. He was in touch with other freedom fighters in Africa and all of this. Ghana is seen as the pioneer of things. Politically, it is ripe. Whenever things happen in Ghana, it is very possible that is can happen in other African countries. Also, generally, Ghana is seen as liberal in the West African region. It is seen as the most peaceful country is Africa, the most peaceful place to have businesses and all of that. It is a very strategic political move to target Ghana to use this bill as a thing. However, of course, their bigger plan is not just to come for the LGBTQ community. They have their own plans, which are mostly conservative beliefs. Of course, it makes sense to target the LGBTQ community because that is a community that brings all of these different religious groups together to hate, because when you take Islam, for instance; it is against homosexuality. Christianity is against homosexuality. To some weird extent, the current practices of African religion are also believed to be against homosexuality. Even though, evidence shows that in the past; it wasn’t. You can see that it is an issue that they can come together to push. Outside of that, of course, they are working to fight against women’s rights, children’s rights. They are pushing for ‘parental rights.’ “Yes, we protecting our children. That is why we are against this bill.” It is something that has been thought through for it to happen. That would be my analysis of it.
Jacobsen: Are most of these Evangelical groups in America Caucasian, Euro-American, or white communities?
Moh: White, very, very white. One of the persons in the forefront of this group is Sharon Slater. The name, of course, gives it away. She is very white. So, she has been present in almost all of the meetings that we are aware of; in Ghana, she was at the parliamnet lobbying. Her name appears in some of the meeting minutes. In Uganda, it is the same. Whenever there is a meeting for the Cngress of Families, she is there. She is in the forefront. You can see that mostly, whenever they’re meeting these African parliaments; they are the white ones. It is either her or the other white people, and in the African parliaments with the African parliamentarians. I haven’t seen any black person in the diaspora who is part of their team, yet. That I can say. But all that I have seen and the people there who have been ther eas part of the World Congress of Families have been white.
Jacobsen: America has a lot of family issues. If taking on their perspective, the lack of fathers and the broken homes, and the highest number of single parent households, single moms and single dads, in the world in the United States. Why the focus on an African nation-state and its culture with a political-ideological move rather than its own borders?
Moh: I mean, it’s not like they’re not working there. They are also doing that. You are influenceful when Roe v Wade was overturned and other major laws wer e overturned in the United States. It has their fingerprint all over it. Of course, it is not limited to their place. However, when you look at it as why they are going to Africa, it has been a breeding place for Evangelical Christians for a long time. In every corner of Africa, you will see missionaries. These missionaries, church missionaries, doing differet projects and preaching. Africa is known for religious, strong religious, stance. So, of course, it would be an easy place to spread such hate. Of course, if you look at the situation happening in Africa, it’s a lot. It’s a lot, politically. For instance, there is a lot of hunger on the continent. So, Africa is always seen as this place that needs help; that needs foreign aid. That needs philanthropy. So, that is what we see. Of course, these things come with these philanthropic activities and all of that because they say they are bringing their Bible and Koran, saying, “This is the Good Word. We are helping you.” That would be the motive and idea behind it. It is not surprising that Africa is seeing this as well. Thanks to colonization, which laid the foundation for this, Africa didn’t really entirely move forward after colonization. The whole thing that happened during colonization. We didn’t get the chance or give ourselves a chance to reflect that, maybe, our culture has been changed through this. So, maybe, what kind of continent do we want? Who is to be included, excluded? We didn’t have that moment. It all comes together, politically, for this to happen. Because, of course, when the missionaries left, when the colonization left, they left us with Bibles and all of that. That is what we embraced. Hundreds of years of this being beaten into us, and given to us. Of course, this is going to be way of life for us. You understand. The foundation was laid for a long time before this Christian Evangelicals even came in, because they also saw an opportunity; and they took it.
Jacobsen: Also, there are, within Ghana, hardline prominent people who are anti-LGBTQ, anti-LGBTI. How is the fight going against those individuals? What are their current social or political moves to undermine minority populations?
Moh: Generally, it has been documented that mostly in Africa; there are politicians who have this populist approach to democracy, always find a good future for themselves, politically. I don’t know if that makes sense. When you look at Ghana, one of the politicians that pushed and pushed in 2014 for this, when the first ‘kill the gays’ bill was introduced. Nothing happened to him. Fast forward, he is Minister of the State. So, every other politician sees that, of course. If you hate on queer minorities, it doesn’t affect your political career in your country. Generally, the population’s idea is that they are fighting the good fight for them. It is positioning them for a very long political fight in their countries. These people, these individuals that are in Ghana, for example. They are following the same example. It is nothing new. Because they know that, at home, their political career will soar whether the bill passes or not, as long as they can ride on this propaganda that they are for the people, safeguarding the morals of the society, pushing away the evil of the West, then their political career is solid. Now, it is hard to fight them because they have the support of the masses. So if anything happens to them, or if we are able to push for sanctions against them and all of that, the queer community would face backlash for that, because they end up saying that it is “because of you” that this person is facing sanctions. Of course, they know this. That is why they say in some of their pronouncements, “We are being attacked. They are trying to sanction us,” because these are some of the implications of their actions internationally. Nationally, they would have a very long political career.
Jacobsen: Would you consider this the worst time?
Moh: The worst, I would say yes because the queer community hasn’t experienced this level before. In the past, it has died down within two days. It is mostly not serious issues. It might be a queer person beaten somewhere. It became sort of normal. It is in the media for a day or two, then it is gone. Now, for two years running since the closure of a community centre and then the bill, it has constantly been in the news. We have seen a rise in attacks, a rise in abuses, a rise in blackmail. So, yes, this is the worst time a queer person can be in Ghana, or even in Africa; I would say. We are seeing all these bills popping up in different parts of the continent as well.
Jacobsen: How is Alex Kofi Donkor doing in all of this?
Moh: Generally, of course, it takes a toll on a person who has become the face of an issue in a country. Now, we are trying our best to make sure that he is safe. Of course, he is an activist. So, he still believes in what he believes in. He is still fighting. But now, due to security reasons, we are all looking at our modes of activism. So, we are also trying to utilize different kinds of methods to push through. That is what he is doing as well. He is taking it pretty well. I would say.
Jacobsen: How about yourself? Do you consider yourself safe psychologically and physically in the midst of some of this stuff?
Moh: No. I don’t feel entirely safe. However, we grew up in this system. So, we are able to navigate through it. Psychologically, I definitely acknowledge that this takes a whole lot of mental toll. So, now, I have a therapist who I talk to every two weeks and try to get in touch with myself. I do some exercises and all of that. That helps me feel grounded and all of that. It is not easy. I am not entirely safe. That’s the thing. I don’t think any queer person, especially activists, are entirely safe in our country.
Jacobsen: Have there been public beatings or murders of LGBTQ people in the light of some of this stuff?
Moh: There have been a lot of beatings. Murders, not yet. There was a stabbing that happened a month ago. Luckily, the victim did not die. However, just last week, there was a suicide situation, where a teacher was outed as bisexual. He took his life. Outside of that, we have seen a hike in abuses, almost every week; we get a new case of a lynching and abuses of someone in some part of the country. We are seeing this everywhere: the community, the chiefs, the traditional leaders. They all perpetuate these things.
Jacobsen: How did Kamala Harris’s help in any way?
Moh: Publicly, it really didn’t.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Moh: [Laughing].
Jacobsen: [Laughing] Fuck, eh.
Moh: I don’t know how or why they thought it makes sense for them to say she was here to talk about LGBTQ and to tell the state to accept the LGBTQ. That’s what they did. That became the meaning of Kamala Harris’s visit. So, personally and politically, for the queer community, Kamala Harris’s visit caused more harm than good. Even though, he wasn’t here particularly to do that. Because we all saw what she was here for, to improve ties between Ghana and USA when Russia is trying to make friends in the region. That’s what happened with the visit. Also, she wasn’t here for the community anyway.
Jacobsen: What is Canada doing if anything positive or negative because I am calling from Vancouver or Langley, Township of Langley?
Moh: Canada has been steadfast in their foreign policies regarding LGBTQ. That’s a good thing. Personally, we have had different engagements with the Canadian mission here on how to strategize against the bill, and other stuff all well. On the international front, Canada is doing their best diplomatically on how to not let this bill come into force. I would, personally, appreciate those efforts. Canada, especially in Ghana, has not publicly done anything to cause backlash in the community. So, I don’t think they’ve done anything bad, yet. [Laughing]
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Moh: Stressing the “yet,” our engagement has been positive so far. Not just the Canadian mission here, some time ago, we had conversations with Members of Parliament who visited. I am sure it was translated to their visits to parliamentarians here. Generally, Canada is doing well in this front.
Jacobsen: Any final thoughts based on the conversation today?
Moh: Final thoughts, I would say that we need more platforms. I am glad that we are having this conversation. Even if there are people who do not know about this, now, they would through your platform. So, any available platforms that would be willing to carry the story or highlight it is, of course, very welcome. We appreciate all of the support from the international community. Hopefully, it gets better.
Jacobsen: I believe that’s the main message. “It gets better.” [Laughing]
Moh: [Laughing].
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Mr. Moh.
Moh: Thank you, too, Scott.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/11/20
*Interview by Adewale Sobowale, transcription by Scott Douglas Jacobsen.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the Founder of In-Sight Publishing and Editor-in-Chief of “In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal” (ISSN 2369–6885). Jacobsen is a Tobis Fellow (Research Associate) at the University of California, Irvine for 2023-2024. He is a “Freelance, Independent Journalist”, “in good standing” with the Canadian Association of Journalists. He considers the contemporary scientific method as the pragmatic, functional source of understanding the world and universal human rights as the moral frame leading substantive ethical discourse, internationally. You can email: Scott.Douglas.Jacobsen@Gmail.Com. Here I talk with Adewale Sobowale of The Migrant Online about a lot of things.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I’m enjoying the Vancouver life still, still at the ranch here.
Adewale Sobowale: [Laughing] Alright, how was the experience?
Jacobsen: It was good. I found it, more or less, educational. I found them focusing less on specific orientations around economics and more on principles and models, and concepts, of economics. That’s different than one might expect in an economics course for journalists provided by a thinktank because, when most of us have an idea of a thinktank, we’re thinking of a group of people with a good deal of funding who provide a specific lens on economics, on policy, on politics, on analyzing society. This wasn’t that. So, I think the fact that we included people from left to right to center in the political spectrum looking at some of the biographies of some of the people participating with us in our class of 22 minus 1 was very good. So, I think the presentation was fair and the information was informative. How did you find it?
Sobowale: By the way, Could you introduce yourself?
Jacobsen: Sure [Laughing], that might help. [Laughing] So, hi, my name is Scott Jacobsen. I live in Langley, British Columbia, Canada. I am a freelance, independent journalist in good standing with the Canadian Association of Journalists. I am a Tobis Fellow for my second/renewed year 2023/24 at the University of California, Irvine in the Center for the Scientific Study of Ethics and Morality. The title is Tobis Fellow for that. I have a lot of titles and things of that nature and a long history of doing different things. Right now? I just came off shift doing ranch labour with horses. It is exactly what you’re thinking about: cleaning buckets, shovelling poo, driving the tractor, loading manure bins. Things of this nature.
Sobowale: You must have a lot on your hands.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] I assure you. We have a team. This team, they grew up with horses. It’s a much different experience for them. For me, I had no background with horses. As far as I am concerned, I had no right to be here. Yet, I wanted to take on that challenge. In a Ghandian sense, I wanted to be among a people to be able to know them, and then be able to write on them, appropriately. So, I have been doing interviews, writing some articles, but more interviews with people in the equestrian industry in Langley, British Columbia, Canada. Because, at least, the moniker in public discourse – news, opinion pieces – in the history of the township is “the horse capital of British Columbia.” That’s a fair statement given the number of horses here and the fact that we have Thunderbird Show Park, which is, probably, the largest facility, probably, in British Columbia for any equestrian sport. Probably, the biggest in Canada would be Spruce Meadows, which has this huge international status. People I have interviewed in Holland would consider it an honour to fly their horses from Holland to Alberta to compete at Spruce Meadows. This is the kind of thinking of a horse person when they look at Spruce Meadows or other similar stature places.
Sobowale: Now, we discussed about your activism and all those things. Can you just tell us why you’re an activist and which type of activism are you into?
Jacobsen: I’m into a lot. It depends on the frame. It depends on the time. It depends on the interest. If I have the time, I try to commit some time to it. If there is a season of life where time or finance might be a little more limited, I can’t fund things as much as I would like to; I can’t take as much time as I would like to, to help some initiatives that, to me, seem important. So, the types of activism, more to the question; they’ll, typically, be around critical thinking, scientific education, Humanism, human rights, and a wide smattering of those things. Those tend to be relatively broad terms. You know, when we say, “Human rights,” as you know, those can be broken down to a number of different things. I know we are doing this interview for Migrant Online. When you look at the number of international treaties and rights documents on migrant and refugee rights, there are an extraordinary number going back decades near or at the founding of the United Nations. One of the most recent was even in 2010. Certainly, there will be more coming through in different bodies of the United Nations. It speaks of States’ responsibilities and human rights simply for the fact of their humanity.
Some things would also be around human rights. There has been a focus on some Indigenous rights. That has been more giving some profile of people in the secular community who haven’t had much of a voice. In fact, there isn’t much of an organization around it. If an individual classified under the United Nations title of “Indigenous” exists and does not adhere to the traditional beliefs, so, they know of their cultural background or what is left post-colonial context. Yet, they don’t believe in the supernaturalism around it, for example. Those people have a hard time organizing because they could lose, sort of, community support for having given up those beliefs. There is a similar situation, as Mandisa Thomas of Black Nonbelievers (Inc.) told me, with regards to African Americans who reject the African American Church, for instance, because it is sort of a mixed history. On the one hand, and this is the way it’s explained to me, there is the history of racism and slavery and the use of the church to oppress, while, at the same time, during the Civil Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Era in the United States; the church was one of the only places of civil and political organizing to simply fight for basic rights, for equality, as African Americans with not only white Americans, but others in the United States. It is seen as a system of oppression taken on by African Americans and then used in a positive way for community building.
But then, if one doesn’t adhere to a belief in a God and in the relevance of the Bible to their personal lives, it becomes very difficult – this is the way it is explained to me – because it is sort of a mixed history because it is a positive and a negative thing to them. Just given their right to freedom of belief and freedom of religion, they have the right to leave. The rub is when they do leave. It comes with certain social consequences. It becomes particularly acute when the major social capital, social support systems, aren’t from the State. It’s from the community and, primarily, from the church community. So, by rejecting that structure, they give that up. So, I’ve done some work profiling some of those voices because I think it’s important. I have more stuff coming on down the line regarding that. A lot of people who tend to be non-religious in highly religious societies. There are some very good societies where people get along. There is a lot of inter-religious, inter-belief dialogue. People getting along, respecting each other. There are other contexts where the State, by law, is used to keep people, sort of, in the closet about their non-belief. There are a number of people who I have interviewed who could not finish the interview because they were taken to jail in the process of the interview.
This did not happen in Canada. One happened in Pakistan. Another, who I did several interviews with and was doing several more, as I talked over dinner with you, happened to an individual from Nigeria, Mubarak Bala. I don’t know if his term is up. He is the President of the Humanist Association of Nigeria. It’s an important country because it is a huge population of people. Not everyone agrees with what was done, obviously, because people don’t want that to happen to them for their personal philosophical beliefs. Yet, it happens. I think cataloguing some of those views does a little bit of work that is important to help out. It is free. It is a little bit of time, little bit of labour, and taking the time for a conversation. Others, it’s really getting people who come out of traumatic circumstances. There were a couple of cases, where it is somewhat associated with the last topic. Individuals who gave up their religious belief. But it wasn’t necessarily for formal theological reasons. It wasn’t, “I studied the text. And I disagree with the orientation or the statements within the holy text.” Rather, it’s the home circumstance was abusive. They managed to get out or had to flee. It’s similar with some of those cases where the State is after them for their things stated, then the reprisal isn’t from the public, but more from that which the public pays for with taxes: the government.
Other cases, there’s been a lot of board work as well. So, I think United Nations Women Canada does important work, but I think that’s dissolved into a foundation now. There are a lot of concerns with the United States in Canada given the overturning of Roe v Wade, which was a major landmark in a lot of active equality movements, human rights movements, reproductive justice movements, for women in terms of, at least, having some choice in whether they have the child. So, if they can delay their pregnancy or plan it out, or if an unplanned pregnancy happens and it’s the wrong person, say, then this can be halted. They can pursue an education.
Sobowale: Excuse me, are you linked to any organization?
Jacobsen: Right now, Humanists International, I am linked to. I do some work interviewing some of them. I used to be part of Young Humanists International. So, Young Humanists International, I used to be the Secretary-General for a time, which is an elected position. I believe I was elected in 2019 in Iceland. I was on the Board of Humanist Canada. Right now, I am on the Council for Centre for Inquiry Canada. It is a less active role than being on the Board and there are a larger number of people for that organization. It would, typically, be defined as a secular humanist organization. The main stuff I am doing right now would be associated with The Good Men Project for writing, as a platform. In-Sight Publishing as a sort of experimental platform, which stage-wise is having new things added to it. But given its experimental nature, how that will turn out is an open question, although, I have been working on it for a while on-and-off. And then, there is also the University of California, Irvine Ethics Centre. I am a Tobis Fellow there. A lot of the work I do through there or for them has to do with women in the academic system. I would say those three: The Good Men Project, In-Sight Publishing, and the University of California, Irvine, are the main ones with a lot of independent work. There were a lot of former board positions, where the term just ended. We can go into that more if you like. But I don’t want to ramble too much [Laughing].
Sobowale: Why are you interesting in fighting for human rights?
Jacobsen: To me, it seems like the substantive alternative. In fact, the only real game in town, internationally. Where, we have parochial ethical systems. You might find some in various Abrahamic religions or minority religions around the world. They have their uses. People, they build lives. They would define themselves as a religious person, as a moral person, living according to rules of their holy text. The one that everyone seems to, at least, declare that they would abide by, for the most part, even if they don’t in terms of action on the ground by governments, by States, Member States of the United Nations, is international human rights, international law. Those, to me, everyone, at least, seems to take part in them and that seems substantial to me. It seems more legitimate because everyone is partaking regardless of ethnicity, sex, gender, religion, non-religion, etc. So, it seems to me like the right thing to do, and, in terms of, at least, having the premise of a moral discussion; everyone plays by the same rules.
Sobowale: What would you say about the state of the world now?
Jacobsen: Mixed [Laughing].
Sobowale: What would you say about the state of the world now?
Jacobsen: I would say the state of the world is mixed. I may have the general statement wrong. However, I think there are more democracies now than there have ever been. If that is so, that’s a positive.
Sobowale: Just a minute, when you said, “There are more democracies now.” Don’t you think there are pseudo-democracies?
Jacobsen: Yes, I would take it as a sliding scale. That would be the first caveat. On one, there are more democracies than ever. On the second hand, there is a sliding scale of democratic governance. So, individual States that have corruption of various degrees will have a lower democratic rating. Those that are autocratic, authoritarian. They would have an even lower status. I would take it as a sliding scale based on the strength of the institutions. I would assume there are indexes that sort of gather relatively agreed upon indices of democratic systems and then the degree to which each country has them. You collate those per country. You get the country. You rank-order them. Then you get a matrix of values per country. Then you rank-order them, then you have a relative system. There is a weakness inherent in that sort of ranking.
Sobowale: Why has migration become a political issue?
Jacobsen: Because if it’s a political issue, I would assume that it garners votes. If you can have something that is a social issue for a decent number of the population, good and bad, across the spectrum, then you can make a divisive opinion about it: complete migration, complete no migration. Then you come off as a firm, non-wishy-washy politician. People like that. So, you get votes in either direction. So, “hot button issues,” as they say in North America.
Sobowale: This migration issue, they are using it to gain or lose votes.
Jacobsen: Yes, I mean this was part of the discussion over the weekend for our class. It’s not the money, in this sense. In some sense, we can talk about economics as about money and money as human utility, but money doesn’t capture everything. So, it’s not quite a generalized human utility index, so far. But in terms of just getting votes, if you take votes, the economics of votes. What topics come to the top of the list? If migration is a really big topic, then you orient your frame and your political party around that frame vis-a-vis migration and, at the end of the day, human beings – migrants and refugees, then you can run it through the marketing and public relations people. And they’ll jazz up the public about how you are dealing with this hot button issue. So, you can garner more votes on that. Either it’s xenophobia, “We don’t want these people here.” Or it’s ultra-compassion, “We are super good. The other party is super evil. We want more people in because we are the good, compassionate people. Those evil people don’t want them in.” Obviously, an oversimplification and simplistic, but I think the general orientation of the argument is that it is an economics of votes, and there’s a utility in taking firm stances or extreme stances, or both, about certain hot button issues. One of them happens to be migration.
There can be entirely invented ones too. If you can get a public riled up enough, this can also have political impacts. Even though, your neighbour might have superstitions about numbers. And you don’t. And you want to buy their property. This was an example from Lee Kuan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore, before he died. His son is actually likely stepping down next year or as soon as next year. He said, “If they move, and you put a pitch for the price for the home,” this isn’t the exact example. “You don’t care about that numerical superstition about some number. However, you have to take into account the other thinking of that person when you are purchasing that property because you have to take the how they are framing it.” So, even though, it is imaginary. It is a superstition about any number, doesn’t matter. You have to take that into account. A non-rational, irrational thing in order to do rational decision-making about house purchasing next door. It’s like that on any human issue, really.
Sobowale: By the way, as you are talking about economics or whatever, I tend to think some of these leaders are, more or less, gaining economically, from instability, from whatever. You know?
Jacobsen: Yes, that’s where the economics of votes is really about economics too [Laughing].
Sobowale: [Laughing].
Jacobsen: If you are a politician, in most countries, it pays well. You can decide your pay, sometimes. You get benefits. Some of the best benefits in the world. You get prestige. You get respect, sometimes. You get hate as well, and stereotyping as a politician. You get, sort of, career advancement. You can try to run for president, prime minister.
Sobowale: That’s true.
Jacobsen: If you’re a place like Iceland, you have a president and a prime minister, but that’s another story. [Laughing]
Sobowale: By the way, even the arms dealers, the guys dealing in arms and ammunitions. They gain economically.
Jacobsen: Yes, that’s the black market. In many ways, if you outlaw industry, an industry, you create a black market overnight. I mean, the more rapid example, by analogy, would be if you pass a law, overnight, you’ve made a whole class of criminals. A slow motion version of that analogy, going to the original example; you make a black market by outlawing things for guns because war is profitable. People will slowly develop a black market for AK-47s. Open question: What about all of the arms and artillery and tanks that the American military left in Iraq and Afghanistan after the Doha Agreement with the Taliban in 2020/2021? This is open field for high technology to be taken by religious fundamentalist militants, by State actors hostile to the United States, or simply State actors who have an interest in the black market economy of arms, even people who are non-State actors who have an interest in the black market economy of arms. There are prominent cases. I remember looking at some international individuals from different countries, including Nigeria, I think, who were dealing with arms or who had militias kidnap kids, drug them, brainwash them, train them to be killers. It is really horrific. Fundamentally, back to your original question about why get involved in some of these things, or at least write on them, do a small like that, not be boots on the ground getting kids out of hostage situations. It seems like the right thing to do. That’s an intuition rather than a firm fact. Yet, I think it reduces the total number of human suffering. So, I think it is a reasonably good thing to do.
Sobowale: By the way, don’t you think the “Third World War” is starting?
Jacobsen: I don’t know. If you look at the Doomsday Clock of the Atomic Bulletin of Nuclear Scientists [Ed. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.], or however it goes, I forget the exact organization it’s from, but it is the Doomsday Clock. Certainly, it has been ticking closer to midnight. But we have conflagrations with the Russo-Ukrainian War, with the Hamas-Israeli war.
Sobowale: The last one or the continuous one.
Jacobsen: The ongoing ones, it’s sort of in Middle East-North Africa and Eastern-Western Europe – Eastern Europe. Those two, certainly, represent conflagrations. Yet, I think it’s important to reflect. Most of human history has been war. I believe the number is less than 10% of recorded human history has been peaceful. So, the default is 9-to-1, war. Something like that. So, war is not new, as we both know. The ratio of war is not new. The major threats on the immediate ground have to do with nuclear powers fighting one another.
Sobowale: By the way, what I wanted to say, you know, when you look at it: the distribution of arms or whatever. The amount spent on arms and munitions. If you could just slice this into half, would the world not benefit?
Jacobsen: I mean, I’m a peacenik. So, it’d be nice. The question is, “How do you get from A to B?”, or A to Z – so to speak. Treaties help. Where there is mutual benefit in a very hot situation, the Cold War would be a good example between the Soviet Union and the United States. Those treaties, that started, if you track them. I forget off the top because it’s been years since I looked at that stuff. The treaties, when you look at those treaties to reduce arms mutually, they were effective. So, international law and treaties, and focusing on reducing nuclear arms, did work. And not many nations necessarily have them. So, I mean…
Sobowale: …one thing, I see. Just like the internet, I mean, internet could be used for good purpose and for negative purpose. Nuclear, too, it could be used for good and for bad.
Jacobsen: Yes, it’s… the common example is a hammer. You can hit a nail into a 2×4 and build a cabin for a family to live in, in the forest, or you can bludgeon a skull and kill someone. This is in some of the oldest literature around like the story of Cain and Abel. These sort of violent stories of brother killing brother. I think it extends in a loose way to using a hammer to build a home or bludgeon a skull. Those kinds of examples are very clear to people. It sets an example that the category “technology” is neutral. It depends on the orientation of how you use it and then the purpose behind that, the why you are using it. Technology, even to the current moment, is like that as well. Something as advanced as nuclear technology is in a similar state. Even ones that are more slow proceeding threats since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution would be the emission of CO2 into the atmosphere, and other emissions, those create, you know, these sort of negative feedback effects where there is a capture of additional energy into the atmosphere. It is sort of a greenhouse effect. So, we get a warming planet. That is more slow going. That didn’t start… that started well before either of us were born, but we can somewhat pinpoint it based on different metrics.
Sobowale: What kind of world would you see 5 years time?
Jacobsen: It is always interesting to ask that question or reflect on that topic when a war starts. Imagine asking this at the beginning of the Iraq and Afghanistan war. I would argue we’d have relatively rapid technological change, faster than now, because we are not seeing linear changes on information processing fronts and developments in those styles of information processing. Somewhat similar to human, somewhat different, we are seeing exponential effects. So, let’s say a doubling happened every year, okay, year one from now. It seems the same as a linear change. By the fifth year, you’re 1, 2, 4, 8, 16. So, it’s 5 years, but it has been 16 times the change. That sort of scales up. That has effects on everything that is downstream from information processing changes. I think any kind of warfare we’re going to see, if we are sticking to war examples for the last few that we’ve had. We’re going to see less on boots on the ground, ships in the sea, planes in the sky, and more fourth dimension of war in terms of cyberwarfare: hacking, shutting down plants, gathering data and information about the citizens, the army. Those sort of hacking initiatives will be a difficult forefront. We are seeing some changes in the Canadian Armed Forces around this as well. Where some positions have come up in the last several years to sort of develop a frontline of protection for Canadian citizens from this, but, I mean, obviously, the secret intelligence services will be more important for that. I would see: war, but also a changing landscape of war. I believe the Israel-Hamas War will, probably… I mean, it is idiotic to make these kinds of predictions. Maybe, a cooldown and then a re-entrenchment by the Israeli forces into Palestinian occupied territory and with Ukraine and Russia; that ball is still up in the air. Most other parts of the world will, probably, be relatively similar.
Sobowale: Okay, we have about 6 minutes more. What do you hope to achieve with your activism?
Jacobsen: A modicum of change that only one person can make in a limited amount of time with limited resources, with time being another resource [Laughing].
Sobowale: You know, change could be relative, you know? Look at this. The arms dealers, they are there to make money. I regret to use the word “developing” because we all know they’re underdeveloped. They are just there, right? They are there to make money. Where does that leave us?
Jacobsen: If people want to make money, that’s their prerogative. Not everything has necessarily been monetized at this time. Although, human beings, certainly, in many regards have been objectivized… objectified and made into commodities. Obviously, that’s a longer discussion, but, to the original question, nearing the end of that 6 minutes. I would aim to add a little bit of good that I can in a limited amount of time, and that without any praise from a higher power or sense of doom about a hell after motivating me, simply because it is the right thing to do is good enough for me.
Sobowale: I just wish you all the best. Because I know the stories are out there. Because, I mean, like I just said, the arms dealerl, you are out there trying to fight for human rights, trying to do all those things. Maybe, the leaders in the developing countries. It’s kind of a morass, you know? But then, I just wish you all the best. So, let’s just quit the program and we’ll talk some other day.
Jacobsen: Excellent, thank you, and thank you for the opportunity.
—
Audiovisual interview original publication at The Migrant Online:
(November 9, 2023)
A chat with Scott Jacobsen, a Canadian activist and journalist!
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/11/19
Prof. Jim Al-Khalili CBE FRS is a quantum physicist who holds a University of Surrey Distinguished Chair as well as a personal chair in physics since 2005 and a University chair in the Public Engagement in Science. He is a living three-piece suite. He spends roughly half his time as a ‘public scientist’ as a populariser and science communicator and has written many books aimed at the lay reader as well as presenting numerous TV documentaries and radio programmes, mostly for the BBC. Here we catch up after a few years and talk about science communication and Humanism.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, this is an interview with Jim Al-Khalili. Our last interview was several years ago for a British magazine called Conatus News [Ed. Now Uncommon Ground Media Ltd., “Interview – Professor Jim Al-Khalili, on Science and Humanism,” and “In Conversation with Professor Jim Al-Khalili (Part 1).”]. Obviously, remotely at the time, from Vancouver, Canada, I reached out because I realized I hadn’t done an interview with you in a while.
Prof. Jim Al-Khalili: Right [Laughing].
Jacobsen: I have been doing [Laughing] more interviews in a series with other humanists. I thought I’d do another round with you. Obviously, you’ve been writing books. You’ve been doing work for BBC Radio 4. Maybe we should focus on some of the commentary that you’ve been mentioning lately. Potentially, some of the programming has been ‘dumbed down’ for scientific presenting to the public. What are some of your reflections on it?
Al-Khalili: I suppose we have to draw a distinction between television and radio. For years, I presented documentaries on the BBC. A lot of them now are available. If they are not owned by the BBC, if they are produced by independent production companies, they can sell them to other providers, e.g., Netflix and Amazon Prime. They have been great because of the programs I have been commissioned to do. You can get really stuck in the science. These are popular science programs. It is not so much the dumbing down but the fact that the BBC and other networks are simply not commissioning any more television documentaries. So, what is available there either repeats, which is great, I don’t have to do any work. My stuff gets churned out and has a long shelf life, which is fine. I don’t know if it is because of a lack of money getting stuck into the science or not appreciating that there is an appetite for viewers out there. For radio, no, it’s fine. I’ve presented my BBC Radio 4 program, The Life Scientific, which then goes out on podcast. It has been going on for 12 years now. I interviewed other scientists. We can get stuck into some serious science and talk to them about their life and work. That’s very rewarding. That’s, essentially, a big chunk of my public engagement and my outreach activity these days.
Jacobsen: Do you notice, even though there is an appetite for this scientific presentation in television documentaries, an impact on the public opinion or public knowledge of science with a decline in commissioning of these?
Al-Khalili: I’m not sure. Certainly, for viewers in North America – Canada and the US, where they are getting to see these BBC productions because they are available online on Netflix and Amazon Prime, I was recently in the US. There is a niche audience who are fans of these programs. They find them very rewarding and very fascinating. It’s nice to receive compliments about them. So, they’re not aware that I have not made anything new. They are seeing it for the first time. I say, “Yes, I filmed that 10 or 11 years ago.” I’m not sure what the impact of a drop in commissioning is being seen yet. I think all of the time, there is an audience out there, and all of the time, these things are available. But it is a shame if we aren’t producing new material. There is not that much out there. In the US, for example, PBS, Nova, National Geographic, and Discovery – who would traditionally have the output in these programs, aren’t even producing the real scientific stories that people want to hear about. There is always the natural history. The David Attenborough type of programs. With high production values, they are seen all around the world. It’s a bit more niche for someone like me to talk about quantum physics. But there is an audience out there. There are people who want to hear this stuff, who are fascinated. “Blow my mind! Hit me with stuff.” We’ll see if there is going to be a resurgence one day. We keep trying.
Jacobsen: There’s also democratic intellectual health. If the public doesn’t have these types of professionally produced, presented, and qualified documentaries on science, what happens? Who fills that void?
Al-Khalili: Yes, absolutely; the BBC, in particular, as you know, is a public broadcasting corporation. It has a remit to educate as well as entertain. Something called the Reithian value of the BBC. It is its responsibility to produce these things. It is a shame. If we end up having people getting their opinions from all sorts of weird and wacky sources, anyone can post anything. It’s great. YouTube and social media are great. But, of course, if the average person doesn’t know where to go for reliable information, we only have ourselves to blame if there is a rise in conspiracy theories or if people don’t know the value of vaccinations, and so on because they are not being exposed to serious, well-researched, well-evidenced science in these well-made documentaries.
Jacobsen: Maybe I can take a step back because this is something I don’t, actually, know. How did you first get involved in wanting to be a public presenter, public science person, or educator?
Al-Khalili: It wasn’t intentional. I followed a very traditional route in degree, postdoctoral research, getting onto the academic ladder, and becoming a lecturer, as we say in the UK, but in North America, you become an assistant professor or associate professor. You move up the ranks. That was my life. Publishing papers, getting research grants, going to conferences, at some point, it was probably early in my career – early to mid-30s. I realized I enjoyed doing outreach. It started small: talks about local schools at science festivals. I’d be the guy in the physics department that a journalist would point to: “Jim Al-Khalili will talk to you.” Everyone else was a bit nervous about it. [Laughing]
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Al-Khalili: I got as much a kick out of explaining science and demystifying complex ideas as I did doing the research myself. It is one thing that leads to another. When I started off as a science communicator, there weren’t many people out there one could look to. There were the Carl Sagan’s of this world. But not everyone is going to be a Carl Sagan. There wasn’t any one role model to look at, “I want to be like that person.” You meet someone. If that hadn’t happened, I would not have published the first book. I would not have done that first interview on that documentary. If I… Serendipity, being at the right time in the right place, also, when I started science communication in the mid to late 90s, it was becoming more respectable. So, my generation was the first where it was okay to be regarded as a serious, respected academic but also to be someone who can communicate science and work in the media. Until then, it was regarded as something… “You’ve gone over to the dark side.” Even people like Carl Sagan were no longer regarded as serious scientists because he tried to spread the word to wider society; thankfully, that’s changed. A lot more people want to do this. “How did you get to be presenting in front of a camera?” It happened. It was never an ambition or a plan of mine. I realized I enjoyed them once those opportunities came.
Jacobsen: As the 90s moved forward into the 2000s, there was a natural incentive for that kind of presentation.
Al-Khalili: Yes, documentary providers in the UK, BBC, Channel Four, started commissioning science programs. The big multi-part series I presented first was “Atom” in 2006. Thereafter, I was making a 2- or 3-part documentary series a year for the next decade or more. “All right, you’ve done this. What’s next, Jim? What do you want to make a program about next? Is it the history of science? Is it some particular area of science?” There was a boom. There was a decade of commissioning of science documentaries between 2006/7 and 2016 and 2017. Then, money got tight. People lost their appetite. It started dwindling then. It’s not much at all now, which is a big shame.
Jacobsen: When you have been doing these big documentaries presenting scientific ideas to the public? What idea tends to be the hardest to get through to someone who may not have the specialization of training?
Al-Khalili: It so happens that the sorts of things I talk about are those complicated concepts, whether quantum physics or Einstein’s theories of relativity. Those are the counterintuitive ideas in science. There’s a lot of hard science, complicated science, whether molecular biology, genetics, or astrophysics. But they can be explained. You can find simple examples and analogies and can do simple demos on a TV program. You’d interview someone. But it is those concepts that are part of my own specialism, like quantum mechanics, which I think are the hardest. Not just with explaining and waving my hands around, but how do you give the audience that they think, “Yes, I think I get that.” Sometimes, you have to admit that the audience will need years of study to really appreciate what you’re telling them, but you can still blow their minds. “I don’t care. I’m not going to get all of this. Make me feel clever! Give me something.” Sometimes, that’s enough to excite people about science. If they want to know more, they’re going to have to dig deeper than I can provide on a TV documentary.
Jacobsen: You had a career in the formal humanist community as well, not sort of a regular member, so to speak.
Al-Khalili: Yes.
Jacobsen: How have you found being part of the humanist community, presenting science to the public more or less as a unified endeavour?
Al-Khalili: It follows naturally for many scientists to be humanists. We have a rationalist view of the world. Scientists, if they are any good, don’t say, “The world is this way because God made it this way.” We want to know why; we want to find the laws of nature. So, we are naturally of that mindset. We don’t want to appeal to anything supernatural or a higher power; we want to rationalize in a way that we can understand. Then, we are awe-struck by the wonder of nature itself. We don’t need anything more than that. What is the purpose? Why is the world? The world is the way it is; that is fascinating enough for us. We celebrate because we want to be a good person, which is part of what defines our humanity. It is not because of something external. It was natural for me. I think, like many people, I was a humanist before I knew I was a humanist. You have it pointed out to you. You realize, “That’s my worldview. That’s how I see the world. Oh, I’m a humanist, then.” Because I come from an unusual background, inThat, my mother was a devout Christian, an Evangelical born-again Protestant Christian. My father was a Shia Muslim. Religion was never rammed down our throats at all. It was very tolerant, liberal, and so on. Inevitably, that dichotomy and, being fascinated by science and looking for rational explanations of things, training as a scientist led me to move away from religion, probably in my teens. It was only relatively later in life that I embraced Humanism as what you would define it as today. I was thrown in the deep end. Not only did I embrace Humanism, but I was asked to take up the role of President of what was the British Humanist Association, now Humanists UK. So, it is interesting to be sink-or-swim, what do I think? [Laughing] Have my view of these things.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] Andrew Copson, he’s made a similar comment. A lot of people are, in fact, humanists if you check the individual boxes of premises of the orientation. They don’t take the formal title. I think that’s a very fair point.
Al-Khalili: Humanists UK has this quiz you can take online, “Are you a humanist?” People do it. More often than not, they’re 100%. “Yes, you are definitely a humanist.”
“Oh! I never realized.” [Laughing]
Jacobsen: [Laughing] That culture with humanists in the UK, not only the longer history of it, but it probably accounts for the large humanist membership and a robust one.
Al-Khalili: As we grow, more and more people are realizing. More people are choosing humanist celebrants for weddings and funerals. It’s not another religion. It’s not a tree-hugging, hippie-dippie, weird views. It’s simply, “Well, okay, I want to be good because that defines me as a human being, not because some ancient book tells me to be good or that I will be rewarded in some future afterlife or that I will be threatened with damnation if I don’t do this. No, I do this because I want to do it.” I think a lot of people think that way. That’s what Humanism is about.
Jacobsen: Even in Canada, I was in contact with someone in the Armed Forces. They are starting to get humanist chaplains in the military. Our first one was only in 2022. So, there is still quite an edge to be pushed forward, just for that form of equality for humanists, secular humanists. However, you want to phrase it.
Al-Khalili: It is good. It is changing now.
Jacobsen: When I went to Copenhagen earlier this year, the big thing was the global South was one big focus or an area of conversation among the national leaders because they, obviously, have a harder time of it when 95% of the population adheres to religious orthodoxy. That becomes, in terms of my conversations with them, a very common political tool. It makes any kind of progress in a humanistic, democratic direction difficult.
Al-Khalili: Yes, we’re in a privileged position here in Western Europe, UK, Northern Europe, Scandinavia, where there are very large humanist organizations. By and large, people are not religious. We don’t have that problem. We forget the vast majority of the rest of the world; religion is a dominant worldview.
Jacobsen: Do you have any contact with science communicators from that global South region who are trying to do the things Carl Sagan did, you did, Stephen Hawking did, with regards to the education of the public in radio, documentaries, or media in general?
Al-Khalili: It is starting. I’ll be in touch now and again with people asking for advice. “We’ve got this program. How can we progress with it?” It is starting, but it is starting slowly. They are faced with a much greater challenge. Here in the UK, whether my science communication or my non-religious beliefs, I was pushing against an open door. A wider society was ready for a rational worldview trying to understand the mysteries of the laws of nature. I didn’t have to battle against prejudice or against people who were resisting that view. This is why I say we are in this privileged position in the West, in the first world, but even in the US, it is a lot harder. Those who have a religious belief or who believe in a higher entity, believe in God, are in the majority in the US. They are in the minority in the UK. Sometimes, we forget. It is a lot harder to promote humanist ideas and ideals and, indeed, rational scientific worldviews in many parts of the world today.
Jacobsen: In the United States, on other metrics, it is an outlier with regard to religiosity. A lot of the major creationist organizations are there, too. These sorts of things. I think you get a society that… Actually, I believe the most cited epidemiologist is Gordon Guyatt. He’s at McMaster University and is a co-founder of Evidence-Based Medicine. Something he notes is that the values and preferences of society guide choices in medicine, for example. If you get places like the Scandinavian societies or Canada, you get societies. They value equity. If you go to the United States, they value autonomy. That changes how they do their national healthcare. Is it mostly private or mostly public? Canada is mostly public. The United States is mostly private. Is there that much of a difference in the quality of care? Or the argument, “I just want to be front of line.” The answer on most of the metrics: Not really, it’s just more expensive. I think one argument that they make for the healthcare system in the United States is half the outcome for twice the cost; you have a quadrupling of inefficiency. Those have a big impact.
Al-Khalili: It is the inequality of it. The haves and have-nots. If you can afford your medical insurance in the US, great, you are looked after. The technology and the medicine available to you are second to none. But plenty of people don’t have medical insurance, people who can’t afford it. It does mirror humanist values. Not being selfish, not thinking about number one, this is our world. We only have one world. We only have one shot at life. Life isn’t a rehearsal. There’s nothing else beyond this. Make the most of this time here; part of that is, I like to think, to have compassion, have empathy; I think that feeds into ideological views, whether political alignments in the US. Be nice! [Laughing]
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Al-Khalili: It is a nice dictum to adhere to; part of that is making sure wider society is fairly treated rather than just looking after number one, which, for me, is a selfish way of living your life.
Jacobsen: Within the international humanist community, we’ve done our recent 2022 update to the 2002 Amsterdam Declaration, which is the third version. I think you’re aware. It is an empirical ethic. Therefore, it will be an evolving ethic with more evidence. What are some areas that you think Humanism will be expanding into in terms of its considerations based on new evidence from the sciences or based on a better understanding of human psychology and behaviour?
Al-Khalili: There are areas in science that are moving rapidly now that have ethical issues. Artificial intelligence is a very good example. I don’t mean if you have a computer that is conscious, it will be endowed with a religious belief or if it should have humanist values. I mean, we have to redefine what it means to be human. Studies into the nature of consciousness, for example, redefine what it means to be sentient. We know that humans aren’t the only conscious living creatures on this planet. So, whether it influences whether we become vegetarians or vegans because we don’t want to cause suffering to other animals, science is constantly giving us a revised view of the world. That means that we have to constantly revise our behaviour and our ethical values. What are we doing to the planet and biodiversity? These are huge challenges that face us. It’s a shame when they get clouded by political ideology or when people are so easily swayed by opinions that they hear because of the fact that we are constantly bombarded by information and data these days, partly due to the internet and social media. That means it is harder for us to make sensible decisions about how to live our lives. I think having humanist ideals plays into how our world is developing constantly, all the time, and increasingly so now with technology changing so rapidly. We have to examine our behaviour and how we deal with each other, how we deal with our planet. This is something that humanists need to be part of that conversation, constantly, because, if not, the ideologies and the bigotry, and the hatred… we’re seeing what the world is like today and how polarized opinions can be. I think humanist values, hopefully, would help remind people of the humanity.
Jacobsen: Two points about the edge. One is about artificial intelligence. One is about consciousness. What is it about human information processing that allows us to have this conscious arena of manipulation of information? Is substrate independence an assumption that we’re making about consciousness? If you take it from an evolved carbon-based organism into silicon circuits, would it be replicable in that sense? Reverse engineering and putting it into a different substrate, then you have a conscious system.
Al-Khalili: I think it is substrate-independent. Consciousness isn’t magic. The human brain is made of matter, made of atoms. They are fitted together to make neurons that fit together into a network and fire and exchange information. There isn’t some magic pixie dust that you sprinkle on the brain to turn this lump of squiggly grey matter into a mind that thinks itself aware is sentient. There is no reason for that complexity. The brain is the most complex system in the universe. There’s no reason that complexity can’t be replicated somewhere else. It doesn’t mean that we have an artificial general intelligence that can think and is conscious and that it is now human because what defines us as humans is more than just our brain. It is our environment, our heritage, and how we deal with our surrounding world. The fact that we’ve got hands. We experience reality in a unique way that is not going to be experienced in the same way as a computer sitting on a desk. But then, things like joy and anger and guilt and empathy are higher-lever computations. I see no reason why they can’t be replicated in some other medium. That is not unique to us as humans. They won’t behave like humans, but these higher-level emotions, I don’t see why they couldn’t be artificially created as well.
Jacobsen: Final question: Are there any books or projects that you’d like to plug in?
Al-Khalili: I’ve started writing a proposal for a new book on the nature of time, which is actually part of a research project I am working on now. More specifically, it’s on the direction of time. Why does time have an arrow from past to future? It is a very deep question in physics and philosophy that has been out there for millennia. I am not saying I have solved it, but it is something that I am very fascinated by. My research in this area is spilling over into writing a popular science book on the arrow of time. That is like way down the road. So, I don’t want to make too big of a plug because it won’t appear for a couple of years.
Jacobsen: We heard it there first. Thank you very much for your time again. [Laughing]
Al-Khalili: [Laughing] My pleasure, Scott.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/11/18
Lina Tebbla has Sami background, which, as far as I know, is the only recognized Indigenous group or people group in Europe. She is an atheist. This is part of a wider effort to catalogue those freethinkers who are Indigenous, to get their views and experiences too. Here she talks about her life and views.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How did the Saami start? Was there a connection to people like the Vikings?
Lina Tebbla: There was a differentiation between the Vikings and many other people, but the lifestyle they had a resemblance to what the Sámi people are doing today. So yes, there’s a connection, but it’s not at all the same, of course.
Jacobsen: These kinds of interviews are going to be necessary. This is new, and a credit to Magnus Timmerby for connecting to you through the Copenhagen World Congress and General Assembly of Humanists International. He and I were having a conversation about Victoria Gugenheim. I was helping her cut some A3 frame stuff into fit. He mentioned your name because I said I was hoping to do this project of interviewing indigenous freethinkers. He said that he knows some heritage of a friend of his.
Tebbla: Oh, yes, I understand now. So yes, my family is off and on because we ultimately left the Sami identity around 1920. Then, in the late 1990s, a woman doing her thesis in archaeology contacted our family and said, “Hey, did you know?” And, of course, some of the elders of our family knew but did quite a good or bad job at hiding it. Some people were good at it, and others were terrible at it.
Half living the Sami lifestyle, half living the Swedish lifestyle, but denying and hiding. Once my grandmother died, the Sami people of our village were very frank about the fact that they knew that she was Sami-speaking. They were sharing knowledge about my family’s heritage. As in other countries like Canada, the Sami people have been persecuted, and the children have been taken from them and put into boarding schools. Being a Sami person at the beginning of the century was a problem. That’s why my family decided to leave that identity and take on a Swedish identity. Also, the memories of my grandmother and her siblings made them afraid to share their background and knowledge with others. It was only the closest people who already knew that also knew their story. And when they died, the memory of our heritage was still among the people who are alive. They have been generous enough to teach me the old ways and let me into the lifestyle of my grandmother and father’s error.
Jacobsen: And these boarding schools; were these religious?
Tebbla: Not so much. A little bit, but not so much. It varied. I don’t know very much about it. I know what’s from popular culture, but what I know about it is that they have been in effect from, like, let’s say, the mid-1800s. Of course, religion had a much more significant role in society back then. Still, the focus has always been to wash away the Sami identity and the language from these kids and teach them to be Swedish because Sami did not fit into Swedish back then.
Jacobsen: How big is the population of the Sami now?
Tebbla: That is also a question I still need to learn, but there are several different layers of Sami in Sweden right now. There are the people who are hardcore Sami. The Sami people have lived in Scandinavia, or Sāpmi as we call it, for a very long time. So, we’re very much blended. We come in many different shapes and sizes. You cannot see who is Sami just by looking at their appearance or their racial identity. It is much deeper than that. It’s the culture. But I was saying that there are culture bearers. Some people are a little in between, who may know some language and are active in certain areas, and others are like me. I think that the vast majority are people like me, who are several thousand in Sweden, who every year, when somebody in their family dies, or they find papers or whatnot, family history reveals itself. They understand that we have been living a lie. In my case, it was my father who told me. So, I think it is a rough definition; 70 to 80% are people who live without the culture, 20% are half-time living with the culture, and the other 10% are hardcore living it, almost like the old school days.
Jacobsen: The language itself – typically languages and cultures evolve – evolves. So, they’re not a static thing similar to personal identity or senses of the self. Has it been traced how the culture became over time in some ways?
Tebbla: That’s a fascinating question. Well, my reflection upon the language is that the Sami language was like many indigenous languages, never really written down. So, that is a fabrication of our modern times, which has been helpful because that means that many people who don’t have native-speaking relatives who can teach them can go to different schools and buy books. Even though the material is very scarce. Still, there is an alternative to do that, at least. That Sami differs from the spoken language of the elders. You can hear it when they speak. It is just that the people who wrote down the Sami language only had part of the language themselves. So, there are gaps in grammar and words, which makes it so that the language needs to find new ways. So, there are new words. An elder of mine told me that “heartbeat” is the same as “snowmobile” because the snowmobile makes the same sound as a heartbeat in the snowmobile engine. That is beautiful. I never thought of it that way, but it speaks volumes about how the language has evolved. Adapting to modern times is essential because that means it has a chance to survive.
Jacobsen: How is Sami traditional spirituality, for instance? In North America, there are over 600 bands of indigenous people in Canada. Each has its orientation, but there tends to be an idea of a creator of some sort, their narrative of how they came to be, and so on. For individuals who might be in a freethought community within, like Sweden, who happen to be Sami, how do they incorporate that into that free thought?
Tebbla: There is a story about the maker. There are a couple of female and male gods. There are certain symbols connected to these Gods. My interpretation of the spirituality connected to these is also accurate. You have a few who are hardcore, people who call themselves modern shamans or whatnot. I will not judge how true they are, but they are really into it and trying to dive deep into it, over-reacting a bit of what it has been. But then there are people, I think I’m one of them, who use these symbols to riot against the system, showing that you could not wash them away. For instance, I bought a ring symbolizing Máttaráhkká, the elder mother. She is a god. When the church tried to Christianize the Sami people, the symbol of Máttaráhkká resembled an M, and the Sami females kept wearing that M mark, making the priests believe it was a symbol of Mother Mary.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Tebbla: It is not so much about spirituality as it is an act of rebellion, a silent revolution. And many people wear these jewellery or these symbols today. They are more symbols of what was lost and what was done to the people rather than that they believe that Máttaráhkká is going to come and save them. However, as in many different types of religions, people are a little bit off and on, I guess, but it has been so shattered and so silenced that I think there are very few, if any, alive who do know what the Sami religion was. There are several interpretations, and much research is going on. I think it’s perfect, and some people need that to hold on and save a part of themselves or their way of understanding life. I’m not judging them, but for me, these symbols are my rebellion against the Swedish government trying to break down my family to show that we’re still here.
Jacobsen: You noted the Christianisation attempts as well as state involvement; that particular orientation sounds a lot more like the colonial context for what is now Canada, where the state approved and, I believe, funded the churches to go and be, in a way, an arm of the government to colonize. How was this implemented in Scandinavia, probably generally, but Sweden in particular for this case?
Tebbla: We should look upon it as in Sápmi because it was almost the same everywhere. So, that process has been ongoing and very similar to what’s been happening in Canada. I think pretty much everything can be just copy-pasted into what’s been going on in Sweden, which makes it so that the Sami people are a little bit critical about when Swedish delegates are trying to judge Canada or Australia for what they’ve been doing to their indigenous people. Still, we have fewer rights than the indigenous people of Australia, Canada or even the US. So, that is also a huge problem, but everything: boarding schools, the taxation system, not having the right to speak your language, being punished for expressing cultural artifacts or rituals. It is so that a lot of Sami people are Christian today. If it works for them, that’s fine, but I think you could also, in a more historical setting, see that as a very successive way of colonizing a people; that they still 100 years since the last wave started, people are still Christian in a very secular society as Sweden is.
Jacobsen: Similar to Canada, although I mean in the 2001 census, 77% of Canadians identified as Christian. About the same identified as indigenous communities, although it may have a different flavour within 20 years for the 2021 census that came out recently. Only 53% of Canadians identified as Christian. So, there is a massive decline in Christian identification and probably even those who do remember have a much lighter and less rigorous form of it. At the same time, in Canada, we have more attempts which could fail; they could outright fail at reconciliation, building an educational truth among the culture about acts done by the government and the church, primarily. Are there any “truth and reconciliation” efforts in Sweden?
Tebbla: Yes. So, the church has made some efforts in that way. I think it was last year, or the year before, that the Archbishop of Sweden had a ceremony asking for forgiveness and closure of the Sami people. For me, it was very moving because I remember the shame that my father and my grandmother, whom I love very much, carried. Some other Sami people who have lived in the culture all their lives did not trust the effort; it didn’t feel natural to them. To me, it meant something that it was a symbolic act. The first try can never be perfect, but it helps you understand when you do the second, the third and the 10th try at something. So, I think it was good at least that the church tried. The government, not so much. They do what they do; they give money, support culture projects, and help make natural reserves, but they have yet to be there. They have yet to ratify, for instance, which Canada and many other countries have, but not Sweden.
Jacobsen: As far as I know, only two significant rights documents incorporate indigenous rights. One everyone knows is the UNDRIP, The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The other one is more of a document within the ILO. I believe it is Convention 169—the International Labor Organization around labour rights of indigenous peoples.
It should be noted on tape that the Sami are the only recognized indigenous group within United Nations classifications of indigenous peoples within Western Europe, as far as I know. I might have to correct it, but I believe so or one of the few if that’s the case. So, when I heard from Magnus about this, I was like, “Please!”
So, what I’m hoping to do with these kinds of things is really to gather an international repository of some of these conversations and what I’m getting preliminarily so far; a small sample size is pretty much boilerplate: similar stories of language, land, money, failed attempts at apologies – some successful, some not, not even apologizing in other cases in Canada. The pope came one time and didn’t apologize. Recently, years later, he did go and apologize.
There is a deceased commentator, named Lee Maracle. She noted in an interview, not mine, that if he does not apologize now, the first time when he decided not to go to the Catholic Pope. It probably means that it’s happening elsewhere, with the implication being that he would then have to have a cascade of responsibilities to apologize for this and that and that: reparations, apologies, and giving land back, this sort of thing.
So, as someone of recent descendants who have said, “Okay, we’ll take on Swedish identity just to get rid of the maltreatment socially,” say, do you see yourself more as a freethought person who doesn’t have any supernaturalistic inclinations? And that’s the way to go for you. At the same time, you understand the historical context of colonialism in the erasure of beliefs, so those beliefs may not be accurate in a factual scientific sense. However, they have a sentimental value, and the historical facts of colonialism must be confronted to reconcile all of the contingent acts passed with present conditions for equality.
Tebbla: Yes. So, I see. That’s the blessing of being new to something – seeing things with fresh eyes. Also, the Elders of the Sami village have been very generous with their thoughts and knowledge to me. We can be very open and speak to each other very directly, and they share what hurts and they share what they remember. My relationship with spirituality and religion is entirely dual because I can see how, in the Sami population today, spirituality plays a role in their resilience in the sense of who they are. It also depicts their relationship to nature, which is like the core value of their religion. However, I do not believe in God, and I do not believe in spirits. Just being there with the reindeer and with the people and repeating what our ancestors did is enough for me, and it gives me a sense of strength and belonging; it is the values that are the future of the world.
Jacobsen: In the recent Amsterdam Declaration 2022 for Humanists International, there’s much democratic input into what we are defining as humanism globally; there was much feedback and one of the big pieces, I think, was a significant update, or at least a more explicit update was caretaking for the wider environment. There’s an excellent fit there.
Tebbla: Yeah, and also understanding it. So, it’s not just about going outside and hugging a tree. It’s about understanding that when this plant grows here, the reindeer will move this way, which means that this will happen to the land, and the water will flow there. And that has nothing to do with spirituality so much as it has to do with the knowledge that people have been living in nature and maybe not knowing the cause of everything but having a sense of how natural phenomena are connected, and that knowledge is essential. One of my elders has been tracking for the government for 15 years what’s going on because he’s a reindeer keeper. He’s been following what happened with the water levels, how much snow, what moss, what plans, and how the reindeer are moving over these 15 years, and he recently sent that report to the Swedish government. It paints an unfortunate story for the climate but also shows how much informal knowledge there is in the forest today because people still live the old way of life.
So, it has to do with understanding climate change and what solutions we could do in a smaller setting besides, of course, the more significant goals, but also how we can restore essential environments for the microenvironment, how we can track the development of pollution or forest fires or floodings and also maybe knowing what’s going to come and counteract that for the people and the animal living in the nature who’s going to be affected by it.
Jacobsen: One last question. I’ve worked at an Olympic-level equestrian facility for about two years, mostly seven days a week. Before, I was very much a writer-academic. I decided to make a switch. Indeed, that rhythm of seasons and much non-verbal communication, really just seeing what’s out there, not just codifying it in terms of linguistic representations, becomes very apparent because if you’re not able to tell, this horse has a bad attitude, then you’re going to get bitten. You’re going to misread them, and so on. I got bit yesterday.
With this horse, we all think he has a bad attitude. I like him, but he was in a bad mood with me that day. So, I understand entirely in that context what you’re saying. That could be an explorable mesh for those who connect to their indigenous past culturally and ritually, like smudge ceremonies in North America. At the same time, they reject the idea of a maker in your terms or a creator in North American terms, spirits and so on, but the connection to the past is something.
It’s a soft approach that harder secularists might want to take into account, that just going out and debunking, just going out and doing street epistemology, isn’t always the right approach to the Sami work with this. I think respecting people’s past who are not coming from an accessible context is essential for their orientation toward free thought and humanism. Do you have any final thoughts on our conversation today?
Tebbla: No, but what you said is, we didn’t talk so much about that, but the reindeer is essential to the Sami culture. I used to work a lot with horses when I was young, so the step into the Sami culture was very much through the reindeer and the connection with the reindeer because they’re miniature wild horses. As you said, the soft touch because, in the end, when you come from such harsh environments and have lived through many of these aggressions from the government, you also understand that life is holy in itself. It does not come from the maker; it does not come from the Bible; it is Holy in itself, and energy needs to be preserved in any way or form. And you do that by nurturing it, caring for it, and protecting it; by that, you say, ‘Soft touch.’ And ask yourself, “What did I do wrong that the horse bit me? What did I do wrong when the reindeer didn’t want to come?”
It’s been a very fruitful perspective to have on life with my kids, with my work, with my colleagues, and with my husband. It humbles me and takes me back to a place where I feel safe, comfortable, and happy.
Jacobsen: Lina, thank you for the opportunity and participation in the series.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/14
Lovecrestian: Lovecraftian hourrer show; aten sighroon, twelves’ buggers heraldic as a zodiac kills itself; 12, 10, 8, sex 4 2.
See “I.”
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Kingdom of Heaven: Among the choir of angels and even Cherubim, Heaven suffered violence; thus, what escape for you?
See “Nature.”
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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His eternal love: “Every living substance that I have made will I destroy”; “All flesh died that moved upon the earth.”
See “Bible.”
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Neutrality: Even the neutral frame amounts to an emotional-cognitive frame, thus isn’t neutral; it’s evolutionarily contingent.
See “Non.”
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Turkeys: Which side of the turkey has more feathers?
See “The outside.”
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/10
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What are you thinking about recently regarding informational cosmology?
Rick Rosner: All right, we were discussing Ed Fredkin and digital physics. I first came across the concept of digital physics around 1972, when a physics professor, who was the father of my brother’s basketball teammate, lent me the book “Gravitation” by Wheeler and others. It was a monumental work on gravity, a massive, 1000-page book that I barely understood. However, it introduced me to Wheeler’s concept of “It From Bit,” his vision of a computational universe, which was the prevailing idea in digital physics at that time, around 1977. I’ve been contemplating it for quite a while, and looking at the universe, I don’t see a clear computer-like correlation. The bits of information don’t seem to be stored in proton-electron pairs or in the arrangement of electrons around a nucleus. These don’t act as gates or bits in a computer. The state of an electron in relation to its proton, or the state of protons linked via shared electrons, doesn’t seem to correspond to the binary states in a computer, as digital physics might imply.
Now, I’m sure if I delved deeper into digital physics, someone would clarify that this isn’t exactly what they mean. But without that deeper understanding, I think the information in the universe is more about the interactions among particles. It’s not holographic or holistic, terms I dislike, but rather aggregate information held among the entirety of matter.
Jacobsen: I prefer the term ‘relational.’ It differentiates between digital physics and informational cosmology; whether it’s the 1972 version, 1978, or 1992 version, it’s more about relational physics versus digital physics.
Rosner: I think that’s a good term.
Jacobsen: It doesn’t confine us to discrete versus continuum.
Rosner: Yeah, I like it. This talk was meant to discuss what to call this concept and how much credence to give it. We know that the information we observe in the universe, which includes every part’s interactions with every other part, defines all matter. This shared information prevents the universe from being too fuzzy, despite its quantum mechanical fuzziness. It’s unfuzzy due to the sheer number of particles, yet fuzzy in quantum terms. This setup requires widespread information sharing, with geographic locality playing a role. Things in one part of the universe have more information about each other than about distant parts.
There are laws governing interactions among matter, like the inverse square force law and the inverse square law for waves such as light and gravity. Simply put, things closer to each other have more effect on each other than things far apart. The information is both shared universally and localized in a straightforward way.
Jacobsen: But the localization is representative of the tightness of the information’s association with each other. So, it’s not thinking because the way you’re phrasing it almost has an intuitive grasp of Newtonian Mechanics in it. It’s sort of like it’s out there and things are kind of distant apart from one another as opposed to informationally related and informational relationship determines the tightness of themselves in space-time, in terms of distance.
Rosner: Yeah. So you’re just taking what you see with gravitation and all the forces that work over a significant distance, which is really just gravitation and the electromagnetic force. They have the inverse square and really when you’re talking about being down a potential, well, it’s one over X instead of one over R. But that’s a straightforward thing that everybody who studied physics knows and if you say well extend it to the idea that how every part of the universe is defined and the particles in it is to find relationally, it may not work exactly as inverse squared but it’s kind of what’s behind Mock’s principle though a lot of physicists will say, “Yeah but Mock’s principles never been adequately mathematically integrated” It’s never been proven in any kind of substantiated in any kind of way except for intuitively to be the deal behind inertia. So, your term relationally seems to apply that at least when you’re talking about how everything in the universe is defined in relation to everything else, it’s right in that sense.
Jacobsen: Here’s an analyst conversation in philosophy; is it being or non-being? Is that the split of everything of existence? I take the same perspective on is it discrete or continuum. I don’t think those are adequate. So, in the same way you’d have to sidestep being and not being to get to a proper answer, to question properly; I think similar with discrete or continuum; I think it’s “neither is the answer.” It’s relationally.
Rosner: Also, I think you can put it on… you just said continuum; I think you can put it on a dial or a continuum where you can kind of up for discussion is how distributed is the information in a strictly digital universe. All the information is, at least by according to my naive understanding of it, is strictly localized. It’s like every bit of information is like in one place in the hardware.
Jacobsen: So, maybe, it’s relational degrees of freedom; in the sense, the looser the relationship the more distant and the tighter relationship the closer?
Rosner: We don’t need to solve it now but we can just say that there’s this up for discussion or up for trying to figure out is where along the continuum between completely local information and completely distributed information, where are different forms of information in the universe? We know that the gravity and electromagnetism work according to this inverse square deal which is fairly strictly geometrical and that maybe something [11:40] in with regard to like inertia or with regard to the universe defining itself quantum mechanically via the whole history of exchanged particles over the entire lifespan of the universe. That may be at a different point on the local versus distributed dial.
And then there are two questions; it’s that how distributed is the information and its question one. And question two is; is the information in the universe just about the universe itself or is it also about this other thing that’s being modeled in the universe the same way our minds model the external world? Our mind is a thing that can be itself be modeled geometrically we hope but it is modeling, the information that we work with in our minds is about a world external to our minds. And we know that the universe we live in has all the information that needs to define itself. So, on the one hand, you have a universe that’s self-defined and on the other hand you have our minds which are defining an external reality, modeling an external reality.
One’s entirely internal; the Universe defining itself. And one’s entirely external; the mind modeling external reality which includes the brain and the mind and all. One’s external and one’s internal and then there is a dial or a continuum as to whether those two things are perfectly equivalent which is IC as we understand it or whether the mind is completely distinct from and in function and form from the universe and the intuition that they’re probably equivalent and each working on two different levels; one defining itself as the universe does and the other defining something that it’s modeling that’s external, whether both the mind and the universe do both or not.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 202
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Please go ahead. What are you talking about in terms of conceptual?
Rick Rosner: So, you’re using the money you make working hard around horses to pay for massages.
Jacobsen: Oh yeah.
Rosner: My experience in my 20s was in Boulder in the 80s. People worked incredibly long hours at multiple jobs, just to afford cocaine, which then fueled more long hours at work.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: You have a healthier cycle, working these intense hours at a demanding job to afford massages that enable you to continue working. It’s a tough job.
Jacobsen: Yeah, it’s great… all of it. It pays for a lot of things. I hire people for transcribing things like this. It’s essentially a team to help with various tasks, which I consider as assistance at this stage. It’s quite beneficial for my early career, saving me time. By the way, guess whose daughter has ridden at the show park here?
Rosner: Am I supposed to start naming famous Canadians? Like William Shatner and Alex Travis.
Jacobsen: No, a famous American.
Rosner: With ten times as many people as Canada, that’s even harder to guess.
Jacobsen: Bill Gates. Jessica Gates; Bill Gates’ daughter.
Rosner: Oh, wow!
Jacobsen: Yeah, there’s an interview with her. It’s incredible.
Rosner: Is she a good rider?
Jacobsen: I don’t know, but if she’s riding there, she’s probably pretty good. It’s likely the best place in BC. Who else? Michael Bublé’s kids. Yeah. That’s great.
Rosner: I always mess up when I meet celebrities, but I like seeing them.
Jacobsen: Who?
Rosner: I don’t know. When I was involved in the celebrity world, I saw many of them and learned to keep my distance. Any interaction, unless it was for work, usually didn’t go well. They wouldn’t even let me meet Tom Cruise because they thought I’d come off as too much of a weirdo. He was a big deal for the show, and they didn’t want to risk a strange encounter. Of course, he’s quite a character himself with the Scientology thing, but he is a really nice guy. I met him briefly in another context, and he seemed genuinely pleasant. Anyway, let’s talk about Informational Cosmology (IC) for a second.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/09
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How do you deal with comments that are awful aimed at you in all domains?
Rick Rosner: I’ve faced terrible behavior in various settings. One experience was working as a bouncer in bars, where checking IDs and ejecting people often led to verbal abuse. It was part of the job, and to some extent, even exciting. Before social media, most people didn’t encounter confrontations daily, but here I was, in a job where confrontations were frequent. Once, after confiscating a fake ID, a girl insulted me humorously. I’ve had experiences like getting bitten, puked on, and even punched. Although I didn’t grow up very manly, engaging in these confrontational, ‘manly’ activities was somewhat enjoyable and felt like an adventure.
Transitioning into comedy, I brought lessons from that world. I wasn’t great at firing back, so I would just take it and shrug it off, playing along. In writers’ rooms, I’d endure the tough environment and keep trying. I had a writing partner who often treated me terribly. Most of the time, I endured it, rationalizing it as part of the well-paid job. There was one instance where I did fight back physically, but that was an exception.
While dealing with this abuse from my writing partner, I was undergoing therapy every few weeks. Through couples counseling, I could express how working in such an environment made me feel. Despite the abuse, there was camaraderie and affection.
Jacobsen: So, not all bad, in other words.
Rosner: Absolutely not. It was part of the understanding that we loved each other, except for the psychopaths and sociopaths. We played rough because we were adults, and that’s the nature of this type of comedy. You need to push boundaries, which includes ‘busting balls.’ In middle school or junior high, this sort of behavior is expected. Often, the meanest things said to me and others came from people I love. They targeted vulnerabilities, not out of malice, but as part of the fun and play.
I often received more flak than others because I had more quirks to poke fun at. This, in a way, gave me a certain amount of job security. Being the figure of fun and playing the fool was part of how I fitted into this environment.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/09
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In your time as a comedy writer, how do you learn to deal with belligerent social and political commentary; things so abhorrent happening in the social scene or legal scene or cultural scene in America that only a joke can make some sense of it?
Rick Rosner: The political climate in America has been tumultuous, particularly since the early days of the Trump administration. Initially, there was a glimmer of hope among many that Trump would adopt centrist policies, given his lack of fixed political ideologies. However, it quickly became evident that he was governing primarily for his base, embodying a particularly abrasive attitude. This attitude seemed to empower tens of millions, including myself, to adopt a similar tone. My response often involves firing back at people on Twitter, trying to blend humor with the harsh rhetoric that characterizes the current political discourse in America.
Even though I aim for humor, I strive to avoid clichéd language when responding to someone from the opposition, especially if they’ve made an untruthful or offensive statement. For instance, Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson recently made absurd comments against vaccines, questioning the efficacy of human-made solutions compared to divine intervention. Instead of resorting to outright insults, I labeled him a “Russian dupe,” considering some evidence suggests Russian manipulation. However, this approach has its limits, as many people are resistant to changing their views.
In these cases, I often turn to the internet for support. For example, after Ron Johnson announced his third-term candidacy, contradicting his previous promises, I compiled and shared various articles and op-eds highlighting his negative aspects. This method serves to underline my points without resorting to direct insults.
When you initially posed your question, I thought you were referring to how I handle offensive comments directed at me.
Jacobsen: Oh, that’s another session.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/09
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How can the universe manage contradictions, or what must it do with them to remain mostly non-contradictory and continue to exist?
Rick Rosner: The parts of the universe that contradict its active center must be largely shut down, rendered unable to interact with the active center. We have mechanisms for this shutdown. Recently, there hasn’t been much discussion about Informational Cosmology (IC), especially under the conditions of Covid. However, there are new aspects to consider, particularly if we or I start to view an IC universe as not strictly digital but more aggregational. This perspective raises questions about how the shutdown parts, the collapsed parts, or the new parts around the initial time (T0) function in a universe where information is aggregational.
This concept contrasts with a digital, Minecraft-like world. In an aggregational universe, the substrate consists of protons, neutrons, and various particles. The information is constructed from enough of this substrate, so the individual, single-atom interactions are not as prominent in the overall information structure. This is similar to how a single atom is not a significant part of a clay sculpture, though a single pixel can be crucial in something like Minecraft. The focus shifts from individual elements to the aggregated whole, influencing how we perceive and understand the universe’s structure and function.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/09
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: For the past eight years, we’ve been discussing the concept of Informational Cosmology (IC), and personally, I’ve been contemplating it since I was 21. That’s when I first had more than just a hint of its significance. So, essentially, I’ve devoted 40 years to pondering these ideas. However, my latest thoughts revolve around whether an armature is necessary to sustain the material – the information manifested as space-time and the material world. My current line of reasoning suggests that the space-time and material world are consistent from a quantum mechanical standpoint. Essentially, everything exists moment to moment in a world governed by quantum mechanics, without contradiction. These contradictions are kept at bay, which is necessary for the world’s existence. Since the world does exist, we can assume it does so without contradictions. But is this lack of contradiction adequate? Under the framework of IC, we believe our mind is mathematically describable and resembles the universe. We acknowledge that our minds wouldn’t exist without our brains, which serve as the hardware supporting our mental processes. But is this arrangement obligatory? Can an information world exist without needing something external, separate from that universe, to act as the hardware supporting these information states? This is still unclear to me. I believe people will eventually ponder and debate this, which leads to a second question that could significantly challenge the validity of IC. If there isn’t an external, physical armature or hardware world to support the information as the material world, does the information need to be about anything other than the relationships defining the universe itself? We understand that our universe, and presumably any conceivable universe, contains information that defines everything within it to the extent it can be defined, considering it’s a finite universe governed by quantum mechanics. Reasonably, in a finite world, things won’t be infinitely defined. They will be somewhat indistinct due to the finite amount of information available about everything in the universe. So, these are the two questions I’m presenting tonight. Essentially, does the universe need to be about anything other than itself? And is an external support universe necessary – a hardware to store the information that allows the existence of the universe as a construct of matter, space, and time?
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/08
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Who’s likely in his eighties now. Hold on, the heater just came on, so you’ll need to start that second point again, and a bit louder, please. Yeah, I’m not entirely sure, but from your explanation, I’d probably need to read the paper or something. It sounds like he’s suggesting that the injection of information creates the future; that the future is a subsequent moment in time where open quantum situations have been resolved, which is pretty much what we’re saying. And you mentioned he had two laws of information, which we should consider.
I’m leaning towards the idea that, in the universe, you don’t need a compact digital representation of information. Instead, the information is contained within finite physical systems; the standard array of fundamental particles and their interactions. But these interactions are not digital in nature, as they don’t encode information digitally in a compact manner. Rather, information is held in a more holographic fashion, which requires these bas… What’s that? Well, in computer information, each bit of information is stored at a specific location in the hardware, within a system of circuits and memory. My guess is that in the universe, information isn’t stored because a specific electron, especially considering the problem with identifying particular electrons under quantum mechanics, as electrons are pretty indistinguishable. But rather, information is stored through a vast history among a whole lot of particles. The information is interwoven into all their relations and histories, not stored at specific points.
Okay, but I don’t particularly like the term ‘holographic.’ Maybe ‘relational’ is a better term, suggesting that information is stored more in the universe as a whole. Yeah, I mean, you have to reconcile the idea that the universe is some kind of semi-optimized system for cataloging all the relationships among its component parts. It’s arranged in a way that minimizes the total aggregate distance among the connected elements in the universe. For example, a connected set of elements could be an electron falling to a lower energy shell around a nucleus, and a photon is emitted. At some future point, that photon is absorbed by another atom. That’s a relationship, a connection between those two atoms. The universe can perhaps be seen as a catalog of all these connected atoms, arranged in such a way to maintain causality and some kind of minimal arrangement of those relationships. The minimal quantity might be aggregate distance, or it might be something less obvious. The universe is a manifestation of these connected elements, and probably not just the elements themselves, but also tacitly the elements that aren’t connected. When a photon is emitted and makes it beyond the surface of the sun, the odds are like only one in a trillion that it’ll run into anything in the visible universe. It’ll just keep going. So, that photon doesn’t have a relationship with anything in the visible universe, except for gravitational interaction. Its path is shaped by the shape of the universe, but it goes billions of light years without being absorbed and maybe does get absorbed in the mess at t=0 (T-zero). So, you have the explicit relationships between atoms that exchange a photon, and then you have the implicit non-relationships with photons that just keep going. Information is stored in all these relationships, rather than in… I mean, there is a specific event that precipitated the sharing of information when the photon is emitted. Then, information is tacitly shared about this event with the rest of the universe by the emitted photon traveling for billions of years. But that’s not as digital a thing as Fredkin is suggesting in a digital universe. And what’s his second principle? That information can neither be created nor destroyed, right? Information is conserved like other things in the universe.
I don’t know, you said he had these two principles of information, I’m not sure if it’s 1978 or 1992 or neither. Yeah, I don’t want to talk about that anymore. Let’s talk about what you mentioned off tape earlier. Fredkin said that information might be conserved; neither created nor destroyed. I wouldn’t agree with that, but I would agree that when information is created or destroyed, it follows the rules of quantum mechanics and the yet unfleshed-out rules of IC where information can only slide into or out of the universe in ways that are dictated by IC plus quantum mechanics. Information slides into the universe at the edges from around t=0. As the universe’s apparent age increases and more things become visible at the edge of the universe, you see older stuff becoming visible as the universe unfolds; you’re able to see farther back into the universe, and as those early galaxies age, you can get more information from them. It’s different under IC, but there are some commonalities with the big bang theory. Similarly, information can be obliterated as the apparent age of the universe is reduced, as the temperature of the universe increases. The armature or the hardware of the universe can have room for more information, or it can break down, and the universe can lose information. But you don’t see the armature from within the universe; you see the universe as having an increasing apparent age as it acquires information or a decreasing apparent age as it loses information. That decreasing apparent age is seen from within the universe as the temperature, the background temperature of the universe increasing, and that heat obliterating information, particularly at the edges. By saying that, I agree with Fredkin that there are rules for… but I don’t agree that information is conserved. However, I do agree that information is subject to precise rules as to when and how it can be created or lost.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/08
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Well, my focus is on how our brains are filled up. You see, we have the same brains, genetically speaking, as people did 100,000 or even 10,000 years ago. But today, three key factors contribute to our brains being more saturated with information than they were 2,000 or even 500 years ago. The first factor is our increased lifespan; we live longer, giving us more time to accumulate experiences, memories, and information. The second factor is language, an efficient tool for storing or compacting information. It involves naming things and manipulating them symbolically, as a word in our brains is a symbol for an actual thing.
Then there’s the third point, and I’d add a three and a half to it. We’re constantly bombarded with information-rich content all day long – TV, movies, social media, newspapers, printed materials. And three and a half, this content is processed, reflecting a comprehension of the world that early humans lacked.
Our perception of the world and our thoughts are largely shaped by our external environment, by the things around us. We’re naturally distractible, which makes sense. If your brain functions as a predictor, which it does, you need some level of distractibility to ensure safety and to exploit new situations. You need to be acutely aware of what’s happening around you and not get lost in your own thoughts. Hence, our stream of consciousness is erratic; our thoughts can shift in just a third of a second based on external stimuli. Our thoughts are influenced by, or we’re prompted to think about things by, our surroundings. And with more control over our environments than early humans, we have greater control over our thoughts.
All this boils down to the idea that our thoughts are much more coherent than those of humans 90,000 years ago. Before language and the ability for systematic thinking, our behaviors and thoughts were probably quite similar to other primates. Back then, we could likely make tools and find shelter, but coherent thinking was a smaller part of our daily lives. I’d argue that, 80,000 years ago, most of our time was spent responding to immediate stimuli, whereas now, we integrate these moment-to-moment responses into our comprehensive worldviews.
So, there’s definitely a quantitative difference between us and the primates on the savannas 80,000 years ago. I think it’s also qualitative – we have more coherent thoughts, which probably requires a deeper exploration of what we mean by ‘coherent thought’. But for now, I’ll just leave it here, having outlined just a few reasons why our thinking is probably way more coherent than that of people 100,000 years ago. Our thinking will likely become even more coherent in the future, especially as the people who come after us utilize AI tools and integrated resources to hold, manipulate, and analyze more information. Thus, we’ll be able to respond to moment-to-moment situations while retaining more knowledge.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/06
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Okay, what this makes me think of is how the most thrilling games in sports happen during pivotal moments, like a World Series or a Game Seven that’s still tied in the ninth, tenth, or eleventh inning. Or consider a Super Bowl going into overtime. The closer the match between two competitors, the more arbitrary it feels to declare one as superior. This situation seems to touch on the difficulty in making decisions when there’s little basis to prefer one option over another, at least that’s my take on it.
Yeah, I’m not sure how to approach that. What I’ve been leaning towards in the past year or two is the concept that everything, on a collective level, contributes to information that results in lasting traces. The existence of information in our universe seems to stem from vast collective interactions and subtle, individual quantum events. These quantum events, not particularly special in themselves, serve as a foundational layer from which information is constructed. But it’s the quintillions of collective and virtual interactions that accumulate into significant amounts of information.
When we first started discussing this, I considered the idea that the universe, at any given moment, possesses numerous open quantum potentialities. These are indeterminate scenarios that become determined in future moments. Something that’s indeterminate now becomes determinate later, and the subsequent moment we experience reflects a world where a multitude of previously indeterminate events have occurred. These events become determinant, and the determination happens through the selection of possible future moments. Every moment carries a vast array of potential next moments, and things become determined simply by transitioning to one of these possible moments. You don’t choose the moment you’re in; you exist within it. However, this moment can be viewed as a consequence of the previous moment, with events unfolding between the two. The ‘have happened’ aspect is inherent to the moment, suggesting a chain of moments where the informational content within each moment indicates what has transpired.
Initially, I thought that every quantum determination reflected a different bit of information entering our world. Something was perceived, and the information processing system, which is the universe, filled in some determined, previously open quantum scenarios. Now, I’m considering that it might not be as straightforward or digital as Fredkin suggests. Information might enter our universe from an underlying reality, but it does so collectively through a multitude of quantum events. Each quantum event might not necessarily correspond to a specific event in that underlying reality. This doesn’t directly answer your question, but rather suggests that individual quantum events – which you could call decisions or determinations – don’t hold much meaning individually. It’s only in the aggregate that the universe generates information by interacting with itself on a large scale.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/06
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Okay, let’s delve into our discussion about IC, focusing on the idea that it essentially underpins the principles of existence. This begins with a somewhat circular notion that entities capable of existence do indeed exist, stemming from the possibility of non-self-contradictory systems. It’s possible to construct entire systems, even universes, based on modes of existence that permit their constituent elements to coexist without contradictory elements. Our own universe exemplifies this, with its distinct existence characterized by vastness in size, quantity of matter, and age, all enveloping an immense volume of information. Within this universe, we observe entities with a high degree of existence, though perfect existence remains unattainable due to the infinite specificity it would necessitate, equating to boundless information. Yet, there exists a plethora of entities with a high likelihood of existence, cohering through a shared, non-contradictory history with the universe.
These entities collectively affirm the consistency and existence of each other. However, elements that contradict the current state of the universe’s active center are kept sufficiently distant, where time progresses normally. The universe sustains its existence by isolating these contradictory elements within a self-consistent system. Discussing the universe’s dynamics, we note that certain parts emerge into the active center, while others recede, highlighting the contradictions in the information outside the active center, yet these are kept at a distance.
This brings us to the metaphysical aspect, exploring the rationale behind the possibility of existence. It sidesteps, but doesn’t exclude, concepts like souls or a universal spirit. Under IC, one could interpret the soul as a complex landscape within the informational space of the mind, and concepts akin to divinity could emerge without necessitating an actual deity’s creation.
To be specific, encountering a civilization 300 million years advanced would reveal technologies and transcendent capabilities appearing divine to us. Such beings might be termed ‘gods’, yet this label has its limits unless we consider the universe itself a conscious entity. Its vastness and rich informational content could arguably possess god-like qualities. But, is it truly divine? This returns us to the foundational principles of existence, rather than a divine creation.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/06
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Okay, let’s start with the concept of ‘It from Bit’ and digital cosmology, which posits that every physical occurrence in the universe carries computational significance. In computing, each circuit transition from zero to one, or vice versa, represents an informational event. However, reflecting on our discussions over the years and the universe’s structure, I’m inclined to think that the universe operates more flexibly than this strict digital framework suggests.
You have essential components like protons, neutrons, and a variety of particles that contain information, but the way this information is conveyed seems more holistic, or even tacit, than explicitly digital. I’m hesitant to use the term ‘holographic,’ but I doubt that every single physical interaction in the universe carries a distinct informational meaning. It might be that information manifests more in the aggregate.
Take, for example, the interactions inside a star, where countless photons and particles are exchanged at an incredible rate. Most of these interactions leave no lasting record; they are part of a chaotic process involving fusion and heat transfer. For every successful fusion from hydrogen to helium, there are countless near-misses with no permanent trace. The individual interactions that lead to the accumulation of helium from hydrogen aren’t recorded; they’re lost in the sea of activity. The universe doesn’t seem to maintain a detailed record of these events. This suggests to me a universe that operates less on strict computational events and more on a looser, aggregate-based system.
Regarding the nature of changes, countless physical interactions occur without leaving any trace. This leads us into a philosophical realm, akin to the ‘tree falling in the forest’ conundrum. If we only know about events in terms of the broader universe interacting with them, and this interaction is what imparts information, then the specificity of these events may not fundamentally exist. It’s challenging to discuss changes if they don’t have a tangible, enduring presence. This might be an indication that the universe does not function in a strictly digital manner, unlike digital events in a computer, which are based on definitive circuit transitions.
I don’t think there are actual atoms in the center of the sun where fusion happens. Instead, there are probably just nuclei. Given the extreme temperatures and pressures there, I suspect that atoms as we typically understand them can’t exist. It’s more likely just nuclei bouncing off each other, with electrons forming a sort of sea, not specifically belonging to any one nucleus but swirling around somewhat indeterminately. The exact physics of the sun’s core is beyond my full understanding, but the conditions there seem too harsh for traditional atomic structures to remain intact. This sea of nuclei and electrons results in definite events and consequences, but the process is chaotic. When the energy finally reaches the sun’s surface and photons are emitted, we can trace their individual histories here on Earth with detectors. However, the myriad interactions at the sun’s core leave no record, opposing the precision and definiteness that some theorists, like Fredkin, might argue for.
About the concept of finiteness, I’m generally averse to the idea of infinities, unless they’re so abstract or distant as to have no practical impact on the universe’s workings. We’ve previously discussed some theoretical infinities, like the idea of “turtles all the way down,” which poses a difficult problem. But if an infinity is merely implied and infinitely far removed in terms of causality or nested within other realms, then perhaps it’s not a direct concern.
I agree with the notion that the universe is finite. Fredkin suggests everything is finite and digital, but I’d lean more towards saying everything is finite and quantum mechanical. Quantum mechanics involves a degree of ‘digitality,’ but also an absence of it. It’s essentially the mathematics of incomplete information. Quantum events are often incompletely specified because full specification would demand an infinite amount of information, meaning every quantum event carries a non-zero probability of differing from observation. If you could bring a quantum physicist and Fredkin together, they might find some common ground, or they might not. It would be interesting to see if they could reconcile Fredkin’s digital perspective with the quantum mechanical nature of the universe.
So, what’s the fourth principle we’re considering?
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/01
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Could you elaborate on the situation regarding Trump and his SAT scores, as it actually happened?
Rick Rosner: Trump was enrolled at Fordham University at the time and aspired to graduate from a more prestigious institution. According to a book by Trump’s niece, his sister was assisting him at Fordham, essentially writing his papers. Similar to this, he had others complete various assignments for him. However, as she was a woman and couldn’t take the SAT for him, Trump sought out a male proxy. He found a skilled test-taker, referred to as Joe Epstein in the book – although I’m uncertain about the last name, as it seems too coincidental. Nonetheless, this individual took the SAT on Trump’s behalf, enabling his admission to the University of Pennsylvania around 1964, when Trump was about 18 or 19 years old.
Back in my early days, around 1980, when I first started working in bars, 17 of America’s 50 states didn’t even include photos on their driver’s licenses. They were merely paper slips. So, considering that this was about 15 years prior, security measures for something like the SAT would have been even more relaxed, raising the question of how many others might have exploited such laxity. Although I have no specific figures, I’d like to believe there was more integrity back then. Furthermore, college admissions were not as fiercely competitive as they are now. For instance, when I applied to Harvard in 1977, about 20% of applicants were admitted, a stark contrast to the current rate of under 5%. So, during Trump’s era, the pressure to misrepresent oneself for college admission was arguably less intense, given the less frantic nature of the whole process. Based on this, I would estimate that fewer than 1% might have cheated on the SAT in that manner back then. But, of course, this is purely speculative. I don’t have concrete information to substantiate these thoughts. I could elaborate based on my personal experiences, but that’s about the extent of what I can offer on this topic.
Jacobsen: Thank you, that’s quite insightful.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/07
War Frame: War determines who’s left and makes minds that which is right in front of them; everyone’s a stranger now.
See “Framed Raw.”
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/09
“bridge called Tilt-Ass”: siltriller tanton wanton needoff in assonein; ateto one leftover undertit; beachthrills titsass.
See “Food”.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): Unknown
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So there has been some work on turning wastewater into fertilizer with a promising green method. This is the focus of some of the recent research output. To start, how long has this particular research been ongoing?
Unknown Researcher: if my memory is accurate, we started this work about two years ago when one of my posts was doing my group. I specifically find this target to him. In the beginning, we didn’t have any experience exploring these. It was relatively new to us and the whole field at that time. So we spent a lot of time trying to set up the right protocols to do the task and find a good catalyst to understand what’s going on. So, it takes some time to dig deeper into the idea.
Jacobsen: And why is this standard Haber Bosch procedure energy intensive for producing nitrogen gas into ammonia?
Unknown Researcher: So the traditional Haber Bosch process, that’s the global population of about seven billion, right. Even though what we expect is a significant increase in the population in the next decade or so. But you think that Haber Bosch has been one of the most, most exciting and important industries for the past five to 10 decades to feed the whole population. We cannot have that control. But the thing is, during that process, it consumes a lot of hydrogen from the steam reforming process. So, during that process, a lot of CO2 will be generated. So basically, what that process is, they take their natural gas and then crack it to generate the hydrogen, doing that process to work it out. OK, that contributes about one to two percent of the current global CO2 emission. Think about that scale, right?
Not only do the chemical feedstocks need to use that hydrogen, but the reaction conditions are high pressure and high temperature. So, all adds up to say that it consumes about 1.2 percent of global energy consumption.
Jacobsen: Now that’s very impressive. So, at the collection, researchers came from Calgary, Toronto, Houston and Tennessee to develop this green process for converting nitrates NO3 into industrial wastewater into ammonia; the nitrates in industrial wastewater into ammonia. What was the first spark of insight into the feasibility of this new green method?
Unknown Researcher: So, actually, the story is very interesting. Initially, we were not considering using nitrate as a source to generate ammonia. At the very beginning, what we wanted to do was electrochemical; we wanted to reduce the nitrogen gas. The reason is very obvious, right? We get the natural gas everywhere in our air. Atmosphere, 70 percent is natural gas. But the problem is, even though the field is very exciting. A lot of people are jumping into that field, the problem is that nitrogen gas is such an inert molecule and the production rate and reaction activity if you want to reduce nitrogen gas to ammonia is so low and which makes it very unlikely for near future industrialization. Because the generation rate is so low compared to the Haber Bosch, and the energy cost is very high actually because you need to put a lot of energy to drive that reaction also.
So that loses that many to the automated way for Haber Bosch, right. Then, we try to think of another nitrogen source for ammonia production. And it turns out they attract a lot of about the nitrate ions. The reason why we thought about nitrate ions is because I’m located in the Houston area, and we have a lot of skeptical industrial plants. We learned much about the treatment, and they always mentioned nitrate treatment. And then that raised my interest. OK. You must treat nitrate; you cannot discharge the water into the atmosphere. And how about we use that nitrogen generated from the chemical petroleum industry? But that started our first exploration to see if we can electrochemically convert those. So, by nitrating wastewater backing to somebody with a product like ammonia. And the test ought to be working very well.
Jacobsen: What was the particular toolset used at Canadian Light Source, the research center at the University of Saskatchewan, to get this work under practical effects and testing?
Unknown Researcher: So it has to be a very long time, not that long, but quite a few years of exciting collaboration experience with the Canadian Light Source. We collaborate a lot with the scientific and research staff, but not for this work, which dates back many years ago when we started the collaboration. The unique part they can provide us is their very strong X-ray beams. So we can use that X-ray beam to detect many of the material’s properties, which we cannot regularly do in our university, home, or lab because we cannot produce that high X-ray energy. However, the Canadian light source has synchrotron-based electrons. They can make a lot of high-energy light X-rays that can penetrate the materials and excite some of the electrons, which is very interesting.
And then we detect that. We know what’s going on in our materials. For example, in this work, we want to produce a catalyst that is called a single-atom catalyst, which is a relatively new concept for research in recent years. And that is unique compared to its particle or bulk counterparts because we want to use isolated atoms instead of atom clusters. The X-ray beam can tell us if we synthesize those isolated single atomic science or if the materials we synthesize are clusters or nanoparticles.
Jacobsen: Is this a more efficient and environmentally friendly way of producing ammonia?
Unknown Researcher: So I want to be more conservative, even though the work is really exciting, and it could be a very green and sustainable alternative to Haber Bosch. But I never can imagine it can completely replace Haber Bosch. I can tell you the reason why we cannot say that it can replace Haber Bosch because this process is limited by military sources, even though our industry, our chemical plants, are producing a lot of nitrate. But think about that scale; even considering all the plants you accumulate and all the nitrate from the wastewater, it will not deliver the scale of a Haber Bosch process to feed the global population. But the thing is, as long as we can replace a portion or a significant portion of the Haber Bosch process to produce ammonia, we can contribute a lot to the human beings’ combination of decarbonization; that’s the reason why we need to try every single method that is possible to make unique contributions for a sustainable and greener the production of ammonia.
Jacobsen: How could you fine-tune that process to get a more concentrated form of ammonia from the wastewater? How can you use the findings from the recent research done over some time in collaboration to produce an efficacy that you could scale up to a significant portion of replacement of the Haber Bosch process?
Unknown Researcher: Yes. So I think that means a lot of collaborations, not only within the Academic Industry Institute but also needs to have a strong connection with the industry. So that’s also the next phase of our research. We will promote our existing technology to our industrial partners to see if there is any interest in them. We are also further improving the catalytic performance of our catalysts and the production rate. So now our ongoing work has even more exciting results that are a follow-up to our published work. We now can deliver even higher production rates under even lower nitrate sources. So, all of this put together, I think we will continue to push forward in this field. As I mentioned earlier, this field is still relatively new, and there are still a lot of challenges and obstacles that we need to consider and address, but I think the future should be very bright.
Jacobsen: That’s fabulous. Who are you looking to collaborate with in the future? So, you collaborated with scientists from Calgary, Toronto, Houston, and Tennessee. How can you expand upon that current network? How do you intend to expand upon that current network?
Unknown Researcher: So I think collaboration, there is no boundary for collaboration. So that’s my principle. So, as long as there is a common interest and we can help each other, we feel free to collaborate. So that’s the single principle. For the ongoing work, we also collaborate with professors at Arizona State University and so on. Also, we are contacting local municipal water treatment plants to get a lot of the wastewater samples from them for field tests. So we are completely open to different types of collaborations, including both government, industry and academic institutes. So there are many things to do, and we don’t have a clear, I’ll just say, we don’t have exactly the scope of, the range of collaborators we need to explore. As the research moves forward, we will know whom we should collaborate with at this certain point. Yes, including the big chemical producers like Chevron, who are located in the Houston area. We are keeping very close contact with them for this technology. Yeah.
Jacobsen: And how about the Canadian light source? What other kind of work are you hoping to do through it?
Unknown Researcher: So, I think the Canadian light force is unique in terms of the characterization of materials. As I mentioned, a key part of that process is finding the right materials to do the conversion. The materials need a lot of development characterization and back-and-forth optimization. So that’s really why Canadian light sources play a very important role in helping us with the Advanced Materials popularization tool to help us understand, OK, what’s going on in those materials? What’s the active site in those materials, and how can we further improve the materials? So I think that’s its unique part.
Jacobsen: I will ask about collaboration in science as a general academic matter. For those who don’t have that kind of training or know-how within the academic system in collaboration with industry. What is the importance of teamwork and large enough budgets in modern science? For instance, we have this common idea of an Einstein or Newton figure who mainly counts as an individual or sole person who produces these amazing theories. Modern science is much different. How would you characterize this teamwork network and finance-based form of modern science?
Unknown Researcher: I think that’s a fantastic question. From my perspective, the scientific development is completely different from what we had about 100 years ago. A single person can develop a theory that can change the world. No, I think a lot of collaborations are needed now. This is because, for a single institute, you cannot host all the characterization tools. You cannot host all the resources needed to make a big impact; that’s one thing. So that’s why we need to always find collaborators who have the complementary two skills that can support our ongoing research, not only in domestic collaborations but also in international collaborations. Number two, you mentioned the fund or the financial support, which is also important because even though you have ideas, if you cannot realize your idea, then your idea will be meaningless, at least not that meaningful, OK?
So that’s the reason why we emphasize a practice that means a lot of human resources. You can think about what you need to put students. You need to put researchers. You need to put postdocs to do the job to realize that idea and try back and forth to do materials characterization synthesis and everything. You need strong human resource support to realize that idea. Also, starting from the inside, you want to develop an industrial process. Industrial people also need to invest a lot of human resources, teamwork, etc. So that’s what I said. It’s not only a theory breakthrough. Nowadays, most scientific breakthroughs are collaborative work because it’s now getting more and more difficult for a spark to turn into reality, even taking the example of lithium-ion batteries. Successful batteries do not come from only one laboratory, right? These come from different laboratories’ collaborative work with a big community and industry and make today’s success, though. So that’s my perspective. Yeah.
Jacobsen: Thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate that.
Unknown Researcher: Thank you.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): Unknown
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, I have noted over the last couple of years that superhero movies are very popular, so I always like to start with an origin story. How would you characterize your family history leading into your own story? What is the sense of continuity in some of the aspects you might find there?
Wajid Hassan: As far as my family history.
Jacobsen: Yes.
Hassan: I was originally born in Pakistan, and my father was from the desert region of Multan. And my mother was, she was in the Punjab there in Lahore. My father was a math teacher at a high school there and did private tuition. Looking back on the history, of course, in India, Pakistan was part of India before the partition in 1947. So, at that time, my father said, everybody kind of got on well together, the Hindus and the Sikhs and the Muslims. They also found that I traced my ancestry to the fact that, like in the 1800s, my relatives from my mother’s side were Sikhs who converted to Islam. And so I have Sikh blood in me as well as Muslim blood. Then we moved to England at the age of 3 because my parents, my mother and my father, couldn’t afford to live on the salary that he had. At that time, Pakistan was part of the English-British Commonwealth, so menial jobs were available for people from abroad. And so, carried out possessions. There was no such thing as money for planes and trains. Well, at least not for planes. So we took trains and buses over five weeks through Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Greece and of course, in the English Channel to go over and then move into the north of England, where I stayed till the age of 10, and then we moved to London when I went to high school in London. So that’s the basic aspect of my ancestral history.
Jacobsen: And for your development in terms of Islam. How has your theology and your metaphysics around it evolved over time?
Hassan: Well, I was raised a Muslim. I went to the mosque. I read the Quran. I did the Muslim prayers and I was quite content with my Muslim upbringing, but at the same time, I went to infant school, junior school and high school in England, mostly opposed to Church of England School, so I could spend time. I also received a Christian education: Bible studies, hymns, and Christmas carols. So I had Christian and Islamic teachings, and I looked at them. I didn’t see any difference. I thought they were different aspects of returning to the same divine source. So, even at that age, I was quite comfortable being in a Christian church as in a mosque. And, through the years, I’m just as comfortable being in the Hindu temple as in the synagogue or any other place of worship. So, I have a very open mind regarding the different religions and types of worship. I don’t believe that any particular religious God is such a thing. They’re all the same teachings going back to the divine principle. But just given in different periods, different cultures. So I’m very, very open-minded in regards to that.
Jacobsen: And how do you view the different forms of theologies and texts themselves so less on the particular deity or in mind? But what are the consistencies that you might find either in ethical teachings or stories that are told in religious texts and about religious leaders? But what do you note as consistencies with this kind of pluralistic background?
Hassan: Well, I just strongly believe that the founders of the great religions, people like the Master Jesus, Buddha, Krishna and others, have been Prophet Muhammad; I think they were all great teachers that were introduced to this. [I believe] they were higher beings from other dimensions of the [even] of the other planet. I think that the thing that really annoys me regarding my religion is the hypocrisy that I found not only in the Islamic region but also in other religions where they have dogmatic teachings and put them in their particular laws. I didn’t like the fact that I was told that Jews and Christians were condemned to hell and that Muslims would go to heaven even at the age of 16. I decided not to believe in that. Same with many Christian philosophies, where Jesus is the one and only son of God, and only He can bring you to heaven. And so that aspect of religion, I don’t care for. This, over history, has caused a tremendous amount of bloodshed between religious factions and a lot of murder and mayhem.
And so I think those were insightful things that were created to create power and power of the people, as well as trying to create power over the other races and religions, so I totally disagree with the philosophies of the different religions. Again, they point to not killing, loving, healing, cooperation, loving each other, and charity. I’m for all that. I also like the mystical aspects of Islam and Sufism delving into meditation, as seen with the mystic aspects of Christianity Hin, Hinduism and Buddhism, where they go beyond the Orthodox, beyond the dogma and teach their followers to go to raise their consciousness onto larger, more mystical levels. And I enjoy that aspect of religion as well.
Jacobsen: And when we first contacted. Your book had come out of the struggle for world sanity. When this idea percolated in your mind about writing the book, what were some of the original inspirations for writing it?
Hassan: I think we’re mankind is at a crossroads right now, I think. I had different mystical, spiritual experiences that I kept to myself over the years because I felt they were just pretty personal. And I felt at this time, we’re in a crisis in this world. We have overpopulation. We have a lot of hatred between races. We have a lot of hatred between the religions. We have a climate situation, pollution. We have an economic system where the minority of rich people are becoming more richer, and the poor are becoming more poorer. And so, I believe that writing the book. Of course, I talked about meeting my own yoke master at the age of 16 and the Englishman Dr. George King, whom I decided to follow. Again, I am not putting you down. I have nothing against Islam or Christianity, or any of the other religions. But he brought up a philosophical concept, which I found fascinating. And he taught truths, where beings connected him. I believe none of this world would have been higher vibrational sequences. And I’ve been following him ever since. And so we’ve reached a crossroads now where either we change or can [climb] back to the spiritual laws which the great teachers of the religions laid down. One aspect of the teachings, which has not been overlooked in different religions, is the fact that reincarnation is. I believe I’m a strong believer in reincarnation, and I believe that that truth has to be shown to the masses.
My understanding of Christianity at one time did teach reincarnation. And why? Why am I strong on reincarnation is because people would think twice about killing anybody if they knew that they were their brother or sister or father in the past life. And so I think that one aspect of truth has to be reintroduced back to the world. We’re also astrologically in an age where the [piscine]age is over, and we’re now astrologically being influenced by the age of Aquarius. The age of Aquarius also demands that mankind come together in cooperation, love, and service. And, the beings that contact my spiritual master have said that we’re all one race. We’re not a bunch of different religions. We’re not a bunch of different races [that] look upon us as a terrestrial man, and they’re asking that we raise our vibrations. I also strongly believe Mother Earth is a living goddess who has given us refuge in space over the centuries, and it’s time that we cooperate with her and give back. , instead of taking and raping all the resources, I believe also her vibrations are also being raised at this time. So, there is a spiritual renaissance that’s occurring on the planet right now, and it’s time for mankind to wake up and realize that we can’t blame any particular religion or any particular race for the problems that are occurring on this planet. We have to take the responsibility. We have to raise our vibrations and send out this love energy to help raise the vibrations [of the hope.]
Jacobsen: And regarding individual Muslims or theologies that do not take in a new age philosophical approach, how did they interact regarding your perspective on the kind of junction between Islam and New Age philosophy?
Hassan: Well, there’s a lot of young Muslims these days that are searching, and they have found that Orthodox Islam or there’s a lot of Christian young Christians who are searching and they’re not finding the answers in the dogmatic teachings of the religions. And again, the dogmatic teachings were created, I believe, by the people who control the religions and not by the actual founders of them, the victims themselves. So the people are questioning, and that’s what I questioned. A lot of customs were suppressed in different religions. Those things, again, I think, are manmade. I don’t think they were. The teachings of the original religions originally put them in. And so people are questioning dogma. They are questioning what the reality is. And my master, Dr. George King, wrote a book in the 60s called The Nine Freedoms. There, he went beyond many religious teachings beyond the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita and outlined them based on the information he got from high sources. The outline of the evolutionary cycle of man and, in the coming years. He also went back into the history of mankind, which, again, a lot of the religions and a lot of the historians have not propounded the true history of mankind.
And if people want to go and read The Nine Freedoms, they can get that on Amazon, and it goes into the true history of mankind where we went back 18 million years ago; we would know actually from this planet, we were erased. They inhabited another planet in the Solar System by the name of Maldek. Maldek was a planet orbiting Jupiter and Mars, and it was a highly cultured civilization. And Dr. King, through his meditations, found that the race was highly technically advanced. He said their goal was to evolve. In the past, they had control of whether they had an abundance of food, and the Bible talks about the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, which I believe has a lot of truth in it. I think it’s a fairy story, but it has a lot of truth in it because what my master said was the scientist on the project invented a hydrogen bomb that was 10000 times more powerful than the ones that we have on Earth today and destroyed the planet Maldek and was left. Maldek, these days in the asteroid belt, we are all extraterrestrials.
We’re not from this Earth. We were reincarnated on this Earth by the grace of Earth, who took us on over the years to help us evolve throughout our history with actual civilizations that have been destroyed by atomic warfare. The civilization of and the civilization of Atlantis. Atlantis some of the wars that occurred in Atlantis were actually talked about in philosophy, in Hindu philosophy, where one side had an atomic ray called [interest dart], and the other had a bomb called the [drama] weapon or the weapon. Some can verify these things. Individuals going back 20000 years from the Hindu text discussed the mechanism and the [anti-aerial fights]. So Atlantis went under, and then the modern age. It was known by the higher forces that Mother Earth was going to die because man again opened Pandora’s box and started the atomic madness. In the 50s and 60s, that’s where so-called UFOs. Unidentified flying objects were seen in the skies because there was a concern that, again, man could destroy the Earth, and the Americans exploded over a thousand nuclear warheads, as did the Russians. And that fallout was going to kill the whole population of this Earth.
And it was intervention from the higher beings who I believe are not only scientifically more advanced than we are but also spiritually more advanced. They saved this human race in the 50s and 60s. So. again, as I said, we, these are thoughts which will probably create a lot of stir amongst those people who are in Orthodox religion. But I believe that we are at a crossroads. If mankind does not change, most of those who do not conform to the natural laws of spirituality and do not help each other will eventually be unable to stay on this Earth. They won’t be able to handle the vibrations that are occurring with this spiritual renaissance that’s occurring. So Scott, what’s happening today is not an insight into what will happen shortly. Dr. King prophesies that there will be a new age where people will live harmoniously. There will be no economic system, no wars, no atomic warheads ready to destroy mankind. We are going to have a sense of a new age where there is going to be utopia and peace, and those who do not conform will not be allowed to live on this planet and will have to reincarnate on another younger world in this solar system.
Jacobsen: Do you find any parallels with Islamic scripture and some things that George King is positing?
Hassan: Well, all religions, Islam, Christianity, all religions spoke about the day of Armageddon, when there will be a sorting of the wheat from the chaff. I believe that every religion talks about a messiah that will be coming to Earth. And I agree with this ridiculous. And Dr. King did say that; he said people like Lord Christian or Lord Jesus and Buddha and others say. He said these were higher beings from higher civilizations on other planets in the solar system.
Before your readers laugh at that concept, Hindu and Buddhist teachings talk about other levels of existence and think that there are four levels below us and six levels above us. Where we die, stay on these levels, experience these levels and come back, and the cycle goes on. And it’s the same with other planets in the Solar System. Of course, I don’t think physically anybody could live on Mars or Jupiter, Saturn or Venus. It would be quite impossible. But if you look at the higher aspects of civilization, quant physics, in their calculations, have said there are such things as parallel universe or dimensions that are invisible to the physical eye but actually exist. And that’s where Dr. King wrote another book called You Are Responsible, where he talks about projecting to these higher planets both protecting Mars and Venus and finding that there are [very grand] civilizations that live there, very advanced spiritual and scientifically advanced civilizations, which I believe that these are the spacecraft monitoring the Earth at this time.
And so, coming back to Armageddon or the next Messiah, I believe that the information that Dr. King got from the high sources was that people like Krishna were from different, higher realms. They said that Krishna was actually from higher realms, that the master Jesus was from the higher realms of Venus, and when the Lord Buddha was born, there were five [shaped] objects in seen in the skies above the temple, and when he died, that was five [distinct objects] seen on the sky. And when he died, the master Jesus, the star of Bethlehem, wasn’t exactly a star, but again, a spacecraft that came into orbit to manipulate the metaphysical manipulations required to introduce a Venetian master into the cycle to help save mankind. So this next messiah is going to come, but he will land openly in the spacecraft. The declaration given to Dr. King was that he would be about seven feet tall in a one-piece silver suit, and he would approach the leaders of the Earth just like Moses of old, who could part the Red Sea. They will ask for these credentials, and he will produce these credentials.
And it’s been said that he’s proud that this new next messiah will come openly and be greater than all armies’ combined materialistic minds. And again, those who don’t heed his word will take mankind into this new age. [There] prophesized by the prophets of old, and those who don’t heed his word again, will not come as a killer or a dictator, but again through death. They will be reincarnated onto another planet in the Solar System, which is on the other side of science called Planet X. Scientists know that this planet exists because of the [pole] that Neptune and Uranus exert it. At that time, It did exist, and Dr. King said that’s where the people who weren’t confined to this new age would go. So all Dr. King has done is, in his book, the same teachings as the original teachers of this world; he just wanted more to conform to the new because we’re now in the age of science, and science now is in the realms of causing a tremendous amount of destruction on this planet. And he said that without spiritual guidance, science can again cause tremendous upheaval. But with the spiritual guidance of science, we can change that to something that can be more positive for mankind, which is needed now.
Well, I appreciate it, and I hope your videos will stay open-minded in regards to what I said, and if they want to get the book The Struggle for World Sanity. in there, I outlined what we have to do on a spiritual basis to help create, to help heal the planet in these very, very crucial times on planet Earth.
Jacobsen: Excellent. Thanks so much for your time.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): Unknown
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Humanism comprises a broad term for a number of ethical propositions, those which can become split into different areas of focus, one of which is humanist chaplaincy. Let’s discuss this from an educational perspective. What is the relevance of Humanism to Canadian socio-cultural life?
Dr. Marty Shoemaker: That question is one that experientially we really can’t answer until really the last, oh, about 12 years because that’s how we got our first humanist chaplain in a university, but we could have discussed it more as a career, as a theoretical application of Humanism, which I think that we now have a fair number of experiences out, but they’re all in universities as humanist chaplain here in Canada. But there is other literature about spiritual care and caretaking in Europe and in the United States that, in ways, were more advanced than what we had in Canada. We’re kind of the last kids on the block not getting our first chaplain in place, except in 2009 and 2010, University of Toronto Gail McCabe. So I think that chaplaincy, I don’t think of it as a specific and ethical focus; I think of it as a way to interact with people in times of need, which I have done my whole life as a psychologist and also in educational context to share kind of our life stance and live that out in every kind of flexible environment, particularly university where people are starting to form some of their opinions about how to live so different being a chaplain to 75-year-old who’s dying of cancer and a 20-year-old student in university, who is not really sure they want to follow their parents’ faith. So I don’t necessarily think of it as a big ethical issue other than there are ethics around care that we all share that are pretty common, and whether you’re a psychologist or a social worker, a chaplain, a priest, or whatever, which is to really honour people in a time of need.
And I would say our difference is that we don’t have much dogma to rely on for guidance. We don’t have a book that we turn to and says, in chapter 3 of John, it says, and or in Quran on this hadiths application, we don’t have that. We really are getting at it by our own internal kind of inculcation of humanist values and humanist principles that we may have lived out before we ever knew we were humanists. So the ethics of it are really a combination, probably what we would call care ethics, which is probably a primate extrapolation from having children and being in groups to cooperate where you take care of each other, even like primates do. There is also a more scientific way to look at ethics, which is John Mill’s pragmatic, utilitarian approach, which particular approach helps the most people and what hurts the most people. And that’s not particularly a care ethic. It is care to be very individualized, whereas utilitarian ethics are numbers, and you have to have data, right? So, for example, the whole idea of whether you should get vaccinated in Canada? Do we allow churches to avoid vaccination, saying, “It’s our religious right”? And yet they could be carriers. So I would say that the utilitarian principle there is, yeah, it may violate some of your personal freedom, but in the long run, it’s going to help your congregation and your children and your neighbours. So why don’t you think about it that way? And that’s more data.
Jacobsen: How is chaplaincy something integral to acting out the humanist life stance?
Shoemaker: Okay, let’s see. I would say that as a life stance, which is a concept that has become popular among a number of writers, and I can’t remember the name of the guy who actually wrote about Humanism as a lifestance. But what it does is it allows you to be a personal model for some of the things that are pretty essential to our core principles, and that is that’s the way you decide around what’s right and wrong and what’s the correct action, which is an epistemic principle, which is that we do that by human experience, need in science and evidence. We don’t do it with a 3000-year-old cultural morality book of laws. That’s part of our life stance. We don’t turn to those books to tell us what to do.
We have other kinds of evidential ways of doing that and often “skepticism” to say what the conditions would be or what would fail. And I’m trying to understand those. So you have a more sophisticated look at it rather than a blank, dogmatic rule. I also think the life stance for us, which is very relevant today with climate change and potential crisis, is that we are naturalistic beings and are part of evolutionary life on this planet, but we don’t know if it exists anywhere else. But we don’t consider ourselves so unique that we can screw up the Earth, and God will take care of us. So I think that’s a very important part of our life stance now, particularly given how our human skill sets and technologies have faced much of the world.
So I think that’s a large part of our life stance now that didn’t used to be that way. Maybe back in the Enlightenment and the beginning of the Industrial Age. I also think that there are some social lifestyle considerations because we do believe in individual free will. But I also think that we have an interdependence on each other. And the power of groups to get stuff done and be aware of our biases and the noise that groups can make by just giving adherents to the strongest speakers in the group and forming patterns of bias. That’s all part of becoming living a life stance is knowing how you can screw up in these groups, but yet use them and the power of the group to move forward with progressive initiatives. And then finally, the last couple, I would say, certainly there’s an ethical way to live out, which for me has to do with the dignity of every human being and learning how to show care, which has a lot of meaning. And if you do that over time, then you have a character that is very altruistic, and you can very naturally not have problems helping other people out. So that’s a life stance for me. And that’s why I am a chaplain, as opposed to just a private practice psychologist where I charge $200 an hour and only the wealthy can come and see me. I think there’s self-actualization, which is a big component of human life, which is that I’m responsible now for my own happiness.
And if I screw up, I’m accountable. Nobody else is. And I don’t have anybody else to blame. Joseph Campbell called following your bliss, which is an interesting hybrid work because it has to do with a kind of psychological blessing. And yet he was a good Catholic, and I think following your bliss really means an intuitive thing that really brings you joy and meaning. And so I think part of the humanist lifestyle is you got to figure that out. Nobody’s going to tell me that you got to figure it out. The final one probably is a more social concept of justice rather than just one-on-one, which has to do with our primate application of fairness, which you can see monkeys sharing with each other when somebody has something to eat without the hierarchy of the alpha male ramming it down your throat and giving you a licking. It’s a form of justice that has more to do with civil discourse and human rights and the procedures of using a civil litigation system to make sure that people are protected from the laws of your country. So those all, for me, are part of the life stance, and it’s living out those things every day through good habits and being willing to question yourself and notice when you screw up and admit that.
Jacobsen: What were some of the earliest moves for humanist chaplaincy in Canada?
Shoemaker: As I alluded to earlier, we are the new kids on the block, and there are a few other denominations and certain cults that don’t have chaplains, like pagans and some of the ancient Celtic Druid religions. But most of the major religious groups have had chaplains, and the chaplaincy in Christianity goes all the way back to the first chaplains at Cambridge in the 13th century. Christianity has an 800-year history in this, whereas we have about 12 years; there is just a slight difference there.
Jacobsen: Yes.
Shoemaker: And we, as I said when our first chaplain volunteered, Gail McCabe, at the University of Toronto, she was followed shortly by Mary Beattie, who is a professional librarian and very aware of a lot of the policy issues. Great reference individual. She brought a lot of wisdom that she has as a humanist chaplain to her website. Then, I became the third chaplain in Canadian history when I joined KPU in 2014, and I was the only secular chaplain west of Toronto. But now we have a fourth chaplain at the University of Ottawa, who was finishing the double doctorate at The University of Ottawa and has gone through an accreditation process, is actually helping us with our committee and our training, and she is the fourth one we have.
So I think that we are just getting started. We have some significant barriers that we have faced in the past and will continue to face. But the good news is that this year, 2022, we will approve the first humanist chaplain at the end of any military in North America. The U.S. doesn’t have it. They’ve been blocked. It’s a very political issue with the religious right and the traditional religions. And although there’s an atheist military group run by Jason Torpy, we are going to be the first group of humanists nationally to get approval. And that’s because we took an already approved chaplain in the military, who is moving over to our worldview from a traditional religion. I can’t go into any more detail about it because it’s somewhat private at this point in time, but it is going to happen next year, and it’s going to be headlined. Canadian Humanism accredits and has authorized the first humanist chaplain in military history in North America. That’s exciting. So we’re the new kid on the block, but we were moving fast, man, we’re jumping over buildings here.
Jacobsen: Also, as you alluded a bit, what is your record and history as a humanist chaplain in Canada?
Shoemaker: My personal record is I have been a psychologist for 50 years. So the idea of moving into some kind of an advisor role as a chaplain was pretty automatic for me, particularly since before I [reconverted], I actually was thinking about the ministry, and I went to a conservative but old seminary in Southern California called Fuller Theological Seminary, where I got both my Ph.D. in clinical psych and a master’s in Christian thought and theology. So, I actually could qualify to be a chaplain in the institution because I do have a master’s degree. So, it wasn’t problematic for me to be accepted in an institution like a university. In fact, they actually invited me to apply after hearing some of the lectures I gave in SMU and our senior administrator and student services, who I happen to think is probably a secular or agnostic or something, actually reached out to us and asked us to send somebody. That’s very unusual, Scott, that doesn’t usually happen. But if it’s going to be happening more particularly in Canada, because of such high numbers of secularity, particularly out west here in B.C., less so in the Maritimes and less so in the Prairies. But I think the Canadian government and I think the military understand that there is a tremendous number of nonbelievers, irreligious atheists, agnostics, secular free thinkers, whatever you want to call them in the military, and they have some uncomfortableness going to traditional religious chaplains. So my record, I think, is going to a school like a college where I am in the space center was a very natural encore career for me from being a psychologist and sort of semi-retiring, but still want to stay inside of a caring and the guiding and advising role, even if I’m doing this volunteer.
But honestly, when my family was growing up, and I had to make almost six years here in Canada, I couldn’t have been a chaplain unless I just volunteered for a very short time because of this. And until we get approval for some alternative kinds of degrees other than these M.Div. degrees and masters of theology and spiritual care degrees, it is not going to pay because the institutions that pay hospitals, a few prisons and the military pay well actually. We haven’t really been approved because we don’t fit the slots of education that are traditionally set aside by the great churches of history. They’ve dominated what it takes to be a chaplain. And as I say, as a new kid on the block, we’re getting lots of support now because there are people who are chaplains who would like to identify as a humanist because they’ve already read deep into their history and into the theology and into the textual criticism of their holy books. And they realize there’s a lot of shams there, and they don’t believe anymore. But to keep going, they have to stay in their particular belief system as we offer this, and they can stay a chaplain but change the label on their lapel or get a lot of movement.
Jacobsen: What are the current projects important for the advancement of humanist chaplaincy in Canadian society, as well as becoming more accepted as a non-supernatural alternative to celebrations of life?
Shoemaker: Yeah, I think humanist chaplains are going to be embraced very easily, particularly if we are well trained in world religions and multi-faith and multicultural interfaith environments, which I like to call pluralism pubs and their hubs of lots of different views. So I think that we will be welcomed except by the most extreme and most threatening religious people. And that could be just an individual issue, not really within the major making demand of that particular organization. So I think that our advancement, the biggest barrier we have at this point in time, is two things: education, which now requires some kind of master’s degree in theology or divinity or spiritual care that’s not relevant to humanists. Those are not the things that we are particularly motivated by. We’re motivated by other things. You might be interested more in how to counsel and a more [psychotherapy] approach or an educational approach or a client-centred kind of exchange to help release the potential of whatever client we’re working with. So, I think the education barrier is the biggest one in front of us.
And the second one is funding, and that is we don’t have deep pockets. , we’re fortunate that we have an association that’s growing here in Canada and even here in BCHA, where I work and live. I basically give enough money to the organization to pay the fee I have to pay to be a chaplain. Otherwise, it would have to come out of their budget. So I think that that’s a major problem because if you have a family or if you need to start a career and buy a house, et cetera, et cetera, chaplaincy is a very tenuous path. Unless you go through the traditional education, are certified, and can work in a hospital or for the government in some institution. So far, we only have institutions of learning, and they don’t pay, and those in the military will get paid, and they’ll get paid well. They get paid about $60000 a year. So, shielding funding, but that’s the minority. So I would say funds in education are the two biggest ones, not that we won’t be accepted by our peers.
Jacobsen: What would you like to be your legacy as a humanist and as a humanist chaplain?
Shoemaker: Legacy is probably something that enters my mind a little bit more at my age. , the closer I get, the 80s and the years of some kind of cerebral efficiency are still in my grasp. I would say at this point in time, I’m just starting to accumulate that, and it’s going to come out, I think, predominantly as an educator and promoter of this chaplaincy initiative is just getting started. I’m on the accreditation committee. I have the honour of being the first accredited humanist chaplain in Canadian history, which I am very humbled by, and I’m not sure I should have got it because I certainly wasn’t the first in the country. But be that as it may, I would like to say we’re writing a book, Trixie and I, and that book is the proceeds of that book. I want to fund chaplaincy education and chaplaincy promotion and to expand the rules that we can find where chaplains can be paid. I’m a psychologist who did a lot of career counselling and did a lot of coaching. So, I want to leverage my psychological skill set and my experience of consulting and organizations to help chaplains not only work in prisons and hospitals but also in the military and schools.
I would like to see us get into the community particularly; I’d like to see our work in organizations as kind of humanist ethics collaborators and advisors and actually coach executives and the kind of things that will put their employees in a position of being dignified and will be a voice for balancing out the profit motive and capitalism with the way we treat our people in these organizations and our clients. So that’s one of the legacies I like to live, leaving [this] kind of a hybrid between my consulting industrial organization, teaching background, and chaplaincy as a career. It can pay and be honoured and have some status within the consulting community because that’s the training that I have, and I’ve made this switch over relatively easily. But when we start with a 25-year-old, he doesn’t have any psychological training but wants to be an ambassador for Humanism and needs to get paid. We’ve got to find other ways than just governmental institutions. So, probably, the legacy that I would like to leave is education and finding ways to make reasonably wage-earning careers as chaplains.
Jacobsen: Dr. Shoemaker, thank you very much for the opportunity and your time.
Shoemaker: Did you get enough stuff?
Jacobsen: I think so.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publisher: In-Sight Publishing
Publisher Founding: March 1, 2014
Web Domain: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com
Location: Fort Langley, Township of Langley, British Columbia, Canada
Journal: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal
Journal Founding: August 2, 2012
Frequency: Three (3) Times Per Year
Review Status: Non-Peer-Reviewed
Access: Electronic/Digital & Open Access
Fees: None (Free)
Volume Numbering: 12
Issue Numbering: 1
Section: B
Theme Type: Idea
Theme Premise: “Outliers and Outsiders”
Theme Part: 29
Formal Sub-Theme: None.
Individual Publication Date: December 8, 2023
Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2024
Author(s): Sam Vaknin (Brussels Morning)
Author(s) Bio: Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. is a former economic advisor to governments (Nigeria, Sierra Leone, North Macedonia), served as the editor in chief of “Global Politician” and as a columnist in various print and international media including “Central Europe Review” and United Press International (UPI). He taught psychology and finance in various academic institutions in several countries (http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/cv.html).
Word Count: 1,003
Image Credit: Sam Vaknin.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369–6885
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Keywords: Big Three, economics, Europe, executive pay, good enough firm, Purchasing Power Standards, Sam Vaknin, United Auto Workers, USA.
Europe Must Cap Executive Pay or Face Labor Unrest
Before it is too late, Europe should reign in executive pay and cap it. Otherwise, it is headed towards a period of massive strikes and a decline in the profitability of its industries.
In terms of Purchasing Power Standards (PPS), Europe is still way more equitable than the USA, for instance. Copious social transfers redistribute resources from the rich to the poorer, thus dramatically reducing the dreaded Gini coefficient all over the European Union.
But across the continent, income inequality has been on the rise as has inflation, a regressive tax on the poor.
Such convergent adverse conditions always lead to increased labor unionization, labor unrest, and a realignment of the interests of stakeholders in private business: shareholders (capital), labor, and management.
Recently, the United Auto Workers (UAW) won their battle against Detroit’s Big Three auto-manufacturers which also own European production assets and automotive brands.
Wage negotiations are an intricate dance. As the economist Richard Lester observed, they do not reflect only hard, cold data such as productivity figures or profits. There is a “range of indeterminacy” within which wages fall.
The reason for this uncertainty is an information asymmetry. Workers don’t have access to the big picture or even to other workers’s output and income info.
Workers are also often interchangeable and dispensable. Many of them do not have the financial cushion to survive a strike or litigation against the workplace.
Only when employees band together – unionize – does their aggregate power right the scales, to some extent. A Gallup survey of millions of workers in multiple industries over several decades found that unionized workers earn 10-20% more than their brethren who are not members of a labor union.
Moreover: the extra pay does not affect economic growth, only bloated executive pay and bottom line profitability. But even so, wages make a mere 5-15% of the cost of any given product.
Wages are one example of the conflict between rapacious executives and all other business stakeholders.
Managers are supposed to generate higher returns to shareholders by increasing the value of the firm’s assets and, therefore, of the firm. If they fail to do so, goes the moral tale, they are booted out mercilessly.
This is one manifestation of the “Principal-Agent Problem”. It is defined thus by the Oxford Dictionary of Economics:
“The problem of how a person A can motivate person B to act for A’s benefit rather than following (his) self-interest.”
The obvious answer is that A can never motivate B not to follow B’s self-interest – never mind what the incentives are. That economists pretend otherwise – in “optimal contracting theory” – just serves to demonstrate how divorced economics is from human psychology and, thus, from reality.
Managers will always rob blind the companies they run. They will always manipulate boards to collude in their shenanigans. They will always bribe auditors to bend the rules. They will always deny workers just wages. In other words, they will always act in their self-interest.
In their defense, they can say that the damage from such actions to each shareholder is minuscule while the benefits to the manager are enormous. In other words, this is the rational, self-interested, thing to do.
But why do shareholders cooperate with such corporate brigandage? In an important Chicago Law Review article titled “Managerial Power and Rent Extraction in the Design of Executive Compensation”, the authors demonstrate how the typical stock option granted to managers as part of their remuneration rewards mediocrity rather than encourages excellence.
But everything falls into place if we realize that shareholders and managers are allied against the firm – not pitted against each other.
The paramount interest of both shareholders and managers is to increase the value of the stock – regardless of the true value of the firm. Both are concerned with the performance of the share – rather than the performance of the firm. Both are preoccupied with boosting the share’s price – rather than the company’s business.
Hence the inflationary executive pay packets. Shareholders hire stock manipulators – euphemistically known as “managers” – to generate expectations regarding the future prices of their shares.
These snake oil salesmen and snake charmers – corporate executives – are allowed by shareholders to loot the company providing that they generate consistent capital gains to their masters by provoking persistent interest and excitement around the business. Shareholders, in other words, do not behave as owners of the firm – they behave as free-riders.
The Principal-Agent Problem arises in other social interactions and is equally misunderstood there.
Employers and employees, producers and consumers all reify the Principal-Agent Problem. Economists would do well to discard their models and go back to basics. They could start by asking:
Why do shareholders acquiesce with executive malfeasance as long as share prices are rising?
Could it mean that the interests of shareholders and managers are identical?
Nothing happens by accident or by coercion. Shareholders aided and abetted the current crop of corporate executives enthusiastically. They knew well what was happening. They may not have been aware of the exact nature and extent of the rot, but they witnessed approvingly the public relations antics, insider trading, stock option resetting, unwinding, and unloading, share price manipulation, opaque transactions, and outlandish pay packages. Investors remained mum throughout the corruption of the globalized corporate universe. It is time for the hangover.
The Good Enough Firm
Conventional economics is based on wildly unrealistic assumptions regarding human nature and, by extension, the conduct of human institutions. One of them is that firms – led by agents and egged-on by principals – seek to maximize both profits and productivity.
This is nonsense. Firms seek to optimize – not maximize – profits by choosing the path of least resistance. As far as productivity: it depends on how fierce the competition is. Absent competition, there is no incentive to increase it. Firms invariably settle on being good enough, until they are rattled by an external shock.
One way to remedy all these pathologies is, therefore, to introduce competition, both from within the European Union and from without. Perhaps 18-century economists were not so wrong after all.
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Cardwell C. Europe Must Cap Executive Pay or Face Labor Unrest. December 2023; 12(1). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/executive-pay
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Cardwell, C. (2023, December 8). Europe Must Cap Executive Pay or Face Labor Unrest. In-Sight Publishing. 12(1).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): CARDWELL, C. Europe Must Cap Executive Pay or Face Labor Unrest.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 1, 2023.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Cardwell, Chaunte. 2023. “Europe Must Cap Executive Pay or Face Labor Unrest.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 1 (Winter). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/executive-pay.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Cardwell, C “Europe Must Cap Executive Pay or Face Labor Unrest.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 1 (December 2023). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/executive-pay.
Harvard: Cardwell, C. (2023) ‘Europe Must Cap Executive Pay or Face Labor Unrest’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(1). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/executive-pay>.
Harvard (Australian): Cardwell, C 2023, ‘Europe Must Cap Executive Pay or Face Labor Unrest’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 1, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/executive-pay.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Cardwell, Chaunte. “Europe Must Cap Executive Pay or Face Labor Unrest.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 1, 2023, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/executive-pay.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Chaunte C. Europe Must Cap Executive Pay or Face Labor Unrest [Internet]. 2023 Dec; 12(1). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/executive-pay.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen, or the author(s), and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors copyright their material, as well, and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): Unknown
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, today, we’re here with Dr. Gus Lyn-Piluso from the Centre for Inquiry in Canada. So, we’ll focus on general conceptual matters around the Centre for Inquiry Canada, its emphasis on human rights and science within Canada, and more general critical thinking. So when will the Centre for Inquiry be founded? Centre for Inquiry Canada will be founded as an extension of the Centre for Inquiry, the transnational organization. Also, how has this generally evolved? My understanding was that it was probably 2007 when it was founded.
Gus Lyn-Piluso: Yeah. It started during that, or would we call it the rise of the new atheists or whatever we’d like to call it? After 9-11, that period was when there was a real interest, a renewed interest, if you like, on secularism in particular. So some of the humanists in Toronto, in particular, got together, and we’re talking with CFIUS or transnationals, as we now call it. And we started as a branch of theirs. And then, over the years, it slowly became an organization in and of itself rather than a branch of the transnational. We became CFIC, which separated us from them other than the name and we helped each other out. We’re kindred spirits, but we have no formal ties anymore. So, the people involved were some of the movers and shakers in the humanist movement in Canada. People like Henry Morgentaler and Robert Buckman just headed up the starting CFIC.
And then, it slowly became its entity. And since then, it has grown and grown and then retracted somewhat. It’s shrunk down. We lost some funding and are now in the regrowth process again. So we were probably at our biggest, roughly speaking, at around twenty-fourteen or something like that. Maybe even earlier. And then we shrunk, and now we’re slowly. What we’re trying to do is build, but we’re trying to build in a way that ensures we can continue that growth. We may have artificially grown in the past, but we got a chunk of money, and that was great, but we couldn’t hold on to that level of activity. We needed the volunteer base and the commitment that we needed. What we’re trying to do right now is grow slowly but grow with individual members first.
So, the more individual members we have, the more we want them to be active. Active because partly that’s what our mission is. It’s about engaging and getting Canadians active in the democratic process. And what we mean by the democratic process is something much more than representative democracy or elections. CFIC sees this, and this goes back to Kurtz in Rochester, Buffalo, who was one of the founders of CFI Transnational. The idea is that what we need to be doing as citizens is engaging in the discovery of ethics and knowledge as simply as citizens. So, it’s the idea of active citizenship. So, we engage in a democratic process. In other words, we engage in activity that allows us to develop insights based on our activity. In other words, we evaluate how that went. Did it work? Did it not work? It’s an empirical process.
Then, from there, we engage in self-reflection and dialogue discourses, and awe re-emerges with a new emphasis on action. So it’s a cyclical process of action, reflection, and then more action or knowing what we learned, bringing us to new action. So it’s a cyclical process. That’s what we’re trying to get our members to do or to be involved in. So we don’t just want members who pay their yearly fee and then sit back. We want active people who engage in the decision-making process of CFIC and discussions, then difficult discussions. What I mean by difficult discussions is the diversity of ideas, and sometimes we prefer to avoid hearing that, but that’s what we’re aiming for. And from that, those people will fuel CFIC. In other words, it won’t be based on one person or two people or one person with somewhat celebrity status.
We’re looking for a diverse, widespread base of active members. And as a result, we’ve been doing much better. We have a lot of activity, particularly in the education department. And as you saw, the cost of religion and other projects, we have human rights projects. But strictly from an organizational point of view, we have more capacity. If one or two of us or six of us are eight of us leave, we have people take over, and that’s what I believe we were missing before. So I’m very happy with the way we’re situated right now. We need to continue to grow, and we also need to continue to develop that leadership within and the engagement of our members.
Jacobsen: Regarding the cost of religion report as an example, what was the planning stage? How did you execute, and what was the response?
Lyn-Piluso: Well, the cost of religion came from research done by Sandra Dunham; I believe her. Yeah, she’s our director of development. So she, our secular chair, and several others conducted the research. And she also worked with several other members who were particularly attuned to how CR works. The tax laws and such. And they broke it down and got it to a point where we can communicate it to the public. That’s where it gets tricky. We could understand it, and we can put it down on paper. But how do you communicate it to the public? And that’s really what we’re trying to get better at. Although we’ve done a fairly good job with this, we must capitalize on it even more. And that’s one of the things we’re working on now, and how do we get that message out?
Jacobsen: On a conceptual level, what do you consider the costs of religion in Canadian society?
Lyn-Piluso: Well, strictly from an economic point of view, it’s the taxes. I mean, that’s, for example, in Ontario, we have a school board. We are paying for two school boards. So, doubling funding is unnecessary, and that money could be going to all sorts of things. I don’t need to itemize them, but mental health is one of them, and certainly now, with the improvement of air quality in schools and all sorts of things like that, we’re spending all this extra money on a separate school system for reasons that are now obsolete. So financially, there’s a huge cost to all of us. When a religious organization engages in religious activity and gets a tax break for it, it is being funded and supported by everyone, every Canadian, if they were to engage in charitable work, feed the homeless and not religious, but feed the homeless or whatever the religious activity might be, then that’s perfectly valid.
So there’s no issue there. The issue is simply when they’re taken into tax relief for religious activities. They’ll often talk about the advancement of education, and it’s unclear what kind of education they promote. Are they engaging in religious education? And these are the kinds of things that relieve poverty. Well, OK. How are you doing it? These are the things that need to be explored. The way you asked that question led me to believe that maybe you wanted even more than that. I am not personal; this is just me speaking, not CFIC. But I don’t have a problem with religion and religious organizations. I believe that an organization such as CFIC should go out of its way to support the religious freedoms of different groups, specifically because we live in a secular society.
We need to make sure that everyone has the right to their beliefs. What we object to is that any one group is using political or public power to infringe on the rights of others, and that’s the key. I think that often, people misunderstand an organization like CFIC and see us as anti-religion. I don’t think so. Not only do I not think so, but it simply is not true because, if anything, we are working to promote the freedom of all people and their freedom of belief. Often, you end up with some religious organizations that claim to be pro-religious but are doing more harm to other groups; they’re simply pro-religious points of view. And ours is no. Everyone has the right to religious belief or not believe in any religion. So, in that sense, the cost of religion can be quite high.
More than just financially because it infringes on the rights of other Canadians. And that is sides against the charter, in my humble opinion, not being a lawyer, but I think it’s pretty clear. But it also destroys the one thing Canadians seem to be proud of. Canadians seem to be proud of our diversity in this country, or what you might call multiculturalism. To have real diversity, we have to protect the rights of all people across the board and not favour any group. So anyway, I thought that was important for me to say because often people misunderstand what CFIC is about.
Jacobsen: You have internal educational matters, too. I mean, what is the secular library?
Lyn-Piluso: Sorry, what did you say?
Jacobsen: You have internal educational matters, too. What is the secular library?
Lyn-Piluso: You mean our secular library? Yes. Well, it’s simply a library. It’s a library created by CFIC members in the past 15 years. It’s housed in Ottawa, and members have a right to an opportunity to use it. I was going to say in it you’ll find some of the books you’d expect to find in the library. Bertrand Russell and people like that. But you’ll also find some very interesting books on the development of religion, the rise of religion, Canadian history, and those sorts of things.
Jacobsen: The 10:23 campaign was one of the first types of projects that I was aware of coming out of Centre for Inquiry Canada. I don’t mean the 10:23 campaign in particular, but the campaign against homeopathy as a severe pseudoscience problem in Canada because people, in essence, get water. So, what is the 10:23 campaign? What’s the origin of that title?
Lyn-Piluso: Hold on. This is one of those things I need to check because it was before me. And the one thing I’m not sure of, I believe it started in England. I’m hesitating; I don’t want to claim it as ours. This is one of the bits you can edit out, OK.
Jacobsen: We’re early sometimes; my colleague or whatever, they’ll start. Oh, by the way, we’ll have a little side conversation. I’ll see you at dinner at six, and then we start the session.
Lyn-Piluso: Yeah. So, if my memory is correct, OK, the 10:23 campaign started in England by, I think, a skeptics organization in Liverpool or Manchester. OK. OK, there you go. This is my memory of it, OK. And then we started doing it here in Canada. The famous thing we did here was that we, again, well, I believe it was at Queen’s Park now. OK, so sorry, Leslie would have been involved in that; Leslie is our treasurer. But I believe it was at Queen’s Park. I could be wrong. It may have been in Parliament Hill in Ottawa, but it might have been here in Toronto, where people got together and took a whole bunch of supposed medication.
Jacobsen: Lethal amounts.
Lyn-Piluso: Lethal amounts, right?
Jacobsen: Yeah. But this was taken from James Randi when he did that, from a TED talk, where he says, Oh, lethal amounts, I’m going to take it, and he takes the whole.
Lyn-Piluso: That’s right. So that happened. Well, over ten years ago, because I’ve been involved for about seven or eight years. So well more, I would say, about ten years ago. And again, here’s one of the problems we have with distinguishing our movement. You’ll know this because of your association with the humanist. Often, one group will start something, a skeptic group, humanists, or CFIC, and all the other groups will join. And then it’s hard. When you’re speaking about it historically, you don’t want to be in a position of saying, yes, we did this when it turned out that you weren’t the organizer, even though you remember being there. So that’s why I’m a little hesitant.
Jacobsen: Yeah. It should be clarified. Humanism, Secular humanism, and religious humanism are very different because they agree on many of the same things; they emphasize and rank those values differently, too. So it can confuse the public seeing some of these things. The Venn diagram overlaps on a couple of things. Everyone gets together to form a coalition on that particular topic, and then it causes a lot of confusion. I understand completely.
Lyn-Piluso: Right. Well, where was I going? I was going to do something worthy.
Jacobsen: You begin to fundamentalist evangelicals in the United States, joining up with hard-line Catholics on some anti-abortion issue. Then people will talk about Christians, but in their mind, conceptually, they’re thinking about Catholics in America. Yet they will ignore the fact that there are things like Catholics for choice in the United States, which, no matter how many boring encyclicals the pope puts out, this group of laity will ignore and will advance what is modern medical technology and a woman’s choice.
Lyn-Piluso: Right. And feminist Catholics, the whole thing. Right. So, I had something in my head. It’ll come back to me, and when it comes to me, I’ll say it’s OK. Well, just ask me whatever, and then we’ll.
Jacobsen: Yeah. I mean, the Bangladeshi writers, you were involved. You started in 2014 and 2013. OK. So there’s a when you’re starting this campaign around supporting Bangladeshi bloggers who are being murdered, which is to say people being murdered or killed for words because of words that were against public opinion or the opinion of the authorities. So how does CFIC support some of these individuals or these collectives who fall under the category of writers, particularly in countries where they’re at risk?
Lyn-Piluso: Well, more than anything else, our role is educational. So we are concerned with human rights, but there’s very little we can do to help individuals. Every once in a while, we’ll do what we can to connect people, particularly through our program. We work jointly with CFI U.S. or CFI Transnational on this. Hold on, let me just get the name of the program. I just want to not screw it up. When dealing with specific individuals, there’s little we can do. We have a program called Assistance for Apostates. In that program, we work together with secular rescue from CFI Transnational. We try to do our best to connect them with refugee organizations and maybe with some financial assistance, although we’re limited in what we can do there. Our main work has to do with educating and educating the public.
Canadians are fairly well-tuned into the fact that there are refugees out there. Although not all Canadians are necessarily supportive of refugees, generally, people tend to understand that refugees are, through no fault of their own, in a position of danger in their homelands. Canada is one of those countries that says, if you are in this position, we will especially look at your application to come to this country. What is missing in the general public is this understanding that sometimes people are being persecuted not just because of their religion but because they don’t have a religion or because they speak against a particular religion. So we educate Canadians, and we’re trying to do all we can to raise awareness around the idea that such individuals have the same rights to refugee status in Canada.
One of the things we’ve been working on recently with Humanist Canada, and hold on, I’ve got to give you the name, whether you heard of the organization. Doug Thomas’s organization, do you remember?
Jacobsen: Secular connection, SES.
Lyn-Piluso: Secular connections, right? Is the idea that atheists or non-religious refugees should have the same, what’s it called the hurried, the sped up? What’s the term they used?
Jacobsen: It sounds like a horror film, and call it the quickening. It’s expedited.
Lyn-Piluso: Expedited refugee process, and we’re just waiting today. I believe today is the day we’re supposed to hear from the minister. He’s had forty-five days to respond, and I believe today is the forty-fifth date. Unless they didn’t count a particular day that I’m not clear on, let’s give them until Monday or Tuesday. But we should be hearing from them. So our role is one of it. It’s an educational role. Then, we work to change policies and maybe help individuals. In the case of those particular Bangladeshi writers, we did all sorts of PR work around that, particularly in Canada, but we also worked specifically to help one of those young people move to Canada. I remember correctly now that he’s in Quebec.
Jacobsen: In these cases, they are prominent, I mean, in the sense that there’s a lot of them. Even with the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, the U.S. CIRF is bipartisan as an organization; it’s federal, and they have several cases. In at least one of the cases that I’ve seen, which is in Pakistan, the religious affiliation is humanist. I’m not going to balk at the religious affiliation, just the fact that it’s labelled humanist as the title under which he’s not treated well. I think earlier this year, given the death sentence after three years in jail.
Lyn-Piluso: So, has he labelled himself a humanist because there needs to be a religious status there? Is that the idea?
Jacobsen: I’m not entirely sure because some might be atheists and might be Muslim.
Lyn-Piluso: Right. But if the refugee granting body needs a religion, this is part of the problem that sometimes people have to say they’re being prosecuted because of their religion. If they don’t have a religion, then the assumption is they can’t possibly be prosecuted.
Jacobsen: And which doesn’t match the Pew Research, which is to say people take the United States data tripartisan independent Republican and Democrat hate atheists. Americans just don’t like them. I would assume there is a milder form in Canada without formal data to back it up. But given the cultural overlap, this must be the case, whether from other people telling stories of personal experience. It’s just part of living in Canada. And you see in the various religious privileges. And so, yeah, in a sense, I would expand that conversation to refugee status and things of that nature because in Canada and elsewhere, it’s just a little bit harder not to identify with a religion. And if you need to do that to get refugee status, you will do it because your life or livelihood is on the line.
Lyn-Piluso: Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah, I think generally; again, I don’t have the stats in front of me, but I think we’re better off in Canada than they are in the States. I think we are lucky not to have that belt of religious furor that is around the southern parts of the United States. We have a little bit of it, but not that much. And as a result, we tend to be, I would guess, more accepting of atheists. I’m not sure if we call it more acceptable. I would say that Canadians just don’t care as much about religion.
Jacobsen: Tolerance by indifference.
Lyn-Piluso: Exactly. Indifference. They just want to get on with their lives and not care. But these things come and go. They ebb and flow, so we never know. And with what we see happening in the United States could easily blow up here as well.
Jacobsen: I mean, some of the figureheads in the United States who fuel some of these hate movements and others they come from Canada. So, their origins are in this society. And so they become part and parcel of that American narrative, which Canadians criticize but do not necessarily consider. It started here, some of them.
Lyn-Piluso: That’s strange. I wonder; I thought of that as well. People like Cruz and and such. I wonder if they would have had as much traction here, though, or even, well, maybe not, I don’t know. I was going to say even in a northern state. But I guess it depends on where Trump is sort of throwing everything off every time I thought that I understood something in American politics, and he’s throwing everything off.
Jacobsen: Sure. Well, I think everything has a season. In a sense certain, it can be state-wise. We’ll have seasons where you just ask how this person gets elected. Other times, the federal.
Lyn-Piluso: But there’s a lack of critical thinking going on. I mean, the conspiracy theories and whatnot. That, to me, is the most dangerous thing the world is facing right now. I mean, OK, there’s climate change and such, but in terms of the political process, it’s the inability to ask oneself basic questions like who is making a claim? What do they have to do? How might they profit from such a claim? Or where’s the support for such a claim? Where’s the empirical evidence? And we don’t need to be fancy. And this is, again, where I get back to the idea of a true democratic process. We need to have a citizenship engaged in the community that values diversity. In other words, let me hear what Scott has to say. And if I think I disagree with them, let me say, Scott, I disagree with you. I’m not getting it to help me understand your position here, Scott.
And in that process of back and forth, we may learn something from each other, and that’s missing right now. And as a result, people are simple. I’m starting to fall for some really bad thinking. I would imagine we’ve always fallen for these bad things throughout history. Certainly, the protocols of the Elders of Zion and such, there’s been crap out there forever. But I think, with the internet now and such, it just spreads faster and is more dangerous. That, to me, is what an organization like CFIC is ultimately about. If we can engage before, going back to the refugees, if someone says, well, why should these people come in, well, here’s why. , let’s look at them. Look at the people who are being persecuted simply because they’re Muslim. That is wrong.
Well, it’s equally wrong for people to be persecuted simply because they’re not or they don’t have a belief. Both people deserve a right to live. And we need to do all we can in the community, in the global community, to make sure that we protect people as much as we can, or at the very least help the citizens understand the importance of this, right? I go too far once I get going on certain things; I’m so sorry.
Jacobsen: And so, at a core, CFIC situates itself as both a buffer and a corrective. A buffer against those forces.
Lyn-Piluso: I would see CFIC as a counter-hegemonic vision. What I mean by that is we have this notion of democracy in our society that is not democratic. Making an ex four times once every four years is not democracy. Real democracy requires active citizens. But to be an active citizen, you need the skills of democracy. You need to know how to negotiate and how to engage in dialogue. How to read, but also how to read statistics and such. We’rewe will not all be statisticians, but we can learn to ask the right questions. We can learn to understand the basics or the executive summaries if you like. We can learn to ask the experts in the field questions so that they can help us understand them. This is what real democracies, its active citizens, people who believe that their voices matter and that the voices of their fellow citizens matter.
Organizations like CFIC set themselves up to speed up that kind of democracy. What’s it called when whisky is fermenting? Fermentation. We’re trying to ferment this democratic process, OK? So if we end up, this is my idea of what good education is, from when a child is very young through their educational experience. It should not simply be about learning facts. It should be engaging with the facts and engaging with others, seeing for themselves and testing those facts out for themselves. If we can create schools and situations where people engage in those things, they will not accept governments that dictate or control them. So CFIC is a harbour if you like; it’s a place for Canadians to get together and play at that democratic process.
What I mean by play, though, is that in a very serious way, playing at the dialogue is a way to learn from each other, how to engage in the dialogue, and how to engage in critical thinking. If we can do it ourselves in CFIC at the member stage and create a truly democratic organization, then each member will also engage in their particular communities. And what we end up with is active citizenship, a group of citizens who understand how democracy works, who insist that their voices are heard and that the voices of their fellow Canadians are heard too, not simply to the voices of people they don’t want to hear.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time.
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Publisher: In-Sight Publishing
Publisher Founding: March 1, 2014
Web Domain: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com
Location: Fort Langley, Township of Langley, British Columbia, Canada
Journal: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal
Journal Founding: August 2, 2012
Frequency: Three (3) Times Per Year
Review Status: Non-Peer-Reviewed
Access: Electronic/Digital & Open Access
Fees: None (Free)
Volume Numbering: 12
Issue Numbering: 1
Section: A
Theme Type: Idea
Theme Premise: “Outliers and Outsiders”
Theme Part: 29
Formal Sub-Theme: None
Individual Publication Date: December 8, 2023
Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2024
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Word Count: 4,979
Image Credit: None.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
Krzysztof Zawisza is the Founder of the Syncritic Academy. Zawisza’s biography on Syncritic Academy states: “Born 1963 in Lublin, Poland. In my youth, I was interested in astronomy. In high school, I was a laureate of the nationwide XXV Astronomical Olympiad, then I studied astronomy at the University of Warsaw, and at the beginning of this millennium, I was a participant in a doctoral seminar in the philosophy of nature conducted by the outstanding Polish cosmologist, Archbishop Józef Życiński at the Catholic University of Lublin. I am the author of several revolutionary yet unpublished (apart from placing them in such places as the website of the Section of the Philosophy of Nature of the Catholic University of Lublin) scientific discoveries. These include a new, fundamental law of nature, tentatively called by me the Rule of Chance, which says that even in random events and processes, there is an order and a mathematical formula for it. I also discovered and developed the once sought-after G.W. Leibniz’s method of creating a mathematical and philosophical language, i.e. a language that contains all absolute general truths and can always decide about the truth. I have also found the formula for a physical Unified Field Theory in the last decade. One of the multiple consequences of this formula is that just as we can split atoms, we can also split photons into parts to achieve antigravity and control matter, space and time by converting chronons (time quanta) into photons (energy quanta). I am currently refining and developing this discovery. People will need it to survive in the near future and for further, long-term development. Some of these works have already been very positively reviewed and evaluated, partly by Polish professors from various research centres and partly by members of various high IQ societies. I will write about other, even more interesting discoveries and ideas soon elsewhere. In my spare time I listen to classical music and read a lot. I especially like history books, classic literature, modern, well-written SF novels and science thrillers based on some interesting ideas. Sometimes I write (less often also publish) short stories and poems. In my life, I have traveled whenever I had the opportunity. During these trips, I managed to visit several times, among others: CERN in Geneva, the Vatican Observatory in Castel Gandolfo (Specola Vaticana), the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, as well as various other research centers in Europe and America. I also like to learn foreign languages as much as I have time and strength. I speak and write in English, German and Russian. I also read texts in Latin and ancient Greek [Ἑλληνική]. I am currently learning Italian. I now live in the capital of Poland – Warsaw – with the 9-year-old mini pig Lola (who weighs almost a hundred kilos, though). I am a member of several international high IQ societies, including the Ligue of Geniuses and the Enigma High IQ Society. I am the originator of the Syncritic Institute, which aims to help people overcome the current crisis of science and culture and provide them with a good, developing and interesting future. Now, together with my best friends, we are organizing this Institute, inviting the most intelligent, creative and promising people from all over the world to join us. You can learn more about my work here.” Zawisza discusses: Syncritic Academy; the name of the academy; founding members of Syncritic Academy; Syncritical Institute; civilizational crisis; alternatives to academia; standards of academia at the University of Warsaw in the past; high-IQ communities; the experience with Archbishop Józef Życiński at the Catholic University of Lublin; the overarching goal of The Syncritic Academy; Rule of Chance; and other high-IQ collectives.
Keywords: Armin Becker, Arthur Pletcher, Bhekuzulu Khumalo, Carolina Rodriguez Escamilla, Christopher Langan, Claus Volko, Gina Langan, high-IQ, Jaime Alfonso Navas, Joanna Święcka, Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński, Katja Ujčič, Krzysztof Zawisza, Marlena Natalia Witek, Poland, Richard Louis Amoroso, Stanisław Lem, Syncritic Academy, Veronica Palladino.
Conversation with Krzysztof Zawisza on Syncritic Academy: Founder, Syncritic Academy
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The Syncritic Academy isn’t precisely a high-IQ group and exactly a thinktank of the high-IQ. However, it’s created by high-IQ society members, as far as I can tell – as I recognize faces and people. It’s an interesting “social and scientific initiative.” The “why” comes first in this one. Why found it?
Krzysztof Zawisza: It’s a very important social and scientific initiative. We founded The Syncritic Academy because we noticed that there is an urgent need to defend the rights of highly intelligent people who are discriminated against in many societies. There is historical precedence for this unfortunate behaviour, where for example, “geniuses” have been persecuted by society and even burned at the stake in the not-too-distant past. Few people realize that this persecution has not disappeared but has, in fact, intensified in recent times, but appears in different forms. There is also an important need to use the potential of such people, which is always wasted in modern communities. As the famous Polish writer and philosopher Stanisław Lem wrote in “The Perfect Vacuum”:
“Es ist schlecht Geschäft, einer Genius zu sein!” […] “First come your run-of-the-mill and middling geniuses, that is, of the third order, whose minds are unable to go much beyond the horizon of their times. These, relatively speaking, are threatened the least; they are often recognized and even come into money and fame. The geniuses of the second order are already too difficult for their contemporaries and therefore fare worse. In antiquity, they were mainly stoned; in the Middle Ages burned at the stake; later, in keeping with the temporary amelioration of customs, they were allowed to die a natural death by starvation, and sometimes even were maintained at the community’s expense in madhouses. A few were given poison by the local authorities, and many went into exile. Meanwhile, the powers that be, both secular and ecclesiastical, competed for first prize in ‘genocide’, as Odysseus calls the manifold activity of exterminating geniuses”.
Many writers, chroniclers of social life, and thinkers have long drawn attention to the fact of discrimination and persecution of so-called geniuses. Balzac devoted a trilogy called “Lost Illusions” (especially the second volume titled “The Inventor’s Sufferings”) to this topic. The fact that every person who is cognitively far above average is perceived by social decision-makers as a foreign body and eliminated (including their physical elimination) has been noticed, among others, in the XX-century poignant novel of Soviet visionaries of philosophical fiction, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, titled “The Beetle in the Anthill”.
The consequences of this state of affairs are disastrous, both for the most intelligent and creative people and for society as a whole. As the American writer and visionary Paul Anderson noted in the 1950s in his novel “Brain Wave”, the exclusion of the most intelligent individuals from society and the resulting undervaluation of reason is the direct cause of the collapse of subsequent human civilizations. My research and observations support Anderson’s thesis. We are currently facing another deep crisis and collapse, after which, as many times before, we will have to start many things over again (if there is someone to start them). To break out of this historical vicious circle, we must finally fully include the most talented and intelligent people in human society and stop excluding them. This is roughly what our Academy represents.
Jacobsen: Why the name “The Syncritic Academy”?
Zawisza: Because this name was available from the pool we considered and still suitably represented our mission. The name “The Syncretic Academy” was reserved by historians for the activities of Antiochus of Ascalon from the first century BC, while “Noetic Academy” (which we also considered at first) is, among others, the modern Education Academy in Bavdhan in India.
“Syncritic” (from “syncrisis”) means, in rhetoric, a figure of speech in which opposite things or persons are compared.”; and this is the role of our Academy. Our goal is to find and reconcile contradictions, both social and existing in today’s science, and to create a new synthesis beyond these contradictions and divisions.
Moreover, the words “syncrisis” and “syncritic” are so rare that no one actually knows what they mean, and that’s why there is a good chance that no one will make any undesirable associations with these names.
Jacobsen: Who were some of the founding members of the Syncritic Academy?
Zawisza: All our members at this stage of our project’s development are “our founding members”, and certainly, all of them are worth mentioning. Dr. Veronica Palladino, well-known in the high IQ societies (among others, thanks to the interviews you conducted with her), is an Italian writer, poet and doctor, with very wide interests (both scientific and literary) and enormous creative potential, based on very high intelligence, rich imagination and emotional depth. We will definitely hear about her again. Joanna Święcka, a Polish polymath high IQ philologist, is the author of the book “New Era. The Key to Reason”, which deals with the contemporary civilizational crisis caused by the undervaluation of reason and ways to overcome it. Currently, she is working on a new cosmology based on the famous and mysterious “Law of Creation”, discovered by probably the most original Polish mathematician and thinker – Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński. Jaime Alfonso Navas is a Mexican polyhistor and former child-prodigy, currently dealing with mathematics, astronomy and biology (he created, among others, a new definition of life), and the author of an extremely original idea of multidimensional conceptual art. In addition, Carolina Rodriguez Escamilla – an American polymath with Aztec roots – is an innovative scientific thinker, poet, engineer and creator of a new approach to mathematics based on the Indian cultural code (she published a book on this subject “TEOTL Theorem”). Her approach, based on the concepts of balance and order, can lead to an incredible simplification and orderliness in the way we perceive science. Arthur Pletcher (member of, among others, The International Society for Philosophical Inquiry) is a painter and published author of works in the fields of Astrophysics, Quantum Physics, Astronomy and Cognitive Science. Arthur combines different perspectives and different methodological approaches in his works, explaining in a very interesting way, among others, the last, extremely troublesome for the Big Bang Theory, observations of the James Webb Telescope. Marlena Natalia Witek is a Polish artist and engineer creating new physics based on a new paradigm of dynamic thinking about matter as not (more or less stable) particles and fields but on the vision of the Universe being a constant transformation of the information field. Her perspective gives hope for new, rapid technological progress and for the combination of physics and biology. We also have Armin Becker, who is our invaluable Project Manager (Armin composes music, is an expert in Nietzsche’s philosophy and develops the ideas of transhumanism) and Bhekuzulu Khumalo, who finances his physical experiments himself, revolutionizes the magnetic field theory (so far largely deficient in physics) and combines exact sciences with economics (Digital Economy and Knowledge Economics). Our recent member, Dr. Claus Volko (you also interviewed him several times), is the author of the epoch-making idea of transforming parasitic microorganisms into symbionts. This idea, well justified by its author, when it will no longer be excluded a priori from scientific discourse, has the potential to revolutionize both medicine and biology. We also have Katja Ujčič, a well-known therapist, artist and coach of highly gifted people. Katja has experience in supporting very talented people who, due to their high intelligence, are alienated from society and sometimes from themselves. Recently, Richard Louis Amoroso joined our Academy. He is the director of The Noetic Advanced Studies Institute, an original thinker and author of inventive patents and approximately 250 works in various fields written in 5 languages.
We also have very skilled associates. Our Webmaster, Kamba Abudu, is an experienced engineer who has been involved in Information Technology and related fields since the late 1980s, and our Executive Assistant, Joanna Łopusińska, is a Polish author of widely read scientific thrillers working at the University of Oxford.
Jacobsen: What is the Syncritical Institute within The Syncritic Academy?
Zawisza: Establishing the Syncritic Institute is one of the most important statutory goals of our Foundation. The Institute is intended to be a strongly supportive and friendly place for the most creative and intelligent people to live and work, and its goal is to provide an impulse for the further development of science, which is currently experiencing an unprecedented crisis that threatens (according to many well-known authors) the further development of our species. The Institute’s action plans also include educating extremely intelligent young people who, in today’s world, do not have their own educational and development path. A detailed project of the Institute’s activities (authored by me and Ms. Joanna Święcka) is available on our website.
Jacobsen: What does The Syncritic Academy define as the “deepening crisis of our civilization”?
Zawisza: Many scientists and publicists write about the crisis that we are currently experiencing in the development of civilization, and – above all – it is confirmed by facts. Generally, attention is paid to how global crises like ecological disasters, financial meltdowns, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism, and food shortages are converging symptoms of a single, failed global system. However, an even more important symptom of this crisis is the halt in the development of theoretical physics, which is described by such famous authors as Lee Smolin, Peter Woit, and Sabine Hossenfelder. The reason for this blockage in physics is not the lack of people capable of giving an impulse to the development of this very important branch of science. In our Academy itself there are several people whose works are much more complete logically, and sometimes also empirically, than many recognized theories of modern science. However, all of them are (like C.M. Langan’s CTMU theory) a priori excluded from scientific discourse, and the results of these works are covered by a conspiracy of silence.
The consequence of this halt of physics is, in turn, an impasse and even regression in the creation and implementation of new technologies that have been taking place since the 1970s. As Peter Thiel recently pointed out, we live under the illusion that the sea of applications and new models of what we already know, flooding our consciousness, is constant leaps and bounds of progress. The fact is, however, that recent decades have not brought changes in many aspects of human life. Progress has been particularly slow in areas where people have not only not been freed from hard, often slave-like, manual labour but whose work is not much different from what was done in factories in the late 19th century. For my part, I would like to add that, contrary to previous plans and hopes, a cure for cancer has not been found, we are not colonizing space, and the extension of the human lifespan is slowing down. Simple examples of not only the lack of technological progress but even regression in key areas are the continued (despite constant new announcements) resignation from returning man to the Moon and the cessation of the operation of supersonic passenger planes such as Tu-144 and Concorde and at the same time the impossibility of replacing them with other, more modern machines. Due to the depletion of fossil fuels and the lack of new, equally effective energy sources, we are threatened with a civilizational collapse, a terrifying vision which was recently presented by the famous British writer David Mitchell in his novel “The Bone Clocks”.
The most acute, however, is the crisis of human consciousness. This is evidenced by the ever-increasing number of suicides, as well as the increasing epidemic of mental illnesses that have plagued Western Culture for decades (as clearly stated in WHO reports). Living in a post-truth world seems to be largely responsible for this. The pursuit of truth, achieved in various ways, has been a religious, moral and life guide for people for centuries. The removal of this extremely important concept from today’s science and culture is undoubtedly the direct cause of the loss of modern man. As Felipe Fernández-Armesto writes about it in his famous History of Truth:
“Against the background of the history of the truth-quest, the scale of current indifference looks like a sudden, uncharacteristic and dangerous novelty. Embraced with conviction, the quest has always been a source of inspiration and drive. It has made progress happen and civilization work. We cannot be sure of getting any further ahead or even of surviving much longer without it”.
According to our diagnosis, the underlying cause of all these phenomena is the democratization of social life, which – apart from its undoubted positive values – has caused the erosion of social and scientific elites and a significant decline in the average intelligence of scientific and social decision-makers, which in turn results in the exclusion of reason as a human management centre. According to reliable estimates collected by Libb Thims, one of the founders of modern science, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, had an IQ of at least 5.5 standard deviations above average. According to these estimates, Niels Bohr and Wolfgang Pauli, who created 20th-century physics, had an IQ of at least 5 standard deviations above average. Today, people with such intelligence are incomprehensible to average (and even extraordinary) academic professors, and that is why they are removed from science in particular and social life in general.
Jacobsen: Why are alternatives to academia important at the moment, as this has been a concern to the Mega Foundation for sure, Mega Society in some ways, and others and yourself – as you note?
Zawisza: The Mega Foundation, as far as I know, was created by Christopher and Gina Langan because Christopher’s important scientific theory of CTMU was (and is) excluded a priori by official academics from scientific discourse. Academic scientists did a similar thing with the brilliant book “The World’s Most Famous Math Problem” by Marilyn Vos Savant, in which this well-known high-IQ author drew attention to important logical biases in today’s mathematics and shortcomings in the modern methodological approach to the queen of sciences. It is true that mathematicians wrote one review of her work, in which, however, they rejected all of Marilyn’s theses out of hand, using hollow rhetoric and logically erroneous arguments such as non sequitur and ignoratio elenchi. Academic institutions today are unable to discuss and create science. They have given up trying to understand the world and ourselves and, entrenched in their defeatist positions, are now focused mainly on collecting and organizing knowledge about particular facts. For the purpose of classifying this knowledge, models and theories are created that no one claims to be true anymore but only “useful”. Therefore, today’s academy performs not scientific functions but library ones. This is undoubtedly due to the ongoing process of deelitization of science and the related decline in the average intelligence of scientists. This is a long-term process that has been going on since the Renaissance but has accelerated significantly over the last few decades. In the 14th century, when universities began to be established rapidly in Europe, we had no more than approx. 20,000 for the continent’s approximately 100 million inhabitants (according to the preserved data) students at all universities together. Today, out of approximately 750 million inhabitants of the old continent, we have well over 20 million university students. Assuming that students are usually the most intelligent people (those most eager for knowledge), this means that the average intelligence of a medieval university abecedarian could have been approximately 3-3.5 standard deviations above the average, i.e. it approached the intelligence of today’s “average” Nobel Prize winner in physics. Today, the average student’s intelligence is not much more than one standard deviation above the mean. This drastic decline in the intellectual potential of students necessarily entails a decline in teaching standards at universities. In the Middle Ages, this standard was teaching and practising logical thinking (or at least “correct associations”), known today as (unfairly ridiculed) scholasticism. A medieval student learning liberal arts (artes liberales) was able to compose music, deliver a clear and transparent speech written according to the principles of the art of rhetoric, refute philosophical theses using subtle, dialectical discourse, and determine the time by the position of the stars in the sky. Currently, students only learn knowledge about particular facts, often detached from practice, arbitrary models and the use of arbitrarily established cognitive schemes (algorithms), which, instead of developing reason and logical thinking in humans, are intended to replace them. The results of scientific investigations are blocked and excluded from “science” if they do not respond to current “social needs” or oppose social ideas about truth. The criterion of rational justification of scientific theses has today been replaced by the so-called consensus of scholars, which is a textbook example of the logical fallacy of consensus gentium. Nicolaus Copernicus, in his work De revolutionibus, wrote about many European scientists that “they are driven to the study of Philosophy for its own sake by the admonitions and the example of others, nevertheless, on account of their stupidity, hold a place among philosophers similar to that of drones among bees.” In the first half of the 19th century, Arthur Schopenhauer, in the Parerga und Paralipomena, sharply criticized the empty erudition and thoughtlessness of university professors. In turn, in the 20th century, Martin Heidegger, in his famous book “What is Called Thinking”, stated that “science does not think”, and in Vorträge und Aufsätze, he sees that Greek science was, in some important respects, much more precise and strict than modern science. Abraham Maslow called modern science “a kind of technology that enables creative actions by uncreative people.” At the same time, the famous writer and visionary Harlan Ellison noted that in our democratic era, “science bends to the will of the masses”.
In this situation, an initiative is necessary today that will restore the elitist character and the proper, rational dimension of science.
Jacobsen: When studying astronomy at the University of Warsaw, what were the standards of academia? How have those changed over time, whether the participants in academic sociopolitics and intellectual life, or the teaching, administrating, and publishing side of it?
Zawisza: I completed my studies at the University of Warsaw in the 1980s, when Poland belonged to the communist camp. At that time, especially after the declaration of martial law by General Jaruzelski’s regime, scientific contacts and access to Western scientific publications were severely limited. For example, when it comes to exact sciences, in Poland, we often used Western books and other publications translated from English into Russian and published in the Soviet Union. In contrast to today, a “student exchange” could only be dreamed of. Nevertheless, the substantive level and quality of teaching at university was higher than today. In the 1980s, higher education, especially mathematics and science studies, was still quite elitist. Today, due to the general increase in the number of places at universities and greater availability of higher education, the average intellectual level of both students and professors has decreased. Even at the beginning of this century, when I was working on discovering what I later called “The Rule of Chance,” I had no great problem discussing at least some parts of my work with professors, especially with older professors. At that time, there were already huge problems with publishing research works discovering new thinking paradigms, but I still received a number of official, very good opinions about my discovery from Polish professors representing various universities (they are now available on my personal website). Today, the very idea of discussing something that goes beyond only one generally accepted paradigm of thinking (or rather: a paradigm that replaces thinking) causes panic among academic lecturers and immediately ends in their mental closure and withdrawal.
Jacobsen: What high-IQ communities are you a member of now?
Zawisza: I am a member of The League of Geniuses, The Enigma High IQ Society and (created ambitiously by Randy Myers) the International League of the Highly Gifted. It’s not much, and it will probably stay that way for now. But in our Academy, there are people who, like Armin Becker or Veronica Palladino, have already joined a dozen or even several dozen high-IQ communities. Most of our members participate in various international (usually elite) high-IQ societies, although this is not a necessary condition for being a member of our Academy. A sufficient (although not necessary) condition is to have unique personal achievements in the scientific and/or creative field to the extent that certifies self-awareness, i.e. developed self-critical thinking. It is difficult to expect people who have probably created some ground-breaking scientific work or achieved something important in another cognitive sphere to be interested in taking intelligence tests, i.e. checking their intellectual potential and therefore checking whether they are able to potentially achieve what they have already achieved. Many people notice that solving a difficult scientific (or thought) problem or creating a new, important theory is the best test of intelligence, i.e. of having high-quality cognitive abilities. As intelligence increases, not only does the speed and efficiency of cognitive processes increase, but their quality also changes. According to my observations, at an intelligence level of five standard deviations above the average, there is the ability not only to associate efficiently but also to think abstractly, i.e. to abstract from associations. The currently used high-range tests usually do not capture this difference between association and thinking. However, if people who want to join our initiative do not yet have clear cognitive achievements, their IQ test results will, of course, be considered.
Jacobsen: What was the lesson in the experience with Archbishop Józef Życiński at the Catholic University of Lublin?
Zawisza: For a doctoral (PhD) seminar in the philosophy of science conducted at the Catholic University of Lublin by Archbishop Prof. Józef Życiński, I joined in the early 2000s with the hope that this generally very good natural philosopher, cosmologist and erudite would be able to understand, accept and support the results of at least some of my investigations, which were already met with interest in the scientific community, but at the same time with fear. In the beginning, my cooperation with the Archbishop was good. The progress in work on the Rule of Chance that I systematically reported at his seminar aroused his serious interest, which resulted in him sending my completed work to Prof. Konrad Rudnicki, then well-known in the scientific world astronomer, cosmologist and philosopher of science. Prof. Rudnicki rated the work very highly, and he was followed by several other Polish professors who clearly positively assessed both the idea and the empirical tests I performed to verify this idea. Then Archbishop Życiński, as well as his friend, later winner of the famous Templeton Prize, Fr. Prof. Michał Heller, began to insist that I send several different articles about this work to various scientific journals, offering them both as reviewers. However, when it turned out that no journal was willing to accept the articles for publication (all of them, including “Nature”, replied after an unreasonably long waiting time that the work should be published by “someone else”), both reverend priests-professors withdrew their support, and they started avoiding contact with me.
I described both this story and the conclusions drawn from it in one of the texts on the website of our Academy. I continued working on the empirical testing of the Rule of Chance in the following years together with my two colleagues from UMCS and the University of Warsaw (Dr. P. Kowalski, K. Modro). All tests strongly confirm the validity of the theory. Last year, the largest Polish publishing house, WAB, published Joanna Łopusińska’s novel “Zderzacz” (“The Collider”), the plot of which is the discovery of the Rule of Chance. The film/ series version of the novel is scheduled for release within the next 3 years.
Jacobsen: What is the overarching goal of The Syncritic Academy? How does this feed downstream into its leadership direction and targeted objectives as an academy?
Zawisza: Our Foundation, called the Syncritic Academy, is, as far as I know, the first social initiative in history (maybe with the exception of the Pythagorean Union that existed 2500 years ago) that aims to overcome social exclusion and discrimination of people who are exceptionally intelligent and innovative/creative and determined preventing the destruction of their cognitive potential and the waste of their work.
With their power to change the known world, exceptionally intelligent and talented people have always aroused fear and the desire to be excluded from the “human herd”. However, in a modern democratic society, focused on “equalizing” opportunities (i.e. usually levelling down), emphasizing “social equality (as above)” and universal access to education and culture, outstanding individuals are particularly undesirable. The members of our Academy are people who, without exception, have experienced, to a greater or lesser extent, discrimination and social exclusion, as well as aggressive and persecutory reactions, including – most often – a persistent attempt to block and keep silent about their works.
The well-known Soviet writer and poet, Vadim Shefner, already in the 1960s wrote a quite appealing but shocking story, A Modest Genius, in which he shows how mediocre and little-changing innovations and inventions are socially promoted, while important, beautiful discoveries and truly groundbreaking works are programmatically unnoticed and wasted, and their authors are pushed to the margins of social life.
There is still a widespread view that the social ostracism faced by exceptionally intelligent and creative people is an inherent part of human history and that this state of affairs is allegedly unchangeable and natural. We do not agree with this view. No society can call itself a modern and humanitarian society, and no rule can claim to be a rule of law if it excludes and destroys the most intelligent individuals and blocks their creative, sometimes revolutionary, and sometimes even epoch-making achievements. We live in times when (especially in the areas of Western civilization) we strive for social inclusiveness and discriminating against people based on gender, age, sexual orientation or ethnic origin is met with unequivocal condemnation. At the same time, however, the same Western communities try not to notice the existence of discrimination and social exclusion due to high intelligence, as written by, among others, Michael Ferguson in his famous article “The Inappropriately Excluded”. Eviatar Zerubavel, an American sociologist dealing with the processes of social denial, silence and exclusion, states in his also well-known book “The Elephant in the Room”: “Science, nominally established for the purpose of producing cognitive progress, turns out to be an extremely conservative field, hard to tolerate innovators”, and he adds: „this very act of social denial is itself denied.”
In this state of affairs, the creation and development of our initiative to publicize this state of affairs and fight against it becomes both a rational and moral necessity. As one of our members, the well-known Dr Claus Volko, has long argued: “Somebody should start a ‘gifted-awareness’ movement to highlight the problems of the highly gifted, similar to the LGBTI movement”.
Jacobsen: What is your Rule of Chance, extending on the basic definition of “even in random events and processes, there is an order and a mathematical formula for it”?
Zawisza: The existence of the Rule of Chance, discovered by me more than twenty years ago, was already predicted by the co-founder of modern science and continuator of classical Greek thought – G.W. Leibniz. This German scientist and philosopher noticed that it is impossible to draw a chaotic arrangement of dots on a piece of paper. Because no matter how much we try to make the arrangement of dots irregular, we can always connect these dots with a line into some shape. A geometric shape is a certain function or relationship, therefore, a rule defining some order. Leibniz generalized this observation by discovering the Principle of Universal All-Union (“The absence of a union is also a union”). I managed to notice and describe the mathematical formula that governs the so-called random distributions of elements in space and time. This formula shows that for purely logical reasons, the simplest proportions are most probable ones. The simplest proportion is the so-called golden proportion (aurea sectio). This rule will allow us to predict things such as the most likely arrangement of the orbits of newly discovered planets, and explains the previously mysterious prevalence of the golden ratio in nature. However, the Rule of Chance also has a much more fundamental meaning. It illustrates the fact that all, even the most “independent” elements and processes of the Universe are stochastically interconnected and that we all form a unity at a basic level with all other beings and with the entire Universe. Therefore, both together and each of us individually, we represent the entire Universe and we are never isolated in It.
Jacobsen: What other high-IQ collectives seem similar to The Syncritic Academy? What is the incentive and invitation for others to join The Syncritic Academy?
Zawisza: Unfortunately, I don’t know any other high-IQ collectives that set similar goals to ours. If such groups appear, we will, of course, be happy to cooperate with them. Today, we invite to our Academy all people who have high cognitive potential, have unique achievements in the field of discovery and/or creativity and who want their skills and work not to be wasted but to serve people. We will fight to provide all such people with material and mental conditions to develop their talent and work, and we will ask them to promote and support our ideas and, if possible, help other members of our Academy in their work.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Krzysztof.
Zawisza: Thank you for your interest in our Academy and for spreading the word about our initiative by interviewing us, Scott. I wish you all the best on your important path to keeping apprised of high-IQ community developments and letting people know about them.
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. Conversation with Krzysztof Zawisza on Syncritic Academy: Founder, Syncritic Academy. December 2023; 12(1). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/zawisza
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2023, December 8). Conversation with Krzysztof Zawisza on Syncritic Academy: Founder, Syncritic Academy. In-Sight Publishing. 12(1).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. Conversation with Krzysztof Zawisza on Syncritic Academy: Founder, Syncritic Academy. In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 1, 2023.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2023. “Conversation with Krzysztof Zawisza on Syncritic Academy: Founder, Syncritic Academy.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 1 (Winter). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/zawisza.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “Conversation with Krzysztof Zawisza on Syncritic Academy: Founder, Syncritic Academy.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 1 (December 2023).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/zawisza.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2023) ‘Conversation with Krzysztof Zawisza on Syncritic Academy: Founder, Syncritic Academy’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(1). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/zawisza>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2023, ‘Conversation with Krzysztof Zawisza on Syncritic Academy: Founder, Syncritic Academy’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 1, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/zawisza>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “Conversation with Krzysztof Zawisza on Syncritic Academy: Founder, Syncritic Academy.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 1, 2023, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/zawisza.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Scott J. Conversation with Krzysztof Zawisza on Syncritic Academy: Founder, Syncritic Academy [Internet]. 2023 Dec; 12(1). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/zawisza.
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Publisher: In-Sight Publishing
Publisher Founding: March 1, 2014
Web Domain: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com
Location: Fort Langley, Township of Langley, British Columbia, Canada
Journal: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal
Journal Founding: August 2, 2012
Frequency: Three (3) Times Per Year
Review Status: Non-Peer-Reviewed
Access: Electronic/Digital & Open Access
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Volume Numbering: 12
Issue Numbering: 1
Section: A
Theme Type: Idea
Theme Premise: “Outliers and Outsiders”
Theme Part: 29
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Individual Publication Date: December 8, 2023
Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2024
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Word Count: 1,364
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International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
Tianxi Yu（余天曦）is a man who’s interested in IQ tests. Yu discusses: the high-IQ societies developing in China; any new ultra-hard tests; numerical stuff; new hobbies; high-IQ societies; building a career; checks and balances; most important positive news; the Chinese high-IQ community; and notable members.
Keywords: Americans, China, Chinese, CPC, Europeans, intelligence, IQ, Mahir Wu, Tianxi Yu.
Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Chinese High-IQ Communities: High-IQ Community Member (4)
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s cover some news for you, personal and professional, how are the high-IQ societies developing in China?
Tianxi Yu: Activity is slowly declining, people don’t care much about IQ tests and related topics anymore, and are more likely to discuss life, entertainment, and do more realistic social communication.
Jacobsen: Have you taken any new ultra-hard tests? If so, how have you done? If not, why not?
Yu: The last submission was Mahir Wu’s CAT2, the only Mahir’s test I hadn’t submitted before. It is one of the toughest spatial tests, and I obtained a score of 30/36 with an IQ=179 SD=15. It’s probably been a long time since I’ve done IQ training, and CAT2 is the only Mahir’s test I haven’t gotten a first on, and I’m currently ranked probably third!
Jacobsen: You tend to perform very well on numerical stuff. Obviously, everyone, in the professional world of psychologists, psychiatrists, psychometrists, and the like, agree on the fact of general intelligence and its higher heritability as one ages or develops. Less smart parents can produce more smart kids; more smart parents can produce less smart kids. However, smart parents are more likely to produce smart kids; and, less smart parents are less likely to produce more smart kids. Environmental factors play a decent role, especially in early development. However, culture can make already high lopsided intelligence even more so – average verbal and genius level numerical intelligence. For instance, a culture with a robust mathematical and numerical education – drilling math sense into kids – can make someone’s innate math and numerical sense and abilities even greater. Did this seem to happen in your case? The stereotype in the West is China has a great intensity on mathematical and numerical education. If true, then it’s just a statistical generalization (generalized fact), not a stereotype.
Yu: I was trained in math when I was young, starting with bead counting and waiting until I was in elementary school to take OU training. I grew up in Hubei province, which is a major education province in China, and the difficulty of the exams is among the highest in the country, so we were arranged to participate in many competitions from a young age, which also made me bored with exam-oriented education. In high school, I did not continue to participate in competition training, but this may be a regrettable choice for me, because I showed talent in mathematics, science and chemistry subjects, especially physics, if I insisted on competitions at that time there may be more choices. But I’m relieved now, after all, I’m doing well now. In China, there is a word called “卷(juan)”, which means vicious competition due to uneven distribution of resources, resulting in people having to spend more to get less in return. At present, the phenomenon of “juan” is getting more and more serious, and ordinary people can only live an ordinary life by working very hard. This may answer your question, China emphasizes all aspects of education, not just numbers, and if graphing had a curriculum, the top of the spatial IQ test would probably be Chinese as well lol.
Jacobsen: What have you been doing in the meantime, personally? Any new hobbies since our last interaction?
Yu: I got into the government service through a tough competition, currently working in a biology lab, and have been busy in the midst of a new job lately. What I’m interested in, is probably reading books, I’ve bought more than twenty books this year, but I’ve only read about ten of them because I’m too busy with my work. Most of the books I’ve read lately are related to politics, economics, and culture, and I’ve been fascinated by their contents. Two of the books that have impressed me the most, “Being Inside” by Xiaohuan Lan and “The Rise and Fall of Nations”, I used to have a misunderstanding of macro and even disdain for it, but now world macro has a deep attraction for me and makes me want to study it.
Jacobsen: What are the updates with the high-IQ societies in which you’re involved, including CatholIQ, Chinese Genius Directory, EsoterIQ Society, Nano Society, World Genius Directory?
Yu: I haven’t followed these societies for a long time, and have previously requested the Chinese Genius Directory and the Esoteric IQ Society to remove my name, but have gotten no response from either. I think there are certain problems with the current IQ societies, such as less attraction, less marketing ability, and no ability to keep people active.
Jacobsen: Professionally, how are you building a career, training, or pursuing some passion now?
Yu: Maybe my answer won’t satisfy you too much. My attitude toward life in the moment is to keep alive without serious ambition, retaining hope for the future, retaining curiosity and the ability to explore the frontiers of the world, and then trying to work at my current position without being laid off. That’s my attitude at the moment. The economic situation now is very bad, and even China has internal and external problems. Let me tell you a set of data, the youth unemployment rate is no longer published, before that it has been maintained at a high level of 20%, and in the Great Depression in the United States in 1927, the rate of unemployment for the whole population was just about 25%. Now China’s employment is very difficult, I took the government office last year, ten years ago, no one to go to the government units, but now with the economic downturn, the number of exams more and more people, the national average enrollment ratio has remained at more than 70:1, many positions are several thousand people in the admission of a person, the first two years there was a 25,000 people competing for a job situation. As for why I test government agencies, because outside the system is worse, even companies like Tencent, Ali, Huawei, also in the big layoffs, many graduates work for a few years, even in the probationary period when they were laid off. It’s not hard to explain why I stayed negative about the passion.
Jacobsen: What can provide some checks and balances for fraud within the high-IQ communities? When it does happen, I am aware. People don’t take kindly to it. Props to the high-IQ community for doing its own clean-up, not every industry or community can say that. It’s about incentives because everyone suffers reputationally if not handled.
Yu: I’ve thought about this too, and it can only be done through very strict offline exams, with increasing the reputation of highly intelligent people, to create a virtuous cycle, and I’m going to go ahead and make the relevant push, won’t reveal too much until then.
Jacobsen: What do you think the most important positive news in the Chinese high-IQ world at the moment?
Yu: Embarrassing, none, hopefully there will be one in the future.
Jacobsen: How could the Chinese high-IQ community integrate better with the international high-IQ community? Traditionally speaking, it’s been dominated by the Americans and the Europeans. I think that’s a relatively fair, objective, and factual statement.
Yu: I think it is difficult for China’s high IQ group to integrate into the international high IQ group. China’s national conditions dictate that it is the people who are more in tune with the social system who are in control of the society, not the smarter people. Chinese society has been like this for the past 5,000 years, emphasizing inheritance, conformity, and unity in order to do great things, and it is very difficult to change in the short term. This set of thinking may be a bit pedantic nowadays, and people have already understood the drawbacks of the previous system, but the good thing is that the CPC is also actively selecting young cadres nowadays, and also reducing resistance for young people, so hopefully, in the next round of the Kampo cycle, the whole of China will be refreshed.
Jacobsen: Who are some new notable members of some of the Chinese high-IQ societies?
Yu: Unfortunately, not many new people are joining us at the moment.
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Chinese High-IQ Communities: High-IQ Community Member (4). December 2023; 12(1). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yu-4
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2023, December 8). Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Chinese High-IQ Communities: High-IQ Community Member (4). In-Sight Publishing. 12(1).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Chinese High-IQ Communities: High-IQ Community Member (4). In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 1, 2023.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2023. “Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Chinese High-IQ Communities: High-IQ Community Member (4).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 1 (Winter). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yu-4.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Chinese High-IQ Communities: High-IQ Community Member (4).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 1 (December 2023).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yu-4.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2023) ‘Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Chinese High-IQ Communities: High-IQ Community Member (4)’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(1). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yu-4>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2023, ‘Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Chinese High-IQ Communities: High-IQ Community Member (4)’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 1, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yu-4>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Chinese High-IQ Communities: High-IQ Community Member (4).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 1, 2023, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yu-4.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Scott J. Conversation with Tianxi Yu (余天曦) on Chinese High-IQ Communities: High-IQ Community Member (4) [Internet]. 2023 Dec; 12(1). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/yu-4.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen, or the author(s), and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors copyright their material, as well, and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publisher: In-Sight Publishing
Publisher Founding: March 1, 2014
Web Domain: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com
Location: Fort Langley, Township of Langley, British Columbia, Canada
Journal: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal
Journal Founding: August 2, 2012
Frequency: Three (3) Times Per Year
Review Status: Non-Peer-Reviewed
Access: Electronic/Digital & Open Access
Fees: None (Free)
Volume Numbering: 12
Issue Numbering: 1
Section: A
Theme Type: Idea
Theme Premise: “Outliers and Outsiders”
Theme Part: 29
Formal Sub-Theme: None
Individual Publication Date: December 8, 2023
Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2024
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Word Count: 1,061
Image Credit: Tomáš Perna.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Abstract
Tomáš Perna is a Member of the World Genius Directory and a GIGA SOCIETY Fellow. Perna discusses:Clay Eva; the traitor of Clay Eva; mathematics; a “deep belief in God”; matrilineal passing of intelligence; an elementary level; Hamlet; consciousness; the explanatory gap for consciousness; defining “consciousness”; the fundamental quandary; personal identity; a common issue in many religions; Jesus Christ the Son of God; and Virtue Ethics.
Keywords: Clay Eva, consciousness, explanatory, God, Hamlet, mathematics, matrilineal, religion, Tomáš Perna, Virtue Ethics.
Conversation with Tomáš Perna on Clay Eva, mathematics, God, and the Explanatory Gap: Member, World Genius Directory (5)
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What were the leadership roles of your grandfather’s brothers in Clay Eva?
Tomáš Perna: Clay Eva was the resistence movement organization, which mapped the important german military positions in the east Moravia in order to prepare the great uprising against nazists there, in an association with organized partisan groups. The informations about the nazi-positions was sent via two radiostations Eva of the resistance leadership staff in Hostýn to London. Both Kubič brothers were its members with narrow connections to partisan groups and parachutists send to Maravia from London. (One of the brothers was the owber of the hotel in Hostýn, where not only the main staff was located, but also the parachutists sent from London found their refuge.) The group was betrayed by one its closest cooperator and both brothers arrested and hardly tortured and finally gassed in concentration camp Mauthausen. After the Second world war, they obtained in memoriam the highest czechoslovak award for bravery.
Jacobsen: Who was the traitor of Clay Eva?
Perna: The teacher František Bednář, called “malý Franta” (the small Francis) and additively by František Šmíd, called “velký Franta” (the great Francis).
Jacobsen: How does mathematics seem like an applied philosophy to you? Most would see it as an abstract exercise.
Perna: If you take the basic trinity of maths: definition – theorem – proof, you should define only what you contextually understand with respect to basis of some process of meaningful putting questions as far as beings sense is considered. Since the problem of the truth is coupled with the being, some theorems should emerge characterizing this fact. And this is the case only then, if they can be considered as being true in the context of the searched truth of being.
Jacobsen: With a “deep belief in God” to make sense of the world, what might be the attributes of God to give sense to the world?
Perna: I think that the same like those being possessed by a man giving a sense to the God. Unlike Him however, you can never know all such your attributes, since you are part of Him and you can never be an attribute of your own (selfdual, expressed methaphorically).
Jacobsen: Is this matrilineal passing of intelligence being supported by modern psychometric research?
Perna: I have not noticed it so far.
Jacobsen: “What is an elementary level, however?” That’s a good question. I ask you.
Perna: As to my understanding, the elementary level is the first recognizable step, on which a temporality is emerged from an eternity.
Jacobsen: What makes Hamlet a genius production?
Perna: The satisfactory intelligent creative force to be able to avoid in our times manifestable, postmodernistic-like forces making the dramatic figures idiotic via reduction. – Many contemporary dramatic figures – many idiots, one Hamlet – one genius.
Jacobsen: Why is there a premature declaration of premature consciousness in artificial intelligence, or computer algorithms, rather than simply a declaration of some forms of artificial intelligence without proper reasoning capacities – like sufficiently complex statistical analysis to dupe people into believing there is a self there?
Perna: That I don´t know. Maybe, the main reason is an emergency of Uebermensch within AI and aNN systems creators minds. Namely, when an AI-system can possess its own self, then the selfs of usual people can be controlled by infallible Uebermenschen, with Ueberselfs, the AI-system-selfcreators. – By the new gods. And, furthermore, when such a new god comes to the investor, he automatically obtain money for creating some sort of economical Uebersystem for him personally.
Jacobsen: Why are neurons the explanatory gap for consciousness?
Perna: Only on the classical level, when you suppose the the computations performed by neurons is so complex that it is not possible to imagine that such a complexity cannot look like a consciousness. The fact that all such computations must be already conscious implies simply that neurons are selfdual with the neural network, what is a contradiction. Nobody knows, who assign the identity to such an logically inconsistent system, when we consciously avoid the religion´s answer.
Jacobsen: Also, how are we defining “consciousness” here? I forgot to ask.
Perna: I have just answered your question, as far as the mentioned neuron level is concerned.
Jacobsen: Is the fundamental quandary experiencing the presence of God, Himself, only in light of belief in God, where God grants the experience if believing and returns the opposite favour if disbelieving? A certain experiential ethical symmetry of God to Man.
Perna: Some kind of such an ethical symmetry I have mentioned in my answer ad 4) already. Since we are not able fully to imagine ourselves such a great symmetry, we cannot decide, whether the so called “disbelieving in God” is simply not a part of it, manifestitng itself in a mutually complementary relation with each other on the human being´s level of the ethical goodness.
Jacobsen: How is personal identity a miracle? Is there a manner in which to provide a functional explanation for it – the how, even though the why is God gifting it?
Perna: I will answer shortly: Paramatmas in our hearts must be mutually different to be the same as the God. This objective differentiations assign a completely original subjective identities to ourselves. Under AI-consciousness controll, we all will be Smiths.
Jacobsen: Is a common issue in many religions a sense of “superiority” and an “owning system”?
Perna: Without a sense of superiority and “owning system”, there were not erring human being trying to become infallible with respect to the God by means of religions of its own.
Jacobsen: How is Jesus Christ the Son of God?
Perna: If “I am” is the truth, then adding to this truth the words “way” and “life” prevents me as the truth from being the God with His “I AM” in this additive sense. Using these additive words, Jesus as a human being permits to be only partially equivalent to the God. With all these words Jesus becomes the Christ and in such connotations I believe that He was the Son of the God. Roughly speaking: I am the truth is less than I am the truth, way and life and it is less than I AM.
Jacobsen: What values in Virtue Ethics matter the most to you?
Perna: The mentioned “ethical symmetry” via Jesus Christ with the God. So the maximal ethical value is “I am” respecting all “I am” for me.
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. Conversation with Tomáš Perna on Clay Eva, mathematics, God, and the Explanatory Gap: Member, World Genius Directory (5). December 2023; 12(1). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/perna-5
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2023, December 8). Conversation with Tomáš Perna on Clay Eva, mathematics, God, and the Explanatory Gap: Member, World Genius Directory (5). In-Sight Publishing. 12(1).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. Conversation with Tomáš Perna on Clay Eva, mathematics, God, and the Explanatory Gap: Member, World Genius Directory (5). In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 1, 2023.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2023. “Conversation with Tomáš Perna on Clay Eva, mathematics, God, and the Explanatory Gap: Member, World Genius Directory (5).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 1 (Winter). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/perna-5.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “Conversation with Tomáš Perna on Clay Eva, mathematics, God, and the Explanatory Gap: Member, World Genius Directory (5).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 1 (December 2023).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/perna-5.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2023) ‘Conversation with Tomáš Perna on Clay Eva, mathematics, God, and the Explanatory Gap: Member, World Genius Directory (5)’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(1). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/perna-5>.
Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2023, ‘Conversation with Tomáš Perna on Clay Eva, mathematics, God, and the Explanatory Gap: Member, World Genius Directory (5)’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 1, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/perna-5>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “Conversation with Tomáš Perna on Clay Eva, mathematics, God, and the Explanatory Gap: Member, World Genius Directory (5).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 1, 2023, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/perna-5.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Scott J. Conversation with Tomáš Perna on Clay Eva, mathematics, God, and the Explanatory Gap: Member, World Genius Directory (5) [Internet]. 2023 Dec; 12(1). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/perna-5.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen, or the author(s), and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors copyright their material, as well, and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Publisher: In-Sight Publishing
Publisher Founding: March 1, 2014
Web Domain: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com
Location: Fort Langley, Township of Langley, British Columbia, Canada
Journal: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal
Journal Founding: August 2, 2012
Frequency: Three (3) Times Per Year
Review Status: Non-Peer-Reviewed
Access: Electronic/Digital & Open Access
Fees: None (Free)
Volume Numbering: 12
Issue Numbering: 1
Section: B
Theme Type: Idea
Theme Premise: “Outliers and Outsiders”
Theme Part: 29
Formal Sub-Theme: None.
Individual Publication Date: December 8, 2023
Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2024
Author(s): Chaunte Cardwell
Author(s) Bio: None.
Word Count: 1,846
Image Credit: None.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369–6885
*Original publication here during July, 2018.*
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Keywords: Advocates for Jehovah’s Witnesses Reform on Blood, blood policy, Chaunte Cardwell, Christian, Jehovah’s Witnesses, medicine, Nashville, Watchtower Society.
Chaunte Cardwell – from Near Death to Freedom
Shortly after I was born, my parents decided to become Jehovah’s Witnesses. My dad was an elder, and everyone in our family pioneered during the summer while I was growing up. I was baptized in 1986 at thirteen years of age, in Ogden, Utah. We were the picture-perfect JW family. Even today, people identify me as Brother Salazar’s daughter.
I became a regular pioneer after getting married in 1991. After two children and a move from Utah to Tennessee, my husband decided he didn’t want to be a JW any longer. Now a former JW, he was a good provider for me and the girls, but worked away from home more than 300 days a year.
Because I was now married to an unbeliever, I received help from several members of our congregation. The kids and I rarely missed a meeting, and I went in the door-to-door work every week. I did what a good JW mother was expected to do, monitoring our entertainment and association, and studying with the kids once a week.
One Saturday afternoon after field service, one of my good JW friends and I took our kids to a park in Nashville. Later, the girls and I spent the night with a JW family, and the next morning we all went to the Sunday meeting. While at the Kingdom Hall, I felt sick and dizzy, so I spent most of the meeting in the mother’s room. While there, another sister nursing her baby thought I might be pregnant, so I took a pregnancy test after the meeting and it turned out to be positive.
That evening while talking on the phone with my JW friend Jenn, my stomach started to act up. So I told her that I needed to use the bathroom, and I would call her back. Once in the bathroom, the pain was unbelievable. I asked my oldest daughter, who was six years old, to call her grandparents.
Her grandmother answered the phone and suspected this was serious. She and my father-in-law dropped everything and drove to our house, picked up the girls and I, and we rode with them to the hospital. At this point my memory becomes fuzzy, as I was in and out of consciousness.
In the hospital I began vomiting, and shortly thereafter my mom and sister arrived. My sister immediately asked where my Durable Power of Attorney (DPA) was, since this was now the standard document that replaced the old blood cards. Since I didn’t think to bring it, she drove to my house and brought it back.
Later, my sister-in-law, a non-JW nurse, showed up at the hospital and did her best to convince me that I needed to take blood. “The kids need you and God does not want you to die”, she said. “No one has to know if you take blood. It will be just between you and me.” But I stubbornly refused.
Finally the hospital staff moved me to another room. The nurse and my mom kept trying to help me get up onto a table. I kept passing out, and the last time I didn’t wake up and soiled myself. I was in shock and my hemoglobin had dropped to 1.7 – the normal range is 12 – 15.5 grams per deciliter.
After a blood test and ultrasound, I was told that I was six weeks along with an ectopic pregnancy. The pregnancy likely occurred in my fallopian tube, which carries eggs from the ovaries to the uterus, rather than the uterus itself. The uterus is made to sustain pregnancy, the fallopian tube cannot. In an ectopic pregnancy, the fertilized egg cannot survive and bursts the fallopian tube as it grows larger. In my case the growing tissue was causing life-threatening bleeding. I had been bleeding internally all day as the rupture worsened.
I remember being half aware of a nurse coming in to get my blood type and a cross match, in case I changed my mind. I woke right up and told her I would not change my mind. The staff was now having trouble finding a doctor who would perform surgery without blood. Everyone had refused, saying I wouldn’t survive without it. All during this time my husband was still working in Canada. He was not able to get a flight home until the next day.
By now I was confined to lying full-time on an inverted table in order to move blood towards my heart. I was in-and-out of consciousness. Elders and members of the congregation were showing up, as well as the Hospital Liaison Committee (HLC). They all did their best to unduly influence me to not take blood. This was good news for my mom and sister, because it helped reinforce in their minds that not taking blood was the right thing to do; it’s what Jehovah wanted me to do.
I did have the good fortune of a pioneer sister who came to see me, although she was careful to make sure that no JW heard our conversation. She asked to see my DPA. I had marked “No fractions.” Whispering in my ear, she suggested I change that. The Watchtower organization now accepted all blood fractions. She convinced me that by accepting blood fractions there was a chance the fractions would build up my blood. So I promptly and privately informed the staff that I would now take blood fractions.
Under this condition, a physician finally agreed to do the surgery. He woke me up and said I would probably not survive the surgery, and to tell my children goodbye. I reminded him that I’d prefer to die now and be with my kids forever in paradise rather than live the short time until Armageddon, and be dead forever. This is what I expected would happen had I accepted whole blood or one of the forbidden components.
I kissed my family goodbye, and prayers were said. I had arrived at the hospital at 8:30 pm and my surgery started at 2:30 am the next morning. I survived the surgery and was placed in a drug induced coma. My husband arrived and said that I was grey and green, and looked like I was dead when he first saw me.
While I was sleeping, my family and the HLC were fighting for a doctor to give me the erythropoietin (EPO) shot. This is normally given to cancer patients. But no one would agree to prescribe it for me, because it takes several days for it to work. In my condition, the odds were that I would likely die before it did any good.
Erythropoietin (EPO) is a hormone produced by the kidney, which promotes the formation of red blood cells by the bone marrow. The EPO stimulates the bone marrow to produce more red blood cells. The resulting rise in red cells increases the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood.
I am unsure how many days passed, but they finally found a family doctor, who would prescribe the EPO. My injections started the day I woke up. I received the shot once a day for three days. I can only imagine how horrible this time was for my family. They are rarely willing to talk about it.
The arguments with my surgeon and unbelieving family also started the day I woke up. My husband did not agree with my decision, but he respected it. Over and over I had to defend my choice, quoting what I would later learn was misinformation coming from Watchtower.
I was finally able to go home. Since my husband had left to go back to work in Canada, sisters from the local congregation brought food and helped with chores. At day seven of my first EPO shot, I woke up as good as new. At my follow-up with the doctor, who prescribed the EPO, he didn’t recognize me. He never thought to use erythropoietin for a need like mine, but he would consider it in the future.
Two weeks later I made it to Sunday meeting. I was a star! I had refused blood and lived. The circuit overseer was visiting and talked about it from the platform. His prayer made me cry, as he was the first to pray for the baby I had lost. Everyone else had forgotten I had just lost a child; they were so focused on the blood issue.
I continued being a good JW and in 2005, four years later, I delivered a healthy baby boy. When he was two years old, I had an epiphany and started to think seriously about whether I would allow any of my children to die if they needed a blood transfusion. That triggered a moment of doubt, and I decided to do my own research online and do it privately.
I googled Watchtower and blood transfusions and that’s where I found the AJWRB website. It proved to be a treasure trove of scientific facts along with good biblical information.
The specific bit of information that broke Watchtower’s hold on me was reading about how JWs in Bulgaria can receive blood without negative consequences. I had once been willing to let my kids die for this rule. But had I been living in Bulgaria, God’s law on blood would somehow not have been applicable for me! How can JW’s in one country accept blood when others couldn’t?
It was also helpful for me to ponder on a post on AJWRB.org, which described blood fractions. The article really simplified it, at least for me, by comparing fractions to all the ingredients of a cake. So Watchtower’s blood policy was in fact like being able to accept all the ingredients of cake, but not the cake.
If this was a law from Jehovah, which made me choose to die and leave my kids motherless, or makes parents fight for their kids to not receive blood even though they may die, shouldn’t it apply to everyone?
I saw way too much human involvement in this. I began looking at other policies and rules from Watchtower. After careful and extensive research, it was obvious to me that many of Watchtower’s policies were man-made, human interpretations. In 2010 I wrote my letter of disassociation. One elder who received it told me he was ignoring my letter and suggested that I just drift away. I am not sure and I don’t care, but I suspect that I have now been disfellowshipped in the congregation where I had nearly died.
Seventeen years later, I still suffer from memory loss as a result of the massive amounts of blood I lost from my ectopic pregnancy and related complications. I can live with that. But there is something I would not be able to accept.
Even back then, I believed I lived so I could help someone else not make the kind of choice I did. Now that you know my story, please do your own personal research. It could save a life—your life, a life of a friend or a child.
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Cardwell C. Chaunte Cardwell – from Near Death to Freedom. December 2023; 12(1). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/chaunte-cardwell
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Cardwell, C. (2023, December 8). Chaunte Cardwell – from Near Death to Freedom. In-Sight Publishing. 12(1).
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): CARDWELL, C. Chaunte Cardwell – from Near Death to Freedom.In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 1, 2023.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Cardwell, Chaunte. 2023. “Chaunte Cardwell – from Near Death to Freedom.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 1 (Winter). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/chaunte-cardwell.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Cardwell, C “Chaunte Cardwell – from Near Death to Freedom.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 1 (December 2023). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/chaunte-cardwell.
Harvard: Cardwell, C. (2023) ‘Chaunte Cardwell – from Near Death to Freedom’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(1). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/chaunte-cardwell>.
Harvard (Australian): Cardwell, C 2023, ‘Chaunte Cardwell – from Near Death to Freedom’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 1, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/chaunte-cardwell.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Cardwell, Chaunte. “Chaunte Cardwell – from Near Death to Freedom.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 1, 2023, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/chaunte-cardwell.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Chaunte C. Chaunte Cardwell – from Near Death to Freedom [Internet]. 2023 Dec; 12(1). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/chaunte-cardwell.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen, or the author(s), and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors copyright their material, as well, and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website):
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/11/30
Nuns — nothing but the purity of virginal self-sacrifice for their Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, unburdened over the decades by the countless and ubiquitous allegations about the depraved activities of Catholic priests. Until now.
For as long as we can remember, the Catholic Church’s priest class has been facing profound accusations of sexual misconduct. I wouldn’t claim to be a moral exemplar. I, like most of you, am just a Canadian citizen with concerns. It is important, however, to point to systems of power, often unquestioned, and ask critical questions.
In 2004, a commission found over 4,000 priests faced accusations of sexual abuse of youth over the last five decades. Perhaps partially as a result, membership and influence of the Catholic Church has been declining in Canada for decades. The most precipitous decline has been between 2001 and 2021, with 12,793,125 Roman Catholics in 2001 at 43.2 percent of the population and then 10,799,070 in 2021 at 29.9 percent.
How will this affect public policy, politics, and so on? The moral stature of the Catholic Church has been devastated internationally with the effects of these crimes, which have traditionally been deliberately hidden. The above declines in the total number of Catholics in Canada have a corresponding problem with acquisition of a new class of nuns. There were 47,000 nuns in Quebec alone in 1961. That declined to less than 6,000 by 2018.
A spokesperson for the Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto has argued that becoming a nun has an attraction of experiencing faith in a way that is “real and that’s robust” for younger women. But this is opining. We have to be realistic. Not only is this class of women declining precipitously; it has encountered a few recent potshots in the media. As Molly Hayes in The Globe and Mail noted, “A 97-year-old nun has been criminally charged in a historical sexual-assault case connected to a notorious residential school in Northern Ontario.” Brett Forester has reported similar stories. Are we witnessing a descent of nuns to rival that of priests?
Many of us believe that churches could be moral exemplars. They could be institutions representative of a philosophy of love and forgiveness. Yet we’re always disappointed, when this ideal is absent. Regular Canadians are not stupid; they’re just busy with getting by the days of the week at work and at home. They know people who have been affected or know of people who have been affected by the crimes of the Catholic Church.
Canada deserves better; the victims deserve better; Catholic clerics deserve better; and, most importantly, the followers of the Catholic Church deserve better. As a non-religious person, I have hope that the Catholic Church can morally renew itself. Proper accounting for a) crimes of priests and nuns against individuals and b) crimes against Indigenous peoples can be the first major, practical step in doing so.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website):
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/11/21
Human rights advocacy can be graded by degrees. Some advocacy is communicated in articles, interviews, donations, and professional work. Still more is committed by people in collectives working for dignity and equality. Sometimes fearless advocates can be awardees and/or lightning rods. One of those people is Narges Mohammadi.
Mohammadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023. She has fought for the equality and dignity of women in Iran. She has been convicted five times, arrested 13 times, and sentenced to 31 years in prison plus 154 lashes. Currently, she is in prison.
Since the Islamic regime took power in Iran in 1979, people have protested against the brutality and oppression of the Iranian morality police and the theocratic system. There can be inflection points. One was the murder of Mahsa Amini in September, 2022. Amini’s murder unleashed the largest political demonstrations since 1979. Twenty thousand protestors were arrested, thousands were injured, and 500 were killed. Demonstrators created the slogan “Zan – Zendegi – Azadi,” meaning “Woman – Life – Freedom.”
Mohammadi has a history of working for gender equality. Her arrests started in 2011 when she spoke out about activists who had been jailed. She then fought against the death penalty. She was re-arrested in 2015 for fighting against the death penalty. As a physics student in the 1990s, she wrote for reformation-oriented publications. She has been involved with the Defenders of Human Rights Center in Tehran, which was founded by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi.
Once in prison, Mohammadi began fighting against the sexualized violence and use of torture against political prisoners in Iranian prisons. In protests in prison, she assumed leadership, expressing solidarity with inmates. Even with strict impositions on communications in a Tehran prison, she smuggled an article out, which was published by the New York Times on the one-year anniversary of Mahsa Amini’s murder. The more such political prisoners continue to be inmates, the more powerful they become.
Mohammadi has engaged in a hunger strike. The reason: Despite Mohammadi suffering from a heart condition, prison guards would not take her to the hospital for treatment unless she wore a headscarf. Seven prisoners joined her, refusing to wear the headscarf out of solidarity.
Mohammadi’s fight continues, with or without the awards.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/01
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Alright, let’s talk about Omicron. It’s way more contagious than the Delta variant, which itself was more contagious than any previous variant. Despite high vaccination rates, like in England where over 90% of those eligible have had at least one dose, they’re still seeing record-breaking numbers of new cases. As of January 1st, 2022, England, for instance, is experiencing the highest daily new case numbers in their history, with figures like 189,000 cases per day in a country of 66 million people. This suggests that a significant portion of the population is currently positive for Omicron.
Now, what makes people somewhat optimistic is that daily deaths in England are currently about 1/1000th of the daily new cases. Similar patterns are seen in other countries where Omicron is surging, like South Africa, France, and Italy. This gives hope that Omicron may not be as lethal as previous variants. However, we need to remember that deaths are a lagging indicator, so the true impact on mortality from the current surge is yet to be seen.
Globally, the number of cases has been shattering records. Just two days ago, the world doubled its previous record for most new cases in a day. This increase is staggering, and we might even see these numbers triple.
Despite the alarming rise in cases, there’s a noticeable fatigue and defiance toward COVID-19. For example, large events are still happening in the US with minimal masking, and New Year’s celebrations went ahead, albeit with some restrictions.
So far, COVID-19 has killed about a quarter of the number of people who died in World War II and maybe a third to a quarter of those who died from the Spanish flu. With over 9.2 billion vaccine doses administered globally, we hoped to be closer to achieving herd immunity, but Omicron is challenging that.
Regarding Omicron’s pronunciation, some people prefer ‘AH-muh-kraan,’ but, well, I’m not too fussed about that.
If Omicron’s cases keep spiking and don’t decline sharply, COVID-19 could become the deadliest event since World War II. However, in terms of percentage mortality, it’s less deadly than both World War II and the Spanish flu, considering the global population has more than doubled since then. But with Omicron’s spread, we could see a significant increase in the total number of cases and, potentially, deaths. It’s going to be a tense few weeks, maybe longer.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/01
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: So, let’s talk about holidays. The ones that nobody seems to object to, particularly those summer-ish holidays in the US, are quite likable. You have Memorial Day towards the end of May, the Fourth of July, and Labor Day at the beginning of September. Memorial Day and Labor Day kind of bookend the summer, with Memorial Day being more favorable because Labor Day signals the end of summer and a return to school.
In the US, we also have Columbus Day. From what I’ve read, it seems like Columbus Day was questionable from the start. The more we learn about Columbus – his involvement in slavery, his cruelty, and his dismissal by the Queen of Spain – the less admirable he seems. The holiday is gradually being replaced by Indigenous People’s Day in some places. It’s not much of a holiday these days, as you don’t usually get the day off. All in all, it’s not a great holiday.
Halloween, though, is a great holiday. When I lived in Colorado, with its wintry winters, Halloween was like the last chance to socialize before everyone hunkered down for the winter. It’s a low-expectation holiday – you’re not trying to impress anyone, just having fun.
Easter is more of a medium holiday, mostly for kids. It’s a bit grim, centering around the death and resurrection of Jesus, but it’s mainly about candy and egg hunts for the little ones.
As for Jewish holidays, Hanukkah is always enjoyable, especially for kids with the tradition of gifts over eight nights. Yom Kippur, though, is more solemn. It’s a day of fasting and atonement, reflecting on one’s actions over the past year. Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, comes 10 days before Yom Kippur and is a time for preparing to atone. It’s okay in terms of food. Passover is akin to the Jewish Easter. I think Jesus’ last supper was a Passover dinner. I made a silly joke on Twitter – if the Romans had executed people with wedgies instead of crucifixion, religious symbols might be very different.
Ramadan is another holiday I’m not too familiar with, but it involves fasting during the day and eating well at night, I believe.
In America, Super Bowl Sunday is practically a secular holiday. I’ve had mixed feelings about it. The food is supposed to be a highlight, but it’s often not as amazing as you’d hope. I remember the Jimmy Kimmel Super Bowl parties being fun but also a bit stressful with celebrities around.
To wrap this up, if you can, it’s not a bad idea to work on the less enjoyable holidays. At least you’re getting paid and have an excuse not to participate in the festivities.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/01
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Alright, some holidays are definitely more enjoyable than others. Take the winter holidays, for example: New Year’s, Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa. Christmas, at least, is based on a historic event, the birth of Jesus. However, most historical scholars, to the extent they acknowledge Jesus’ existence, agree he wasn’t born on December 25th. It seems that Christmas was established to coincide with, or perhaps even overtake, the various pagan winter festivals. We have these winter celebrations because, frankly, winter can be bleak – it’s dark, cold, and people often feel down. Celebrating around the winter solstice, when things are at their bleakest, makes sense. We indulge in drinking, eating sugary treats, and giving gifts to lift our spirits.
New Year’s, however, can be a bit of a downer. There’s the pressure of figuring out where to go, especially if you have a date, or feeling left out if you don’t. Prices for restaurants and events are hiked up for the occasion, akin to the inflation we see on Valentine’s Day – another holiday where you’re hit with increased costs for flowers and dining out.
I used to enjoy working on New Year’s Eve when I worked in bars. It provided me with a place to be, surrounded by people having fun, immersing myself in the festive atmosphere. I got a kick out of catching people with fake IDs – one New Year’s, I think I caught about 15 trying to sneak into my bar. It was a good distraction, especially during the years when I didn’t have a girlfriend; it gave me something to do.
So, that covers the less appealing holidays. But what about the more enjoyable ones?
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/12/29
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: I agree with the notion that everything, whether it has evolved naturally or been developed intentionally, represents an ordering of the world.
There was a significant period in human history, which could be termed the biblical era, where humans were perceived as distinct and superior to the rest of creation. Prior to this era, it’s plausible that humans, to the extent that they conceptualized themselves, saw themselves as merely another part of the animal kingdom, not exalted in any way. This perspective is suggested by cave paintings and other ancient artifacts, indicating that early humans viewed themselves as integrated into the natural world, without a distinct hierarchy. Then, as civilization progressed, there emerged a belief that humans were somehow divinely appointed as rulers over nature. However, since the Renaissance and the advent of scientific discovery, we’ve been gradually realizing that biologically, we’re not fundamentally different from other animals. Would you agree with that assessment?
Regarding Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous quote about the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice, it can be argued that every form of order is a form of information processing, exploiting regularities in the environment. Thus, the arc of the information processing universe is bending toward AI or increasingly sophisticated forms of information processing. Although not directly related, it’s interesting to note that since we started discussing these topics eight years ago, AI has become mainstream. It reminds me of how interracial couples have become widely accepted in culture, with only fringe opposition. Similarly, AI is now a common selling point for products, though many people, including myself, only have a semi-clear understanding of it. AI used to be associated with either apocalyptic scenarios or robotic companions, but now it’s marketed as an advanced technology capable of sophisticated algorithms and understanding customer preferences.
Let’s shift gears from this tangent.
It’s worth mentioning the different time scales of evolution and innovation. Initially, there were billions of years with no life, followed by the emergence of life on Earth about four billion years ago, starting with simple organisms that didn’t do much. This period of slow evolution lasted for billions of years. Then, about 650 million years ago, evolution accelerated with the advent of animals and plants, leading to a rapid increase in species competition and diversity. The arrival of humans marked a significant increase in the speed of innovation. So, we have these epochs: no life, simple life, rapid evolutionary life, and the human era. Now, we might be entering a fifth era dominated by AI and machine learning, which could further accelerate these processes. Would you say that’s a reasonable framework?
One naive argument I tend to make, as I am admittedly naive in this area, is that the technology behind machine learning processes information faster than humans do. We still only have suggestions about how humans physically create thoughts and memories. In our discussions, I think we’ve agreed that much of it happens in the dendrites, where constant rewiring stores information. But it’s not just rewiring; before that, there’s reweighting of brain circuits, where some neural pathways are strengthened and others weakened. This ‘soft learning’ eventually becomes ‘hardwired’ as dendritic activity solidifies effective thought patterns on a micro-level. Does that sound like a reasonable argument?
However, while this process in the human brain isn’t slow, it’s certainly slower than what machine learning can achieve. Then again, there’s the issue that humans are generalists, while machine learning, at this point, requires specific programming for specific tasks. The specificity allows the harnessing of the power of machine learning, which is not yet generalistic in nature. Take Watson on Jeopardy, for instance. It doesn’t understand the questions; it’s merely a probability engine. Watson’s ‘knowledge’ that Tycho Brahe was associated with Prague is purely probabilistic, not understanding. It’s an association engine, much like we are, but we have such a rich network of associations that it feels like consciousness.
Machine learning is incredibly fast and powerful once it’s adapted for a specific task, like playing Go. The initial programming, which includes the rules and objectives, is done by humans. After that, machine learning rapidly excels, becoming the best at that specific task. The future development of machine learning will involve less human input in setting up the task, allowing AI to frame its own challenges. A small example of this evolution is seen in Google Translate. It’s suspected to operate as a massive AI association engine across numerous languages and phrases, utilizing a kind of meta-language. This meta-language acts as a central nexus for concepts like ‘love,’ where it understands how this concept interrelates with other words in various languages. So, while some translations are direct and hardwired, more complex phrases might pass through this central associative nexus. This mechanism in Google Translate, acting as an intermediary meta-language, is a step towards a truer AI that can frame its own questions and develop expertise. Does that make sense?
I agree with that, and the term that comes to mind is ‘wherewithal.’ Before the existence of DNA and RNA, there wasn’t a highly efficient mechanism for passing on information to facilitate reproduction. Theories about what preceded DNA and RNA suggest that in certain environments, like specific silts, there were chemical conditions conducive to forming membranes, which are essential for cell structures. The formation of these proto-cells and the inclusion of proto-genetic material could lead to rudimentary reproduction systems, but it was a slow process due to the lack of sufficient wherewithal. However, once a genetic system was established, gene-based evolution could occur, marking a significant step forward.
The transition from apes to humans, or proto-apes, represents another phase change. When evolutionary glitches began producing creatures with additional brain matter, these animals fared better due to their increased behavioral flexibility, supported by the wherewithal for more complex brain functions. This led to a gradient favoring more brain development.
In the context of AI, there’s a similar phase change. Remember the computers of the 80s and 90s? They lacked the wherewithal for advanced functions. Most computers still don’t possess it, but we’re beginning to see AI systems that are just starting to have the necessary capabilities. Through intentional design and sheer capacity increase, we’re moving towards a significant shift. You can’t just link thousands of old-school computers and expect consciousness to emerge. But if you design computers with AI in mind and increase their processing capacity, we might see phase changes that push these systems towards becoming generalists, capable of framing their own questions and driving their own development, much like humans, but more powerful. Did that come across semi-clearly?
To achieve AI with human-like capabilities, it’s not just about flexible AI programming; there also needs to be a vast amount of circuitry involved.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/12/29
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Before we start, I want to clarify that my understanding of AI and machine learning is quite basic, as I’ve never taken a formal course in these subjects. However, as we discussed last time, eight years ago AI wasn’t a common term in most people’s vocabulary, though it has now become a significant part of the tech marketing sphere. Products are often marketed as having AI, which seems to be more of a selling point than an accurate description. ‘Machine learning’ might be a more precise term for what these AI products actually do.
When we try to define AI, it might be more useful to consider machine learning, which essentially involves circuits with feedback mechanisms. This means that circuitry or decision trees leading to better outcomes can be tuned to receive more traffic, right? The idea is that successful circuitry is reinforced while unsuccessful circuitry is suppressed.
The core technology behind a machine’s ability to improve its performance involves running simulations repeatedly so that the circuits can be refined.
To lay the groundwork for our discussion, let’s recall our previous conversations about the brain and neuroscience. The brain acts as a predictor and a preparer. Its job is to anticipate what’s going to happen and position the organism it belongs to for optimal response. The brain generates various possible outcomes and aims to prepare you in the best way possible. There are different strategies it might employ, like a high-risk, high-reward approach, where, based on the brain’s model, there might be a 20 percent chance of a significant payoff. A more conservative brain, however, might steer you away from risky situations in favor of safer alternatives.
All these predictions and decisions are grounded in the brain’s understanding of you and the world. Essentially, we are evolved to survive and improve our circumstances. This includes basic survival instincts and, in some cases, altruistic behaviors towards kin. The brain positions us accordingly, like triggering adrenaline for fight or flight responses.
Because the brain has what, about 10 to the 10th neurons, I think? And each neuron, on average, has around 10,000 dendrites, so that’s fairly complex. It’s not impossibly complex, though, especially when you consider that we’re starting to see circuits with a number of bits that are roughly equivalent to our neuron count. We don’t fully understand the information capacity of neurons to make exact comparisons, but at these magnitudes, it seems feasible that we could manufacture devices with similar complexities. I’m not sure if the focus is currently on creating conscious machinery, but if it were, and we knew how, we probably have the technological means to do it, in terms of assembling enough circuits.
From what we’ve learned through machine learning, seeing how neurons and circuits feed back on each other, it doesn’t seem technologically unfeasible to eventually, maybe even within decades, build machines that think in ways similar to us.
It would certainly be beneficial to have a mathematical model of consciousness and the mind. Even without such a theory, it’s possible to build machines that exhibit consciousness through reasonable guesses and emulation. If you have enough ‘as if it were in a brain’ components operating at different scales, it’s plausible. You can’t make three circuits conscious, but three billion circuits connected in a certain way might appear to process information as if they were conscious. If the ‘as if’ is convincing enough, you could argue they’re probably conscious. But let’s be clear: nothing being sold as AI or machine learning right now is conscious. Machine learning involves networks and circuits that can be adjusted based on repeated experiences in similar situations – that’s the essence of what it is currently.
As for AI, the term is a bit muddled because different groups – science fiction writers, futurists, engineers, computer scientists, and advertising agencies – all have their own interpretations. When it comes to defining AI, it really depends on which group’s understanding you’re referencing. But two things are particularly amazing: one, the fact that we’ve managed to create these networks of circuits capable of tuning themselves through feedback, which is mathematically straightforward but astounding in its simplicity and resemblance to the thought process. And there’s that quote, attributed to Einstein – real or not – about the universe being understandable. Then there’s another one about the effectiveness of mathematics in understanding the universe, which is also quite profound.
The concept that mathematics is remarkably effective in describing the universe has always been considered somewhat miraculous. Similarly, it’s a smaller but still significant wonder that simple circuits and their interconnections form the basis for learning capabilities. This is the first miraculous aspect.
The second miraculous aspect is consciousness itself. The rich information processing and association among specialized subsystems in the brain result in the sensation of existing in the world as conscious beings. Consciousness can be seen as a kind of technological marvel, an evolved technology. Our brains have developed to allow us to experience being in the world as ourselves.
Discussions about AI, depending on who is leading them, often blur these two marvels. They mix the small miracle of feedback circuits with the more ambitious hope of achieving the larger miracle of consciousness from these simpler foundations. In my opinion, this leap from simple circuitry to consciousness will likely happen reasonably soon.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/12/27
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Alright, in our previous discussion, we touched upon the concept of the best of all possible worlds, leading to the idea of alternative worlds. Imagine worlds where dinosaurs survived and built civilizations, or universes only a tenth of our size. The scope of these differences varies widely. However, when discussing possible alternate worlds, one can confidently speak of those shaped by different quantum events. For instance, considering a world where Lincoln wasn’t assassinated necessitates a specific causal framework. An easy alternate scenario would involve John Wilkes Booth and a Schrödinger’s cat-style decision based on a quantum event, which clearly wasn’t the actual case. Therefore, imagining a world where Lincoln survives isn’t straightforward.
Extending this to larger differences, like a universe only a tenth our size, raises further complications about the feasibility of such worlds.
Moving on to a different topic, we previously explored seeking evidence that the universe is older than its apparent age of 13.8 billion years. Another aspect to consider is the universe’s arrangement. It’s similar to the concept of random walks in probability. Take a drunkard’s random staggering: it’s extremely unlikely for them to end up eight miles from the bar in a straight line after two hours. Typically, the distance covered is proportional to the square root of time elapsed.
In informational cosmology (IC), the universe’s size correlates with its information content. However, the current structure of the universe, such as its gravitational flatness and the balance between being an open or closed system, seems too intricate for its supposed age. The universe’s organization, including the distribution of galaxies, suggests a need for precise cosmic events. This level of orderliness may be improbable in just 14 billion years but more plausible in a universe that has been accumulating information in a non-linear, random walk manner. The big bang model implies a steady information accumulation, akin to the unlikely scenario of the drunk walking straight. A more probable scenario is an older universe that has gathered 14 billion light-years’ worth of information over a much longer period. This perspective might offer another avenue to argue for an older universe, although proving it might be more challenging than, say, assessing the percentage of gold in the universe.
Alright, wrapping that up, I have one more point to discuss. Recently, while listening to comedy radio in the car, I came across a discussion about a quote from Colin Quinn. It wasn’t related to our earlier conversations, but it did bring to mind the classic jocks versus nerds debate. Quinn mentioned that comedians often play the role of outsiders or the so-called ‘losers’ – those who don’t typically win over the girl. This resonates with the notion that many comedians adopt personas shaped by rough experiences or a sense of not fitting into the ‘cool jock’ stereotype. This perspective aligns with our previous argument about the dynamic between jocks and nerds: jocks are well-adjusted to their environment and don’t necessarily need to innovate, whereas nerds, often feeling out of place, are compelled to think creatively to adapt.
A talented comedian, in this context, is someone who brings novel perspectives to everyday observations. Then, you have comedians like Dane Cook, who might alienate some audiences due to their more abrasive, ‘bro’ style, as opposed to the more relatable, ‘loser’ type of comedian. It seems that in the comedy world, especially among those who truly appreciate the art, authenticity is key. Audiences tend to favor comedians who stand apart from conventional norms, offering unique and thoughtful insights into the world, a trait not commonly found in the typical ‘bro’ comedian.
On another note, having listened to numerous comedians – thanks to Carol’s satellite radio in her old car I’ve been driving – I’ve noticed that most comedians don’t exhibit a commanding or traditionally masculine voice. Joe Rogan, for instance, does have that commanding, masculine tone, but he has somewhat diverged from pure comedy to a more assertive, opinionated role. A similar case could be made for Adam Carolla, who maintains his humor while embodying a more traditionally masculine demeanor. However, most male comedians tend to present themselves in a manner that’s slightly less assertive. This got me thinking: perhaps there’s a comfortable niche both for comedians and their audience in this approach. It seems we prefer our comedians to not embody the alpha male archetype; rather, we lean towards those who appear as the ‘betas’ – individuals who rely on their wit and intelligence to navigate and interpret the world.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/12/19
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Here’s a thought: existence is a characteristic of entities that are real, which makes perfect sense. So, when we say the universe exists, we’re grounding it in statistical logic. This is a foundational aspect of informational cosmology. Within this framework, I had an insight…
Rick Rosner: In recent months, I’ve noticed a few things about informational cosmology (IC) versus the real world. We’ve discussed how the most verifiable aspect of IC might be its suggestion that the universe is much older than it appears. If we’ve correctly understood IC, despite lacking a substantial mathematical framework, the idea is that the universe’s age extends beyond its apparent Big Bang origin. If we find objects older than 14 billion years, it would strongly suggest that the universe is older than it seems. I believe I shared an article with you about this.
One area to examine is the creation of heavy elements, those heavier than iron. Normal fusion processes in stars can create elements up to iron. Typically, stars fuse hydrogen into helium, but as they age and hydrogen depletes, they start fusing helium into heavier elements. This leads to the formation of red giants. However, fusion stops at iron, as further fusion would consume more energy than it releases.
Iron is relatively low on the elemental list, I think in the 20s by atomic number, but naturally occurring elements extend up to uranium, which is atomic number 92. So, there’s a significant number of elements that need to be accounted for. The prevailing theory is that these heavier elements form in supernova explosions. When a star’s energy is exhausted and fusion ceases, the star collapses, leading to an explosion where heavy elements are created. However, calculations suggest that supernovas alone can’t account for the abundance of heavy elements. Another theory involves neutron stars colliding, but even that doesn’t seem to suffice.
I propose that if the universe is much older than its perceived age from the Big Bang, then there’s been ample time for these rare events to produce all the heavy elements we observe. In a significantly older universe, processes that destroy or erode celestial bodies also occur, preventing the universe from becoming overly saturated with black holes or heavy elements. In such an ancient universe, there would be enough time for the formation of heavy elements, dark matter, and evidence of colossal events like star collapses or collisions.
In the early universe, we wouldn’t expect to find much of these elements due to the lack of time for their formation. If we can’t reasonably explain the abundance of heavy elements like gold, it might indicate that the universe is older than it appears.
A theory without testable predictions is weak, as per the history and philosophy of science. A good theory should be verifiable; otherwise, it’s just conjecture. In our case, although not fully developed, a potential area for validation is searching for objects older than 13.8 billion years.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/12/11
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I find the concept of intergenerational relationships and ideas quite appealing, as most of my acquaintances are of your age or older. For you, what does it mean to have influences from one, two, or even three generations prior, whether in intellectual terms or familial connections?
Rick Rosner: My initial reaction to this is skepticism towards the often-used phrase ‘the world we’re leaving for our children and grandchildren.’ I believe that individuals and entities 50 to 100 years from now will be vastly different from us. Another thought I have, which might be a bit too focused on rapid change, is that things might evolve quicker than anticipated. As we discussed earlier, I could become a grandfather in a few years, but not to a half-robot baby. Yet, when this child reaches 20 and I’m in my 80s, they might possess technological enhancements aiding their cognitive processes. The technology available to them will be remarkably advanced compared to what we have today, potentially making them far smarter than us. It’s uncertain how this will unfold. I hope the technology will significantly enhance our capabilities, but that remains to be seen.
This hypothetical child will also face the repercussions of climate change, which is what politicians refer to when they talk about the legacy we leave for future generations. In 20 years, if I’m still around, I might become as burdensome to my children as my surviving mother and mother-in-law are to us now. Although I wish it won’t be the case. Carol, who has many older friends, knows some in their 80s who are still mentally sharp and not troublesome. However, most older individuals I know are quite bothersome. Harrison Ford, who is about to turn 80, seems to be an exception, maintaining functionality, especially for a hefty film fee.
So, when I think of grandchildren, I think about the distinct world they will inherit, a world that I assume will make them quite different from previous generations, though perhaps not as drastically as I once believed. In 20 years, we’re unlikely to see the science fiction scenario of people genetically modified into dinosaurs, as some predict. What are your thoughts on future generations?
Jacobsen: Most of my friends, either newly retired or long retired, have predominantly been women. There’s a certain difference in perspective here, as many of them are mothers, grandmothers, or even great-grandmothers. My views are shaped by this. My generation, including myself, are referred to as “digital natives.” This term, meant to describe those immersed in screen time, doesn’t really resonate with me. Academic and cultural social terminology often falls short in being descriptive or concrete enough to truly capture the essence of being a digital native. What does it even mean?
Rosner: Indeed, the term ‘digital native’ suggests certain characteristics – frequent social media posting, constant phone checking – but it fails to provide deeper insight or instruction beyond that general impression.
Jacobsen: The inputs are increasingly immersive – visual, auditory, kinesthetic, tactile – and these are the aspects often discussed in relation to digital natives. However, a more accurate term might be digital immersion, which is evolving into digital integration for future generations. As Dr. Evangelos Katsioulis, whom I interviewed, stated, ‘there is no limit to the integration’ between human-created technology and naturally evolved technology, a viewpoint I share.
Rosner: You’re referring to Evangelos Katsioulis, the individual reputed to have the highest IQ? I concur with his opinion. Between the three of us, we should have a good grasp on this topic, although it’s important to remember that it’s just IQ.
Jacobsen: Organizing a discussion between you two, with me moderating, would be intriguing, considering your experience interviewing others in that community.
Rosner: Regarding digital interactions, my initial thought is that we’re somewhat shortchanged. I, for instance, devote hours daily to Twitter and have tweeted around 60,000 times. This equates to the length of a substantial book. I once received a Keurig coffee maker, possibly due to my influence on Twitter, though my wife believes it was just a random distribution. This output of words, equivalent to numerous books, is given freely with minimal compensation beyond gaining insights from others’ tweets, like learning appropriate social conduct.
But this is minor compensation for countless hours of unpaid work. Future generations, with their deeper integration with technology, will gain actual capabilities. Currently, we can instantly access basic answers to nearly any question through Google, a significant leap from the past when information was limited to library visits or encyclopedias. This has broadened the range of questions we ask, though our reading habits have become more superficial.
Our current technology allows for an explosion in our questioning skills, which is beneficial. However, compared to future technologies, our gains seem modest. Current cognitive science suggests the brain’s primary function is to prepare us physically for anticipated future events, making it a prediction tool. Future generations, closely integrated with technology, will be superior predictors, possessing more information for analysis and decision-making. Our technology barely assists us in this regard, even though we heavily rely on it. This seems like a fitting point to pause.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/12/10
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What are some common ruts in science fiction?
Rick Rosner: Discussing the usual pitfalls in science fiction, one can find a plethora of tropes online, notably on TV Tropes, which serves as a kind of encyclopedia for clichés in TV shows, movies, and books. It’s an excellent starting point for exploring overused themes. For instance, the zombie theme has been excessively used. As for the typical mistakes about the future in science fiction, there are a few to note. For example, faster-than-light travel, although a convenient plot device, isn’t realistically feasible. Presently, humanity would struggle to reach a star like Alpha Centauri, only four light-years away, in under 35 years, even if we devoted all our resources. This distance is often trivialized in science fiction, like in the Dune series or Star Wars, where warp drives make interstellar travel seem effortless.
In series like Alien, however, characters spend years in cryonics suspension to traverse the stars, which might be closer to reality. Time travel, another common theme, seems to be an impossibility. A significant oversight in science fiction is portraying humans as the future’s masters, appearing human. The original Star Trek series exemplifies this, though it later diversified its characters. Another error is the assumption of rapid technological progress; in reality, most science fiction predictions take much longer to materialize. The expectation of an apocalyptic event that regresses civilization to the 1800s or earlier, like a zombie apocalypse, often indicates a lack of creativity in envisioning the future.
Regarding my recent trip to Florence, Italy, it influenced my thoughts about the future. While life there seems timeless and appealing, it’s important to remember it’s a tourist’s view. Crafting a complete picture of the future is challenging, and it’s easy to fall into mistakes due to ignorance, laziness, or lack of imagination.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/12/08
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Go ahead.
Rick Rosner: You asked about the future of comedy. We’ve talked about this before. Since I’ve been driving my wife’s car with Sirius XM, which has several comedy channels, I’ve been listening to nothing but comedy bits. The difference between comedy now and a hundred years ago is that we’ve heard thousands of jokes, while people back then had heard just a few hundred. We’re familiar with the tropes. Classic comedy, like from Stiller and Meara or Milton Berle, can be boring because we’ve heard it all before.
There’s also this really messed-up, beyond-comedy type that comedians use to entertain other comedians. It’s more perverse and fucked up, catering to those who are jaded by their profession. The big data aspect is that we’re all big data people now regarding entertainment. We’re familiar with it, and basic forms of entertainment can bore and frustrate us. For instance, network TV shows are simplistic and appealing to certain demographics, like older people or those who can’t afford cable. CBS, for example, is the old person network. Their shows follow well-established formulas, like murder investigations in CSI or NCIS, which are easily understood by older viewers.
In contrast, streaming shows assume a high level of knowledge and sophistication. They don’t explain things to viewers. Watching them requires a trained eye, like following the action in a superhero movie. Comedy, like all entertainment, will continue to assume a high level of knowledge and sophistication. The most profound comedic insights come from jokes that reveal basic truths in a novel way.
Good comedy routines are similar to the reading comprehension section on the SAT. They argue a point and expect the audience to understand the style of argument. For example, a comedian talked about the awkwardness of performing in front of their parents and ended with a joke about a queef, revealing a deeper truth about parents’ awareness of taboo subjects.
We can expect comedy to continue revealing knowledge, especially taboo knowledge. As we move into the future, comedy will evolve alongside information processing. It’ll be powerful, hilarious, and maybe inscrutable to us but understandable to the big data-augmented folks of the future. The future will continue to be filthy and foolish, contrary to sanitized versions of the future like in Star Trek and Star Wars. The end.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the future of the human model, and what do you mean by that?
Rick Rosner: There’s this saying, “The measure of a man is man,” which I suppose means that all our systems of judgment are grounded within a human framework. Our perceptions of good, bad, or compelling are based on what is relevant or significant to humans. Take dogs, for instance. I have a couple of dogs, and you’ve had dogs too. To them, about 99% of what goes on with humans is incomprehensible, and honestly, we don’t really mind. It doesn’t affect us that dogs can’t grasp the complexities of human actions beyond the basics like feeding, sleeping, and walking.
Our entire civilization, with its thousands of years of development, is entrenched in human-centric systems. Whatever comes next, whatever supplants us, will likely continue to use human models for a wide array of concepts – emotions, economics, conflict, friendship, partnership, and maybe even romance, at least initially. This is because the human experience offers a rich, well-established set of working dynamics. It’s not as if robots will suddenly build their own civilization based on robotic standards.
Moreover, the evolving civilization, which includes humans, augmented humans, and various AIs ranging from simple, non-conscious systems like a refrigerator ordering groceries to fully conscious AIs, will be heavily influenced by human history. So, for hundreds of years, I believe the human template will continue to dominate. That’s my take on that topic.
Okay.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/12/07
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Things like augmented humans in increasingly large numbers are becoming more common. One possibility is that with increasing lifespan and advancements in medicine, as well as several other factors like people living virtually, San Junipero style, population growth will likely slow down, maybe even stop. The total number of humans living traditionally may even gradually decline. On the other hand, the pleasures of being human have increased significantly since the 1970s – entertainment, food, and things are getting cheaper, which could work against the reduction in population. As technology gets more powerful, it’ll probably clean up most of the problems of climate change within this century and then overtake them.
It still seems a reasonable bet that the population growth of humans living as humans will continue to slow and will probably reach zero at some point. Right now, we’re just about at eight billion humans, and a hundred years from now, I guess we’ll be somewhere between 10 and 14 billion. We won’t keep doubling. Two hundred years from now, maybe that same range or maybe less.
Given how powerful technology will be 200 years from now, there will likely be entities moving back and forth between physical bodies and virtual living. The overall effect, I think, will be a world that has room for all the people and other conscious beings in it, which you could call the emptying world. The things you need to live in whatever form will be cheap enough that you can live a basic, pleasurable life without working too hard. The strain on the environment should be less, with a fairly steady population plus a bunch of technology, meaning we’re not messing up the world as much as we are now. If it turns out we’re only at 10 billion humans 200 years from now, there will be a lot of stuff for those humans. Manufacturing will be super powerful.
My wife and I have started collecting micro mosaics, and there’s an established market where they go for a certain amount of money. In a world with plenty of ways to live besides in a fleshy body, plus increasingly powerful tech, there should be a lot of stuff available for those who choose to live in the world in the coming centuries.
Now, people who want to live as humans should be able to live pretty decent lives, lives that are nicer than what not everyone has now. Not everyone can live in Florence or Paris, but with all the tech and a stable population, there should be enough great stuff to go around so that the world is nice 200 years from now, with less poverty and strife than now. Of course, people have been predicting this sort of thing for probably centuries. For 100 years, people have predicted that the workweek will shorten thanks to increased productivity. Productivity has increased, but we keep finding work to fill work weeks. It’s possible we’ll find new forms of strife to replace the forms of strife that tech will alleviate.
Despite that, I still picture a world 200 years from now that’s nice for people who want to continue to live as humans or who want to live as humans part of the time, and also a world that’s nice for those who want to live artificially and virtually. There might be disasters, like the virtual world getting wiped out in virtual wars, but I think it’s a historical trend that life keeps getting nicer. It’s probably better to live now as a middle-class person in a developed country than to be a king in the 17th century. I think this trend of life getting nicer will largely continue. The end.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Or at least for most of our lives. A vast majority of people will try to avoid old age in one way or another, but the pleasures of human life, up until around age 60 or 65, will still be embraced by many. Anyway, have you ever taken a physics class where you had to diagram all the forces acting on a box?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Sure.
Rosner: Like one attached to a pulley, sliding across a flat surface?
Jacobsen: Not that specific experiment, no.
Rosner: Ok, it’s like first-year physics. You’ve got frictional resistance and the weight of the box exerting a downward force. Then there’s the normal force, which I forget the exact term for, but it’s the force exerted by the table on the box, keeping it from falling through. You have to diagram all these forces and then predict what will happen to the box. So, there’s a lot going on, and in the future, we can’t predict exactly what will happen; we can only discuss some of the forces.
One such force is climate change, which will displace people and may lead to strife or even wars. Another is political instability, with people being influenced by new forms of media, like the rise of anti-democratic forces. In America, for example, it seems an unprecedented number of people are becoming increasingly irrational. Several tens of millions, you could argue, are acting irrationally due to forces that encourage such behavior. And it’s not just in America, although it’s most apparent here.
There are various political forces at play. Look at China, urbanizing rapidly in its quest to become the world’s most powerful country, with an economic system that’s somewhat of a mix. It’s dictatorial yet capitalistic, labeling itself communistic, but in practice, it’s increasingly capitalistic. What it terms communistic is actually more dictatorial, but this approach is working for them in terms of gaining political power. As a result, democracy may become less influential as a political force. Governments in general will likely become less powerful as they struggle to handle technical challenges effectively.
So, we have political instability, climate change, and alternate forms of living, all contributing to the complexity of future scenarios.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Go on.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the ’emptying world’? What do you mean by this? How does it play out? Why did this concept emerge?
Rosner: Essentially, the question is, what will the world look like once humans are no longer the dominant information processors on the planet? My wife and I, along with our daughter and her boyfriend, went to Florence for a week to celebrate our 30th anniversary. We had visited Florence for a couple of days for our 25th anniversary and loved it so much that we decided to return. It seems Florence is quite popular, particularly with the English upper crust, due to its appeal. Florence, in relation to Tuscany, is somewhat like Vancouver is to British Columbia – it’s a central, defining part of the region.
On our trip, we couldn’t land in Florence due to fog, so our plane kept attempting to land, then diverting to nearby cities like Pisa and Bologna, which aren’t too far. We kept trying, but it just wasn’t possible. However, this gave us a chance to fly over the countryside at a low altitude, offering us a unique view of the area. Florence, it turns out, is a wonderful place. Contrary to what one might expect, it’s not prohibitively expensive, especially when compared to cities like L.A., San Francisco, or London. There’s a well-established way of life there, with civilization dating back thousands of years and a current lifestyle that’s been around since the post-Renaissance era. The architecture is fairly standard – stucco two-story apartment houses with tile roofs.
Jacobsen: I’m sure Florence has its less appealing parts, but we didn’t visit those. It’s a place where you could live reasonably, considering its historical and cultural significance. The area has been civilized for centuries, with a relatively stable architectural style.
Rosner: So, that’s an argument for the continuation of human forms of existence, even as humans might no longer be the top species. A lot of human activities will likely persist, and many models for life – economics, commerce, relationships, group dynamics – might remain influential, even as humans fall behind in the information processing race. These forms of existence will probably continue to be prominent because there’s a history of certain human systems working. Smarter, more powerful, hybridized or augmented humans, along with AIs, will use human history as a foundation for future developments. And, of course, there will still be billions of people who enjoy being human, as we’ve evolved to do.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: In addition to the big question that’s up for grabs, there’s the difference between what a conscious being wants and what a deceased conscious being wants, which is essentially nothing. A dead conscious being feels no regrets because there’s no trace of that being left to feel any regrets or pain. We don’t apply this logic to ourselves, though. The idea that death is inconsequential because it’s the end of the game doesn’t sit well with us. We strive to keep people alive and make murder illegal, but we apply a different logic to animals, especially those raised for meat. We think it’s acceptable to treat chickens, hogs, and cows poorly because we only need to meet the minimum requirements for their existence and maybe slaughter them humanely. Once they’re dead, they’re dead, and to us, it’s no big deal. So, we’re deeply hypocritical in this regard.
Another huge area where the golden rule is valuable is that consciousness does not provide an unbiased view of reality. This lack of bias is most apparent in areas of sex. Evolution has driven us to be motivated by sex in ways that cause us to behave irrationally, take in information, and misjudge information in ways that are contrary to our best individual interests, assuming those interests involve living as long as possible in the healthiest way possible. Sex often sabotages this, showing how our consciousness has evolved to undermine us in service to the species.
So, the whole area of ethics, stemming from the golden rule, is full of landmines. That’s pretty much the end. What do you think?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I agree that the golden rule needs a revamp. In addition to the information golden rule we developed several years ago, it needs an adaptation that can more adequately encompass these complexities. It wouldn’t be called the golden rule anymore because it would surpass the simplicity of reciprocity proposed by the original golden rule.
Rosner: I would argue that the golden rule is a good starting point. Most religions haven’t missed it completely.
Jacobsen: Yes, and I think a college seminar titled ‘The Golden Rule’ could be quite insightful. It would start with the golden rule and then critically examine everything that underpins it. The seminar would address the issues you and I have raised, exploring a more robust rule or set of principles that could emerge from the golden rule. Despite its limitations, the golden rule remains quite useful in many situations, just as Newton’s universal gravitation equation is still applicable in certain contexts.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: This leads us back to the sort of casual, almost throwaway arguments that the golden rule is good because it’s simple, easy to understand, and applies to a lot of situations. It’s easy enough that we can reasonably expect many people will follow it and not cause harm to others. Then you brought up those more exceptional situations – though they might not be that exceptional – where what you want, according to the golden rule extended to others, may not at all align with what they want. Like, if you’re a serial killer or others are serial killers. As we move into the chaotic future, we see that the history of the golden rule involves a slow, often grudging extension of empathy to increasingly wider groups of people. This includes some animals, first men of the same race and community, then reluctantly to women, other races – it’s a disappointingly slow spread of empathy. This probably isn’t adequate for the future’s demands, where we’ll see a proliferation of conscious beings, including problematically conscious ones. As far as we know, all the conscious beings we’re aware of on Earth are evolved creatures who have evolved to enjoy things that contribute to their continued existence: eating, sleeping, mating, and so on.
And all this ignores the notion, under the assumption that it’s reasonable, that there’s no omnipotent creator dictating an overall ethical system. So, there’s no default, God-given ethical system, as far as we can tell. The problem with created conscious beings is that we’ll be able to create beings with a whole different set of priorities than evolved ones. While many of the conscious beings we create might share some of the drives and pleasures of evolved beings, a lot won’t. Then there’s the issue of whether these beings are truly conscious or not, which would require an entire mathematics of consciousness. Take, for example, an AI warehouse guard, which might be conscious but doesn’t care about reproducing, or may be engineered not to care about existing beyond its designed lifespan. It might find pleasure in efficiently guarding the warehouse, not in the things that traditionally give pleasure to evolved beings.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: To want to exist and reproduce, to derive pleasure from existence, is something many of us share. We are part of an order that supports our existence – the matter we consist of, the planet we live on, and the nuclear reactions in the sun that provide us energy. All these elements persist because they conform to the principles of existence. In our case, as living beings, this means evolving sophisticated ways to continue existing, perpetuating our species, collaborating with other species, and adapting to the material constraints of the world. All of this, though, is open to being challenged – whether it’s legitimate or not.
Then you get to the golden rule. We’ve kind of set up this shaky foundation, but with enough effort, it could be shown to be more stable than it seems. The golden rule, at some level, is built into what allows us to exist – order and keeping disorder at bay. This leads to considering how humans function in societies. The simplest and most straightforward ethical principle is the golden rule. At first glance, it’s easy to understand and applies to many initial situations. It’s akin to Newton’s universal gravitation versus Einstein’s theory of general relativity, except even less sophisticated than Newton’s theory. It’s a preliminary attempt that covers a wide range of situations and is intuitively easy to grasp. It can be expanded as civilization itself has slowly done over thousands of years.
First, there’s the notion of ‘what do I want?’ and the assumption that others want what I want, leading to behavior based on that premise, at least when it’s not too inconvenient. It’s easier to empathize with and grant similar desires to people who, in my mind, are like me. This fits within the context of overall order, where altruism benefits both me and others. You could argue that the golden rule isn’t really ethical if it’s just self-serving, ensuring everyone else upholds the deal of treating everyone as themselves. But then again, you could argue that if it weren’t somewhat self-serving, it wouldn’t have persisted as a principle.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Regarding the golden rule, we have a version called the information golden rule. It’s centered around information processing as a fundamental aspect. Essentially, we only value rocks to the extent that they’re relevant to information processors. The traditional golden rule advises treating others as you would treat yourself, which is widely accepted in North America. However, I think it’s flawed because it lacks a theory of mind. It’s more appropriate to treat people as they would want to be treated, not as you would want to be treated.
This traditional golden rule, as presented in most ethical and religious contexts, is fundamentally flawed. It’s a decent starting point, but without a theory of mind, it’s incomplete. If you incorporate a theory of mind, explicitly and not just inferred in modern interpretations, it wouldn’t be the golden rule anymore. It would transform into something else, albeit retaining a semblance of the original principle. Does that make sense?
Rosner: Yes.
Jacobsen: So, what’s good for you is good for you, and what’s good for me is good for me. There might be overlaps in many areas, but this isn’t always the case. Consider different people, like a serial killer or an insane person, or different relationships, like husband and wife, or wife and wife, or husband and husband. People have varying desires and needs, and these don’t always align. Therefore, the principle of doing unto others as you would have done to yourself fails in this context. This failure, I believe, fundamentally lies in the requirement of a theory of mind, indicating a significant shift in how we think about it.
Rosner: That seems like a valid argument. Ever since you proposed this more than 12 hours ago, I’ve been pondering it. The golden rule and everything around it are fraught with pitfalls that can undermine the whole concept. In our discussions about ethics, we’ve often returned to the golden rule as one of the more solid foundations, perhaps the only solid ground to build ethics on in a sea of uncertainty. However, the golden rule itself is subject to criticism. Going back to first principles, which themselves are just attempts at foundational truths and subject to being disproved by future or current thinkers, we start with the universe’s existence and our existence within it, though these are open to challenge. One of the primary questions is what can be convincingly deemed to exist? Ourselves, following Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am,’ or the wider world, which we must assume exists to provide a place for our existence, unless we’re part of a simulation, which opens another complex debate about reality. Accepting that, we delve into the question of why things exist, leading us into discussions about systems that are non-contradictory and capable of persistence.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/12/05
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Does anyone else in your family possess extraordinary intelligence?
Rick Rosner: Yeah, quite a few actually. My dad was among the top CPAs in New Mexico’s history. He had a knack for handling people’s taxes with remarkable precision and integrity. The guy never lost an audit in nearly 60 years, although his work quality did decline a bit in the last five. We tried to get him to retire earlier, but he just kept on working. He was definitely smart, very meticulous, albeit a bit slow.
My mom’s quite smart too, especially in the liberal arts, like language and writing. She got accepted into Stanford and I think it was either Vassar or Yale, but she never went because my grandmother didn’t want her to leave home. She was an only child and my grandma didn’t want to be alone, you know? So, mom’s really smart.
Carol’s smart too, but she had a tough upbringing, kind of primitive, so she never really got to capitalize on her intelligence. However, the more time I spend with her, the more I realize how smart she is. Plus, she’s funny, and I think humor is a sign of intelligence. It’s just that my own quirkiness and maybe a bit of self-focus tend to overshadow everyone else.
My daughter is super intelligent and has the added bonus of being personable, charming, and not weird, which is great. She’s also excellent at research. Then there’s my ex-stepsister. We’re not related by blood, but she’s incredibly smart. She’s a forensic psychiatrist. My half-brother, Ray, is pretty smart too. He’s been in finance, working on Wall Street for his entire career.
My late stepbrother, David, was also smart but in a more rugged way. He became a lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps Reserves and was a stand-up comedian, performing gigs globally. He was versatile, funny, and charming. Several of my half-sisters are very intelligent too. One is a lawyer who just completed her degree in social work.
Interestingly, more than half of us, including my siblings and me, have worked as strippers at some point. So, we’re not just smart; we’ve got a bit of a sleazy side too, which I think is a fascinating combination. Basically, everyone in my family, at least within a generation of me, is pretty smart. The end.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/12/05
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: We’ve delved quite a bit into IQ, its history, and tests related to aptitude, like the SAT. The SAT, as we know it now, came about after World War II, mainly because the GI Bill was made available to veterans, though African Americans, despite their service, often didn’t receive these benefits. This led to a historic surge in college enrollments, and college admissions officers found themselves needing a quicker method to differentiate among the applicants. No longer a craft-like process, admissions turned into a systematic operation. The SAT, which had been around for 40-50 years or possibly more before this, involved essays and language translations, including Latin. It wasn’t based on multiple-choice questions and required detailed assessment rather than machine scanning. This need led to the creation of the modern SAT.
From this, we can infer that people saw a need for IQ testing, desiring a tool that could quickly determine if someone was, in plain terms, not very smart or indeed brilliant. If you work with someone for about six months, you generally get a good sense of their abilities and personality. But there was this belief that no one had time to potentially waste on unsuitable individuals. This led to the development of aptitude testing for school children in France at the start of the 20th century, initially using a simple scale from one to five. IQ testing in California, particularly the Terman model, expanded this to a hundred point system, plus or minus. This approach really took off with mass testing, especially during World War I, where millions received these early and, frankly, problematic American IQ tests.
People had convinced themselves of the necessity of these quick assessment tools, despite their issues. IQ and SAT tests, at best, were just okay at differentiating intelligence levels. Mensa, created in the late ’50s, is a case in point. Named after the Latin word for ‘table,’ its founder envisioned a round-table discussion of the world’s highest IQ individuals to solve global problems – a modern-day Knights of the Round Table, but focused on IQ. However, it’s pretty obvious that Mensa hasn’t exactly resolved any major world issues.
IQ tests don’t really excel at what they were initially designed for. If you can figure out someone’s not too bright in six months, you can likely do it in a week. The prime time of IQ testing has passed. The SAT, too, is on a rapid decline. It’s been playing this game for 30, 40, 50 years, where it gets periodically revamped. In the television world, I call this ‘the churn,’ where shows are constantly updated to keep the audience’s interest. The Tonight Show is a classic example. It’s been a late-night ratings leader since the ’50s. Johnny Carson and then Jay Leno dominated this slot for decades. When Jimmy Fallon took over, NBC heavily advertised this change. The Tonight Show maintained its lead, but the show I worked on began to lose out in the ratings. This situation often prompts networks to make changes – ‘the churn.’ You replace staff, particularly writers, to show that you’re addressing the issue, even if it doesn’t really change the core problem.
The SAT has been doing this for decades. They change things up – tweak the essay section, drop analogies – and claim it’ll solve all the problems with the SAT. But these changes are superficial. Recently, they’ve gone all digital, claiming it will make the test more responsive. But it doesn’t address the inherent issues with the SAT. The test doesn’t really add much in predicting a student’s success in college beyond what you’d get from the rest of their application. The COVID pandemic was a real eye-opener, with the SAT becoming impractical due to social distancing, leading many colleges to drop the requirement. This has significantly impacted the relevance of the SAT.
So, after all that, you asked about productivity, genius, and IQ. When we talk about productive geniuses – those extremely rare individuals like Einstein, who in one year, 1905, wrote four papers that revolutionized physics, and then did it again in 1915 with general relativity, and even had a hand in inventing the laser – we’re talking about something extraordinary. Newton, too, who developed calculus and universal gravitation, is another example. These kinds of geniuses are so rare. Even Stephen Hawking, while brilliant, didn’t revolutionize physics to the extent of Einstein. Then there’s Crick, Watson, and Rosalind Franklin, who discovered DNA’s structure – a significant achievement, but again, a singular event. Shakespeare wrote numerous plays and sonnets, most of which are highly regarded. But when you consider the billions of people who have lived, the number of these extraordinary geniuses is exceedingly small.
You might think there’d be some overlap between IQ test geniuses and these historic figures, but it’s incredibly rare. The history of IQ testing is littered with people celebrated for high scores, but few have achieved what these notable geniuses did. Even in cases like Terence Tao, the UCLA mathematician, or the Polgár sisters, chess prodigies, where people have estimated their IQs based on their achievements, it’s just speculation. So, the odds of an overlap between an IQ test genius and an Einstein-type genius are astronomically low.
But to answer your question, I think the real indicator of a super-genius is an unrelenting drive to figure things out, coupled with the ability to do so. Newton, for example, was fascinated by the natural world. He pondered why apples fell and connected it to the moon’s orbit around the Earth. He developed calculus to explain these phenomena. He even tried to decode the Bible, though he wasn’t successful there. Newton also tackled practical problems, like the issue of coin clipping, by adding milled edges to coins. Edgar Allan Poe, known for his literary work, also contemplated why the night sky is dark, a genuine scientific inquiry. So, true genius is about relentless curiosity and the ability to make significant discoveries or create profound works.
Living a long life can help, but it’s not a guarantee. Newton lived a long time, but others, like Poe, died young. Getting your work recognized and accepted is crucial – you have to appear more brilliant than eccentric. Newton managed this, despite his difficult personality. Shakespeare got all his work published. Then there’s Emily Dickinson, who barely published anything in her lifetime but is now considered a major poet.
Genius is often a solitary pursuit, but it’s defined in relation to society. Many in the high IQ community haven’t achieved recognition for their work. It’s not just about being smart; it’s about having your work acknowledged as legitimate, which involves a mix of factors, including luck. For instance, the original creator of shadow boxes was just doing it for personal amusement, but later, people recognized it as genius. So, being a genius isn’t just about having a high IQ or making groundbreaking discoveries; it’s also about how your work is perceived and valued by society.
So, this is what the SAT has been doing roughly every decade since, I believe, the 1980s. The test remains essentially the same, primarily multiple choice, but they do tweak things here and there. For instance, they mess with the essay section, eliminate analogies, and then claim, “Look, these changes we’ve made will solve all your issues with the SAT.” But really, they don’t accomplish much. Just recently, the SAT went through this process again; they’ve moved to an all-digital format. Paper-based SATs are a thing of the past. Now, you’ve got to sit in front of a monitor to take it. The SAT seems to be saying, “Yeah, this shift will make us more responsive to the needs of an aptitude test,” even though they don’t label it as an aptitude test anymore. However, this change doesn’t address any of the SAT’s fundamental flaws; it’s just a desperate attempt to appear up-to-date. The main issue with the SAT is that it doesn’t really give you a better prediction of whether a student will excel at your university compared to simply reviewing the rest of their application. It’s not adding any real value. Also, with Covid, the SAT faced its moment of truth when it became impractical to administer the test to large groups. Consequently, thousands of colleges dropped the SAT requirement, which really hit the test hard.
Now, moving on to the broader issue you were asking about – productivity, genius, and IQ. When we talk about productivity, I think what we’re really discussing is true productive genius. I’m talking about those one-in-a-gazillion types, like Einstein, who wrote four ground-breaking physics papers in a single year, 1905, and then changed the game again in 1915 with general relativity, not to mention his role in inventing the laser. Or take Newton, who invented calculus and the theory of universal gravitation. These types of geniuses are incredibly rare. Think about the likes of Einstein, Newton, and Darwin. Hawking dealt with black holes, which are, well, super hard to see, and while he was brilliant, it’s tough to say if he revolutionized physics like Einstein did. Then there’s Crick, Watson, and Rosalind Franklin, known for their discovery of DNA’s structure – again, a significant achievement, but a singular one. Shakespeare wrote tons of plays and sonnets, almost all of which are highly acclaimed. But still, out of the billions of people who have lived, you can count these extraordinary geniuses on one or two hands.
It’s statistically improbable that there’s much overlap between those with sky-high IQs based on tests and these super-duper productive geniuses. Throughout the history of IQ testing, we’ve seen a few dozen individuals celebrated for their high scores, but their achievements don’t compare to those historical figures. Then there are people like Terence Tao, the UCLA mathematician, and the Polgár sisters, chess prodigies, whose IQs are estimated based on their accomplishments. But in reality, the likelihood that such IQ test geniuses and Einstein-level geniuses overlap is extremely low – hundreds of millions to one, and even optimistically, maybe two million to one.
So, any questions? I’m not sure if I’ve fully addressed your initial query.
Jacobsen: Perhaps I can broaden the question a bit from the specific one. What would you say are the most significant indicators of intelligence, qualitatively speaking, rather than relying on paper and pencil or electronic tests? The original question focused on productivity, but that seems a bit narrow.
Rosner: My best guess for the real markers of a super genius involves an unstoppable drive to figure things out, coupled with the actual ability to do so. Take Newton, for instance. He observed things falling – whether it was an actual apple or not, I don’t know, but stuff falls, right, like apples from trees. He was around in the 1660s when not much was happening. He had to leave Cambridge due to the plague and ended up back at the farm or in the countryside. So, he’s observing trees and the moon and makes this connection that the moon and the apple are both pulled toward the Earth. The moon never crashes into us because it’s moving fast enough to miss but keeps getting pulled around in a circle by gravity. He figured that out and came up with calculus to explain how this all works. He also spent a lot of time with the Bible, looking for secret codes, though he didn’t find any. He was wrong there, but he was still driven to search for these codes.
Newton also dealt with practical issues, like when he was in charge of the Mint. Back then, coins were made of precious metal, and people would file down the edges to steal the metal. If you filed off a bit from a bunch of coins, you could make a decent sum. Newton addressed this by adding milled edges to coins – think of the lines on the edge of a US dime. This made it obvious if someone tried to file the edges off. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it probably stopped most of the tampering. So, Newton had this drive to figure things out, and he was successful in many cases. Then there’s Edgar Allan Poe. He figured out why the night sky is dark, which is pretty impressive. He’s known for creating the detective story genre and unfortunately died young, under somewhat mysterious circumstances. But before that, he wrote a lot and pondered significant scientific questions. And, of course, Einstein – he just figured out all sorts of stuff.
So, that’s about it. If you’re keen on figuring stuff out and you’re actually good at it, those are key indicators. Oh, and another thing: living a long life. In Poe’s case, no, he died young. Newton, on the other hand, lived a remarkably long life. His most significant scientific contributions were made when he was younger, but living long doesn’t hurt. You know, not everyone like Shakespeare lived to old age. Well, maybe not, but that’s something to consider. It seems that about half of the names I’ve mentioned didn’t have particularly long lives.
Another thing that might be a tell is getting your work recognized as legitimate. You need to appear more brilliant than insane, and Newton was pretty good at this. He made it to Cambridge, despite being quite difficult to get along with, but he apparently had the social skills to prevent his prickliness from being a major issue. Shakespeare managed to get all his plays and sonnets published, so luck plays a part too. Take Emily Dickinson, for example; she barely published anything during her lifetime. Someone stumbled upon her poems later and decided they were noteworthy, despite her reclusive nature.
One more thing I’d like to add is that being a genius is somewhat solitary by nature, historically speaking. But it’s not entirely so. Newton did a lot of work alone, as did Einstein, though Einstein had a group of physics friends to discuss ideas with. What I’m getting at is that genius is often seen as an individual trait, but it’s actually defined in relation to society. You need societal recognition to be considered a genius. This might sound obvious, but it’s an important dynamic. In the high IQ community, there are many smart people, even self-proclaimed mega geniuses, who haven’t managed to get their work acknowledged as legitimate by society.
It’s not just a black and white situation. There are factors that can increase the likelihood of your work being recognized as genius, and luck is certainly one of them. Consider the guy who invented shadow boxes. Nowadays, you can buy these shadow boxes in craft stores, where you can display little found objects, like rocks or a piece of pottery. The original creator of these shadow boxes was probably just making them for his own amusement in the Northeast US, and then people discovered them and deemed them genius.
There are other factors too, like having a romantic or intriguing story. Think of a reclusive individual who’s written thousands of poems; there’s a certain allure to that. Or take Louis Wain, the Victorian era artist known for his cat drawings. They’re making a movie about him, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Wain made art for postcards and greeting cards featuring cats, which people adore. His life was quite dramatic – he was surrounded by cats, and it’s said he developed schizophrenia, which influenced his art. His cat drawings evolved from pretty pictures to abstract, spiky designs, eventually resembling mandalas with just a couple of cat eyes in the center. The movie about him will explore the fine line between madness and genius. So, there you go, I’ve been rambling on. The end.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/12/05
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What are other grotesque things about your anatomy or physiology that you find?
Rick Rosner: I’ve been thinking, if this Kevin Kretschmer show happens, about giving a tour of my various grotesqueries. The second one would be my balls, which feel like big sacks of spaghetti due to a bunch of extra veins. So, my balls are fairly large because they’re full of surplus veins. The third would be my butthole, which is mostly scar tissue. At one point, not of my own volition, but due to others’ curiosity, I had to take a picture of it because I talked about it too much, given its problematic nature. I don’t recall if I looked at the photo, but someone said my butthole looks like a pair of kissy lips, kind of like the Rolling Stones logo. That’s pretty grotesque.
I’ve got around 10 feet or more of scars, most of which I carved into myself trying to be manly. Some of those scars are fairly picturesque, as I placed them artistically, but I’ve also had a bunch of minor surgeries, so I have various little incisions. Well, I’ve had about 1,650 hair transplants. They don’t look too bad, but up close, I guess they’re a little grotesque. My nostrils have been narrowed by about an eighth of an inch on each side, so there are stitch marks from where they were sliced and sewn back.
If you look at a lot of people’s nostrils where they join the face, many are a little torn up around there. I don’t have two different colored eyes like my dad did. I’ve got a beard chin – I have a fairly weak chin. It’s not disastrously weak, but enough that I wanted plastic surgery as a kid. It’s a simple surgery; they just slice open between the front of your teeth and your front lip and jam a chin-shaped thing in there. But my mom wouldn’t let me get it. Eventually, I grew a beard, which covers it up, plus it’s not too bad. Like David Duchovny, he doesn’t have a strong chin, and he’s still considered attractive.
Now that I’m older, I’m getting lots of earwax, which they don’t tell you is a thing about getting old. Old people produce more earwax, which is a bit gross. Though, I’m holding off on the ear hair – I only get a new ear hair every month or two. My dad had huge, tough, severe ear hair that was unmanageable, but mine come along slowly enough that I can keep them under control. You know, that’s most of the grotesqueries.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/12/05
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What’s up with your big second toe?
Rick Rosner: My big second toe?
Jacobsen: Yeah, we met in person when you were sick. You have this big-ass toe, and Jimmy Kimmel even had a cat.
Rosner: Yeah, someone made a gift for him – a silicon, very lifelike replica of my foot, which Jimmy eventually got. He probably got tired of it pretty fast and turned it over to me to be the custodian of my own foot. I don’t know. I just have grotesque feet, combined with other stuff like varicose veins. So, I’ve got flat feet, this toe situation, and a horrible thumb toenail fungus, making my toenails gross. My feet are purple from the same vascular incompetence that leads to the veins. When I was a kid, I used to scare girls with my foot. I liked any attention at all from girls, but that was really not the way to go. I don’t know. I just have ugly-ass feet. People like to say bullshit like a long second toe is a sign of intelligence. But no, I don’t know what it means at all, if anything. It’s just, I don’t know, unusual toes. That’s it for that question.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/12/04
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: And the main issue that comes up is, well, this is a potential human life. So even when it’s just 8 cells, 16 cells, or 64 cells, there’s this belief that those cells have a right to life. Yet, a quarter or a third of all these early-stage embryos are miscarried naturally. We haven’t even resolved the issue of abortion, arguably one of the simpler, supposedly challenging ethical questions of modern biology. In reality, it’s not that challenging at all. But it’s a burning issue in America and other parts of the world, and we’re far from settling it. Now we’re about to step into an era filled with other tricky ethical questions surrounding consciousness and what qualifies a being as deserving of being considered as such, deserving not just of existence but of a non-painful existence.
We’re likely going to do a poor job in a lot of places, maybe particularly in the U.S., at resolving these issues and at building a legal framework that extends the golden rule to other forms of sentience. This includes animals, especially as we start messing with their genomes to increase their intelligence or lifespan. Imagine dogs and cats living for 30 years, with their intelligence doubled, giving them the intellectual sophistication of a three-year-old. We’re going to screw all this up because politicians are shitty. A lot of forces, at least in America, repel good people from politics and attract scumbags. The end.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/12/04
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, go ahead.
Rick Rosner: Alright, related to our earlier topic, and I think we brought this up years ago, is that AI, along with other high-powered technologies, is on the brink of leading to replicable brains. Within the next 20 to 30 years, we’ll see the emergence of sentient beings that are semi-manufactured. We’re about to delve into all sorts of hocus-pocus with consciousness, which really is the crown jewel of what sets humans apart. We’re going to start messing with it in the coming decades, and this will inevitably lead to a host of ethical questions. For example, people might go to court to claim that, even when most of their brain has been replaced with bio-circuitry, they still have the legal right to be considered themselves. Or when 90% of their brain’s neurons have been replaced with artificial ones, they have the right to marry their robot girlfriend, and all sorts of other ethical dilemmas.
Then there’s the issue of sentient entities, manufactured beings, and their right not to be treated like trash and tossed into landfills. We can expect governments, especially in America, to do a really shitty job at resolving these issues. Take the abortion debate, for instance. We’re about to take a step back in time with Trump appointing three conservative justices to the Supreme Court, who mostly lied to the Senate about overturning Roe vs. Wade. This 50-year-old ruling granted women the right to abortion under reasonable circumstances, usually within the first trimester and often through the second trimester until fetal viability.
Now, with six conservative justices, we’ve just heard a case from Mississippi to limit abortion after 15 weeks, well before viability. They will probably tear down a big chunk of Roe vs. Wade when the ruling comes through, probably by June. They heard the case now, in November or December, but it’ll take them months to roll it out. When it comes to consciousness, the abortion issue is relatively clear. The consciousness of a 15, 18, or 20-week fetus, if you think about it, is not overly problematic. There’s not much of a consciousness there. If you’re okay with snuffing out the consciousness of a chicken to eat chicken, then the consciousness of a 20-week-old fetus is much less than that of a chicken, pig, or cow. Consciousness should be one of the tent poles in considering whether abortion is acceptable. Yet, it’s barely taken into account by many people who argue against abortion, focusing instead on the fetus’s ability to feel pain, which, even if present, is minimal compared to the sophistication of consciousness being snuffed out.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Political forces and climate change are leading to rapid changes in the way billions of people live. You know, the point of what I’m saying right now is, around seven or eight years ago, we were among the few people talking about this. And now, there are quite a few people, who are considered experts, discussing it. These are individuals you’d listen to, like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and others. I’m not sure if Hawking talked about this before he passed, but many tech billionaires, venture capitalists, and high-tech pundits have started matter-of-factly stating that AI is going to fuck everything up, in both good ways and bad.
We were a bit ahead of our time, and now, well, that’s not all. Everyone at a certain level is talking about it. Anyone who wants to educate themselves can share their concerns and mostly their understanding. However, it’s not making a huge difference in how people behave. There are more shows, and given the hundreds of shows available for streaming, there are a few more about AI and the future. Most of them are shitty and stupid, but at least they exist. So, people who are smart enough to think about what the future might hold can find the thoughts of others who aren’t complete idiots, as well as plenty who are.
We can expect more people to start thinking about it and more signs of technological and AI disruption as the years go by. We’re still in the early days of this disruption, especially compared to what’s coming later. But it’s not too early for non-schmucks to consider it, which leads to a whole other topic.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/12/04
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, go ahead.
Rick Rosner: Alright. So when you and I started chatting, what was it, eight years ago now?
Jacobsen: God, it must have been. You were still writing for Jimmy Kimmel when I first came across your work.
Rosner: Okay, so I got fired almost eight years ago, I think, or maybe more than that. I try not to dwell on the dates too much because it just makes me feel like a bit of an asshole for not having lined up anything subsequent. But it did give us time and the mental space to work on this huge project over the past eight years or so. When we began our discussions, we were talking, among other things, about AI and super high-tech stuff pretty much leading to the end of human life as we know it. At least, human life being the apex life on the planet, within a couple of centuries. One hundred years from now, there will still be several billion humans living more or less as we do now. But there will also be augmented humans and AIs functioning at higher levels as information processors than un-augmented humans. Human life will go on for a while as it has, but it won’t be the most sophisticated form of life on the planet in terms of information processing anymore.
And within the next couple of centuries, human life won’t disappear, but it’ll become kind of secondary. This comes after ten thousand years of humans being the apex information processors on the planet. The structure of human life, with pairing up, making stuff, doing agriculture, living in communities – this is how we’ve lived for many thousands of years. Sure, London in the 21st century differs from Jerusalem at the time of Jesus, but you could argue that there are more similarities than not, in terms of how life functions on the planet. But in a hundred to two hundred years, there will be very dissimilar ways of living that are more informationally powerful and sophisticated than how humans currently live. When we first started talking about this around 2013 or 2014, not many people were discussing it. Nobody was freaking out about it. But in the past four or five years, all these big tech guys have started talking about it, in somewhat worried but matter-of-fact ways. They acknowledge that life on the planet is going to be severely disrupted and that tech will challenge all the ways of living that we’re accustomed to.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/09/27
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Hey.
Rick Rosner: Hey, man.
Jacobsen: Okay, I’m going to record this. Yes, it’s okay. So hello, I can hear you.
Rosner: Alright, so I’m writing about the near future, where we’re at the very beginning of what you might call a Cambrian explosion in non-human and augmented human consciousness. There’s a whole array of different AIs and such. At the end of the argument I’m making here, the early forms of non-human consciousness will largely be based on human consciousness, because innovation in form is slow. Take cell phones, for instance. They started as wireless devices you hold in your hand, essentially phones, but now, 25 to 30 years later, making phone calls is probably the least used feature. So, the innovation came slowly relative to the technology’s development.
Like with airplanes, coast-to-coast passenger travel initially mirrored other forms of transportation, like trains and ocean liners. Early airplane design tried to replicate train compartments, ocean liner cabins, especially for those who could afford it. Cars initially took on the form of horse-drawn carriages. Many aspects of these early designs persist, but if we were to re-engineer planes now, solely for efficiency, disregarding their historical development, the passenger compartment might look quite different.
And when you do innovate, often it’s simplistic. For example, slave ships at the beginning of the slave trade were designed to cram in as many slaves as possible, even if it meant losing a significant portion of the ‘cargo’ – a horrifying term for human beings.
Now, when it comes to non-human consciousness being engineered, it will likely resemble human consciousness, as that’s the model we have. Conscious AI will initially fall back on human models, and it will take decades, even with AI’s rapid innovation, to fully diverge from human consciousness. Another idea I’m exploring is that many humans will think they’re in control long after they’ve lost it. This is partly because it’s market-driven – humans will still be key consumers – and partly because it’ll be less disruptive to maintain the illusion that humans are in charge. It’s the easier route. So, those are my thoughts on the early stages of non-human engineered consciousness.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/09/16
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, I wanted to discuss simulations and their popular depictions, like ‘The Matrix.’ I hear there’s a sequel coming out, ‘Matrix Resurrection’ or something. Given that you’re in Hollywood, you’re probably more in tune with this stuff. So, what can you tell us about these popular portrayals?
Rick Rosner: Can you hear me?
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: Okay. We’re essentially discussing the near future, what entertainment will look like, and beyond that, how living might evolve for people choosing to live virtually or augment themselves. Science fiction didn’t really become mainstream until the pulp novels of the 1930s and the sci-fi movies of the 1950s. It’s a relatively new cultural element. We’ve observed that everything is market-driven – tech advancements, medicine, computing – all propelled by the potential for profit. Take Uber, for instance. It’s not profitable yet, but people are investing, expecting it to be lucrative in the future.
Regarding ‘The Matrix,’ it’s about aliens enslaving humans in a simulated reality, driven by their own bizarre alien economy. In our reality, as we see in science fiction that constructs complete worlds, there’s a gritty, Blade Runner-like aspect where amazing technology exists, but it’s only as good as what people can profit from. So, we admire our tech, but we’re not constantly in awe of it.
I’m trying to write about the near future, offering a perspective not commonly explored in other works. I’m focusing on the 2030s rather than the 2080s. My main characters are incredibly wealthy, which isolates them from the rest of the world’s struggles. They’re aware of global issues but are insulated from them.
The key issue in writing about the near future is guessing where normal human activities will erode due to technological disruptions. I need to anticipate where these disruptions will occur and their impacts. We know video games will keep improving, with better physics and light engines, making them more realistic. Human simulations are still challenging, but they’re getting there.
The sensory simulation will also improve, especially for future virtual reality and augmented reality experiences. Sight and sound are currently the focus, but touch will become crucial, particularly for virtual sex. Eventually, smell and taste might be added, though they’re less important in entertainment.
Further in the future, consciousness itself might be directly manipulated, creating characters who are aware within their simulated worlds. In about 60 years, this could be a reality. But it’s one thing to predict this; it’s another to build a world around it where significant societal structures are disrupted. That’s what I’m working on now, and it’ll take more thought before I can delve into specifics. Maybe in a future session, I can expand on this. The end.
Oh, and just so you know, tomorrow’s a write-off for me. I’ll be unreachable.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/09/16
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, let’s add an addendum regarding the election in California. We are recording this.
Rick Rosner: This addendum applies to both the 2020 presidential election and the recent California election. There’s a genuine sense of derangement among some people. Some just want to win for Trump, while others can’t fathom that people wouldn’t vote for their ‘great man.’ In many upcoming elections, we’re likely to encounter these deranged fuckers who consume nothing but Fox News, OAN, and Newsmax. They’re convinced that anyone not voting for their preferred candidates is essentially lying. They see their guys as great and, in the context of California, can’t believe anyone would support mask mandates or lockdowns to control COVID. They refuse to believe in COVID or the vaccine and think anyone with a different view is lying. That’s the addendum.
Jacobsen: Okay, and what was the other topic you wanted to discuss?
Rosner: Actually, it’s you who wanted to…
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/09/15
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Ready? Okay. So there’s this Never Trumper, a former Republican strategist named Rick Wilson, who came up with a principle he calls “everything Trump touches dies,” shortened to hashtag ETTD. His theory is that Trump is such a disaster that anyone linked to him will likely end up unemployable. Any enterprise he’s involved with is bound to fail. Trump is essentially the kiss of death. It’s a solid principle because there are so many examples. He’s the guy who managed to go bankrupt multiple times running casinos, which should be the easiest businesses to run because people just hand over their money.
Now, I’ve noticed another principle. It’s not as solid, but it’s still pretty valid: there’s no good news about Trump. Whenever a story about Trump emerges, it never shows him in a better light. Today, parts of Woodward’s book about Trump’s last days in the White House began circulating. It includes stuff like General Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, calling his Chinese counterpart to warn them about Trump. He essentially said, “Look, we have a dangerous lunatic planning a coup. Our president is insane. If he plans a war against you, I’ll keep you informed so we can avoid a nuclear confrontation.” Milley also made his generals swear that they wouldn’t follow any insane directives from Trump. This, along with other revelations about Trump’s inner circle, consistently portrays him negatively. My principle is: there’s just no good news about Trump. Every story that comes out confirms he’s even more of a piece of shit than previously thought. That’s the principle: any news about Trump always confirms that he’s a problem, more so than you might have realized before. That’s it.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How much time was wasted on this, do you think?
Rick Rosner: Well, months were spent gathering signatures, taking them to court, and then the two months for the election itself. Ballots were mailed out about seven weeks ago. The whole thing cost about 275 million dollars, which in a state of nearly 40 million people is only seven dollars per person, but it’s still more than a quarter billion dollars.
Jacobsen: What else could have been done with that quarter billion?
Rosner: A lot of people suggest it could have gone towards solving California’s huge homelessness problem, maybe building some homeless housing. But the money was legally allocated for the election because of the recall law, which most other states don’t have. This law allows 12 percent of the voting public to call for a recall and lets someone with just 10 percent of the vote become governor if the current governor doesn’t get 50 percent.
Jacobsen: How many secular candidates do you think were in California?
Rosner: Secular? I’m not sure. Probably one or two out of the forty-six. Angelyne, who doesn’t seem to have any fixed beliefs, was on the ballot and is actually leading Caitlyn Jenner right now. They each have about one percent of the vote. But among the 46 candidates, there’s all sorts of lunatics. The end.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/09/15
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Are you ready? Okay, so there’s this Never Trumper, a former Republican strategist named Rick Wilson, who coined a principle he calls “everything Trump touches dies,” abbreviated as hashtag ETTD. His theory is that Trump is such a disaster that anyone associated with him is likely to become unemployable for the rest of their career. Additionally, any enterprise linked with Trump will probably fail. He’s like the kiss of death. It’s a compelling principle given how many examples there are. He’s the guy who went bankrupt multiple times running casinos, which should be the simplest business because people just hand over their money.
Now, I’ve noticed another principle, not as solid but perhaps still valid: there’s no good news about Trump. Every story that continues to emerge about him never paints him in a better light. For instance, today, parts of Woodward’s book about Trump’s last days in the White House started circulating. It includes revelations like General Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, contacting his Chinese counterpart to express concerns about Trump’s behavior, hinting at the possibility of a coup. Milley even assured the Chinese official that he’d keep them informed to avoid a nuclear confrontation if Trump made any aggressive moves. Moreover, Milley reportedly vowed to his generals that they wouldn’t follow through on any insane directives from Trump.
This information, alongside other revelations about Trump’s inner circle, like Vice President Pence, consistently portrays Trump negatively. This leads to my principle: there’s simply no good news about Trump. Nothing that comes out ever shows him in a more favorable light. You never hear stories about Trump secretly sending puppies to children or anything of that sort. Every new story about Trump reinforces the notion that he’s even worse than previously thought. That’s the principle: any news about Trump always confirms that he’s a problem, more so than you might have realized before. That’s it.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/09/14
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s move on to the second point?
Rick Rosner: Sure. I was examining a graph concerning the impact of COVID on global population growth. Initially, my thought was that its effect was minimal. Historically, significant plagues, like the Black Plague, drastically reduced the human population over a century or two, wiping out perhaps a third of Europe’s population. In contrast, the Spanish flu killed about 50 million people, which was more than 3%, possibly up to 5%, of the then global population of 1.5 billion. This would have required several years for recovery. COVID, however, has officially caused about 4.5 million deaths globally, maybe three times that unofficially, but still only a fraction of the world’s current population of 7.8 billion.
Jacobsen: So, not a substantial impact on population growth?
Rosner: Exactly. COVID might have delayed global population growth by a few months at most. If we’re concerned about overpopulation exacerbating issues like climate change, resource depletion, and international strife, COVID offers little relief. But the real question is how worried should we be about overpopulation? A common concern, especially in Western liberal circles, is climate change and the Earth’s survivability.
Before delving into that, let’s look at U.N. statistics on population growth rates since 1950 and projections until 2100. Presently, excluding COVID’s impact, the global population grows by about 1.03% annually. At this rate, we’d expect a doubling from 7.8 billion to 15.6 billion in about 70 years. However, this growth rate is decelerating. Last year it was 1.03%, the year before 1.05%, and a few years ago, around 1.11%. The U.N. projects a future growth rate of 0.03% by 2100, meaning it would take around 2,500 years to double the population. So, instead of reaching 15.6 billion by 2100, the U.N. estimates a rise to 10.87 billion, an increase of about three billion or less than 40%.
Jacobsen: That seems more manageable.
Rosner: Right, it seems feasible to accommodate a 40% increase over 80 years. An 11-billion-people planet will be different for numerous reasons, not just population. The U.N.’s estimates, however, likely don’t factor in certain elements. As nations become more prosperous, birth rates typically decline due to lower infant mortality and access to medical services. People in developed countries tend to have fewer children, and as lifespans increase, they have children later in life. If medical advancements allow for significantly longer or even indefinite lifespans, this trend could intensify. Also, the possibility of living in virtual environments and the increasing appeal of entertainment over physical relationships might further reduce birth rates.
There’s also the factor of gender fluidity potentially affecting birth rates. In Western countries, people are having less sex, which could lead to fewer children. Climate change concerns may also cause people to hesitate about bringing children into an uncertain future. All these factors combined might mean that the U.N.’s projection of nearly 11 billion by 2100 could be an overestimate.
Jacobsen: So, a potential decline in population growth rates?
Rosner: Yes, and once population growth stabilizes, many population-related issues will become less pressing. Climate change, while causing significant damage, may not directly result in mass casualties. The reduction in population growth, spurred by various factors, might see us closer to 10 billion, or even fewer, by 2100. With technological advancements, we could ensure that the majority of this population lives relatively well. That’s my take on it.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/09/14
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Hello?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: It’s functioning. Alright, let’s get started.
Rosner: Okay.
Jacobsen: We were going to talk about the concept of locality and its contrast with the holographic principle.
Rosner: Yes, more or less. Off the record, you mentioned a Google search on ‘informational cosmology,’ a term we’ve somewhat adopted, and found earlier instances of its usage.
Jacobsen: That’s right.
Rosner: Not too surprising, really. It’s a useful term, applicable to various concepts. Anyone familiar with quantum mechanics, computing, and related fields understands the concept of information. Some of them also grasp the idea that the universe could be an information processor, or even fundamentally made of information, which feels intuitively correct.
Jacobsen: Indeed.
Rosner: If you were creating a futuristic science fiction movie, set in, say, the 22nd century, and needed some speculative physics, you might base it on information. It has a modern, science-fiction feel and seems plausible, though information theory wasn’t developed until 1948 by Claude Shannon at Bell Labs. So, it’s a relatively new field, and its deep connections with quantum mechanics weren’t immediately obvious.
Jacobsen: That makes sense.
Rosner: Seventy years on, people are quite familiar with the concept of information. It wasn’t a popular topic in the 1930s, but now it’s prevalent. We could use Google Ngram to track its historical usage, but that’s a task for another time.
Jacobsen: Agreed.
Rosner: Regarding what others have said about informational cosmology, the concept of a holographic universe versus an information-based one sparked thoughts about the nature of locality versus holography. It’s akin to the philosophical debate on atomism versus infinite divisibility – whether the universe’s components are endlessly divisible or ultimately composed of indivisible atoms. Recent discoveries point to limits in the divisibility of the universe’s components.
Jacobsen: A compelling point.
Rosner: Right. The question of locality’s limits, or its spectrum, is likely resolvable through theory and observation. Locality is practical for our daily lives, providing spatially limited, manipulable material objects. However, non-locality is essential too. Without it, the universe wouldn’t be able to communicate the existence of local entities, rendering them isolated.
Jacobsen: So both aspects are crucial?
Rosner: Exactly. Local entities need their existence acknowledged by the broader universe, to an extent. For instance, we’re unaware of happenings on planets outside our solar system, except for the scant details we can infer, like from the closest planets around Alpha Centauri. Local information must be communicated to ensure continuity, like an apple remaining on the table even if you leave the room. The universe incorporates both locality and non-locality in this system.
Jacobsen: There are varying impacts of non-locality?
Rosner: Yes. We obtain information from photons, whether it’s about a nearby apple or a distant galaxy. Distance reduces the detail we can discern. Large structures are visible from afar, but finer details require specific information systems, like spacecraft transmitting data from Mars.
Jacobsen: Local information is more detailed?
Rosner: Precisely. Local entities have distinct structures, unlike the blurrier representations in a holographic view, where even a small snapshot can reveal general images of distant entities. The key physics and metaphysics questions involve understanding how information operates within the universe, determining the nature of both local and non-local phenomena. That concludes our first discussion topic.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/08/25
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You’ve discussed various exercise routines in past interviews, including doorframe pull-ups. You also appeared on A&E’s show “Obsessed,” focusing on your fear of aging and dying, and your rigorous exercise regime. I’d like to delve more into your current exercise routine. What does it look like now?
Rick Rosner: In that episode, they highlighted my intense gym visits. At one point, I was going to the gym about 50 times a week, around seven or eight times daily. However, due to COVID, I’ve reduced it to about five times a day, with quick visits while double masked. I avoid anyone not wearing their mask properly. Besides the gym, I have a home setup for abs and leg presses, and another one in the attic for pull-ups and chest presses. I haven’t missed a day at the gym since January 20th, 1991, which means I haven’t missed a workout for over half my life. I’ve even done pull-ups on a plane once, back in the mid-90s. My routine involves about a hundred sets daily, and I visit two different L.A. Fitness gyms. I alternate between push and pull days to avoid overworking the same muscle groups. I’ve had to adjust my routine to maintain my kidney health. If certain machines are too close to people not following mask guidelines, I adapt my routine accordingly. Gyms are a mix of health-conscious individuals and overconfident people, so it balances out the risk of COVID exposure. Today, for instance, was a pull day, and I managed various sets across different exercises. I still have more workouts planned for tonight.
Jacobsen: What do experts generally recommend for a healthy workout routine? How does your routine align with or differ from these recommendations?
Rosner: Most fitness experts recommend including aerobics, but I find them boring and unpleasant, so I don’t do them. I’m skinny and have a decent pulse rate, and I take cholesterol-blocking drugs. My wife hikes daily and has a very low resting pulse. Experts suggest aerobics don’t need to be intense; even walking, like my wife does, is beneficial. At my age, 61, heavy lifting like Stallone isn’t advisable without support like steroids, which aren’t healthy. Heavy lifting can elevate blood pressure, which isn’t ideal during heart attack-prone years. I’ve been cautious with my weightlifting, avoiding straining too hard. I do too many sets and workouts, which isn’t ideal for muscle building or sleep. My OCD manifests in needing to work out multiple times a day. My diet is relatively healthy, and I avoid excessive protein, which can be hard on the kidneys. I maintain a healthy weight and don’t feel the need to be excessively muscular. That’s essentially my routine and approach to fitness.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/08/22
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Recently, we’ve delved into the statistical argument contrasting existence and non-existence, discussing it in depth in our sessions both this year and late last year. I’m now interested in exploring the principles that govern the transition from non-existence to existence – how something moves from a null state to a non-null state, akin to a universe coming into being.
Rick Rosner: Right, we did spend considerable time yesterday debating natural versus simulated universes. Our somewhat speculative hypothesis, lacking robust support, is that if our universe is composed of information, which we believe it is, then it necessitates a material base in another materially existing world – an armature or hardware world. This is similar to how our brains support our minds; without the physical brain, the mind wouldn’t exist. So, we propose that a universe of information cannot exist without some form of hardware support from another universe. However, this is just a theory lacking direct evidence. Critics might argue that our universe’s mathematical and quantum mechanical framework is self-sufficient and doesn’t require an external ‘hardware’ universe. It’s a debatable point, and perhaps future developments might provide stronger arguments or evidence.
The emergence of a universe from non-existence, if it does rely on a hardware world, would require that this hardware world possesses a structure capable of storing and processing information in a self-consistent manner, reflecting a quantum mechanical, and possibly a general relativistic, universe. As this information accumulates over time, the universe appears to age, expand, and contain more matter. Initially, the universe is a chaotic soup, poorly suited for information exchange until it cools down. This cooling process allows for more defined interactions, akin to the universe becoming ‘visible’ to itself. The visibility of the universe’s early stages, like the cosmic microwave background, depends on the formation of basic elements and the release of photons as the universe cools and expands.
Historically, theories like the Big Bang and steady state models have attempted to explain the universe’s expansion. The steady state theory, now largely discredited, proposed continuous creation of matter in the voids between galaxies, which conflicts with our understanding of a self-consistent informational universe. Matter, we hypothesize, must emerge from the ‘edges’ of the universe, integrating into the rest of the universe in a way that maintains consistency and historical continuity.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
In-Sight Publishing 