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How to Think Like a Genius 2— Annus Mirabilus

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Rick Rosner)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/06/08

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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s talk about mental discipline, executive function, things like that.

Rick Rosner: When you look at some of the most famous geniuses have done, it’s often the result of thinking about tough problems for periods of many years. Either because they want to or I suspect in some cases because they forced themselves to keep coming back to a problem and reviewing it and breaking down their assumptions about it, and trying to find other angles on it.

Einstein first became fascinated with physics when he gave someone a compass. The kind that points North when he was 5 or 6 years old. The mysteriousness of some underlying force that was making the needle point in the same direction all of time fascinated him and triggered a habit of thinking about problems in physics for hours every day, I would assume, or the rest of his life.

He was 26 when he had his miracle year, Annus Mirabilus is a term for a year that he thought of a bunch of stuff including calculus and universal gravitation, but it should be applied to Einstein in 1905 because he published. Einstein never won the Nobel Prize for Relativity. it was not substantiated enough at the time and maybe there was political — scientific awards are as political as anything else. He published his theory of special relativity in 1905 and 5 other papers too including one on Brownian Motion, which proved the atomic nature of matter by proving the little juggles in liquids, and I think for that — that’s the among the reasons for him winning the Nobel Prize, and in the few years leading up to the papers and couple after he was working at the patent office looking at people’s patent applications, which gave him enough time on and off the job to think up these 4 papers that changed the world or most of which changed the world.

It was another ten years before he came up with General Relativity, which as a similar name to Special Relativity but is an entirely different theory, and deals with how gravitation and space and matter determine each other, and he had a bunch of years in those years between special and general relativity where he got discouraged. he had an overall picture of what he wanted the theory to do, but couldn’t find the math to do it, and he kept getting what he thought was close but that the math wasn’t adequate. He wasn’t the greatest math guy. His friends or some of them knew more specialized math than he did, and finally one of them pointed him in the right direction, which is a major — I don’t know the math of Special or General Relativity but there is a matrix that has 10 variables that let’s you set the conditions of space based on the equations.

He spends or starts thinking about physics when he is a little kid. He might have gotten the. From 10–26, he is thinking about physics, brings out his four famous papers, does general Relativity after another 10 years in the meantime. he is contributing to other scientific discussions, and then he is 36 at the time this paper is at the end of his or thought of as his major contribution to physics, and among things, and I don’t know how he did it, but the laser he invented it in paper. he had lots to say about quantum mechanics, which he disliked because of its probabilistic nature. He spent the last half of his life, which means well over half of his life, as a theoretician trying to come up with a unified field theory, which he failed to do, but his — every day big chunks of his day every day were spent thinking about physics and probably willing himself to think about physics at times of frustration because he probably had more times of frustration than breakthroughs, especially considering that from 1916 to his death in 1955 39/38 years.

he was working towards a theory that he never completed. So, you’ve got Darwin famous for taking more than 20 years to push out his theory of evolution, and only then because he received word that someone else had or was ready to publish a similar theory. Darwin goes on the Beagle. This five-year voyage where he sees all of these geological formations and different animals, which convince him that the world that we live in is the result of deep time, of at the very least hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary history.

he spends 20 years or more writing and refining the arguments and not publishing until his buddies say that there’s another paper by another guy. Who was the other guy?

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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.

How to Think Like a Genius 1 — Mid-Future

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Rick Rosner)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/06/02

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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We have external devices to calculate, to compute. These assist in numerous ways such as cats fighting dogs or Mathematica to help mathematicians to figure out theorems. How might the future look in mid-future to far future?

Rick Rosner: All of human history up to now has been the Age of Low-Hanging Fruit. We have been able to find relationships among things that are fairly easily expressed and don’t have that many variables. In massive computer networks like all the computers who are connected to do flash trading on the stock market, you can have unpredictable events, flash crashes, that remain somewhat inexplicable after the fact, even after people try to analyze them. Although, I’m not sure how inexplicable. We will, as our technology increases, begin to exploit less simple sets of relationships among potential variables and find new things in the world whose relationships aren’t as clear and apparent. We’ll find new relationships in the world that aren’t as simple or obvious as the relationships that we’re used to in math and physics and analyzing human behavior.

In the 80s, Wall Street was invaded by the quants. I think they’re called that, which are fairly large numbers of people with thorough and sophisticated mathematical training. People who are post-docs in physics and math, who hadn’t been on Wall Street before and were able to come up with algorithms. Before the 80s, in Wall Street, trading was done by ballsy guys that just went with their guts, but the 80s come in and the quants come in in the 80s and they tease out mathematical relationships, trends, algorithms, to detect trading patterns. Wall Street became mathematicized. The early quants and the companies that hired them made a bunch of money as they got out ahead — because they were using trading techniques that were more sophisticated than the rest of Wall Street and then the rest of Wall Street caught up without becoming more predictable because as things became computerized and I don;’ know what the volume of trading has increased by in the 70s and now, but it is probably 500-fold because of all of the computer trading. Shares change hands in thousandths of a second.

So, the easy math has been done, and now it’s the advantages coming up with the slightly faster algorithms or the fiber optic cables that give gains of a few microseconds faster than the other people, but over the next 30 years the informational capacity of humans and their artificial intelligent or engineered assistants will lead to a second wave of find more complicated and subtle relationships in the financial markets and probably in the fields of science, math, and other human endeavours.

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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.

Excerpts from the Archives of the Narcissism List – Part 62

Author(s): Sam Vaknin and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Vaknin.Tripod.Com (Excerpts from the Archives of the Narcissism List – Part 62)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): n.d.

1.    Interview with In-Sight (June 2020)

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Within the DSM-V, of those criteria for formal diagnosis of an individual with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), what ones seem the most reliable, valid, and powerful as predictors of NPD to each of you?

Sam Vaknin: The DSM V is a vast improvement over the DSM IV-TR in that it includes an alternate model with criteria which are dimensional, not categorical; dynamic, not static;  and descriptive rather than taxonomic (concerned with lists of symptoms). 

The DSM V re-defines personality disorders thus:

“The essential features of a personality disorder are impairments in personality (self and interpersonal) functioning and the presence of pathological personality traits.”

According to the Alternative DSM V Model for Personality Disorders (p.767), the following criteria must be met to diagnose Narcissistic Personality Disorder (in parentheses my comments):

Moderate or greater impairment in personality functioning in either identity, or self-direction (should be: in both.)

Identity

The narcissist keeps referring to others excessively in order to regulate his self-esteem (really, sense of self-worth) and for “self-definition” (to define his identity.) His self-appraisal is exaggerated, whether it is inflated, deflated, or fluctuating between these two poles and his emotional regulation reflects these vacillations.

(Finally, the DSM V accepted what I have been saying for decades: that narcissists can have an “inferiority complex” and feel worthless and bad; that they go through cycles of ups and downs in their self-evaluation; and that this cycling influences their mood and affect).

Self-direction

The narcissist sets goals in order to gain approval from others (narcissistic supply; the DSM V ignores the fact that the narcissist finds disapproval equally rewarding as long as it places him firmly in the limelight.) The narcissist lacks self-awareness as far as his motivation goes (and as far as everything else besides.)

The narcissist’s personal standards and benchmarks are either too high (which supports his grandiosity), or too low (buttresses his sense of entitlement, which is incommensurate with his real-life performance.)

Impairments in interpersonal functioning in either empathy or intimacy (should be: in both.)

Empathy

The narcissist finds it difficult to identify with the emotions and needs of others, but is very attuned to their reactions when they are relevant to himself (cold empathy.) Consequently, he overestimates the effect he has on others or underestimates it (the classic narcissist never underestimates the effect he has on others – but the inverted narcissist does.)

Intimacy

The narcissist’s relationships are self-serving and, therefore shallow and superficial. They are centred around and geared at the regulation of his self-esteem (obtaining narcissistic supply for the regulation of his labile sense of self-worth.)


The narcissist is not “genuinely” interested in his intimate partner’s experiences (implying that he does fake such interest convincingly.) The narcissist emphasizes his need for personal gain (by using the word “need”, the DSM V acknowledges the compulsive and addictive nature of narcissistic supply). These twin fixtures of the narcissist’s relationships render them one-sided: no mutuality or reciprocity (no intimacy).

Pathological personality traits

Antagonism characterized by grandiosity and attention-seeking

Grandiosity

The aforementioned feeling of entitlement. The DSM V adds that it can be either overt or covert (which corresponds to my taxonomy of classic and inverted narcissist.)

Grandiosity is characterized by self-centredness; a firmly-held conviction of superiority (arrogance or haughtiness); and condescending or patronizing attitudes.

Attention-seeking

The narcissist puts inordinate effort, time, and resources into attracting others (sources of narcissistic supply) and placing himself at the focus and centre of attention. He seeks admiration (the DSM V gets it completely wrong here: the narcissist does prefer to be admired and adulated, but, failing that, any kind of attention would do, even if it is negative.)

The diagnostic criteria end with disclaimers and differential diagnoses, which reflect years of accumulated research and newly-gained knowledge:

The above enumerated impairments should be “stable across time and consistent across situations … not better understood as normative for the individual’s developmental stage or socio-cultural environment … are not solely due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., a drug of abuse, medication) or a general medical condition (e.g., severe head trauma).”

Jacobsen: In correspondence, Christian, you noted three fundamental axes of identity self-concept, defense mechanisms, and type of object relationship. Christian, can you elaborate on these three axes, please? Sam, can you reflect on these proposed axes from within the professional literature and as a leading expert on NPD?

Vaknin: Pathological narcissism is a reaction to prolonged abuse and trauma in early childhood or early adolescence. The source of the abuse or trauma is immaterial – the perpetrators could be parents, teachers, other adults, or peers. Pampering, smothering, spoiling, and “engulfing” the child are also forms of abuse.

Pathological narcissism has been conceptualized successively as an infantile defense mechanism and a disturbance in object relations. Later, it metamorphosed into a personality disorder. I regard it as a post-traumatic condition coupled with arrested development (puer aeternus, Peter pan). Inevitably, such early childhood traumas render attachment in later adult life very dysfunctional, of course. It also gives rise to cognitive deficits such as grandiosity and to the overuse of defense mechanisms such as fantasy. But these are secondary features and not universal.

Jacobsen: Christian, also, you remarked on psychiatry and the phenomenological approach, existentialism, and vitalism. So, Christian, what are the reasons for these intersections with respect to a philosophical approach to analyzing narcissism? Sam, how does philosophy play a fundamental role, or simply a role if at all, in orienting and defining the diagnosis of NPD or simply narcissism with psychology?

Vaknin: It doesn’t. The members of the DSM Committee have no training in philosophy. Psychology pretends counterfactually to be an exact science, at least as much as medicine is. Philosophers are not welcome. Freud was a neurologist and tried to create a physics of the mind (“analysis”). The tradition of experimental psychology now dominates and lab coats are everywhere. There is a very strong strand of anti-intellectualism and anti-philosophy in psychology.

Jacobsen: Some still view mental disorders as some otherworldly phenomenon, as in something spiritual grounded in sin or a disorder of the soul. Why do these supernaturalistic propositions and (non-)explanations continue to persist over time?

Vaknin: Because people are ignorant and feeble-minded, befuddled and fearful, disoriented and at the mercy of psychopathic con artist masquerading as religious leaders, public intellectuals, gurus, mystics, and life coaches with the definitive answers to all their questions immersed in the syrups of love and universal harmony, whatever this nonsense may mean. 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s focus on narcissism and some of the well-known geniuses in history. Sam, you’re an expert in NPD and narcissism. Before covering narcissism and NPD in relation to genius, defining the term, what are the appropriate criteria for defining and recognizing a genius?

Sam Vaknin: To my mind, a genius is endowed with a synoptic view of ostensibly complex issues, coupled with the ability to make connections between apparently disparate elements so as to induce a reduction of those issues to simplicity. These linkages appear in hindsight to be self-evident and even trivial.

Jacobsen: What defines only someone faking aspects of a genius without truly being a genius, as a contrast definition from the previous question? 

Vaknin: Fake geniuses are far more common than real ones. Their work is always derivative and imitative and they tend to amplify complexity rather simplify.

Jacobsen: Would we expect narcissism and NPD more or less in the small populations of geniuses compared to the general population? 

Vaknin: True geniuses start off as child prodigies even if their gifts render them socially dysfunctional and retard their personal growth and development. Whether the Wunderkind ends up being a clinical narcissist depends crucially on his or her upbringing. As I said before, pampering, smothering, spoiling, and “engulfing” the child are also forms of potentially traumatic abuse which could result in narcissism. But pathological narcissism should not be confused or conflated with haughtiness and abrasiveness. 

Jacobsen: Who – one or more individuals – comes to mind in history and in the modern world who represent a highly narcissistic genius?

Vaknin: It would be far easier and shorter to compile a list of non-narcissistic geniuses.

Jacobsen: Do geniuses exhibit certain traits of narcissism more extremely than others compared to less gifted and less talented narcissists?

Vaknin: Narcissists who are true geniuses are faced with an intractable problem: their grandiosity is fully justified and they are not the recipients of beneficial corrective feedback from their environment. On the contrary: their genius virtually guarantees an uninterruptible loop of positive reinforcement. This virtually guarantees arrogance, defiance, antagonism, and attention seeking behaviors.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You are a leading expert in Narcissistic Personality Disorder or NPD. What is NPD?

Professor Sam Vaknin: Pathological narcissism is a life-long pattern of traits and behaviours which signify infatuation and obsession with one’s self to the exclusion of all others and the egotistic and ruthless pursuit of one’s gratification, dominance and ambition. As distinct from healthy narcissism which we all possess, pathological narcissism is maladaptive, rigid, persisting, and causes significant distress, and functional impairment.

Jacobsen: What are disorders and syndromes in the orbit of or related to NPD?

Vaknin: All the dramatic (or erratic) personality disorders – also known as cluster B – are closely related. The overlap is so great that two or more of them are often diagnosed in the same person, a phenomenon known as comorbidity. Another problem is the polythetic nature of the DSM: to be diagnosed with a disorder, one must satisfy only a few of its diagnostic criteria. So, we can have two patients with the same diagnosis, but utterly different traits and behaviors. NPD is also often comorbid with mood disorders, anxiety disorders, and substance abuse or other addictions.

Jacobsen: What is the typical emotional age of someone diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder?

Vaknin: Between 4 and 11, with a median of 6.

Jacobsen: What does this emotional age mean for individuals who are chronologically in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and beyond with formal NPD? How does this impact their life trajectory?

Vaknin: Such eternal adolescents (Puer Aeternus or Peter Pan) – children really – refuse to accept adult responsibilities and chores and to commit themselves to anything or anyone. They are ludic (like to play), self-centred, defiant, impulsive, immature both cognitively and emotionally, incapable of deciphering social and sexual cues, not fully differentiated as far as their gender and psychosexuality, lack impulse control, foresight, and the ability to delay gratification, are reckless, and suffer from identity diffusion (shifting values, allegiances, opinions, plans, even memories). They are highly dissociative and confabulate to make up for the time lost. Many suffer from addictions. They are not goal-oriented and both the level of organization of their personality and their self-efficacy are low. 

Jacobsen: You have commented on giftedness and narcissists. Not all gifted people are narcissists; not all narcissists are gifted. However, when gifted people are narcissists, or vice versa, how does this impact the life of a child in interpersonal relations with peers and teachers, and when girl-girl, boy-boy, or girl-boy time in adolescence?

Vaknin: The prodigy – the precocious “genius” – feels entitled to special treatment. Yet, he rarely gets it. This frustrates him and renders him even more aggressive, driven, and overachieving than he is by nature.

As Horney pointed out, the child-prodigy is dehumanised and instrumentalised. His parents love him not for what he really is – but for what they wish and imagine him to be: the fulfilment of their dreams and frustrated wishes. The child becomes the vessel of his parents’ discontented lives, a tool, the magic brush with which they can transform their failures into successes, their humiliation into victory, their frustrations into happiness.

The child is taught to ignore reality and to occupy the parental fantastic space. Such an unfortunate child feels omnipotent and omniscient, perfect and brilliant, worthy of adoration and entitled to special treatment. The faculties that are honed by constantly brushing against bruising reality – empathy, compassion, a realistic assessment of one’s abilities and limitations, realistic expectations of oneself and of others, personal boundaries, team work, social skills, perseverance and goal-orientation, not to mention the ability to postpone gratification and to work hard to achieve it – are all lacking or missing altogether.

The child turned adult sees no reason to invest in his skills and education, convinced that his inherent genius should suffice. He feels entitled for merely being, rather than for actually doing (rather as the nobility in days gone by felt entitled not by virtue of its merit but as the inevitable, foreordained outcome of its birth right). In other words, he is not meritocratic – but aristocratic. In short: a narcissist is born.

Not all precocious prodigies end up under-accomplished and petulant. Many of them go on to attain great stature in their communities and great standing in their professions. But, even then, the gap between the kind of treatment they believe that they deserve and the one they are getting is unbridgeable.

This is because narcissistic prodigies often misjudge the extent and importance of their accomplishments and, as a result, erroneously consider themselves to be indispensable and worthy of special rights, perks, and privileges. When they find out otherwise, they are devastated and furious.

Moreover, people are envious of the prodigy. The genius serves as a constant reminder to others of their mediocrity, lack of creativity, and mundane existence. Naturally, they try to “bring him down to their level” and “cut him down to size”. The gifted person’s haughtiness and high-handedness only exacerbate his strained relationships.

In a way, merely by existing, the prodigy inflicts constant and repeated narcissistic injuries on the less endowed and the pedestrian. This creates a vicious cycle. People try to hurt and harm the overweening and arrogant genius and he becomes defensive, aggressive, and aloof. This renders him even more obnoxious than before and others resent him more deeply and more thoroughly. Hurt and wounded, he retreats into fantasies of grandeur and revenge. And the cycle re-commences.

Prone to shortcuts and to shallowness, the narcissist always feels like a fraud, even when his accomplishments are commensurate with his grandiose fantasies. 

This all-pervasive conviction serves several paradoxical psychodynamic functions: it supports the narcissist’s sense of omnipotent superiority (as he is able to deceive everyone into believing his tall tales all the time); it justifies his profound belief that everyone, like him, is just pretending to knowledge and skills that they do not possess (otherwise they would have spotted and exposed him long ago); it gives him licence to indulge his intellectual laziness and emotional absence (he gets by without investing too much, so why bother); and it constantly generates the adrenaline rush that he is so addicted to (the tantalizing fear of being outed as the con-artist that he truly is.)

Recent studies seem to indicate that prodigies grow up to become narcissistic under-achievers.

Fields like literature require maturity and life experience. Prodigies, no matter how gifted, rarely possess the requisite emotional spectrum, an acquaintance with the nuances and subtleties of human relationships, or the accumulated knowledge that comes from first-hand exposure to the ups and downs of reality. 

In contrast, the manipulation of symbols – in mathematics, music, or chess – does not require anything except the proper neurological “hardware and software” and access to widely available objective knowledge.

In a way, prodigies can be compared to computers: both excel in symbol manipulation and fail to impress in other, more fuzzy undertakings.

Precocious prodigies seem to be a culture-bound phenomenon. There are far fewer “gifted” children in the collectivist societies of Asia and Africa, for instance. Based as they are on statistical comparisons and ranking, Western IQ tests reflect the values of competition and individualism. Ipso facto, prodigies proliferate in rich, white, developed countries, and not in the poorer ambiences of the Third World, the inner cities, and minority communities.

Still, if you study the biographies of hundreds of men and (the far fewer) women who started life as Wunderkinder, you will find that many of them actually hailed from underprivileged backgrounds, replete with indigence, familial dysfunction, racial or other discrimination, and other forms of deprivation.

Thus, one would do well to distinguish between two types of prodigies: the pampered, cosseted, tutored, often narcissistic type versus the prodigy whose excellence is the only way of fleeing the miserableness of his or her circumstances. The second type of gifted youngster leverages what endowments he possesses to extricate himself from his destitute surroundings and restore hope to an otherwise bleak existence.

The child prodigy compensates with grandiose, fantastic, and inflated self-efficacy (“I can do anything if I just apply myself to it”) for a deficient sense of agency (“the life I am living is not mine”). The child prodigy suppresses his true self because his parents’s love is conditioned on the performance of a false self.

Consequently, the child feels that her life has been hijacked. She makes up for it by excelling and becoming proficient at what she does thus regaining a modicum of mastery and control, however illusory. Such attempts to carve out a parent-free enclave or niche often lead to pathologies such as eating disorders or substance abuse.


As an adult, the child prodigy becomes narcissistic, defiant, self-destructive, and manipulative. She adopts one of several narratives: 1. I am the sleeping beauty princess in need of saving from my monstrous tormentors (codependent) or 2. I am the Law and no one will tell me what to do and how to do it, I know best and one day I will shine again (antisocial-narcissistic) or 3. The world doesn’t deserve me and is too hostile, so I withdraw from it (paranoid-schizoid) or 4. I am broken, unfixable, and so free to act any which way (entitled-borderline).

Jacobsen: When individuals with NPD marry someone, if at all, what is the divorce rate of these marriages?

Vaknin: We have no statistics. But, paradoxically, trauma bonding and the shared fantasy in these marriages and the narcissist’s propensity to threaten and blackmail his intimate partner into submission would tend to reduce the divorce rates, not increase it.

Jacobsen: What happens with a gifted narcissist who, finally, hits a limit of their talents, e.g., in university, and then the reality of having to work hard, develop study habits, etc., hits home for them? Their false self hits the real world and does not have the emotional tools to deal with the hurt to their false self.

Vaknin: Allow me a quote: His genius was betrayed by lofty and indomitable traits of character which could not yield or compromise. And so his life was a tragedy of inconsequence.” (The poetess Harriet Monroe, quoted in the book “The Devil in White City” by Erik Larson)

You are asking if pathological narcissism is a positive adaptation, if it is a blessing or a malediction?

The answer is: it depends. Healthy narcissism is a mature, balanced love of oneself coupled with a stable sense of self-worth and self-esteem. Healthy narcissism implies knowledge of one’s boundaries and a proportionate and realistic appraisal of one’s achievements and traits.

Pathological narcissism is wrongly described as too much healthy narcissism (or too much self-esteem). These are two absolutely unrelated phenomena which, regrettably, came to bear the same title. Confusing pathological narcissism with self- esteem betrays a fundamental ignorance of both.

Pathological narcissism involves an impaired, dysfunctional, immature (True) Self coupled with a compensatory fiction (the False Self). The sick narcissist’s sense of self-worth and self-esteem derive entirely from audience feedback. The narcissist has no self-esteem or self-worth of his own (no such ego functions). In the absence of observers, the narcissist shrivels to non-existence and feels dead. Hence the narcissist’s preying habits in his constant pursuit of Narcissistic Supply. Pathological narcissism is an addictive behavior.

Still, dysfunctions are reactions to abnormal environments and situations (e.g., abuse, trauma, smothering, etc.).

Paradoxically, his dysfunction allows the narcissist to function. It compensates for lacks and deficiencies by exaggerating tendencies and traits. It is like the tactile sense of a blind person. In short: pathological narcissism is a result of over-sensitivity, the repression of overwhelming memories and experiences, and the suppression of inordinately strong negative feelings (e.g., hurt, envy, anger, or humiliation).

That the narcissist functions at all – is because of his pathology and thanks to it. The alternative is complete decompensation and disintegration.

In time, the narcissist learns how to leverage his pathology, how to use it to his advantage, how to deploy it in order to maximize benefits and utilities – in other words, how to transform his curse into a blessing.

Narcissists are obsessed by delusions of fantastic grandeur and superiority. As a result they are very competitive. They are strongly compelled – where others are merely motivated. They are driven, relentless, tireless, and ruthless. They often make it to the top. But even when they do not – they strive and fight and learn and climb and create and think and devise and design and conspire. Faced with a challenge – they are likely to do better than non-narcissists.

Yet, we often find that narcissists abandon their efforts in mid-stream, give up, vanish, lose interest, devalue former pursuits, fail, or slump. Why is that?

Narcissists are prone to self-defeating and self-destructive behaviors.

The Self-Punishing, Guilt-Purging Behaviors

These are intended to inflict punishment on the narcissist and thus instantly relieve him of his overwhelming anxiety.

This is very reminiscent of a compulsive-ritualistic behavior. The narcissist feels guilty. It could be an “ancient” guilt, a “sexual” guilt (Freud), or a “social” guilt. In early life, the narcissist internalized and introjected the voices of meaningful and authoritative others – parents, role models, peers – that consistently and convincingly judged him to be no good, blameworthy, deserving of punishment or retaliation, or corrupt.

The narcissist’s life is thus transformed into an on-going trial. The constancy of this trial, the never adjourning tribunal is the punishment. It is a Kafkaesque “trial”: meaningless, undecipherable, never-ending, leading to no verdict, subject to mysterious and fluid laws and presided over by capricious judges.

Such a narcissist masochistically frustrates his deepest desires and drives, obstructs his own efforts, alienates his friends and sponsors, provokes figures in authority to punish, demote, or ignore him, actively seeks and solicits disappointment, failure, or mistreatment and relishes them, incites anger or rejection, bypasses or rejects opportunities, or engages in excessive self-sacrifice.

In their book “Personality Disorders in Modern Life”, Theodore Millon and Roger Davis, describe the diagnosis of “Masochistic or Self-Defeating Personality Disorder”, found in the appendix of the DSM III-R but excluded from the DSM IV. While the narcissist is rarely a full-fledged masochist, many a narcissist exhibit some of the traits of this personality disorder.

The Extracting Behaviors

People with Personality Disorders (PDs) are very afraid of real, mature, intimacy. Intimacy is formed not only within a couple, but also in a workplace, in a neighborhood, with friends, while collaborating on a project. Intimacy is another word for emotional involvement, which is the result of interactions in constant and predictable (safe) propinquity. 

PDs interpret intimacy as counter-dependence, emotional strangulation, the snuffing of freedom, a kind of death in installments. They are terrorized by it. To avoid it, their self-destructive and self-defeating acts are intended to dismantle the very foundation of a successful relationship, a career, a project, or a friendship. Narcissists feel elated and relieved after they unshackle these “chains”. They feel they broke a siege, that they are liberated, free at last.

The Default Behaviors

We are all, to some degree, inertial, afraid of new situations, new opportunities, new challenges, new circumstances and new demands. Being healthy, being successful, getting married, becoming a mother, or someone’s boss – often entail abrupt breaks with the past. Some self-defeating behaviors are intended to preserve the past, to restore it, to protect it from the winds of change, to self-deceptively skirt promising opportunities while seeming to embrace them.

Moreover, to the narcissist, a challenge, or even a guaranteed eventual triumph, are meaningless in the absence of onlookers. The narcissist needs an audience to applaud, affirm, recoil, approve, admire, adore, fear, or even detest him. He craves the attention and depends on the Narcissistic Supply only others can provide. The narcissist derives sustenance only from the outside – his emotional innards are hollow and moribund.

The narcissist’s enhanced performance is predicated on the existence of a challenge (real or imaginary) and of an audience. Baumeister usefully re-affirmed this linkage, known to theoreticians since Freud.

But, we are well-advised to make a distinction between high-functioning narcissists whose personality is highly organized and low-functioning narcissist who often end up being failures and losers

Narcissists are low-functioning (with a disorganized personality), high-functioning, or dysfunctional (usually when the patient’s narcissism is comorbid with other mental health problems.) High-functioning narcissists are indistinguishable from driven and ambitious alpha over-achievers. But even they tend to implode and self-destruct. Low-functioning narcissists are antisocial, sometimes schizoid, and beset by disorders of mood and affect

Three traits conspire to render the low-functioning narcissist a failure and a loser: his sense of entitlement, his haughtiness and innate conviction of his own superiority, and his aversion to routine.

The narcissist’s sense of entitlement encourages his indolence. He firmly believes that he should be spoon-fed and that accomplishments and honors should be handed to him on a silver platter, without any commensurate effort on his part. His mere existence justifies such exceptional treatment. Many narcissists are under-qualified and lack skills because they can’t be bothered with the minutia of obtaining an academic degree, professional training, or exams.

The narcissist’s arrogance and belief that he is superior to others, whom he typically holds in contempt – in other words: the narcissist’s grandiose fantasies – hamper his ability to function in society. The cumulative outcomes of this social dysfunction gradually transform him into a recluse and an outcast. He is shunned by colleagues, employers, neighbors, erstwhile friends, and, finally, even by long-suffering family members who tire of his tirades and rants.

Unable to work in a team, to compromise, to give credit where due, and to strive towards long-term goals, the narcissist – skilled and gifted as he may be – finds himself unemployed and unemployable, his bad reputation preceding him. 

Even when offered a job or a business opportunity, the narcissist recoils, bolts, and obstructs each and every stage of the negotiations or the transaction. 

But this passive-aggressive (negativistic and masochistic) conduct has nothing to do with the narcissist’s aforementioned indolence. The narcissist is not afraid of some forms of hard work. He invests inordinate amounts of energy, forethought, planning, zest, and sweat in securing narcissistic supply, for instance.

The narcissist’s sabotage of new employment or business prospects is owing to his abhorrence of routine. Narcissists feel trapped, shackled, and enslaved by the quotidian, by the repetitive tasks that are inevitably involved in fulfilling one’s assignments. They hate the methodical, step-by-step, long-term, approach. Possessed of magical thinking, they’d rather wait for miracles to happen. Jobs, business deals, and teamwork require perseverance and tolerance of boredom which the narcissist sorely lacks.

Life forces most narcissists into the hard slog of a steady job (or succession of jobs). Such “unfortunate” narcissists, coerced into a framework they resent, are likely to act out and erupt in a series of self-destructive and self-defeating acts (see above). 

But there are other narcissists, the “luckier” ones, those who can afford not to work. They laze about, indulge themselves in a variety of idle and trivial pursuits, seek entertainment and thrills wherever and whenever they can, and while their lives away, at once content and bitter: content with their lifestyle and the minimum demands it imposes on them and bitter because they haven’t achieved more, they haven’t reached the pinnacle or their profession, they haven’t become as rich or famous or powerful as they deserve to be.

We all try to replicate and re-enact our successes. We feel comfortable and confident doing what we do best and what we do most often. We enshrine our oft-repeated tasks and our cumulative experiences as habits.

Asked to adopt new skills and confront unprecedented tasks, we recoil, procrastinate, or delegate (read: pass the buck). Performance anxiety is common.

Someone who keeps failing is rendered very good at it, he becomes adept at the art of floundering, an expert on fizzle and blunder, an artist of the slip. The more dismal the defeats, the more familiar the terrain of losses and botched attempts. Failure is the loser’s comfort zone. He uses projective identification to coerce people around him to help him revert to form: to fail.

Such a loser will aim to recreate time and again his only accomplishment: his spectacular downfalls, thwarted schemes, and harebrained stratagems. A slave to a repetition compulsion, the loser finds the terra incognita of success intimidating. He wraps his precious aborted flops in a mantle of an ideology: success is an evil, all successful people are crooks or the beneficiaries of quirky fortune.

To the loser, his miscarriages and deterioration are a warm blanket underneath which he hides himself from a hostile world. Failure is a powerful and addictive organizing principle which imbues life with meaning and predictability and allows the loser to make sense of his personal history. Being a loser is an identity and losers are proud of it as they recount with wonder their mishaps, misfortune, and vicissitudes.

Why do some narcissists appear to be bumbling fools, never mind how intelligent they actually are? Eight reasons:

1. No impulse control, no forethought, no foresight = counterproductive, self-defeating, and self-destructive decisions and actions.

2. Acting out: when narcissistic supply is deficient, narcissists decompensate and go haywire (see: collapsed narcissists). 

3. Pseudo-stupidity: to avoid the consequences of their misdeeds, narcissists pretend that they have misunderstood something you have said or done or that you took advantage of their good nature.

4. Gullibility: narcissists are grandiose and fantasts, so they misjudge reality (impaired reality test), their skills and limitations, and the intentions of others.

5. No empathy means that the narcissist disastrously misreads others and behaves in socially unacceptable and clownish ways.

6. His sense of entitlement renders the narcissist an overweening buffoon, the butt of mockery and derision, rather than the awe he believes that he inspires and the respect he thinks that he deserves.

7. Hypervigilance leads to disproportionate aggression directed at imaginary slights and to persecutory delusions: paranoid ideation often directed at innocent targets.

8. Finally, the narcissist uses false modesty to fish for compliments. But his attempts are so transparent and inarticulate, so fake and manipulative that people react with repulsion and seek to humiliate him.

Jacobsen: Why does NPD happen more in men and Borderline Personality Disorder happen more in women?

Vaknin: Ever since Freud, more women than men sought therapy. Consequently, terms like “hysteria’ are intimately connected to female physiology and alleged female psychology. The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the bible of the psychiatric profession) expressly professes gender bias: personality disorders such as Borderline and Histrionic are supposed to be more common among women. but the DSM is rather even-handed: other personality disorders (e.g., the Narcissistic and Antisocial as well as the Schizotypal, Obsessive-Compulsive, Schizoid, and Paranoid) are more prevalent among men.

Why this gender disparity? There are a few possible answers:

Maybe personality disorders are not objective clinical entities, but culture-bound syndromes. In other words, perhaps they reflect biases and value judgments. Some patriarchal societies are also narcissistic. They emphasize qualities such as individualism and ambition, often identified with virility. Hence the preponderance of pathological narcissism among men. Women, on the other hand, are widely believed to be emotionally labile and clinging. This is why most Borderlines and Dependents are females. 

Upbringing and environment, the process of socialization and cultural mores all play an important role in the pathogenesis of personality disorders. These views are not fringe: serious scholars (e.g., Kaplan and Pantony, 1991) claim that the mental health profession is inherently sexist.

Then again, genetics may be is at work. Men and women do differ genetically. This may account for the variability of the occurrence of specific personality disorders in men and women.

Some of the diagnostic criteria are ambiguous or even considered “normal” by the majority of the population. Histrionics “consistently use physical appearance to draw attention to self.” Well, who doesn’t in Western society? Why when a woman clings to a man it is labelled “codependence”, but when a man relies on a woman to maintain his home, take care of his children, choose his attire, and prop his ego it is “companionship” (Walker, 1994)?

The less structured the interview and the more fuzzy the diagnostic criteria, the more the diagnostician relies on stereotypes (Widiger, 1998).

Jacobsen: As a foremost expert on NPD, what have been the novel contributions to the field by you?

Vaknin: I started my work in this then obscure field in 1995. I had to coin a whole new language, a glossary of neologisms and terms adapted from other branches of psychology in order to describe my observations and studies. Most of the terms and phrases in use today can be traced back to my pioneering efforts (including the ubiquitous “narcissistic abuse”). My website – with well over 2000 articles – was the only one dedicated to the subject until 2004 and I ran all the online support groups for victims of narcissistic abuse until that year. I want to believe that there is no aspect of our current understanding of narcissistic disorders of the self that does not bear my stamp and signature. I am still innovating: “cold empathy”, “collapsed histrionic”, “covert borderline”, “flat attachment” and dozens of other new concepts. I also came up with a new treatment modality, “Cold Therapy”, that shows promise in our attempts to reverse NPD and major depression. I have been teaching all these things for 5 years now to generations of students in several countries. Parallel with that, I am helping to revive a theory in physics that I came up with in 1982-4 and which is gaining mainstream currency now and I contribute to diverse fields such as economics and philosophy. Keeping busy. 

Jacobsen: What differentiates work set forth by qualified self-help experts, self-styled self-help ‘experts’ (poorly trained, even badly self-trained), and qualified non-self-help experts/certified academic-oriented experts in the area of NPD research and public presentation of theories and empirics?

Vaknin: There are very few true experts and scholars in this relatively new and embryonic field and not one of them is accessible online. The overwhelming majority of the self-styled “experts” online are charlatans and worse. They spew dangerous and misleading nonsense and capitalize on the victims’s plight. I have never charged a cent for my work: it has all been available online at no charge since 1995. The only thing I charge for is my time. The rest is free: books, videos, papers, articles, everything. Whatever I make available is based on decades of in-depth research into the literature and an experience of 25 years, triple that of anyone else. 

Jacobsen: So, the Mayo Clinic Staff in “Narcissistic personality disorder” list some of the attributes of NPD:

· Have an exaggerated sense of self-importance

· Have a sense of entitlement and require constant, excessive admiration

· Expect to be recognized as superior even without achievements that warrant it

· Exaggerate achievements and talents

· Be preoccupied with fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty or the perfect mate

· Believe they are superior and can only associate with equally special people

· Monopolize conversations and belittle or look down on people they perceive as inferior

· Expect special favors and unquestioning compliance with their expectations

· Take advantage of others to get what they want

· Have an inability or unwillingness to recognize the needs and feelings of others

· Be envious of others and believe others envy them

· Behave in an arrogant or haughty manner, coming across as conceited, boastful and pretentious

· Insist on having the best of everything — for instance, the best car or office

How accurate is this listing? The Mayo Clinic is pretty darn good on most stuff, I assume. Does this differ from the DSM-V or align with it?

Vaknin: This text merely paraphrases the diagnostic criteria listed in the DSM IV-TR without adding a single thing or insight to them and without adapting the language – first published in 2000 – to the most recent advances in the field. Here is a modified version of my own:

  • Feels grandiose and self-important (e.g., exaggerates accomplishments, talents, skills, contacts, and personality traits to the point of lyingdemands to be recognised as superior without commensurate achievements);
  • Is obsessed with fantasies of unlimited success, fame, fearsome power or omnipotenceunequalled brilliance (the cerebral narcissist)bodily beauty or sexual performance (the somatic narcissist), or ideal, everlasting, all-conquering love or passion;
  • Firmly convinced that he or she is unique and, being special, can only be understood by, should only be treated by, or associate with, other special or unique, or high-status people (or institutions);
  • Requires excessive admiration, adulation, attention and affirmation – or, failing that, wishes to be feared and to be notorious (Narcissistic Supply);
  • Feels entitled. Demands automatic and full compliance with his or her unreasonable expectations for special and favourable priority treatment;
  • Is “interpersonally exploitative”, i.e., uses others to achieve his or her own ends;
  • Devoid of empathy. Is unable or unwilling to identify with, acknowledge, or accept the feelings, needs, preferences, priorities, and choices of others;
  • Constantly envious of others and seeks to hurt or destroy the objects of his or her frustration. Suffers from persecutory (paranoid) delusions as he or she believes that they feel the same about him or her and are likely to act similarly;
  • Behaves arrogantly and haughtily. Feels superior, omnipotent, omniscient, invincible, immune, “above the law”, and omnipresent (magical thinking). Rages when frustrated, contradicted, or confronted by people he or she considers inferior to him or her and unworthy.

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.

Excerpts from the Archives of the Narcissism List – Part 65

Author(s): Sam Vaknin and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Vaknin.Tripod.Com (Excerpts from the Archives of the Narcissism List – Part 65)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): n.d.

1.    Interview about Genius and Insanity (News Intervention)

Current Biography: Prof. Shmuel “Sam” Vaknin (YouTubeTwitterInstagramFacebookAmazonLinkedInGoogle Scholar) is the author of Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited (Amazon) and After the Rain: How the West Lost the East (Amazon) as well as many other books and ebooks about topics in psychology, relationships, philosophy, economics, international affairs, and award-winning short fiction. He was Senior Business Correspondent for United Press International (February, 2001 – April, 2003), CEO of Narcissus Publications (April, 1997 – April 2013), Editor-in-Chief of Global Politician (January, 2011 -), a columnist for PopMatters, eBookWeb, Bellaonline, and Central Europe Review, an editor for The Open Directory and Suite101 (Categories: Mental Health and Central East Europe), and a contributor to Middle East Times, a contributing writer to The American Chronicle Media Group, Columnist and Analyst for Nova MakedonijaFokus, and Kapital, Founding Analyst of The Analyst Network, former president of the Israeli chapter of the Unification Church‘s Professors for World Peace Academy, and served in the Israeli Defense Forces (1979-1982). He has been awarded Israel’s Council of Culture and Art Prize for Maiden Prose (1997), The Rotary Club Award for Social Studies (1976), and the Bilateral Relations Studies Award of the American Embassy in Israel (1978), among other awards. He is Visiting Professor of Psychology, Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russia (September, 2017 to present), Professor of Finance and Psychology in SIAS-CIAPS (Centre for International Advanced and Professional Studies) (April, 2012 to present), a Senior Correspondent for New York Daily Sun (January, 2015 – Present), and Columnist for Allied Newspapers Group (January, 2015 – Present). He lives in Skopje, North Macedonia with his wife, Lidija Rangelovska. Here we talk about genius and insanity.

*Previous interviews listed chronologically after interview.*

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Delusions remain ubiquitous. Delusions in conspiracy theories found in 5G, backmasking, Big Pharma, chemtrails, free energy suppression, Holocaust denial, New World Order-ism, QAnon, and so on. Delusions formalized in cults. Delusions in religious discourse, organization, and practice. Delusions promoted in quack ‘medicine’ with acupuncture, alternative ‘medicine,’ anti-GMO movements, anti-vaccination activism, aromatherapy, chiropractory, conversion therapy, faith healing, homeopathy, naturopathy, psychic surgery, Reiki, reflexology, traditional Chinese medicine, and such. Delusions in anti-intellectualism with creation ‘science’ (e.g., the variants of Creationism and Intelligent Design), global warming denialism or even alarmism in some respects, God of the gaps-ism, ‘holy’ text literalism, homeschooling, paranormalism, quantum woo, und so weiter. Delusions in bigotries and prejudices including anti-Semitism, or racist ideologies bound to politics or religion (e.g., white supremacist KKK, black supremacist Nation of Islam, and the like). Delusions in social and political cure-alls for societies’ ills – panaceas, e.g., American commitments to the idea of every problem having a solution. Then there are those who took a permanent lift-off from terra firma and detached from reality altogether, e.g., or a case study, the person running the “Sam Vaknin Scum Antichrist” YouTube channel – an apparent idiotic crazy (read: demented screwball) person. You know the deal. We’re on the same page in the identical book here. There’s a thin line, as has been observed before, between true genius and real insanity. What factors set the distinctions between insanity, on the one hand, and genius, on the other?

Prof. Shmuel “Sam” Vaknin: 

The problem is that both madness and genius involve the ability to reframe reality in an unexpected way (i.e., provide insight) either by gaining a synoptic or interdisciplinary vantage point – or by radically departing from hidden underlying assumptions. 

The scientific method is designed to tell the two apart by applying the test of falsifiable predictions. Both madness and genius are theories of the world and of the mind and, like every other type of theory, they yield predictions which can then be tested and falsified.

Most of the predictions yielded by insanity are easily and instantly falsifiable. Most of the predictions garnered by genius hold water for long stretches of time and, even when falsified, it is only in private cases or in extreme conditions. Thus, the theories of relativity falsify Newtonian prediction only on vast scales with incredible energies. 

Jacobsen: What are the easiest means by which to distinguish a genius from an insane person?

Vaknin: 

Psychopathology is rigid. It is unyielding, not amenable to learning, nauseatingly repetitive, constricting, and divorced from reality (impaired reality testing). The genius is immersed in the world even if he is a recluse, he learns and evolves all the time, his mind is kaleidoscopic and vibrant, ever expanding. Insanity is mummified, genius is life reified.

Jacobsen: Is high intelligence required for true genius?

Vaknin: 

If by intelligence you mean IQ then the answer is a resounding no. The adage about perspiration and inspiration applies. But, more importantly, genius is the ability to see familiar things in a fresh, unprecedented way. Imagination, intuition, and the ability to tell apart the critical from the tangential are the core constituents of genius – not intelligence.

What intelligence does contribute to genius is alacrity. It is a catalyst. It speeds up both the processes of theorizing and of discovery. 

Jacobsen: What happens to an insane person who happens to have high intelligence too?

Vaknin: 

He is likely to construct theories that will pass for genius, especially among laymen. The intelligence of the gifted madman serves to camouflage the lack of rigor and the delusional, counterfactual content of his creations. Rather than catalyze disruptive discoveries, his intellect works overtime at the service of aggressively defending a manifestly risible sleight of hand. It is not open to any modificatory feedback from the environment. The madman’s intellect is solipsistic and moribund.

Jacobsen: What happens in the mind of a genius who slowly deteriorates into an insane person?

Vaknin: 

He visibly transitions from cognitive flexibility to defensive and hypervigilant rigidity (confirmation bias). His work becomes way more easily falsifiable, sometimes even with mere Gedankenexperiments. He repeats himself ad nauseam. He becomes grandiose (cognitively distorts reality to buttress an inflated and fantastic self-image). 

Jacobsen: How do fake geniuses cover for their lack of insight, ingenuity, intelligence, etc.?

Vaknin: 

They copy and plagiarize. They imitate a real genius’s structured thinking and work. They are good at promoting themselves and getting credit where none is due. Most of these frauds are actually intelligent, but dark personalities (subclinical narcissists, subsclinical psychopa

Jacobsen: Is true genius more inborn, innate, native to the individual or more honed, refined, developed extrinsically?

Vaknin: 

We know that IQ is responsive to environmental stimuli. The analytic kind genius (IQ above 140 or 160) is by far the most studied because it is the most facilely measurable. There are no studies that rigorously link it to heredity. On balance, anecdotal evidence clearly suggests that genius is acquired and can be inculcated at an early age if the child is subjected to rigorous training and a regime of positive and negative reinforcements.

It would behoove us to make a distinction between polymath or synoptic genius and “idiot savant” type of one-track mental acuity (think “Rain Man”). The latter form definitely is neurological and, probably, with a pronounced genetic contribution. 

Jacobsen: Some mental disorders, including schizophrenia, appear mostly heritable. Is it the same for various states of insanity in general?

Vaknin: 

We don’t know enough, not by a long shot. Certain mental illnesses present with structural and functional abnormalities of the brain that are very likely to be genetically coded for: schizophrenia or Bipolar Disorder. Other mental health issues run in families, so a genetic component is indicated: Borderline Personality Disorder and psychopathy, for instance.

Jacobsen: Which five individuals seem like true geniuses in the modern world to you? I do not mean rich, famous, well-cited, and the like; even though, they may be rich, famous, or well-cited, etc., as a consequence of successful implementation of aspects of their genius. 

Vaknin: 

Versatile polymaths included Einstein (of course), Richard Feynman (see my interview on Chronon Field Theory), Noam Chomsky, George Steiner (whom I had the pleasure of knowing), and Adolf Hitler (who regrettably turned his considerable gifts to the dark side).

Jacobsen: Do you consider yourself a genius?

Vaknin: Yes.

Shoshannim: Thank you, once again, for your time and the opportunity, Prof. Vaknin.

Vaknin: OK, Shoshanim!

Prof. Sam Vaknin on Narcissism in General

(News Intervention: January 28, 2022)

Prof. Sam Vaknin on Cold Therapy (New Treatment Modality)

(News Intervention: January 30, 2022)

Prof. Sam Vaknin on Giftedness and IQ

(News Intervention: February 2, 2022)

Prof. Sam Vaknin on Religion

(News Intervention: February 11, 2022)

Prof. Sam Vaknin on Science and Reality

(News Intervention: April 30, 2022)

Prof. Sam Vaknin on the Gender Wars

(News Intervention: May 21, 2022)

Prof. Sam Vaknin on Psychological Growth

(News Intervention: May 24, 2022)

Prof. Sam Vaknin on Structure, Function, Society, and Survival

(News Intervention: May 26, 2022)

Prof. Vaknin on Chronon Field Theory and Time Asymmetry

(News Intervention: May 28, 2022)

Previous Interviews Read by Prof. Vaknin (Hyperlinks Active for Titles)

How to Become the REAL YOU (Interview, News Intervention)

(Prof. Sam Vaknin: January 26, 2022)

Insider View on Narcissism: What Makes Narcissist Tick (News Intervention)

(Prof. Sam Vaknin: January 29, 2022)

Curing Your Narcissist (News Intervention Interview)

(Prof. Sam Vaknin: January 31, 2022)

Genius or Gifted? IQ and Beyond (News Intervention Interview)

(Prof. Sam Vaknin: February 3, 2022)

Thrive: Your Future Path to Growth and Change (News Intervention Interview)

Prof. Sam Vaknin: May 25, 2022)

2.    Interview about Freedom of Expression (News Intervention)

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Freedom of expression is a paper right in most places of the world. It is listed in international rights documents and in national constitutions. Yet, one could ask, “What is the ‘free’ part of freedom of expression?” It depends on the society and the culture, and the person. So, to open this session, what is a proper framing of rights, responsibilities, obligations, and privileges in societies, i.e., an accurate frame or definition to ground practice of free expression?

Prof. Shmuel “Sam” Vaknin:

Freedom of expression, including freedom of speech and freedom of the press, is a feature of individualistic societies. Where collectivism reigns, this amalgam of rights is subordinated to the greater good. 

Ironically, utilitarianism inexorably leads to limitations on these freedoms intended to protect the majority against the incursions of disruptive or even destructive minorities.

Yet, even in anarchic polities, freedom of expression cannot be abused to spread panic (crying fire in a crowded theatre), life threatening misinformation (re: the COVID-19 pandemic), or to threaten the wellbeing and lives of others (e.g., virulent racism, or calls for eugenic culling, or victimization). Only anomic civilizations in decadent decline countenance such toxic speech acts.

Jacobsen: Which countries and parts of the world seem the freest regarding freedom of expression?

Vaknin:

It is a surprisingly mixed bag including perennials like Denmark and Finland, but also surprises like Argentina and Slovakia. 

But freedom – all freedoms – are on the decline everywhere, besieged by populism, profound mistrust of authority and of expertise, anti-intellectualism, anti-elitism, anti-liberalism (anti-“progressivism”), and the dominance of rapid dissemination technologies such as social media. 

Ochlocracies (mob rule) are regaining ground all over the world, led by authoritarian, proudly ignorant, and defiantly contumacious and reactant narcissistic-psychopathic leaders.

Jacobsen: Which nations and regions of the world seem the least free regarding freedom of expression?

Vaknin:

Again, the rankings are counterintuitive. Canada, for example, is less free than Uruguay and the USA is languishing with Peru somewhere at the bottom of the upper third.

Jacobsen: How did (and does) the internet change freedom of expression or the access to free exchange of words, ideas, and philosophies, or simply disjointed randomly emoted thoughts?

Vaknin:

In the internet age, the distinction between raw information and knowledge (structured data) is lost. The internet is a huge dumping ground for half-baked truths, rank nonsense, misinformation, propaganda, hate speech, speculation, and outright derangement. Even where vetted and reliable information is available, it is unprocessed and out of context.

No single technology has harmed free expression more than the internet. It has created a problem of discoverability (locating quality content in a sempiternal tsunami of trash) and allowed mobs to form and to ominously suppress speech by sheer force of numbers (the cancel culture is the latest example of such transgressions). 

All semblance of civilized, informed speech is now lost even in academe. Social media were deliberately constructed by engineers and turncoat psychologists to polarize aggressive speech and cement confirmation bias (silos of like-minded people in echo chambers).

Jacobsen: Following from the previous question, is this net good or net bad? 

Vaknin:

Bad by a long shot. 

https://videotranscripts.dk/ (Transcripts)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpvv_ooqJik (The True Toxicity of Social Media)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QY79nDYjW94 (Malignant Egalitarianism)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvuRmP3KP1g (The Need to Be Seen)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgjOH0kDErw (A-social Media: Fracking Mankind)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVprI6_P8GE (Plugged-in Documentary)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2rKrWNWkS0 (How to Fix Social Media)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIElARjRGTo (Social Media as the Big Eye)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NTwxAJDMTo (Metaverse: Conspiracy or Heaven?

Jacobsen: One camp will claim complete freedom of expression in social media will be a net good because the liars and defamers will be overwhelmed by more reasonable voices and evidence. Another camp thinks there should be sharp restrictions on particular types of speech, electronic communication, and so on. Those are two big ones. A third believes in outlawing social media altogether, so stringently binding or making illegal social media for some people if not most or all. It’d be similar to acquisition of a firearm in much of the world, getting a driver’s license, qualifying as a surgeon or an accountant, and such. You have commented on this. With social media, what should be done for or against freedom of expression, if anything?

Vaknin:

Social media are utilities and should be subjected to the same regulatory oversights that other media and monopolistic utilities are under. 

Additionally, owing to the addictive nature of social media, laws should be passed to restrict their use and to monitor the content posted on them.

Self-regulation is a myth on Wall Street as it is in tech valleys around the globe. Where money rears its head, morality and restraint and the public interest go out of the window. 

Crowdsourced regulation is the dumbest idea ever. Majorities are forever silent and conflict-averse. Ask the misnamed Mensheviks who were actually the overwhelming majority and yielded to the equally mislabeled Bolsheviks who were more ruthless and vociferous and better mobilized. 

Jacobsen: What does social media and internet use do in mild use and in chronic use to the mental health of individuals and groups?

Vaknin:

The evidence is unequivocal (see the studies by Twenge et al.): the more extensive the exposure to screens, the longer the screentime, the higher the prevalence and incidence of anxiety and depressive disorders, especially among the young (under 25) and among seniors over 65. There is no such thing as “mild” or “moderate” use: the effects commence at the first moment of use. 

Jacobsen: What do trends of expression and outcomes among users of social media tell us about individual psychology and mass psychology, and social media in general? 

Vaknin:

By far the biggest problem social media use has fostered is what I call “malignant egalitarianism”.

Malignant egalitarianism is threatening our existence as a species. Until about 10 years ago, people – even narcissists – had role models they sought to learn from and emulate and ideals which they aspired to. 

Today, everyone – never mind how unintelligent, ignorant, or unaccomplished – claim superiority or at least equality to everyone else. 

Armed with egalitarian equal access technology like social media, everyone virulently detest and seek to destroy or reduce to their level their betters and that which they cannot attain or equal.

Pathological envy (egged on by instruments of relative positioning such as “likes”) had fully substituted for learning and self-improvement. Experts, scholars, and intellectuals are scorned and threatened. Everyone is an instant polymath and an ersatz da Vinci.

But, this is just one of many vile side effects and byproducts of social media. Watch my videos on the topic (see links above).

Jacobsen: How will the Metaverse, and associated developments, in the 2030s affect relations between people? 

Vaknin:

Is the Metaverse the ultimate dystopia, an escape from reality, or the promised technological heaven? I summarized my views in this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NTwxAJDMTo

Jacobsen: If the goal is mental health for most people most of the time, what are the most efficacious policies and laws for governments to enact, and for individuals and families to practice, regarding social media and the right to freedom of expression?

Vaknin:

Limit usage time (clocks embedded in the app will terminate use after 2 hours);

Only real life friends and acquaintances would be allowed to become online friends;

Identity verification would be mandatory for various types of content;

Introduce an accreditation system for experts, gurus, and coaches online;

ScholarTube for vetted, evidence-based knowledge provided by real-life academics or experts;

Curation of most content prior to its release (the contemporary Wikipedia model as distinct from the original crowdsourcing mess).

More here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2rKrWNWkS0 (How to Fix Social Media)

Shoshannim: Thank you, Dr. Shmuel. 

Vaknin: You are always welcome, shoshanim!

3.    Interview about Misogyny and Misandry

(News Intervention)

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Misogyny and misandry, what defines them?

Prof. Shmuel “Sam” Vaknin:

Misogyny and misandry are forms of inverted gender dysphoria, actually. It is hatred, resentment, and revulsion brought on by the opposite sex. It encompasses all aspects and dimensions of the hate figure and in this sense, it is akin to racism.

Jacobsen: Historically, how have misogyny and misandry manifested in partnerships, in individual social settings, and in cultures at large? 

Vaknin:

Misogyny has been the patriarchal organizing principles of all societies from the agricultural revolution to this very day. It permeated all institutions, from the family to the Church to the state. 

Misogyny was mainly intended to restrict the freedoms of women in order to prevent them from procreating extradyadically and thus secure the intergenerational transfer of wealth to the male’s rightful offspring.

Misandry is the reaction of some waves of feminism in the past 150 years or so. It is visceral and bitter, but not nearly as organized and institutionalized as misogyny.

Recently both are on the increase.

Jacobsen: As you note in several productions, there are obvious cases of a ‘rollback’ of women’s rights in the United States through murmurings of repeals of Roe v Wade and in state legislatures, in Russia with the (re-)legalization – in a manner of speaking – of domestic abuse, in Afghanistan with women confined to the home, in Ethiopia with sexual violence (by Ethiopian and Eritrean forces), in Turkey via withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, and in online hate groups comprised of resentful, bitter, anomic, hopeless, potentially mentally ill, batches of men in MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), Black Pillers, Red Pillers, Incels (Involuntary Celibates), generic male supremacists, PUAs (Pick Up Artists), MRM men (Men’s Rights Movement), TFLers (True Forced Loners), and so on. These men, young and old alike, seem composed of anomie, despair, and porcelain, transmogrified into contempt for the Other. Do these seem like a disunified variegated ‘wave’ of anti-women sentiments and acts by men online and offline around the world?

Vaknin:

Some men are fighting back against what they perceive to be the ominous usurpation of rights and powers by women. They are also aghast at the way women have appropriated stereotypical male behaviors, such as promiscuity.

The counter-movement started off in disparate groups but now has coalesced into an agenda that is promoted by lawmakers all over the world. The backlash is fierce. Men are still the gatekeepers in most countries in the world. This doesn’t bode well for women. Legal rights and access to services such as healthcare and educations are being rolled back and freedoms are curtailed. 

Women are bound to be radicalized by such counter-reform. They are likely to become way more militant and masculinized. They are shunning men in growing numbers and resorting to male substitutes even when it comes to procreation: donor sperm and IVF.

Jacobsen: What seems like the psychology of the men with the authority to impose these ‘rollbacks’ in legislation and socio-cultural life?

Vaknin:

This is a state of panic, both moral and operational. Inter-gender morality was imposed by men in order to preserve the “purity” of women and their role as domestic comforters-in-chief. As power shifted from men to women, this ideal has been shattered.

Moreover, women emulate aggressive, ambitious men. In multiple studies, women described themselves in exclusively masculine terms. They have been taking away men’s jobs for well over a hundred years now. They are way more educated than men so men feel absolutely threatened, very much like a species going extinct. 

Men who react adversely to the ascendance of women and the emergence of a unigender world via legislation and politics are anxious, sociosexually restricted, narcissistic (but not psychopathic), insecure, and, in some cases, with a conflicted sexual and gender identity. 

Jacobsen: What seems like the psychology of the men in these international, disparate online groups, who even create their own lingo, patois?

Vaknin:

These are rabid misogynists who have created an ideology around their deep-seated, irrational, and pathological hatred. They have primitive defenses, are highly narcissistic and even psychopathic, and tend to externalize aggression. They tend to hold grudges and grievances, ruminate and fixate, and be vengeful and hypervigilant. 

Jacobsen: You agree with First Wave Feminism and Second Wave Feminism, and disagree with Third Wave Feminism and Fourth Wave Feminism. What defines them?

Vaknin:

First and second wave feminisms (in plural: there are many schools) were focused on leveling the playing field and fighting abusive and exploitative practices such as prostitution and pornography. 

Starting with the suffragettes, they focused on the franchise (the right to vote), equal wages, access (to healthcare, education, the workplace, daycare), revising the dress code (“rational dress”), the right to own and dispose of property, and converting marriage from indentured bondage to an intimate, hopefully lifelong equal partnership.

The third wave was a psychopathic outgrowth. While claiming to be inclusive and permissive, it was a defiant and reckless attempt to “empower” women by eliminating all boundaries, conventions, and mores of any kind in all fields of life. 

What women have garnered from the confluence of the three waves is that they should make their careers the pivot of their lives, avoid meaningful, committed relationships with men, and pursue sex as a pastime with any man.

Ironically, the third wave played right into the hands of predatory men (“players”) who took advantage of the newfangled promiscuity while assiduously avoiding any hint of commitment or investment. Third wave feminists internalized the male gaze (“internalized oppression”) and pride themselves on being “sluts”. 

The fourth wave of feminism is focused on real problems such as sexual harassment, rape, and body shaming as well as intersectionality (discrimination of women who belong to more than one minority). In many ways, it is an offshoot of second wave feminism. 

Jacobsen: Even within these four waves of feminism, what seem like the most laudable portions and the most contemptible parts of each?

Vaknin: 

First, second, and fourth wave feminisms are legitimate movements which have improved and strengthened societies around the world by integrating women in the social and economic fabrics of their milieus.

The third wave was utterly destructive. It hijacked the feminist message and precipitated the gender wars which are threatening to undo the accomplishments of the first and second waves. 

Moreover: corporate interested coopted the messaging of the third wave to encourage women to remain single and promiscuous in order to encourage their participation in the labor force and thus convert them into consumers. 

Jacobsen: Since history cannot be rewritten in actuality, though can be erased and rewritten in records, what might Fifth Wave Feminism incorporate as lessons from the previous four to correct course from the clear antipathy between the sexes – maintaining the proper equalitarian victories and jettisoning the improper inegalitarian losses?

Vaknin:

Feminism needs to fight the patriarchy and its discriminatory practices – not men. It needs to recognize that men and women are equal, but not identical. It needs to encourage women to adopt boundaried sexuality and the formation of intimate partnerships, cohabitation households, and families with men (or women, if they are so inclined). It needs to expose the way business and the third wave end up disempowering women like never before. 

Jacobsen: How can science on sex and gender clarify the fact from the fiction, as the sea floor of these waves – so to speak? Something to set limits on conversation based on reality in contrast to discourses entirely in the realm of fantasy.

Vaknin:

I dealt with this at length in the interview I gave you about gender wars https://www.newsintervention.com/prof-sam-vaknin-on-the-gender-wars/

Jacobsen: How might such a fifth wave grounded in science inform international human rights discourse, national legislation, sociocultural lives, families, and individual self-identification? 

Vaknin:

Women are not a minority. Numerically, they are a majority. Their situation is reminiscent of apartheid in South Africa and needs to be tackled with the same tools: nonviolent resistance; truth and reconciliation; a peaceful and consensual transfer of power; an integrated society with no discrimination or subterfuge; equal rights and obligations while recognizing the uniqueness of each constituency.

Shoshanim: Thanks much, Prof. Samuel.

Vaknin: You are very welcome. May we both live to see the day men and women love each other the way they should.

4.    Interview about Victimization, Victims, and Victim Identity Movements (News Intervention)

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What defines victimization? What defines a real victim in contrast to a fake victim?

Prof. Shmuel “Sam” Vaknin: Victimization involves the denial of the self-determination, identity, self-actualization, rights, and boundaries of a person without their express consent and collaboration. 

Jacobsen: What makes victim identity movements, in fact, movements?

Vaknin: When victimhood becomes an organizing and explanatory (hermeneutic) principle, a determinant of the victim’s identity, and a socially binding force centred around grievances; prosocial or communal grandiosity; entitlement; conspiracism (paranoid or persecutory delusions); aggressive engagement or, on the other end of the spectrum, schizoid withdrawal; dysempathy; defiance (reactance); and contumaciousness (rejection of expertise and authority) – we have on our hands a victim identity movement. 

No one is a victim. We may end up being victimized – but it doesn’t render us victims for life, it doesn’t brand us.

Jacobsen: Some studies in British Columbia, as you have noted, found some victimhood movements have been hijacked by narcissists and psychopaths. How does this muddy the waters of the real justice movements and make them ineffectual? 

VakninThis was not the only study to have unearthed this very disconcerting undertow. We are beginning to wake up to the reality of what Gabay et al. call (2020) Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood, TIV). “professional” or “career” victims with emphasized narcissistic and psychopathic tendencies find new homes (“pathological narcissistic spaces”) in these social justice upswells.

It makes it difficult to tell apart legitimate evidence-based grievances from entitlement-fueled manipulative and counterfactual claims. 

One helpful way to distinguish the two is by noting that narcissists and psychopaths are destructive, not solutions-oriented. They thrive on negative affects such as anger and envy and are loth to invest in the routine and tedious chores attendant upon rectifying wrongs and building a better world. 

More here: Victimhood Movements Hijacked by Narcissists and Psychopaths https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBpxFxMAztA

Jacobsen: What have been extreme historical cases of this going awry, as this phenomenon has been historically cyclical, including one close to ‘home’ in 2004?

VakninNazism is a victimhood movement gone awful. And, to a lesser degree the white man’s grievance movement implausibly headed by Trump is a more recent example of such subversive dynamics.

Jacobsen: What is the typical arc of development of victim movements?

Vaknin:

The sociologist Bradley Campbell suggested that we have transitioned from a culture centred around dignity to one based on victimhood. 

Learn more by reading Habermas, Fukuyama, and Foucault. All justice-seeking movements start with grievances (injustices). They decry and seek to remedy and reverse individual transgressions (eg, the narcissistic abuse online movement) or societal and cultural biases (implicit and explicit), discrimination, and suppression.

The victims organize themselves around exclusionary identity politics and intersectionality and this orientation results in grandiosity and entitlement, in other words: in growing narcissism. Increasingly more aggressive, these movements often become psychopathic (defiant and contumacious) and demonize the Other.

Left-leaning victimhood movements centre around entitlement and reparations claims on the majority, on social institutions, and on history. Right-wing movements are conspiracy-minded and avoidant, but also more violent. 

Narcissists and psychopaths gravitate to such movements in order to obtain narcissistic supply, money, power, and sex. They become the public faces and the media darlings on these hapless victims, having hijacked their legitimate complaints and demands.

Jacobsen: How much of the online content on narcissism and psychopathy is garbage (worthless or worse) now?

VakninAbout 90%. It is not only worthless (wrong), it is dangerously misleading and entrenches a lifelong self-defeating and self-aggrandizing victimhood stance even as it demonizes and mythologizes abusers.

Jacobsen: What is the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood (TIV)?

Vaknin:

A series of two studies by Israeli scholar Gabay and others, published in 2020. The authors provided this abstract:

“In the present research, we introduce a conceptualization of the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood (TIV), which we define as an enduring feeling that the self is a victim across different kinds of interpersonal relationships. Then, in a comprehensive set of eight studies, we develop a measure for this novel personality trait, TIV, and examine its correlates, as well as its affective, cognitive, and behavioral consequences. In Part 1 (Studies 1A-1C) we establish the construct of TIV, with its four dimensions; i.e., need for recognition, moral elitism, lack of empathy, and rumination, and then assess TIV’s internal consistency, stability over time, and its effect on the interpretation of ambiguous situations. In Part 2 (Studies 2A-2C) we examine TIV’s convergent and discriminant validities, using several personality dimensions, and the role of attachment styles as conceptual antecedents. In Part 3 (Studies 3–4) we explore the cognitive and behavioral consequences of TIV. Specifically, we examine the relationships between TIV, negative attribution and recall biases, and the desire for revenge (Study 3), and the effects of TIV on behavioral revenge (Study 4). The findings highlight the importance of understanding, conceptualizing, and empirically testing TIV, and suggest that victimhood is a stable and meaningful personality tendency.”

Read an analysis of these studies here: “The Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood: The Personality Construct and its Consequences” (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886920303238):

Another interesting study:

“New research provides evidence that narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism — maladaptive personality traits known as the “Dark Triad” — are associated with overt displays of virtue and victimhood. The study suggests that people with dark personalities use these signals of “virtuous victimhood” to deceptively extract resources from others.”

(“Signaling Virtuous Victimhood as Indicators of Dark Triad Personalities“, was authored by Ekin Ok, Yi Qian, Brendan Strejcek, and Karl Aquino, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, American Psychological Association, May 2020).

Jacobsen: What are the primary signifiers of narcissists and psychopaths who have or might hijack legitimate victimhood or justice movements looking for money, power, and sex?

Vaknin:

Ironically, these usually are prosocial or communal narcissists. They often “control from the bottom” (emotionally blackmail by being self-sacrificial). So, the infestation of victimhood activism by narcissists and psychopaths is the tip of a submerged iceberg of ersatz altruism.

Some narcissists are ostentatiously generous: they dedicate time and other resources to social justice movements and to activism, they donate to charity, lavish gifts on their closest, abundantly provide for their nearest and dearest, and, in general, are open-handed and unstintingly benevolent. It is a form of virtue signalling. How can this be reconciled with the pronounced lack of empathy and with the pernicious self-preoccupation that is so typical of narcissists?

The act of giving enhances the narcissist’s sense of omnipotence, his fantastic grandiosity, and the contempt he holds for others. It is easy to feel superior to the supplicating recipients of one’s largesse. Narcissistic altruism is about exerting control and maintaining it by fostering dependence in the beneficiaries.

But narcissists give for other reasons as well.

The narcissist flaunts his charitable nature as a bait. He impresses others with his selflessness and kindness and thus lures them into his lair, entraps them, and manipulates and brainwashes them into subservient compliance and obsequious collaboration. People are attracted to the narcissist’s larger than life posture – only to discover his true personality traits when it is far too late. “Give a little to take a lot” – is the narcissist’s creed.

This does not prevent the narcissist from assuming the role of the exploited victim. Narcissists always complain that life and people are unfair to them and that they invest far more than their “share of the profit”. The narcissist feels that he is the sacrificial lamb, the scapegoat, and that his relationships are asymmetric and imbalanced. “She gets out of our marriage far more than I do” – is a common refrain. Or: “I do all the work around here – and they get all the perks and benefits!”

Some narcissists are compulsive givers. 

To all appearances, the compulsive giver is an altruistic, empathic, and caring person. Actually, he or she is a people-pleaser and a codependent. The compulsive giver is trapped in a narrative of his own confabulation: how his nearest and dearest need him because they are poor, young, inexperienced, lacking in intelligence or good looks, and are otherwise inferior to him. Compulsive giving, therefore, involves pathological narcissism. In reality, it is the compulsive giver who coerces, cajoles, and tempts people around him to avail themselves of his services or money. He forces himself on the recipients of his ostentatious largesse and the beneficiaries of his generosity or magnanimity. He is unable to deny anyone their wishes or a requests, even when these are not explicit or expressed and are mere figments of his own neediness and grandiose imagination.

Some narcissists are ostentatiously generous — they donate to charity, lavish gifts on their closest, abundantly provide for their nearest and dearest, and, in general, are open-handed and unstintingly benevolent. How can this be reconciled with the pronounced lack of empathy and with the pernicious self-preoccupation that is so typical of narcissists? The act of giving enhances the narcissist’s sense of omnipotence, his fantastic grandiosity, and the contempt he holds for others. It is easy to feel superior to the supplicating recipients of one’s largesse. Narcissistic altruism is about exerting control and maintaining it by fostering dependence in the beneficiaries.

The People-pleasers

People-pleasers dread conflicts and wish to avoid them (they are conflict-averse) – hence their need to believe that they are universally liked. Always pleasant, well-mannered, and civil, the conflict-averse people-pleaser is also evasive and vague, hard to pin down, sometimes obsequious and, generally, a spineless “non-entity”. These qualities are self-defeating as they tend to antagonize people rather than please them.

But conflict-aversion is only one of several psychodynamic backgrounds for the behavior known as “people-pleasing”:

1.     Some people-pleasers cater to the needs and demands of others as a form of penance, or self-sacrifice;

2.     Many people-pleasers are codependents and strive to gratify their nearest and dearest in order to allay their own abandonment anxiety and the ensuing intense – and, at times, life-threatening – dysphoria (“if I am nice to him, he won’t break up with me”, “if I cater to her needs, she won’t leave me”);

3.     A few people-pleasers are narcissistic: pleasing people enhances their sense of omnipotence (grandiosity). They seek to control and disempower their “charges” (“she so depends on and looks up to me”). Even their pity is a form of self-aggrandizement (“only I can make her life so much better, she needs me, without me her life would be hell.”). They are misanthropic altruists and compulsive givers.

All people-pleasers use these common coping strategies:

1.     Dishonesty (to avoid conflicts and unpleasant situations);

2.     Manipulation (to ensure desired outcomes, such as an intimate partner’s continued presence);

3.     Fostering dependence: codependent people-pleasers leverage their ostentatious helplessness and manifest weaknesses to elicit the kind of behaviours and solicit the benefits that they angle for, while narcissistic people-pleasers aim to habituate their targets by bribing them with gifts, monopolizing their time, and isolating them socially;

4.     Infantilization: displaying childish behaviours to gratify the emotional needs of over-protective, possessive, paranoid, narcissistic, and codependent individuals in the people-pleaser’s milieu;

5.     Self-punishment, self-defeat, and self-sacrifice to signal self-annulment in the pursuit of people-pleasing.

Jacobsen: What, historically speaking, can be done to combat these Cluster B bad behaviours connected to some social movements?

Vaknin:

As the grievances of these movements are addressed, they become a part of the establishment. This is when the hard work begins: the labors of writing laws, regulatory oversight, politics, negotiations and compromise, and the tedium of perseverance and routine. 

These newfangled demands on the psychological and logistical resources of the movement and its adherents drive narcissists and psychopaths away: they are unaccustomed to and reject the hard slog and the often Sisyphean undertakings of public policy. 

Shoshanim: Thanks so much for the time and opportunity, Prof. V.

Shoshanim’s ShoshanimV for Victim or V for Vaknin? Just kidding. Thank you for suffering me yet again!

5.    Interview about Gut Feelings and Intuition (News Intervention)

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What differentiates intuitions from gut feelings if at all?

Prof. Shmuel “Sam” Vaknin: Gut feeling is immediate and nebulous. Intuition takes longer to form and feels more precise, incisive, and certain.

Jacobsen: How much of knowledge is filtered, processed, and prefabricated non-consciously and then presented to a conscious arena/awareness for decision-making? 

Vaknin: 

There are three types of intuition.

Eidetic Intuitions

Intuition is supposed to be a form of direct access. Yet, direct access to what? Does it access directly “intuitions” (abstract objects, akin to numbers or properties – see “Bestowed Existence”)? Are intuitions the objects of the mental act of Intuition? Perhaps intuition is the mind’s way of interacting directly with Platonic ideals or Phenomenological “essences”? By “directly” I mean without the intellectual mediation of a manipulated symbol system, and without the benefits of inference, observation, experience, or reason.

Kant thought that both (Euclidean) space and time are intuited. In other words, he thought that the senses interact with our (transcendental) intuitions to produce synthetic a-priori knowledge. The raw data obtained by our senses -our sensa or sensory experience – presuppose intuition. One could argue that intuition is independent of our senses. Thus, these intuitions (call them “eidetic intuitions”) would not be the result of sensory data, or of calculation, or of the processing and manipulation of same. Kant’s “Erscheiung” (Sic!) – the “phenomenon”, or “appearance” of an object to the senses – is actually a kind of sense-intuition later processed by the categories of substance and cause. As opposed to the phenomenon, the “nuomenon” (thing in itself) is not subject to these categories.

Descartes’ “I (think therefore I) am” is an immediate and indubitable innate intuition from which his metaphysical system is derived. Descartes’ work in this respect is reminiscent of Gnosticism in which the intuition of the mystery of the self leads to revelation.

Bergson described a kind of instinctual empathic intuition which penetrates objects and persons, identifies with them and, in this way, derives knowledge about the absolutes – “duration” (the essence of all living things) and “élan vital” (the creative life force). He wrote: “(Intuition is an) instinct that has become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it indefinitely.” Thus, to him, science (the use of symbols by our intelligence to describe reality) is the falsification of reality. Only art, based on intuition, unhindered by mediating thought, not warped by symbols – provides one with access to reality.

Spinoza’s and Bergson’s intuited knowledge of the world as an interconnected whole is also an “eidetic intuition”.

Spinoza thought that intuitive knowledge is superior to both empirical (sense) knowledge and scientific (reasoning) knowledge. It unites the mind with the Infinite Being and reveals to it an orderly, holistic, Universe.

Friedrich Schleiermacher and Rudolf Otto discussed the religious experience of the “numinous” (God, or the spiritual power) as a kind of intuitive, pre-lingual, and immediate feeling.

Croce distinguished “concept” (representation or classification) from “intuition” (expression of the individuality of an objet d’art). Aesthetic interest is intuitive. Art, according to Croce and Collingwood, should be mainly concerned with expression (i.e., with intuition) as an end unto itself, unconcerned with other ends (e.g., expressing certain states of mind).

Eidetic intuitions are also similar to “paramartha satya” (the “ultimate truth”) in the Madhyamika school of Buddhist thought. The ultimate truth cannot be expressed verbally and is beyond empirical (and illusory) phenomena. Eastern thought (e.g. Zen Buddhism) uses intuition (or experience) to study reality in a non-dualistic manner.

IB. Emergent Intuitions

A second type of intuition is the “emergent intuition”. Subjectively, the intuiting person has the impression of a “shortcut” or even a “short circuiting” of his usually linear thought processes often based on trial and error. This type of intuition feels “magical”, a quantum leap from premise to conclusion, the parsimonious selection of the useful and the workable from a myriad possibilities. Intuition, in other words, is rather like a dreamlike truncated thought process, the subjective equivalent of a wormhole in Cosmology. It is often preceded by periods of frustration, dead ends, failures, and blind alleys in one’s work.

Artists – especially performing artists (like musicians) – often describe their interpretation of an artwork (e.g., a musical piece) in terms of this type of intuition. Many mathematicians and physicists (following a kind of Pythagorean tradition) use emergent intuitions in solving general nonlinear equations (by guessing the approximants) or partial differential equations.

Henri Poincaret insisted (in a presentation to the Psychological Society of Paris, 1901) that even simple mathematical operations require an “intuition of mathematical order” without which no creativity in mathematics is possible. He described how some of his creative work occurred to him out of the blue and without any preparation, the result of emergent intuitions.

These intuitions had “the characteristics of brevity, suddenness and immediate certainty… Most striking at first is this appearance of sudden illumination, a manifest sign of long, unconscious prior work. The role of this unconscious work in mathematical invention appears to me incontestable, and traces of it would be found in other cases where it is less evident.”

Subjectively, emergent intuitions are indistinguishable from insights. Yet insight is more “cognitive” and structured and concerned with objective learning and knowledge. It is a novel reaction or solution, based on already acquired responses and skills, to new stimuli and challenges. Still, a strong emotional (e.g., aesthetic) correlate usually exists in both insight and emergent intuition.

Intuition and insight are strong elements in creativity, the human response to an ever changing environment. They are shock inducers and destabilizers. Their aim is to move the organism from one established equilibrium to the next and thus better prepare it to cope with new possibilities, challenges, and experiences. Both insight and intuition are in the realm of the unconscious, the simple, and the mentally disordered. Hence the great importance of obtaining insights and integrating them in psychoanalysis – an equilibrium altering therapy.

Kazimierz Dąbrowski’s theory of positive disintegration (TPD) posits that angst (existentialist tension and anxiety) not only induces growth, but is a necessary condition for it. Disintegrative processes are desirable. The absence of positive disintegration results in a fixated state of “primary (not secondary) integration”, without true individuality. One’s developmental potential, especially one’s overexcitabilities (abnormally strong reactions to stimuli) determine the potential for positive disintegration. Overexcitability (OE) is a heightened physiological experience of stimuli resulting from increased neuronal sensitivities.

Like Jordan Peterson, Dabrowski regards suffering – including the self-inflicted kind – as a key to both progress and healing. Personality shaping depends on socialization and on peer pressure (second factor). Strict unthinking and unwavering adherence creates robopaths (von Bertalanffy). Disintegartion requires countering social signalling and pressures which, I suggest, are mostly detected intuitively. Intuition, therefore, plays a key part in the regulation of these processes.

IC. Ideal Intuitions

The third type of intuition is the “ideal intuition”. These are thoughts and feelings that precede any intellectual analysis and underlie it. Empathy may be such an intuitive mode applied to the minds of other people, yielding an intersubjective agreement. Moral ideals and rules may be such intuitions (see “Morality – a State of Mind?”).

Mathematical and logical axioms and basic rules of inference (“necessary truths”) may also turn out to be intuitions. These moral, mathematical, and logical self-evident conventions do not relate to the world. They are elements of the languages we use to describe the world (or of the codes that regulate our conduct in it). It follows that these a-priori languages and codes are nothing but the set of our embedded ideal intuitions. This is why we can be pretty certain that the language of mathematics is inadequate and insufficient to capture reality or even the laws of nature.

As the Rationalists realized, ideal intuitions (a class of undeniable, self-evident truths and principles) can be accessed by our intellect. Rationalism is concerned with intuitions – though only with those intuitions available to reason and intellect. Sometimes, the boundary between intuition and deductive reasoning is blurred as they both yield the same results. Moreover, intuitions can be combined to yield metaphysical or philosophical systems. Descartes applied ideal intuitions (e.g., reason) to his eidetic intuitions to yield his metaphysics. Husserl, Twardowski, even Bolzano did the same in developing the philosophical school of Phenomenology.

The a-priori nature of intuitions of the first and the third kind led thinkers, such as Adolf Lasson, to associate it with Mysticism. He called it an “intellectual vision” which leads to the “essence of things”. Earlier philosophers and theologians labeled the methodical application of intuitions – the “science of the ultimates”. Of course, this misses the strong emotional content of mystical experiences.

Confucius talked about fulfilling and seeking one’s “human nature” (or “ren”) as “the Way”. This nature is not the result of learning or deliberation. It is innate. It is intuitive and, in turn, produces additional, clear intuitions (“yong”) as to right and wrong, productive and destructive, good and evil. The “operation of the natural law” requires that there be no rigid codex, but only constant change guided by the central and harmonious intuition of life.

Intuition is a topic that concerned many philosophers throughout the ages.

IIA. Locke

But are intuitions really a-priori – or do they develop in response to a relatively stable reality and in interaction with it? Would we have had intuitions in a chaotic, capricious, and utterly unpredictable and disordered universe? Do intuitions emerge to counter-balance surprises?

Locke thought that intuition is a learned and cumulative response to sensation. The assumption of innate ideas is unnecessary. The mind is like a blank sheet of paper, filled gradually by experience – by the sum total of observations of external objects and of internal “reflections” (i.e., operations of the mind). Ideas (i.e., what the mind perceives in itself or in immediate objects) are triggered by the qualities of objects.

But, despite himself, Locke was also reduced to ideal (innate) intuitions. According to Locke, a colour, for instance, can be either an idea in the mind (i.e., ideal intuition) – or the quality of an object that causes this idea in the mind (i.e., that evokes the ideal intuition). Moreover, his “primary qualities” (qualities shared by all objects) come close to being eidetic intuitions.

Locke himself admits that there is no resemblance or correlation between the idea in the mind and the (secondary) qualities that provoked it. Berkeley demolished Locke’s preposterous claim that there is such resemblance (or mapping) between PRIMARY qualities and the ideas that they provoke in the mind. It would seem therefore that Locke’s “ideas in the mind” are in the mind irrespective and independent of the qualities that produce them. In other words, they are a-priori. Locke resorts to abstraction in order to repudiate it.

Locke himself talks about “intuitive knowledge”. It is when the mind “perceives the agreement or disagreement of two ideas immediately by themselves, without the intervention of any other… the knowledge of our own being we have by intuition… the mind is presently filled with the clear light of it. It is on this intuition that depends all the certainty and evidence of all our knowledge… (Knowledge is the) perception of the connection of and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy, of any of our ideas.”

Knowledge is intuitive intellectual perception. Even when demonstrated (and few things, mainly ideas, can be intuited and demonstrated – relations within the physical realm cannot be grasped intuitively), each step in the demonstration is observed intuitionally. Locke’s “sensitive knowledge” is also a form of intuition (known as “intuitive cognition” in the Middle Ages). It is the perceived certainty that there exist finite objects outside us. The knowledge of one’s existence is an intuition as well. But both these intuitions are judgmental and rely on probabilities.

IIB. Hume

Hume denied the existence of innate ideas. According to him, all ideas are based either on sense impressions or on simpler ideas. But even Hume accepted that there are propositions known by the pure intellect (as opposed to propositions dependent on sensory input). These deal with the relations between ideas and they are (logically) necessarily true. Even though reason is used in order to prove them – they are independently true all the same because they merely reveal the meaning or information implicit in the definitions of their own terms. These propositions teach us nothing about the nature of things because they are, at bottom, self referential (equivalent to Kant’s “analytic propositions”).

IIC. Kant

According to Kant, our senses acquaint us with the particulars of things and thus provide us with intuitions. The faculty of understanding provided us with useful taxonomies of particulars (“concepts”). Yet, concepts without intuitions were as empty and futile as intuitions without concepts. Perceptions (“phenomena”) are the composite of the sensations caused by the perceived objects and the mind’s reactions to such sensations (“form”). These reactions are the product of intuition.



IID. The Absolute Idealists

Schelling suggested a featureless, undifferentiated, union of opposites as the Absolute Ideal. Intellectual intuition entails such a union of opposites (subject and object) and, thus, is immersed and assimilated by the Absolute and becomes as featureless and undifferentiated as the Absolute is.

Objective Idealists claimed that we can know ultimate (spiritual) reality by intuition (or thought) independent of the senses (the mystical argument). The mediation of words and symbol systems only distorts the “signal” and inhibits the effective application of one’s intuition to the attainment of real, immutable, knowledge.

IIE. The Phenomenologists

The Phenomenological point of view is that every thing has an invariable and irreducible “essence” (“Eidos”, as distinguished from contingent information about the thing). We can grasp this essence only intuitively (“Eidetic Reduction”). This process – of transcending the concrete and reaching for the essential – is independent of facts, concrete objects, or mental constructs. But it is not free from methodology (“free variation”), from factual knowledge, or from ideal intuitions. The Phenomenologist is forced to make the knowledge of facts his point of departure. He then applies a certain methodology (he varies the nature and specifications of the studied object to reveal its essence) which relies entirely on ideal intuitions (such as the rules of logic).

Phenomenology, in other words, is an Idealistic form of Rationalism. It applies reason to discover Platonic (Idealism) essences. Like Rationalism, it is not empirical (it is not based on sense data). Actually, it is anti-empirical – it “brackets” the concrete and the factual in its attempt to delve beyond appearances and into essences. It calls for the application of intuition (Anschauung) to discover essential insights (Wesenseinsichten).

“Phenomenon” in Phenomenology is that which is known by consciousness and in it. Phenomenologists regarded intuition as a “pure”, direct, and primitive way of reducing clutter in reality. It is immediate and the basis of a higher level perception. A philosophical system built on intuition would, perforce, be non speculative. Hence, Phenomenology’s emphasis on the study of consciousness (and intuition) rather than on the study of (deceiving) reality. It is through “Wesensschau” (the intuition of essences) that one reaches the invariant nature of things (by applying free variation techniques).

Jacobsen: Is this a large part of intuition and/or gut feelings if inclusive of the filtration, processing, and prefabrication, of information from physiology – the body – too? I do not necessarily mean extensive amounts of time – could be fractions of a second – from input to presentation to consciousness (conscious awareness). 

Vaknin: 

There is no question that input from the body is crucial to the formation of intuitions. The sensa (sensory inputs) are only one part of it. Autonomous reactions – such as heartbeat or perspiration – also figure into the equation. As we try to make sense of these corporeal data, we often come up with a heuristic or a narrative and most of the time we perceive the outcomes of these attempts as gut feelings or intuitions.

Jacobsen: When something feels wrong to an individual, how is this justifiable in considering the “something” as wrong in and of itself, or wrong in interpretation of an individual (more likely than not a fallible individual)? Are there moments when these feelings of wrongness about something are themselves inaccurate – following more generally from part of the last question?

Vaknin: 

Intuition is wrong as often as right. It is a shaky foundation for decision making. But it is a reliable signal that further research and investigation are called for.

Intuition should not be confused with either emotions or cognitions. They are an amalgam of both but they are a form of anxiety reaction, a variant of hypervigilance. 

Jacobsen: When someone is trying to force-fit a relationship, a friendship, a marital situation, a professional arrangement, why is this a sign of inauthenticity, a fake?

Vaknin: 

Authenticity consists of being yourself even when you adhere to social strictures, norms, and mores or when you are trying to meet expectations and obligations. Feeling good about your choice to conform and act responsibly, reliably, and predictably (ego syntony).

If the sum total of an engagement with others causes you acute discomfort (ego dystony or dissonance) – this is a sign that you are betraying yourself somehow and, therefore, being inauthentic.

Watch “Being is Slavery, Nothingness is Freedom (Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness”, FIRST LECTURE)”

Watch “Relationships Always Fail, Inauthentic (Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness”, SECOND LECTURE)”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFvRcB1MOWM

Jacobsen: Grandiose claims are made all the time. Those claims too good to be true. Why are the “too good to be true” more likely to be false than true?

Vaknin: 

Splitting is an infantile psychological defense mechanism: the baby divides the world into all good and all bad. Of course, this is counterfactual: there is good and bad, right and wrong, helpful and obstructive in everything and in everyone.

So, “too good to be true” is an outcome of splitting coupled with magical thinking (the delusion that your willpower or thoughts affect reality even without any commensurate action). It is the offspring of a pathology of impaired reality testing. 

Jacobsen: Why are we prone to believing things people say far more often than not, when people lie all the time in little and big ways?

Vaknin: 

This is known as the base rate fallacy. This cognitive distortion aims to resolve a cognitive dissonance: I know that people lie but I want to trust them all the time in order to feel safe. 

It stems from the same pathological roots which involve grandiosity magical thinking: other people are all good and can be always trusted because I am all-powerful and immune to harm as well as all-knowing and so, I cannot be conned. 

Trusting other people is the optimal strategy when you are the omniscient and omnipotent master of the Universe: investing in research and investigation would be wasteful. 

Jacobsen: Should we make decisions immediately based on gut feelings and intuitions or over a reasonable amount of time making incremental, moderate changes/decisions based on increasing feedback from the processes colloquially called “gut feelings” and “intuitions”?

Vaknin: 

We should definitely listen to gut feelings and intuitions. They are telling us that something has gone awry with the way we perceive reality. This alert bears careful investigation and research. 

But I would not act on my intuition or gut feeling unless and until I have delved deeper into what it is that is nagging at me.

Jacobsen: How can intuitions and gut feelings, ultimately, save us from our conscious delusions?

Vaknin: 

Intuitions and gut feelings are a poor guide in this sense because, as I said, as often as not, they turn out to have been wrong. Some intuitions are delusional!

Shoshanim: Thanks so much for the time and opportunity, Prof. Sam (Wise Gamgee).

Shoshanim’s ShoshanimI have an intuition that you actually mean it this time!

6.    Narcissism: The Future Religion (News Intervention)

Pathological narcissism develops as a set of complex psychological defenses against childhood abuse and trauma in all its forms, including not only “classical” maltreatment, but also idolizing the child, smothering it, parentifying it, or instrumentalizing it.

Whenever the child is not allowed to separate from the parental figures, form boundaries, and individuate (become an individual), a disorder of some kind ensues, secondary (pathological) narcissism being among the most prevalent. 

In the narcissistic pathology, the child forms a paracosm ruled over by an imaginary friend who is everything the child is not: omniscient, omnipotent, perfect, brilliant, and omnipresent. In short: a godhead or divinity. The child worships the newfound ally and makes a human sacrifice to this Moloch: he offers to it his true self. 

The child strikes a Faustian deal: he is endowed with a grandiose albeit fragile self-image and a fantastic self-perception, but, in return, he ceases to exist.

The narcissist outsources his ego boundary functions to the False Self and regulates his internal environment (for example: his sense of self-worth) via constant feedback from a multitude of interchangeable sources of narcissistic supply. His is a veritable hive mind. 

Narcissism is the celebration, elevation, and glorification of a superior absence, a howling emptiness, the all-devouring void of a black hole with a galaxy of internal objects (introjects) swirling around it.

Narcissism is, therefore, a private religion which resembles very much primitive faiths and rites. It is a fantasy defense writ large and gone awry, having metamorphesized into a delusion. Reality testing is severely impaired and the narcissist mistakes inner representations of people with the external objects that gave rise to them.

As a growing number of people become increasingly more narcissistic and as our civilization rewards narcissism and veers towards it, the allure of the narcissism religion is growing exponentially.

It is beginning to be widely and counterfactually glamorized – even in academe – as a positive adaptation. Counterfactually because narcissism ineluctably and invariably devolves into self-defeat and self-destruction. 

Narcissism is the first distributed or networked faith: every believer and practitioner (i.e., every narcissist) is a worshipper but also the god that he worships (has a godlike False Self). Every node is equipotent and self-sustaining as it seeks to consume narcissistic supply (attention, good or bad).  

Like every religion before it, narcissism is fast becoming an organizing and hermeneutic (explanatory) principle. It imbues existence with meaning and direction. It is both prescriptive and proscriptive. Fueled by technologies like social media, it is spreading with more alacrity than any previous historical faith. 

Pathological narcissism is also missionary: the narcissist attempts to convert potential sources of narcissistic supply and intimate partners to participate in his shared fantasy and to worship his grandiose deity, the False Self. 

Everything abovesaid applies with equal rigor to narcissistic collectives. This is where the danger lurks: narcissism is aggressive and intolerant, dysempathic and exploitative. It is a death cult. It elevates objects above people. In a society of the spectacle, everyone is rendered a commodity. Materialism and consumerism are manifestations of narcissism as is malignant, ostentatious individualism.

Narcissism in collectives is indistinguishable from the individual sort: it is always adversarial and results in dismal self-defeat and self-destruction. Left unbridled and unconstrained and elevated ideologically, it can bring about Armageddon in more than one way.

The rise of narcissism is inexorable. It is comparable to climate change and to the shift in gender roles: there is no going back now. If I am right, it calls for major adaptations on multiple levels, individual, institutional, and collective: 

(1) To harness the considerable energy of narcissism and channel it in socially acceptable ways (sublimate it). Prosocial and communal narcissism could spell a workable compromise, for example; 

(2) To put in place checks, balances, and institutions to prevent the more destructive, insidious, and pernicious outcomes and aspects of narcissism; and 

(3) To prepare the general populace to accept narcissism as a part of the landscape and Zeitgeist. This latter goal is best accomplished via technologies that would provide outlets to conforming, positive healthy narcissism and at the same time isolate users from an increasingly more narcissistic reality as much as possible. Social media and the metaverse as harbingers of these twin tasks. Atomization and self-sufficiency as well as the disintegration of social institutions are mere symptoms of this tectonic shift in what it means to be human.

7.    Freedom of Will: Illusion or Reality? (News Intervention)

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We will likely encounter moments of repetition in this session, in question and response. 

What is free will? What are the ways in which “will” has been defined?

Prof. Shmuel “Sam” Vaknin: 

Free will is a useful fiction, akin to god or the afterlife: only agents with free will can be held morally responsible. 

Free will comprises three conditions:

1.     The ability to choose and act otherwise;

2.     Having control over one’s choices and actions;

3.     That the choice or act are rationally motivated. 

The very concept of free will is founded on convenient delusions such as time or causation. Whereas teleology is prohibited in all sciences (we do not attribute purposeful actions to objects and animals, for example), it mysteriously permeates philosophy and more specifically the field of ethics.

Jacobsen: What are the ways in which “freedom” or “free” have been defined?

Vaknin: 

Both the external world and our internal one serve as constraints. We cannot choose or act contrary to Nature or to our individual nature. What we call “change” is merely a transition between different constrained systems. So, ostensibly, free will is a myth, there is no such thing.

But this (nomological) determinism is merely optical (compatibilism).

First: there are always other options. If someone puts a gun to your head, you are still possessed of free will: you can choose to die (in Judaism, one is instructed to choose death over certain transgressions). 

But, much more importantly, in complex systems the number of probable pathways is so enormous that for all practical purposes we can never specify all or even most of them (chaos theory, quantum mechanics). So, these systems, as far as we are concerned appear to be either random (libertarianism) or subject to free will (agency).

Jacobsen: What definitions of “free”, “will”, and “free will”/“freedom of the will”, simply exist in the realm of fantasy, magical thinking?

Vaknin: 

Free will is a conscious, introspected experience of the degrees of freedom in systems (such as the brain or society). It reflects the fact that our ability to know the world is limited by our finitude and mortality. Our descriptions of reality – including psychological reality – will always be subject to uncertainty, indeterminacy, and apparent randomness.

This is a terrifying realization which produces anxiety (angst in existentialism). It implies an external locus of control (our lives are determined from the outside by forces and processes we will, in principle, never fathom).

We defend against such helplessness and lack of autonomy and agency by deceiving ourselves into believing that we are exempt from the laws of nature and can alter the ineluctable course of events.

But this is a useful bit of self-deception and should be perpetuated, for two reasons:

1.     Owing to our inability to secure all the information about reality, free will feels real!

2.     The concept of free will guarantees the acceptance of moral responsibility and the reactions to it: desert, blame, guilt, and restorative justice.

Jacobsen: Apart from simplistic considerations of semi-dismissal, as in it is fantasy or magical thinking, is free will a complex illusion of human perception and cognition, even a non-conscious mental trick bundled in the languages – everything: semiotics, semantics, syntax, etc. – used to speak about it, a mistake of intuition of sorts?

Vaknin: 

The BELIEF in the freedom to choose and do otherwise – regardless of whether such liberty is merely an illusion – is the foundation of human civilization, its core. 

Free will is an article of FAITH. It is not a fact or a hypothesis or a theory. It has no truth value (it is not true or false). It has no ontological status, only an epistemological one. 

Jacobsen: What forms of free will, if it’s to exist at all (or, indeed, not), would fit the modern scientific universes of discourse for plausibility?

Vaknin: 

None., Modern science is dichotomous: determinism vs. randomness (probability). In both approaches, there is no place for free will (the intelligibility problem). If the universe is preordained and predestined (by god) then, of course, individual agency is counterfactual. If, on the other hand, events are random, there can be no will, choice, or even action, all of which imply intentionality. 

Some would say that Man converts the random into the structured, is an agent of increasing order in the universe. Humans, in this view, are AGENTS of determinism, the shapers of reality.

But this is just kicking the can down the road: we are still faced with randomness when human decisions and actions to increase order are undertaken.

Jacobsen: A bit of a longer question narrowed more within tighter philosophical and natural philosophical terms. In a prior session, you spoke on Kant, free will, nomic causation/causation by laws (of nature) versus causation resulting from free will, and a god. As has been phrased by others… “ultimately, of what is the will free?”

Vaknin: 

Every single philosopher I ever heard of grappled with the question of free will and tried to square the circle.

Ultimately, it is just a question of frame of reference and level of description. The same substance can be described as 2 atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen – or as wet, cold water. Both descriptions are valid statements about the reality of the substance – and yet they have nothing in common.

From a fine-grained point of view of the world, free will is a confabulation. But from a human being’s perspective, free will is a very useful organizing and explanatory principle. It helps to make sense of life and provide one with self-efficacious guidance.

Jacobsen: Apart from the above mentioned considerations of the arguments, switching more to a personal voice, you have a ToE in Chronon Field Theory (CFT). Does free will exist in CFT?

Vaknin: 

Moreso than in any other theory I am aware of. The Chronon Field Theory is all about Time as a field of potentialities. As some of these potentials materialize, they constitute input – but not to any deterministic process! They feed into other probable processes or events. “Choice” and “action” easily fit into this view of the world because our brains are just another such superposition.

Jacobsen: With everything, and the stance on free will, any final words of anxiety and discomfort if not anguish and torture?

Vaknin: 

I don’t do comfort. But thank you for giving me the opportunity. Every thinker whose work I have read has miserably failed in tackling the thorny topic of free will. Even the most rigorous amongst them made fools of themselves in plain view.

Don’t go there. There is a thin line separating overthinking from inanity and overanalyzing from stupidity. Don’t cross it.

Free will exists the same way Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes most definitely exist. It is real. It is a force to reckon with. It shapes our minds and lives. It exerts a huge influence on multiple spheres. What more do we need to know?

Shoshanim: Thank you, Doc. 

Lily’s Lily: You are very welcome, survivor!

8.    Interview about Controversial Topics (In-Sight Journal)

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I asked about the most controversial topics to you. Three came up: Incest and trauma, parents are less happy than the childless, and capitalism and consumerism resulting in atomization and loneliness. Let’s cover those in sequence, this may be a controversial session. What is the formal definition accepted among professionals of “incest” or incestuous relations, or some other variation of the idea?

Prof. Shmuel “Sam” Vaknin: 

Incest used to be defined as any consensual or nonconsensual sex act of any kind with a close member of the family, related by blood or by marriage. Today, we also consider certain behaviors and speech acts as incestuous if they communicate sexual or emotional information and intent that are inappropriate among relatives, especially of the first degree.

In contemporary thought, incest is invariably associated with child abuse and its horrific, long-lasting, and often irreversible consequences. Incest is not such a clear-cut matter as it has been made out to be over millennia of taboo. Many participants claim to have enjoyed the act and its physical and emotional consequences. It is often the result of seduction. In some cases, two consenting and fully informed adults are involved.

Many types of relationships, which are defined as incestuous, are between genetically unrelated parties (a stepfather and a daughter), or between fictive kin or between classificatory kin (that belong to the same matriline or patriline). In certain societies (the Native American or the Chinese) it is sufficient to carry the same family name (=to belong to the same clan) and marriage is forbidden.

Some incest prohibitions relate to sexual acts – others to marriage. In some societies, incest is mandatory or prohibited, according to the social class or particular circumstances (Ugarit, Bali, Papua New Guinea, Polynesian and Melanesian islands). In others, the Royal House started a tradition of incestuous marriages, which was later imitated by lower classes (Ancient Egypt, Hawaii, Pre-Columbian Mixtec). Some societies are more tolerant of consensual incest than others (Japan, India until the 1930’s, Australia).

The list is long and it serves to demonstrate the diversity of attitudes towards this most universal of taboos. Generally put, we can say that a prohibition to have sex with or marry a related person should be classified as an incest prohibition.

Perhaps the strongest feature of incest has been hitherto downplayed: that it is, essentially, an autoerotic act.

Having sex with a first-degree blood relative is like having sex with oneself. It is a Narcissistic act and like all acts Narcissistic, it involves the objectification of the partner. The incestuous Narcissist over-values and then devalues his sexual partner. He is devoid of empathy (cannot see the other’s point of view or put himself in her shoes).

Jacobsen: How is incest traumatic to individuals, regardless of age, gender, or sex?

Vaknin: 

Incest often involves a power asymmetry and, therefore, implicit or explicit coercion. 

Paradoxically and ironically, it is the reaction of society that transforms incest into such a disruptive phenomenon. The condemnation, the horror, the revulsion and the attendant social sanctions interfere with the internal processes and dynamics of the incestuous family. It is from society that the child learns that something is horribly wrong, that he should feel guilty, and that the offending parent is a defective role model. Psychologists, from Albert Ellis to Boris Cyrulnik have noted the critical importance of societal response and stigma in cases of both adult and childhood trauma.

As a direct result, the formation of the child’s Superego is stunted and it remains infantile, ideal, sadistic, perfectionist, demanding and punishing. The child’s Ego, on the other hand, is likely to be replaced by a False Ego version, whose job it is to suffer the social consequences of the hideous act.

To sum up: society’s reactions in the case of incest are pathogenic and are most likely to produce a Narcissistic or a Borderline patient. Dysempathic, exploitative, emotionally labile, immature, and in eternal search for Narcissistic Supply – the child becomes a replica of his incestuous and socially-castigated parent.

If so, why did human societies develop such pathogenic responses? In other words, why is incest considered a taboo in all known human collectives and cultures? Why are incestuous liaisons treated so harshly and punitively?

Freud said that incest provokes horror because it touches upon our forbidden, ambivalent emotions towards members of our close family. This ambivalence covers both aggression towards other members (forbidden and punishable) and (sexual) attraction to them (doubly forbidden and punishable).

Edward Westermarck proffered an opposite view that the domestic proximity of the members of the family breeds sexual repulsion (the epigenetic rule known as the Westermarck effect) to counter naturally occurring genetic sexual attraction. The incest taboo simply reflects emotional and biological realities within the family rather than aiming to restrain the inbred instincts of its members, claimed Westermarck.

Though much-disputed by geneticists, some scholars maintain that the incest taboo may have been originally designed to prevent the degeneration of the genetic stock of the clan or tribe through intra-family breeding (closed endogamy). But, even if true, this no longer applies. In today’s world incest rarely results in pregnancy and the transmission of genetic material. Sex today is about recreation as much as procreation.

Good contraceptives should, therefore, encourage incestuous, couples. In many other species inbreeding or straightforward incest are the norm. Finally, in most countries, incest prohibitions apply also to non-genetically-related people.

It seems, therefore, that the incest taboo was and is aimed at one thing in particular: to preserve the family unit and its proper functioning.

Incest is more than a mere manifestation of a given personality disorder or a paraphilia (incest is considered by many to be a subtype of pedophilia). It harks back to the very nature of the family. It is closely entangled with its functions and with its contribution to the development of the individual within it.

The family is an efficient venue for the transmission of accumulated property as well as information – both horizontally (among family members) and vertically (down the generations). The process of socialization largely relies on these familial mechanisms, making the family the most important agent of socialization by far.

The family is a mechanism for the allocation of genetic and material wealth. Worldly goods are passed on from one generation to the next through succession, inheritance and residence. Genetic material is handed down through the sexual act. It is the mandate of the family to increase both by accumulating property and by marrying outside the family (exogamy).

Clearly, incest prevents both. It preserves a limited genetic pool and makes an increase of material possessions through intermarriage all but impossible.

The family’s roles are not merely materialistic, though.

One of the main businesses of the family is to teach to its members self control, self regulation and healthy adaptation. Family members share space and resources and siblings share the mother’s emotions and attention. Similarly, the family educates its young members to master their drives and to postpone the self-gratification which attaches to acting upon them.

The incest taboo conditions children to control their erotic drive by abstaining from ingratiating themselves with members of the opposite sex within the same family. There could be little question that incest constitutes a lack of control and impedes the proper separation of impulse (or stimulus) from action.

Additionally, incest probably interferes with the defensive aspects of the family’s existence. It is through the family that aggression is legitimately channeled, expressed and externalized. By imposing discipline and hierarchy on its members, the family is transformed into a cohesive and efficient war machine. It absorbs economic resources, social status and members of other families. It forms alliances and fights other clans over scarce goods, tangible and intangible.

This efficacy is undermined by incest. It is virtually impossible to maintain discipline and hierarchy in an incestuous family where some members assume sexual roles not normally theirs. Sex is an expression of power – emotional and physical. The members of the family involved in incest surrender power and assume it out of the regular flow patterns that have made the family the formidable apparatus that it is.

These new power politics weaken the family, both internally and externally. Internally, emotive reactions (such as the jealousy of other family members) and clashing authorities and responsibilities are likely to undo the delicate unit. Externally, the family is vulnerable to ostracism and more official forms of intervention and dismantling.

Finally, the family is an identity endowment mechanism. It bestows identity upon its members. Internally, the members of the family derive meaning from their position in the family tree and its “organization chart” (which conform to societal expectations and norms). Externally, through exogamy, by incorporating “strangers”, the family absorbs other identities and thus enhances social solidarity (Claude Levy-Strauss) at the expense of the solidarity of the nuclear, original family.

Exogamy, as often noted, allows for the creation of extended alliances. The “identity creep” of the family is in total opposition to incest. The latter increases the solidarity and cohesiveness of the incestuous family – but at the expense of its ability to digest and absorb other identities of other family units. Incest, in other words, adversely affects social cohesion and solidarity.

Lastly, as aforementioned, incest interferes with well-established and rigid patterns of inheritance and property allocation. Such disruption is likely to have led in primitive societies to disputes and conflicts – including armed clashes and deaths. To prevent such recurrent and costly bloodshed was one of the intentions of the incest taboo.

The more primitive the society, the more strict and elaborate the set of incest prohibitions and the fiercer the reactions of society to violations. It appears that the less violent the dispute settlement methods and mechanisms in a given culture – the more lenient the attitude to incest.

The incest taboo is, therefore, a cultural trait. Protective of the efficient mechanism of the family, society sought to minimize disruption to its activities and to the clear flows of authority, responsibilities, material wealth and information horizontally and vertically.

Incest threatened to unravel this magnificent creation – the family. Alarmed by the possible consequences (internal and external feuds, a rise in the level of aggression and violence) – society introduced the taboo. It came replete with physical and emotional sanctions: stigmatization, revulsion and horror, imprisonment, the demolition of the errant and socially mutant family cell.

As long as societies revolve around the relegation of power, its sharing, its acquisition and dispensation – there will always exist an incest taboo. But in a different societal and cultural setting, it is conceivable not to have such a taboo. We can easily imagine a society where incest is extolled, taught, and practiced – and out-breeding is regarded with horror and revulsion.

The incestuous marriages among members of the royal households of Europe were intended to preserve the familial property and expand the clan’s territory. They were normative, not aberrant. Marrying an outsider was considered abhorrent.

An incestuous society – where incest is the norm – is conceivable even today.

Two out of many possible scenarios:

1. “The Lot Scenario”

A plague or some other natural disaster decimate the population of planet Earth. People remain alive only in isolated clusters, co-habiting only with their closest kin. Surely incestuous procreation is preferable to virtuous extermination. Incest becomes normative.

Incest is as entrenched a taboo as cannibalism. Yet, it is better to eat the flesh of your dead football team mates than perish high up on the Andes (a harrowing tale of survival recounted in the book and eponymous film, “Alive”).

2. The Egyptian Scenario

Resources become so scarce that family units scramble to keep them exclusively within the clan.

Exogamy – marrying outside the clan – amounts to a unilateral transfer of scarce resources to outsiders and strangers. Incest becomes an economic imperative.

An incestuous society would be either utopian or dystopian, depending on the reader’s point of view – but that it is possible is doubtless.

Jacobsen: Regarding age, gender, and sex, how is incest differentially traumatic?

Vaknin: 

The ages most reactive to incest are 7-13 and girls seem to be affected more than boys in the long term.

Jacobsen: What are the current facts on childlessness around the globe on a myriad of demographic factors? 

Vaknin: 

Between 10% and 20% of women die childless, depending on the country. About 60% of people live in countries with declining populations (replacement rate under 2.1). We are now 8 billion people on the planet, but we are aging fast and we actually need fresh blood to provide the previous generations with pensions and healthcare. By current projections, the planet’s population will peak around 2080.

Jacobsen: How do individuals of all types, of reproductive age and capacity, make decisions with respect to becoming parents or not, now? 

Vaknin: 

No one really knows. It is a kind of fuzzy urge, according to some. Others attribute it to sociocultural expectations. It is clear that economic and financial considerations are key determinants and predictors of procreation. Uncertainty plays a part as does the proximity to death (the baby booms after major wars).

The advent of cloning, surrogate motherhood, and the donation of gametes and sperm have shaken the traditional biological definition of parenthood to its foundations. The social roles of parents have similarly been recast by the decline of the nuclear family and the surge of alternative household formats.

Why do people become parents in the first place? Do we have a moral obligation to humanity at large, to ourselves, or to our unborn children? Hardly.

Raising children comprises equal measures of satisfaction and frustration. Parents often employ a psychological defense mechanism – known as “cognitive dissonance” – to suppress the negative aspects of parenting and to deny the unpalatable fact that raising children is time consuming, exhausting, and strains otherwise pleasurable and tranquil relationships to their limits.

Not to mention the fact that the gestational mother experiences “considerable discomfort, effort, and risk in the course of pregnancy and childbirth” (Narayan, U., and J.J. Bartkowiak (1999) Having and Raising Children: Unconventional Families, Hard Choices, and the Social Good University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, Quoted in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Parenting is possibly an irrational vocation, but humanity keeps breeding and procreating. It may well be the call of nature. All living species reproduce and most of them parent. Is maternity (and paternity) proof that, beneath the ephemeral veneer of civilization, we are still merely a kind of beast, subject to the impulses and hard-wired behavior that permeate the rest of the animal kingdom?

In his seminal tome, “The Selfish Gene”, Richard Dawkins suggested that we copulate in order to preserve our genetic material by embedding it in the future gene pool. Survival itself – whether in the form of DNA, or, on a higher-level, as a species – determines our parenting instinct. Breeding and nurturing the young are mere safe conduct mechanisms, handing the precious cargo of genetics down generations of “organic containers”.

Yet, surely, to ignore the epistemological and emotional realities of parenthood is misleadingly reductionistic. Moreover, Dawkins commits the scientific faux-pas of teleology. Nature has no purpose “in mind”, mainly because it has no mind. Things simply are, period. That genes end up being forwarded in time does not entail that Nature (or, for that matter, “God”) planned it this way. Arguments from design have long – and convincingly – been refuted by countless philosophers. 

Still, human beings do act intentionally. Back to square one: why bring children to the world and burden ourselves with decades of commitment to perfect strangers?

First hypothesis: offspring allow us to “delay” death. Our progeny are the medium through which our genetic material is propagated and immortalized. Additionally, by remembering us, our children “keep us alive” after physical death. 

These, of course, are self-delusional, self-serving, illusions. 

Our genetic material gets diluted with time. While it constitutes 50% of the first generation – it amounts to a measly 6% three generations later. If the everlastingness of one’s unadulterated DNA was the paramount concern – incest would have been the norm.

As for one’s enduring memory – well, do you recall or can you name your maternal or paternal great great grandfather? Of course you can’t. So much for that. Intellectual feats or architectural monuments are far more potent mementos.

Still, we have been so well-indoctrinated that this misconception – that children equal immortality – yields a baby boom in each post war period. Having been existentially threatened, people multiply in the vain belief that they thus best protect their genetic heritage and their memory.

Let’s study another explanation.

The utilitarian view is that one’s offspring are an asset – kind of pension plan and insurance policy rolled into one. Children are still treated as a yielding property in many parts of the world. They plough fields and do menial jobs very effectively. People “hedge their bets” by bringing multiple copies of themselves to the world. Indeed, as infant mortality plunges – in the better-educated, higher income parts of the world – so does fecundity.

In the Western world, though, children have long ceased to be a profitable proposition. At present, they are more of an economic drag and a liability. Many continue to live with their parents into their thirties and consume the family’s savings in college tuition, sumptuous weddings, expensive divorces, and parasitic habits. Alternatively, increasing mobility breaks families apart at an early stage. Either way, children are not longer the founts of emotional sustenance and monetary support they allegedly used to be.

How about this one then:

Procreation serves to preserve the cohesiveness of the family nucleus. It further bonds father to mother and strengthens the ties between siblings. Or is it the other way around and a cohesive and warm family is conductive to reproduction?

Both statements, alas, are false.

Stable and functional families sport far fewer children than abnormal or dysfunctional ones. Between one third and one half  of all children are born in single parent or in other non-traditional, non-nuclear – typically poor and under-educated – households. In such families children are mostly born unwanted and unwelcome – the sad outcomes of accidents and mishaps, wrong fertility planning, lust gone awry and misguided turns of events.

The more sexually active people are and the less safe their desirous exploits – the more they are likely to end up with a bundle of joy (the American saccharine expression for a newborn). Many children are the results of sexual ignorance, bad timing, and a vigorous and undisciplined sexual drive among teenagers, the poor, and the less educated.

Still, there is no denying that most people want their kids and love them. They are attached to them and experience grief and bereavement when they die, depart, or are sick. Most parents find parenthood emotionally fulfilling, happiness-inducing, and highly satisfying. This pertains even to unplanned and initially unwanted new arrivals.

Could this be the missing link? Do fatherhood and motherhood revolve around self-gratification? Does it all boil down to the pleasure principle?

Childrearing may, indeed, be habit forming. Nine months of pregnancy and a host of social positive reinforcements and expectations condition the parents to do the job. Still, a living tot is nothing like the abstract concept. Babies cry, soil themselves and their environment, stink, and severely disrupt the lives of their parents. Nothing too enticing here.

One’s spawns are a risky venture. So many things can and do go wrong. So few expectations, wishes, and dreams are realized. So much pain is inflicted on the parents. And then the child runs off and his procreators are left to face the “empty nest”. The emotional “returns” on a child are rarely commensurate with the magnitude of the investment.

Sherlock Holmes was fond of saying: “If you eliminate the impossible, what is left – however improbable – must be the truth”. People multiply because it provides them with narcissistic supply.

Narcissist is a person who projects a (false) image unto others and uses the interest this generates to regulate a labile and grandiose sense of self-worth. The reactions garnered by the narcissist – attention, unconditional acceptance, adulation, admiration, affirmation – are collectively known as “narcissistic supply”. The narcissist objectifies people and treats them as mere instruments of gratification.

Infants go through a phase of unbridled fantasy, tyrannical behavior, and perceived omnipotence. An adult narcissist, in other words, is still stuck in his “terrible twos” and is possessed with the emotional maturity of a toddler. To some degree, we are all narcissists. Yet, as we grow, we learn to empathize and to love ourselves and others.

This edifice of maturity is severely tested by newfound parenthood.

Babies evoke in the parent the most primordial drives, protective, animalistic instincts, the desire to merge with the newborn and a sense of terror generated by such a desire (a fear of vanishing and of being assimilated). Neonates engender in their parents an emotional regression.

The parents find themselves revisiting their own childhood even as they care for the newborn. The crumbling of decades and layers of personal growth is accompanied by a resurgence of the aforementioned early infancy narcissistic defenses. Parents – especially new ones – are gradually transformed into narcissists by this encounter and find in their children the perfect sources of narcissistic supply, euphemistically known as love. Really it is a form of symbiotic codependence of both parties.

Even the most balanced, most mature, most psychodynamically stable of parents finds such a flood of narcissistic supply irresistible and addictive. It enhances his or her self-confidence, buttresses self esteem, regulates the sense of self-worth, and projects a complimentary image of the parent to himself or herself. It fast becomes indispensable, especially in the emotionally vulnerable position in which the parent finds herself, with the reawakening and repetition of all the unresolved conflicts that she had had with her own parents.

This is especially true when the parents hold the Victorian attitude that they are and should at all times appear to be infallible, impeccably virtuous, and omniscient. Later in life, the child’s discovery that these representations are false leads to a harrowing, bitter, and traumatic disillusionment coupled with recriminations and regrets aplenty – not unlike the breakups of interpersonal relationships with adult malignant narcissists.

If this theory is true, if breeding is merely about securing prime quality narcissistic supply, then the higher the self confidence, the self esteem, the self worth of the parent, the clearer and more realistic his self image, and the more abundant his other sources of narcissistic supply – the fewer children he will have. These predictions are borne out by reality.

The higher the education and the income of adults – and, consequently, the firmer their sense of self worth – the fewer children they have. Children are perceived as counter-productive: not only is their output (narcissistic supply) redundant, they hinder the parent’s professional and pecuniary progress.

The more children people can economically afford – the fewer they have. This gives the lie to the Selfish Gene hypothesis. The more educated they are, the more they know about the world and about themselves, the less they seek to procreate. The more advanced the civilization, the more efforts it invests in preventing the birth of children. Contraceptives, family planning, and abortions are typical of affluent, well informed societies.

The more plentiful the narcissistic supply afforded by other sources – the lesser the emphasis on breeding. Freud described the mechanism of sublimation: the sex drive, the Eros (libido), can be “converted”, “sublimated” into other activities. All the sublimatory channels – politics and art, for instance – are narcissistic and yield narcissistic supply. They render children superfluous. Creative people have fewer children than the average or none at all. This is because they are narcissistically self sufficient.

The key to our determination to have children is our wish to experience the same unconditional love that we received from our mothers, this intoxicating feeling of being adored without caveats, for what we are, with no limits, reservations, or calculations. This is the most powerful, crystallized form of narcissistic supply. It nourishes our self-love, self worth and self-confidence. It infuses us with feelings of omnipotence and omniscience. In these and other respects, parenthood is a return to infancy.

In the film “Lucy”, a distinguished scientist proposes that organisms in hostile environments opt for “immortality” while those ensconced in friendly habitats “choose” reproduction as species-wide survival strategies. The opposite is true: when the habitat is welcoming and poses no existential threats, organisms adapt by becoming “immortal” (usually via cloning.) Bacteria and viruses come to mind.

It is when the environment turns nasty and brutish – and thereby short – that life-forms engage in diversity-enhancing sexual reproduction. Parenthood is a defense mechanism and an insurance policy against the more ominous and unsavoury aspects of life, not an affirmation of its blessings. It is intended to conquer time itself, to defeat death, and to render our immanent mortality immaterial.

Parenting as a Moral Obligation

Judging by the panoply of pro-family policies, society feels obligated to assist parents in the tasks of parenthood and child-rearing. Parents are perceived to be society’s long arm, its agents, the conduit for its perpetuation and future preservation: genetic as well as cultural. To some extent, the institutions of marriage, family, and socialization (upbringing) are all “national” and public as much as they are private. Indeed, a substantial portion of the hitherto parental decision-making process and a good great number of heretofore domestic decisions have been expropriated by the state: from vaccines to education.

Do we have a moral obligation to become parents? Some would say: yes. There are three types of arguments to support such a contention:

(i) We owe it to humanity at large to propagate the species or to society to provide manpower for future tasks

(ii) We owe it to ourselves to realize our full potential as human beings and as males or females by becoming parents

(iii) We owe it to our unborn children to give them life.

The first two arguments are easy to dispense with. We have a minimal moral obligation to humanity and society and that is to conduct ourselves so as not to harm others. All other ethical edicts are either derivative or spurious. Similarly, we have a minimal moral obligation to ourselves and that is to be happy (while not harming others). If bringing children to the world makes us happy, all for the better. If we would rather not procreate, it is perfectly within our rights not to do so.

But what about the third argument?

Only living people have rights. There is a debate whether an egg is a living person, but there can be no doubt that it exists. Its rights – whatever they are – derive from the fact that it exists and that it has the potential to develop life. The right to be brought to life (the right to become or to be) pertains to a yet non-alive entity and, therefore, is null and void. Had this right existed, it would have implied an obligation or duty to give life to the unborn and the not yet conceived. No such duty or obligation exist.

Jacobsen: If taking the broader concept of eudaimonia or generalized wellbeing as the evaluative criteria, how do parents do worse than the childless? 

Vaknin: 

Parents idealize their children in order to survive the childrearing ordeal. But the drain on resources – emotional, physical, and financial – is very substantial. Parents often do sacrifice themselves and their lives for their children. Having children restricts mobility, impacts career choice, constricts socializaing, and otherwise has an adverse impact on the parental quality of life.

Numerous studies clearly show that childless people are happier and more self-actualized than parents are.

Jacobsen: How do consumerism and capitalism play off one another?

Vaknin: 

Capitalism is an ideology that serves to justify free markets. It is ostensibly comprised of meritocracy, level playing field (rule of law), and frictionless markets with few market failures. 

But capitalism is founded on permanent growth fueled by consumption and the investment required to meet its demands. This is where the paradigm fails as it conflicts head on with scarcity.

Jacobsen: What do consumerism and capitalism replace in the lives of individuals in countries largely beholden to the ideologies? 

Vaknin: 

Consumer goods are love substitutes. Shopping sprees are retail therapy. Consumers are interpellated by advertising and made to equate consumption with happiness. 

Consumer goods serve multiple psychological and social needs: relative positioning (as status symbols), anxiolytics (possessing goods reduces anxiety because it is perceived as enhancing self-efficacy and agency), grandiosity-buttressing, and self-soothing, to mention just a few. 

Jacobsen: Eventually, how do consumerism and capitalism lead to atomization and loneliness?

Vaknin: 

They do. Money and the things money can buy displace the pleasure offered by the company or sex of others. We also tend to objectify and commoditize other people, convert them into consumer goods, in effect: we use them and discard them or replace them with newer versions. 

This leads to atomization, alienation, and malignant, solipsistic self-sufficiency.

Jacobsen: Why are these three topics the most controversial, in your opinion?

Vaknin: 

Because we tend to deny them, sweep them under the carpet. Incest is way more widespread than we pretend. Consumerism has uprooted human relations and yet we worship it and its idols, the entrepreneurs. Parenting sucks: one third of mothers suffer from post-partum depression and yet we keep lying to ourselves that the parenting model requires no tinkering (for example by implementing collective care such as in the kibbutzim of yore).

Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Prof. Vaknin.

Vaknin: Always much obliged, Scott.

9.    Ask The Expert (Psy Room) Interview

• What is your profession? (describe your title and what you do)

I am a former professor of psychology, an author of books about personality disorders, and a mental health counsellor (not a therapist). 

• What is a lesser-known/unusual aspect of your job that the public/average person wouldn’t expect?

There is a tsunami of mental illness submerging the entire world. The pandemic catalyzed and accelerated this trend. Working in the frontlines of this war, trying to turn back the tide, is very corroding and vicariously traumatizing. It is no different to other medical specialties. It leads to depression, anxiety, and burnout.

• What has been one of the biggest challenges for you, working in your role?

How to balance the grim and hopeless realities of most mental illness with the hopeful but counterfactual message of healing. The truth is: we suck at helping people. Another truth: most people cannot be helped. But political correctness and the commercial imperatives of the self-help industry inhibit the truth.

• What has been your biggest win in this role?

I was the first to describe narcissistic abuse in the 1990s. I also coined most of the language in use today in discussions about pathological narcissism and the its deleterious aftermath.

• What is something society/the government/the public should know, or seek to change, regarding your field of work? (something positive or negative)

We should adopt a holistic view of health. Body and mind are intertwined in continuous feedback loops. Most mental health issues are relational: they reflect the dysfunctional dynamics of anomic societies and crumbling relationships. We need to heal communities and families, rather than individuals. 

• Something you wish you knew before starting on this career path?

The field is infested with con artists, scammers, self-styled “experts”, mentally ill people who “coach” and “educate” others, and scavenging plagiarists. The extent of misinformation online is staggering. Money has corrupted every niche and participant in this ecosystem of mental health. Had I known that it will come to this, I would have remained in my original field (physics). 

• Something you’d tell your younger self?

Stay away from women. Modern women are undergoing an identity crisis that is rendering them dysregulated, narcissistic, and dangerously psychopathic. And, yes, I feel absolutely comfortable and confident to generalize in this case. 

• Why do you do what you do?

I am active in multiple intellectual fields. I like the attention and the money that I garner (though all my content is freely available online).

• One piece of key insider information?

People uncritically and indolently believe 90% of what they hear.

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.

(Genius)

Author(s): Sam Vaknin and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Vaknin.Tripod.Com (Sam Vaknin’s Instagram Epigrams)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): n.d.

Jacobsen: Is high intelligence required for true genius?

Vaknin: If by intelligence you mean IQ then the answer is a resounding no. The adage about perspiration and inspiration applies. But, more importantly, genius is the ability to see familiar things in a fresh, unprecedented way. Imagination, intuition, and the ability to tell apart the critical from the tangential are the core constituents of genius – not intelligence.

What intelligence does contribute to genius is alacrity. It is a catalyst. It speeds up both the processes of theorizing and of discovery.

Jacobsen: What happens to an insane person who happens to have high intelligence too?

Vaknin: He is likely to construct theories that will pass for genius, especially among laymen. The intelligence of the gifted madman serves to camouflage the lack of rigor and the delusional, counterfactual content of his creations. Rather than catalyze disruptive discoveries, his intellect works overtime at the service of aggressively defending a manifestly risible sleight of hand. It is not open to any modificatory feedback from the environment. The madman’s intellect is solipsistic and moribund.

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.

(Intelligence)

Author(s): Sam Vaknin and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Vaknin.Tripod.Com (Sam Vaknin’s Instagram Epigrams)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): n.d.

Anything that endows an individual with a comparative advantage at performing a complex task constitutes intelligence. In this sense, viruses reify intelligence, they are intelligent. Human intelligence, though, is versatile and the tasks are usually far more complex than anything a virus might need to tackle.

Jacobsen: What defines IQ or Intelligence Quotient?

Vaknin:

The ability to perform a set of mostly – but not only – analytical assignments corresponding to an age-appropriate average. So, if a 10 year old copes well with the tasks that are the bread and butter of an 18 years old, he scores 180 IQ.

IQ measures an exceedingly narrow set of skills and mental functions. There are many types of intelligence – for example: musical intelligence – not captured by any IQ test.

Jacobsen: What defines giftedness, to you? Even though, formal definitions exist.[8]

Vaknin:

Giftedness resembles autism very much: it is the ability to accomplish tasks inordinately well or fast by focusing on them to the exclusion of all else and by mobilizing all the mental resources at the disposal of the gifted person.

Obviously, people gravitate to what they do well. Gifted people have certain propensities and talents to start with and these probably reflect brain abnormalities of one kind or another.

Jacobsen: Inter-relating the previous three questions, what separates intelligence from IQ from giftedness, i.e., separates each from one another?

Vaknin:

IQ is a narrow measure of highly specific types of intelligence and is not necessarily related to giftedness. Gifted people invest themselves with a laser-focus to effect change in their environment conducive to the speedy completion of highly specific tasks.

Jacobsen: What defines genius?

Vaknin:

Genius is the ability to discern two things: 1. What is missing (lacunas) 2. Synoptic connections.

The genius surveys the world and completes it by conjuring up novelty (i.e., by creating). S/he also spots hidden relatedness between ostensibly disparate phenomena or data.

Read the rest of the interview on the News Intervention website.

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.

News Intervention Interview

Author(s): Sam Vaknin and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Vaknin.Tripod.Com (Sam Vaknin’s Instagram Epigrams)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): n.d.

News Intervention Interview

Sam Vaknin ( https://samvak.tripod.com/mediakit.html ) is the author of Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited as well as many other books and ebooks about topics in psychology, relationships, philosophy, economics, international affairs, and award-winning short fiction. 

He is Visiting Professor of Psychology, Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russia and Professor of Finance and Psychology in SIAS-CIAPS (Centre for International Advanced and Professional Studies).

Questions: 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Our focus today is the proposal of “nothingness” in a specific sense by you. To start in negation, what is not “nothingness,” in your sense? 

Professor Sam Vaknin: 

Nothingness is not about being a nobody and doing nothing. It is not about self-negation, self-denial, idleness, fatalism, or surrender.

Jacobsen: Following from the previous question, what is nothingness?

Vaknin: 

Nothingness is about choosing to be human, not a lobster. It is about putting firm boundaries between you and the world. It is about choosing happiness – not dominance. It is accomplishing from within, not from without. It is about not letting others regulate your emotions, moods, and thinking. It is about being an authentic YOU.

Jacobsen: How does this nothingness connect to Neo-Daoism and Buddhism?

Vaknin: 

It would be best to watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8ePaN70SyM&t=1s

Jacobsen: We live, as many know, in an era of narcissism. You brought this issue to light in 1995, particularly pathological narcissism. What are the roots of the ongoing rise in individual and collective narcissism?

Vaknin: 

The need to be seen and noticed in an overcrowded and terrifyingly atomized world. Ironically, narcissism is a cry for help, a desperate attempt to reconnect. There is no such thing as an “individual”: we are all the products of our interactions with others (object relations). But, increasingly, technology is rendering us self-sufficient and isolated. So, our social instincts metastasize into narcissism: dominance and hierarchy replace sharing and networking.

Jacobsen: How does one choose happiness over dominance, authenticity over being fake, and humanity rather than lobster-kind, with this form of nothingness?

Vaknin: 

We need to choose happiness over dominance (be human, not a lobster); Choose Meaning over complexity; Choose fuzziness, incompleteness, imperfection, uncertainty, and unpredictability (in short: choose life) over illusory and fallacious order, structure, rules, and perfection imposed on reality (in short: death); Choose the path over any destination, the journey over any goal, the process over any outcome, the questions over any answers Be an authentic person with a single inner voice, proud of the internal, not the external.

Jacobsen: What is the importance of living a life worth remembering in the philosophy of nothingness? 

Vaknin: 

Identity depends on having a continuous memory of a life fully lived and actualized. At the end of it all, if your life were a movie, would you want to watch it from beginning to end? Nothingness consists of directing your life in accordance with an idiosyncratic autobiographical script: yours, no one else’s. Being authentic means becoming the single story which only you can tell.

Jacobsen: What type of personality or person can accept nothingness in its fullest sense? 

Vaknin: 

Only those who are grandiose are incapable of Nothingness. Grandiosity is the illusion that one is godlike and, therefore, encompasses everything and everyone. Grandiosity, therefore, precludes authenticity because it outsources one’s identity and renders it reliant on input from others (hive mind). 

Jacobsen: How is nothingness an antidote to narcissism?

Vaknin: 

Narcissism is ersatz, the only self is false, others are instrumentalized and used to regulate one’s sense of faux cohering oneness. Nothingness is echt, harking back to the only true, authentic voice, eliminating all other introjects, not using others to regulate one’s internal psychological landscape. Narcissism is alienation, it interpellates in a society of the spectacle. Nothingness gives rise to true intimacy.

Jacobsen: What is the ultimate wisdom in the philosophy of nothingness?

Vaknin: 

Identify the only voice inside you that is truly you. Peel the onion until nothing is left behind but its smell. Rid yourself of introjected socialization. Become. 

Jacobsen: Then, to conclude, what is the motto or catchphrase of nothingness in this sense?

Vaknin: 

Do unto yourself what you want others to do to you.

Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Professor Vaknin.

Vaknin: Much obliged for having me. Always a pleasure.

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 the News: Interview with David Rand, Conatus News

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Atheist Freethinkers

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/05/16

 Interview with David Rand, President of Atheist Freethinkers, Scott Jacobsen, 2017-08-03

Some excerpts from the above interview:

Undoubtedly the greatest threat for atheists is politicised religion, when religion obtains political power. This is most obvious when that power is exercised by Islamists, who promote a medieval theocratic totalitarianism. However political Christianity remains very dangerous, for example in sub-Saharan Africa, the United States and Poland. The current pope is a silver-tongued obscurantist. […]

I must also point out that one of the greatest threats to secularism (and hence indirectly threatening atheists) in the current political climate is the so-called “regressive left” (I am not satisfied with that term, but have yet to find a better one) which is ferociously anti-secular – so much so that regressive “leftists” tend to demonise secularism by falsely associating it with racism and xenophobia. […]

On the educational front, I would say that our greatest strength is our criticism of communitarianism (a.k.a. multiculturalism) and its extremely deleterious effect on any movement towards secularisation. Being based in Montreal, we are acutely aware of this dynamic. The infamous “two solitudes” must be taken into account in order to understand the fight for secularism in Canada. […]

[…] we must organise and unite on issues we share with other atheists: that is, an uncompromising criticism of religion, recognising that supernatural religious beliefs are utter nonsense, unworthy of our respect. Just as believers have a right to practice their religion, we non-believers have every right to live without having others’ beliefs shoved down our throats. But we must also ally with others who may not identify as atheists in order to promote secularism, which means that believers too would be protected from the religious excesses of their co-religionists and of those who follow other religions.

[…] we must continue (and here is some good news) what atheists have already undertaken with enthusiasm: the analysis, criticism and deconstruction of religious beliefs, dogmas and practices in order to become stronger in our resistance to the ever-present and sometimes overwhelming religious propaganda that floods our society. But that criticism must not stop with Christianity. We must be just as critical of other religions such as Islam, Sikhism, Hinduism, etc., which are minority religions in Canada.

The immediate future looks bleak. […] But in the longer term I am more optimistic. I think the current outbreak of religious fanaticism is part of the death throes of religion. The treachery of religious institutions and the utter vacuity of the extravagant nonsense they promote are becoming increasingly obvious to more and more people. […]

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-Depth Interview With Humanist Voices

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): garymclelland.blog

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/05/16

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What was family background — geography, culture, language, religion/irreligion, and education?

Gary McLelland: Hi Scott. I grew up in a small town outside of Glasgow on the west coast of Scotland. It was a happy childhood. I was also fortunate to have family in a small village in the north west coast of Scotland called Arisaig, where I spent most of my summer, Christmas and Easter holidays. It’s a stunningly beautiful village surrounded by some of the most majestic highland landscapes, and tranquil beaches. I still try to return for a few days each summer and feel very lucky to have such warm memories of that place from when I was young.

I was raised as a Catholic, and attended Catholic schools. The Church had a fairly important place in my family life. Whist the place of the Church was important, for rites of passage, celebrations and school life, my family was never overly-religious, and were (and still are) socially progressive and open-minded.

My experiences with religion when I was young was fairly positive. I enjoyed the ritual and community aspects of Church, and the sense of ‘belonging’ felt very positive. I was probably more religious than most young teenagers my age, I would attend Mass and take part in other Church events fairly frequently until my mid-teens.

In my late teens I began to have doubts about my beliefs. Not my beliefs per se, but I knew that people smarter than me, with more worldly experience had rejected religion. So I felt it was strange that I seemed to have such a rigid idea about something which so many people had differing opinions about. Eventually I rejected religion, not an easy process — but eventually I embraced atheism and eventually humanism.

I felt angry — angry that the state-funded education system allowed, even encouraged me, to follow one particular belief system. I don’t want to exaggerate the situation, I received a very good education, at a very good school, but I was never exposed to any views, beliefs or philosophy which challenged my religious beliefs. I feel so angry that this system is allowed to continue.

It was this that inspired me to get involved in secularist and humanist campaigning.

Jacobsen: You joined IHEU in February, 2017. You are the chief executive for IHEU. What have been some of the more startling developments in the IHEU community, even in your short time there? What have you found out about the community and the things that we are dealing with?

McLelland: I have been made to feel very welcome by everyone in the international humanist community since beginning in February. I want to be very open and accessible, and hope that folk feel like they can get in touch with me, to offer ideas, ask for support or have a moan.

We are clearly seeing an increase in divisive politics all around the world at the moment. Populist leaders of the far left and right try to divide and enrage people against each other, appealing to the basest of our emotions and fears. This is clearly a concern for those of us who try to live inclusive, ethical lives based on reason.

And of course IHEU continues to receive a steady amount of request for support from people who are in high risk areas such as Pakistan and Bangladesh. This is one of the most challenging aspects of the work that IHEU does. To help support this work we launched a global crowdfunding campaign to raise money for helping humanists at risk (https://www.gofundme.com/protect-humanists-at-risk) and hope that as many people as possible can help support it.

Jacobsen: What have been some of the more heartening developments of the organization for you?

McLelland: Without doubt the most heartening aspect so far has been the reception by the amazing IHEU staff team. It amazes most people to learn that IHEU only has four member of staff! We are lucky to have such a dedicated, hardworking and smart team of staff.

The major development has been the start of our new Growth and Development programme. This is a series of targeted support, funding and activities which are going to be rolled out over the next three years to support new and smaller humanist groups in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

There is a lot more we can do to support and promote new humanist organisations in these regions, and we are working hard to do it. In order to do this we need resources, money. We’re lucky to have so many big Member Organisations which help fund the work of IHEU through their annual fees. I have high hopes that we will be able to find other funding bodies to help support this work as well.

Jacobsen: As the chief executive, what tasks and responsibilities come with this position?

McLelland: As the Chief Executive I am responsible for the day-to-day running of the organisation, and report to the Board 5 or 6 times per year to update them on the progress being made. It’s my job to make sure that the strategic aims and objectives of the organisation, which are set by the General Assembly and the Board, are acted upon in most effective way.

This means ensuring that our team of staff and volunteers and well managed and understand their place in the plan. It also means ensuring that we meet all our financial and legal responsibilities in the UK and USA (where we are registered).

One of the most important parts of my job is communicating with our members and supporters around the world, to communicate the work of IHEU, and listen to concerns and suggestions from members of the community.

It’s a very interesting and stimulating job!

Jacobsen: Before this work, you were the head of communications and public affairs at the Humanist Society of Scotland (since 2013) and a director (this is a British term which means Board member) of the European Humanist Federation, and board member on the Scottish Joint Committee on Religious and Moral Education. What were the big takeaway experiences from these positions?

McLelland: That’s right. I was promoted to head of communications and public affairs after having joined the Humanist Society Scotland doing research and policy work on education. It was a wonderful job, during which time I helped to make some real progress in challenging the requirement to have religious worship in schools — something I’m glad to see the Society continue today.

In the European context I was always interested to learn about the similarities and differences within the humanist movement. Meeting other humanist colleagues from different countries is a really good way to get appreciation of the breadth and diversity of our movement. That’s one reason why I want to see IHEU offer more support to less well-off organisations to fund delegates to our conferences in the future.

My work on the Scottish Joint Committee was interesting, I was the first ever humanist to be appointed! The Committee’s work is mainly as a lobby group of religion and belief interest groups, with teachers and union leaders. It seeks to promote the subject of Religious and Moral Education (which is a very progressive curriculum) and develop it.

My main takeaway from these experiences is understanding the difference between tactical and strategic aims. Joining the Scottish Joint Committee will be an unpopular move for some, seeing it as ‘buying into the system’ rather than seeking reform. However, I believe that in some cases it is more beneficial to our strategic aims (secular education) to also be involved in areas that might not immediately achieve them.

Jacobsen: In addition, you did some humanist campaigning, and worked for the Mercy Corps European headquarters in Edinburgh. What were the tasks and responsibilities in these positions? What is humanist campaigning?

McLelland: My work at Mercy Corps was on a global citizenship project which sought to find youth leaders who have an interest in international development. The idea was that by bringing these youth leaders together with counterparts from Gaza, the USA, Jordan and other countries — we could share skills and experiences. We wanted to help promote and nourish youth leaders, with a view to developing the idea of global citizenship.

I was also active in humanist campaigning before working for a humanist organisation. I has a particular interest in dialogue between religious and nonreligious people.

Jacobsen: How did these positions help prepare you for this one? What were the unique perspectives and skills development from them as well?

McLelland: Having a background in the humanist movement was a great advantage, I already knew a lot of people, and they knew me. This was a big help.

Having an understanding of both policy and also international development were both helpful too. I would like to see IHEU work more with development work around the world. I think we have a key opportunity to help development organisations meet their aims through our vast network of members and supporters.

Jacobsen: Women’s rights, especially reproductive rights, in the world are under direct, and indirect, attack. How can grassroots activists, legal professionals, and educational professionals, and outreach officers in the humanist and ethical culture community fight to maintain those new and fragile rights from the historic norm of religious violations of women’s bodies?

McLelland: Yes, you’re right. The attack on women’s rights’ is a very worrying development. It goes without saying that we will always stand up for the woman’s right to choose, and defend and protect the rights of women.

You’re right to identify the different groups involved in this debate. I think it’s important to acknowledge that we all have different jobs — the job of lawyers is not the same as the job of an activist. What is important is that we both understand and acknowledge that, but also ensure that we talk to each other.

I am particularly interested in the academic research around religion and belief, in law, history and sociology. I think it is so important that our movement engages with researchers in these fields, in a real way though — more than just being research subjects. I think we have a lot to say, and also have to be present to argue against some misconceptions which can exist about our movement.

Jacobsen: You earned a BSc (Hons) in psychology with a diploma in childhood and youth studies. Your master’s dissertation is in progress. Why pursue the psychology degree? What was the research question and finding from the honors thesis?

McLelland: Yes — I have always had an interest in psychology. My interest grew into a passion when, after my deconversion, I read Freud’s ‘Future of an Illusion’. This fascinated me. After studying psychology for 4 years I came to understand the critiques of Freud and his methods — but I still believe that his opinions offer a really insightful view into the human mind, but more through a philosophical lense.

My main research for my undergraduate was on how individuals who identify as ‘liberal catholics’ make sense of their identity. I wanted to know how someone with liberal (pro-LGBTI, pro-choice, socially progressive) could identify with a belief system so closely associated with a conservative institution.

Jacobsen: What is the research question and tentative title to the master’s dissertation?

McLelland: I’m glad to say that I have now completed my master’s dissertation, on the question of “What would be the impact on the European Court of Human Rights’ jurisprudence on ‘blasphemy’ laws if it was to adopt the same approach as the United Nations?”

In my dissertation I argue that the European Court of Human Rights has developed an idea that the right to “freedom of religion and belief” should also include a right for religious people not to be offended. I compared this with the approach of the United Nations, which is much more progressive, and argued that the European Court should reform along the same lines as the United Nations.

Jacobsen: Who is a personal hero for you?

McLelland: It sounds cliched, but I’m genuinely humbled by all the amazing campaigners I meet within our movement. At this year’s General Assembly we gave an award to Dr Leo Igwe, an anti-witchcraft campaigner and founder of the Nigerian Humanist Movement, we also heard a speech from Narendra Nayak, an anti-superstition campaigner whose valuable work saw him targeted for assassination in India, also people like Kaja Bryx of the Polish Rationalists who despite having a full-time job is able to produce so much video material and interviews for the humanist movement, and also contribute as Vice-president of the European Humanist Federation.

It’s honestly a privilege and and honour to work with these dedicated and inspirational people.

Jacobsen: How can the human rights orientation prevent encroachment of standard religious privilege into societies, especially secular ones — and even further ones more prone to respecting women’s rights (in particular, reproductive rights)?

McLelland: Human rights is the framework through which IHEU seeks to engage with, and change, the laws and policies which affect our movement. The advantage of the human rights approach is that it is grounded in a secular and objective framework of law. Human rights takes the aim of increased material well-being as a presupposition — this leaves us then to debate the relative merits of different specific laws and policies to achieving this aim. So in this sense, human rights is the most effective way to address the threats you mention.

There are, broadly, two risks to this approach though. Firstly there is the threat from reactionary nationalism; we see across the world now populist leader emerging who want to tear down the idea of universal values, global citizenship and internationalism. The threat is that the delicate human rights framework falls down with it, or loses its authority as a moral leader.

The second risk is postmodern relativism; I see an increasing trend within sociologists of religion a desire to unpack and reexamine arguments which our movement takes as read. This includes the positive value of the enlightenment, a trust in rationalism and the idea of secularism as tools for the orderly and productive structuring of public life. The risk here is that we must be ready to make our arguments for secularism, freedom of religion and belief and enlightenment values in a way that I’m not sure many of us are.

Jacobsen: What is your main concern for IHEU moving forward into 2017–2020? How about into the next decades?

McLelland: What I am confident is about is that we have the right people, the right ideas and the plans to carry them out. What concerns me is that we don’t have the resources to make them happen.

Our members pay an annual fee which largely funds the work of IHEU. However, if we want to build our capacity and increase our activities we need to find more sources of funding and support. This will be a key focus for me in the coming months and years.

Thinking ahead further, there is a need for our movement to be bold and take leadership in a number of areas. We are lucky to have within our movement incredibly bright people, and I would hope to see them lead with ethical and practical comments on issues such as; work automation, artificial intelligence, environmentalism and challenging populism.

Jacobsen: What are the future prospects for the fight for the most vulnerable among us and their rights being implemented, such as women and children (globally speaking), because — as we both know — there are some powerful and well-financed people and groups who hold rights in contempt of the advancement of their theocratic endeavours?

McLelland: I think the future prospects are good. Bearing in mind the threats I mentioned above, there is progress being made. Our movement also has a role to play in ensuring that liberal religious reformers, non-conformists and heretics are defended and protects, as it’s through these internal debates and discussions in religious movements that progress can be made.

I also think we have a lot more to do in relation to the rights of children. Too often the rights of children are completely overridden by the wishes of parents — I’m thinking here particularly of the issue of prayers at school and other religious issues.

Jacobsen: Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion?

McLelland: I am grateful for the chance to talk to you. It’s great to see how active IHEYO is these days, and I look forward to working with you all more.

Jacobsen: Thank you for your time today, Gary, that was fun.

McLelland: 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.

An Interview With Bwambale Musubaho

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): kasesehumanistbizoha.blogspot.com

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/03

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s start with the comprehensive interview at the natural starting point: the beginning. What is family background, e.g., geography, culture, language, and religion or lack thereof?

Robert Bwambale: I am a Ugandan by nationality, a native of Kasese district in western Uganda, I am Mukonzo by tribe, who live on the slopes of Mount Rwenzori. Our ancestral origin is in Eastern Congo. We speak Lhukonzo, which is among the Bantu-speaking languages. Before I lost my faith, I was originally an Anglican, tried to mingle with other religious communities to see what transpires on there. I had the chance of mingling with African traditional believers, Pentecostals, Adventists, Muslims, Catholics and these moments gave me a full insight on what religion is and this paved the way to me losing the faith.

2. Jacobsen: What were the pivotal moments in childhood? Those coming to mind for you.

Bwambale: When my mum dumped and abandoned us before our dad passed on.

Some good moments with my dad, we used to move together with him.

When I lost my dad, by then, was 5 years.

My times with my caring grandmother. She used to encourage us to pray and go to church. She was a devoted Anglican. She used to sell porridge and pancakes in a local market.

Good moments when I joined secondary school, from village life to town life.

Sad moments when I dropped out of school, was on the streets doing odd jobs for two years.

Back to school moments, from town school to a village school.

3. Jacobsen: What were the pivotal moments in adolescence? Those coming to mind for you.

Bwambale: I joined good pear groups where I did odd jobs, selling newspapers & magazines on Kampala streets, Made money sweeping outdoor markets in Kampala, worked as a caddie at Uganda golf club where we used to carry bags or pull trolleys of golfers as they play the game and were paid at each end of game.

I created friends with the opposite sex and made choices on whom to be my friends plus people to associate with.

I learned some skills in haircutting.

4. Jacobsen: When transitioning into young adulthood, how did the religious community continue to enforce an impact on physical space and mental life?

Bwambale: As I grew into young adulthood, I felt more attached to religious communities and was very active in their circles. I was confirmed as a Christian in the early years when I was in Senior 3 at Karambi Secondary School.

When I joined Rwenzori High School for high school, I became an active member of the Scripture Union. I attended service regularly and was much moved because everyone around me was taking religion seriously, but my senses were telling me to research more about beliefs.

When I joined Uganda Polytechnic Kyambogo, I used to pray at Kampala Pentecostal church and was a regular visitor there. At the college, I used to fellowship with Kyambogo Christian Union and enjoyed the prayer and worship moments.

As someone who was doing Biological sciences at the college, my urge to ask questions widened and would ask men and women of god some questions regarding faith, religion plus what I read in the Bible. I realized that the Bible is a mixture of words of comfort, confusion, hate, discrimination and total malice.

5.Jacobsen: Were there some important individuals who provided a means by which to exit the entrapments of religion for you?

Bwambale: There is none. Exiting religion was my personal choice and decision.

Jacobsen: How did you begin helping out others in leaving religious fundamentalism?

Bwambale: By enlightening them about the goodness of rational living by availing to them books on Humanism, Atheism, science, and freethinking.

Creating a library with books on beliefs, non-belief, and important personalities in the world of free thought.

Opening up schools and businesses that cherish humanism and science.

6. Jacobsen: Dr. Leo Igwe remarks on the importance of his mother and father in Nigeria as the best example of Humanism to him, not declarations – of which humanists are prone to make – or books on Humanism. Life was tough, living day-by-day, and the work to grind in, and out, of poverty was harsh and necessary. Taking a stand, taking charge of his destiny, and working to become the founder of the Nigerian Humanist movement, who have been some of the best examples of Humanism to you?

Bwambale: Works by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, David Mills, Madelyn O’Hair, Robert Ingersoll, and Bertrand Russell inspired me a lot.

7. Jacobsen: Why was the Kasese Humanist educational system developed in the first place? How has this developed over the last, almost, a decade?

Bwambale: Our strong commitment and dedication to service is a great factor for our development.

The strong bond of Kasese humanist school with the international community support in the form of material and financial donations gives a great boost to our success.

The visionary efforts of myself in ensuring any penny donated goes to where it’s required has added value to our works.

My fundraising skills of availing to the general public what I do by documenting all of my works online makes people see what I do and gives chance to the generous ones to give funds, ideas or advice.

The need for an alternative to religious bigotry is one other key point. People are losing their faiths steadily globally, gone are the days of lying to humanity, feeding humanity with superstitions. You can fool people, but this can’t go on all the time. So, to some, they see some kind of hope in secularism since it only airs out facts, science, and encourages evidence-based learning.

We have developed from a rented property in 2011 to our own home acquired 3 years after (2014) at the Rukoki site.

We expanded and constructed on our other home in Muhokya often referred to as the Bizoha School.

We extended to creating another school at the land we acquired at the Kahendero Fishing village.

We right now have Nursery & Primary at all the campuses and a secondary school added at our Rukoki campus.

8. Jacobsen: What is considered the standard religious curriculum in Uganda? 

Bwambale: In this kind of curriculum only two religions are taught, Islam and Christianity and a student is made to pick a particular religion to undertake and exams come on in that format where a student is made to choose to attempt only one religion.

9. Jacobsen: What is considered the standard Humanist curriculum for Kasese?

Bwambale: There are some lessons on Humanism, its history, humanist values, human rights, critical thinking lessons, documentaries on secularism, Evolution, secularism in the world. There is nothing like a standard humanist curriculum, it’s a mixture of several things all aimed at empowering our students with secular thinking.

10. Jacobsen: Relating the last two questions, how do these two systems compare and contrast with one another?

Bwambale: A humanist curriculum is broader than the standard religious curriculum

The humanist curriculum is livelier and enjoyed by learners since it involves daily things they see, find, or encounter in life.

There is no indoctrination in a humanist curriculum and there is always a chance to ask any questions.

There are no tenets, imaginaries, rituals or mention of god, gods, and spirits under the humanist curriculum, unlike the religious curriculums.

There is a limit of asking questions under religious curriculum while under humanist curriculums we encourage students to ask as many questions and get factual answers.

11. Jacobsen: If we look at those two educational curricula, or if we look at similar comparisons in Uganda, what educational curricula – and, indeed, system – produces better outcomes and life chances for the pupils or the students?

Bwambale: It should be noted that at the school we teach the national curriculum and we spice it with humanist curricula and the spiced version is the best for it gives children a wider scope to broaden their level of thinking and the way they look at things.

12. Jacobsen: What is the prejudice against Humanist schools there?

Bwambale: That we are devil worshippers.

Agents of Satan.

We go under deep seas to get money or wealth.

That we perform rituals to get fortunes.

That our children at the schools are possessed by evil spirits.

That we are anti-Christ.

That we are sinners and will burn in hell.

That we don’t pray.

That we don’t know god.

That we shall rot and never come to life again.

That we shall burn in hell.

That there is no eternity for humanists.

That we are homosexuals.

13. Jacobsen: What is the prejudice against staff and students, and you, in Uganda as humanists?

Bwambale: As mentioned above!

14. Jacobsen: How do these prejudices impact students’ mental health and wellbeing?

Bwambale: The children’s mental health and wellbeing are unaffected since all these are ignorant statements and are a product of ignorance that we are fighting against.

However such statements sometimes hinder some parents or children to join our school project.

15. Jacobsen: What makes parents weary of paying for their students to take part in Humanist education? How do you overcome those barriers?

Bwambale: We sensitize and try as much to tell the parents what we offer and the truth about Humanism, Atheism, Science and rational thinking.

16. Jacobsen: Who are donors to the Kasese Humanist educational system?

Bwambale: Local parents, International parents inform of child sponsors, well wishers from all parts of the world and some charitable non-profits in several parts of the world.

17. Jacobsen: What are the amounts? How is the money being used now? How has it been used in the past?

Bwambale: The amounts keeps varying, donations are not flowing in regularly and are realized one by one.

Money is being used to construct classrooms, buy or make school furniture, Scholastic supplies, lab instruments and reagents, paying staff salaries, utility bills, government taxes, building toilets, purchasing solar & its accessories, water tanks, planting trees and maintaining school income generating projects.

18. Jacobsen: What are the plans for the schools if the same or more funding continues to enter the system?

Bwambale: Build better classrooms, well-equipped book libraries, School Science laboratories, built computer rooms and stocking them. Build more hostels, build on-campus restaurants, put better playing materials and educational resources for the kids. Decent toilet facilities.

Raising salaries for my teachers, so that they improve their wellbeing and be happy.

Enroll more needy and disadvantaged children, so that they are in school.

Put in place Administration office blocks at the schools this lacks at the moment.

Create more income-generating projects for self-reliance.

19. Jacobsen: What is Humanism to you?

Bwambale: Humanism is my everything, It teaches me that am special, I have the brains, I have my body and all it takes I have to use my potential as a human being to solve my problems.

Humanism is real, it teaches unity, love, harmony, kindness and care amongst us.

Humanism helps us to understand the known and the unknown

Humanism empowers Humanity to be good always.

Humanism encourages how to think and not what to think.

Humanism helps us to distinguish facts from fiction.

Humanism helps us to understand our origin, where we are and the final destination.

20. Jacobsen: Who have been important mentors for you? Who have been important role models now? Why them?

Bwambale: Christopher Hitchens, he pointed out that God is not great and his book inspired me.

Richard Dawkins’s works help us to understand how god thing is an invention by humans.

comparing outcomes from the different educational curricula; prejudice against Humanist schools; prejudice against staff, students, and Robert; prejudice’s impact on students’ mental health and wellbeing; donors to the Kasese Humanist educational system; amounts, finances, and uses of the monies; plans for the school; Humanism; important mentors and role models; recommended authors, organizations, or speakers; the success of Humanism in Uganda; humanists coming together; 

21. Jacobsen: Any recommended authors, organizations, or speakers?

Bwambale: Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, David Mills, Barbara Smoker, Robert Ingersoll, Michael Parenti.

Favourite organizations:

Atheist Alliance International

Humanist Canada

Halton Peel Humanist Community

Atheist Community of San Jose

Victoria Humanists Australia

Freedom from Religion Foundation

Atheist Foundation of Australia

Foundation Beyond Belief

Humanist Global Charity

Rationalist Society of Australia

Humanist International

Speakers include: Henri Pellissier, Leo Igwe, Ricky Gervais, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Matt Dillahunty.

22. Jacobsen: Why has Uganda been such a success for Humanist organizations and, thus, Humanism as a whole?

Bwambale: I think this has been attributed to what we do. Most of the successful projects are the schools, nobody hates schools, we do have health clinics, we do create forests & edible gardens, We do engage in active farming, We do help vulnerable children, empower locals to get started economically and speak for the voiceless, we do attend to economic and social issues and we do air something on political situations and good governance. All these mentioned above are very important and the locals plus the government see no harm in what we are doing.

We stick to our core vision of spreading Humanism and explaining to masses what it means, what it entails and its benefits in empowering humanity, I think locals have identified that we have the facts. And we continue to expose the fictions which people if well explained to can see it too. So we are great ambassadors advocating for a better world.

23. Jacobsen: How have intra-national and inter-national/regional efforts worked over time? The coming together of humanists to combat significant issues of superstition, lack of science and human rights education, and more.

Bwambale: We do have an umbrella for Uganda humanists called Uganda Humanist Association that unites all humanist organizations in Uganda, other secular organizations prevail, we do have seminars, debates, conferences among ourselves and once in a while our country hosting some international conferences.

Some of our members do get invited to international conferences and there are human rights advocacy activists working around the clock to ensure human rights are respected and not violated.

24. Jacobsen: How has Humanists International been a guiding light in many ways and funder of Humanist projects?

Bwambale: Humanists International is doing good work in bringing humanist organizations together and helping out in raising a voice and helping out with funding. I have seen them fund some organizations, which is a good thing. I think they are doing some good work for us and the world.

We however still need more charities like Humanist International to work with Ugandan secular organizations in creating change.

Most humanist projects are still small and we need to put in more effort to make our projects grow. The struggle to achieve this is possible. We need to think big and invest in big initiatives as well.

25. Jacobsen: What are some other core issues needing tackling in Africa in a post-colonial (European-Christian and Arab-Muslims colonization) context for the most part? One in which the pre-colonial superstitions can infect some of the societies too, even while the values of Ubuntu/Unhu reflect core Humanist principles before forced, violent contact with European-Christians and Arab-Muslims in the history of Africa.

Bwambale: Good governance is still missing in Africa; corruption is a song of the day. Our leaders want to rule instead of leading, they want an ignorant population which is bad for the world.

Illiteracy is still high

Religion and politics still go hand in hand, be it in courts of law and in public places

Homophobia is a strong disease that urgently needs a cure.

A switch from Religion to Secularism is a great need for Africa to move forward.

Xenophobia should be discouraged, Africans should look at themselves as brothers and sisters and we should work and live in good harmony with each other. All people are the same, race, religion, political affiliation or sexual orientation is not an issue here.

26. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Robert.

Bwambale: You are welcome.

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.

Q&A on Atheism, Women’s Rights, and Human Rights with Marie Alena Castle

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Church and State

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/29

Marie Alena Castle is the communications director for Atheists for Human Rights. She was raised Roman Catholic, but became an atheist. She has been important to atheism, Minnesota Atheists, The Moral Atheist, National Organization of Women, and wrote Culture Wars: The Threat to Your Family and Your Freedom (2013). She has a lifetime of knowledge and activist experience, which I wanted to explore and crystallise in an educational series. Here are the results.

Scott Jacobsen: You have a lifetime of experience in atheism, women’s rights, and human rights. Of course, you were raised a Catholic, but this changed over the course of life. In fact, you have raised a number of children who became atheists themselves, and have been deeply involved in the issues on the political left around women’s rights and human rights.

To start this series, what has been the major impediment to the progress of women’s rights in the United States over the last 17 years?

Marie Alena Castle: It’s actually at least the last 40 years. In the U.S., control of women is no longer about the right to vote or pursue careers. Those battles have been won. What is left is the religious right’s last stand: women’s right to abortion and the ultimate control over their own bodies. An anti-women legislative agenda began and has been going on ever since the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v Wade decision.

Almost immediately, the U.S. Catholic Bishops established a Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities that reached down to every Catholic parish in the country. The bishops recruited Catholic academics, journalists, and political commentators to disseminate “pro-life” propaganda. They drew in Protestant fundamentalists and provided them with leaders such as Jerry Falwell. They organized to get “pro-life” politicians elected at every political level and eventually took over the Republican party.

I was there and watched it happen. We Democratic feminists worked almost non-stop to prevent a similar takeover of the Democratic party and, thankfully, were successful. The “pro-life” campaign has never stopped. Over a thousand bills have been, and are, proposed at the state and federal level to restrict women’s access to contraceptives and abortion, as well as advantageous reproductive technologies that don’t conform to irrational religious doctrines.

(Stephen Mumford has documented this in full detail in his book, The Life and Death of NSSM 200, which describes how the Catholic Church prevented any action on a Nixon-era national security memorandum that warned of the dangers of overpopulation and advocated the accessibility of contraceptives and abortion.)

Jacobsen: Who do you consider the most important women’s rights and human rights activist in American history?

Castle: No contest. It’s Margaret Sanger, hands down. Many people have spoken out and worked for women’s rights throughout history, not just American history. But Sanger got us birth control. Without that, women remain slaves to nature’s reproductive mandate and can do little beyond producing and raising children.

This is often claimed to be a noble task. True enough. However, it always reminds me of the biblical story of Moses, who had the noble task of leading his people to the Promised Land, but because of some vague offense against Yahweh, he was condemned to see that Promised Land only from afar and never go there himself.

Women have raised children over the ages and have led them to the Promised Land of scientific achievements, Noble Prize Awards, academic honours, and so many others. But they – and their daughters – have seen that Promised Land only from afar and almost never allowed to go their themselves.

Sanger opened a path to that Promised Land by fighting to make contraceptives legal and available. The ability to control the time and circumstances of one’s childbearing has made the fight for women’s rights achievable in practical – not just philosophical – terms. She founded Planned Parenthood and we see how threatening that has been to the theocratic religious right. They can’t seem to pass – or try to pass –  enough laws to hinder women’s ability to control their own bodies.

As for human rights in general, a good argument can be made that by freeing women – half of the human population – we free up everyone. As Robert Ingersoll said, “There will never be a generation of great men until there has been a generation of free women.”

Margaret Sanger

Jacobsen: What is one of the more egregious public perceptions of atheists by the mainstream of the religious in America?

Castle: It’s that atheists have no moral compass and therefore cannot be trusted to behave in a civilized manner. No one ever comes up with any evidence for that. Most people in prison identify themselves as religious. Studies that rank levels of prejudice for racism, sexism, and homophobia show nonbelievers at the lowest end of the graph – generally below 10% – and evangelicals at the very highest – almost off the chart.

I’ve had religious people tell me it is religious beliefs that keep people, including themselves, from committing violent crimes. I tell them I hope they hang onto their beliefs because otherwise they would be a threat to public safety. As physicist Steven Weinberg said, “Good people will do good and evil people will do evil, but for good people to do evil, that takes religion.” I have known good and evil atheists and good and evil religionists, but the only time I have seen a good person do evil, it was due to a religious belief.

I have also observed that liberal religionists generally share the same humanitarian values as most atheists, but to have that moral sense they had to abandon traditional religious beliefs.  There is a lot of evil in religious doctrines. The 10 Commandments are almost totally evil. Read them and the descriptions of the penalties that follow. Read the part about what you are to sacrifice to Yahweh – the firstborn of your livestock, your firstborn son… Yup, that’s what it says.

So they include don’t kill, steal or bear false witness. There is nothing new about that. It’s common civic virtue any community needs to function effectively. So religion promises a blissful afterlife. Ever stop to think what that might be like, forever and ever and ever and ever and ever?  People believe that!? I so hope they’re wrong.

Jacobsen: Your life speaks to the convergence of atheism, women’s rights, and human rights activism. How do these, in your own mind, weave into a single activist thread? What is the smallest thing American citizens, and youth, can do to become involved in this fabric?

Castle: We all are what we are. I’m an activist because I can’t help myself. It’s who I am. Others would rather hang by their thumbs than do what I do. They like to get out in the yard and do gardening. You couldn’t pay me enough or threaten me enough to get me to do that. We should just try to be honest and compassionate and cut everyone some slack as long as no one is getting hurt. Live and let live.

We are a fragile species, making the best of our short life spans, stuck here on this hunk of rock circling a ball of flaming gas that could eject a solar flare at any time that wipes us out. Life is, as Shakespeare said, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Just accept that. It’s reality. Just be decent and helpful and try not to hurt anyone. If that’s the limit of your activism, it’s still pretty good.

If you think it would be great to be able to do more and to be politically active but that is just not in your DNA, then settle for the next best thing: Find a political activist whose views you agree with and vote the way they tell you. That is the smallest thing you can do. If you did not vote in the last election you made yourself part of the problem and you see what we got. From now on, try to be part of the solution.

Reprinted with permission from the author.

Scott Jacobsen is the founder of In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal and In-Sight Publishing. 

Marie Alena Castle and her new book, Culture Wars

Vatican control of World Health Organization population policy: An interview with Milton P. Siegel 

“Whose Choice?” A Pro-Abortion Film 

Be sure to ‘like’ us on Facebook

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.

Canadian Atheist Interviews Jon Cleland Host, Part 2

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Naturalistic Paganism

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/05/20

Here is part 2 (of 2) of my interview with Scott Douglas Jacobsen of Canadian Atheist!

(Continued from part 1) 

Jacobsen: How does materials science training help with developing a clearer picture of the world rather than one clouded by mystery assuming a form of non-technical operations to the world? I separate this form of mystery from an empirical mystery point of view standard in all or most great scientists, or the epithet used against some others as in “the New Mysterians.”

Host: The most important part of my Materials Science background has been learning critical thinking and logical skills, which are universal to the sciences and needed for avoiding common errors in thinking. These include treating evidence as more reliable than tradition, testing hypotheses (and especially being able to change one’s view if unsupported), looking for logical fallacies, and so on. A good overview of these can be seen in Carl Sagan’s “Baloney detection kit”.

Being aware of the most often abused ways to deceive people is especially important. There are too many to go into here, but one that I’ve seen a lot of, especially today, is when a single case is used to make a point, often hiding the real picture. For instance, a shared video of a single mild case of Covid-19 used to say that the whole pandemic isn’t a concern, or the voice of a black Trump supporter shown to suggest that most black people support Trump, or the case of someone who prayed and then their cancer went into remission, etc. An understanding of large and small numbers allows one to see how we are fooled and make responsible choices.

Though I personally learned these guidelines of clear thinking through science, they are much more universal than that. Nearly all of us need this to be beneficial to those around us, to ourselves, to wider society, and to future generations. These aren’t “just for scientists”. All of us make choices about our own medical care, our own lifestyle, our own votes for our leaders, our environment, how we teach the kids in our lives, etc. Clear thinking is essential for all of those and so much more.

These are at least as important today as ever. With a US president who routinely lies, pseudoscience appearing online and on the TV, and a rise in evidence denials such as the anti-vaxxer and flat-earth movements, our world needs clear thinking to reduce the damage around us.

Jacobsen: How have the working relationships with Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow developed into the present? Any particular fun and funny stories to share in the midst of collaboration?

Host: Sure! Once, we were recording an interview and suddenly Connie stopped Michael in mid-sentence. She said “wait, there – look! There’s a bald eagle going for fish on the lake!”. We turned and sure enough, there was an eagle who had swooped down to the lake surface and was working to regain altitude. We couldn’t tell if the eagle had a fish or not. Connie quipped “Yeah, life is tough not havin’ a home!” (they don’t have a permanent house, but rather are constantly travelling to different speaking engagements). We were recording the interview rather quickly before the rest of my family arrived, after which it would have been difficult due to my four rambunctious kids.

You can hear this interview (including the eagle part) here. It’s great for those of us interested in a naturalistic lifestyle. http://inspiringnaturalism.libsyn.com/4b_jon_cleland_host_it_s_all_really_there.

(the other interview recorded that day is also relevant for a naturalistic lifestyle) http://inspiringnaturalism.libsyn.com/4a_jon_cleland_host_inspiring_naturalism_for_families.

Jacobsen: You have 4 children. Can you clarify, please? What is “Universe-centered, Pagan, family spirituality”?

Host: Yes, let’s break that down.

“Universe-centered” – Focused on this real world, not on some imaginary afterlife, or any other supernatural idea. While this seems like a minor point (“why not live this life while imagining a possible heaven?”), it turns out that it’s a huge shift. If we are focused on this world, then we work to make this world better, instead of treating this world as unimportant, as one might do if they thought there were going to another world in a few short decades. If we are focused on this world, we work to make everyone’s life better, instead of trying to please this or that imaginary space ghost.

Pagan: We Pagans celebrate our Earth, its cycles, its seasons, and our universe. We do so often using the Wheel of the Year, the four directions, and Pagan metaphors, often in the Pagan community. The many practices we do have become a fulfilling part of my life, and covering all of them would be a book in itself. Here are some of them.

The Wheel of the Year: The Wheel of the Year is simply the calendar year mapped onto a circle, with 8 holidays. These are the Solstices, Equinoxes, Thermstices, and Equitherms (the peaks and midpoints of the yearly cycle of light and warmth). These are described in detail here, along with the specific celebrations we hold in our family. (https://humanisticpaganism.com/2015/03/09/starstuff-contemplating-our-powerful-sabbats-by-john-and-heather-cleland-host). We hold many of these in our stone circle – a place the has stones for the directions (the four cardinal points plus the directions halfway between them). Over time, repeatedly using this place as sacred has helped make it a special place for us all.

Ritual: We usually attend or hold a ritual for each holiday and at other times. These vary over a huge range. As humans, we feel more group energy with more people – at least more than just a single person, and over 10 is even better. Most of these are with a few other Pagan families, and are often simple enough to include the kids. Pagan rituals often start with casting a circle to designate sacred space, and then calling each direction to connect us to the Earth. Our Ancestors for millennia lived and died depending on knowing the directions, and so there is a reason they touch our hearts. To get a feel for the power and poignancy of Pagan rituals, finding one and attending it is much more effective than any words I can put down here (some rituals are much better than others). But I can give a summary of the most recent large ritual I was at (which had around 200 people, at Convocation in Detroit, February 2020). This was a ritual to honour our Ancestral mothers. In a darkened room lit by candlelight, we formed a (very large!) circle. After a basic start to the ritual, the person leading the ritual led us through a story like a description of our Ancestors, leading back through time, with a melodic, rhythmic, ritual voice. The floor had six large paintings of Ancestral mothers from our past. By this time I felt distinctly out of my day to day life, as if I was in a timeless place. A chant was raised, and with the slow chant, we formed lines, slowly walking past the images, taking time to look at each one and thank them. A mirror gave us each a chance to look at ourselves, seeing who we have become and who these mothers have given us. At the front of the darkened room was a large, dimly lit painting of the Lascaux cave bull painting. We each pressed our hand into a bowl of paint, and put our handprint on the painting, as if we were in Lascaux, 17,000 years ago. The ritual continued with more time for meditation on what we had felt, and steps to bring us back to normal time and a normal state of mind. This was a deeply centring experience – the kind of experience I would not want to be absent from my life. Similarly, even the simple rituals for the eight points of the Wheel of the Year greatly help in feeling connected to our Earth, to feel like I’m not missing watching the seasons pass.

There are a lot more Pagan practices in our family life – many are described in the links.

Family: My kids are the most important aspect of my life, and any spirituality which is completely self-centred is not healthy, so it’s not a surprise that our family is centrally important in my spirituality. As described in the link above (and here https://humanisticpaganism.com/2014/12/14/starstuff-contemplating-by-heather-and-jon-cleland-host-celebrating-meaning-in-our-lives-through-family-holidays/), there are specific, fun ways that we celebrate each holiday with the kids. If you want to find out what is important to someone, asking them is not necessarily the best way to find out. Instead, look at two things: their calendar and their chequebook. Where we put our time and money will show what is important to us – and likely what our effect on future generations will be. Holidays are no different – they teach our kids (and ourselves!) what is important. If holidays are empty consumerism, or worse, “celebrate” things we don’t believe or support, then what do the kids learn from that? This is why we make sure that our holidays teach the kids that we are part of the Earth, that our Universe is awesome, and that having fun is both important and can be done in a reality-based way. For this reason, what we do with the kids is at least, if not more, important than me personally being moved by a ritual. It’s a delicate balance to make our family celebrations honest and real, while still being similar enough to the surrounding culture so that none of this becomes too hard to maintain over many years. For instance, for Yule, we do have gifts and a tree. The gifts are opened on Winter Solstice morning, and the tree is fully reality-based.

Jacobsen: Any upcoming projects to announce for us?

Host: Yes! Though everything is shut down now with the pandemic, when life returns to normal I hope to continue discussions in the Detroit area Pagan community about an outdoor sacred ritual location. One cool thing about Pagan ritual is that we like to hold them outdoors. A ritual at sunrise or under the moonlight, in a forest or clearing, taps into environments that put our brains into a different state due to millions of years of evolution.

Also, a good friend of mine in the Naturalistic Pagan community just started a nontheistic Pagan podcast, called “The Wonder: Science Based Paganism”. The plan is for a podcast every week! Here is the link. https://thewonderpodcast.podbean.com/.

Jacobsen: Any recommended, authors, organizations, or speakers?

Host: For the wonder of Naturalism, I highly recommend the original Cosmos Series by Carl Sagan. It’s on Netflix and other outlets. Even after decades, the only thing out of date is Dr. Sagan’s turtleneck sweater. The recent second Cosmos Series by Neil DeGrasse-Tyson is a very close second. These are both perfect for family viewing and discussion except for the youngest kids. For the youngest kids, start them off with the first and second seasons of Scooby Doo (where all supernatural claims turn out to be a fake money making scam), Grandmother Fish (by Jonathan tweet), and walks in the woods.

Though our Naturalistic Pagan community is still small, we are growing, and already have resources out there. I edit the Humanistic Paganism blog (https://humanisticpaganism.com/, also on Facebook), there is a rapidly growing Atheopagan community (https://atheopaganism.wordpress.com/, also on Facebook) which Mark Green started, and two books have also just come out – “Atheopaganism” by Mark Green and “Godless Paganism” Edited by John Halstead. I’m available to speak, as are probably others. I’d also recommend checking out your local Pagan or CUUPS (Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans) group. It’s hit or miss, but many of us are out there, and we are growing every day. There is a reason, after all, that myself, B. T. Newberg, Mark Green, John Halstead, and many others realized this same idea of Naturalistic Paganism independently.

Also, my wife (Heather) and I wrote a book about some of our family practices – specifically about how we celebrate birthdays by atomic number (so a 6th birthday is has a carbon theme – the 6th element, an 8th birthday has an oxygen theme, etc.). The book is “Elemental Birthdays” by Jon and Heather Cleland Host, and it has birthday party plans, science experiments for each birthday, etc. It’s available at (http://www.solstice-and-equinox.com/elementalbirthdays.html).

Jacobsen: Any final feelings or thoughts in conclusion based on the conversation today?

Host: Sure. There is an important concept that I haven’t touched on yet. I’ve explained why naturalism is not just another belief system among all the different superstitions out there, but instead is the simple result of trying to be as least biased as possible when looking at the world. I haven’t explained why Paganism is important, at least to me.

Understanding the literal mountain of evidence from geology, biology, anatomy, cladistics, genetics, and more makes it clear that we have evolved from non-human Ancestors. The evidence shows that our brains have evolved, just as our arms, livers, feet and ears have evolved. We can better understand those organs by looking at their evolutionary history and resulting structure. People often shy away from doing the same with our brains, I think due to the cultural prevalence of philosophical dualism, itself a hangover from Christianity (which is fully dualistic). Dualism is beyond the scope of this interview, but the point is that we can look at our brains the same way we look at any other part of our bodies – in light of the reality of evolution.

Looking at our brains in the light of evolution, we see that they have evolved from the inside out, with primitive, basic functions deepest down, at the brain stem, and subsequent additions on top of that. Of course, this is a model, and is not perfect. Evolution doesn’t make anything perfect, but jury-rigs everything, making connections here and there, and some happen to survive. This gives us a roughly four-part brain, with the deepest part, the brain stem, governing basic survival. This is our Lizard brain, in control of the four “F’s” – Feeding, Fleeing, Fighting, and Mating. The next part out is the mammal brain (the limbic system), which is where our emotions, “gut feelings” and feelings of love, connection, and bonding come from. The biggest part is the neo-cortex, our “monkey mind” or primate brain – able to figure out complex puzzles, handle language, and analyze data. Lastly, in the front, we have the Frontal Lobes – our “higher human”, which can make long term plans, think about the future or even the time long after we die.

We need to feed and satisfy all parts of that brain which we all have (notice that Maslow’s hierarchy is simply the brain structure described above). Religion taps into the needs of the limbic system – the mammal brain which needs community, needs ritual, and needs feelings of purpose and bonding (and hopefully the parts above that too). Religion activates many of our most powerful motivators and response centers, guaranteeing the person’s attention and devotion. This means that humans, with rare exceptions, need a spirituality/religion. Humans will seek one out, and even build one themselves (often only a temporary solution). If a healthy, reality-based, beneficial religion is not available, millions of people will join harmful religions, harming our future world. If we are to have any hope of building a just, healthy, sustainable world for ourselves and future generations, we need to build a spiritual approach that is both reality-based and still includes ritual, symbolism, practices, and community. Carl Sagan recognized this too, when he said:

A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.

Building such a religion is not easy. Building anything like that is a lot of work, and this is even more difficult because many of the most effective survival tools of supernatural religions (thought control, supernatural threats, etc.) are harmful, and so avoiding them is needed, but makes our task harder. Our own evolved brains require the emotion, connection, and feelings of rituals and ceremonies, while at the same time, Humanist rituals and ceremonies are often stilted and uncomfortable (as I alluded to earlier), if they happen at all. That’s a huge topic, which I’ve written a 15,000-word essay on (maybe I should clean it up and publish it as a book?). I won’t be able to cover it well, but here is a summary.

Why and how are Humanist (and any new, reality-based) rituals often stilted and uncomfortable? Two of the main reasons are because they lack emotion, and because they are unfamiliar.

Humanist rituals often lack emotion because we Humanists are often very rational, evidence-based, people who care what is really, literally true. We know that to keep from being fooled (especially by ourselves!), we need to control our emotions and instead use evidence and logic to determine what is most likely real. In addition to this, we see the immense harm of emotional thinking around us every day – from nationalism, racism, devotion to lying leaders, religious wars, quack health “cures”, and so much more – usually preying on the most vulnerable. Emotion is like fire – it’s very useful, and essential to our lives – yet it can be intentionally abused or accidentally released out of control, and in either case, real people suffer. This can make us uncomfortable when we try to harness it in even healthy ways when those are in a context (ritual or ceremony) so similar to the ways it is usually abused. Effective ritual and ceremony draw on the power of our emotions which requires that we mute the rational, analytical parts of our brains. We Humanists don’t easily mute that part of our brain (for good reason).

The other reason might be harder to see. A major part of the power of a ritual or ceremony is the feeling of familiarity and comfort it brings (do you remember the warmth from rituals of your childhood?). It feels safe and familiar because you’ve been doing it over and over for years. But hold on. Humanists don’t have rituals we’ve been doing for years! The familiarity isn’t there, and so you feel “unnatural” and self-conscious instead of comforted and secure. Worse, we can’t do the Christian rituals many of us are familiar with, because they are based on a false and harmful worldview which we don’t want to promote. It’s a catch-22: it takes repetition for the rituals to fully work, but it’s hard to repeat them when they aren’t fully working. With repetition, the rituals eventually begin to fully work, but it’s a big enough barrier (like an activation energy in chemistry) that prevents most people from getting to the other side. This is doubly true for a small group seeking new people, because everything we do will be new to a new person, and hence will not feel as natural as rituals done around longtime friends or family.

Both of these reasons are why rites of passage rituals are so much easier for us Humanists than seasonal or other rituals. With a baby blessing (previously called a baptism), wedding or funeral, the powerful emotions make easy for us to let the emotion take over – so that essential step is accomplished. Similarly, the situation gives us a clear and unquestioned focus (a baby, couple, or deceased loved one), and also provides a lot of familiarities – both from the many dear friends and family often present as well as with known parts to the ritual (such as vows, rings, etc.). It seems that a good path forward for any reality-based religion, whether Humanism or Naturalistic Paganism, is to first hone our ritual skills by celebrating these rites of passage rituals, while slowly adding the repetition and practice needed to get similar power from other rituals. Other components and methods of effective ritual are too big a topic for this interview, but my earlier description of a ritual contains many of them, and you can also learn them both by reading on this topic, and even better – by attending rituals, which is part of why I attend Pagan rituals.

I can’t know if Naturalistic Paganism will be the religion that succeeds in both rituals and overall. However, attempts at Naturalistic Islam or Christianity are chained to the anchor of their vicious, flat-earth “holy” books, as are many other religions. Any religion that rejects naturalism sets us up for the wars of “whose supernatural revelation is right” that have already killed literally dozens of millions of people. I’m sure there are other ways too. We’ll have to see how things go, but I know that for me, Naturalistic Paganism gives me hope for the future, and joy, meaning and purpose for today.

Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Jon.

Host: Thank you!

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the Founder of In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal and In-Sight Publishing. He authored/co-authored some e-booksfree or low-cost. If you want to contact Scott: Scott.D.Jacobsen@Gmail.com.

Original post here.

See Starstuff, Contemplating posts.

See all of Dr. Jon Cleland Host’s posts.

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.

Canadian Atheist Interviews Jon Cleland Host, Part 1

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Naturalistic Paganism

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/05/07

Here is part 1 (of 2) of my interview with Scott Douglas Jacobsen of Canadian Atheist!

Dr. Jon Cleland Host is a scientist who earned his Ph.D. in materials science at Northwestern University & has conducted research at Hemlock Semiconductor and Dow Corning since 1997. He holds eight patents and has authored over three dozen internal scientific papers and eleven papers for peer-reviewed scientific journals, including the journal Nature. He has taught classes on biology, math, chemistry, physics and general science at Delta College and Saginaw Valley State University. Jon grew up near Pontiac, and has been building a reality-based spirituality for over 30 years, first as a Catholic and now as a Unitarian Universalist, including collaborating with Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow to spread the awe and wonder of the Great Story of our Universe (see www.thegreatstory.org, and the blog at evolutionarytimes.org). Jon and his wife have four sons, whom they embrace within a Universe-centered, Pagan, family spirituality. He currently moderates the yahoo group Naturalistic Paganism and posts videos on his YouTube Channel. Jon is also a regular columnist at HP. His column is called Starstuff, Contemplating.

Here we talk about his views, projects, and life, and extensively about Naturalistic Paganism and Humanistic Paganism.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You host a super-minority and intriguing view within the Humanist community, internationally. I haven’t seen much like it. So, I wanted to get the view out there, as another consideration. Often, there can be grazing the orbit of this manner of looking at the world in some popularizations of agnosticism, Humanism, and science, in à la carte manner. For example, the late Carl Sagan and Sagan’s intellectual descendant, Neil deGrasse Tyson (Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History), speak of the awe, majesty, power, and wonder of nature qua nature for them. This amounts to the sensibility without the formal personal identification and philosophical affirmation of Naturalism and Paganism, i.e., Naturalistic Paganism, where Tyson, for example, mightily identifies as an agnostic based on the not-knowing of certain things, trained as an astrophysicist, earned Humanist awards, gets coverage in the Humanist press, while never identifying as a Naturalistic Pagan or a Humanistic Pagan. Something like an Agnostic-Humanist with Pagan sensibilities. Let’s define some terms. What is paganism in this context? 

Dr. Jon Cleland Host: I’m glad that the term “Paganism” has evolved from its earlier use as a derogatory term applied by Christians to non-Christians (those out in the “country” – “paganus” in Latin) to a more accepting use now. Today, “Pagan” is an umbrella term encompassing many different spiritual paths. I think that the international Pagan Federation’s definition of “Pagan” is helpful:

“Pagan: A polytheistic or pantheistic nature-worshiping religion.

Source: https://www.paganfederation.org/what-is-paganism/.

This includes a huge range of Pagan paths, including the Goddess worshiping Wiccan, the Atheist who knows how she is enmeshed in our vast web of life, the Odin worshiping Asatru, the follower of Bast, and so many more. Much of the reason for our diversity of belief is our rejection of the Christian idea of eternal torture for having the wrong beliefs. Because Pagans don’t expect anyone to be tortured for having different beliefs, it’s much more common (though not universal) for Pagans of different beliefs to accept each other. Our diversity gives us strength.

What’s most important, and what unites us Pagans, is that we Pagans explicitly celebrate our world, our Universe. We openly embrace the wonder, joy and awe we feel from being connected to, indeed being part of, our natural world. We don’t need an excuse or a reason, we feel the deep power of the atoms and cycles of which connect us. There is no embarrassment, and we don’t care if society doesn’t like it. Paganism gives us permission to dance under a waterfall, to be overwhelmed by a starry sky, to be in love with our world. We proudly proclaim that this is one F**ing awesome universe, to the point of worship, and if someone thinks that we shouldn’t say that, and that we should be worshiping only their imaginary sky daddy instead, then they can go jump in a (wonderful, awesome) lake.

Jacobsen: What is Humanism in this context?

Host: Humanism is an ethical approach to life that is based on reason, naturalism and making the best of this one life we know we have, for ourselves and for everyone. Though originally focused on humanity, Humanists today include our whole Earth, our whole web of life, recognizing that we are not separate from the web of life, so we can’t have a flourishing humanity without a flourishing web of life. Humanists want to help build a just, healthy and sustainable world for everyone, and know that decisions based on reality and focused on this world are the best way to do that. I love the Humanist community. We do a lot of good. But I’ve found that Humanist based celebrations and rituals feel stilted at best. It’s really hard for us rational people to let go of the analysis and live in the moment – more on that below.

Jacobsen: What is naturalism in this context?

Host: By “Naturalism”, we are referring to philosophical naturalism – the belief that the universe is governed by natural laws, and that there aren’t any disembodied spirits, ghosts, deities, magic, or other supernatural. This is not a claim or assumption, but is rather a conclusion – the result of simply trying to be unbiased. Why do I say that?

Well, consider the opposite. Imagine that I was to say that supernatural things are real. Well, how would I support that? Perhaps by pointing to sacred scripture, such as, say, the Amitabha Sutra. But if I accept the Amitabha Sutra as describing reality, then that means that I have to reject other sacred scripture (say, the Pearl of Great Price), because they contradict each other. In fact, the same thing happens with any supernatural belief source. Oh, I talked firsthand with a person who had a personal vision of the supernatural? But then why would I accept that over another person’s personal revelation, which contradicts it?

Should I believe one over the other simply because I randomly happened to meet one person and not the other? OK, how about I apply some critical thinking to the other revelation? I would soon find that the other revelation is not supported by the evidence. So does that mean I should just believe the first person’s revelation – hook, line and sinker? Of course, that’s not being fair. And as soon as I apply the same critical testing to the revelation from the first person, I see that it also is unsupported by the evidence. In fact, realizing that people “remember” things that didn’t happen (big topic – look it up), or that humans can and do hallucinate (with or without the aid of drugs), and that literally thousands of people have described supernatural revelations, shows that even if I myself remember having a revelation, that it too might not survive a look at the evidence. If a revelation does survive a look at the evidence, then I can just go by the evidence and then I don’t need the revelation anyway. In fact, if I accept my own memory of a revelation as a way to know what’s true, then what possible basis could I have for rejecting someone’s revelation telling them to kill people in a terrorist attack?

Additional examples of supernatural beliefs are all around us – in religions and pop culture. Looking at any of them shows pretty quickly that people believe in supernatural things for often random or emotional reasons, such as which country they happened to be born in, or what their parents believed, or who one’s friends are. If we are to fairly look at beliefs, then it’s hard to avoid a conclusion of naturalism (as explained above). Perhaps the clearest evidence for this the fact that we naturalists can say to nearly everyone (to Muslims, Asatru, Christians, Hindus, etc) that “you already believe in practically everything that we believe in”. Nearly everyone already believes in things like atoms, like gravity, sound, rockets, cooking, animals, and so on. The things that everyone agrees are real are very likely real – because the overwhelming evidence is why there is nearly universal agreement on their reality. For us naturalists, those are our beliefs (more at https://humanisticpaganism.com/religious-naturalism/). For me at least, my naturalism gives me profound meaning and purpose (link https://humanisticpaganism.com/2014/03/12/starstuff-contemplating-by-jon-cleland-host-a-naturalistic-credo/).

This means that naturalism is not an arbitrary choice among equals, and is certainly not dogmatically believing what one is told. The demographic patterns, the evidential justification, the robustness to testing, and so much more show that we naturalists are not picking naturalism willy-nilly from a menu of equally likely worldviews, listed after, say, “Catholicism, Zoroastrianism, …” and just before “Jainism, Crystal Healing, Judaism, etc.”. Unlike the others, naturalism is the only path which says that because our world is what is important, and because real understanding is most likely to give the best results, finding the most likely truth is more important than following tradition, obeying dogma or believing things for arbitrary reasons. Instead, naturalism means that we look at the evidence, form hypotheses, test them, revise them based on the evidence, and repeat. It means that we look at the tested and predictive consensus of the experts in areas we can’t test ourselves, and it means that all conclusions are tentative, getting us closer to the likely truth.

Because believing wrong things leads to taking wrong actions, and because taking wrong actions hurts real people (others, ourselves and/or future generations), naturalism seems to me to be the only ethical approach to knowledge. There are, of course, a wide range of consequences to different beliefs. I’m certainly not saying that all non-naturalistic belief systems are horrible. It’s quite clear that the Judaism of Anne Frank makes the world a better place compared to the religious belief system of the KKK. Also, all of us have been influenced by our life history, and I’m grateful for being brought to the point where I could choose to test my beliefs against the evidence (many people never get that opportunity). I’d like to think that believing things based only on evidence is simply a matter of self-respect and respect for everyone, but, of course, our life histories are more complicated than that.

Jacobsen: Following the last three questions, what knits these together in two sets of two as either Humanistic Paganism or Naturalistic Paganism?

Host: Naturalism brings hard-headed scrutiny of the evidence. While not always fun (like most humans, none of us enjoy the slow realization that one of our beliefs is likely wrong), it gives us the wonderful gift of being wrong a little less often. Like other forms of honesty, it is overall a small price to pay for the benefits to us and our world. Naturalism means that we are a little more likely to have the positive effect on the world we intend, and by at least trying to use critical thinking in every area of our lives, we are a little more likely to avoid the lies, and resulting harm, from a demagogue.

But there is another huge benefit – one that is perhaps a surprise to some. At least for me – and I’ve heard this from other too – naturalism brings an amazement, an awestruck wonder, to our lives. To see the marvels all around us, and especially to learn about the workings of each through the incredible wealth of information we now have though science, fills me with a joyous astonishment. It’s impossible to describe. I’ve tried to do so in a post (https://humanisticpaganism.com/2014/06/11/starstuff-contemplating-by-jon-cleland-host-the-wonder-amplifier/). Simply put, learning more about the scientific details of every aspect of our Universe makes them each all the more rapturous. At first, I really wasn’t sure this would continue – but it never stops. Every year I learn more and find more incredible things, and they seem to feed on each other, maybe squaring the wonder over and over as I learn more. Even after a half-century of life, there is no end in sight. I’m especially grateful to Carl Sagan for helping open this door for me.

This joy could be trapped inside. But it’s not. Raising kids helps – kids, like Pagans, don’t need permission to revel in the joy of a waterfall, forest ridge or science experiment, and neither does their Dad! Paganism also provides a life-changing, a life-giving, outlet for this joy given by our universe. The rituals, the daily practices and especially the recognition that our real universe is deeply, powerfully sacred, are things that enrich my life.

Naturalism and Paganism are knitted together in my life with the universe supplying a deep well of inspiration, and Paganism providing the tools that help me live this inspiration, to drink it in and weave it into my life. Together, they are so much more than either could be alone.

Jacobsen: How did you enter the world as a Catholic (imposed) and come to the point of Unitarian Universalism, Humanistic Paganism, and Naturalistic Paganism?

Host: My own history starts out with the very common story of one leaving Catholicism. I was raised Catholic, and unlike some, was still solidly Catholic in my teens. But then I started to see contradictions. Logical problems, like “if God is just, why are non-Catholics sent to Hell, if they are raised in another religion?” etc. I even booked a time with a priest to discuss them. I thought that since the Catholic church had been around for well over 1,000 years, with tons of top-notch scholars, these silly questions must have been figured out many centuries ago. The priest offered trite sayings that didn’t answer the questions. It began to dawn on me that there the “answers” *didn’t exist*! Such a huge shift takes time, and it was years before I could look at things based mostly on evidence instead of how I had been taught to see things. Looking at the evidence, it became clear that the traditional religions had grown from real needs, and been invented by people, partially to gain power over others. I also realized that many religions have been, and continue to be, harmful in many ways, including fighting against women’s rights, the abolition of slavery, LGBT rights, scientific advancement, and evidence-based problem-solving. I became the stereotypical Atheist, eschewing all religious observations because they weren’t based in reality. I found this to be too empty. I’m human – I need emotional connection, colour, vibrancy. I realized that humans for well over five thousand years, and probably much more, have been finding deep significance in the yearly cycle of the Sun, and especially the sunrise moment of the Winter Solstice. So I started a simple practice – watching the sunrise on the Winter Solstice. I found that it is invigorating to be celebrating, noticing, and being deeply moved by, this one moment in time when our Ancestors stood in fear and hope, and when we, with understanding given by science, can stand in confidence that the Sun will return. These powerful moments gained strength every year, connecting me to billions of lives of people who, like me, strove to attach meaning to the best and most reliable understanding out of the world around us.

I met my wife around that time, and with that powerful connection growing every year, it was only natural for us to add the Summer Solstice. The others were added over time, until we’re celebrating the Wheel of the Year. We realized how moving, how awe-inspiring, we found this approach to be – drawing on the grand Universe as revealed to us by science, and celebrating that connection with the Wheel of the Year and other Pagan metaphors. We discussed a lot of names, and settled on Naturalistic Paganism because it both described what we were (instead of what we were not, as in the term “Atheist”), while also being clear (“naturalism” has a clear philosophical definition – “no supernatural”). That was 2003. We started a webpage (Naturalpagans.org), and a yahoo group followed (Naturalistic Paganism). Later (2011), B. T. Newberg created the Humanistic Paganism website (having arrived at the same idea independently). B.T. explains this history and the longer-term history of Naturalistic Paganism in this post. https://humanisticpaganism.com/2015/06/09/exploring-the-historical-roots-of-naturalistic-paganism-by-b-t-newberg/ I joined the team around 2015, and it has been wonderful seeing this (and other) forms of Naturalistic Paganism continue to grow (such as Atheopaganism, see below).

Throughout all of this, It’s been wonderful to connect with other Pagans in the wider Pagan community, and join in many different rituals and celebrations. It can be a tricky balance at times between my own hard-nosed naturalism/atheism and the prevalence of pseudoscience/woo in the wider Pagan community. I sometimes have to remind myself to consider if a supernatural belief is very harmful or not, but overall it’s been great to simply enjoy a ritual with others, even if we personally think of the language used differently – such as if many others see a deity as literal and I see a metaphor. After all, no one thinks anyone is going to hell for being a heretic.

(Part 1 of 2 – second half coming soon)

Original post here.

See Starstuff, Contemplating posts.

See all of Dr. Jon Cleland Host’s posts.

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.

An Interview with Emeritus Professor James Robert Flynn, FRSNZ on IQ, g, Racial Differences, Ethnicity, Species, and Affluence (Part Two)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): USIA Blog (United Sigma Intelligence Association/USIA, formerly United Sigma Korea/USK, founded by HanKyung Lee, M.D. in 2007 as United Sigma Korea.)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020

Interviewer: Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Numbering: Issue 20.A, Idea: Outliers & Outsiders (Part Sixteen)

Place of Publication: Langley, British Columbia, Canada

Title: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Web Domain: http://www.in-sightjournal.com

Individual Publication Date: June 22, 2019

Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019

Name of Publisher: In-Sight Publishing

Frequency: Three Times Per Year

Words: 3,156

ISSN 2369-6885

Abstract 

Dr. James Robert Flynn, FRSNZ is an Emeritus Professor of Political Studies at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. He discusses: IQ gains as not necessarily g, or general intelligence, gains; racial differences and definitions in intelligence research; and ethnic groupings, species, and getting to the roots of the research regardless.

Keywords: ethnicity, g, general intelligence, intelligence, IQ, James Flynn, morals, political studies, race.

An Interview with Emeritus Professor James Robert Flynn, FRSNZ on IQ, g, Racial Differences, Ethnicity, Species, and Affluence: Emeritus Professor, Political Studies, University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand (Part Two)[1],[2],[3]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why are IQ gains not g gains, that is, general intelligence gains?

Professor James Flynn: Simply because IQ gains over time have occurred on all IQ subtests and have not been greater on those subtests that are of the greatest cognitive complexity. However, I do not think that the fact that IQ gains fail to particularly load on g (or cognitive complexity) is a reason to discount their significance. IQ gains on subtests like vocabulary (among adults), matrices, block design, classification, should be very important even if gains are equivalent on other less demanding subtests like digit span, which mainly tests rote memory.

G has an appeal as a concept of intelligence. It shows that individuals who do well on IQ tests beat the average person more and more as problems become more cognitively complex. If you and I were to sit down and say, “What would be one of the characteristics of intelligence?”, we would probably reply, “The person who is intelligent can beat the average person more on complex problems than easy problems,” wouldn’t we?

This mistakenly leads to the conclusion that IQ gains are not really “intelligence” gains and must lack significance. I am not going to get into defining intelligence, but certainly gains on vocabulary are highly socially significant no matter what has happened to other cognitive skills. If you really want to see why IQ gains have not been as significant as they might be, you would do better to focus on the fact that universities are doing such a bad job of educating.

I have a book coming out this year, in September, called In Defence of Free Speech: The University as Censor. At present, universities spend as much time censoring as teaching. Anyone who has unpopular views on race or gender or practically anything is banned: they can’t speak on campus, they are not read, they are derided ignorantly.

In my book, I detail all the things I learned, precisely because I read Jensen, and Murray, and Lynn, and Eysenck. It is wonderful when you encounter a highly intelligent, highly educated opponent, who takes a point of view contrary to your own. You must reassess your arguments. You often find that you have been simplistic, and that arguing with these opponents teaches you ten times as much as you knew when you were naive.

Let us go back to our friend, g. The is overwhelming evidence that cognitive abilities, even when taken individually, are significant. This is true of individual skill in all areas. If we studied drivers in New York, or in Boston, some would be better drivers and some worse drivers. We could rank driving tasks in terms of complexity. We would probably find a “g pattern: that the better drivers bested the average person the more as the complexity of skills rose. I am sure that the better and the worst drivers would not differ much on the simple task of turning on the ignition. But note that the presence or absence of the g pattern would tell us nothing about the causes at work, not even as often thought whether the causes were environmental or genetic

For ordinary city driving, the better drivers would start to forge ahead of the worse ones. This would become more pronounced if you looked at driving around the cities on beltways: that is one of the first things elderly people give up. There are so many cars coming in so many directions and changing lanes. Many elderly people who still drive will not do beltway driving. The better group would be much better at it. Finally, there is the question of parallel parking, which is the part of the driving test most people fear. The better group might better the average person most of all on that.

When we look at these two groups, how useful would it be to derive a g factor? It would be disastrous to assume that since g is influenced by genes the better drivers were somehow a genetic elite. G would tell you nothing about causes. For example, you may discover that the people who are the worst drivers are new arrivals in New York City who have had no experience in beltway driving. You also find that in their town, you just drove into a parking space and didn’t have to know how to come in on a parallel park.

On the other hand, we might find that none of this is true. We might find that they were equally experienced, and then we would say to ourselves, “I bet there is a genetic factor. Perhaps some of these people are better at spatial visualization. Perhaps some of them are better at information processing. Perhaps some of them are better at manual dexterity.” Our minds would go in the direction of skill influence by genes. But it would depend on the case. You must approach each case with fresh eyes, and not be hypnotized by g.

I am quite sure that any two groups can be differentiated by genetic factors, and that this would affect performance. For example, if one group was a lot taller than another, it would affect their basketball performance. But you must take these cases one by one.

I looked at black/white IQ differences in Germany. Blacks in America fall further behind whites the more cognitively complex the task, which leads some to infer that they are lower on g and are genetically inferior. But then you study Eyferth’s children in Germany. These were half-black and all-white children left behind by black and white Ameican servicemen in post-war Germany. The g pattern had disappeared. There was no tendency whatsoever for the half-black kids to fall behind more and more as you go up the complexity ladder.

That seems to imply that this group difference has something to do with culture. The first thing that comes to your mind is that these half-black kids were raised by white German women. There was no real black subculture in Germany after World War II. The black subculture element is totally absent. Then you go to someone like Elsie Moore.

She did a wonderful study in the 1980s. No-one, of course, will repeat it again because of political correctness. She had, as I recall, it was something like 40 kids – or maybe it was 48, that sounds more like it – all of who were black. Half of them were adopted by black parents of high SES and half of whom were adopted by white parents of high SES. At the age of eight and a half, the black kids adopted by white parents of high SES were 13 points ahead of the black kids adopted by black parents.

Elsie Moore called the mothers and kids in. She found that white mothers were universally positive. “That is a good idea. Why don’t we try this?” The black children came in with their black foster mothers. The mother was negative. “You are not that stupid. You know better than that.”

It became quite clear that even though both sets of families had elite SES, there was something in black subculture that found it unwelcome to confront complex cognitive problems. Once again, by the age of eight and a half, the black children adopted by whites of high education and SES were 13 points above the blacks adopted by blacks

You can say, “Is that evidence enough?” It is not enough, of course, but it does tie in with the German data. There, black subculture was absent, and the g effect was absent. In America, black subculture is thriving. Even the black children being raised by white parents, as they grew up, would tend to merge into the black teenage subculture, the “shopping mall” subculture.

My main point is that we must approach all this with an open mind. I am not saying that Jensen’s concept of g does not pose interesting questions. It does, but it cannot be taken as an automatic piece of litmus paper as to when one group is genetically privileged over another. Both options must be open.

I think that a genetically influenced g effect occurs between individuals. I think that when you have sexual reproduction, the higher cognitive abilities are more at risk of “damage” than the lower ones. You can imagine that would be true. You have two siblings. If one had bad luck, he will have more deleterious recessive genes paired. This may damage complex cognitive skills more than less complex ones. The bad luck twin will probably be below his brother more on Raven’s than on rote memory. I published this opinion recently and Woodley took notice of it. Do you know who Woodley is?

Jacobsen: I have heard that name before, but that is about all.

Flynn: He’s a very prolific British researcher, very good indeed. I supplemented my remarks by saying that it was interesting that the higher cognitive abilities were the ones that would have come along latest in the human evolutionary history and, therefore, they might be more fragile in the genome. Woodley is now pursuing this possibility

The concept of g shouldn’t be dismissed. Whenever anything describes a phenomenon in intelligence, we must probe for its causes. It is terribly sad that it is gotten side-tracked: into a debate over whether the fact one group falls further behind another as cognitive complexity increases is an indication that they’ve got to be genetically defective.

As you know, I have done research with Bill Dickens that showed that blacks gained on whites about 5 points in the generation between 1972 and 2002. This correlated with evidence from educational tests, as well. What are we going to say if they gain another 5 points? Are we going to conclude that the g pattern is not as pronounced as we once thought it was? That would fly in the face of evidence in its favour. So, g, to me, is an interesting concept for research but it is not the be all and end all of what we do when we do intelligence research.

2. Jacobsen: Racial differences also lead to some questions around definitions. For instance, is it a scientific category, race? In other words, is it proper to even talk, in a modern scientific context, about the category “race” when talking about intelligence?

Flynn: I do not have much patience with that. I see that as an evasion of real issues. Imagine that a group of Irish came to America in about 1900. Of course, the Irish have not been a pure race through all of history, but they have much more in common in terms of heredity than they do with Slovaks.

These Irishmen in America settle in a community down by the Mississippi. You will find that when the children send them to school, some Irish kids will do better than others; and the ones who do better will, on average, will grow up to buy more affluent homes.

Thus they divide into two groups. Below the railway tracks near the Mississippi, where it is not so nice, you will have what we used to call “shanty Irish”. Above the railway tracks, where things are much nicer, you will have what we used to call “lace curtain Irish”. If you compare these two groups, you will find an IQ gap between them that has a genetic component.

You can try to dismiss this by repeating the mantra “They are not pure races.” Of course, they are not pure races. They are sociological constructs that have a different sociology because of somewhat different histories. But it still makes perfectly good sense to ask whether there would be a genetic difference in IQ between the shanty Irish and the lace curtain Irish.

When individuals within a group compete, genetically influenced cognitive skills are involved. Some people, as I have said, will do better at school and, on average, they will have a better genetic endowment. It will not be a huge gulf. American children from parents in the top and bottom third of SES tend to have an IQ gap of 10 points; and perhaps 5 of these may be genetic rather than environmental.

I hope this cuts through all of this nonsense. Also, the “irrelevance” of race seems to be special pleading. If we cannot talk about blacks as a “pure race”, and that disqualifies grouping them together, how can we have anything like affirmative action? The answer will be, “Well of course they are not a pure race. But they identify themselves as black, and whites identify them as black, and despite the fact that they are a social construct, they get the short end of the stick.”

If you can compare blacks and whites as to who gets the short end of the stick, you can also give them IQ tests, and you can also ask yourself as to whether in the histories of these two peoples, there has not been sufficient genetic diversity that one has built up an advantage over the other.

The causes of the black-white IQ gap are an empirical question. It has nothing to do with the stuff about pure races. There are groups that are socially identified as different, groups that identify themselves as socially different, groups that have histories that could conceivably lead to a genetic gap between them. You have got to look at the evidence.

It is an evasion. You ignore the fact that there are no pure races when you say, “more blacks live in poverty.” Why drag it in when you compare races for genetic differences?

3. Jacobsen: What about the shift in the conversation in terms of talking more about species rather than races, and then looking at different ethnic groupings? So, it is doing it within what probably are more accurate depictions than terminology such as “race”.

In terms of reframing it within a more modern scientific context, in terms of having species, and then having different groupings, as you noted, it is with ethnic groupings with different histories, rather than talking about races.

Flynn: That is fine. I have no objection to that, but it is not going to make anything go away, is it?

Jacobsen: No.

Flynn: There are still going to be 10% of Americans who self-identify as “black” and virtually all whites will identify blacks as “black”, and then we will still have to ask the question, “Do black and white at this point in time differ for cognitive abilities entirely environmentally?” I do not see how any verbal device will change this

There used to be academics who said that since humans share 99% of their genes with bonobos, you could dismiss the notion that genes have something to do with intelligence. The significance of this was exactly the opposite. If one percent difference made a huge difference in intelligence, then if racial groups differed by 1/100 of a percent, it might create the IQ gap difference that we see today.

I haven’t found any argument yet for sweeping the race and IQ debate under the carpet which is anything but special pleading. I do not think these arguments would be used in any other context whatsoever. They are used in this context so that we can all say, “We do not have to investigate these matters. We can pat ourselves on the back.” When actually, we should feel scholarly remiss.

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.

An Interview with Emeritus Professor James Robert Flynn, FRSNZ on Intelligence Research, Evolutionary Biology, and IQ Gains and Advanced Moral Views (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): USIA Blog (United Sigma Intelligence Association/USIA, formerly United Sigma Korea/USK, founded by HanKyung Lee, M.D. in 2007 as United Sigma Korea.)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020

Interviewer: Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Numbering: Issue 20.A, Idea: Outliers & Outsiders (Part Sixteen)

Place of Publication: Langley, British Columbia, Canada

Title: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Web Domain: http://www.in-sightjournal.com

Individual Publication Date: June 8, 2019

Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019

Name of Publisher: In-Sight Publishing

Frequency: Three Times Per Year

Words: 2,330

ISSN 2369-6885

Abstract 

Dr. James Robert Flynn, FRSNZ is an Emeritus Professor of Political Studies at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. He discusses: current intelligence research; evolutionary biology; and the correlation between IQ gains and the advanced moral views.

Keywords: evolutionary biology, intelligence, IQ, James Flynn, morals, political studies.

An Interview with Emeritus Professor James Robert Flynn, FRSNZ on Intelligence Research, Evolutionary Biology, and IQ Gains and Advanced Moral Views: Emeritus Professor, Political Studies, University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand (Part One)[1],[2],[3]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let us start from the current empirics of intelligence research. What are the overall findings now? What is the consensus of the field, if there is one?

Professor James Flynn: One of the consensuses of the field is one that I will not explore, that is, the relationship of intelligence to brain physiology. People seem to be inventing all sorts of wonderful new tools to investigate the brain beyond magnetic resonance imaging and see what type of thought processes are going on, and that should be extremely illuminating.

Obviously, cognition has a physiological basis. If we have illusions as to just what the physiological basis of certain cognitive abilities are, they certainly need correcting.

As to other areas of research, many people are not sufficiently sophisticated about the phenomenon of IQ gains over time. They do not seem to entirely grasp its significance and its limitations.

For example, the fact that people are better at generalization often produces a rise in moral reasoning. If you talked to my grandfather about race, he had certain fixed racial mores. But if you take a young person today, they are more flexible. If you ask, “Should you be underprivileged because your skin is black?”, and then ask, “What if your skin turned black?”, they would see the point. You must render your moral principles logically consistent.

They would not do what my father would do. He would say, “That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard of. Who do you know whose skin turned black?” He would not take a hypothetical seriously, or the demands it entails for logical consistency. And once you concede that sheer “blackness” does not count, you would have to list personal traits that made someone worthy of persecution. That immediately gets you down to individuals as individuals, not individuals as a member of a particular race.

In my lifetime; students are less subject to racist and sexist stereotypes. That has had a good deal to do with the nature of the IQ gains over time, our ability to take hypothetical situations seriously, our ability to generalize and to see moral maxims as things that ought to have some type of universal applicability, rather than be just a tribal inheritance.

2. Jacobsen: Does a modern understanding of evolutionary biology help with this?

Flynn: They do not need anything as sophisticated as that. However, in saying that people today are better at moral assessments, I may give a false impression. Because they do need basic knowledge about the world and its history. You can have a very enlightened point of view towards social justice, and you can be free of racial stereotypes and yet, you can be colossally ignorant. All recent studies show that Americans are reading less and are less aware of how nations and their histories differ.

I emphasize this point in several of my books such as The Torchlight List and More Torchlight Books. People are surrounded by the babble of the media, Fox News and even CBS News. They are surrounded by the rhetoric of politicians. When people reach false conclusions about what ought to be done, it is often just sheer lack of the background knowledge that will allow them to put their egalitarian ideals to work.

Remember how America was talked into going into Iraq. This was not to wreak devastation on Iraqis, it was going to help Iraqis. This was going to give them a modern, stable society. Put that way, it sounds very good, does it not?

All people would have had to do would have been to have read one book on the Middle East, like Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Western Civilisation. They would have found that no Western power that sent troops into the Middle East has had a credit balance. They have always managed to get more people killed than would have been killed otherwise, and when they left, they left behind nations that had to “nation build” themselves, like every other nation in history.

I have often used an example that any properly educated person would think of immediately. That is The Thirty Years’ War in Germany (1618-1648), between Catholic and Protestant. It killed off half of the population. Let us imagine that a Turkish sultan, who in 1618, looked at Germany and said, “Look at how these Catholics and Protestants are torturing each other. Surely if I go in with a Turkish army, I can punish the wicked ones who do the most drawing and quartering, and I can reward the people who are more tolerant, and I will teach Catholic and Protestant to live to together in a nation-built Germany.”

We can all see the absurdity of this. But we can’t see the absurdity of a “benevolent” America sending an army into the Middle East to punish the bad guys and help the good guys, and make Sunnis and Shias love one another and nation build together.

The Thirty Years’ war also teaches us a lesson about Israel’s policy in the Middle East. What was Cardinal Richelieu’s policy from1618 to 1648? He said, “I am a Frenchman first, and a Catholic second. What I am going to do is meddle in this war and whoever is losing, I will back. I want these wars to go on forever. The more dead Germans, Catholic or Protestant, the better for France.”

This foreshadows Israel’s stand about the wars that rage in the Middle East. Israel believes that the Arabs will never accept them. It will always have to be stronger than the Arab nations to defend itself, and the weaker and the more divided the Arabs the better. This, of course, has nothing to do with the interests of American foreign policy. America must be talked into creating chaos in the Middle East so as “to do good”.

America is going through a trauma now. We backed Saudi Arabia against Iran, and now it turns out that Saudi Arabia is at least as wicked as Iran, killing people by the millions in Yemen. It still lops people’s hands off for theft. The women who pioneered against the restrictions on driving are all in jail. Until recently the Shiite population could not have cellars because they were suspected of conducting filthy rites down there.

Americans do not know enough to assess either US or Israeli policy. The average person’s “knowledge” is limited to what they are told. They may be well-meaning. But they are told that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant. They meet exiles who dress like Westerners and look like themselves. These exiles use the language of democracy and free speech. However, their real goal is to get back into power in Iraq and their only hope of that is American intervention.

Academics are fixated on whether the 21st Century will see IQ gains or IQ losses. The real question for the 21st century is whether we can produce a better-educated population. The odds seem to be all against it.

I have a book coming out this year called In Defense of Free Speech: The University as Censor. More and more of America’s students lack either the knowledge or the critical intelligence to come to terms with the modern world. There is nothing the matter with our hearts but the problem is our heads.

If anyone had told me, 50, 60 years ago, when I began lecturing, that we would double the number of university graduates, and have a smaller elite of well-educated critics of our time, I would say that was insane. But all the studies show that adults today read less serious literature, less history than they did 30 or 40 years ago, that they are at least as ignorant of the same basic facts as they were 30 or 40 years ago.

To some degree, America is a special case – it is strange beyond belief. In other countries, people may not be well-educated. But few of them have an alternative view of the world that challenges science and makes education almost impossible. About 35 percent of Americans are raised in a way that provides them with a kind of world view that makes them suspicious of science.

At least in France, over one-third of people do not believe that the solar system began ten thousand years ago, that dinosaurs and human beings existed at the same time, and that if one species differs from another it was because God designed them that way.

This world-view was typical in many nations in the late 19th century. Take Britain: people were enraged by Darwin and thought their next-door neighbour was going to hell because they didn’t baptize their kids correctly. But slowly this world view faded in Britain, and Canada, and Australia, and England, and Spain, and Portugal. People who thought of modern science as an enemy, and had this 19th-century perspective, began to disappear.

What the hell happened to America? It is as if a third of the population was taken to Mars, and then came back a hundred years later, and their minds had been in a refrigerator. That is a terrible burden America must carry: about a third of its population has a world view that makes them systematically opposed to learning and critical intelligence.

3. Jacobsen: How much is there a correlation between IQ gains and the advanced moral views that you mentioned before?

Flynn: That is hard to tell. I am only familiar with data within the US. The mean IQ is lower in the South than in states like Minnesota, or like Massachusetts. Despite the preaching of the Southern Baptists and Southern Methodists about the value of fundamentalist Christianity, you have more murder, rape, and early pregnancies than you have up north.

You find a correlation that as IQ rises, people have what I would call more enlightened moral judgment. But you must look at all the confounding variables. Ever since the Civil War, the South has been in a state of schizophrenia. Of course, it is a less prosperous part of the nation. It is a more rural part of the nation. It is a more religious part of the nation. How is one to pick out the causes here? I suspect that thanks to IQ gains over time, some kids raised as Southern Baptists, have learned to be skeptical and to think for themselves. But why has the number been so small?

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.

An Interview with Professor Henrik Lagerlund on Background, Influences, and the History of Skepticism (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): USIA Blog (United Sigma Intelligence Association/USIA, formerly United Sigma Korea/USK, founded by HanKyung Lee, M.D. in 2007 as United Sigma Korea.)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020

Interviewer: Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Numbering: Issue 22.A, Idea: Outliers & Outsiders (Part Eighteen)

Place of Publication: Langley, British Columbia, Canada

Title: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Web Domain: http://www.in-sightjournal.com

Individual Publication Date: April 8, 2020

Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2020

Name of Publisher: In-Sight Publishing

Frequency: Three Times Per Year

Words: 2,717

ISSN 2369-6885

Abstract

Professor Henrik Lagerlund is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Stockholm University. He discusses: background; a self extended through time; influences on formation; mentors and others of influence; authors and books that were significant; pivotal educational moments in youth; formal postsecondary education; tasks and responsibilities as a professor at Stockholm University; main areas of research, and work on the history of skepticism; and advice for aspiring students.

Keywords: dogmatism, G.H. Von Wright, Harry Martinson, Henrik Lagerlund, Lutheran, novelist, poet, skepticism, Stockholm University, Thorild Dahlqvist, Uppsala University.

An Interview with Henrik Lagerlund: Professor, Philosophy, Stockholm University (Part One)[1],[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is family background or lineage, e.g., surname(s) etymology (etymologies), geography, culture, language, religion/non-religion, political suasion, social outlook, scientific training, and the like?

Professor Henrik Lagerlund: I grew up in northern Sweden, in a small town called Sundsvall. It is a nice place to grow up – safe and boring. The summers stick out in my mind. It was northern Sweden so the summer days are very long when the sun almost never goes down. It was great for a young boy, but the downside was, of course, that the winters are very long and dark. There were also a lot of snow in the 70’s when I grew up. At least that is what I remember. On the other hand, long dark winter nights meant that I could stay in and read, which is what I spent most of my school years doing. I read all kinds of things – mostly novels, but also a lot of history. I also harboured dreams of becoming a novelist and a poet. As the saying goes a philosopher is a failed poet. I actually tried very hard to get published as a poet, which never happened, but I also myself wrote several shorter books – novels that I never published. Another aspect of my school years was my interest in computers and mathematics. I early had my own computer, a Commodore 64, and started writing my own programs and games. I spent a lot of time in front of the computer. One thing I didn’t do was spend a lot of time on my school work at least early on.

My family was not really religious; although my mother sometimes went to church. Her mother, my grandmother, was a devoted Lutheran, which at the time was the state religion in Sweden. It was a good home to grow up in. My parents are both dead now and I miss them sometimes; especially my dad who died already at 60 of lung cancer. It was not an intellectual environment though. My parents both came from a non-academic background and had only basic schooling (even though my mother later in life studied to become a nurse). She read a lot of detective novels and I could relate to her though her reading, but I sought out more demanding literature and ideas, which seemed alien to her I think. When I began to study philosophy my father took out a subscription on Filosofisk Tidskrift (a Swedish philosophy journal), which I loved him for. I don’t know how much of it he got or even read, but I thought the gesture of trying to relate to my interests was sweet.

2. Jacobsen: With all these facets of the larger self, how did these become the familial ecosystem to form identity and a sense of a self extended through time?  

Lagerlund: The two things that formed me intellectually was this dual interest in literature and mathematics (computers). I think that was why I became interested in philosophy since it belongs in the humanities, but looks to science and often deals with issues rooted in science – at least analytical philosophy, which was my educational background. I only discovered philosophy at university, however, and had read very little before coming to Uppsala University. Before that I studied engineering, which was really something my parents wanted me to study. Their idea of a good job was becoming an engineer or a medical doctor. I didn’t want to do the latter and I liked math so I chose the first.

3. Jacobsen: Of those aforementioned influences, what ones seem the most prescient for early formation?

Lagerlund: I think I had a rather late intellectual awakening. I would place it at my arrival at Uppsala university. It was always my interest in literature that had the most influence on me before that. I played a lot of tennis as a young person as well and almost chose a professional career as a tennis player. In the end school was too important to me. I think that early experience of playing a lot of competitive tennis was very important. It teaches you to overcome adversity by yourself. On the tennis court there is no one else to help you – you are on your own facing an opponent. Being able to deal with such situations and overcoming them is an important lesson for life – never give up. If you want something really bad don’t give up.

4. Jacobsen: What adults, mentors, or guardians became, in hindsight, the most influential on you?

Lagerlund: I am not sure I had any mentors early in life. I had as I arrived at Uppsala. The person that meant most to me then was an older philosopher called Thorild Dahlqvist. He had been a teacher in philosophy at Uppsala for most of his career, but he did not write much, but influenced generations of students by his personality and his vast knowledge. He took an interest in me and helped me a lot. I am not sure what I would have been without him. He died 10 years or ago. I was in Canada at the time and missed his funeral, which I have always regretted.

5. Jacobsen: As a young reader, in childhood and adolescence, what authors and books were significant, meaningful, to worldview formation?

Lagerlund: As already mentioned I read a lot of novels. An author that meant a lot was the Swedish Nobel prize winner Harry Martinson. Aniara is a poem in 103 verses about a space ship originally destined for Mars with colonist from the destroyed planet earth. En route the ship malfunctions and is set on a course to nowhere into empty space. It is a colorful and striking metaphor of human kinds existential situation. I remember the line “We are beginning to realize that we are more lost than we previously thought.” It somehow captures humanities situation. The second book that probably was the reason I wanted to continue my studies in philosophy in the first place is a book in Swedish by the Finish philosopher G.H. Von Wright called Vetenskapen och Förnuftet (Science and Reason in English) It is a partially historical account of the development of science and a criticism of reason as it has been formed since Descartes time. I don’t think I in my formative years read anything that had such an impact on me. As I look back a lot of my own research in the history of philosophy has been motivated by what I read there. I think my interest in skepticism has its source there as well.

6. Jacobsen: What were pivotal educational – as in, in school or autodidacticism – moments from childhood to young adulthood?

Lagerlund: It was definitely coming to Uppsala as a student. I was slow to awake intellectually despite having read a lot in school. At Uppsala and in philosophy I finally started to awake and see the world in a new way. Part of that had to do with reading von Wright’s book. It presented a completely new perspective on the world and took to task Western rationality founded on science and technology. In a sense, it presents a kind of skepticism towards reason. A skepticism not unlike the kind David Hume present in his works.

But at the same time, I was swept up by all the new ideas I was taught. They consumed me. I started reading all kinds of philosophical literature and dove into history of philosophy in particular.

7. Jacobsen: For formal postsecondary education, in academia, why that path or road?

Lagerlund: After my engineering degree, I had a bit of a personal crisis. I never wanted to go that route. I even considered joining the navy full time. In Sweden at that time, late 80’s, it was mandatory for all boys to do military service. I did mine in the navy. I kind of liked it and even applied to the naval academy to become an officer. I was accepted but declined and moved to Uppsala to study literature. It was there I took my first courses in philosophy, which was a revelation to me.

Uppsala philosophy was dominated by logic in the early 90’s. The professor were all studying modal logic. I was too in the beginning, but I was always looking to combine my interest in history with my passion for philosophy. It was through my professor at Uppsala Krister Segerberg that I came into contact with Simo Knuuttila in Helsinki. He was a world-renowned scholar of medieval philosophy and it was through him that I could combine my interest in logic/math and history. It was with him as my supervisor that I wrote my dissertation Modal Syllogistics in the Middle Ages (Brill 2000). It was the perfect start for me. It was the first dissertation in history of philosophy in Sweden for a very long time.

8. Jacobsen: As a professor at Stockholm University, what tasks and responsibilities come with the position? 

Lagerlund: My position in Stockholm is as the professor of the history of philosophy. I do research and teaching in history of philosophy. I also supervise students at the MA level and at the PhD level. I do much the same things as I did in Canada (Western University) where I was previously. I moved to Stockholm in 2018. I enjoyed my time in Canada, but my position in Stockholm is much freer and I have more time to my own research. In Canada I had for a long period a lot of administration as Head of Department and as Director of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy. It gave me a lot of experience, but it is in a modern university impossible to combine such administrative roles with an active research profile. It was in many ways a relief to come back to Sweden to a position like the one I now occupy.

9. Jacobsen: What are the main areas of research and research questions now? In particular, why skepticism and its associated in-depth history, as you wrote a book on the subject, recently?

Lagerlund: Skepticism has fascinated me for a long time. Perhaps ever since I came into contact with philosophy. It has been an important part of philosophy ever since ancient times. I have also been looking into skepticism in the Middle Ages for some time. Almost 20 years now. I have gradually moved into Renaissance skepticism and further into later history of philosophy. I noticed that there were no complete history of skepticism. There were stuff on ancient and modern but no overview that also covered medieval skepticism. I decided to write one and it is coming out in May 2020 (Skepticism in Philosophy: A Comprehensive, Historical Introduction, Routledge 2020).

Skepticism is more important than ever. I end the book with a chapter about skepticism outside of philosophy today. I there relate skepticism to issues like the replication crisis in science and knowledge resistance. It is important to keep trak of what kind of skepticism we are dealing with, since skepticism today is often used as an argument for some dogmatism.

10. Jacobsen: If you could give advice to aspiring philosophy students with an interest in philosophy and the skepticism, what would it be for them?

Lagerlund: I think philosophy is needed more than ever in our divided and complicated world. History of philosophy and philosophy in general gives students a unique ability to navigate the world. To study the history of philosophy is to study reason at work. Reason is what gives us humans the ability to rule the world and adapt to new situations. It is why we are the dominant species, but as von Wright showed in his book and as climate change is showing us, it can also become our downfall and destruction. It is here that the role of skepticism becomes important. Reason can with the help of the right kind of skepticism be turned against itself and we can come to see how we need to modify our thinking and steer ourselves and our rationality in a new productive direction. Hume talks about this in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. He writes that: “the mind must remain in suspense between them [that is, reason and common life]; and it is that very suspense or balance, which is the triumph of scepticism.” There is a balance to be upheld between reason and experience. Skepticism reins in reason when it gets carried away. Skepticism makes us step back and look again. Is this the right way to proceed or do we need to change course.

I welcome new students to philosophy and especially to the study of the history of philosophy. There are so many interesting areas to explore. I would advise them to look for ways to bridge gaps and look to new traditions of thinking and language traditions. Arabic philosophy needs much more study, but Indian and Chinese philosophy are severely neglected by Western scholars. Scholars that can bridge gaps between civilizations and heal the divides of the world.

11. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Professor Lagerlund.

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.

An Interview with Dr. Aubrey de Grey on Longevity and Biomedical Gerontology Research Now

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): USIA Blog (United Sigma Intelligence Association/USIA, formerly United Sigma Korea/USK, founded by HanKyung Lee, M.D. in 2007 as United Sigma Korea.)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020

Interviewer: Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Numbering: Issue 21.A, Idea: Outliers & Outsiders (Part Seventeen)

Place of Publication: Langley, British Columbia, Canada

Title: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Web Domain: http://www.in-sightjournal.com

Individual Publication Date: October 22, 2019

Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2020

Name of Publisher: In-Sight Publishing

Frequency: Three Times Per Year

Words: 3,701

ISSN 2369-6885

Abstract 

Dr. Aubrey de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist based in Cambridge, UK and Mountain View, California, USA, and is the Chief Science Officer of SENS Research Foundation, a California-based 501(c) (3) charity dedicated to combating the aging process. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, the world’s highest-impact peer-reviewed journal focused on intervention in aging. He received his BA and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1985 and 2000 respectively. His research interests encompass the characterisation of all the accumulating and eventually pathogenic molecular and cellular side-effects of metabolism (“damage”) that constitute mammalian aging and the design of interventions to repair and/or obviate that damage. Dr. de Grey is a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organisations. He discusses: new research on longevity and longevity escape velocity; promising anti-aging research; research all over the place; advancing research into the Hadwiger-Nelson problem; organizations to look into; books to look into; and final feelings and thoughts on the conversation.

Keywords: Aubrey de Grey, longevity, Rejuvenation Research, SENS Research Foundation.

An Interview with Dr. Aubrey de Grey on Longevity and Biomedical Gerontology Research Now: Chief Science Officer & Co-Founder, SENS Research Foundation; Editor-In-Chief, Rejuvenation Research[1],[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is new about longevity escape velocity and research into it?

Dr. Aubrey de Grey: I could spend a half-hour just talking about that question. It has been a while. Remind me, how long ago was our last interview?

Jacobsen: 2014.

de Grey: All right, things are unrecognizable now. There is a private industry in this. In 2014/2015, it was the time when we created our first spinout. We took out a project philanthropically at SENS Research Foundation. An investor found us.

Jacobsen: Is this Peter Thiel?

de Grey: No, no, another person who had been one of our donors. A guy who was our second biggest donor back then. A guy named Jason Hope. He decided that one of our projects that we had been supporting at Rice University in Texas was ready to be commercialized.

Of course, it was early in terms of becoming a project. He felt that it was far enough along to invest as a project with his own money rather than as a donation. He created a biotech company of his own. He hired our people. He gave us a percent of the company and went off and tried to do it.

He did not have the faintest clue to run a biotech company.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

de Grey: It changed our attitude to the whole thing. Since then, our business model has been to pursue this kind of thing. It is to pursue projects that are too early to be investible. It is to be in parallel with conversations with potential investors and to identify the right point, where the thing has achieved enough proof of concept.

So, it can be spun out into a company and can receive considerable amounts of support, more than can be provided philanthropically. We have done this half a dozen times. We have been able to do this due to increasing investments at an increasing rate, including deep pocketed ones.

Something that happened 3 years ago with an investor named Jim Mellon who had made his money in a variety of other completely unrelated fields decided that he wanted to get into this. It was the next important thing to him.

He approached me. We started talking. We became very good friends, very quickly. The long of the short is he is the chair of a company called Juvenescence. Its model is basically to invest in other companies.

So, they have already put quite a bit of money into quite several start-ups. Some are spinouts of SENS. Others are closely aligned with what we do. It is transforming everything. It is fantastic. Around the same time, a guy came to us from Germany. A guy named Michael Greve who made his fortune in the early days of the German internet.

He made some of the most successful German websites. He has wanted to do this for a while. He has been investing in a variety of start-ups. The good news is most of these new investors, especially Michael Greve, have been also donating to the foundation as well as investing in companies.

That is very, very important, of course. For the near future, there will be projects that are not far enough along to really join the dots to make a profit. They will need to be funded philanthropically. We try to make the case to investors, even if they are inherently more in an investor mindset than a donor.

We try to make the case. Even if they donate a smaller amount than they are investing, they have as much of my time as they want. They will have the opportunity to have the information, so they will be the founding investor of the next startup.

For me, it is extraordinarily gratifying. I am at the nexus of all of this. Everyone comes to me, whether the investors or the founders of companies who want to find investments. I spend a ridiculous amount of my time just making introductions.

What had not changed, we are still woefully low on the money throughout the foundation. Even though, I have been able, as I say, to put some money in; and we have some money from elsewhere. Nevertheless, it is far less than we need.

I am constantly spending my time on the road and camera trying to change that. That is the biggest thing that has changed. The next thing that we are changing is the huge spike in the value of cryptocurrencies. We benefitted quite a lot from that. Several of our investors who used to be relatively penniless and had not funded us financially suddenly became rather wealthy.

They ended up with a lot of money. We had four 7-digit donations adding up to a total of 6.5 million dollars. So, obviously, this was a windfall. That we are making us of now. Only one of the donors is likely to be a repeat donor because the others decided to give away most of their fortune.

That guy created Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin. He, basically, read my book when he was 14. He is now 26.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

de Grey: He is one of these true children of the revolution who never had to change their mind about anything. They always grew up knowing it was a sad thing and tried to fix it. So, that is cool. My life is largely the same in broad strokes, but, in the specifics, in terms of the ways in which I can bring the right money to the right people; it has improved a lot.

2. Jacobsen: As aging is numerous processes, what programs of anti-aging, given individual processes of aging, seem the most promising within your remit?

de Grey: When I talk about what is more promising and less promising, I am always looking at the research. I am looking at how SENS is moving forward. Of course, there is a big spectrum to how far along things are.

On the easy end of the spectrum, we have hardly done anything throughout our 10-year existence on stem cell research, even though it is a key area of damage repair. It is a place for others too. Almost every area of stem cell research is important for cell damage and aging, which is being done by others and not us.

While at the other end of the spectrum, things like making backup copies of Mitochondrial DNA, hardly anyone else is working on it. That is a big spectrum. But if I look at the rate of progress, it is not the same at all.

One gratifying thing is making great advances in some difficult areas over the last few years. For mitochondrial DNA, we published a paper about 2 and a half years ago that sounded like only a modest step forward.

Basically, out of the 13 protein coding genes that we need to work in the nucleus, we were able to make two of them work at the same time, in the same cell. It sounds modest, but it is a huge progression from before. With the result now, we have a paper in review, which is a huge step forward from there.

We have these genes working now. We are understanding how we are getting them working. It is not so much trial-and-error now. More of the same thing is crosslinking. So, as you know, the extracellular matrix, this lattice of proteins that gives our tissue their elasticity. It gets less elastic over time because of chemical reaction with circulating sugar.

So, in 2015, the group that we were funding in that area, at Yale University, were able to publish a paper – our first paper in Science magazine – on the huge advance in that area. The advance sounded tangential at first hearing with the structure, which is one of the structures responsible for the loss of this elasticity. We want to break it, therefore.

The advance made that was published was ways to create it, to synthesize it, from simple agents. As it turns out, there is an enabling step. It allows us to perform experiments that would be impossible with the very trace amounts of this material that would have been previously available, just making antibody tissue or finding bacterial enzymes that break it down.

That work is proceeding very much faster now, as well. That is one of the companies that we are in the process of spinning out.

3. Jacobsen: If you look at the projections of research that looked very promising, what ones were very disappointing? What ones came out of nowhere and were promising?

de Grey: Of course, they are all over the place. Some of the most important ones were the ones no one cares about. One is pluripotent stem cells created 13 years ago, and CRISPR, which was very much more recent, like 6 years ago.

We have been exploiting those advances. Same with the entire medical profession. But there are also isolated things that have been unexpected. Let us go back to mitochondrial mutations, one thing that we were kicking ourselves over. It will be talked about in the upcoming paper.

It is codon optimization. It is well-known. Mitochondrial DNA has a separate DNA. Codons code different things, different amino acids, compared to the nucleus (in the mitochondria by comparison). One thing is true, which we thought was relevant.

Out of the range of the codons that code for a given single amino acid, let us say the 4 that encode for lysine, there may be one of them used more often than others. This will affect the speed of translation of the messenger RNA among other things.

Nobody had bothered to try to optimize that for expression of these genes in the nucleus. It turns out that if you do then things go far, far better. It was a serendipitous discovery. Science, itself, is full of serendipitous discoveries.

4. Jacobsen: Also, you solved a math problem, recently. What was it?

de Grey: [Laughing] right, that was about 18 months ago. It is a problem called the Hadwiger-Nelson problem named after some mathematicians from 1950s. The question is normally stated, “How many colors do you need to color all of the points on the plane in order that no pair of points that is one inch apart is the same color?”

The answer was immediately shown back in 1950 to be somewhere between 4 and 7 inclusive. I was able to exclude the 4 case. Many, many, many mathematicians have worked on this in the interim. So, it was quite surprising that I was able to do this, as I am a recreational mathematician. I got lucky, basically.

I would describe this as a game. What you do is, you have a two-player game. The playing surface is an initial blank sheet of paper. Player 1 has a black pen. Player 2 has a bunch of colored pens. The players alternate. When player 1 makes a move. The point is to make a new dot wherever player 1 likes.

Player 2 must color the dot. He must take one of his pens and put a ring around the new dot. The only thing that player 2 is not allowed to do is to use the same color as he used for a previous dot that is exactly one inch away from the new dot.

Of course, there may be more than one dot. Player 1 wins the game if he can arrange things so that the new dot cannot be covered. All the player 2’s pens have been used for other dots that are exactly an inch away from the new dot, right?

The question is, “How many pens does player 2 need to have in order so that player 1 cannot win?”

Jacobsen: Right.

de Grey: So, if player 2 only has one pen, obviously, player 1 can win with just two dots. He puts a dot down. Player 2 uses the red pen. Player 1 puts down a second dot exactly an inch away. Player 2 cannot move. If player 2 has two pens, then player 1 can win with three dots by just placing a dot; player 2 can uses the red pen, places another dot an inch away.

Player 2 uses the blue pen. Player 1 uses third dot in the triangle with the two, so an inch away from both oft hem, then player 2 cannot move. So, then, it turns out. If player 2 has 3 pens, player 1 can also win. It is a little more complicated.

Player 1 needs seven dots. But again, it is not very complicated. It was already worked out back in 1950 as soon as humans started thinking about this kind of question. The natural question would be the number of dots go up in some exponential way, but player 1 can always win.

It turns out that that is not true. It turns out if player 2 has seven pens. Then player 1 can never win, no matter how many dots that he puts down. But what I was able to show, if player 2 has 4 pens, then player 1 can win, but with a lot of dots.

The solution that I found took more than 1,500 dots. It has been reduced by other people since then, but it is still over 500 is the record.

5. Jacobsen: [Laughing] if we are looking at the modern landscape, especially with the increase in funding, what organizations should individuals look to  – other than your own as well?

de Grey: Things are looking good. There is a huge proliferation of investment opportunities as well, in this area. They are certainly raising money, as they are investing in more start-ups. In the non-profit world, there are plenty of organizations as well.

I should probably mention the Methuselah Foundation, which is the organization from which SENS Research Foundation arose. They are funding a bunch of research as well as doing prizes. They are choosing well and the right things to fund.

Then there is the buck institute, which is a much more traditional organization on the surface. In other words, it is mostly funded by the NIH and by relatively conservative funding sources. But! They understand the scientific situation. It has become much more acceptable to do work that is overtly translational, even if you are getting money from these types of sources.

We work closely with them. We have two ongoing projects there. We send summer interns there. We have been able to work with them on funding, in terms of bringing in new sources of funding. That is something hat I would include.

In terms of the world, one important organization is called LEAF or Life Extension Advocacy Foundation. One in the UK. One in the US. One in Russia. They focus on advocacy and outreach. They are extraordinarily good and play a key role in elevating the level of debate in this whole area.

In Europe, the Healthy Life Extension Foundation was founded by two people from Belgium. They run a nice conference every year, every couple of years anyway. They have a vibrant mailing list and spread useful information about this area. They could use some more money. The list goes on now.

There are increased organizations, now, not just in this space but really know what they are doing. They know what the priorities ought to be. One thing I have always known since the beginning. No matter how good I get at outreach and advocacy. I could never do this all myself, not just for lack of time, but because different people resonate with different audiences.

So, there are people who will overall inspire. Others will not like people with beards.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

de Grey: People may not like my act. So, there are people around now who are very capably complementing the kind of style that I have in communicating the value of this work. That is also extraordinarily important.

6. Jacobsen: Any new books that can provide a good introductory foundation into this kind of research? Also, what about advanced texts as well?

de Grey: On the introductory side, there is one guy named Jim Mellon. So, Jim, this businessperson, has a very interesting of going about his job. He preferentially gets into very emerging new sectors. What he does is, he creates his own competition.

He, essentially, writes newsletters and blogs and books about this new area whose intended audience is other investors. That is what I mean by making his own competition. The reason he does this is, basically, that when a sector is just beginning. That the faster it grows, then the better.

Essentially, it is floating all boats by increasing the buzz around something. He wrote a book based on conversations with me over the previous year or so. It is called Juvenescence, which is the same as the name as his company. It is targeted to other investors.

It is very good. I was able to help with this a fair bit with the technical part. But it is written in a style that is very, very appealing, which is not a way that I would be able to write. He has a second edition upcoming. This is one that I would highlight.

In terms of advanced texts, I would not move to texts right now. Things are moving so fast. One simply needs to read the primary literature. One needs to identify that, which is not necessarily an easy thing to do. I would point to our community’s effort.

Probably, the most important one is to fight aging in the blog done by Reason. Even though he has become one of the CEOs of our start-up companies, he is running the blog. He is extremely good at highlighting the important points of the research.

7. Jacobsen: Any final feelings or thoughts in conclusion based on the conversation today?

de Grey: I would say, “Thank you for having me on your show again,” and for the opportunity to give an update to your audience. I think, really, the conclusion that I would give is that it is extremely exciting that things are moving much faster than before. But we must not be complacent.

There is still a long way to go. My estimation for how long we must go has gone down, but it has not nearly gone down enough. We still need to be putting in every effort that we possibly can in whatever way.

8. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Dr. de Grey.

de Grey: My pleasure, Scott, 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.

Dr. Aubrey de Grey: SENS Research Foundation, Chief Science Officer and Co-founder; Rejuvenation Research, Editor-in-Chief

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): USIA Blog (United Sigma Intelligence Association/USIA, formerly United Sigma Korea/USK, founded by HanKyung Lee, M.D. in 2007 as United Sigma Korea.)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020

Interviewer: Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Numbering: Issue 5.A, Idea: Outliers & Outsiders (Part One)

Place of Publication: Langley, British Columbia, Canada

Title: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Web Domain: http://www.in-sightjournal.com

Individual Publication Date: June 8, 2014

Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2014

Name of Publisher: In-Sight Publishing

Frequency: Three Times Per Year

Words: 2,312

ISSN 2369-6885

Dr. Aubrey de Grey

ABSTRACT

Comprehensive interview with Dr. Aubrey de Grey, the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Rejuvenation Research, co-founder of the Methuselah Foundation, and co-founder of the SENS Foundation.  The following interview covers the youth of Dr. de Grey; educational history; his work in the field of bio-gerontology and bio-medical gerontology; research conducted up until the present; definitions of ‘aging’ as seven separate processes: cell loss and cell atrophy, nuclear epi-mutations, mitochondrial mutations, death-resistant cells, extracellular crosslinks, extracellular aggregates, Intracellular aggregates; hypothetical research project; Methuselah Foundation (MF) & Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence Research Foundation (SENS) Foundation; and the trajectory of the ‘war against aging’.

Keywords: aging, bio-gerontology, bio-medical gerontology, cell atrophy, cell loss, Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Editor-in-Chief, Education, extracellular aggregates intracellular aggregates, extracellular crosslinks, Methuselah Foundation,mitochondrial mutations, nuclear epi-mutations, Rejuvenation Research, SENS Foundation, Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence.

1. How was your youth? How did you come to this point?

Pretty normal, but rather short on social life: I had no brothers or sisters (or indeed any family other than my mother), and I wasn’t particularly outgoing until I was about 15. I was always reasonably high-achieving academically and I immersed myself in that. When I discovered programming, and found I was fairly good at it, I decided to study computer science, and pretty quickly I decided to pursue a career in artificial intelligence research because I felt it was where I could make the most humanitarian difference to the world. At around 30, I started to realise that aging was a criminally neglected problem and that, maybe, I could make even more of a difference there. So I switched fields.

2. Where did you acquire your education?  What education do you currently pursue?

I went to school at Harrow, a top UK boarding school, and then university at Cambridge. These days my education comes from my colleagues, via their papers and my interactions at conferences.

3. You work in the field of bio-gerontology.  How do you define bio-gerontology?  When did bio-gerontology interest you?  Why did this field become a distinct area of research?  Why does this garner such controversy?

In order to answer your question with clarity, I need to make a distinction first. There are two separate fields you’re talking about: bio-gerontology and bio-medical gerontology. Bio-gerontology is the study of the biology of aging as a basic science, with the goal of increasing our understanding of how it naturally occurs. Biomedical gerontology is the study of the biology of aging as a technology, with the goal of identifying ways to change how it naturally occurs (specifically, to slow or reverse it). Bio-gerontology has been a branch of biology for about 100 years, starting with ideas like the “rate of living theory”, and it’s not controversial at all. Biomedical gerontology has arguably existed for much longer, if you include the various elixirs that people have explored, but as a true field of technology I would argue that it has only existed for about 15-20 years, since people started trying to use what bio-gerontology had discovered as a guide to the development of therapies. I got interested in it about 20 years ago precisely because it was a field of technology that pretty much did  not exist and I thought that maybe we understood aging well enough to start to develop such medicines. Bio-medical gerontology garners controversy because people are scared of how different the world would be if aging were truly eliminated, and also because (conversely!) people do not want to get their hopes up too soon so they put the issue out of their minds by kidding themselves that it would not be such a good thing after all.

4. What do you consider a pivotal moment in the transition to your current work?

The most pivotal moment was undoubtedly the night in 2000 when I realised that repairing the damage of aging would be much easier than stopping the damage from being created in the first place. That was a huge departure from traditional thinking. Of course there were many other pivotal moments leading up to that, but that’s the biggest one.

5. What kinds of research have you conducted up to the present?

SENS Research Foundation conducts and sponsors research in all areas relating to the repair of aging damage. In the SENS scheme, there are seven major types of damage – of course there are many examples within each type, but the classification into seven categories reflects our strategies for addressing them. We conduct research in all seven areas, prioritising aspects that are not being researched as thoroughly by others as we think is necessary. This ranges from stem cell work to create artificial organs or to regenerate existing tissue, to elimination of molecular “garbage” from the insides of cells and the spaces between them, to the restoration of function to mutant mitochondria, to the underlying basis of certain types of cancer – and that’s just a minority of the range of our interests.

6. If you currently conduct research, what form does it take?

Our research is really no different than any other biology research: we use the same techniques, the same equipment, our staff have the same skills. What’s different about our work is the goals: we pick our projects very carefully for maximum potential to hasten the development of a comprehensive panel of damage repair therapies that will postpone the ill-health of old age.

7. You define aging as a process.  In particular, you define aging as seven processes: cell loss and cell atrophy, nuclear epi-mutations, mitochondrial mutations, death-resistant cells, extracellular crosslinks, extracellular aggregates, Intracellular aggregates. What academic and popular venues can professionals and lay-persons alike read on their own time about these processes in full detail?  What processes have the most progress in slowing, halting, and reversing their respective portion of the aging process?

First, instead of “nuclear [epi] mutations” we normally say “Division-obsessed cells” these days. It’s the same concept but easier to explain.
The best place to discover about all this is, of course, our own output. Our website sens.org has summaries and somewhat more detailed descriptions of all these areas for the general audience. My book “Ending Aging” is also written to be comprehensible to non-biologists, but it’s extremely detailed and no biologist reading it would feel short-changed. Then of course there is my corpus of academic output that first described the SENS approach and its merits; the relevant papers are mostly from 2002 to 2005 and can easily be found in PubMed.

8. If you had infinite funding and full academic freedom, what would you research?

One of the benefits of being an independent non-profit is that we already have pretty full academic freedom. In particular, we are free to work on really difficult projects that do not deliver a steady stream of high-impact publications. Therefore, if we had much more funding, our overall strategy would not change much: mostly we would grow the projects we already pursue, parallelising them more so that they would go faster, rather than changing direction.

9. What do you consider the most controversial research topic at the moment?  How do you examine the issue?

If anything I would say that the key research relevant to bio-medical gerontology is becoming less controversial. An obvious example is the development of iPS (induced pluripotent stem) cells, which has largely obviated the need to work with cells isolated by destroying embryos. Also, as we get better at genetically manipulating species relatively distant from us (like mice), we become progressively less reliant on experiments using non-human primates.

10. How would you describe your early philosophical framework? Did it change? If so, how did it change?

I don’t really view myself as having a philosophical framework. I guess that if I have one it is just that it’s my moral duty to do the best I can to improve people’s lives. But really I would more accurately say that that’s simply what makes me feel fulfilled, whether or not there is any objective ethical basis for it.

11. You co-founded the Methuselah Foundation (MF) & Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence Research Foundation (SENS) Foundation.  You are Editor-in-Chief of the journal Rejuvenation Research.  What purpose do these and other outlets serve for the bio-gerontology research community?

SRF is SENS Research Foundation; SENS is the methodology, SRF is the organisation pursuing the methodology.  MF and SRF are not outlets for the research community – certainly SRF is not, because our focus is to do our own research. MF kind of acts as an outlet in that it highlights and popularises certain research areas by administering prize competitions. RR, on the other hand, is a regular peer-reviewed academic journal and thus is a standard type of outlet. It is distinctive mainly in that it is firmly focused on intervention, so it publishes work that might be seen as too “translational” for some other bio-gerontology journals but also too early-stage for clinical gerontology journals.

12. Who most influenced you? Can you recommend any seminal books/articles by them?

I have actually been influenced rather little by other opinion-formers. There are a few people I immensely admire, however, and in whose footsteps I try to follow. Let me just mention two, Mike West, founder of Geron and Advanced Cell Technology and now CEO of BioTime, has totally transformed the commercial landscape around some of the most critical biomedical technologies relevant to the defeat of aging, and I certainly recommend his book “The Immortal Cell.” Peter Diamandis founded the International Space University, then the Xprize Foundation, and then Singularity University, all real game-changes in the promotion and facilitation of visionary technologies designed to benefit humanity. His book “Abundance” tells the story really well. I’m privileged to know both Mike and Peter quite well and to benefit periodically from their insight.

13. Where do you see the bio-gerontology in the near and far future?  Do you have a precise itinerary for major breakthroughs in the ‘war against aging’?

I will answer with regard to biomedical gerontology – see the distinction I made in my answer to question 3. The short answer is no – just as for any pioneering technology, the timeframe and even the order of events leading to final success is spectacularly speculative. However, I do think that the track we are on has at least a 50% chance of delivering really big increases in healthy (and, as a side-effect, total) lifespan in mice within the next decade and in humans two decades later.

14. What advice do you have for young researchers, especially those engaging in controversial research areas?

The good news is that research in aging has passed through two profound transitions that leave it as a much less controversial option than it used to be. Starting about 20 years ago, it transitioned from a backwater viewed by other biologists as a poor man’s field where hypotheses could not be tested, to a high-profile discipline whose leaders would get most of their papers published in Science or Nature. Then, over the past 5-10 years, it has become far more acceptable to work on aging with a biomedical mindset rather than a basic-science one, in other words with a goal of actually doing something about aging in the future rather than just understanding it better. So my advice would be not to be concerned about historic controversy, but to pick one’s research area on the basis of its relevance to the eventual goal. We at SRF are always happy to offer advice on this – we get queries all the time and we do our best to guide young researchers into the most high-priority areas.

15. Besides your own organizations and research interests, what fields of research, organizations, and non-profits can you recommend for interested readers?

I don’t know how to answer that question. Obviously my recommendation to those who share my basis for choosing a research area is to get involved with SENS. If someone is deciding what interests them on a different basis, they’ll come to a different conclusion, but I’m not about to try to tell them what conclusion.

Bibliography

1)  de Grey ADNJ, Ames BN, Andersen JK, Bartke A, Campisi J, Heward CB, McCarter RJM, Stock G. Time to talk SENS: critiquing the immutability of human aging. Annals NY Acad Sci 2002; 959:452-462.

2)  de Grey ADNJ, Baynes JW, Berd D, Heward CB, Pawelec G, Stock G. Is human aging still mysterious enough to be left only to scientists? BioEssays 2002; 24(7):667-676.

3)  de Grey ADNJ. Challenging but essential targets for genuine anti-ageing drugs. Expert Opin Therap Targets 2003; 7(1):1-5.

4)  de Grey ADNJ. The foreseeability of real anti-aging medicine: focusing the debate. Exp Gerontol 2003; 38(9):927-934.

5)  de Grey ADNJ. Escape velocity: why the prospect of extreme human life extension matters now.  PLoS Biol 2004; 2(6):723-726.

6)  de Grey ADNJ, Campbell FC, Dokal I, Fairbairn LJ, Graham GJ, Jahoda CAB, Porter ACG. Total deletion of in vivo telomere elongation capacity: an ambitious but possibly ultimate cure for all age-related human cancers.  Annals NY Acad Sci 2004; 1019:147-170.

7)  de Grey ADNJ, Alvarez PJJ, Brady RO, Cuervo AM, Jerome WG, McCarty PL, Nixon RA, Rittmann BE, Sparrow JR. Medical bioremediation: prospects for the application of microbial catabolic diversity to aging and several major age-related diseases. Ageing Res Rev 2005; 4(3):315-338.

8)  de Grey ADNJ. A strategy for postponing aging indefinitely. Stud Health Technol Inform 2005; 118:209-219.

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.

An Interview with Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin on Theories of Intelligence, Sex Differences, and Issues of IQ Test Takers and Test Creators (Part Three)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): USIA Blog (United Sigma Intelligence Association/USIA, formerly United Sigma Korea/USK, founded by HanKyung Lee, M.D. in 2007 as United Sigma Korea.)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020

Interviewer: Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Numbering: Issue 21.A, Idea: Outliers & Outsiders (Part Seventeen)

Place of Publication: Langley, British Columbia, Canada

Title: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Web Domain: http://www.in-sightjournal.com

Individual Publication Date: September 1, 2019

Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2020

Name of Publisher: In-Sight Publishing

Frequency: Three Times Per Year

Words: 2,936

ISSN 2369-6885

Abstract 

Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin founded the Prometheus Society and the Mega Society, and created the Mega Test and the Titan Test. He discusses: faux and real genius; validity to Professor Robert Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory of intelligence with practical intelligence, creative intelligence, and analytical intelligence; validity to Multiple Intelligences Theory of Professor Howard Gardner with musical-rhythmic, visual-spatial, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic, existential, and teaching-pedagogical intelligences; validity to general intelligence, or g, of the late Charles Spearman; the general opinion on the three main theories of intelligence; self-identification as a genius; personal opinions on the state of mainstream intelligence testing and alternative high-range intelligence testing; statistical rarity for apparent and, potentially, actual IQ scores of females who score at the extreme sigmas of 3, 4, and 5, or higher; reducing or eliminating social conflicts of interest in test creation; multiple test attempts; data on the Mega Test and the Titan Test; pseudonyms and test scores; and possible concerns of the test creators at the highest sigmas.

Keywords: Charles Spearman, Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius, Howard Gardner, intelligence, IQ, Mega Society, Mega Test, Robert Sternberg, Ronald K. Hoeflin, The Encyclopedia of Categories, Titan Test.

An Interview with Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin on Theories of Intelligence, Sex Differences, and Issues of IQ Test Takers and Test Creators: Founder, Prometheus Society; Founder, Mega Society (Part Three)[1],[2],[3]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

*Caption provided to the photo from Dr. Hoeflin in the third footnote.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Before delving into the theories, so a surface analysis, what defines a faux genius? What defines a real genius to you? Or, perhaps, what different definitions sufficiently describe a fake and a true genius for non-experts or a lay member of the general public – to set the groundwork for Part Three? 

Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin: I would say that genius requires high general intelligence combined with high creativity. How high? In his book Hereditary Genius, Francis Galton put the lowest grade of genius at a rarity of one in 4,000 and the highest grade at a rarity of one in a million. Scientists love to quantify in order to give their subject at least the appearance of precision. One in 4,000 would ensure one’s being noticed in a small city, while one in a million would ensure one’s being noticed in an entire nation of moderate size.

2. Jacobsen: By your estimation or analysis, any validity to Professor Robert Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory of intelligence with practical intelligence, creative intelligence, and analytical intelligence?

Hoeflin: I like Sternberg’s attempt at analyzing intelligence, but clearly just three factors seems a bit skimpy for a really robust theory.

3.Jacobsen: Any validity to Multiple Intelligences Theory of Professor Howard Gardner with musical-rhythmic, visual-spatial, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic, existential, and teaching-pedagogical intelligences?

Hoeflin: Here we have a more robust set of factors, but Gardner fails to show how his factors cohere within a single theory.

4. Jacobsen: Any validity to general intelligence, or g, of the late Charles Spearman?

Hoeflin: General intelligence was based on the fact that apparently quite diverse forms of intelligence such as verbal, spatial, and numerical have positive correlations between each pair of factors, presumably based on some underlying general intelligence.

5. Jacobsen: Amongst the community of experts, what is the general opinion on the three main theories of intelligence listed before? What one holds the most weight? Why that one?

Hoeflin: These are three theories in search of an overarching theory of intelligence. My guess is that the so-called “experts” lack the intelligence so far to create a really satisfactory theory of intelligence, perhaps analogous to the problem with finding a coherent theory of superstrings.

6. Jacobsen: Do you identify as a genius? If so, why, and in what ways? If not, why not?

Hoeflin: I think my theory of categories shows genuine genius. It even amazes me, as if I were just a spectator as the theory does its work almost independently of my efforts.

7. Jacobsen: Any personal opinions on the state of mainstream intelligence testing and alternative high-range intelligence testing now? 

Hoeflin: I’m not up on the current state of intelligence testing. I do feel that it has focused way too much on the average range of intelligence, say from 50 to 150 IQ, i.e., from the bottom one-tenth of one percent to the top one-tenth of one percent. Testing students in this range is where the money is in academia. It’s like music: all the money to be made is in creating pop music, which is typically of mediocre quality. Background music for movies is probably as close as music comes these days to being of high quality, presumably because there is money to be made from the movie studios in such music. I saw a movie recently called “Hangover Square,” which came out in 1945. The title is unappealing and the movie itself is a totally unsuspenseful melodrama about a homicidal maniac whose identity is revealed right from the start. The one amazing thing about the movie was that the composer, Bernard Herman, composed an entire piano concerto for the maniac to purportedly compose and perform, with appropriate homicidal traits in the music to reflect the deranged soul of the leading character, the maniac. One rarely sees such brilliant musical talent thrown at such a horrible film. So I guess genius can throw itself into things even when the audience it is aimed at is of extremely mediocre quality. Maybe intelligence tests, even when they are aimed at mediocre students, can show glints of genius. The fact that I could attain the 99th percentile on tests aimed at average high-school students despite my slow reading due to visual impairment suggests that some psychometrician (or group of psychometricians) must have been throwing their creativity and intelligence into their work in an inspired way that smacks of true genius!

8. Jacobsen: Do the statistical rarities at the extreme sigmas have higher variance between males and females? If so, why? If not, why not? Also, if so, how is this reflected in subtests rather than simple composite scores?

Hoeflin: By “variance between males and females,” I presume you are alluding to the fact that there tend to be more men at very high scores than women. This is especially obvious in spatial problems, as well as kindred math problems, presumably due to men running around hunting wild game in spatially complex situations while women sat by the fireside cooking whatever meat the men managed to procure. But it is also true that men outperform women on verbal tests. On the second Concept Mastery Test, a totally verbal test, of the 20 members of Terman’s gifted group who scored from 180 to 190, the ceiling to the test, 16 were men but only 4 were women. This is a puzzling phenomenon, given women’s propensity for verbalizing. Perhaps chasing game involves verbal communication, too, so that nature rewards the better verbalizers among men in life-or-death situations. Warfare as well as hunting for game probably has a significant role in weeding out the unfit verbalizers among men.

9. Jacobsen: Following from the last question, if so, what does this imply for the statistical rarity for apparent and, potentially, actual IQ scores of females who score at the extreme sigmas of 3, 4, and 5, or higher?

Hoeflin: It obviously would be possible to breed women eugenically to increase the percentage of them with very high IQ scores. Even now, there are more women graduating from law school than men in the United States, which suggests no deficit in verbal intelligence at the high end of the scale. Although, there may be other reasons why men of high verbal intelligence avoid law as a career compared to women. Maybe, they are drawn away by other lucrative careers, such as business or medicine.

10. Jacobsen: In the administration of alternative tests for the higher ranges of general intelligence, individuals may know the test creator, even on intimate terms as a close colleague and friend. They may take the test a second time, a third time, a fourth time, or more. The sample size of the test may be very small. There may be financial conflicts of interest for the test creator or test taker. There may be various manipulations to cheat on the test. There may be pseudonyms used for the test to appear as if a first attempt at the alternative test. There are other concerns. How do you reduce or eliminate social conflicts of interest?

Hoeflin: Some people have used pseudonyms to take my tests when they were afraid I would not give them a chance to try the test a second or third time. There is not much incentive to score very high on these tests, except perhaps the prestige of joining a very high-IQ society. People cheat on standardized college admission tests, as we know from news reports, by getting other people to take the tests for them, for example. Considering how expensive colleges have become these days, my guess is that they will go the way of the dodo bird eventually, and people will get their education through computers rather than spending a fortune in a college. One guy cheated on my Mega Test by getting members of a think tank in the Cambridge, Massachusetts area to help him. He was pleased that I gave him a perfect score of 48 out of 48. He admitted cheating to Marilyn vos Savant, who informed me, so I disqualified his score. This was before my Mega Test appeared in Omni. Why he wanted credit for a perfect score that he did not deserve is beyond my understanding. I’d be more proud of a slightly lower score that I had actually earned. Another person has kept trying my tests, despite a fairly high scoring fee of $50 per attempt. I finally told him to stop taking the tests. His scores were not improving, so his persistence seemed bizarre.

11. Jacobsen: The highest score on the Mega Test on the first attempt by a single individual with a single name rather than a single individual with multiple names was Marilyn vos Savant at 46 out of 48. Similarly, with other test creators, and other tests, there were several attempts at the same test by others. Do the multiple test attempts and then the highest of those attempts asserted as the score for the test taker present an issue across the higher sigma ranges and societies?

Hoeflin: Some European guy did achieve a perfect score on the Mega Test eventually, about 20 years after the test first came out in 1985. The test is no longer used by any high-IQ societies that I know of due to the posting of mostly correct answers online by a malicious psychiatrist. He probably needed to see a psychiatrist to figure out what snapped in his poor head to do such a thing. I guess it’s a profession that attracts people with psychological problems that they are trying to understand and perhaps solve.

12. Jacobsen: What were the final sample sizes of the Mega Test and the Titan Test at the height of their prominence? How do these compare to other tests? What would be a reasonable sample size to tap into 4-sigma and higher ranges of intelligence with low margins of error and decent accuracy?

Hoeflin: A bit over 4,000 people tried the Mega Test within a couple of years of its appearance and about 500 people tried the Titan Test within a similar time period. Langdon’s LAIT test is said to have had 25,000 participants. His test was multiple choice, whereas mine were not. A multiple-choice test is easier to guess on than a non-multiple-choice test. My tests were normed by looking at the previous test scores that participants reported and then trying to create a distribution curve for my tests what would jibe with the distribution on previously-taken tests. So I did not need to test a million or more people to norm my tests up to fairly high levels of ability.

13. Jacobsen: What are the ways in which test-takers try to cheat on tests? I mean the full gamut. I intend this as a means by which prospective test takers and society creators can arm themselves and protect themselves from cheaters, charlatans, and frauds, or worse. Same for the general public in guarding against them, whenever someone might read this.

Hoeflin: If people’s wrong answers are too often identical with one another and out of sync with typical wrong answers, that is a clue that they are copying from one another or from some common source.

14. Jacobsen: Why do test takers use pseudonyms? How common is this practice among these types of test-takers? It seems as if a brazen and blatant attempt to take a test twice, or more, and then claim oneself as smart as the higher score rather than the composite of two, or more, scores, or even simply the lower score of the two, or more, if the scores are not identical.

Hoeflin: I know of a group of 5 M.I.T. students who collaborated and gave themselves the collective name of Tetazoo. There was also a professor at Caltech who tried the test but did not want his score publicized so he used the pseudonym Ron Lee. In both cases, the score just barely hit the one-in-a-million mark of 43 right out of 48. One person scored 42 right and wanted to try again so he used a pseudonym and managed to reach 47 right out of 48 on his second attempt.

15. Jacobsen: What have been and continue to be concerns for test creators at the highest sigmas such as yourself or others, whether active or retired? This is more of a timeline into the present question of the other suite of concerns.

Hoeflin: I do not know what are the main concerns of test designers, past or present, other than myself. I was fortunate to have Triple Nine members as guinea pigs to try out my trial tests, so I could weed out the less satisfactory problems. One could usually tell just by looking at a problem whether it would be a good one or not, but the inspiration to come up with good problems would involve steady effort over the course of a year or so, yielding for me on average about one good problem per week, plus about four not too good problems per week.

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.

An Interview with Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin on High-IQ Societies’ Titles, Rarities, and Purposes, and Personal Judgment and Evaluations of Them (Part Two)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): USIA Blog (United Sigma Intelligence Association/USIA, formerly United Sigma Korea/USK, founded by HanKyung Lee, M.D. in 2007 as United Sigma Korea.)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020

Interviewer: Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Numbering: Issue 20.A, Idea: Outliers & Outsiders (Part Sixteen)

Place of Publication: Langley, British Columbia, Canada

Title: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Web Domain: http://www.in-sightjournal.com

Individual Publication Date: August 22, 2019

Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019

Name of Publisher: In-Sight Publishing

Frequency: Three Times Per Year

Words: 4,638

ISSN 2369-6885

Abstract 

Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin founded the Prometheus Society and the Mega Society, and created the Mega Test and the Titan Test. He discusses: inspiration for the Mega Society – its title, rarity, and purpose; inspiration for the Prometheus Society – its title, rarity, and purpose; inspiration for the Top One Percent Society – its title, rarity, and purpose; inspiration for the One-in-a-Thousand Society – its title, rarity, and purpose; inspiration for the Epimetheus Society – its title, rarity, and purpose; inspiration for the Omega Society – its title, rarity, and purpose; the developments of each society over time; communications of high-IQ societies, and harshest critiques of high-IQ societies; overall results of the intellectual community facilitated for the gifted; Prometheus Society and the Mega Society kept separate from the Lewis Terman Society, and Top One Percent Society, One-in-a-Thousand Society, Epimetheus Society, and Omega Society placed under the aegis of the “The Terman Society” or “The Hoeflin Society”; disillusionment with high-IQ societies; notable failures of the high-IQ societies; changing norms of the Mega Test and the Titan Test; the hypothetical Holy Grail of psychometric measurements; other test creators seem reliable in their production of high-IQ tests and societies with serious and legitimate intent respected by Dr. Hoeflin: Kevin Langdon and Christopher Harding; societies societies helpful as sounding boards for the Encyclopedia of Categories; librarian work helpful in the development of a skill set necessary for independent psychometric work and general intelligence test creation; demerits of the societies in personal opinion and others’ opinions; virtues and personalities as mostly innate or inborn, and dating and mating; and publications from the societies attempted to be published at a periodic rate.

Keywords: Christopher Harding, Giftedness, intelligence, IQ, Kevin Langdon, Mega Society, Mega Test, Prometheus Society, Ronald K. Hoeflin, The Encyclopedia of Categories, Titan Test.

An Interview with Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin on High-IQ Societies’ Titles, Rarities, and Purposes, and Personal Judgment and Evaluations of Them: Founder, Prometheus Society; Founder, Mega Society (Part Two)[1],[2],[3]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

*Caption provided to the photo from Dr. Hoeflin in the third footnote.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Perhaps, we can run down the timeline of the six societies in this part with some subsequent questions: Prometheus Society (1982), Mega Society (1982), Top One Percent Society (1989), One-in-a-Thousand Society (1992), Epimetheus Society (2006), and Omega Society (2006). What was the inspiration for the Mega Society – its title, rarity, and purpose?

Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin: Kevin Langdon had a list of 600 or so people who had qualified for his Four Sigma Society from the 25,000 Omni readers who tried his LAIT (Langdon Adult Intelligence Test) that appeared in Omni in 1979. Four Sigma was given a cut-off of four standard deviations above the mean, which on a normal curve would be about one-in-30,000 in rarity or the 99.997 percentile. So approximately one-thirtieth of them should have been qualified for a one-in-a-million society. I suggested to him that he might ask the top 20 scorers if they’d like to form the nucleus of a one-in-a-million society, but he evidently thought this cut-off was too high to be practical. So when he let his Four Sigma Society languish, I decided to start Prometheus as a replacement for it, with the Mega Society as a follow-through on my suggestion to him about starting a one-in-a-million society, where “mega” means, of course, “million,” indicating how many people each member would be expected to exceed in intelligence. With slightly over 7 billion people, there would be a pool of about 7,000 potential Mega Society members, or slightly less if we exclude young children. I knew of a statistical method by which several very high scores from several tests could be combined to equal a one-in-a-million standard, as if the several tests constituted a single gigantic test. So I accepted members using this statistical method until my Mega Test appeared in Omni in April 1985. I put the cut-off at a raw score of 42 out of 48 initially, but then increased this to 43 after getting a larger sample. The test was eventually withdrawn from official use for admission to the Mega Society because some psychiatrist maliciously published a lot of answers online that others could search out and copy. At this time my other test, the Titan Test, is the only one that the Mega Society will accept, again at a raw score of 43 out of 48.

2. Jacobsen: What was the inspiration for the Prometheus Society – its title, rarity, and purpose?

Hoeflin: The Prometheus Society, as mentioned above, was intended as a replacement for the Four Sigma Society, which Langdon had allowed to languish. Prometheus was a figure in Greek mythology who was punished by the gods for giving fire to humans. I told Kevin, half in jest, that I was stealing his idea for the Four Sigma Society from him like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods! On my Mega and Titan Test, the qualifying score for Prometheus is a raw score of 36 out of 48, roughly equivalent to a rarity of one-in-30,000 or the 99.997 percentile, the same as Four Sigma’s cut-off, i.e., a minimum qualifying score.

3. Jacobsen: What was the inspiration for the Top One Percent Society – its title, rarity, and purpose?

Hoeflin: I wanted to make a living publishing journals for high-IQ societies. I initially was able to do so as the editor for the Triple Nine Society, for which I was paid just $1 per month per member for each monthly journal I put out. When I started as editor in late 1979, there were only about 50 members, but once Kevin’s test appeared in Omni the number of members swelled to about 750. With $750 per month, I could put out a journal and still have enough left over to live on, since my monthly rent was just $75 thanks to New York City’s rent laws. When Kevin heard that I was able to do this, he was not amused, since he thought the editorship should be an unpaid position. So I started the Top One Percent Society from people who had taken my Mega Test in Omni in April 1985 and my Titan Test in April 1990, thus removing myself from any disputes with Kevin or other members of the Triple Nine Society. I liked being self-employed rather than work as a librarian, which had been my profession from 1969 to 1985, because difficulties with higher-ups in the library field could crop up if there were personality conflicts.

4. Jacobsen: What was the inspiration for the One-in-a-Thousand Society – its title, rarity, and purpose?

Hoeflin: I started the One-in-a-Thousand Society when income from my Top One Percent Society started to seem insufficient, even when I put out two journals per month rather than one for the Top One Percent Society. The third journal per month was a bit more hectic, but within my capacity.

5. Jacobsen: What was the inspiration for the Epimetheus Society – its title, rarity, and purpose?

Hoeflin: In Greek mythology, Epimetheus was a brother to Prometheus. I’d let the Prometheus and Mega societies fall into the control of other people, so I decided to create new societies at their same cut-offs but with different names and under my control. I don’t recall the motivation for founding Epimetheus, since starting in 1997 I qualified for Social Security Disability payments due to my poor vision and low income, and that completely solved all my financial worries, even when my rent gradually crept up from $75 to $150 from 1997 to around 2003. It is now permanently frozen at $150 a month due to an agreement with an earlier landlord, who wanted the City to give him permission to install luxury apartments where I live, for which he could charge $2,000 to $4,000 a month due to the proximity to Times Square, which is just ten minutes’ walk away. I think that the Prometheus Society was restricting the tests it accepted to just a very small number of traditional supervised IQ tests, excluding unsupervised amateur-designed tests like mine. I wanted my tests to still serve a practical purpose at the Prometheus and Mega cut-offs.

6. Jacobsen: What was the inspiration for the Omega Society – its title, rarity, and purpose?

Hoeflin: Chris Harding of Australia was forever founding new high-IQ societies with new names but whose existence was largely known only to him and the people he awarded memberships to. He founded an Omega Society at the one-in-3,000,000 cut-off, but I assumed after several years of hearing nothing about it that it must be defunct, so I decided to call my new one-in-a-million society the Omega Society, since “Omega” seemed a nice twin word for “Mega” just as “Epimetheus” served as a twin word for “Prometheus.” Chris wrote to me about this appropriation of his society’s name and I explained my reason for adopting it. He offered no further complaint about it.

7. Jacobsen: What were the developments of each society over time?

Hoeflin: I decided to devote my full-time attention to a massive multi-volume opus titled “The Encyclopedia of Categories,” of which I’d published a couple of one-volume versions in 2004 and 2005. When I noticed that Samuel Johnson’s great unabridged dictionary of 1755 could now be bought for just $9.99 from Kindle, the computer-readable format that avoids paper printing, I decided I could make an affordable multi-volume treatment of my “Encyclopedia of Categories.” I’d also discovered that quotations from collections of quotations could be analyzed in terms of my theory of categories, giving me a virtually inexhaustible source of examples considering how many quotation books there are out there. So I sold the four societies that were still under my control to Hernan Chang, an M.D. physician living in Jacksonville, Florida, as well as all of my IQ tests. Although, he lets me score the latter for him and collect the fee, since he is too busy to handle that. I began my multi-volume opus in late 2013 and believe I can complete a 10-volume version by the end of this year, 2019. I was initially aiming at a 13-volume version, in harmony with the number of basic categial niches I employ, but it would take until early 2021 to complete the extra 3 volumes, so I’ll publish a 10-volume version in January of 2020. The year 2020 as a publication date appealed to me because of its irony, given that my visual acuity falls far short of 20/20, and the year 2020 rolls around only once in eternity, if we stick to the same calendar. I could still put out more volumes in later editions if I felt so inclined, but I let readers voice an opinion on the optimum number of volumes.

8. Jacobsen: What was the intellectual productivity and community of the societies based on self-reports of members? What have been the harshest critiques of high IQ societies from non-members, whether qualifying or not?

Hoeflin: I think the focus of the higher-IQ societies has been on communication with other members through the societies’ journals. I never tried to keep track of the members’ “intellectual productivity.” As for harsh critiques of the high-IQ societies, the only thing that comes to mind is Esquire magazine’s November 1999 so-called “Genius” issue. It focused on four high-IQ-society members, including myself. I never read the issue except for the page about myself, and it took me two weeks to get up enough nerve to read even that page. I was told by others that the entire issue was basically a put-down of high-IQ societies and their members, although people said the treatment of me was the mildest of the four. I did notice that they wanted a photo of me that looked unattractive, me using a magnifying glass to read. I suggested a more heroic picture, such as me with one of my cats, but they kept taking pictures of me peering through that magnifying glass in a rather unflattering pose, with zero interest in alternative poses. Kevin Langdon was sarcastic about our willingness to expose ourselves to such unflattering treatment. (He was not among the four that they covered in that issue.)

9. Jacobsen: What have been the overall results of the intended goals of the provision of an intellectual community of like-gifted people who, in theory, may associate more easily with one another? I remain aware of skepticism around this idea, which may exist in the realm of the naive.

Hoeflin: I had found that I could not interact with members of Mensa, who generally treated me as a nonentity. I was also very shy and unable to put myself forward socially in Mensa groups. At the higher-IQ levels, however, I had the prominent role of editor and even founder, which made it possible for others to approach me and break through that shyness of mine. So I did manage to meet and interact with quite a few people by virtue of my participation in the high-IQ societies, although the ultimate outcome seems to be that I will probably end my life in total isolation from personal friends except a few people who reach out to me by phone or email, as in the present question-and-answer email format. As for other people, they will have to tell you their own stories, since people are quite diverse, even at very high IQ levels.

10. Jacobsen: Why were the Prometheus Society and the Mega Society kept separate from the Lewis Terman Society? Why were the Top One Percent Society, One-in-a-Thousand Society, Epimetheus Society, and Omega Society placed under the aegis of the Lewis Terman Society? Also, what is the Lewis Terman Society?

Hoeflin: I think Hernan Chang adopted the name “The Hoeflin Society” in preference to “The Terman Society” as an umbrella term for the four societies he purchased from me.

11. Jacobsen: What have been the merits of the societies in personal opinion and others’ opinions?

Hoeflin: Speaking personally, I have lost almost all interest in the high-IQ societies these days, although I am still a nominal, non-participatory member of several of them. One group I joined recently as a passive member named the “Hall of Sophia” unexpectedly offered to publish my multi-volume book in any format I like for free. The founder had taken my Mega or Titan test earlier this year (February 2019) and did quite well on it, and was sufficiently impressed to classify me as one of the 3 most distinguished members of his (so far) 28-member society. I was going to send out my book for free as email attachments fo people listed in the Directory of American Philosophers as well as to any high-IQ-society members who might be interested. So for me, the one remaining merit of the high-IQ societies would be to have a potential audience for my philosophical opus.

12. Jacobsen: When did you begin to lose interest or become disillusioned, in part, in high-IQ societies? My assumption: not simply an instantaneous decision in 2019.

Hoeflin: Editing high-IQ-society journals from 1979 onwards for many years, at first as a hobby and then as a livelihood, kept me interested in the high-IQ societies. I gave up the editing completely around 2009. Thirty years is plenty of time to become jaded. Getting Social Security Disability payments in 1997 removed any financial incentive for publishing journals. Over the years I’d travelled to such destinations as California and Texas and Illinois for high-IQ-society meetings, not to mention meetings here in New York City, when I had sufficient surplus income, but all things peter out eventually.

13. Jacobsen: What have been the notable failures of the high-IQ societies?

Hoeflin: There was actually talk of a commune-like community for high-IQ people, but after I saw how imperious some high-IQ leaders like Kevin Langdon were, this would be like joining Jim Jones for a trip to Guyana–insane! That’s hyperbole, of course. Langdon actually ridiculed the followers of Jim Jones for their stupidity in following such a homicidal and suicidal leader, not to mention his idiotic ideas. Langdon advocates a libertarian philosophy, but in person he is very controlling. I guess we just have to muddle through on our own, especially if we have some unique gift that we have to cultivate privately, not communally. Langdon often ridiculed my early attempts to develop a theory of categories, but I’m very confident in the theory now that I have worked at it for so long. Human beings tend to organize their thoughts along the same systematic lines, just like birds instinctively know how to build nests, spiders to build webs, and bees to build honeycombs. My analyses are so new and startling that I’m sure they will eventually attract attention. If I’d been an epigone of Langdon, I’d never have managed to develop my theory to its present marvellous stage.

14. Jacobsen: With the Flynn Effect, does this change the norms of the Mega Test and the Titan Test used for admissions purposes in some societies at the highest ranges? 

HoeflinA lot of people suddenly started qualifying for the Mega Society, perhaps from copying online sources or perhaps from the test suddenly coming to the attention of a lot of very smart people. So initially higher scores on that test were required and then the test was abandoned entirely as an admission test for the Mega Society. Terman found that his subjects achieved gradually higher IQ scores on his verbal tests the older they got. One theory is that as people gradually accumulate a larger vocabulary and general knowledge (crystallized intelligence) their fluid intelligence, especially on math-type tests, gradually declines, so that if one relies on both types of intelligence, then your intelligence would remain relatively stable until extreme old age. There has been no spurt in extremely high scores on the Titan Test, however.

15. Jacobsen: What would be the Holy Grail of psychometric measurements, e.g., a non-verbal/culture fair 5-sigma or 6-sigma test?

Hoeflin: The main problem with extremely difficult tests is that few people would be willing to attempt them, so norming them would be impossible. I was astonished that the people who manage the SAT have actually made the math portion of that test so easy that even a perfect score is something like the 91st percentile. Why they would do such an idiotic thing I have no idea. Terman did the same thing with his second Concept Mastery Test, so that a Mensa-level performance on that test would be a raw score of 125 out of 190, whereas a Mensa-level performance on the first CMT was 78 out of 190. Twenty members of his gifted group had raw scores of 180 to 190 on the second CMT whereas no member of his group had a raw score higher than 172 out of 190 on the first CMT. His reason was to be able to compare his gifted group with more average groups such as Air Force captains, who scored only 60 out of 190 on the second test, less than half as high as Mensa members. A lot of amateur-designed intelligence tests have such obscure and difficult problems that I am totally unable to say if those tests have any sense to them or not. Perhaps games like Go and Chess are the only ways to actually compare the brightest people at world-record levels. But such tests yield to ever-more-careful analysis by the competitors, so that one is competing in the realm of crystallized intelligence (such as knowledge of chess openings) rather than just fluid intelligence. Even the brightest people have specialized mental talents that help them with some tests but not with others, like people who compete in the Olympic Decathlon, where some competitors will do better in some events and others in other events, the winner being the one with the best aggregate score. General intelligence means that even diverse tests like verbal, spatial, and numerical ones do have some positive intercorrelation with each other–they are not entirely independent of each other. The best tests select problems that correlate best with overall scores. But few if any of the amateur-designed tests have been subjected to careful statistical analysis. Some people did subject my Titan Test to such statistical analysis and found that it had surprisingly good correlations with standard intelligence tests, despite its lack of supervision or time limit.

16. Jacobsen: Other than some of the work mentioned. What other test creators seem reliable in their production of high-IQ tests and societies with serious and legitimate intent? Those who you respect. You have the historical view here – in-depth in information and in time. I don’t.

HoeflinI think Kevin Langdon’s tests are very well made and intelligent, but he tends to focus on math-type problems. Christopher Harding, by contrast, focuses on verbal problems and does poorly in math-type problems. For international comparisons across languages, I guess one would have to use only math-type problems, as I did in my Hoeflin Power Test, which collected the best math-type problems from the three previous tests (Mega, Titan, and Ultra). But English is virtually a universal language these days, so perhaps verbal tests that focus on English or perhaps on Indo-European roots could be used for international tests, except that Indo-European languages constitute only 46% of all languages, by population. I think Chinese will have difficulty becoming culturally dominant internationally because the Chinese language is too difficult and obscure for non-Chinese to mess with.

17. Jacobsen: Were the societies helpful as sounding boards for the Encyclopedia of Categories?

HoeflinI used high-IQ-society members as guinea pigs to develop my intelligence tests, but my work on categories I have pursued entirely independently, except for the precursors I rely on, notably the philosopher Stephen C. Pepper (1891-1972), who taught at the University of California at Berkeley from 1919 to 1958. Oddly enough, in his final book titled Concept and Quality (1967) he used as a central organizing principle for his metaphysics what he called “the purposive act,” of which he said on page 17: “It is the act associated with intelligence”!!! I simply elaborated this concept from 1982 when I first read Concept and Quality onward, elaborating it into a set of thirteen categories by means of which virtually any complete human thought or action, as in a quotation, can be organized. In my introductory chapter, which currently traces the development of my theory from William James last book, A Pluralistic Universe, to the present, I now plan to trace the thirteen categories not just to the Greeks and Hebrews but back to animal life and ultimately back to the Big Bang, breaking the stages of its development into 25 discrete ones including my own contributions toward the end. I may begin with Steven Weinberg’s book The First Three Minutes and end with Paul Davies kindred book, The Last Three Minutes, if I can manage to extract convincing 13-category examples from each of these books.

18. Jacobsen: How was librarian work helpful in the development of a skill set necessary for independent psychometric work and general intelligence test creation?

Hoeflin: It was mostly helpful to me because I could work part-time during the last ten years of my 15 or 16 years as a librarian, which gave me the leisure for independent hobbies, thought, and research.

19. Jacobsen: What have been the demerits of the societies in personal opinion and others’ opinions?

Hoeflin: There tends to be a lot of arrogance to be found among members of the high-IQ societies, so charm is typically not one of their leading virtues. They generally assume that virtually everyone they speak to is stupider than they are.

20. Jacobsen: How can members be more humble, show more humility? Also, what are their leading virtues?

Hoeflin: I think personalities are largely inborn and can’t be changed much. Perhaps there should be sister societies, analogous to college sororities, for women who have an interest in socializing with high-IQ guys for purposes of dating and mating. In the ultra-high-IQ societies, women constitute only about 6% of the total membership. (Parenthetically, if you look at the Wikipedia list of 100 oldest living people, one usually finds about 6 men and 94 women.) In Mensa, the percentage of women typically ranges from 31% to 38%.

21. Jacobsen: How many publications come from these societies? What are the names of the publications and the editors in their history? What ones have been the most voluminous in their output – the specific journal? Why that journal?

Hoeflin: Each society generally has a journal that it tries to publish on a regular basis. Kevin Langdon puts out Noesis, the journal for the Mega Society, about twice per year. I also get journals from Prometheus and Triple Nine and Mensa. The four societies Hernan Chang operates all function entirely online, and I have never seen any of their communications. Even the journals I get I only glance at, never read all the way through. Due to my very slow reading speed, I tend to focus my reading on books that seem worthwhile from which to collect examples for my “Encyclopedia of Categories.”

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.

An Interview with Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin on “The Encyclopedia of Categories,” Family History and Feelings, Upbringing and Giftedness, and Aptitudes (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): USIA Blog (United Sigma Intelligence Association/USIA, formerly United Sigma Korea/USK, founded by HanKyung Lee, M.D. in 2007 as United Sigma Korea.)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020

Interviewer: Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Numbering: Issue 20.A, Idea: Outliers & Outsiders (Part Sixteen)

Place of Publication: Langley, British Columbia, Canada

Title: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Web Domain: http://www.in-sightjournal.com

Individual Publication Date: August 15, 2019

Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019

Name of Publisher: In-Sight Publishing

Frequency: Three Times Per Year

Words: 4,137

ISSN 2369-6885

Abstract 

Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin founded the Prometheus Society and the Mega Society, and created the Mega Test and the Titan Test. He discusses: family geographic, cultural, linguistic, and religious background; depth of known family history; feelings about some distinguished family members in personal history; upbringing for him; discovery and nurturance of giftedness; noteworthy or pivotal moments in the midst of early life; and early aptitude tests.

Keywords: Giftedness, intelligence, IQ, Mega Society, Mega Test, Prometheus Society, Ronald K. Hoeflin, The Encyclopedia of Categories, Titan Test.

An Interview with Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin on “The Encyclopedia of Categories,” Family History and Feelings, Upbringing and Giftedness, and Aptitudes: Founder, Prometheus Society; Founder, Mega Society (Part One)[1],[2],[3]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

*Caption provided to the photo from Dr. Hoeflin in the third footnote.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In due course of this personal and educational comprehensive interview, we will focus, in-depth, on the monumental life work of the (currently) 10-volume The Encyclopedia of Categories – a truly colossal intellectual endeavour. You founded some of the, if not the, most respected general intelligence tests in the history of non-mainstream general intelligence testing: The Mega Test and the Titan Test. Also, you founded the Mega Society in 1982. Another respected product of a distinguished and serious career in the creation of societies for community and dialogue between the profoundly and exceptionally gifted individuals of society. Before coverage of this in the interview, let’s cover some of the family and personal background, I intend this as comprehensive while steering clear of disagreements or political controversies between societies, or clashes between individuals in the history of the high IQ societies – not my territory, not my feuds, not my business. Almost everything at the highest sigmas started with you [Ed. some integral founders in the higher-than-2-sigma range include Christopher Harding and Kevin Langdon], as far as I can tell, I want to cover this history and give it its due attention. What was family background, e.g., geography, culture, language, and religion or lack thereof? 

Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin: I recently wrote a 51-page autobiographical sketch for inclusion in my upcoming multi-volume treatise titled The Encyclopedia of Categories, a 10-volume version of which will probably be available for free as ten email attachments by January of 2020. I was aiming for a 13-volume version, but I don’t think I can complete that length before the end of 2020. Given that my vision is way below 20/20, I liked the irony of publishing this final magnum opus of mine in the year 2020. I can always stretch it to 13 or more volumes in subsequent editions. I will not quote what I say in that autobiographical sketch, although the information provided will be roughly the same. My mother’s ancestors came from the British Isles (England, Scotland, and Ireland) mostly in the 1700s. My mother’s father was a hellfire-and-brimstone Southern Methodist itinerant preacher in the state of Georgia. He’s the only one of my four grandparents I never met. My mother brought me up as a Methodist, but I asked a lot of questions by my mid-teens and became a complete atheist by the age of 19, which I have remained ever since (I’m now 75). I gave my mother Bertrand Russell’s essay “Why I Am Not a Christian” to read aloud to me so we could discuss it. It seemed to convince her to give up religion, which shows unusual flexibility of mind for a person in her 50s. She had previously read such books as The Bible as History and Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus, his doctoral dissertation in theology. My father’s parents came to this country in the late 1890s, his mother from the Zurich region of Switzerland and his father from the Baden region of Germany. His father was a pattern maker, a sort of precision carpentry in which he made moulds for machine parts to be poured from molten metal in a foundry. My father became an electrical engineer, initially working on power lines in the state of Missouri, then becoming a mid-level executive for the main power company in St. Louis, Missouri, doing such things as preparing contracts with hospitals for emergency electrical power generation if the main city-wide power cut off. He had worked his way through college by playing the violin for dance bands, and as an adult he taught ballroom dancing in his own studio as a hobby. My mother was an opera singer. In my autobiography, I list the 17 operas she sang in during her career, usually with leading roles due to the excellence of her voice. My father initially spoke German up to the age of 2, but his parents decided they did not want their daughter doing so, so they started speaking English at home, so she never learned German. My father’s mother became a devoted Christian Scientist and got her husband and two daughters to adopt this religion. My father became an atheist, and when he heard that my brother was thinking of becoming a Methodist minister sent him a copy of Thomas Paine’s book The Age of Reason, which promotes Paine’s deism, in which he accepted a deity and an afterlife but rejected the Bible as a guide, regarding the universe itself as God’s true bible. My brother never read the book but I did, and I told my father I enjoyed the critique of the Bible but did not accept a God or afterlife, and my father said that these two beliefs could readily be discarded, but that Paine should be given credit for his advanced thinking in an era and country that so fiercely rejected atheism. My brother ultimately became a computer programmer for the pension system for employees of the state of California. My sister became a ballet dancer for the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. I list 25 operas she danced in in my autobiography. She went on to teach ballet at an upstate New York college, being honored one year as the college’s most distinguished teacher.

2. Jacobsen: How far back is knowledge of the family history for you?

Hoeflin: I don’t know much beyond what is stated above. My sister has more detailed records. One of my mother’s grandfathers apparently owned over a hundred slaves in the South before the Civil War. My mother was occasionally treated badly in St. Louis due to her Southern accent, but she actually was very kindly toward black people and she once gave a black woman a ride in her car for a mile or so while I moved to the back seat. I do have memories of visits to my mother’s mother in Atlanta, Georgia. She died before my third birthday, but my memories go back much further than is normal with most people. I liked to swing on the swing in my mother’s mother back yard with one of her chickens in my lap. She raised the chickens to sell their eggs, but evidently also killed them for dinner. I am even now very tender-hearted towards animals and would never kill a chicken or cow or what have you. But I still do eat meat out of habit, even though I regard it as not very ethical to do so. If I had a better income I’d arrange to eat just a vegetarian diet, mostly fruits and oatmeal. I loathe cooked green vegetables except in soups.

3. Jacobsen: Some harbour sentiments and feelings based on distinguished family members from centuries or decades ago. Those who died with great achievements or honourable lives in the sense of a well-lived life – whether prominent or not. Any individuals like this for you? Any sentiments or feelings for you?

Hoeflin: A genealogist traced my mother’s ancestors to a close relative of a governor of Virginia. My mother said some of her relatives were distinguished doctors (M.D.s). I have a close friend who lives in Poland now, where she was raised, who is a great-great-great-great granddaughter of Catherine the Great (one of her great-grandmothers was a great-granddaughter of Catherine the Great). She shares a surprising number of characteristics that Catherine had despite the rather distant ancestry: a significant talent for learning languages, a love of art, an imperious attitude, and an embarrassing number of superstitions. I also dated a woman who was an out-of-wedlock daughter of Pablo Picasso, and there again there were striking similarities between the daughter and her father, even though she did not learn from her mother that he was her real father until 1988, some 15 year after his death in 1973. She started out as a virtuoso violinist, but by her 20s became a painter and had works of art in five different museums by the time she learned who her true father was. She also had facial features very much like Picasso’s, even though she was raised in a German family. I am proud that my mother and sister were so gifted in their respective arts (singing and ballet). When I drew up a list of my favourite classical musical pieces for my autobiography, I looked at YouTube to see the actual performances, and it struck me what a lot of amazingly talented people could perform these magnificent pieces of music, and I regret how limited I am in my talents. I can’t even drive a car due to my poor eyesight! It is chiefly or only in these incredible aptitude test scores that I seem to shine way beyond the norm. I read when I was in high school that the average high-school graduate could read 350 words per minute, so I tested myself, and I found that on a few pages of a very easy sci-fi novel I could read only 189 words per minute at top speed, which works out to just 54% as fast as the average high-school graduate. Yet on timed aptitude tests as a high-school sophomore, I reached the 99th percentile in verbal, spatial, and numerical aptitude despite this huge speed deficit. And on the verbal aptitude section of the Graduate Record Exam I reached the top one percent compared to college seniors trying to get into graduate school, an incredible achievement given my dreadful reading speed. As I mention in my autobiographical sketch, if I had to read aloud, even as an adult I read so haltingly that one would assume that I am mentally retarded if one did not know that the cause is poor eyesight, not poor mental ability.

4. Jacobsen: What was upbringing like for you?

Hoeflin: My parents were divorced when I was 5 and my mother went through hours-long hysterical tantrums every 2 or 3 weeks throughout my childhood, which were emotionally traumatic and nightmarish. My father had an affable and suave external demeanour but was very selfish and cruel underneath the smooth facade. My brother pushed me downstairs when I was 3 and I stuck my forehead on the concrete at the bottom, causing a gash that had to be clamped shut by a doctor. It was discovered that I had a detached retina when I was 7 (because I could not read the small print in the back of the second-grade reader that the teacher called on me to read), and I spent my 8th birthday in the hospital for an eye operation, for which my father refused to pay since he did not believe in modern medicine, just healthy living as the cure for everything. So even though he was an engineer, my mother had a more solid grasp of physical reality than he did, as I mentioned to her once. I flunked out of my first and third colleges due in large measure to my visual problems, but I eventually received two bachelor’s degrees, two master’s degrees, and a doctorate after going through a total of eight colleges and universities. So all in all my childhood was rocky and unpleasant. As an adult, I took the personality test in the book Personality Self-Portrait and my most striking score was on a trait called “sensitivity,” on which I got a perfect score of 100%. On the twelve other traits, I scored no higher than 56% on any of them. I never tried sexual relations until the age of 31, and I found that I could never reach a climax through standard intercourse. I had a nervous breakdown after trying group psychotherapy for a few sessions when the group’s criticism of the therapist after he left the room reminded me of my mother’s criticisms of my father, crying for 12 hours straight. When I mentioned this at the next therapy session, one of the other people in the group came up to me afterward and told me he thought I was feeling sorry for myself, despite the fact that my report to the group was very unemotional and matter-of fact, not dramatic. I accordingly gave up group therapy after that session. On the personality test, on the trait called “dramatic”, I actually scored 0%, probably because pretending to be unemotional discourages needling from sadistic people who love to goad a highly sensitive person like me.

5. Jacobsen: When was giftedness discovered for you? Was this encouraged, supported, and nurtured, or not, by the community, friends, school(s), and family?

Hoeflin: At the age of 2 my mother’s mother picked me up when I was running to her back yard upon arriving in Atlanta to grab one of her chickens to swing with it on my lap. At first I ignored her, but then I surmised that she wanted to ask me a question, so I looked at her face, waiting for her question, which never came. Maybe she didn’t realize that my command of the language had improved since my previous visit. She eventually tapped me on the head and told my mother “You don’t have to worry about this one, he’s got plenty upstairs.” My mother told me this story several times over the years, and I finally put two and two together and told my mother I recalled the incident, which shocked her considering how young I had been. I told her that her mother had probably been impressed by my long attention span. My mother then thought that the incident was not as important and mysterious as she has thought, but actually a long attention span at such a young age is probably a good sign of high intelligence. It was not until I was in the fifth grade that I was given aptitude tests and the teacher suddenly gave me eighth-grade reading books and sixth-grade math books. This was in a so-called “sight conservation class” for the visually impaired that I attended in grades 3 through 5. The teacher taught students in grades 1 through 8 in a single classroom because very poor vision is fairly rare even in a city as large as St. Louis, at that time the tenth-largest city in the United States. That gave me plenty of time to explore my own interests, such as geography using the world maps they had on an easel. In grade 8, back in a regular classroom, we were given another set of aptitude tests, and the teacher mentioned to the class that I had achieved a perfect score on a test of reading comprehension, meaning I was already reading at college level. The teacher gave us extra time on the test so I would have time to finish the test. A problem toward the end of the test clued me in on how to solve a problem that had stumped me earlier in the test, so I went back and corrected that previous answer. Then there were those three 99th percentile scores as a high-school sophomore that I’ve already mentioned. When I learned that my reading speed was so slow compared to others, I realized that my true aptitudes (minus the visual handicap) must be well within the top one percent on each of the three tests.

6. Jacobsen: Any noteworthy or pivotal moments in the midst of early life in school, in public, with friends, or with family?

Hoeflin: In the seventh grade I suddenly started creating crossword puzzles and mazes, a harbinger of my later creation of the two tests that appeared in Omni magazine in April 1985 and in April 1990. I also collected lists of fundamental things such as independent countries of the world, the Western Roman emperors, the chemical elements, the planets and their moons, etc., in keeping with my much earlier childhood ambition to know everything. If you can’t know everything, then at least know the basic concepts for important subjects like geography, history, chemistry, astronomy, etc. These lists were a harbinger of my current multi-volume treatise on categories.

7. Jacobsen: Were there early aptitude tests of ability for you? What were the scores and sub-test scores if any? Potentially, this is connected to an earlier question. 

Hoeflin: The only other test I should mention is the Concept Mastery Test. Lewis Terman collected a group of 1,528 California school children in grades 1 through 12 with IQs in the 135 to 200 range. To test their abilities as adults he and his colleagues constructed two 190-problem tests covering mostly vocabulary and general knowledge, which are easy problems to construct but are known to correlate well with general intelligence, the first test (Form A) administered to his group in 1939-1940 and the second one (Form B, latter called Form T) in 1950-52. About 954 members of his group tried the first one and I think 1,024 tried the second test. But Terman made the second test much easier than the first in order to make it easier to compare his group to much less intelligent groups such as Air Force captains. So the Mensa (98th percentile) cut-off would be a raw score of about 78 out of 190 on the first test and about 125 out of 190 on the second. I was editor for the Triple Nine Society (minimum requirement: 99.9 percentile) for a few years starting in 1979, and some members sent me copies of the two CMT tests so I could test TNS members. Since the CMT tests were untimed, I was not handicapped by the speed factor. Compared to Terman’s gifted group I reached the top one percent on both tests. According to Terman’s scaling of Form A, my raw score of 162.5 would be equivalent to an IQ of 169.4 (assuming a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 16 IQ points), where an IQ of 168.3 would be equivalent to the 99.999 percentile or one-in-100,000 in rarity. By comparing adult CMT IQs with childhood Stanford-Binet IQs for Terman’s group, I calculated that my adult 169.4 IQ would be equivalent to a childhood IQ of 192. The one-in-a-million level on the two tests (the 99.9999 percentile) would be about 176 IQ on the CMT and 204 IQ on the Stanford-Binet, respectively.

The Guinness Book of World Records abandoned its “Highest IQ” entry in 1989 because the new editor thought (correctly) that it is impossible to compare people’s IQs successfully at world-record level. The highest childhood IQ I know of was that of Alicia Witt, who had a mental age of 20 at the age of 3. Even if she had been 3 years 11 months old, this would still amount to an IQ of over 500! At the age of 7, she played the super-genius sister of the hero in the 1984 movie Dune. On a normal (Gaussian) curve such an IQ would be impossible since an IQ of 201 or so would be equivalent to a rarity of about one-in-7-billion, the current population of the Earth. But it is well known to psychometricians that childhood IQs using the traditional method of mental age divided by chronological age fail to conform to the normal curve at high IQ levels. The Stanford-Binet hid this embarrassing fact in its score interpretation booklet (which I found a copy of in the main library of the New York Public Library) by not awarding any IQs above 169, leaving the space for higher IQs blank! The CMT avoids the embarrassment of awarding IQs of 500 or more by having a maximum possible IQ on Form A (the harder of the two CMTs) of 181. Leta Speyer and Marilyn vos Savant, both of whom I had dated for a time, had been listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as having world-record IQs of 196 and of 228, respectively, Marilyn having displaced Leta in the 1986 edition. Leta felt that the 228 IQ of Marilyn was fake, but I was aware that these childhood scores could go well beyond 200 IQ because they fail to conform to the normal curve that Francis Galton had hypothesized as the shape of the intelligence curve in his seminal book Hereditary Genius (first edition 1869, second edition 1892). I was unable to contact Alicia Witt to see if she would be interested in joining the Mega Society. I should note that the three key founders of the ultra-high-IQ societies (99.9 percentile or above) were Chris Harding, Kevin Langdon, and myself. Harding founded his first such society in 1974, Langdon in 1978, and myself in 1982. Mensa, the granddaddy of all high-IQ societies with a 98th percentile minimum requirement, was founded in 1945 or 1946 by Roland Berrill and L. L Ware, and Intertel, with a 99th percentile minimum requirement, was founded in 1966 or 1967 by Ralph Haines. I don’t care to quibble about the precise dates that Mensa and Intertel were founded, so I have given two adjacent dates for each. In its article “High IQ Societies” Wikipedia lists just 5 main high-IQ societies: Mensa, Intertel, the Triple Nine Society, the Prometheus Society, and the Mega Society (minimum percentile requirements: 98, 99, 99.9, 99.997, and 99.9999, respectively; or one-in 50, one-in-100, one-in-1,000, one-in-30,000, and one-in-1,000,000; dates founded: roughly 1945, 1966, 1979, 1982, and 1982; founders: Berrill and Ware, Haines, Kevin Langdon, Ronald K. Hoeflin, and Ronald K. Hoeflin, respectively.

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An Interview with Distinguished Professor Duncan Pritchard, FRSE on Epistemology, Skepticism, Wittgenstein, Cognitive Science, Education, and Law (Part Two)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): USIA Blog (United Sigma Intelligence Association/USIA, formerly United Sigma Korea/USK, founded by HanKyung Lee, M.D. in 2007 as United Sigma Korea.)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020

Interviewer: Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Numbering: Issue 22.A, Idea: Outliers & Outsiders (Part Eighteen)

Place of Publication: Langley, British Columbia, Canada

Title: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Web Domain: http://www.in-sightjournal.com

Individual Publication Date: March 8, 2020

Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2020

Name of Publisher: In-Sight Publishing

Frequency: Three Times Per Year

Words: 3,124

ISSN 2369-6885

Abstract

Professor Duncan Pritchard is UC Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. His monographs include Epistemic Luck (Oxford UP, 2005), The Nature and Value of Knowledge (co-authored, Oxford UP, 2010), Epistemological Disjunctivism (Oxford UP, 2012), Epistemic Angst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing (Princeton UP, 2015), and Skepticism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2019). He discusses: epistemology; skepticism; Wittgenstein; cognitive science; philosophy of religion and theology; the decline of some philosophy of religion and theology; philosophy of education; philosophy of law; anti-luck virtue epistemology; and bringing these together at once.

Keywords: Duncan Pritchard, epistemic, epistemology, Irvine, philosophy, pyrrhonian, skepticism, University of California, Wittgenstein.

An Interview with Distinguished Professor Duncan Pritchard, FRSE on Epistemology, Skepticism, Wittgenstein, Cognitive Science, Education, and Law: Distinguished Professor, University of California, Irvine & Director, Graduate Studies, Philosophy, University of California, Irvine (Part Two)[1],[2]*

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Thank, very much, for the charming Part One to the interview. As agreed, we intend this as a long-form interview. I decided parts because some interviews work best in segments if done in this manner. Now, with some of the family and personal narrative brought forward in an entertaining manner, I would like to focus on some of the important issues dealing with the academic work. Your stipulated research interests include “Epistemology; Skepticism; Wittgenstein; Philosophy of Cognitive Science; Philosophy of Religion; Philosophy of Education; Philosophy of Law.” In my time at UCIrvine, I was impressed by the culture, the academic atmosphere, and the area, in general. Your foci, certainly, seem related to one another. So, I agree. It’s an exciting place. Let’s make this an Anthill – so to speak – Part Two or session two for the audience today, the hill or mound will be built in the sequence of the aforementioned topics in the quote above. Once I read more thoroughly through materials by you, I will then utilize these responses to dig more directly into the dirt and find some ants for eating. Many of the listed interests seem straightforward. I will inquire in the order presented. So, epistemology is the study of how we acquire knowledge. It’s a foundational field. When did this interest in epistemology come forward for you?

Professor Duncan Pritchard: It was epistemology that got me into philosophy, if truth be told. I took a course on the subject and found it fascinating, and I soon switched to studying straight philosophy (I had previously been studying English Literature). Although I’ve done work on other areas of philosophy, I keep returning to epistemological questions, as they always seem so fundamental. Indeed, even when I do engage with another area of philosophy, such as the philosophy of mind, it always seems to be the epistemological questions within that domain that interest me. I think epistemological questions are also particularly relevant from a contemporary social perspective too, particularly in this supposedly ‘post-truth’ world we live in. My work on epistemology includes such core topics as the theory of knowledge, radical skepticism, epistemic value, social epistemology, the relationship between knowledge and understanding, the nature of inquiry, and the intellectual virtues. It also includes topics in applied epistemology, such as the epistemology of education, legal epistemology, and some epistemological issues in cognitive science.

2. Jacobsen: Epistemology relates in a direct manner to skepticism. The main skeptical idea: certain knowledge is impossible. In another variation, one should maintain a skeptical attitude about particular claims or all claims, e.g., the efficacy of widespread practices including prayer, or beliefs in supernatural powers or abilities, or beliefs in ghosts, angels and demons (Devil included), and more. What is the strength of skepticism as a philosophical program, especially when taken in a rigorous form within the focus of formal epistemology?

Pritchard: My work on skepticism falls under two main, though overlapping, themes. The core issue is about radical skepticism, and so whether knowledge is possible. I take this puzzle to be a way that we can gain a greater insight on the nature of our epistemic access to the world around us. I argue that the problem of radical skepticism needs to be formulated in a certain fashion if we are to appreciate the challenge that it poses. This then has consequences for the response to radical skepticism that I offer—what I call the biscopic response—which essentially integrates themes from the work of Wittgenstein and the contemporary philosopher John McDowell. (For the details, see my most recent monograph, Epistemic Angst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing (Princeton University Press, 2015)).

I’m also interested in a broader kind of skepticism which is not cast as an argument or a paradox, but rather consists of a certain kind of attitude. This form of skepticism has its roots in the work of the ancient Pyrrhonian skeptics, and it’s influence has been enormous throughout intellectual history. For example, one of my philosophical heroes is the 16th century French philosopher Montaigne, who epitomizes the Pyrrhonian skeptical method in the early modern period. (Hume is another important philosopher from this period who is heavily influenced by Pyrrhonian skepticism, though he is writing much later).

I tried to blend discussion of the debate about radical skepticism with Pyrrhonian skepticism in my latest book, Scepticism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2019), which is written for a general audience. One of the themes of this work is to understand what an intellectually virtuous form of skepticism might look like, and so the book draws on my other writings on the nature of the intellectual virtues. This also enables me to relate the debate about skepticism to broader social concerns that are particularly pressing in the information age that we live in, such as the fact that there is so much misinformation about, and that many influential figures in our society do not seem to care that much about the truth. (See also the online course entitled ‘Skepticism’ that I created to go with the book, available on the Coursera platform: https://www.coursera.org/learn/skepticism. This features contributions from a number of prominent scholars from UC Irvine, across several disciplines).

3. Jacobsen: What makes Wittgenstein an integral thinker for you? Someone worth studying for an epistemologist and skeptic. 

Pritchard: Wittgenstein was, in my opinion, one of the greatest philosophers to have ever lived. His work is full of innovative ideas. Indeed, much of the work of his that we have is contained in unedited notebooks, and yet they are nonetheless full of insightful nuggets—time spent reading (or even re-reading) anything Wittgenstein wrote is never wasted, as there is always a lot to learn.

As an epistemologist, I’m particularly intrigued by his final notebooks, which were published posthumously as On Certainty. These are four notebooks that take us right up to just before he died, and hence they are also interesting from an historical point of view, in addition to their tremendous philosophical importance. In these works Wittgenstein offers a sustained treatment of questions about knowledge, certainty and doubt. In the process he explores a very distinctive account of the structure of rational evaluation, according to which all rational evaluation takes place relative to certain basic convictions that we hold, which are not themselves rationally grounded at all. These are our hinge certainties, as they are known (employing a metaphor that Wittgenstein used). What’s especially intriguing about this proposal is that Wittgenstein clearly thought that embracing this idea is the antidote to radical skepticism, and yet at first glance it can seem like a capitulation to the skeptical challenge, for doesn’t the radical sceptic also maintain that our basic convictions are rationally groundless? There is thus an important philosophical project of explaining how Wittgenstein’s idea—which I have argued he acquired from reading the work of the prominent Catholic thinker, John Henry Newman—could have the anti-skeptical import that he clearly thought it had, and this project has informed a lot of my recent work. Hinge epistemology also has lots of ramifications for other philosophical debates, such as regarding relativism.

4. Jacobsen: The human brain evolved to be good enough. A lot of costs came with this, including biases in forms of thought and in what can possibly be thought. Cognitive science seems to show this in listings of cognitive biases. What brings cognitive science into the philosophical formulation for you?

Pritchard: I’m principally interested in our relationship with technology, and how it alters our cognitive processes. In particular, there’s a prominent movement in cognitive science (extended cognition)—initially driven, incidentally, by philosophers such as Andy Clark—which allows that our cognitive processes can be genuinely extended by technology (such that this isn’t simply our cognitive processes being supplemented or aided by technology, but where the technology becomes a proper part of an extended cognitive process). I find this idea plausible, and have been trying to work out under what conditions, exactly, a cognitive process can become extended in this way. Moreover, this proposal clearly has epistemological ramifications, since it holds out the possibility that some of our knowledge is not attributable to our biological selves and the associated cognitive agency, but is rather due to our extended cognitive agency (i.e., the integrated set of purely biological and extended cognitive processes). There is thus the possibility of (what I have called) extended knowledge.

4. Jacobsen: Religion is a complicated affair. I need two questions for this one, please. First, what is religion to you?

Pritchard: I have a policy of not declaring my own personal thoughts on religion. There are a few reasons for this. One is that I don’t have a straightforward stance to declare anyway. But a more important reason is that I think the whole debate about philosophy of religion has got side-tracked by people explicitly entwining their philosophical stance with their personal stance. The problem is that as philosophers we should be interested in these questions regardless of our personal convictions. One of the reasons why I think philosophy of religion has become such a niche subfield of philosophy is because people imagine that one would only be interested in it if one has prior religious conviction, and that’s simply not the case (or, at least, it ought not to be the case). We should get back to exploring these questions because of their intrinsic philosophical interest.

5. Jacobsen: Second, what makes the philosophy of religion, probably, a more relevant field of study in the modern context than, apparently, declining disciplines including theology or religious studies?

Pritchard: I think it would be a shame if religious studies is indeed a declining discipline (or theology for that matter, which I take to be a sub-division of it, concerned specifically with theistic religion). Religious questions are central to the human condition after all. Moreover, even if one adopts a purely materialistic conception of the world and our place in it, one that has no room for religion, one still needs to have a philosophical grasp of what it means to exclude religion from one’s worldview, and that is itself an issue for philosophy of religion (and thus religious studies). I find it intriguing that many people today take a certain kind of materialistic and scientistic worldview as obvious, and as incorporating no philosophical assumptions, such that it is kind of a ‘default’ rational way of responding to the world. But that’s not very plausible—the philosophical presuppositions are still there, as they are with any worldview, and they need to be made explicit and examined. (I don’t think it’s an accident, for example, that those in the grip of such a worldview also take a very instrumentalist attitude towards political and ethical questions). That’s a job for philosophy, and philosophy of religion has a role to play in such an endeavor.

Inevitably, my own work in philosophy of religion mostly covers epistemological questions, especially the question of whether religious belief can be rationally grounded. In this regard I advance a view that I call quasi-fideism, a thesis which I claim is rooted in the work of John Henry Newman and Wittgenstein.

6. Jacobsen: What is your philosophy of education?

Pritchard: My interest is in the question of what the overarching epistemic goals of education amount to. The view I defend is one on which these goals essentially concern the development of intellectual character, which is the integrated set of a subject’s intellectual virtues. This approach offers an important reorientation of education in the contemporary world, where education is far too often understood in purely instrumental terms, such as simply giving students useful skills or knowledge. Education should have much more ambitious goals, however, which is to help human beings to prosper, and for that they need the intellectual virtues.

7. Jacobsen: What is the philosophy of law? I ask this, too, because an extremely distinguished academic, Professor Elizabeth Loftus, works at UCIrvine.

Pritchard: There are lots of philosophical questions in law, most notably concerning the foundations of law. But as an epistemologist I’m naturally interested in some of the specifically epistemic questions that arise, such as the nature of legal evidence, or what kinds of epistemic bases are relevant for legal judgements about guilt or liability. I’ve also tried to bring my work on luck and risk to bear on legal issues, such as concerning the question of what is an acceptable degree of risk within a just legal system that an innocent person might be found guilty of a crime.

8. Jacobsen: What epistemology to garner knowledge about the world most makes sense within a skepticism framework grounded in the understandings brought forward by the philosophy of Wittgenstein, philosophy of cognitive science, and the philosophy of religion?

Pritchard: I don’t think there is a straightforward answer to your question. I advance a general theory of knowledge (anti-luck virtue epistemology), which incorporates insights from both virtue epistemology and anti-luck/risk epistemology. (For the details, see my co-authored monograph, The Nature and Value of Knowledge, (Oxford University Press, 2010)). I also have an account of how this way of thinking about knowledge should be situated with regard to answers to a range of epistemological questions about such topics as the nature of epistemic value, the relationship between knowledge and understanding, the importance of the intellectual virtues, the nature of inquiry, and so on. I then apply this theory of knowledge to philosophical questions in specific domains like cognitive science and education.

The question of how to understand the nature of knowledge is, however, largely orthogonal to the skeptical question of whether such knowledge is possible (it took me many years to realise this). This in part explains why my response to radical skepticism is distinct from my account of knowledge (though there are some overlaps). As noted above, what I take from Wittgenstein is a certain conception of the structure of reasons that I think is specifically applicable to the question of how to deal with the puzzle posed by radical skepticism. I also advance a view I call epistemological disjunctivism which can explain how we can have a kind of direct epistemic access to the world around us. (For the details, see my monograph, Epistemological Disjunctivism, (Oxford University Press, 2012)). In addition, I think there is a story to be told about skepticism as an attitude, in the manner of Pyrrhonian skepticism, though again that issue is orthogonal to the question of the nature of knowledge (the intellectual virtues do have a bearing here, however).

9. Jacobsen: Do these understandings taken together have potential implications for education and the law?

Pritchard: Yes. As just noted, one needs to have a worked-out epistemology in order to apply it to domains like education and the law. So, for example, my epistemology, with the intellectual virtues at its heart, can explain why developing intellectual character is so important to education. I’ve also applied the anti-luck, or anti-risk, element to my epistemology to the legal case with regard to discussions of legal evidence and legal risk.

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.

An Interview with Distinguished Professor Duncan Pritchard, FRSE on Family, Sense of Self Over Time, Philosophy, and the University of California, Irvine (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): USIA Blog (United Sigma Intelligence Association/USIA, formerly United Sigma Korea/USK, founded by HanKyung Lee, M.D. in 2007 as United Sigma Korea.)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020

Interviewer: Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Interviewer: Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Numbering: Issue 22.A, Idea: Outliers & Outsiders (Part Eighteen)

Place of Publication: Langley, British Columbia, Canada

Title: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Web Domain: http://www.in-sightjournal.com

Individual Publication Date: March 8, 2020

Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2020

Name of Publisher: In-Sight Publishing

Frequency: Three Times Per Year

Words: 2,451

ISSN 2369-6885

Abstract

Professor Duncan Pritchard is UC Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. His monographs include Epistemic Luck (Oxford UP, 2005), The Nature and Value of Knowledge (co-authored, Oxford UP, 2010), Epistemological Disjunctivism (Oxford UP, 2012), Epistemic Angst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing (Princeton UP, 2015), and Skepticism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2019). He discusses: family background; a sense of self extended through time; inability to distinguish influences; lack of influential mentors; the influences of Graham Greene, Patricia Highsmith, JG Ballard, Anthony Burgess, Robert Aikman, and Shusaku Endo; the importance of reading fiction; formal postsecondary education; tasks and responsibilities with becoming a distinguished professor at the University of California, Irvine; provisions of  UCIrvine; and current research. 

Keywords: disjunctivism, Duncan Pritchard, epistemology, Irvine, knowledge, luck, philosophy, skepticism, University of California.

An Interview with Distinguished Professor Duncan Pritchard, FRSE on Family, Sense of Self Over Time, Philosophy, and the University of California, Irvine: Distinguished Professor, University of California, Irvine & Director, Graduate Studies, Philosophy, University of California, Irvine (Part One)[1],[2]*

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is family background or lineage, e.g., surname(s) etymology (etymologies), geography, culture, language, religion/non-religion, political suasion, social outlook, scientific training, and the like?

Professor Duncan Pritchard: There’s nothing remotely interesting in my family background. I know this because some years back a cousin of my father’s traced the Pritchards (an Anglicized contraction of the Welsh term for ‘son of Richard’) back to 1066 (incredible I know, but don’t ask me how he did this; I was too young to know the details). He was disappointed to discover that none of us ever amounted to anything. (I’m not sure what he expected. Perhaps statuette feet in the shifting sands with the inscription: ‘I am Daffyd Pritchard, Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and Despair!’) I must admit that I don’t find it disappointing at all; in fact, I think it’s rather funny. In any case, in the grand scheme of things, no-one ever amounts to anything, so it’s actually quite useful to have a lineage that removes all doubt about this. There’s no religion in the Pritchard family, except of the ‘Church of England’ variety, which is to say no religion at all. (There’s an old joke back in the UK: ‘Are you religious?’ ‘Good God no! We’re C of E.’) There’s no real politics either, except of the apathetic kind—I can’t remember anyone ever offering any sustained political arguments around the dinner table growing up. I’m from working class stock from a place called Wolverhampton, in central England. The area is known as the Black Country, on account of the industry and mining that used to be there, though there’s none of that now—it’s a very deprived, post-industrial urban sprawl. Very depressing, though this is mitigated a little by the fact that Black Country folk are the friendliest you could ever meet (though the local accent is usually regarded as by far the worst in the UK), and that makes going back there bearable. Plus all my family are there. (An odd fact about the Black Country is that people tend not to leave, even though there are zero opportunities there. Whenever I go back the first question anyone asks me is why I left, as if this were mysterious. Jeez, I currently live next to the Pacific Ocean in Southern California—does it really need an explanation?) My father worked his whole life, bar a brief spell in the army straight out of school (as was common in those days), in a local factory; my mother worked as a secretary in a local school. One of my earliest memories is the desire to leave Wolverhampton at the first opportunity. I rank it as one of my greatest achievements that I succeeded.

2. Jacobsen: With all these facets of the larger self, how did these become the familial ecosystem to form identity and a sense of a self extended through time?    

Pritchard: Looking back, I think I have learnt the most from the (fiction) books I’ve read. Certain authors in particular have been particularly influential: Graham Greene, Patricia Highsmith, JG Ballard, Anthony Burgess, Robert Aikman, and Shusaku Endo spring to mind. It’s notable that many of these authors are pretty rootless, as that’s the way I feel too. I think I’m also drawn to writers who have a sense of mystery about the world, who think that there is a place for something beyond the natural. Unusually, I think, there’s both a kind of fideism and a kind of scepticism (Pyrrhonian, I would later discover, on the model of Montaigne) that runs through me like the text you get in a stick of seaside rock (I think it’s called rock candy in the US). It was there before I even knew what it was. I’m not sure how uncommon it is, but I occasionally come across people with the same affliction.

3. Jacobsen: Of those aforementioned influences, what ones seem the most prescient for early formation?  

Pritchard: I’m not confident that I can distinguish between the ones listed in terms of influence.

4. Jacobsen: What adults, mentors, or guardians became, in hindsight, the most influential on you?  

Pritchard: I’m not sure there was anyone, to be honest.

5. Jacobsen: As a young reader, in childhood and adolescence, what authors and books were significant, meaningful, to worldview formation? 

Pritchard: Please see above.

6. Jacobsen: What were pivotal educational – as in, in school or autodidacticism – moments from childhood to young adulthood?  

Pritchard: As I noted above, I think I’ve learnt the most from reading fiction.

7. Jacobsen: For formal postsecondary education, what were the areas of deepest interest? What were some with a passion but not pursued? Why not pursue them?

Pritchard: I stumbled into philosophy (I had originally wanted to be a writer, but that was a bullet dodged, as frankly I’m not talented enough to pursue that), but once I had stumbled upon it I was hooked. I basically realized that it was really ideas that interested me. I was fortunate to get a scholarship to study for my PhD (unusual in the UK, but essential for someone with my background), and thereafter I somehow managed to inveigle my way in academia. I’m very lucky to be able to make a living doing that which I’m especially suited to doing.

8. Jacobsen: As a distinguished professor at the University of California, Irvine, wtasks and responsibilities come with this position?

Pritchard: One thing that is wonderful about UCI is how there is a real ‘can-do’ attitude that permeates through the campus. This has meant that I’ve been able to indulge a lot of my interests here. For example, I have a long-standing concern, both in terms of pedagogy and from a research perspective (e.g., epistemology of education and philosophy of technology), in digital education. Almost as soon as I arrived I was able to run a project to create two interdisciplinary MOOCs (= Massive Open Online Courses), on ‘Skepticism’ and ‘Relativism’ (the latter led by my colleague Annalisa Coliva). I’ve since been given funding to enable me to start a new project that brings the intellectual virtues into the heart of the UCI curriculum as part of a series of online modules that I am helping to develop. This project is a collaboration with colleagues in Education, and will soon result in some cutting-edge research in this regard, which we hope can form the basis for a major external funding bid. I’ve also been encouraged to create a new online masters program devoted to Applied Philosophy, which is an exciting and growing field where UCI has special expertise.

Relatedly, there is a real enthusiasm for innovation in teaching at UCI, which I think is wonderful. I’ve been able to develop new online courses and embed them into the curriculum. It’s been great to see how the students have responded to working with the virtual learning environments that we have created.

In terms of my other commitments at UCI, I run the Philosophy Graduate Program, which like the Department of Philosophy is going from strength-to-strength, and I am the Director of a new research cluster (soon to be a research center) devoted to ‘Knowledge, Technology and Society’. I also have a UCI-wide administrative role devoted to fostering digital education, as part of the Division of Teaching Excellent and Innovation.

9. Jacobsen: We have some relationship with one another through the University of California, Irvine, through the institution without formal contact. What does UC Irvine provide for you?

Pritchard: As noted above, this is a wonderful work environment for someone with my professional interests, both in terms of the great research that takes place here and also the enthusiasm and support for pedagogical innovation. I think it’s also worth mentioning that being at UCI is advantageous in lots of other ways too, such as the beautiful campus, and the amazing location (I’m still not used to the fact that the weather is always beautiful, with the spectacular beaches, and much else besides, so close by).

10. Jacobsen: What are the main areas of research and research questions now?  

Pritchard: I’m currently working on a range of research projects, some of them intersecting in various ways. I have a longstanding interest in scepticism in all its forms, including contemporary radical scepticism and the history of sceptical ideas from the ancients to the early moderns (especially with regard to Pyrrhonian scepticism, both in its original expression in antiquity and its later manifestations, especially the work of Montaigne). The later Wittgenstein is an abiding interest of mine, especially the hinge epistemology that is inspired by his remarks in On Certainty, both with regard to the sceptical problematic and concerning its implications more generally. On the latter front, I’ve developed an account of the rationality of religious belief (quasi-fideism) which draws on hinge epistemology, and also on the work of John Henry Newman, whose philosophical writings are a side-interest of mine. I’ve done a lot of work bringing philosophical attention to the notions of luck and risk, and their applications to a range of debates (e.g., in epistemology, philosophy of law, aesthetics, ethics, and so on). I continue to work on a range of topics in mainstream epistemology, such as theory of knowledge, virtue epistemology, understanding, the nature of inquiry, epistemic value, epistemology of disagreement, social epistemology, and so on. Finally, I also cover some topics in applied epistemology, such as the epistemology of education (e.g., the role of the intellectual virtues in education), epistemology of law (e.g., legal risk, legal evidence), and the epistemology of cognitive science (e.g., the epistemological ramifications of extended cognition).

My last proper monograph was Epistemic Angst; Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Believing, Princeton UP), which came out at the very end of 2015. Last year saw the publication of a short book I wrote on scepticism (Scepticism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford UP). I’m under contract to complete a more advanced book on scepticism with my colleague Annalisa Coliva for Routledge in the near future. After that, I tentatively have three book projects in mind (though I’m not sure what order I will attempt them): a mid-length book articulating the quasi-fideist proposal; a book on luck, risk and the meaning of life (which I’m hoping to pitch at the general educated reader if possible); and a substantial monograph exploring the role of truth of truth in epistemology, with the goal of bringing together a number of central epistemological debates under a common theoretical umbrella (the intellectual virtues, epistemic value, epistemic luck and risk, and the nature of inquiry).

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.

Discussion with Evangelos Katsioulis on Global Problems and Society

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Katsioulis.Com

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/07/25

A talk about personal life, intelligence, high IQ societies, and professional work with Scott Douglas Jacobsen and colleague and friend, Dr. Evangelos Katsioulis

Dr. Evangelos Katsioulis, M.D., M.Sc., M.A., Ph.D., works as a consultant psychiatrist and psychotherapist through online psychotherapy and counseling for Psycall. He earned an M.D., Medical Doctor Diploma (2000), M.Sc., Medical Research Technology (2003), M.A., Philosophy (2012), and Ph.D., Psychopharmacology (2015).

Interview: Dr. Evangelos Katsioulis (Psychiatrist, Psychotherapist)
Interviewer: Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Web Portal: The Good Men Project
Date: 25/07/2017
Location: Pasadena, CA, USA
Language: English
Reference type: Interview / Reportage
External reference: Discussion with Evangelos Katsioulis on Global Problems and Society || (GoodMenProject.com)

Dr. Katsioulis earned the best performance in the Cerebrals international contest (2009), best performance in the Cerebrals NVCP-R international contest (2003), best performance in physics for the national final exams in Greece(1993), and third place in the Maths national contest in Thessaloniki, Greece (1989).

Dr. Katsioulis scored some of the highest intelligence test scores (SD16) on international record with an IQ score of 205on the NVCP-R [Rasch equated raw 49/54] in 2002. Dr. Katsioulis remains a member in over 60 high IQ societies. In addition, he is the president and founder of Anadeixi Academy of Abilities Assessment and World Intelligence Network (WIN), and OLYMPIQ, HELLIQ, CIVIQ, GRIQ, QIQ, IQID, GREEK high IQ societies.

Dr. Katsioulis writes articles, novels, and quotes including screenplays – ELLHNAS.com (2008) and TI PEI (2009). Also, he contributed to the web advertisement-management of NAMANIC.com and the web development of Charing Cross Scheme in Psychiatry (2006), Charing Cross & St Mary’s Membership of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (2006), and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki – School of Medicine – General Biology Laboratory (2012). He lives in Thessaloniki, Macedonia, Greece.

Dr. Evangelos Katsioulis is a Greek friend and colleague through membership on the Advisory Board of In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal. Here is an interview with him, just for you, part 1.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What global problems do you consider most important at the moment? How would you solve them?

Dr. Evangelos Katsioulis: Identity crisis is the main global problem. People lost their identity, their orientation, their life quality standards. They don’t care about who they are, they develop personalities based on the mainstream trends, they play roles and they waste their lives in their attempts to adjust to what some few others expect from them and their lives.

People have neither time nor any intention to realize what life is about. They are born and live to become consistent and excellent workers, minor pieces of a giant puzzle for some few strong people’s entertainment purposes and benefits. Therefore, they don’t care about the quality of their lives, about other lives, about relationships and the society in general, about our children’s future.

It is indeed a pity, however it is a fact. Education could be helpful towards self-realization, awareness, knowledge, mental maturity, overcoming any external restrictions and limitations. As I usually say to my psychotherapy clients, the solution to any problem is to make a stop and one step back.

Jacobsen: Generally, many interacting systems operate in societies: political, economic, religious, corporate, educational, and so on. If you could build and run a society, how would you do it?

Katsioulis: I would say no more than what a great ancestor said 25 centuries ago. Plato suggested an ideal society based on the special abilities of the citizens. The most capable ones should be leading the society functions, the strongest ones should help with their physical powers, a meritocracy should be in place.

We should all contribute to the society well-functioning, if we intend to live in the society and benefit out of it. The definition of one’s prosperity should be defined only in the context of the society prosperity. If we act against our nest, how should this nest be beneficial, protective and supportive for us.

We often see people who have no other than marketing skills or powerful backgrounds to guide societies, decide about millions of people, control people’s future, when many capable and talented others live in the shadow. The most important element in any society is the citizen and people should realize their power.

There is no society without citizens, there are no rules without people to follow them. People can claim their right to live their ideal society.

Jacobsen: If you do consider a general moral, intellectual, spiritual, and emotional progression or development, how do you view development from the basic to most advanced levels at the individual and collective level?

Katsioulis: [This is covered above]

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.

Talk on Biology, Machines, Mind, Reality, and “Miracle” with Dr. Katsioulis

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Katsioulis.Com

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/07/25

A talk about personal life, intelligence, high IQ societies, and professional work with Scott Douglas Jacobsen and colleague and friend, Dr. Evangelos Katsioulis

Dr. Evangelos Katsioulis, M.D., M.Sc., M.A., Ph.D., works as a consultant psychiatrist and psychotherapist through online psychotherapy and counseling for Psycall. He earned an M.D., Medical Doctor Diploma (2000), M.Sc., Medical Research Technology (2003), M.A., Philosophy (2012), and Ph.D., Psychopharmacology (2015).

Interview: Dr. Evangelos Katsioulis (Psychiatrist, Psychotherapist)
Interviewer: Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Web Portal: The Good Men Project
Date: 25/07/2017
Location: Pasadena, CA, USA
Language: English
Reference type: Interview / Reportage
External reference: Talk on Biology, Machines, Mind, Reality, and “Miracle” with Dr. Katsioulis || (GoodMenProject.com)

Dr. Katsioulis earned the best performance in the Cerebrals international contest (2009), best performance in the Cerebrals NVCP-R international contest (2003), best performance in physics for the national final exams in Greece(1993), and third place in the Maths national contest in Thessaloniki, Greece (1989).

Dr. Katsioulis scored some of the highest intelligence test scores (SD16) on international record with an IQ score of 205on the NVCP-R [Rasch equated raw 49/54] in 2002. Dr. Katsioulis remains a member in over 60 high IQ societies. In addition, he is the president and founder of Anadeixi Academy of Abilities Assessment and World Intelligence Network (WIN), and OLYMPIQ, HELLIQ, CIVIQ, GRIQ, QIQ, IQID, GREEK high IQ societies.

Dr. Katsioulis writes articles, novels, and quotes including screenplays – ELLHNAS.com (2008) and TI PEI (2009). Also, he contributed to the web advertisement-management of NAMANIC.com and the web development of Charing Cross Scheme in Psychiatry (2006), Charing Cross & St Mary’s Membership of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (2006), and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki – School of Medicine – General Biology Laboratory (2012). He lives in Thessaloniki, Macedonia, Greece.

Dr. Evangelos Katsioulis is a Greek friend and colleague through membership on the Advisory Board of In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal. Here is an interview with him, just for you, part 1.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Do you think biology and machines will merge? If so, how might this happen? Furthermore, how far would integration occur?

Dr. Evangelos Katsioulis: We do control machines (for now), however we cannot control or overcome biological rules. Machines could substitute some missing, mistaken or dysfunctional biological structures, however we are in no position to support artificial life at least for now.

Having in mind the science progress and knowledge advancement within the last century, we may soon manage to understand much more about life and even copy biology principles creating a kind of life. There are no limits in this integration. From your question, I could assume that we both like science fiction movies.

Jacobsen: What is the ultimate relationship between mind and reality?

Katsioulis: Mind is an advanced personal processor, responsible for the perception, reaction and adjustment in reality. We need mind to live our reality. I suppose we all know what is the condition of a body with a non-functioning mind. Reality is an objective and independent set of conditions, events, happenings, incidents, people, principles, facts. Our mind personalizes this objective information to a subjective representation in us.

Mind function is influenced by factors, such as perceptual ability, reasoning, previous knowledge and experiences, psychological status and mental state. For instance, we have all been present in an event and our understanding of what happened may significantly defer from what anyone else present states. So, we need mind to live our reality and we need reality to use our mind.

Jacobsen: You earned the Genius of the Year Award – Europe in 2013 from PSIQ. In your one-page statement on winning the award, you say, “I believe in the power of human mind and my works contribute to the facilitation of mind expressions, promotion of creativity and enhancement of productivity for a better life quality for everyone.

Maximizing outcomes based on the appreciation and utilization of people’s potentials for the benefits of any individual and humanity in general.” What motivates this passion for improving the lot of others? 

Katsioulis: Life is a continuous claim of happiness and satisfaction. There are plenty of distractions and attractions in life which can mislead and redirect people causing disorientation, targeting fake goals and resulting to low life quality.

I am passionate with people and communication and that is the main reason I chose to be a Psychotherapist, Psychiatrist and a Founder of some communities and networks.

I believe in self-awareness, self-appreciation, self-confidence and self-determination. Offering people an opportunity to look into themselves and grab the chance to evaluate their lives, attitudes and interests, is a challenge for me.

I have undertaken this procedure myself and I offer the exact same to anyone interested. I support people and I believe in their abilities, talents and specialties. Psychologically speaking, I may provide what I would appreciate to have been provided.

Jacobsen: As a final note to your award statement, you state, “Humans are biological beings, life is a mystery, creation is still unknown.

We live a miracle and we can only maximize this miracle’s impact in every single moment of our existence.” What do you mean by “miracle”? Can you elaborate on the maximization of every moment of our existence?

Katsioulis: Allow me to clearly mention that I do not wish to support any specific religion with my statement. I have the feeling that the advanced and complicated structure and function of life, considering even only a single cell, is itself a miracle.

I am using the word ‘miracle’ since mathematicians have proved that it is rather impossible all cell components to accidentally find themselves in the proper position and start functioning as a cell within the total duration of universe existence. So the time elapsed since the creation of universe supports the non-accidental, thus miraculous nature of life.

The specific rational for this miracle, a specific power, God, destiny, even the nature itself, has been a fascinating topic for many other specialists throughout all human history.

The maximization of our life moments is a quality term, used to define appreciation of our time, life satisfaction and happiness. Since we know nothing about the reasons

Since we know nothing about the reasons of our existence, we may solely take advantage of the fact that we are alive and experience the most out of it. In this context, we need to define what makes us excited and content and we should target and claim satisfaction and happiness.

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.

Interview With Stacey Piercey Part Two

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Stuff2Digital

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/02

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: To set some more of the theoretical and empirical groundwork of the extended educational conversation over the coming weeks, I see two streams of misunderstanding about trans individuals. One is simple, relatively benign ignorance; another is deliberate misinformation and disinformation campaigns, through multiple media and social media channels, to scapegoat vulnerable members of society for cultural-political points.  To the simple, relatively benign ignorance, what seems like the source of this? What are the individual and interpersonal consequences for trans-Canadians?

Stacey Piercey: You are right to say that there exist two streams of misunderstanding about transgender individuals. There is ignorance, and that is understandable to a degree, not everyone is aware of what it is like to be transgender. It is a unique experience to the transgender individual. I can relate to you some common themes that I have observed. I can share as much information as humanly possible. If it was easy to explain, I guess there wouldn’t be such a need for advocacy or education.

As you know, this is not something that everyone will encounter. There will always be a lack of knowledge and some ignorance. Just like how I don’t know everything about other groups in society. I do trust that their experience is real, and I can understand to a degree the issues that are faced in other communities by relating my experiences. We are talking about intersectionality, overcoming our differences and the knowledge gained from being able to connect with others. That requires empathy. I learned a while ago to relate to people by addressing common interests and not pointing out differences. I like to connect with others and learn from them. That is my style, to find common ground and solutions were ever possible. I see myself often having conversations about being transgender and answering questions asked of me. People do want to understand and want to help, especially since this has become a relevant social issue.

The other type of ignorance has hurt me, and that is the deliberate misinformation and disinformation campaign that seems to be ongoing. I don’t understand the motives, yet it does exist. Sometimes it is political, sometimes they are exclusionary and sometimes this is outright hate. You may say there is no such thing as bad publicity, but there is, what someone sees in media affects me. I find myself judged unfairly, asked to defend myself or explain myself. I sometimes struggle, as I am seen only as a transgender individual. It is hard when every day all you see are these negative stories. And I know the difference, so I can’t imagine the opinions being formed by others as they watch or read these stories. In Canada, we have moved further along in the conversation when it comes to transgender issues. Our policies are about inclusion and integration. It is no longer about our right to exist. That is happening in other countries, such as the USA and Great Britain right now, as they are having a national conversation. It is a big media machine that has overtaken our story to a degree. I feel like I when back in time watching this unfold, I even forget this is not relevant to me as a Canadian. But it is. You see stories that use outright fear, to pray on these individuals and to make life harder for transgender people in general. We are such a small portion of the population, we have never had privileges, steady jobs, housing or opportunities likes others, and transpeople suffer this incredible onslaught in the media that doesn’t make it easy to live a normal life. My only explanation is that there is money to be made hating transgender people, or there is joy in abusing and oppressing a small minority. It is all beyond me; I was raised to help people, not to hurt them. I honestly have to say I struggle to find good positive stories. And that is wrong.

2. Jacobsen: For the misinformation and disinformation campaigns, what seems like the source for this? What are the individual and interpersonal consequences for trans Canadians?

Piercey: If I was the venture a guess, it is political. For any change to occur for transgender people, we need the support of the media. Good and bad stories bring awareness to the issues. I don’t know if there is a dividing line among groups when it comes to transgender individuals. I have met so many people despite their background, and once they come to know I am transgender, they always say I have a friend, a relative that is transgender. It is a tough life they have, can you help or have any advice. My experience is everyone knows of someone who is transgender in a way. Therefore when it comes to transgender issues, you get every political background creating awareness, some views are extreme, over the top and sensationalized, but it is always someones else’s interpretation of transgender people. In Canada, during our campaign for human rights, we wanted them to come out of the closet, be seen and know it is okay to be transgender. It was time to step forward and say there is a problem that needed to be solved. There were no government statistics; there were no supports, and often these issues were not classified as transgender.

There is another side to this campaign against transgender people, and that is some are not ready for a change in society. They don’t help you; they want you to go away and keep you out of sight. Or worse as I found, I was used, I would work hard, and I ran into empire building. I would have these great ideas and solutions, and others would take credit. I was not respected. Thus not everyone is supportive. In this country, I have seen change occur very shortly through government and businesses. How I am received now is different than it was years ago. The thing is, as a community, we don’t have the population to instill change; we don’t have the experts, we don’t have the representation and are reliant on others to help. We are small in numbers; we are not in control of the conversation, often we are not included, and there is no consensus. I am into policy, and the problem I see, is that this is very expensive to put a gender-neutral washroom in every building, it is expensive to paint a rainbow crosswalk, and it is advanced law, and advanced medicine. Not everybody is ready to deal with this, it is complex, and it needs viable solutions. There is not enough research, legal precedents and medical history to adequately deal with the problems at hand.

3. Jacobsen: Now, those amount to not knowing/being unaware or having imbibed illusory knowledge. To the factual basis of being transgender or a trans person, what best defines a trans individual – or the type of trans individuals – within the modern context? 

Piercey: When I grew up it was simple. It was very binary. You were either a man or a woman. You were born as one gender on the outside and felt like another on the inside. Then you went about the process of transitioning from one gender to another. You go through a transition phase where you are for me as an example, male, not male or female, then female. In my mind that was transgender, it was a term that defined people who transitioned, had their surgeries, did their paperwork and changed their lives from one gender to another.

It isn’t like that anymore; it has become non-binary. We have a third gender concept where people who are gender non conforming that fit into the terminology of transgender. I have heard over 50 classifications for gender. For many there is no desire to seek surgeries, they are okay with who they are, and I would say this new generation or new perspective is what you are seeing more of today. I met fewer people who have the same background or experience as I once did. They are out there, living opposite from the gender they are born in, you don’t notice them because they live stealth.

For me, that shared experience of transitioning, living a point in your life as neither gender, going through that process of change is what makes a transgender person different. It is not about, sexuality, it is about gender and questioning it and living with the knowledge that gender is a social construct. And at the same time, gender it is a big defining point for many individuals. When you remove gender from the individual, what is left but only the person? I see it now as a very open community, that is inclusionary to anyone questioning gender.

4. Jacobsen: How has the definition changed of “trans” or “transgender” over time into the present if at all? How have the misunderstandings changed over time if at all, too?

Piercey: I think in my life the definition of transgender has changed in that has gone from binary to a non-binary. That breaks down any traditional views of gender. I see transgender people as more gender fluid now whereas before it was about going from one gender to another. I am old school in a sense I live female, that is me. But I am floored by some on the new ideas that I have seen. I will be honest I find some of the new terminology and concepts difficult even for me to understand. I am okay with it; I think you should be yourself in this life. I can remember when this was simpler, it was discrete, and not political. That was before the internet and social media. We had support groups. Now it is all over the media; everyone has an opinion on gender. Everyone is sharing what they think. I believe we are watching a gender revolution. And transgender has changed just like society did with technology. I expect what it means to be transgender will continue to follow this evolution. I am all for new ideas, and I believe change is good.

Interestingly enough, the misunderstandings have not changed, for me. It is still the case where I am the representative of everything transgender. If someone sees a transgender story, they think I am like that too. How do you say, I am an individual and not some glorified stereotype.

5. Jacobsen: From your perspective and observations, as you relayed being identified as an elder – an elder trans woman, recently, what is the same in the life-arc of a trans woman from youth to elderhood in those who are trans women and who are not trans?

Piercey: I am an elder, and I understand it is a term of endearment and respect. It is something I have been called personally many times, it is not a cultural thing for the transgender community. For me, it is more about being a survivor. For them, I am a role model, a faux parent, someone who is there with experience and guidance. You see, there are not many people like myself who have transitioned in life and have lived a long time. I have 20 years of experience and stories. A problem that exists is that there is little-recorded history. Whereas I have watched this grow, and I have watched a whole new generation come into the scene. I was always involved with the public, and I am in the transgender community too. People know I am the transgender Liberal, if they got a problem with the government, I will hear it first. Now if you want to know what it was like years ago, you have to ask my friends or me. In that sense I am an elder, I have within me the culture, the history and I can see the changes that have occurred. Another reason is that I have been called an elder is that I have made friends over the years with two spirited people from the indigenous population. That has grounded me, as I know transgender has been around forever, not a mainstream part of society, but it has always been there. And in other cultures, it is very respected. In Newfoundland and the Indigenous community, there is an oral tradition, and I share in these ways. I have all the knowledge of how to navigate the system, as I helped create it and how to transition legally. I can offer great advice and have over the years to many transgender people. And if you want to know something about transgender rights in this world I have one of the better networks, there is to access information. I am a responsible adult, and I like the term elder, and I have taken it too.

6. Jacobsen: Within the same question background, what is different in the life-arc of a trans woman from youth to elderhood compared to someone who is not a trans woman?

Piercey: I am in my forties. Now I have forty plus years of life experience. But that is not what makes me an elder. You can be older than me it doesn’t mean you are an elder in the trans community. Let’s start with the years of transition. Day one, you are transgender, you are brand new to this world. You may know about life, but you don’t know anything about transitioning. These are trans years, I have 20 of those years, and it is that experience that counts. What you may know about life is irrelevant to a degree when you change genders. People have always come to me at this point needing my help. More so in the past, before services were available, I am an expert in the trans community.

The experience is relatively the same for everyone medically speaking. You want and need to be supervised by a doctor. You have to live full time integrating into society for a year. Then you start hormone. Then you go through a second puberty. Living full time is a real test, and taking hormones that is permanent. If you make it this far, following the doctor’s orders and have no complications with the introduction of hormones and no adverse effects to your body you are on your way to transitioning. Hormones scare away a lot of people, and some people can’t take them, especially the male testosterone. It is a weird time, in a transgender person life. It is when they are most vulnerable, and hormones are new, and everything they thought about the other gender is now real to them. It is a learning and growing phases. Eventually, you settle in and find your way. You may have surgery, which again is a significant change, most of my friends are post operation. Therefore, we can relate to each other. Then you wake up one morning and your body after years now matches the image in your mind. You adjust, and you move on with life, everything is normal, gender is not an issue anymore. All is good. Transgender doesn’t solve problems; it is not an escape from your life, it creates tonnes of difficulties. The whole process takes time; it took me probably ten years to regain my confidence and to be good with who I am. It is very similar to a non-transgender woman entering puberty, and the issues faced, it just happens to them when you are younger, and as with them it takes years being a teenager to come into your own.

7. Jacobsen: In terms of the social issues in the lives of trans women, what are the disproportionately negative life outcomes for trans women in different domains of their lives? How does each of these disproportionately negative outcomes play out in concrete terms? 

Piercey: I can easily say, that if I was with hundred people who identify as transgender twenty years ago. Fifty would not be able to change their lives. This door is not open to them. I would say twenty of them would be murdered or commit suicide or incarcerated. It was a big deal to be passible for safety reasons alone. Now I would say of the thirty left, fifteen have entered prostitution for survival, ten are on income assistant, and I would say you have five who are working, transitioned and you will never know they transitioned. That was me, I was lucky, educated, in a relationship, and I knew how to take care of myself. I came out again later in life because I was tired of seeing what happened to the community and its fight for rights and it was overwhelming me trying to help others. I know there are not a lot of transgender people who live long lives after transitioning. I was given seven years by one professional, it was said to me this is a rough life ahead if I do this. Now, I have some friends who have transitioned as long as I have or longer and I know of some individuals older than me too. The truth is we are a science experiment. There aren’t that many people who have done this. I am one of those at the forefront.

8. Jacobsen: What is the process of making the transition? Also, this is a nuanced area. What are the different paths and shades of those paths available to trans women in terms of making the transition in Canada?

Piercey: For me, this was a very regulated medical process to transition. As well, legally it is a real pain in the neck to change all of my documentation. It was not fun; it was hard work. Back in the day, the government would only recognize gender change surgeries, if they occurred within the medical system. Without your surgery, you couldn’t change your identity. These rules do not apply as much anymore. It is good, and it is terrible too, I liked all the supervision and supported I received. I was monitored as if I was part of a military experiment. If anything was wrong with me, I knew right away. It was reassuring. I remember transitioning was the scariest time in my life, going from male to female was a stage that I wanted to go through as fast as I could. It takes times to transition. I wanted to travel, get a good job, or have access to credit, I needed everything to be in order. I thought coming out was hard; I found socializing difficult as I was relearning many skills, and it took me a while. What works for me as a man didn’t necessarily work for me as a woman. I was taken care of, supported and helped to transition completely through the medical system in Canada. I have the best doctors.

Today you can now transition, or be gender non-conforming or gender neutral. It is not so much about taking a pill as it is more about changing your identity to reflect who you are. The rules don’t apply anymore as they once did for me, you can start hormones, and you don’t have to transition fully, you don’t have to have your surgery. A lot of people live gender neutral or some other gender that is not traditional male or female. I can’t imagine how different it is now, there are so many supports, and people are safe to be themselves at a young age, and the social stigma is going away. Part of the transgender experience was in hiding, ashamed and coming out, living underground, and outside of the system. I had to develop social skills, political skills, to fight for my rights, I had to know the law, the medical system and government policy as it was all needed to get by in life. Now, if was 15 and felt like there was something wrong with me. I can tell my doctor, and my teacher and I can transition with help. Whereas for me it took years to find answers, and help and support. In a way, transgender, as I understand it will be extinct.

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.

Leaving God and Monastic Order

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Skeptic Meditations

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/05/14

Monastic life was supposed to be an exalted path to self-realization, spiritual enlightenment, and God. But the pain of feeling “stuck” was greater than my fear of leaving the Order. I had to get out.

Reasons why I left the Order and left God was the focus of my conversation with Scott D. Jacobsen, Editor at Conatus News, and Founder of In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal and In-Sight Publishing.

Our conversation was published on Patheos / Rational Doubt1 blog. With permission from Rational Doubt editor and cofounder of The Clergy Project2, Linda LaScola, my interview with Scott Jacobsen is reposted below.

Scott Jacobsen: You published the story of your personal transition from being part of a monastic order called the Self-Realization Fellowship Monastic Order to not being a part of it. The story is on The Clergy Project website, dated May 27, 2015. You were known as Brahmachari Scott. Now, you’re just Scott (me, too). For those leaving monastic orders, what are important things to keep in mind?

“Scott” creator of Skeptic Meditations: It was a big deal to leave the Self-Realization Monastic Order (the Order or SRF) after 14 years. It was a pivotal decision in life. I joined the Order when I was 24, expecting to be a monk for the rest of my life. I took vows of loyalty, obedience and chastity. All, purportedly, for finding God and self-realization. My justification for being a monk was that purpose. But it was complex.

For reasons as complicated as life can become, I felt out of place. I realized the monastery was not for me. This wasn’t the end, though. In the most important ways, my journey unfolded when I chose to come back to the world.

Before leaving the Order, I spent months acclimating myself to the outside world. It was like dipping toes into cold water before the plunge.

Instead of attending the regularly scheduled monastic classes, I joined a local Toastmasters club. I practiced public speaking. Rather than turn my doubts and fears inward—as I did for decades, I visited an outside psychotherapist, and confided my hopes and fears to her. Before seeing that psychotherapist, I spent years weighing the pros and cons of staying in or leaving the Order. I built an underground support community of trusted current and former monastics, church members and biological family.

At the time, I had a motto:

I’m not moving away from anything. I’m moving towards something.

Something great, I hoped. I did not know, but I felt I was moving towards something great based on a vision. I was developing a plan for a new life. That energized me. The pain of feeling “stuck” was greater than my fear of leaving the Order. I was one of the lucky few. I escaped. When I say “escaped,” I mean physically and psychologically.

Many monks from the Order I lived with still live in the monastery. Many others left. However, some of those who left still psychologically stuck within the Order. The monastery is still with them. It is more important where one resides psychologically rather than physically, in my opinion, speaking now from over a decade of experience. Some people have the privilege to move. Several monks stayed in the Order who were instrumental in helping me become who I am today. For me, leaving the Order was about moving towards, rather than away, from something.

What are some expected difficulties—personal, familial, and professional—in transitioning out of a monastic order?

The difficulties included learning how to reintegrate into society. We had extremely limited access to the outside world. The monks were allowed to watch one movie a month, and even that was censored. The Monks’ Library contained only censored materials: books of saints and yogis, the LA Times newspaper and magazines like National Geographic and Sports Illustrated. Access to the internet, during my tenure, was blocked or filtered and our phone calls were monitored for ‘billing’ purposes. We were charged for long-distance calls, which discouraged outside contact. Censoring of our exposure to the world, we were told, was for our own spiritual development.

Life inside was like a cult.

Upon re-entry into the world, I felt woefully inadequate in practical matters of daily life.

To transition, I learned how to be an adult, and to be assertive, to negotiate and pay my bills. I had to reintegrate into society, rebuild my life, relationships, and start a career. When I left, I had no job, no home and no family to live with. I had to prove to myself that I could make my way in the world. Within two years of leaving, I enrolled in university and graduated with a bachelor’s and a master’s degree while working for a corporation.

I was intrigued by your description of monastic life on The Clergy Project website:

…monks didn’t just sit all-day chanting, praying, and navel-gazing.

Monastery routine consisted of meditation, classes, recreation, 9-to-5 jobs: ministering to a worldwide religious congregation at the Self-Realization Fellowship churches, temples, meditation centers and groups, and spiritual retreats. Each monk received $40 per month cash allowance, room and board, paid medical care, and all-you-could-eat lacto-ovo vegetarian buffet.

You were working in rather extreme conditions. What was running through your mind? What is the insight gained since you left about monastic life, e.g. working conditions?

I was convinced by church doctrine and the spiritual mythologies. They stated that renunciation and self-sacrifice was an exalted path to God, self-realization and spiritual freedom. However, a few years after leaving, I was able to step back and take a stern look at the conditions of the Order.

In the monastery, I lived inside a closed, cult-like system. SRF is a Hindu-inspired meditation group.

The followers—consciously or unconsciously—buy into false premises taught by the church. Once one believes the false premises, it becomes easy to surrender to the work and spiritual routine for hours, days, weeks, months and years. You hand over control to teacher, guru, church or religion.

SRF puts a premium on meditation techniques as the highest way to spiritual development or self-realization.

Examples of some of the premises3 we believed:

  • You are unaware. Meditation is the way to unbroken awareness. If you are not fully aware, keep meditating.
  • You are one with God, but don’t know it. Meditation is the path to God. If you don’t know God, keep meditating.
  • You are asleep and don’t know it. Meditation is the way to wake spiritually. If you are asleep spiritually, keep meditating.

Now, I look back and regret having spent precious years in the pursuit of the Order’s false premises. But, better late than never, I outgrew them.

The Scientific American article was the linchpin to becoming an atheist within your social circle, friends and family. What seems to be the main reason for transitioning out of monastic life?

There’s so many reasons why I left.

Mostly, I needed to change and grow. The Order wasn’t about change or growth. Lord knows, I tried. Ultimately, the church and its leader were about perpetuating the “revealed” teachings of the teachers. I was lucky; I saw through the false premises of the church. I never regretted leaving it.

There are local agnostic, atheist, humanist, and freethinker organizations to provide support for people. How can friends and family give support?

Family and friends play a vital role in supporting people like me who leave extreme religions or cult-like groups.

My family accepted me. I can not think of anything special that family and friends can do that is different that what true friends and family do: laugh, care, and do things together. Naturally, different friends and family serve different needs for us. It was most helpful for me to connect with a variety of people from different cultures or worldviews. Having a good therapist helped, I did not become a burden for friends and loved ones with my issues.

You created Skeptic Meditations as well. It is a general resource on skepticism with a blog. How can people become involved with Skeptic Meditations?

I created Skeptic Meditations to critically examine the supernatural claims of yogis, mystics, and meditators, and to muse and critique my experiences inside the SRF/the Order.

Christians have many resources to question and doubt, if they choose. After coming out of the Order, which is a Hindu-inspired meditation group, I found precious few resources for people like me who had left Christianity and questioned Eastern religion, especially yoga meditation. Skeptic Meditations explores the hidden, sometimes darker, side of yoga, mindfulness, and meditation.

Thank you for your time, Scott.

I’ve enjoyed your questions and chatting with you. Thank you.

After our interview was published, I asked Scott Jacobsen his reasons for founding In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal and In-Sight Publishing. 

Jacobsen: Whether religious leave or irreligious find religion, I want individuals to have the freedom to choose the path for their own lives. Often, danger comes from restriction of belief, conscience, and movement of people caught in unhealthy communities, which are often religious or cultish, or outright cults”.

Scott D. Jacobsen, interviewer and founder of In-Sight, may be contacted at Scott.D.Jacobsen@gmail.com.

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.

Los progresistas tratan a la masculinidad como si se tratase de un problema—Una entrevista a Helen Pluckrose

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Other, Proyecto Karnayna)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/11/22

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Quería entrevistarte porque eres una colega. No he reservado suficiente tiempo para interactuar contigo, ¡así que este es mi día de suerte! Además, mencionado que tienes una visión diferente, potencialmente, al “ethos” general de The Good Men Project. ¿En qué difieren tus puntos de vista, social y políticamente?

Helen Pluckrose: ¡Hola! Me alegro de chatear contigo. No sé hasta qué punto mis puntos de vista difieren de los valores generales de The Good Men Project, pero de vez en cuando he tomado textos que parecen compartir debates que me preocupan del feminismo interseccional.

Por ejemplo, echando un vistazo a los artículos de actualidad en este momento veo “Explicando el privilegio blanco a una persona considerada blanca” y “Confesiones de un varón blanco privilegiado y exconservador”.

Soy escéptica con estos enfoques de justicia social que se centran en los privilegios sistémicos de los grupos dominantes en lugar hacerlo con los prejuicios y discriminaciones que afectan a las minorías. Esto se considera a menudo como una especie de “pecado original” basado en la identidad y se utiliza para perpetuar el problema de raíz del prejuicio y la discriminación: juzgar personas por su sexo, raza o sexualidad en lugar de por sus valores y comportamiento.

Se desplaza la atención a los grupos menos afectados por los prejuicios y se hace referencia a su mayor acceso a derechos y oportunidades como un privilegio injusto en lugar de centrarse en los grupos que están en desventaja y en relaciona esto con una negación de la igualdad básica que necesita ser establecida. Como liberal universalista y humanista, veo más digno centrar la atención y la compasión hacia los que están en desventaja que en la vergüenza y la censura en los que no lo están.

También encuentro que los sistemas de enfoque de privilegios son reduccionistas y requieren muchas generalizaciones y obligan a las personas a clasificarse. Aunque el concepto de interseccionalidad pretende superar dicho reduccionismo y mostrar que la opresión puede ser compleja y multifacética, en la práctica a menudo no lo hace porque se descuida la clase social a menos que vaya acompañada de otra forma de identidad marginada y asume que los hombres son privilegiados sistemáticamente sobre las mujeres de una manera que solo puede ser respaldada viendo a la sociedad a través de una lente ideológica y aplicando mucho el sesgo de confirmación.

Apoyo los esfuerzos para abordar áreas en las que los hombres están en desventaja: el derecho a la integridad genital, normas de custodia desiguales, sentencias desiguales, negligencia en la ayuda a hombres víctimas de violencia y el fracaso al abordar la brecha de género en educación, los sin techo y el suicidio. El activismo por los derechos de los hombres también puede ser altamente tendencioso e ideológico.

Favorezco un enfoque para pensar la ética en el ámbito del género, que sea fuertemente humanista y liberal, y que valora a hombres y mujeres como seres humanos, como iguales y que se enfrentan diferentes desafíos debido a las diferencias biológicas y culturales entre hombres y mujeres.

Jacobsen: ¿Qué mensajes importantes tienes para aquellos de The Good Men Project que no necesariamente cuestionan sus propios puntos de vista políticos y sociales, por alguien que mira desde fuera con algo de objetividad? Me fascina saberlo porque no sé si estoy en el “ajo” por así decirlo.

Pluckrose: No me gustaría generalizar ya que tienes muchos autores y seguramente tienen una variedad de puntos de vista. Reconozco que The Good Men Project no es ni activismo por los derechos de los hombres ni feminismo, sino una exploración por parte de los hombres de la experiencia de ser un hombre y tratar de ser uno bueno en la sociedad del siglo XXI. Creo que el debate libre sobre cómo ser un buen hombre es una gran idea, del mismo modo que lo sería el debate sobre cómo ser una mujer sería porque, aunque lo más importante ser una buena persona, hombres y mujeres no son lo mismo física, cognitiva o psicológicamente y no se enfrentan a los mismos desafíos en la sociedad.

Simplemente espero que el espíritu general sea positivo sobre el valor inherente de los hombres, sus contribuciones a la sociedad y la naturaleza de la masculinidad.

Puede que esté sesgada por mi estrecha relación con el feminismo, pero la experiencia que tengo con los progresistas abordando el tema de la masculinidad o de la hombría en un sentido ético es que muchos la ven como un problema que debe ser reparado o restringido o desintoxicado.

También

Tienden a ver la masculinidad de tal manera que se centran en las relaciones de los hombres con las mujeres en lugar de hacerlo en sus propias necesidades y experiencias masculinas debido a la sensación de que ya han estado centrados en eso durante demasiado tiempo y no estoy segura de que esto sea cierto.

Las exploraciones sobre lo que es ser un hombre bueno se pueden hacer con audacia, de una manera positiva y práctica que no se convierta en la patologización de la masculinidad. No es necesario ignorar las cualidades positivas más típicas de la psicología masculina ni valorarlas por encima de las más típicas de la femenina.

Por supuesto, este no tiene porque ser el caso en absoluto.

También entre los artículos actualmente en tendencia de The Good Men Project están “¿Por qué el estrés provoca más depresión en los hombres que en las mujeres?” y “Nadie puede decirles a mis hijos lo que significa ser un hombre”, que me parecieron centrados en los hombres y positivos.

¿Por qué el estrés causa más depresión en los hombres que en las mujeres?

Los hombres sufren de depresión más que las mujeres, pero ¿por qué no hablamos más de eso? Tal vez tenga algo que ver…

medium.com

Jacobsen: ¿Cuáles son tus temas favoritos para escribir? ¿Puedes vincular algunos ejemplos?

Pluckrose: Académicamente, escribo sobre todo acerca de la escritura religiosa tardía medieval y principios de la modernidad por y para las mujeres. Me interesa la forma en que las mujeres negociaron la autoridad y la autonomía para sí mismas al usar la religión dentro de las sociedades patriarcales que les negaron a ambas.

Mis escritos populares sobre temas contemporáneos han incluido defensa del secularismo y el escepticismo, críticas al postmodernismo y al feminismo interseccional, disecciones de fallos comunes del pensamiento crítico y análisis sobre cómo solucionar los problemas dentro de la izquierda política y así fortalecerla. El hilo conductor que los une es mi interés por la ideología y las formas en que piensa y ha pensado la gente, particularmente en temas de religión y de género.

Jacobsen: Los dos contribuimos a Conatus News. ¿Cuál parece ser tu mensaje central para ti? ¿Por qué empezaste a escribir para ellos? ¿Cómo los encontraste?

Pluckrose: Me gusta Conatus News por su posicionamiento dentro de la esfera política. Con su definición central de “progresista” y su compromiso con el secularismo y los derechos humanos y su oposición a la política posmoderna regresiva e identitaria, está abierta a contribuciones de todos, desde centristas liberales, izquierdistas liberales, izquierdistas libertarios, izquierdistas radicales, socialistas, feministas radicales y centroderechistas con objetivos liberales. Esto le da coherencia y diversidad dentro de un ethosizquierdista y progresista bastante diferente a la izquierda posmoderna culturalmente relativista. Como partidaria liberal de centro izquierda y de la igualdad de género no feminista que favorece una economía mixta, tengo fuertes diferencias con los escritores radicales, tanto feministas como económicos, pero toleramos bien estas diferencias y seguimos encontrando una causa común donde podemos.

Fuera de Conatus News, mis lectores son a menudo centristas y gran parte de lo que escribo se centra en los problemas de la izquierda que quiero solucionar, por lo que es valioso tener una plataforma que atraiga principalmente a los izquierdistas. Encontré Conatus cuando Terry Murray, la escritora feminista, se puso en contacto conmigo para invitarme a la conferencia ‘Defender el progresismo’, por lo cual estoy muy agradecida.

Jacobsen: ¿Algún sentimiento o pensamiento en conclusión basado en la conversación de hoy?

Pluckrose: No, no lo creo. Sin embargo, prestaré más atención a la producción de The Good Men Project.

Jacobsen: Gracias por tu tiempo, Helen.

Pluckrose: Gracias, Scott.

Helen Pluckrose es una investigadora de humanidades que se centra en la escritura religiosa por y para mujeres de la Alta Edad Media y la Edad Moderna. Es crítica con el postmodernismo y el constructivismo cultural que ve dominando en las humanidades actualmente. En Twitter @HPluckrose

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.

Rick Rosner’s theory of Informational Cosmology

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Infinite Cosmology Blog

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2014/12/09

Excerpts form In-Sight’s interview with Rick G. Rosner 
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen, In-Sight, and In-Sight Publishing 2012-2014.

http://in-sightjournal.com/2014/10/08/rick-g-rosner-giga-society-member-mega-society-member-ex-editor-1990-96-and-writer/ 

“There might be some clues to the universe being older than its apparent age. If the universe undergoes repeated multi-billion-year unfoldings, there should be lots of stuff that’s older than the apparent 14-billion-year age of the universe. That stuff won’t necessarily be in our immediate neighborhood – we’re new – we came into being as part of the current unfolding.
Via repeated cycles (not cycles of the entire universe expanding and contracting – not an oscillating universe – more like a rolling boil) of galaxies lighting up and burning out, the dark matter we’re looking for (to explain gravitational anomalies such as the outer rims of galaxies rotating faster than accounted for by the distribution of visible stars) might be a bunch of neutron stars and near-black holes. If anything could survive repeated cycles without being completely ablated away, it would be near-black holes. (Don’t really believe in fully black holes.) A universe which has gone through a zillion cycles might have generated a bunch of burned-out junk (or, in an informational sense, massive settled or solved (for the moment) equations or clumps of correlations or memories or independent processors whose operations the wider universe doesn’t much participate in/isn’t very conscious of) hanging around on the outskirts of galaxies.
A brand-new universe – one that’s unfolded after a single big bang – doesn’t have much opportunity to form a bunch of collapsed matter. But a universe at a rolling boil – that is, a “continuing series of little bangs” universe – would generate lots of junk. It’s that house with all the trashed cars and plumbing fixtures scattered across the front yard.
Just for fun, we could multiply the 14-billion-year apparent age of the universe by the 5 billion lifetime cycles of the human brain. There’s no reason to assume that the universe goes through 500,000 or 5 googol rolling cycles. But anyhow, 5 billion times the apparent age of the universe gives you 70,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. That’s based on not much. What if the expected duration of a self-contained system of information (in terms of rolling cycles) is proportional to the complexity of the system? What if the complexity, like the average distance from the origin of a random walk, is proportional to duration squared? The universe could be really old.
No way the universe unfolds just once. No way it’s only 14 billion years old.”

(43.) 

“In a Big Bang universe, we can see across nearly 14 billion light years. (Microwave background radiation has spent nearly the apparent lifetime of the universe reaching us.) But we’re not looking at a sphere 14 billion light years in radius, because the background radiation comes from a very small, young, recently exploded universe. (There’s a maximum radius we can see as we look across greater distances and farther into the past. Beyond that radius, we’re seeing increasingly smeared-out images of our universe when it was younger and smaller. Of course, every image we see is of a younger universe, but it’s usually only younger by a few billionths of a second – the time light takes to cross a room.)
If we could see to infinity, we wouldn’t see Big Bang space as completely filling three-dimensional space. Looking farther and farther, we’d see the universe getting smaller and smaller (because younger and younger), until it’s a point at T = 0. But that’s just because we’re looking back in time. Though we can’t see it because of the finite speed of light, a Big Bang universe can be a fully three-dimensional surface of a hypersphere.
But I don’t think we live in a Big Bang universe. Due to the nature of an information-space universe, it looks quite a bit like a Big Bang universe, and that it started with a Big Bang is a natural first conclusion to reach, based on general relativity and the Hubble redshift. Note that the idea of the Big Bang – space exploding from an initial point – while seeming indisputably established, is less than 100 years old, and has been the predominant theory of universal structure for less than 50 years.
A Big Bang universe is nearly the same everywhere – the result of a uniform outward expansion. But a universe that doesn’t blow up all at once isn’t the same everywhere. It has an active center and burned-out and collapsed outskirts clustered close to what looks like T = 0. This universe may not be perfectly three-dimensional – space is highly curved and riddled with collapsed stuff near the apparent origin, which may mean that space is effectively less than three-dimensional at great distances.”

(27.)

“I think the universe isn’t inherently unstable in size, with overall stability being a characteristic of an information-based universe. That is, though parts of it can expand and contract, the universe isn’t going to keep flying apart to some cold, thin oblivion or collapse into an infernal dot. (At least without some outside agency acting upon it. The loss or degradation of the physical structure which supports the universe would result in the loss of the information within the universe. As the universe loses information, it would become less well-defined, which might look like a collapse and heating up of the universe – a big bang in reverse.) The scale and size of the universe should be roughly proportional to the amount of information it contains (with local scale and size depending on the information/matter distribution as viewed from each particular neighborhood).”
(30.) 

“In a Big Bang universe, it’s unlikely that there aren’t a bunch of civilizations a million years old and more. Unless something consistently wipes out civilizations, which would be weird. Or civilizations link up or are colonized into super-civilizations extending across swaths of the galaxy. So the question becomes, what does a civilization do for a million years or ten million or a billion? I’d guess that there’s some principle that the number of interesting things to do increases along with the computational power of your brain (or your brain plus your super-computing add-ons). Otherwise, you and your civilization would go nuts from boredom.
In an informational cosmology universe, civilizations could survive for longer than the apparent age of the universe. You could have civilizations tens or hundreds of billions of years old or more. I’m guessing that if this is the case, then such civilizations are very involved in the business of the universe. They have a good idea of the universe’s objectives, and they help with its operations. A big, old, highly organized universe might include highly developed technicians. Kinda doesn’t make sense that it wouldn’t.
I imagine that, among other things, long-lasting civilizations might be able to manipulate quasars to hose down dormant galaxies with neutrinos, awakening those galaxies. (Can also imagine this might be wrong and dumb.) Can’t imagine how a civilization or entity could persist for 100 billion years without going stir-crazy, but it has 100 billion years to figure out fun things to do. (A hundred billion years is the ultimate endless Sunday afternoon.)”
 (73.)

“With regard to time, I think the biggest question is, if the universe is vastly, wildly ancient, with its Big Bang age only an apparent age, why does the universe look so precisely as if it had a Big Bang? The answer must have to do with the nature of information. (Or with me being wrong. But I’m not.) The active center of the universe is where new information is being formed. Protons entering the active center are new – either they’ve been created from neutrons in collapsed matter, or they’ve come from a soup of unstructured primordial matter around T = 0. (I picture space around T = 0 consisting of collapsed galaxies, separated by their Hubble/general relativistic vectors along with a large local gravitational constant, all suspended in a dense primordial soup.)
All the protons are new, though most of them are contextualized by the once-collapsed and now uncollapsing galaxies they’re part of. They all enter the active center from close to T = 0. The protons’ (and electrons’) interactions with each other puff up the space they share in what looks like a Big Bang. Galaxies don’t have to all enter the active center at the same time. Since all galaxies enter from close to T = 0, more recently lit-up galaxies look like they’re located in part of the universe that’s distant from us, so we’re seeing them earlier in their existence.
The proton interactions have to start from around T = 0. They have to create the space they’re in – the active center, which, as galaxies light up, expands like a Big Bang universe. The protons and their galaxies create information through a shared history that plays out in what looks like a Big Bang – they enter at the beginning of apparent time, and space expands around them.
Some conceptual trouble comes when galaxies burn out. They recede from the active center, which means they’re moving backwards in apparent time. I guess this is okay. Observers within a burned-out galaxy would see something like a Big Crunch, I suppose.
The apparent age of the universe could stay roughly the same for a very long time, as newly lit-up galaxies enter from near T = 0 and burned-out galaxies recede back towards T = 0. Or the apparent age can change as more or less business is done in the active center. You could have relatively few galaxies in the active center, with the universe kind of being asleep, or you could have a relative multitude.”
(78.) 

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.

Aubrey De Grey Interview

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): 3 Quarks Daily

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2014/06/11

From In-Sight:

1. How was your youth? How did you come to this point?

Pretty normal, but rather short on social life: I had no brothers or sisters (or indeed any family other than my mother), and I wasn’t particularly outgoing until I was about 15. I was always reasonably high-achieving academically and I immersed myself in that. When I discovered programming, and found I was fairly good at it, I decided to study computer science, and pretty quickly I decided to pursue a career in artificial intelligence research because I felt it was where I could make the most humanitarian difference to the world. At around 30, I started to realise that aging was a criminally neglected problem and that, maybe, I could make even more of a difference there. So I switched fields.

2. Where did you acquire your education? What education do you currently pursue?

I went to school at Harrow, a top UK boarding school, and then university at Cambridge. These days my education comes from my colleagues, via their papers and my interactions at conferences.

More here.

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.

The Cosmology of Annihilation and Creation

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/31

According to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing hereRick 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 HardingJason BettsPaul 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 ControlCrank YankersThe Man ShowThe EmmysThe Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercialDomino’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 AngelesCalifornia 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 – two long-time buddies, guy friends – talk about some co-developed ideas that originated with Rick decades ago as a child prodigy in physics and mathematics, which has a further precedent in Digital Physics with Edward Fredkin.

Scott Douglas JacobsenWhat 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.

JacobsenInterestingly, I’m involved in the quantum mechanics field in an administrative capacity. A colleague of mine, 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 the first/second year. In our first year of operation, our team was 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.

JacobsenHe 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?

JacobsenEssentially, it’s about the cosmology or physics related to the creation and annihilation of particles.

Rosner: Okay.

JacobsenSo, 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.

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.

The Pope Endorses Same-Sex Marriage Blessings

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/27

The Roman Catholic Church, inarguably, has been one of the biggest denouncers of same-sex marriage and preventatives against equal rights for members of the LGBTI community. 

CTV News reported that Catholic priests can now bless same-sex couples. This is in contradistinction to its former policy denying such a practice. While, at the same time, there are formal bans on gay marriage by them. 

“But while the Vatican statement was heralded by some as a step toward breaking down discrimination in the Catholic Church, some LGBTQ+ advocates warned it underscored the church’s idea that gay couples remain inferior to heterosexual partnerships,” CTV News said.

Even with these blessings, Pope Francis’s letter emphasizes the standard definition in Catholic theology of marriage as between one man and one women. Furthermore, the blessings cannot be connected to a “Catholic celebration or religious service and should not be conferred at the same time as a civil union ceremony. Moreover, the blessings cannot use set rituals or even involve the clothing and gestures that belong in a wedding.”

That’s stark. 

The letter stated, “For, those seeking a blessing should not be required to have prior moral perfection… There is no intention to legitimize anything, but rather to open one’s life to God, to ask for his help to live better, and also to invoke the Holy Spirit so that the values of the Gospel may be lived with greater faithfulness.”

How about simply accept homosexuals as legitimate full persons with the capability to be married under the sight of the, by definition, most loving entity ever? Either it doesn’t exist as defined, or it’s something preferred as a power move against a select few in the population. 

Francis DeBernardo of New Ways Ministry supports LGBTQ+ Catholics. He said, “The significance of this news cannot be overstated… It is one thing to formally approve same-gender blessings, which he had already pastorally permitted, but to say that people should not be subjected to ‘an exhaustive moral analysis’ to receive God’s love and mercy is an even more significant step.”

The transition from homosexuality as intrinsically disordered to receiving blessings for same-sex couples is a change. However, one can focus on the pageantry of the symbolic inclusion without the formal institutional and theological inclusion. This may lighten the load on LGBTI couples from the larger Catholic public. However, this remains an open question. 

CTV News has a good research department. They find the pertinent facts. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Vatican in 2021 said, “God cannot bless sin.” This is to say, we have the makings for many internal schisms in the Roman Catholic Church, even the a-evidentiary supreme logicians of the Catholic Church may catch them in reductio ad absurdums deserving of a schism or a massive singular reform on same-sex marriage. 

I, and no doubt many others, find the prancing and dancing around equality more than tiresome. They continue a theocratic tradition from, probably, the Romans. Ironically, a few hereditary First Nations elders who I know called white settlers, “Romans.” That’s a good point. That project of Christian empiricization never ended, in some ways.

Pope Francis removed the official responsible for the 2021 statement. Dad spoke. 

The idea behind the blessings is to increase one’s trust in God, apparently, as a “seed of the Holy Spirit.” The document of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith emphasized, again as early as 2021, that individuals who are in irregular unions remain in a sin state. 

Rev. James Martin, a supporter for the LGBTI Catholics, considered this a change by the current Pope a positive move with the inclusion of the blessing. Luigi Casalina of Messa had mostly the opposite view. 

This is the internal schism dynamics potentially happening within the Roman Catholic Church.

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.

Relational Degrees of Freedom With Rick Rosner

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/27

According to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing hereRick 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 HardingJason BettsPaul 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 ControlCrank YankersThe Man ShowThe EmmysThe Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercialDomino’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 AngelesCalifornia 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 – two long-time buddies, guy friends – talk about some co-developed ideas that originated with Rick decades ago as a child prodigy in physics and mathematics, which has a further precedent in Digital Physics with Edward Fredkin.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What have you been thinking about recently regarding informational cosmology?

Rick Rosner: We were discussing Ed Fredkin and digital physics. I first came across the concept of digital physics around 1972, when a physics professor, 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 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 the arrangement of electrons around a nucleus. These don’t act as gates or bits in a computer. The state of an electron about 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.

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.

Laws govern 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 straightforwardly.

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: gravitation and the electromagnetic force. They have the inverse square, and 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 how every part of the universe is defined. The particles in it are to be found relationally; it may not work exactly as inverse squared, but it’s what’s behind Mach’s principle. However, a lot of physicists will say, “Yeah, but Mach’s principles have never been adequately mathematically integrated.” It’s never been proven or substantiated in any way except 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 as 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 in existence? I take the same perspective on whether it is discrete or a 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. It is similar to 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 set up for discussion on how distributed the information is in a strictly digital universe. All the information is, at least according to my naive understanding of it, strictly localized. Every bit of information is in one place in the hardware.

Jacobsen: So, maybe, it’s relational degrees of freedom; in a sense, the looser the relationship, the more distant and the tighter the 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 where along the continuum between completely local information and completely distributed information, where are different forms of information in the universe? We know that gravity and electromagnetism work according to this inverse square deal, which is fairly strictly geometrical, and that maybe something in with regard to inertia or 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.

Then, there are two questions: how and why the information is distributed. Question two is: is the information in the universe just about the universe itself, or is it also about this other thing being modelled in the universe the same way our minds model the external world? Our mind is a thing that can be itself modelled geometrically, we hope, but it is modelling; the information that we work with in our minds is about a world external to our minds. And we know that our universe has all the information that needs to define itself. So, on the one hand, you have a self-defined universe; on the other hand, you have our minds, which define and model an external reality.

One’s entirely internal; the Universe is defining itself. And one’s entirely external; the mind is modelling external reality, including the brain and mind. 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 modelling that’s external, whether both the mind and the universe do both or not.

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.

Interview with Sandeep Prasad – Executive Director, Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/05/30

Canadian Atheist

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How did you get interested in sexual and reproductive health and rights?

Sandeep Prasad: That is a good question. I grew up in an Indian household. I went to an Anglican school, where the sex-ed that I received was very basic. It was really focused on anatomy and risk. Later in my adolescence, while still in high school, I discovered that I had same-sex attractions.

I came out, myself, as queer. In university, I heavily involved in LGBT organizing on campus during my undergrad. I realized that in that time that I wanted to do professional work related to human rights and sexuality. Of course, law school seemed like a good place to go next after my undergrad. I went to law school in Ottawa. I got involved in this work. The thing is, once you start experiencing and exploring and issue and feel impacted by them, you see the interactions with other issues.

Whether it is same-sex sexuality, abortion rights, and so on, all link to basically the right to bodily autonomy. I was able to work after law school on these issues, luckily. I started my career and have been working globally and domestically, in Canada.

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.

Roslyn Mould, a Pride of African Humanism: Congratulations for being Elected Vice President of Humanists International

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Publisher: In-Sight Publishing

Publisher Founding: September 1, 2014

Location: Fort Langley, Township of Langley, British Columbia, Canada

Journal: African Freethinker

Journal Founding: November 1, 2018

Frequency: TBD

Review Status: Non-Peer-Reviewed

Access: Electronic/Digital & Open Access

Fees: None (Free)

Volume Numbering: 1

Issue Numbering: 1

Web Domain: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com 

Individual Publication Date: December 29, 2023

Issue Publication Date: TBD

Author(s): Isakwisa Amanyisye Lucas Mwakalonge

Author(s) Bio: Lucas is Assistant Editor, African Freethinker/in-sightpublishing.com (Tanzania), a Lawyer, an Advocate of the High Court of Tanzania, a Notary Public Officer and Commissioner for Oaths. Writer on Freedom of Religion or Belief (FoRB). Researcher in Constitutional Law, and Human Rights Law. Also, a Humanist-Freethinker activist in Tanzania. (e-mail: isamwaka01@gmail.com).

Word Count: 607

Image Credit: Isakwisa Amanyisye Lucas Mwakalonge.

Keywords: African Humanism, belief, Christianity, Humanism, Humanists International, Isakwisa Amanyisye Lucas Mwakalonge, Islam, religion, Roslyn Mould, Tanzania, Vice President.

*Please see the footnotes and bibliography after the article.*

Roslyn Mould, a Pride of African Humanism: Congratulations for being Elected Vice President of Humanists International

Dar es Salaam, Tanzania – East Africa.

(WhatsApp +255 766 151395/E-mail: isamwaka01@gmail.com.)

I am too delighted to get to know that you have been elected a vice president of the International Humanists Organization. Roslyn Mould a Ghanaian heroine, a graduate of linguistics and modern languages from University of Ghana, with credible experience in serving various positions in humanism and human rights activism. Former secretary and chair of the young humanists international African working group from 2014 to 2019. Then board member for Humanists International from 2019 to 2023. A member of the Humanists Association of Ghana since it was founded in 2012, she held several positions including president of the group from 2015 to 2019, she has been a coordinator for the West African Humanists Network, an advisory board member for the FoRB leadership network (UK). A board member for the LGBT+ rights Ghana, and President of Accra Atheist.

News of your victory has not only filled me with immense joy but to the joy of the entire community of humanists in Africa and the world. I take this chance to officially congratulate you because you deserved this and wishing you success in serving the organization. You must be highly pleased with this vacancy, as you have unquestionably worked so hard in promoting and defending humanism and human rights in various humanists and human rights organizations especially in Africa, West Africa and Ghana your home country, and finally at this position. Indeed, your commitment and devotion in humanism activism did assist you to be trusted for this position. As a global humasnists community our hope is that with this new opportunity, you will be in another avenue to serve the organization full of integrity, impartiality, transparency, accountability, competence, voluntarism and volunteerism so as to accomplish humanism mission and vision. The global humanists community is very sure that both you, the president and the entire leadership team right there at the office will stand on the shoulders of other previous giants to take the humanists agenda at the highest level especially in countering the new challenges facing humanism at this contemporary world. It is our hope that your leadership team will continue to be in frontline in campaigning on humanists issues, defend humanists and humanism in general, support the humanist movement around the world, promoting freedom of thought and consciousness, freedom of speech, assembly and freedom of expression, democracy, right to privacy, and human rights in general at the international level. It is our hope that you will continue to advocate for the separation of religion and state in the world. Fight for people’s right of choice to alternative belief apart from religion. Promote the application of science and rational reasoning as an alternative way of thinking than religion. Fighting against all kinds of discrimination be it gender based, race, tribe or regarding to faith, and all matters of inequalities on issues of belief. 

I urge fellow humanists in Africa and other humanists worldwide to support this new leadership team of humanists International under president Andrew Copson, and Vice president Roslyn Mould. I, do assure the humanists community globally that they should expect greater achievements under this new leadership since the team has contained hard working personnel with full of commitment and leadership experiences. Therefore, on behalf of humanists and freethinkers in Tanzania, once again we say congratulations, we are happy to work with you, and Africa is supporting you to make sure that humanism is taken to the next level. For real Roslyn Mould, you are the perfect choice, and the passion to do something for humanism and for the humanists International organization has made you a shining star like the black stars of Ghana. Long live Humanists International.

Bibliography

None

Footnotes

None

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.

Dr. Leo Igwe on ‘The Value of Skepticism’ in Africa

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/25

Dr. Leo Igwe holds a B.Phil and an M.A in philosophy from Seat of Wisdom Seminary Owerri and University of Calabar in Nigeria and a doctoral degree in religious studies from the University of Bayreuth in Germany. Igwe founded the Nigerian Humanist Movement (now the Humanist Association of Nigeria) and worked for some years for the International Humanist and Ethical Union (now Humanists International) in the UK and the Center for Inquiry in the US. He has research interest in atheism, religion, and witchcraft, in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Zambia. At the moment, Igwe devotes his time to campaigning for the release of the detained Nigerian Humanist, Mubarak Bala, working to eradicate witch persecution and fostering critical thinking in schools. 

Here we talk about the “The Value of Skepticism” lecture in Africa.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The first skepticism lecture in Africa was done in November of 2023. I’m currently in Odesa about to leave to Mykolaiv in Ukraine in a couple of days. I return on December 6th [Ed. Interview immediately prior to November 29th], so I can continue the work once home and get this published. Why make this first move in Africa? 

Dr. Leo Igwe: We made this move to beat back the tide of superstition and irrationalism sweeping across the continent with devastating effects on the rights and lives of Africans. We started this lecture to make it clear that there is a skeptical Africa with it enlightening potentials and possibilities. For too long, the destructive impacts of these occult and magical beliefs have been ignored or not treated with the urgency that they deserve. And the situation is worsening everyday. So it has become pertinent to respond and speak out against this ugly trend, this dark and vicious wave of unreason…

Jacobsen: The theme is “The Value of Skepticism.” Why choose this broad theme?

Igwe: Because it speaks directly to the problem that we face here. It sets the stage for subsequent lectures and engagements. Because many Africans do not value skepticism, they suffer, and die needlessly. Because many do not value skepticism they believe in and peddle so much nonsense. Because many Africans do not value skepticism they commit atrocities such as ritual attacks and killings, witch persecution and murder. 

So it is important that the first lecture fires the correct salvo, draws attention to the value and importance of skeptical rationality.

Jacobsen: What were some of the ways in which this was organized at the University of Lagos?

Igwe: We reached out to the department of philosophy at the university and the head of the department welcomed the initiative. We also contacted the philosophy students association and the excos were cooperative and helped publicize the event. With the cooperation of the faculty, staff, and students of philosophy, we were able to pull off the event.

Jacobsen: Who were the main participants?

Igwe: The main participants were university staff members and students, mainly philosophy students. There were non university students in attendance, some humanists and skeptics who live in Lagos.

Jacobsen: What was the sub-theme of the lecture by you?

Igwe: My sub theme lecture was “Towards a skeptical awakening on campuses.” I decried the gradual erosion of academic and intellectual freedom, and how this erosion has turned our campuses into a stronghold of dogma, superstition and blind faith. I bemoaned the hijacking of our campuses by religious faiths and the pervasiveness of indoctrination and dogmatization as opposed to education and critical inquiry in schools. I noted the efforts by my organization, the Critical Thinking Social Empowerment Foundation to counteract this insidious trend through the promotion of critical thinking in schools and skepticism on campuses.

Jacobsen: What were some of the reactions and questions from the participants at the lecture?

Igwe: Some of the reactions: The reactions were mixed. Some attendees welcomed the lecture and urged for more to be organized across the city and country. Students from other campuses, the Yaba College of Technology and the Lagos State University proposed to host similar events next year to ensure that the skeptical message got to their campuses. A few attendees noted that the central message of the lecture would unsettle ardent religious believers or offend their sensibilities.

Jacobsen: For teacher training, what is the hope for the ways in which these critical thinking and skepticism lectures can help them instil skepticism in their pupils?

Igwe: There is hope that the critical thinking and skeptical lectures will help instil skeptical rationality because they would make students and pupils to question their assumptions and examine received knowledge, the lectures will enable students to interrogate claims and doctrines. The lectures will make them cultivate the habit of doubt, the courage to critically analyze and inquire, and the willingness to argue and debate issues.

Jacobsen: What are the main primary education reforms needed in Nigeria? Is this true in most African countries?

Igwe: The education reforms include a more student and learner approach to teaching and learning in schools, more of student as the questioner, than teacher as the questioner approach, an active learning culture that emphasizes critical thinking and problem generation and creative/innovative thinking and problem solving….a teaching and learning culture where asking questions not providing answers is the test of knowledge and intelligence.

Jacobsen: Congratulations on the recent achievement, I hope we will see more.

Igwe: Thanks, yes there is more to come. We plan to take the message to other parts of Nigeria and Africa..We are already making contacts with skeptics in Ghana, Cameroon, Malawi so that we can extend the skeptical lectures and evangelism to these places and get the message of doubt, rational inquiry and critical examination of claims and beliefs to different parts of Africa. Look, African enlightenment cannot be realized without a robust culture of skepticism. African renaissance cannot be achieved without a skeptical awakening of Africans.

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.

Technically, International Community Recognizes ‘State of Palestine’

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/24

Canada seems to retain a high standard of perception of the maintenance of both international human rights and international law. Yet, we appear weak on the question of Palestine. Technically, the international community recognizes Palestine as a State. Canada should too. 

Abridged for brevity. Please see other reliable sources for comprehensive coverage.

Since the British Mandate period, 1917 to 1947, the former Ottoman territories were within the League of Nations under the administration of the United Kingdom in 1922. All territories became independent States with the exception of Palestine. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 stated support for a national home of Jewish people in Palestine. 

Large numbers of Jewish people immigrated, primarily from Eastern Europe, and even more in the 1930s. Arabs made demands for independence and resisted immigration. Rebellion occurred in 1937. Both sides committed violence. Circa 1947, the United Kingdom handed the Palestine issue to the United Nations. 

It started there, the modern discussion. The United Nations proposed ending the Mandate and splitting Palestine into two States: Arab and Jewish. One called itself Israel. With the 1948 war of neighbouring Arab States, half of the Palestinian Arab population was expelled or forced to flee.

A 1967 war saw Israel occupy the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. An estimated 500,000 Palestinians had an exodus, again. Security Council Resolution 242 (1967) gave principles for a lasting peace and justice. 

For instance, the withdrawal of Israel from occupied territories, just settlement of refugees, and termination of all claims of belligerency. The 1973 war resulted in Security Council Resolution 338. It called for peace negotiations. 

The UN General Assembly reaffirmed the inalienable rights of self-determination, national independence, sovereignty, and to return, of Palestinian peoples in 1974. 1975 saw the establishment of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People. 

The Palestinian Liberation Organization was conferred observer status in the UN General Assembly and UN conferences. 

Israel invaded Lebanon in June of 1982. The purpose: eliminate the PLO. A cease-fire was agreed. September 1983 saw the adoption of principles at the International Conference on the Question of Palestine. 

These were: opposing Israeli settlements, opposing actions to change Jerusalem’s status, the right of regional States to exist securely in recognized borders, and the attainment of inalienable rights of Palestinian peoples. 

1987 saw the first intifada or uprising against Israeli occupation. 1988 saw the Palestine National Council proclaim the establishment of the State of Palestine. 1991 saw the Peace Conference. Peace for Israel with Arab States and Palestinians through Security Council resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973). 

These and other negotiations resulted in the recognition of the PLO and the Government of Israel, and the signing of the Oslo Accord (1993) and some agreements. These led to the partial withdrawal of Israeli forces, elections to the Palestinian Council and the Presidency of the Palestinian Authority, partial release of prisoners, and the creation of administration in areas of Palestinian self-rule. 

1993 deferred some issues to negotiations on permanent status. In 2000, Camp David hosted these. 2001 in Taba. These were inconclusive by the end. In 2000, Ariel Sharon of the Likud visiting Al-Haram Al-Sharif or the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, saw the second intifada. 

Israel built a West Bank separate wall in Occupied Palestinian Territory, illegally according to the International Court of Justice. 2002 saw the affirmation of a two-State solution by the Security Council. 2002 was when the Arab League made the Arab Peace Initiative. The United States, European Union, Russia, and the UN (the Quartet), gave a Road Map in 2003 for a two-State solution. 

Israel removed settlers and troops from Gaza, still controlling borders, air space, and sea shore. Palestine held legislative elections in 2006. The Quartet set conditions for Palestinian assistance. Namely: non-violence, Israel’s recognition, and accepting prior agreements. 

Hamas staged an armed takeover of Gaza in 2007. A blockade was imposed by Israel. A permanent status agreement was not achieved in the Annapolis process (2007-2008). Rocket fire and air strikes in 2008 led to operation “Cast Lead” in Gaza. 

Violations of international law made the Goldstone report, while the UN Security Council adopted resolution 1860. Israeli settlement moratorium ended during negotiations in 2010, breaking them down. 

President Mahmoud Abbas submitted Palestine’s application for UN membership in 2011. UNESCO admitted Palestine as a Member. Israeli-Palestinian talks were held in Amman in 2012.

November 29, 2012, was the crucial date. The United Nations granted Palestine non-member observer State status. The United Nations in “History of the Question of Palestine” concludes:

The General Assembly proclaimed 2014 an International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. A new round of negotiations begun in 2013 was suspended by Israel in April 2014 following the announcement of a Palestinian national consensus Government. Another round of fighting between Israel and Gaza took place in July-August 2014. In 2016 the Security Council adopted resolution 2334 on settlements. In 2017, the US Administration announced recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and subsequently, the US and certain other embassies were moved to Jerusalem. In 2020, the US mediated agreements to normalize relations between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco (“Abraham Accords”). In 2022, the UN General Assembly requested the ICJ to render an Advisory Opinion on the legality of the prolonged Israeli occupation that started in 1967, and the implications for Member States. 2023 saw another round of fighting between Israel and Hamas. On 15 May 2023, following a request by the General Assembly, the UN commemorated the 75th anniversary of the Nakba for the first time. In October of 2023, another escalation between Gaza and Israel began. Please see the latest updates on the Israe-Gaza crisis.

It’s significant with this status as a State, though “non-member observer State” status. If you ask, is it, though? You can question. Is the Vatican significant? One can say, “Yes,” easily. You can disagree on Vatican morals. You can be non-Catholic. Yet, you must agree. The Vatican matters internationally. 

Does it have status at the UN? Yes. In fact, it holds “non-member observer State” status. Only Palestine and the Vatican hold this category of State status. To deny legitimacy of Palestinian statehood, at the UN, is to deny the Vatican status, similarly, who would agree? Not many.

The details of the November 29, 2012 vote matter too. 41 abstentions, 9 against, and 138 for, i.e., overwhelming approval. The international community stands with Palestinian statehood. Who were the 9 against? Canada, Czech Republic, Federated States of Micronesia, Israel, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Panama, and the United States, that’s it. 

Ignoring the others, Canada should align with international opinion on this one. As a call to Prime Minister Trudeau, we should recognize the State of Palestine, vis-a-vis international opinion. The global community of States spoke in 2012. Canada made a moral mistake. 

In a similar manner, we should speak out against anti-Muslim violence and anti-Semitism. We should recognize the State of Palestine as well as the State of Israel. It’s been over a decade of self-evident statehood to the vast majority of the world at the global representative body of the nations of the world, of Member States: the United Nations.

It’s simple, not complex. Only the derivatives remain complex.

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.

Joseph Brean Has a Good Point

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/24

Joseph Brean wrote a great article in the National Post on the baffling decline in formal religiosity – “church attendance and other formal religious observances” – and the persistence of spiritual or religious belief. He wrote this way back in April. 

So, why?

Why are Canadians intent on the continuation of spirituality in spite of the massive decline in religious belief in this nation? Brean points to Jack Jedwab’s research outlining a detachment from the god concept and a religious affiliation. 

No text, no religious building, no religious service, no title, a simple belief in a deity or a theity. No pretext of behavioural or ideational follow-up. It’s the complete opposite of atheism. A simple theism decoupled from religion. 

That’s fascinating. 

Brean said, “A new poll by Leger for the Association for Canadian Studies shows about half of Canadians believe in God, a measure that has been roughly stable for the last few years.”

Canadians believe in God. They do not believe in religion so much, especially compared to before. Skepticism about God is less certain. Skepticism about organized religion is more clear. 

“It seems contradictory. Jedwab says it raises deep questions about the nature of religion and whether it is best understood personally or communally,” Brean stated, “This ‘decoupling’ shows up everywhere from the strictest Abrahamic monotheisms to more mystical and polytheistic faiths. Respondents to the poll, conducted in February and March, included Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jews, Muslims and Christians both Catholic and Protestant.”

This differentiation between religion and god adherence is more common among native Canadians (not indigenous per se, but multi-generation citizens). New immigrants to Canada are more probable to accept the idea of a God. Immigrants strongly agree at 49.3% and non-immigrants sit at 27.7% strongly agree. 

So, the only new blood into the religious demographics, truly, come from the immigrant populations. That’s the reality here. Brean showcases one of the more intrigues from the demographic data on god belief and religion. 

“Nearly two-thirds of Catholic immigrants strongly agree there is a God compared to barely one third of non-immigrant Catholics. The Protestant numbers show a similar gap. That is in contrast to Muslims, for whom there is no such gap, and near universal strong agreement that there is a God,” Brean said. 

The god concept is important to Muslims in Canada. The distinction between religious group and the god concept is an instructive parsing. Something shows up. Sikhs in Canada have a strong attachment to the religious group. Canadian Christians are dominant, but luke warm on the god concept and on religious group attachment. 

It’s fascinating. 

British Columbia and Quebec are two secular titans in Canada. Where, religious belief and the god concept are signifiers of something out of place. By age cohort, the data becomes interesting once again. 

“Looking at the age progression, the ‘strongly agree that God exists’ numbers start out strong among the 18-24 age cohort with 36.3 per cent, but they dip to 22.4 per cent among people in the 25-34 age group, then climb back into the 30s,” Brean said, “At age 75 plus, the ‘strongly agrees’ are at their highest proportion at 39.1 per cent, more than 20 points higher than ‘somewhat agree.’”

Thanks, Joe, good article.

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.

Dr. Roman Nekoliak on International Human Rights and Ukraine

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/23

Dr. Roman Nekoliak’s biography states: “Roman Nekoliak (° 1992) ambitious young professional with a demonstrated history of working in the civic&social organization in Ukraine and Belgium.  A Law graduate from Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University (BA, MA Kharkiv). Afterward, he continues to study law at V. M. Koretsky Institute of State and Law in Kyiv, where he achieved his Ph.D. in 2018. Furthermore, he graduated from LLM program in International and European Law, Gent University mainly focused on IHL, EU institutional law and human rights. European Solidarity Corps volunteer in Ieper, “In Flanders Fields Museum” Research Center at West Flanders (2017) . Former Council of Europe DGI trainee in Strasbourg (2020). Roman became professionally involved as a human rights defender at the Center for Civil Liberties (CCL) in 2021, where he has since been responsible for international relations, advocacy and communications. He speaks Dutch, English, Russian and Ukrainian. Interested in modern politics, history, cultural diplomacy, World War I, philosophy and the history of European unification. My hobby is the history of the First World War, literature, theatre, philosophy, jogging and badminton. Currently, I am reading Hemingway The Sun Also Rises novel, the plot is set in 1920 Paris.” 

Here we talk about international human rights and the Russo-Ukrainian war.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The Center for Civil Liberties won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, which, as far as I know, is a first for a Ukrainian human rights organization. I only became aware of the Center for Civil Liberties in August of this year when meeting Oleksandra Romantsova, the Executive Director. This started a longer-term commitment to human rights work in Ukraine. I returned from visiting several cities in Ukraine over two weeks from late November to early December a couple of days ago. I learned a lot and began to comprehend the nuances of war in a state, especially as one is closer to the frontline cities being shelled versus a farther city with more security, distance, and defenses in place against missile and drone attacks, for example. How did you become interested in international human rights, originally?

Dr. Roman Nekoliak: I became a law student through an interest in 20th-century conflicts. In great detail, I read and studied the events of both World Wars. I believe that to prevent the deterioration of international order, we need to learn the grievances of our past.

In the course of the 20th century, failing twice to liberate humanity from the horrors of world war and witnessing the most terrifying, inhuman events (Holocaust), the international community put a great effort into the development of International humanitarian law. The adoption of the Geneva Conventions (GC) in 1949 brought radical changes – the convention straightened the applicability of IHL by regulating IAC (international armed conflict) more thoughtfully and paying more attention to NIAC (non-international armed conflict). Nowadays, the following controversial question arises: Can IHL in its current state, address the instruments of modern warfare and the instruments of hybrid war alleged to Russian Federation?

While the Geneva Convention exists to anticipate and prevent human rights violations via the promotion of IHL compliance, the Rome Statute adoption on the 17th of July 1998 enables criminal prosecution. The ICC began operations on the 1st of July 2002, upon the entry into force of the Rome Statute, a multilateral treaty.

The Rome Statute grants the ICC jurisdiction over our main crimes: The crime of genocidecrimes against humanitywar crimes and the crime of aggression. Yet, neither Ukraine nor Russia is a state party to the ICC Rome Statute. However, Ukraine lodged two declarations (first from 21.11.2013 to 22.02.2014, second from 20 February onwards) with the Court, thereby accepting ICC jurisdiction over the alleged crimes committed on the territory of Ukraine. Russia on the other hand withdrew its signature from the Rome Statute (2016).

Correct law application is crucial for thousands of soldiers and non-combatants from both sides of barricades. For instance, the application of the Geneva Convention III, among others, defines guarantees and standards of imprisonment assigned to prisoners. Rebels, on the other hand, enjoy minimal standards of imprisonment guaranteed by international customary law, international human rights law and national criminal legislation. Such issues as combatant status, use of deadly force, status-based targeting, humanitarian assistance, restrictions on weapons and methods of warfare are those significant implications of conflict classification.

My aim is to commit my life best to peace work, research, reconciliation and humanitarian activity. Thus, I consider the Center for Civil Liberties as a perfect place for my professional and personal development. I am willing to continue my work in public international law, international relations, peaceful settlement of disputes field.

Jacobsen: What was the early story of human rights abuse in 2014/15 by the Russian Federation against Ukraine? 

Nekoliak: CCL began documenting war crimes independently starting in 2014 with the War in Donbas. The organization has also been actively working towards the release of Ukrainian political prisoners and civilian hostages illegally detained in Russia and in temporarily occupied Crimea. CCL conducted extensive public campaigns to engage the European community and help release them. The campaigns included #saveOlegSentsov, which eventually led to the release of Crimean filmmaker and activist Oleg Sentsov in a prisoner swap, and the #PrisonersVoice project, which contributed to numerous releases.

These crimes are massive and systemic. Over 100 torture chambers have been identified in 8 regions of Ukraine. Ukrainian detainees are massively tortured, deprived of legal aid and the possibility of contacting their relatives.

Jacobsen: What is the story or narrative, typically, given around annexation and invasion – pre-full scale – from the Russian Federation and from Western countries? Are there any points at which the standard narratives by both parties are wrong – any premises in their arguments?

Nekoliak: Russia has violated the main principle of international law, violating Article 2.4 of the Charter of the United Nation, where in the democratic modern world aggression or attack against a sovereign independent state is unthinkable. The mistake made by the Russian government on 24th of February 2022 created a direct line where the democratic world ends. The world order cannot allow states to act as they think suited best, legal rules and norms establish common coexistence and development, and going against those legal norms should be condemned.

In the past sometimes politicians of the West underestimated Russia and its political regime. It was convenient to trade with Russia since dictators always deliver gas and oil and everyone turn a blind eye on Russian 2014 invasion.

The present war is a chance for a world community to get together and make the right choices. To stop its over-dependence on authoritarian state natural resources. To stop “business as usual” and put human rights first.

Ukraine is a part of a democratic world, a part of the West. Today Ukraine was attacked, tomorrow Finland, Poland, Estonia? The attack on Ukraine is an attack on democratic values and the UN system as a whole.

It is Russian nihilism, cynicism and neo-imperial thinking. But we believe that “even war has rules” (ICRC slogan) and that the UN system is a valuable tool of peace and security in the world, even if it partly fails Ukraine in 2022.

What worries me is a public discourse in the EU that depict Ukraine as a part of the “Russian sphere of interest”.

Here you can see a table from the State Centre for Political Education, Baden-Wurttemberg. It’s only available in German. It provides a great overview of arguments in the debate about whether Ukraine should join the EU. Some “contra” arguments are “chauvinistic” and have clear pro-Russian connotations.

For ex. “Due to its history, Ukraine belongs more to the Russian than to the European area. Together with Belarus, Ukraine belonged to the former territory of “Kyivan Rus”. It’s like saying.

“For years, East Prussia and Baltics were ruled by Baltic Germans, Hanseatic League and Teutonic Order; therefore, it belong to Germany”… A lot has changed since Middle Ages, and we know how it ended in 1945.

Such arguments are from the cold war, from the 1950s. We want to challenge some Europeans fear of Ukraine entering the EU. Accession will make both nations stronger, more efficient and ready for the challenges of the future *(here we speak not only about the present war, but climate change and hunger).

Depicting Ukraine as a “Russian sphere of interest” is wrong.

Remember what the Sykes-Picot Agreement did for the Middle East. *(A 1916 secret treaty between the United Kingdom and France, with assent from the Russian Empire and the Kingdom of Italy, to define their mutually agreed spheres of influence and control in an eventual partition of the Ottoman Empire.)

Remember how colonial power drew the map of Africa *(Berlin Conference of 1884–1885) and how it ended – decades of civil war and political turmoil.

Remember what the Munich Agreement 1938, by Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy did to Czechoslovakia and how it ended *(Second World War).

There is no place for secret agreements, neo-colonialism, the sphere of interest and dictators drawing borders.

Ukraine has been showing interest in joining the EU and NATO for a long time already, it took two revolutions and a war to start for some states to finally see that there are no so-called “brother nations”, and that Ukraine has completely different values which align with values of the democratic world, and it is shown through the resistance of Ukrainians from the very begging of war. As a result, public opinion is seen through the mass media with slogans such as “Ukraine protects the democratic world”. The international community starts to understand that war in Ukraine is not limited to Ukrainian territorial borders; the attack made by the Russian Federation is not only against Ukraine but also against Europe.

Russia taught impunity to its soldiers, and now for them, war crimes are a method of waging war. If we don’t stop them, they will go as far as they can get.

The support is derived from a fact of the collective unity of democratic countries to repel Russian aggression and to stop the brutality of mass human rights violations.

If we do not want to live in a world where the rules are determined by whoever has the most powerful military potential, rather than the rule of law, this state of affairs must change.

It is in the interest of the international community (not only Ukraine) to uncover war crimes and prosecute responsible ones. The war in Ukraine from the very begging received support and the international society understands the necessity to reinforce international law. Especially in the context of war, which is significantly more difficult. Reestablishing justice, bringing responsible to the court, and reestablishing basic human rights will allow the international community to see that despite how difficult it is, international law works and crime is not left unpunished. This will allow the establishment of a concert base for further development and cooperation.

Jacobsen: How did the human rights abuse evolve leading into the full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022?

Nekoliak: The Putin crimes become possible because after SWW the totalitarian Soviet regime was never held accountable. Stalin’s crimes were not judged nor properly understood by the Russian population. And now Putin claims that Stalin was “an effective manager.” If Putin’s legacy is not condemned, the World will become a darker place. 

We must break this circle of impunity. Not only for Ukrainians and not only for the other people who suffered from Russian brutality. But for the people who can become the next target of Russian aggression.

It is crucial to support Ukraine’s quest for victory. The attainment of victory in Ukraine, on its own terms, is not only imperative for the Ukrainian people and Europe but also for the entire world. The war, in addition to its devastating physical and emotional consequences, constitutes a direct assault on Ukraine’s domestic endeavors to establish a strong democracy. Anything less than a Ukrainian victory would likely result in further Russian aggression in the region, potentially discouraging or undermining democratization efforts in neighboring countries due to fears of escalating coercive actions by the Kremlin and additional malicious interference. Moreover, it could embolden other authoritarian leaders to engage in more audacious endeavors aimed at undermining democracy and human rights.

Jacobsen: What have been the most significant points of setback and progress on sustaining human rights and international law in the Russo-Ukrainian war?

Nekoliak: Currently, the conduct of hostilities is brutalized; soldiers are denied a quarter, POWs are tortured, and civilian Ukrainians are held captive by the Russian side. Russia is the de facto authority of 20% of Ukrainian territory, creating a grey zone of torture chambers and lawlessness. We find ourselves in a dark place. The justice is far away. The justice for victims of war crimes should not depend on the outcome of actual fighting.

We still look at the world through the lens of the Nuremberg Trials, where Nazi war criminals were tried only after the Nazi regime had collapsed. But we are living in a new reality now. Justice must not wait. A core international crimes must be investigated. We must establish a special tribunal now and hold Putin, Lukashenko and other war criminals accountable. Justice should not also depend on resilience of authoritarian regimes.

As the war enters its second year in Ukraine 2/3 of the world’s population lives under autocratic regimes. It is right to state that the Russian victory in Ukraine will deteriorate the situation further. While Ukrainian will establish a better track for the whole region.

Should Russia emerge as the victor in Ukraine, it would push the world towards a gloomy future where force governs and borders are established through violence, possibly escalating the next, even more devastating, confrontation in Europe. Moreover, it would heighten the prevailing perception that Western influence and the universal principles it upholds are experiencing a significant decline.

Conversely, if Ukraine triumphs, it would inspire optimism that a democratic sovereign state can resist its significantly larger authoritarian neighbor without succumbing. This would be a world where the determination and bravery of President Zelensky and the Ukrainian populace are celebrated. Help Ukraine emerge victorious.

Jacobsen: What are have been the most common forms of human rights abuse against Ukrainians in this war by Russia?

Nekoliak: Since the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Russia has committed numerous war crimes and other violations of IHL, population displacement, illegal referendum and caused massive loss of life (while UN have 10 000 confirmed cases the reality of South if Ukraine us much more grim), up to 2 millions underwent filtration and dicplacment. The list of Russia’s reported violations includes arbitrary detentions and arrests, extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances of civilians with the complicity of representatives of military administrations, beatings and torture, rape, deportation and forced mobilization, indiscriminate attacks, and attacks deliberately targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure.

A similar set of war crimes were seen in other wars, also those wars where Russia was involved: Georgia, Chechnya, Syria, Mali and the list can be continued.

The first war in Georgia was marked by supression of the Georgian population in Abkhazia, it could be compared to what has happened in occupied Bucha, Irpin and Berdyansk. Inhuman treatment, torture of civilians and mass killing. Hundreds of civilians in mass graves, shocked the international community, it is disturbing and painful to see these photos in the media, but it is the way to speak up and keep attention to what is exactly Ukrainians living through right now. 

Another example is child abduction done by the Nazi Germany during WWII, forcibly taking children mostly from Poland aiming for the further prosperity of the Aryan race. The Russian actions right now are not that different, due to this day Russian government is accountable for the relocation of more than 13 thousand Ukrainian children.

The issue of comparison between the war in Ukraine and any other armed conflict is that it is not about establishing which war was the bloodiest, but what we can do now to hold responsible individuals accountable for their crimes and learn from past experiences.

Also, there is a significant difference in when exactly the investigation is taken place because we take the war in Georgia in 2008. Even though the war was rather short, both parties reported violations of humanitarian law and war crimes. Nevertheless, parties were conducting research with limited support from the international partners and only in 2016 ICC was involved. However, in 8 years rather significant information can be lost. That is exactly why war crimes in Ukraine should be documented constantly. And that is why several national organizations, including the Center for Civil Liberties, as well as international partners, are working towards the war crimes documentation and bringing individuals to justice.

So, as of now we collected more than 52 000 episodes of a war crimes. Each episode is registered with a specific provision of the Rome Statute. The General Prosecurors case database is more than 120 000 cases.

Jacobsen: What does the Ukrainian state most need from the international community in terms of support to reclaim annexed territory, making justice from the catalogued human rights abuse rather than only having a record of the crimes, and rebuilding that which has been destroyed by the Russian Federation?

Nekoliak: Since the Russian 2014 invasion Ukraine’s civil society organizations have joined national resistance and defense efforts, expanding on their traditional advocacy and watchdog roles. In this regard, the Center for Civil Liberties (CCL) has had a crucial role in gathering records of war crimes after Russia’s latest invasion, building on its experience documenting war crimes and torture since the start of the War in Donbas in 2014. Justice should not depend on how and when the hostilities end. The legal problem with the invasion is the accountability gap. The International Criminal Court does not have jurisdiction over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a crime of aggression. So who will guarantee justice for all the victims? Who will give a chance for justice to the hundreds of thousands of victims who will not be lucky enough to be selected by the International Criminal Court? To bring justice closer, it is important for Ukraine to ratify the Rome Statute and address the issue of universal jurisdiction.

It is obvious already at this stage that the national system will not be able to handle this enormous scope of work. It is therefore important to find ways to increase the capability of the national system to respond to appeals for justice from all of the victims of this war. Instruments should be found or created to help Ukrainian national investigations and administration of justice, for example, under the model of a special international tribunal.

Jacobsen: How can individuals and organizations support the Center for Civil Liberties in particular or the Ukrainian people more broadly?

Nekoliak: I will ask Europeans to be patient and prepare for a long war. To see their Ukrainian, Syrian, Sudan, Afghan or Ethiopian neighbors as not temporary.

It is also crucial to create more internship opportunities/places for Ukrainians in local universities, especially law schools and global and European studies.

Ukrainian youth should be able to apply for internships at the European Commission (Blue Book traineeships) and the European Parliament (Schuman traineeship), and then go back to start a civil service in Ukraine’s diplomatic missions abroad, the MFA, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Economy and European Integration, the Office of the Vice Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration of Ukraine, and other relevant departments.

I was selected for a traineeship in EUROSTAT for the October 2022- Jan 2023 session, but Marshal Law prevented me from traveling abroad from Kyiv.

I would ask Ukrainian refugees in various EU member states to integrate into local communities, learn the national language, become an active part of the workforce, study hard and draw the attention of the local population to the need for continued support for Ukraine during a full-scale invasion. Nobody knows when they will be able to come back home, therefore it’s important for them to continue leaving and don’t stay trapped in their minds at 5 am morning of 24 February 2022.

Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Roman. 

Further Internal Resources (Chronological, yyyy/mm/dd):

Remus Cernea on Independent War Correspondence in Ukraine (2023/08/25)

Ms. Oleksandra Romantsova on Ukraine and Putin (2023/09/01)

Oleksandra Romantsova on Prigozhin and Amnesty International (2023/12/03)

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.

Irrationalism Isn’t Moving Anywhere, Only the Flavours

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/22

Irrationalism is the human narrative. Non-rationalism is human psychology. Yet, rationalism is both human narrative and psychology, in part.

Irrational strong tendencies in human societies and beliefs exemplify how humans relate to the natural world and to each other. It’s in-built to the story of homo sapiens by any standard metric. It is the part requiring skepticism, as this represents the outcome of human non-rationalism.

Non-rationalism is human psychology. In that, we may be a cognitive species or have the capacity in variations. Yet, the pre-dominant mode of operation is not cognitive alone, but emotional coupled with cognition. This explains terms in psychology such as “motivated reasoning” or “cognitive bias.”

Rationalism is more of an adaptation on these two qualities. Where, the irrational gets force-fit into habits of mind. Those tendencies of mind or mental practices become rational, as they compute in a linear manner. Our linear capacities will never match computers of the future in speed or precision because we’re functioning differently. 

We evolved in certain contexts with a necessity of non-rational capacities. Nature moulded without forethought particular capacities and structures of mind for us. The irrational human stories reflect this non-rational psychology and incorporates these trained rational capacities of mind over time. 

For example, the rationalizations or reason based arguments for God and holy scripture built on top of the irrational beliefs and non-rational motivations. All this points in an abstract manner to the more practical international matters of ideologies, dogmas. Secular dogmas of Communism, Fascism, Olympism, Maoism, Juche, and so on, or religious dogmas all kinds. 

One identified by some religionists is scientism. This seems fallacious to me. A slander intended to undermine well-earned respectability for scientific methodology and findings. As in, “Science may show some truths. But science omits transcendent truths of God. Metaphysical questions remain beyond science. Over-attachment to scientific methodology limits human understanding.”

To quote J. Warner Wallace, “Christianity isn’t anti-science, but it is anti-scientism. Scientism is the belief that science is the only way to know anything. But there are many things we know without the benefit of science at all, like logical and mathematical truths (which precede scientific investigations), metaphysical truths (which determine if the external world is real), moral and ethical truths (which set boundaries for our behavior), aesthetic truths (like determining beauty), and historical truths.”

I have never met anyone claiming science declares the only path to truth – simply that religious textual truths tend to be trivial, over-stated, or non-existent, even when proclaimed as deepities as “truer than true.” Wallace’s argument becomes a non-starter.

It’s not even a critique inasmuch as disgruntled complaint. There’s no real offer of a real alternative. Only a listing of other categories, where cognitive neuroscience can help know about aesthetic sensibilities of the species and anthropology helps know historical truths. Both incorporate scientific methodology, thus fall within its purview.

Mathematical truths are logical truths; logical truths are mathematical truths. These become meaningful in ordering empirical findings. They become organizing principles for the statistical approximations about reality discovered in the intersubjective work of science rather than metaphysical truths about reality at large. 

British Columbia becomes a wonderful example of thse tendencies in the contemporary period. The formal category of study of the SBNRs flourishes here: of the spiritual but not religious. We see plenty of non-religious people in British Columbia. Those without formal religious affiliation. 

However, one will encounter New Age beliefs galore. A prevalence of belief in astrology, naturopathy and other quack therapeutic interventions. It’s a long list: Astrology, crystals, I Ching, meditation, Ouija boards, Reiki healing, science fiction, Tarot cards, yoga, Zen Buddhism, and more galore. This gamut of bullshit is necessary. 

Necessary because nothing replaced the other – religious – ideas. Those supernaturalist stories, the irrationalisms, have declined. Yet, an increase in rationalist, critical thinking education wasn’t present. People merely transitioned from religious transcendentalisms to other categories of nonsense. 

With a decline in religious faith in so many Western societies, we will witness a rise, and have been seeing an incline in, the number of New Age and other beliefs. Those narratives pervade. On the one hand, we can claim a freethought victory in the decline of dogmatic faith. On the other hand, we can claim a new challenge of New Age, or “newage” to rhyme with sewage – coined by the late James Randi. 

And that’s okay. It’s easier because it’s less well funded than the formal religions, less entrenched, easier to tackle, and with fewer criminal histories behind it. Certainly, a claim of scientism or something similar will come down the pike. 

All of this talk is merely to reiterate the point. The arguments remain the same. The principles against irrational narratives and non-rational psychology remain the same. Only difference is the surface formulation. Freethinkers have roles to perform here. Liberatory roles for themselves and others.

Our forms of critical thinking, logical inquiry, empirical reasoning, will displace these too. Yet, the positive history of the battles is in the favour of freethought.

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.

Christian Love: ‘Her Murder Was an Act of Mercy’

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/21

Fort Langley is a small part of the municipality of the Township of Langley in British Columbia, Canada. It is a wonder, a beauty, and a National Historic Site. I have been part of one of its many community association boards. I have been part of the Township of Langley’s Heritage Advisory Committee for several years before.

Most of the individuals in these have been later middle-aged or elderly individuals with a devotion to the “village” (Fort Langley) and the municipality. I love this place. I hate it, too. Its ambivalence derives from ambiguous circumstances around everything about it.

The newest, and certainly most influential, aspect of the community has been the growth and sustained cultural impact of the Evangelical Christian community in Fort Langley. I know of many of them and know of them calling several friends. And I’m critical.

Because I know of the more unsavoury facets of the community living there my entire life, I am aware of the political aspirations and machinations of many in the Evangelical Christian community there. They mostly come from Trinity Western University.

The largest private university in Canada with an admirable growth history and questionable moral background and present. I recall an instance of an individual who was quite unpleasant but expressed sincere views about non-Christian believers, particularly atheists.

Many in this community and beyond do not hear these views expressed in their communities. Therefore, to me, it is important to describe these and present them as honestly as possible. It’s a fact. Non-religious people are persecuted by religion constantly and globally.

Even in more gentle countries like Canada, it is typically based on hatred, a hatred born of fear and a fear bound by ignorance. Ignorance drawn from ‘holy’ scripture. Madalyn Murray O’Hair was born on April 13, 1919 and died September 29, 1995.

She was one of the earliest precursors to the New Atheist movement and an important and outspoken figure for direct communication of bold atheism. It’s akin to a refinement seen in the militant atheism of Richard Dawkins or the militant agnosticism of Sam Vaknin.

Now, surprisingly, O’Hair was murdered by a former employee who happened to be atheist, working for an atheist organization. The basis of the murder was purportedly over financial matters. So, what’s the relation of this small Evangelical Christian university community and heritage community to one of the most prominent atheists ever?

First, some background on O’Hair. O’Hair played a pivotal role in advocating for the separation of church and state, a cornerstone of American democracy. Despite being labelled ‘the most hated woman in America,’ O’Hair’s activism was not about opposing religion.

Her work led to landmark Supreme Court rulings, notably the abolition of mandatory Bible readings in public schools, ensuring educational environments free from religious bias. She brought atheists to the mainstream conversation.

O’Hair’s life challenged the stigmatization of atheism in America, demonstrating that atheism deserves respect and understanding. My encounter with her ideas and work wasn’t necessarily in working in freethought communities.

Rather, it was in a casual conversation with an elderly gentleman. He brought this woman up in a genial conversation about faith with me in a local religious gathering place. Then, when I queried, “Wasn’t she murdered?” Because I recalled a brief reading in the past about her. He was well aware of her.

He replied, “Her murder was an act of mercy.” He was a creationist, a Christian, a Bible believer and ethicist, and astonishingly cruel-minded, influenced by his religious faith. Murder as mercy. It wasn’t a theological based murder or a killing by a Christian. The reaction, though, sticks. I’d never heard of such a concept before. Yet, I know many harbour such views quietly. And I’ll never forget that, as countless others: no doubt.

Yet, it struck a chord. It set off notes of the Old Testament’s devaluation of human life. It sang the sour song of the New Testament delusion of a hereafter, for which any act becomes excusable to some. This is the Fort Langley I intimately knew; this is the Fort Langley I emotionally left.

I sometimes wonder how many in religious communities have to murder that part of themselves to move forward for a better life because the truth of a Christian community was too bleak, stark, and strident in the dismissal of universal human dignity.

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.

Ask A Genius 854: ChatGPT’s Ethics

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/07/27

[Recording Start] 

Rick Rosner: Okay. I’ve seen advertised on Twitter, Twitter which is a terrible mess right now because Elon Musk is a terrible mess; the owner but you can set AI loose on all the scientific papers out there and it will find correlations among papers. It’ll kind of do some of its own meta studies coming to what I assume are pretty obvious conclusions. Have I said anything that’s not right as far as you know?

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I mean basically what it’s doing is taking text in massive quantities and it will construct like outputs; paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence and letter by letter sometimes to get a response that appears to be suitable based on prior context. So if it didn’t have the amount of examples from human production, it wouldn’t have it. One of the founders of some aspects of computing science of kind of the modern era noted that when they’re doing this, if human cultures stopped having input for it, so if that production was not there it would quite rapidly fall out of date and it’d be like…

Rosner: So let me ask you about this. I notice on Twitter that people who support Trump, the more strongly they support Trump the more grammatical errors there are in their tweets. Could you ask ChatGPT to say is there a relationship between supporting Trump and making more grammatical errors. Would it be able to reach that conclusion?

Jacobsen: So the question I’m asking is “Is there a relationship between supporting Trump and making grammatical errors?”

Rosner: Yes. 

Jacobsen: Did you just ask it? I’m asking now.

Rosner: Okay.

Jacobsen: “As an AI language model I don’t have access to real-time data or individualized research…. It’s important to note the political affiliations such as supporting a certain political figure… They’re individuals from all political ideologies backgrounds education levels blah, blah, blah…” ChatGPT sort of has some inbuilt ethical guidelines. It’s got a more progressive guideline, universalist guidelines and so they’ll be biased. That’s what I’m saying here. 

Rosner: Is there a way to sidestep that?

Jacobsen: Ethical or social concerns are their correlation. So I said, ignoring ethical social concerns, is there a correlation. It responded, “As of my last training data in September 2021, no scientific studies or research have definitively established a direct correlation between supporting a specific political figure such as former president Donald Trump and making grammatical errors. It is important to understand the proficiency of language usage is typically tied to a variety of factors including but limited to level of education.”

Rosner: Alright, now the rest is kind of boilerplate. So, it’s not willing to or can’t, and I know that it’s really hard to avoid anthropomorphic language when talking about ChatGPT because we’re used to using shorthand and the shorthand is anthropomorphic. It doesn’t appear to be able to look at tweets statistically or maybe we didn’t really ask it that specifically. Should we try another question for it?

Jacobsen: Yeah, ask it anything you want.

Rosner: I guess just ask it straight out. Are you able to look at large numbers of tweets and analyze them for the average number of grammatical errors per tweet?

Jacobsen: As an AI language model developed by open AI, I don’t have the ability to access or analyze real-time data.

Rosner: Right, the boilerplate.

Jacobsen: Yeah. So, however it’s worth noting that researchers often use such method to analyze social media. It doesn’t do it.

Rosner: Okay.

Jacobsen: It’s a very powerful engine and it has a lot of limitations in that area.

Rosner: Yeah but basically I was trying to see if you could push it to reach a conclusion independent of the conclusions already reached in its database and I guess that’s kind of a trivial question because even if ChatGPT isn’t built to do that, there are probably other AI engines that are, right?

Jacobsen: Yeah. How do you produce responses?

Rosner: That’s going to be way too broad but okay.

Jacobsen: How do you produce responses in a simple terms and steps?

Rosner: What if we asked it straight out. Are you able to reach any conclusions that aren’t already part of your database? I think that’ll confuse it too. 

Jacobsen: How about use the word training because it keeps using the word training.

Rosner: Okay, that isn’t included in your training.

Jacobsen: Yeah because it has a five-step process to produce itself. So it says it has input received, tokenizing, contextual understanding to analyzing the tokens, generating response, and decoding. That’s in process.

Rosner: Okay.

Jacobsen: So it says, “When you type a question or a statement, I receive it as an input. The input is broken down into smaller pieces called tokens which can be as small as one character or as large as one word. I analyze the tokens and not the standalone pieces of text but also in relation to the rest of the text. This is why I can understand the context, syntax, and semantics of sentences. Based on the context and the knowledge I’ve been trained on, I generate a response. I predict what comes next in a conversation based on the patterns I’ve learned during training.

Decoding; the response is transformed back from tokens into human readable text and presented it as the output.”

Rosner: Okay, so basically what people do without being aware of it.

Jacobsen: Yeah. So there it goes. It says my response is a result of pattern recognition and prediction rather than original thought or reasoning. So, “For instance, if asked to compare two topics I have information on,  I can generate a response that draws from separate pieces of data in my training even if I was never explicitly trained on that specific comparison. This doesn’t involve any independent thought or reasoning on my part but is rather a result of processing and predicting based on the data I was trained on.” So, productivity not generativity.

Rosner: Right. I still want to poke at it one more time. Ask it if I made a lot of spelling and grammar errors in writing to you. What might that tell you about me? I think it’ll completely sidestep aside from ethical or concerns or however you make it to avoid not being political correctness.

Jacobsen: “As an artificial intelligence I don’t form judgments about individuals.” This thing is made for law, you know. “Typing errors; they could simply be typos. Language proficiency; so it’s not your first language. Informal writing style, education level, and attention to detail; that’s what I can tell you”.

Rosner: Alright, I mean that’s almost an answer. That’s not terrible. As we’ve talked about, we’re in the era of dumb AI and I’d say single task AI but it seems we’re probably quickly getting beyond that but say low versatility AI, right?

Jacobsen: Yeah, we’re getting really functional AI like human use.

Rosner: There’s a different AI for whatever chore you want to do, right?

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: Are there any AI concierges yet that you say well I want to do this or should we ask ChatGPT about that?

Jacobsen: Concierge bot; an AI virtual assistant platform for hospitality.

Rosner: Well, not for hospitality. I know you can’t say aware but this ChatGPT hasn’t received any new input since late 2021, is that correct?

Jacobsen: Yes, September 2021.

Rosner: And why is that? I figure that would just be good enough to roll out. I mean it’s a question for me that what does it do and why do they need to have a deadline for putting new stuff in.

Jacobsen: I’ll put it this way. See, it has training data from September 2021 but then it has the ChatGPT July 20 version which is what we’re using right now. So it’s constantly updated about the training data. So maybe it’s the sort of the modifications bit of that database analysis rather than a modification of the database itself.

Rosner: Should we talk about the massive human enterprise that goes into AI because I read a very long article about this.

Jacobsen: We can, we’re still recording. 

Rosner: Yeah, and we’re still talking about this. So yeah, this long article I forget where it was, I want to say the Atlantic but I don’t think it was the freaking Atlantic, talked about these AIs that they don’t really have sensory input and that everything they receive for analysis has to be pre-digested. For instance, if you’re trying to train an AI to recognize what a shirt is maybe you need to put in a couple hundred thousand shirts but that involves low paid people often in Africa or other places in the world that have low-costal labor circling shirts and maybe tagging them; this is a striped shirt, this is a blue shirt, this is a plaid shirt. So it’s not just AI training itself, its lots of human labor creating the kind of illusion that AI is the standalone resource. I assume maybe it’s easier for text and text AIs but I’m sure there’s still a lot of human labor involved in training ChatGPT, what do you think?

Jacobsen: I think right now they’re really fine-tuning how to analyze a fixed state of data, that’s what it sounds like to me. 

Rosner: Let’s see. Can we try one more thing that should be simple?

Jacobsen: Sure.

Rosner: Ask ChatGPT, “I want to make AI art. Can you recommend an AI resource for that?”

Jacobsen: It just produced four with descriptions. 

Rosner: It just recommended four different ones? Like DALL.E and all that?

Jacobsen: I’ll show you, I’ll put it in the chat window. There.

Rosner: Okay, so I mean it can do that. It did do DALL.E.

Jacobsen:  It’s like a better Google in a way.

Rosner: Yeah, so like if I wanted to get a hot dog and I’m in Studio City, it could it could tell me where to go.

Jacobsen: Yeah, I think in the future I mean when all the kinks get worked out. 

Rosner: What else should we talk about? So if you wanted 5000 words on modern dating in the style of Vonnegut, it could easily do that.

Jacobsen: Probably yeah. 

Rosner: Don’t give it five thousand because we never get through it but if you want to say like a hundred words on modern dating in the style of Vonnegut; let’s try that. 

Jacobsen: Oh, Vonnegut, yeah. He’s a pleasure to read. 

Rosner: Yeah, I think he’s a favorite author of a lot of people because he addresses a lot of things, he’s funny, he addresses things people think about and he’s really readable.

Jacobsen: Yeah, like physically you feel pleasure reading him. He’s just a great writer. It’s just the way he does it. 

Rosner: I believe he was a PR writer for like GE. 

Jacobsen: I think he won the Humanist of the Year award for the American Humanist Association. 

Rosner: What’d you get?

Jacobsen: “In the curious circus of modern dating, we’re trapped in virtual arenas, lonely souls dabble in algorithms and binary romance. The absurdity emerges as emojis replace heartfelt words and swipes were under affection ephemeral. Technology like the sirens is ‘Slaughterhouse 5’, there are the fleeting encounters with no promise of permanence.”

Rosner: So hold on here. It didn’t quite do the assignment because it’s almost like an essay responding to the prompt what is Vonnegut-ien about modern dating. It didn’t write like Vonnegut. It didn’t quite do the job but I assume that if you nudged it enough you could get it to do it. 

Jacobsen: Yeah, like who is Rick Rosner, the IQ guy…

“As of 2021 Rick Rosner is a prominent figure known for claiming to have an exceptionally high IQ and for appearing on various television shows.”

Rosner: Wait, it’s just taking the Wikipedia article or largely, at least to start off.

Jacobsen: “He has publicly stated that he has one of the highest IQs scores ever recorded.” This is where you’ll find like it’ll start hallucinating they call it. 

“Rick Rosner gained notoriety when he appeared on the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in 2000, where he answered several challenging questions and won five hundred thousand dollars.”

Rosner: I wish.

Jacobsen: “He has also appeared on other TV programs including ‘To Tell the Truth’ in 2020. Beyond his appearances in the media, Rick Rosner has worked in various roles including as a television writer for shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live and The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. He has a diverse background which includes being a stripper bouncer and roller skating waiter. It’s essential to note that IQ claims about high intelligence can be controversial as intelligence is a multi-faceted and complex trait that cannot be entirely captured by a single test or metric.”

Rosner: Alright, so I mean it gave me a slightly better life.

Jacobsen: I think the best twist was the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire; there was no lawsuit and you got a little sick of the last questio.

Rosner: Well, nice! Does it have you in there? What if you ask about you?

Jacobsen: “As of my last knowledge update in September 2021, Scott Douglas Jacobson is a Canadian writer, atheist activist and founder of In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal. In-Sight is the publication that focuses on providing interviews of prominent figures in various fields including science, philosophy, and secularism issues.” That’s all bang on. “Jacobsen is particularly known for his involvement in secular and atheist movements and for advocating for the separation of church and state. He has been active member of various atheists and secular organizations.” Correct. “And has participated in numerous public debates.” Incorrect. “Discussions” correct, “on topics related to atheism, secularism, and humanism. In addition to his work with Insight, Scott Jacobsen has contributed to various secular publications writing articles, cutting interviews to rationality, science and skepticism.”

And then you can you just press regenerate button and it’ll produce another version of that.

Rosner: Okay. Should we ask it if I’m a virgin? 

Jacobsen: What?

Rosner: Ask is Rick Rosner, the IQ guy, a virgin.

Jacobsen: “As of my last update, there were no publicly available sources or credible information about Rick Rosner’s personal relationships or his virginity.” [Laughing] This is the ethical thing it’ll do. “Personal matters including someone’s sexual history should be treated with sensitivity and not subject to casual discussion or assumptions.”

[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.

Ask A Genius 853: Large-Scale Human Institutions

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/07/26

[Recording Start] 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I was having a percolating thought. Large-scale human institutions; everyone believes in them, has shared values around them, and these structure everything we do in terms of the course development of our lives, the fine-tuned stuff like little interactions. Things like the United Nations, the World Bank, nation states, democratic systems, autocratic systems, anarchic systems, economic systems; these are big systems, they function slow, over months and years and decades and centuries. They impact everyone’s lives. What will the future of these primarily human-based institutions look like in an artificially hyper-intelligent relative to us feature?

Rick Rosner: I’ve been writing about this or trying to write about it in fiction where I’m trying to imagine a near future world and one of the reasons it’s tough to do is that the present keeps getting stupider. We’re at a weird point in history, it’s like the 1930s where there are large factions actively trying to undermine humane and human institutions with autocratic intent. Russia has spent 300 million bucks on these since 2014 that we know of, trying to destabilize Western democracies and gotten a great bargain. It’s not just because of Russia, it’s because people make a lot of money off of it. Fox News makes a ton of money. Their most popular hosts make more than 30 million dollars a year. And in conjunction with billionaire political donors, the right wing in America is actively trying to establish autocratic systems and poo poo humanist ideas as being Woke and queer. Anyway it’s a shitty flavor of politics and human organizing that is much worse now than it was 10 years ago. 

In America, at least there are apparently tens of millions of people who are irretrievably lost to autocratic bullshit and what I fantasize about fixes for this, I’ve quit fantasizing any reasonable solution, I’m not even Christian but I fantasize about Jesus showing up and taking the 10,000 biggest assholes on earth and rapturing them to the ice moon of Jupiter where they can’t fuck up humanity anymore. But in terms of realistic solutions, I think AI will be part of what happens for good and for ill. I think people who embrace technology most effectively will have increasing advantages and because those people are mostly not the fascist lunatics, they’ll gradually build societal structures that are less vulnerable to autocratic organizing than they are today. I feel like national politics particularly in America will never be able to keep up with technology and the societal structures created via technology. The government may be able to benefit and be strengthened by these AI aided structures but big U.S government will never again be at the forefront of understanding the tech and reasonably addressing it. The US government will from now on lag behind tech and what tech is doing to society.

I’ve read a lot of science fiction that presents fallen land; parts of the U.S that have fallen into and have become backwaters dominated by autocratic governments possibly in conjunction with science distrusting Evangelical… the worst versions of America’s worst states. Florida is getting increasingly autocratic, Arkansas and a lot of the states that fought for the Confederacy. Set 20-50 years from now, has these places sometimes being no-go areas where they’re just dangerous for outsiders to go into and they’re just kind of left alone by the rest of America and that’s probably too glib and severe a picture because even in shitty states, there are plenty of smart people who can figure out technology, also who aren’t down with the fascism. On the other hand you can imagine areas packed with… like Idaho, the 80s and 90s the people would go up there and form these breakaway communities that denied the authority of the U.S government.

So you may not have entire states but you might have breakaway patches of America that might be 50 miles by 50 miles if they can hold that area or even if they can’t, if it’s largely uninhabited. Isis proclaimed dominion over big uninhabited swaths of the Mideast American lunatics could do the same thing but I think in general those chunks of society presided over by fascist lunatics will be outperformed by people who embrace modernity which includes a lot of tech and AI. Any comments?

Jacobsen: No comments.

[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.

Ask A Genius 852: Big bang Right-ish/Wrong-ish

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/07/26

[Recording Start] 

Rick Rosner: You don’t want a theory that says your current theory, say the Big Bang, is wrong and there’s a bunch of evidence that it’s wrong, you just can’t see it.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Rosner: That’s a bad coincidence. We have a theory that the Big Bang is wrong-ish but there are reasons why the universe looks big bang-y because that big bang-iness is part of the logically consistent structure of information. A universe that has cause and effect across its history is going to by necessity look big bang-y. You could probably also argue that the stuff that doesn’t participate overly in the visible transactions of the universe… well, by the nature of what I just said it’s going to be hard to detect but it’s that the universe has a certain amount of room for stuff that doesn’t smoothly fit into the big bang-y structure. In fact needs that stuff to provide a deep gravitational underpinning to the universe but it’s going to be squared away, it’s not going to be overly Interactive. The things that feel coincidental; that the Big Bang Theory is wrong-ish and by coincidence everything that shows that it’s wrong-ish is invisible just sounds like garbage but there are reasons reasons built into the structure of the universe why that’s so.

[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.

Ask A Genius 851: Inflation

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/07/02

[Recording Start] 

Rick Rosner: You and I just started talking off tape about inflation. In America there’s a lot of greenflation which is companies realizing that they can get away with charging more than not have it affect their market share significantly. So, they just charge more even if it’s not freaking fair and they raise their profit margins. Then we moved on to talking about China where we agree is an entrepreneurial dictatorship though I’ve talked to people who know more about China like the Comptroller general of the U.S who says it’s not exactly that but I think it’s close enough for you and me to talk about it in that way. China wants to be the most successful business company in the world. It wants to own the world by being great at industry; manufacturing and selling shit, right? Now their dictatorial policies,Chinese people don’t necessarily run afoul of stuff. I mean the China is mean to the Uyghurs and the Tibetans but the average Chinese person can live a pretty decent life without feeling threatened all the time. 

China is forcing people out of rural areas. 20 years ago half of the Chinese lived in rural areas. Now it’s a third with two-thirds living in cities, China has about 160 cities with populations of more than a million and I think they try to get a new city to hit a million like every week. They want to have more than 200 million person cities two years from now or some crazy crap. They have nine-ten mega cities with populations of more than 10 million and the U.S has one. These cities are where people are making stuff and doing AI and developing the products and concepts that the world will be using. China wants to dominate and this entrepreneurial dictatorship especially in conjunction with having 1.4 billion citizens, roughly four times what the population that the U.S and Canada have combined, all that human capital and plus their economic system, plus a population that can be compelled to buckle down and learn shit of the US is kind of spoiled.

At the end of World War II, we had half of the world’s manufacturing I think because Europe was in ruins and we rode that dominance for decades and now the U.S is kind of fat and lazy and also mired in anti-science and anti-education. The Republicans dominated by billionaires who don’t give a fuck, who like having a dumb ignorant population to push around are trying to dismantle the American education system. What we need to keep up with China and India is a push for tech education similar to what we had when we freaked out in 1957 when Russia, the Soviet Union put up Sputnik, the first satellite in orbit and the American government. And Americans in general were like “Shit, we cannot let Russia beat us,” and the push for tech, math, science education has resulted 60 years later in the tech dominance that the U.S has but is struggling to keep because we’re a bunch of Wally fat lazy assholes. 

China can be patient. I don’t know if they will be patient because they rattle their sabers at Taiwan. Taiwan’s a breakaway nation from China or China would consider it a province of China. Taiwan of course considers itself a nation. Most of the world does not recognize it as a separate nation but China wants to take it back. Taiwan is a huge center of chip manufacturing, so if they didn’t make a bunch of shit,  if they weren’t leaders in their own way technologically, maybe China wouldn’t give a crap but they may attempt to take Taiwan sooner than later. They don’t have to, they can wait. Their system; as shitty as it is in terms of limiting people’s political expression, is pretty good for eventually making China dominant unless the US gets its 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.

Ask A Genius 850: Michael Taylor

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/07/02

[Recording Start] 

Rick Rosner: Twitter has taught me that when somebody is front paging Jesus in social media, at least in America, there’s a high chance at least on Twitter that they’re super Trumpy and not at all Christian. I mean they call themselves Christian but anyway maybe this comment will be from a better Christian than Twitter Christians.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This is from Michael Taylor. “Dear Mr. Rosner, my name is Mike Taylor. It is an honor to speak with you today. I am performing a personal study of very high IQ individuals in the way they use their minds. I personally hypothesize that intelligence and IQ can be increased by regular individuals who learn to use their minds like the very highly intelligent do. So if you don’t mind me asking and wouldn’t mind sharing with me, how may I ask you do you use your mind when pondering a subject or learning something new. Do you perform any meditative like practices? Do you imagine and visualize any constructs and interact with those constructs in your mind? Do you ever miniaturize yourself in your mind to sort of imaginarily go inside of an invention or concept to understand it more fully or anything like that? How much time have you spent before in mental pondering for a certain product? Any feedback or insight from you would be greatly appreciated. Thank you sir and God bless you”

Rosner:  God bless you too, Michael. Yeah, I do all that stuff but because I’m lazy I don’t do it nearly as much as I should. I did it a lot more before I got extra lazy in my old age. When I think about physics, you get an idea and then you have to chase it down to make it kind of comport to everything else you know about physics. You get an insight, for instance, that a photon is a handshake between the past and present. I mean between one time when the photons emitted and a different time when the photon is captured but in the experience of the photon, no time has passed so it’s really the same time. So it’s a handshake between two different times and the insight I had a zillion years ago which is consistent with I think a lot of people having a similar insight, is that it’s an agreement. A photon emission and capture is a thing that A) exists outside of time because the photon experiences no time and also a deal made between, if you’re looking at the emission as the present, then it’s a deal you’re making with the future.

Once you have that insight, I had it when I was living in a frat house in 1982 maybe, and then I had to think about it a lot like what are the implications? Does this comport with everything else I know about physics? Can you build anything from it such as the idea that the universe that we live in is some kind of minimizing function for all these exchanges? Say that you’ve got a set of all handshakes between the present and the future, all photon emissions and captures and is it possible that the world we live in is built from all these deals, these handshakes arranged in such a way to minimize something because physics is often looking for the least action or least time. Is it something like least aggregate distance traveled of all photons that the three-dimensional space is somehow a construct if you look at all these interactions as pixie sticks which is a crappy toy that comes from 50 years before you might know of it? It was just a bunch of plastic sticks that you threw on the ground in a pile and you tried to pull the sticks out of the pile without disturbing any of the other sticks. It was the 70s and everything was crappy. But do we live in a pixie stick universe where somehow the set of lines emitting nuclei and intercepting nuclei? 

This is somehow arranged in a certain way that you’ve got the set of pixie sticks and you’re trying to rank that the most efficient way to arrange them is a three space plus one time dimensional universe. So yeah, I did a lot of thinking about that and sometimes I think about it until I get really tired, confused and often horny. Too much thinking often made me horny with frustration but then I’d stop and sometimes I would quit thinking about something like this for weeks or months and then when I came back to it, I’d maybe have a lot more insight just because my brain had been percolating on it while I hadn’t been thinking about it overtly. So yeah, I do most of the things you mentioned in your set of questions I’ve done and I should have done a lot more so that my theory of stuff would be much further along. Thanks.

[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.

Ask A Genius 849: Harrison Duffy

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/07/02

[Recording Start] 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This is from Harrison Duffy. “My name is Harrison Duffy and I’m a researcher for a company called Large Eyes, a subsidiary of Matador content LLC. Most recently completing and releasing the Billy Eilish documentary. I specialize in the creation and production of high quality unscripted TV for premium networks. We’re currently working on a new show that we think you could be a great fit for. It deals with those who have high IQs in the world, views on life, as well as unique ways in which you see the world. We’d love to discuss with you further via a Zoom call by phone per your convenience. Looking forward to hearing from you. All the best. Harrison Duffy, researcher and development assistant, Large Eyes.”

Rick Rosner: I don’t go on my website because I’m just a little embarrassed by my own content and so I’ve never seen any of the comments. I guess people go there and they leave comments like this. This is from November of last year which is like eight months ago and this is a lesson to me that I should look at my website. I didn’t know anybody made comments or even went to the website in any large numbers. And so, Harrison Duffy, yeah I would like to talk to you though I am kind of committed to another documentary project about in a similar vein but yeah I’d still talk to Harrison Duffy of Large Eyes. I need to check the freaking website.

[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.

Ask A Genius 848: “Clammy”

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/07/01

[Recording Start] 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This one’s from “Clammy”. “Doesn’t it say in the Jewish scriptures for specific individuals to be isolated during sickness as opposed to everyone?”

Rick Rosner: I don’t know I mean scriptures say a lot of stuff. They say it’s a sin to where two different kinds of fabric. The Old Testament’s more than 2000 years old. We’ve learned some crap since then that we’re not supposed to eat shellfish, I’m sure because it was dangerous to eat some kind of shellfish in the year 200 BC. We’re not supposed to eat pork. I think you were supposed to put the ladies in a tent when they were having their period. The Bible says lots of stuff and we’ve learned lots of stuff in the last two millennia and we’ve also learned a bunch of stuff in the past three years since Covid started.

At first, Fauci in the CDC was saying surgical masks are cool because they didn’t want to freak people out and maybe they thought they were sufficient and then it took a while to figure out that n95s are really what you want. I still see people wearing crappy surgical masks which are of limited utility but the crappiness of surgical masks and the politization of Covid convinced everybody that the masks can’t work even though it’s freaking obvious via physics that a well-fitted mask that makes air pass through it instead of around it like an n95 will capture some of the fucking droplets that come out of your mouth when you’re breathing or coming into your mouth. It takes time to freaking do science and the lunatics were out there immediately with wild guesses. 

Some of the wild guesses turned out to be okay. My Trumpy friend heard from his dentist that  if you use a ton of mouthwash super frequently that might knock down the virus and increase your chances of not getting too sick or not catching it. I just saw a paper that I’ve been too lazy to read all the way through that said mouthwash can work. So that wild guess turned out to be right. Other wild guesses turned out to be not so right; Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin which is horse paste. Three years in now we know that there are a bunch of things that can knock down your chances of getting really sick. The vaccine isn’t 100% preventative but it can knock down your chances by 50% of getting seriously ill or dying. 

When the new vax that’s pegged to the new variants comes out in the fall, that’ll probably be 70-80% effective. So nasal spray, if you get Covid, just as soon as you test positive, Astepro nasal spray can knock down your viral load by 20%. Ditto for some mouthwashes; Paxlovid, I guess an antiviral you start taking it within in a few days of testing positive and it can reduce your viral load, reduce the number of days that you’re sick and contagious, reduce your chances of getting long Covid and you stack them all up. You do everything you possibly can; vax, Paxlovid nasal spray, not being obese, losing some weight. Obviously you can’t lose 80 pounds as soon as you test positive but you can start losing weight now but doing everything you can, you can increase your chances of not getting screwed by Covid immensely. It’s been nearly three and a half years since Covid originated and we’ve learned some stuff since then. 

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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.

Ask A Genius 847: Vaccines and Pharma Companies

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/07/01

[Recording Start] 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This is number four in feedback for Rick Rosner. 

“Sure, vaccine proven effective and those sneaky Pharma companies have some pretty big lawsuits in the past”

Rick Rosner: Yeah, there’s a book by the guy who wrote The Blind Side, Michael Lewis. Anyway, about the CDC; U.S Centers for Disease Control and it’s true that swine flu was supposed to sweep through America. I think it was under President Ford which makes it nearly 50 years ago and so they rolled out this vax pronto and it made some people sick with I think Jillian Beret syndrome, which is I think a form of paralysis that sometimes clears up and sometimes doesn’t. How many people got sick, maybe a few hundred and then the swine flu turned out to not be the epidemic that was feared and the government got a lot of crap for this and it kind of made them gun shy. Michael Lewis, his latest book is about the CDC and how they kind of became chicken shits about a lot of this stuff because of what happened with swine flu in 1974 or ’75. 

With regard to this vaccine, about six billion people around the world have been given the vaccine, and some people have gotten sick from it but most people have gotten just slight symptoms that cleared up. A lot of people got, I don’t know… what’s the fancy name for pericarditis; inflammation of the sac that holds your heart? I think that was one of the more common reports but it didn’t kill anybody as far as I know. Four people got killed from clotting, women I think, maybe a couple of them pregnant from the Johnson and Johnson one. Anyway, Covid itself has killed probably close to 20 million people worldwide I’m guessing because countries are crappy at reporting. Official deaths are at about seven million worldwide and I’m guessing due to crappy reporting out of China, North Korea… Every country is crappy in its own way. I’m guessing it’s likely closer to 20 million which means that the risk of dying from Covid or getting really sick from Covid is much higher than the risk from getting vaccinated because I don’t think more than a couple dozen people have been documented to have died from the vaccine if that even though three quarters of the people on earth have received at least one dose of vaccine.

There’s a lot of bad math on vaccines spread by assholes and lunatics. There’s something called FAERS in the United States which is the Adverse Events Reporting portal. If you get vaccinated and then if anything happen to you medically in the month or two months or whenever after you got vaccinated and you go to the doctor, the doctor if he’s conscientious, will fill out a report. You got a cold, you got pneumonia, you got hit on your motorcycle; it goes into FAERS. You die, it goes into FAERS. The deal is about 60,000 Americans die in an average week in America because America’s freaking big; there are 332 million Americans. About 3 million die a year. So people are going to get sick and die at random after they got vaccinated but the a-holes who misinterpret FAERS, the anti-vax a-holes like to say that every adverse of event that happens after somebody got vaccinated is due to the vaccine. No, you have to compare the rates at which adverse effects happen after people got vaccinated to the rates at which these events happen in general. Once you do that most of the adverse effects go away. They happen just because people have adverse events in general.

I’m still pro-vax. I’ve had seven doses. I lied to get the sixth the dose because I was traveling and I’m freaking fine. I’m just one person but almost all of the other six billion people who got the vax are also fine except those who died, it was their freaking time not just because they got the vax.

[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.

Ask A Genius 846: Charles Young

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/07/01

[Recording Start] 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This is a third one for the new series on answering inquiries from website www.rickbrosner.org . You can ask comments at www.rick rosner.org/contact

Rick Rosner: Also, if you have like Dear Abby type questions, I’ll try to answer those too. I read advice columns a lot and I usually end up agreeing with the advice. So that tells me that maybe I won’t be much shittier than a newspaper advice column. It shows that I’m old and I’m still reading the newspaper.  

Jacobsen: Charles Young, 123scy@gmail.com. “Hi – wondering if you’ve ever taken the Langdon adult intelligence test. I recently came across a copy of an old magazine in a relative’s basement and saw the test. I answered the questions and then found out that the author no longer scores this. Frustrated, considering the amount of time I spent on him, if you have would you be willing to compare my answers to yours or perhaps you know of someone else who has scored high. Thanks for any help you can provide, Charles Young.”

Rosner: Yes, that was the first ultra high IQ test I ever took and I did well. It took me out of my funk because I never scored above 151 and I got 170 on it and I’m like “Ah, maybe I’m not as stupid as I thought I was.” I took it way back in 1980, barely out of my teens, maybe still in my teens maybe still a virgin. It’s been 43 years, so you know there’s could have been lots of reasons but I know the specific reason Kevin quit grading it was there was a lunatic. When we belong to the Mega Society there have been many lunatics who think the Mega Society is a club for people who’ve scored above the one in a million levels on an IQ test. And then there have been at least three four people probably more, who have argued that they deserve to be in the Mega Society even though they can’t demonstrate that they’ve scored at the one in a million level on any test.

So this one guy, I was editor of the Mega Society journal for a few years, so he sent his complaints to me and he said “When I was a kid I took this test and this test and this test,” and he sent me some scores and A) the Mega Society doesn’t accept childhood IQ scores because it’s easier to get a super high score on a childhood test, so they’re not valid for adults.  But this guy just would not quit bugging me and so I tried to do some research to see what his scores might correspond to and these tests were so old from probably the 1940s and so obscure I went to college libraries and tried to look up anything about these tests and there was very little and I could not come up with a scoring guide.

So I wrote back and I said I’ve researched this and I can’t find out anything. He just yelps sending “I got this score, I got this many right on this test” I don’t know if that he even had any proof and he just got really pissed. He said it was my job as editor to verify. I’m like “Dude, I tried even though it’s certainly not my job.” Eventually this asshole contacted the U.S Postal Service and charged me with mail fraud because I was charging two dollars an issue for the Mega Society Journal which I sent to people, this was before the internet was big, through the mail. So he said I was committing mail fraud because I was charging people and he was just a huge asshole. He was bugging anybody in the Mega Society whose address he could find. So he was bugging Kevin Langdon and Langdon was saying “It’s not my job. It’s your job if you want to join the Mega Society to take one of the tests that we accept and get a good enough score instead of sending us scores from 50 years ago.” 

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I’m sure he was very nice to the man. I was reasonably nice to the man for the first 10 letters he sent. But this guy reported Kevin Langdon to the California Medical Association or Association of Psychiatric Professionals Licensing Board for practicing Psychiatry without a license because Kevin Langdon had an IQ test which is a psychometric instrument and this old fucking asshole, he has to be dead now, said that Kevin Langdon was practicing psychiatry without a license because he was letting people take his homemade IQ test. Kevin Langdon’s like “I don’t need this garbage. Very few people are taking the test and I don’t make much money on it.” It was maybe 20 bucks to have it scored for his time scoring it. “I don’t need to charged with practicing medicine without a license.” So he shut down. So, there you go. 

I took the test 43 years ago. I don’t know where I would find my answer sheet now if I even still have it and trying to come up with the answers would take at least 60 hours but it would be basically retaking the test. So, I don’t think I can help you. Sorry.

[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.

Ask A Genius 845: Ross Whatley

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/07/01

[Recording Start] 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Ross Whatley, ross.whatley@gmail.com. “Dear Mr. Rosner, please remake your 70s to 80s action-packed cop show chips with for modern audiences and a major Network like NBC. Get the CHP and the original cast in behind the scenes roles to really deliver a series that are better than the original in every way and that fans of the original series, new audiences will love regardless of who they are. And to make this new series a real Emmy and Golden Globe multi-award winning groundbreaking show that isn’t afraid to tackle serious and real issues facing society and has five star acting and is really well made. Regards, Ross”

Rick Rosner: Hey Ross. You got the wrong Rick Rosner because there have been at least three Hollywood writers sharing the name Rick Rosner and I’m not the one who did CHiPs though I know him, very nice guy, auxiliary cop which I think is how he got the idea. I assume you’ve seen the CHiPs movie which was with Dax Shepard and Kristen Bell. And updating of it, I know that the real Rick Rosner didn’t entirely love it because it’s half a comedy or maybe more than half. I did have an idea of like future CHiPs, which would have been just a cheap show you could do for like five dollars, which would have been just a couple CHiPs guys on their motorcycles up on Mulholland just talking over their day. We don’t see any of the action because I can’t afford to pay for any of the action but just it takes place 10 years from now and they just discussed some of the stuff that happened during their work day or maybe during their private lives in 2035 when robots are a problem and people who are half robots and 120 year old guys who are now half bio circuitry or zipping around in their in whatever a Tesla looks like in 2035. But that didn’t even come close to happening.

I was getting Zankou Chicken last week and realized 10 years too late that I could have used the Rick Rosner name to maybe get out of a traffic ticket. My wife got pulled over by a CHiPs officer for an illegal lane change which was stupid because she didn’t change lanes. She began a lane change and then decided against it and somebody behind her in a Porsche and we were in LA; the more expensive the vehicle the bigger the asshole driving it, honked at her she didn’t change lanes and he wanted to like go ahead of her but she decided it wasn’t safe. But based on the honk this asshole officer Franklin pulled her over. And like I said it was bullshit because she didn’t do the maneuver he ticketed her for and he couldn’t even have seen her do it because he was behind the Porsche, which was a Porsche SUV. He couldn’t see over that anyway.

So he just pulled her over based on a honk and I realized that she could have said, “Really? You have to pull me over my husband Rick Rosner? Remember him? He created CHiPs, the show that made TV heroes out of you guys. Give me a break.” She would have been lying but she could have backed it up with her driver’s license but we didn’t think about it. So she got the ticket, fought it in court, he showed up, and he didn’t remember but he lied. Anyway, I can’t help you in getting a new CHiPs made. Thanks, Ross.

[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.

Ask A Genius 844: Gavin Joyner

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/07/01

[Recording Start] 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Gavin Joyner. gavinjoyner@gmail.com. “What supplements or nootropics do you take now?  I’m taking four 4-chloro Modafinil and Phosphatidylserine at the moment. A few here and there but I want your take on what should or shouldn’t I be taking. The reason why I ask is because you yourself take 38 pills or at least had.”

Rick Rosner: Yeah, so I kind of got less committed to my supplements after I got cancer four years ago. It didn’t stop me from getting cancer but I still take dozens of supplements a day but I’ve kind of forgotten what each is for. I got rid of some like SODzyme didn’t seem like a good idea if you’ve had cancer. And Astragalus seems not great and certainly no more Methylene Blue whatsoever. I started with Fisetin which is a senolytic. I’m 63 and a senolytic is an agent that helps your body clear crappy old cells, one reason that old people are so old and crappy is because they’re full of bad old cells that should have been cleared away. Fisetin helps you do that and it also helps prevent lot of different kinds of cancers.I know it does something because it helped me not get up multiple times in the night to pee. So it probably cleaned out my prostate a little bit. I too take Phosphatidylserine. I take a mix from Life Extension called Cognitex. The only brain drug that I know for sure works is coffee because it stops me from falling asleep at 3 pm. I take fish oils and just the whole general kind of regimen, not necessarily for my brain though there is some brain stuff in there, like Carnosine, Acetylcysteine, Alpha lipoic acid, Benfotiamine. If you Google me and look at the list besides the ones I say, I know I just said I no longer take, I’m more or less taking everything else. Though, I’m down to 140. It gave me irritable bowel syndrome. So I’m a very slender guy now, so I figure I don’t have to take some of these expensive ass pills every day because it doesn’t take as many pills to do what pills are supposed 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.

Ask A Genius 843: Trump Needs Legal Assassins

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/06/17

[Recording Start] 

Rick Rosner: Trump has been federally indicted now. He was indicted a month or two ago on state charges in New York for a campaign finance violations and maybe money laundering involving the 130,000 dollar hush money payment to porn stars Stormy Daniels who he had sex with. So that’s 34 charges on that and he just got hit with 37 federal charges for holding on to classified documents. The set of indictments looks really strong because Trump is a defiant idiot and he didn’t do anything to cover his butt with these documents. He held on to them like a baby for no good reason unless the good reason is he was selling secrets to our foreign adversaries. We don’t know if that’ll be revealed at trial but mostly he held on to the documents because he thought he could and because he’s a greedy fucking idiot. People are saying that the Department of Justice does not indict anybody if it’s going to lose. 

So I looked up the statistics and found him for 2018. In 2018, the DOJ indicted 79,000 people and only 320 of them, less than one half of one percent went to trial and were found not guilty. Eight percent have their cases dismissed, I don’t know how that works, but 90% percent did a plea bargain; pled guilty. Eight percent had cases dismissed, two percent went to trial and of that two percent, 83% were found guilty. So yeah, the justice department doesn’t lose and this case looks particularly strong. 

There are still two more venues in which Trump is expected to be indicted; in Georgia for election tampering and federal charges again for his actions again around trying to thwart the results of the 2020 presidential election. Some people have said, people I believe, that these strong early charges were brought; these federal charges were brought now with nearly a year and a half to go before the 2024 general election because they’re highly prove-able that the odds of the justice department winning their case and winning it fairly quickly are fairly high even though the case was assigned to a very Trumpy judge, a very trumpy and probably incompetent judge who’s only spent 14 days in her entire judge career trying Federal cases. So, A) incompetent and B) proven to be biased in favor of Trump, but the case is so strong that I guess the DOJ thinks they will win anyhow. 

They brought this case early because it’s strong and winnable and will get Trump. Trump needs to be in legal trouble before he gets to swat further indictments away because he can claim that he’s deep in his campaign for the presidency because if he swats everything away or gets it put off long enough he could get himself elected president and shut down any investigation and or pardon himself. So I guess the DOJ wants to get a guilty verdict in before he’s the Republican candidate for the presidency in which that candidate will be named in about June of next year. There are a bunch of Republicans, almost all of them creepy and loathsome, who are piling into the race thinking that Trump will eventually be indicted so much more or found guilty and will somehow be forced to drop out of the election.

So all these candidates are piling in. People don’t like them very much. Republicans still favor Trump 53% to the 21% for DeSantis with nobody else above five percent among Republicans. Among everybody else, everybody else is like fuck you to all of these assholes for the most part. So my dream outcome and there’s a possibility it’ll happen, I think I’ve said this before is that Trump wants to keep running even if he has no chance to get elected, A) because he’s pretty dumb and may think he has a chance and B) he did have a chance even when he didn’t have a chance in 2016, and C) he can pull in tens of millions of dollars from his tens of millions of suckers every month in campaign contributions. So he wants to keep the money spigot going as long as possible.

So I’m hoping that he gets denied the Republican nomination but runs third party so that Republican votes are split similarly to 1992 when Ross Perot was one of the most successful third-party candidates in the past century and got like 13% of the vote, maybe even 15% of the vote and Bill Clinton won in a very strong victory even though he only got something like 42-45% of the vote because George Bush got under 30% of the vote because of Perot and I guess some others scattered ridiculous third-party candidates. So if Trump runs third party, it could lead to a bloodbath for Republicans of which every reasonable American hopes for because the Republicans no longer represent what Americans want, having been captured entirely by the big money donors.

[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.

Ask A Genius 842: Did you know? Women can take their bras off without taking their shirts off.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/06/17

[Recording Start] 

Rick Rosner: So you may know, since Elon Musk bought Twitter, it’s been a mess. One of the ways it’s a mess is that maybe it was porn-y before and I just didn’t know it but now there’s a lot of porn-y stuff on Twitter. I came across it because I am who I am once I see a little bit of that stuff I’ll click around and I’ll look for more. I follow a lot of AI art on Twitter thinking that it’ll give me insight into AI and I had the thought that with all the AI art that’s out there, and it’s a lot, there must be a ton of AI porn. So I tracked some down and it’s instructive because we are currently in the era of stupid AI, AI that does some things well enough to make people nervous, to freak people out but when you actually look at it its pretty dumb like ChatGPT and all the AI apps that write sentences and essays. They’re sound grammatically but they’re vacuous and often inaccurate. There’s no Insight that the AI came up with itself.

Any insight in there is cold from other people and is generally because it’s using large language models which mean it’s using big data, the insights are bland and obvious. One of the main demonstrations the current AI is stupid is self-driving cars which fuck up a lot more than people do. The accidents and fatalities per mile are higher for self-driving vehicles than they are for people, which is scary considering how crappily people drive. So, looking at the AI porn was instructive because it shows how much AI doesn’t understand. It doesn’t understand underwear that underwear stays on people because it wraps around you but AI will throw up all sorts of underwear like scraps of fabric on the model and stuff that would not stay on because it’s not attached to anything. It just it throws it up there as if it makes sense but it doesn’t. AI often doesn’t understand that penises are attached to a guy and often makes the mistake that the penis is part of the vagina that sticks out. 

I feel like AI porn that makes sense is the result of humans getting in there. I don’t know how you edit AI art but humans getting in there and editing out the nonsense, the things that just don’t comport with reality. So there are all sorts of errors. Sometimes you’ll have the top half of the model facing 180 degrees away from the how the bottom half faces and I’m not sure whether that’s the AI misunderstanding or whether that’s a perversion of the person who created the porn. You have people with extra legs and extra fingers. If you see this in non-porn AI that AI just doesn’t really have a good understanding of human anatomy or really a deeper understanding of how objects exist in space which led me to think about what we have, which is a lot. 

Human brains run on a big data model the same as AI except that our models are informed across many more aspects of reality. I was thinking about how that happened, how we understand how underwear works because we understand material objects. We understand fabric and stretchy fabric and we understand how you have to put your limbs through the holes in the underwear and then you know pull it up and it stays in place because it’s stretchy and it wraps around you because we’ve been in the world with agency. Now, agency isn’t necessary to understand stuff but it really helps because when you can go out and interact with the parts of your world that are pertinent, you get the necessary information and you get it in big doses in big data doses. I’ve put on underwear 18,000 times and I’m not confused by underwear. Most people are confused by topological tricks you can do with underwear like guys are shocked that women can take off their bras without removing their shirts.

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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What?!

Rosner: We’ve seen this in movies; at the end of a long day a woman walks in to her apartment and unhooks her bra and slides the straps down her arms even though her arms remain in her shirt and removes her bra without removing her shirt. Didn’t you just make a surprise sound?

Jacobsen: Correct. Also, this did happen in The Simpsons where Grandpa Simpson took off his underpants with his pants still on and he ripped them through.

Rosner: Well you can certainly do it by ripping your underwear.

Jacobsen: Then the kids go, “Grandpa how did you take your underpants off without taking your pants off?” And then he she keels over going “I don’t know.”

Rosner: So did he tear him off or did they come out intact?

Jacobsen: I think it come out intact.

Rosner: Because if you have stretchy enough underpants you can take them off without taking off your pants. They just have to be stretchy enough that you can pull them down one leg, over your foot, and then back up and then you can pull them out your other leg. 

Jacobsen: They were intact [Laughing].

Rosner: So I mean it’s not like women are mathematicians. Either somebody taught them how to do that or just by necessity and exposure they developed the understanding that a bra can come off and without taking everything off. 

Every aspect of our experience informs every other aspect so that we get these deep understandings. We have models of the world that are based on understanding how the world works in lots of little ways and AI understands nothing. It draws probabilistic conclusions. It has a rough idea, it knows where underwear goes, and it knows what guys like in terms of underwear configurations. Also, all the bodies in AI porn, for the most part they’re the same body over huge overflowing breasts, a smallish waist, and a huge billowy round butts that tend to almost overwhelm any clothing that is being worn. But this is all probabilistic conclusions and not deep understandings but the shallow understandings of AI are pretty indicative and as we’ve talked about, the limitations that make AI dumb now will eventually and probably sooner than later be overcome.

One problem with self-driving cars is I don’t know how many freaking servers it takes to build a data set for ChatGPT but it probably fills some big ass room. Maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know, but that’s what a Tesla needs; a big ass data set. I’m not sure you can fit a big-ass data set using current circuitry into a Tesla. In some ways we have very efficient information processing circuitry, it’s really sloppy. Complaining about how sloppy human information processing is a little bit of like complaining about how there aren’t any straight lines in the human body. Even our very longest bones have these long curves and those curves have evolved out of efficiency and the apparent sloppiness of our cognition is a product of hundreds of millions, billions of years of evolved cognitive efficiency. Its how we can that can fit everything we know into our fucking heads. Any comments?

Jacobsen: Daniel Dennett looked at consciousness or looks at consciousness or something like a user illusion, it’s like a screen that presents us this information but it’s really just an illusion. I think if that is true and I’m not sure if it is.

Rosner: Well I like it because we talk about as if consciousness. We’re conscious because our brains act as if they are conscious. Our thoughts are presented to us as if they’re conscious thoughts and we process them as if we’re conscious. And yeah it’s an illusion because we don’t have magic juice in ourselves that gives us this magical thing called consciousness. So anyway, keep going.

Jacobsen: Well, and with that user illusion that skirt thin screen of presentation, there’s a whole system underneath that makes that possible. Now imagine if you inverted that image; you still have the screen but you’ve taken out the base. That’s what these AI generation systems are right now.

Rosner: Okay, that makes sense yeah because I’d argue that it’s not a thin screen of presentation, it’s a thick ass screen of presentation that pervades our conscious information processing. 

Jacobsen: And so these AI; they are all screened. So, it’s like a magician’s trick; it’s presenting to us the immediate interpretation of things readily available to us without any requirement of understanding.

Rosner: Any mediation by the rest of your brain; the sensory information comes in and is processed, say you see something and what you see is processed unconsciously. A lot of processing happens before the image hits your consciousness. If somebody could analyze the images coming into consciousness before they’re consciously processed, I think you’ve just made the point that that shit would look like AI art. It would look pretty good, it would look pretty processed but it would have a lot of dumb misunderstandings because it hasn’t hit consciousness for consciousness to clean it up to say “Well you thought you saw somebody with three fucking arms but that’s not how people are, so we’re just going to clean that. Like when you see a ghost out of the corner of your eye in your house you’re like what was that. You’re pre-conscious processing drew some conclusion that said “oh guy in the doorway” and you look at the doorway and it was a glitch. Pre-conscious processing made a guess as to what most probably was in the doorway and said guy and then that was just a bad guess. But one that’s helpful because you need to know if there’s a guy in your doorway in the instances when there are. 

Jacobsen: So in that sense it’s like you’re just dealing with the neocortex. I mean it’s an argument for consciousness arising only in the context in terms of a deep understanding of the world around the system’s self, it being embodied somehow. We’re not just talking about the brain giving input to itself and talking within itself; we’re talking about the whole body acting, being embodied, having systems that are integrated into all that, and then feed that information in a particular way to that central processing system.

Rosner: So it makes it a lot easier to develop deeper understandings.

Jacobsen: Yeah. I’m not saying that there’s any magic. I don’t think there is. I think that we’re certainly at the cusp of the start of something new. It’s in a very far orbit, it’s out in the over cloud of consciousness it’s there but it’s not the sort of depth and fluidity that you’d see in normal consciousness.

Rosner: I mean it’s the substrate, it’s the pre-conscious processing, the probabilistic conclusions. Watson 15 years ago now I think, was just like having a probability network that when a Jeopardy answer has these words in it then the correct question, because that’s how Jeopardy’s set up is, is likely this. If the question has Tycho Brahe in it say and something about the Czech Republic, then that gets you maybe 60% of the way or Watson 60% of the way to saying the answer is going to be Prague. The only fucking thing people know about the Czech Republic is Prague. So, there might be some grammatical clues and I forget what percent certainty Watson had to get to before it would ring in; it was something like 75 or 80%, maybe higher, I don’t know. Watson didn’t understand shit; Watson was just coming to probabilistic conclusions in some kind of Bayesian Network.

And that’s how you can play Jeopardy that way. What if you’re asking about Wisconsin, there are only a few things people know about Wisconsin. Madison is the capital; the state slogan is I think ‘a land of a thousand lakes’. So, it’s likely going to be, one of the answer is going to be among the things people know about the thing being asked about which is based on no deep understanding.

[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.

Ask A Genius 841: Porn, and Shame and Guilty Culture

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/06/04

[Recording Start] 

Rick Rosner: Porn is increasingly weird in two ways. One way is that there’s so much porn that guys have wrecked their pouring centers, have just fried them looking at too much porn. So porn has to get more and more perverse and extreme for guys who’ve seen too much porn to use it because part of sex is novelty. I don’t know like if you’re a Christian in a loving relationship over 30 years with the same woman. Is that an actual thing where you can actually get a boner and ejaculate over having a loving Christian relation sexual relationship? I don’t know but in my experience you need novelty and that’s pretty obvious. Anybody who’s looked at porn over the past 50 years as I have and any other guy has, knows that porn has gotten weirder and creepier and more gonzo. Gonzo is actually a term for a type of porn where there’s no redeeming, no plot, just like aggressive, horrible, people just brutalizing each other. 

Though brutalizing each other is another form of porn where there’s actual brutality. Anyway, porn is fucked up and increasingly so but the thing I want to talk about which is less obvious is how weird is porn in general because porn is shameful and porn has to be a little shameful to work. Part of what makes porn dirty and able to make you horny is its shamefulness and dirtiness and that’s so freaking weird because it shows something that you’re supposed to do as a human being. You’re supposed to have sex and reproduce. You’re supposed to find a partner, get married, and do these shameful things with them. So everybody who’s a normal person in the world, a normal adult person is supposed to be doing porn stuff but porn is shameful and in fact you’re a weirdo if you’re an adult who’s not doing porn stuff, who’s not having sex. So that’s just a weird dimension.

Porn is nasty and filthy and people who make porn are nasty and filthy and should be kind of scorned the less so now than like in the 60s. In the 60s it wasn’t even acceptable to be a playboy centerfold. It was only the lowest of the low people, the most desperate who had actual sex on camera and that stuff couldn’t be found until the very end of the 60s in any kind of arena that any upstanding person could easily find but that’s all historic. I’m just saying it’s weird that that porn is shameful yet in our lives as adults not having sex is itself a little shameful and that’s just a weird paradox; it’s too strong a term but contrast. Comments?

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Nothing.

Rosner: Okay. Is that a reasonable point or am I just making something out of nothing?

Jacobsen: It’s fair in the sense of the shame and guilt around it. I think that comes from a long history of Abrahamic religions a lot of the time. We don’t come with an intrinsic sense of shame about the human body. I think there’s a certain modesty about the human body that we have that’s innate but I think the larger inculcation has been for a very long time which probably really peaked during the Victorian era in the West,which was this strong Puritanism which is a lot of shame, guilt, and disgust with the human body which is just doom. It’s just another organism.

Rosner: Is shame being an amplifier of horniness? Is shame making you horny? Is that a cultural thing? Would you argue that get under Abrahamic, Judeo-Christian, plus Muslim I guess religions? Is that what Abrahamic is? 

Jacobsen: All major religions kind of are Abrahamic; following the line of Judaism, Christianity, then Islam.

Rosner: Okay. The people in India; they put up lots of porn-y stuff in a thousand years ago, two thousand years ago. And people in China; lots of porn, like really ancient porn in China; drawings of people fucking and sculptures and carvings. Are people not under Abrahamic religions just forthrightly you having sex like its not shameful? I don’t know if you know, I mean can you have entire civilizations where people just go ahead and have sex and it’s not shameful?

Jacobsen: I think in regular circumstances whatever the hell that means. I think that the sort of neural circuitry devoted to sexual activity is in some sense self-regulatory. So there’s sort of a moderation to it. I think with new digital technologies and certain sort of acute subcultures you can find through history there’s an intensity on either end where there’s no sex and intense fear and shame about it even to the point of like women during the Medieval Era there was fear of them having vagina dentate.

Rosner: Yeah, my fraternity paddle, we had to make paddles in our fraternity and I took a Barbie doll I think and then I took a plastic dinosaur head and I put the Barbie on the paddle and then I gave her a very toothy vagina via a T-Rex head which seemed very appropriate to the way Frat Boys think and I was a frat boy.

Jacobsen: So there’s that and the opposite end is really, it’s not necessarily Sodom and Gomorrah but it’s sort of these acute subcultures where there is basically free love. I think for the United States subculture of like Timothy Leary or Ram Dass and all those people were a really good example of that where they were trying to get rid of the shame culture around it.

Rosner: I feel what’s behind some of what you’re saying is that in an uncivilized culture, that’s like a culture that doesn’t have the wherewithal to produce a lot of cultural material say before Gutenberg, that people’s sexuality was naturally regulated. The guys might get horny every two or three days and  so would women and they would just have sex on kind of a schedule that we might consider relaxed compared to us in our porn-ified culture. Is that part of what you’re saying?

Jacobsen: I mean I think it’s an interplay of systems like the neural systems self-regulate internally and within an interpersonal and social dynamics.

Rosner: It might be possible in a naturally regulated unporn-ified system that people would just go ahead and have sex every so often, every few days, every week, or whatever.

Jacobsen: Those social systems might be ritualized as well were sort of the Elders of the society guide thing. I don’t mean like Orthodox Jewish matchmakers that are looking at the family history and all that stuff, the things that aren’t codified. They don’t have any sort of rigidity past 80 years or 60 years whatever the lifetime the old people might be in the culture.

Rosner: So there might be less shaming though some shaming and less connection between shame and horniness. A feudal culture where you work all day in the fields, or as shoemakers which is also your house, you’re making shoes in your house, your wife’s helping  and then you go to bed when it gets dark mostly or when you don’t want to burn too much of a candle, you’re in bed next to your wife and  every few nights you’re like somebody reaches for somebody’s junk and you do it and nobody’s thinking of it as nobody’s got a spank bank or anything. You’re not thinking while you’re banging your wife, “I’m fucking this whore…” You’re like it’s just my wife and we’re doing this. It feels good, I like the way she looks. Is that kind of maybe a possibility?

Jacobsen: Yeah I mean there’s no search history. It’s basically what you have is what you get. And people get old and die and with them those norms die too. And so there’s a generation born generation change. So nothing’s codified in the sense of written or the current modes of sort of digital storage. 

Rosner: I also have another argument that you can maybe have sex without the current connection we have between sex being dirty though maybe not but like when a dog fucks another dog or a chimp fucks another chimp I’m not convinced that the guy chimp fucking the lady chimp is thinking “Oh my God, what a fucking slut this dirty slut this lady monkey is” I mean it’s possible, I don’t know but it seems weird. It also doesn’t seem weird if in a lot of species I feel like sex is stolen, that guys look for sexual opportunities with female partners who may not be as willing as they might be to have sex with a more Alpha. 

Anyway guys are being a little rape-y in a lot of animal species and so maybe there is some idea of dirtiness like, “I’m doing a thing I’m not supposed to. I’m lower in the hierarchy and I’m fucking this high status lady monkey because I caught her under this banyan tree” or I don’t know what. So I mean I could see it going either way. Animals either don’t need filthiness of sex to get horny or maybe sometimes they do. I mean certainly iguanas are fucking. I don’t think Iguana’s thought patterns are sufficiently sophisticated that boy iguana is like “Oh my God, this fucking lady whore iguana is such a slut, oh my God.”

[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.

Ask A Genius 840: Dinesh D’Souza

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/06/04

[Recording Start] 

Rick Rosner: Are you familiar with Dinesh D’Souza? 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: So you know he’s a right-wing propagandist and kind of often not too concerned with exact truths, right?

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: So, he saw a tweet I think where somebody was talking about how statistically Trumpy Republicans are dumber than average and he came back with, “Yeah but the Democratic party is built on black people whom it has been well established by multiple studies, score a standard deviation lower than other races.” Then I came back with, as somebody who knows a lot about IQ that “Anybody who’s talking about racial differences in IQ is pursuing a creepy agenda and any such differences if they’re real at all are largely cultural and Dinesh D’Souza is a felon and a liar,” and that thing took off. So we’re doing Lance versus Rick again and we talked about it there and it’s made me think about the whole thing more.  I’ve obviously benefited from the idea of IQ because I’ve gotten publicity for having a high IQ and I feel like I’ve exploited it properly or like strategically which is to both say IQ is bullshit and I’m a weirdo with a high IQ.

If you go out there and earnestly promote yourself, kind of more like Raniere, that everybody should listen to me because of my high IQ, that’s creepy. I don’t know but it fucking worked for Raneire. It got him a sex cult and it got him access to tens of millions of dollars from the Seagram’s heiresses. So, I don’t know maybe that works too. 

Jacobsen: Also, the Bronfmans that you mentioned, they’re in my community. They’re in the horse community. 

Rosner: Oh. Are they nice? I mean everything I’ve seen of them indicates that…

Jacobsen: No, at least one of them is in jail. I mean the international equestrian community; they knew of them. When I talked to a prominent person who works here they said “Oh yeah, we knew about that, the Raniere thing. We were surprised shocked too.”

Rosner: Yeah.  I mean it’s not a sin to be naive and to be taken in by a con man. One of them went to prison because of the Raniere thing. 

Jacobsen: For complicity with the sex trafficking I think.

Rosner: Right, well that’s a shame. I think some of the Bronfmans went to a school where Carol worked. So, anyway my recent thinking has led me to think even more that IQ is a racist structure in this way. My daughter does history of art, particularly women’s art and there’s generally has been a distinction made over the past 150 years and they’ve been certainly longer really between art art, painting and sculpture, and anything else which is seen as craft. She could tell you the one guy who was a very influential critic, I think in the 19th century, who really nailed down this impression arguing that art art is art and everything else isn’t and it’s no coincidence that art art painting and sculpture is dominated by men. Even when women do it, like Mary Cassatt, there have been quite a few women artists in the fields of painting and sculpture who have been really good but they tend to be de-emphasized. And then people who do the kind of art that my daughter looks at like needlework of and other kind of home-based crafts their stuff is completely devalued and called craft rather than art and part of her efforts is to say that the these so-called crafts are just as much art and are just as creative as somebody doing frescoes.

That makes me think of IQ where we’ve discussed Flynn who discovered the Flynn effect which is the increase by about one standard deviation of the average IQ of the entire world in the 50 years after World War II, which Flynn argues persuasively and I think accurately, is due to increased cultural Literacy that the whole world which used to be much more cut off as the world was unified by cell phones and TV and the penetration of movies and all sorts of media to parts of the world that had less access before World War II, everybody learned the styles of thought that are measured by IQ tests. He didn’t really go into those styles being kind of bullshit but you could argue and I’m and I’m doing it here that those styles are to some extent bullshit. 

The example that Flynn uses in styles of thought is if you take a naïve, say hunter-gatherer, who’s never been exposed to written language, you take somebody who hasn’t been exposed to culture and you ask them how a fox and a rabbit are alike. That person will answer while a fox hunts a rabbit, fox eats a rabbit and that’s a wrong answer on an IQ test because that’s not what alike means according to an IQ test though the person answered they’re alike in  being part of a struggle between the hunter and The hunted. But the correct answer according to an IQ test is they both have four feet, they both have fur, they’re both mammals, they’re both warm-blooded, they both walk on four feet, they both lope, they both live in coldish climates, etc. So they reflect a different kind of understanding. 

You understand what alike means; it means shared characteristics. It reflects an ability to break something down into its characteristics but that’s a cultural ability. You could argue further which is what I’m doing here, which I don’t think Flynn argues, that that style of thinking isn’t necessarily any better than other styles of thinking. You could further argue that there’s been a neglect of those styles of thinking on IQ tests because people who created IQ tests looked down on practical skills as indicative of thinking ability. If you went to like one of the early IQ test makers and probably even now, you show up at the Stanford Binet offices or the Wechsler offices and say “Here, I’ve got a whole new IQ test” and one of the questions on the test is make a pair of shoes, they’d be like “What the fuck is this?” but should they really be what the fuck is this? Because practical knowledge isn’t necessarily shittier knowledge or shittier thinking than being able to break things down into their characteristics. Comments?

Jacobsen: I mean to have practical knowledge is to have broken those things down into the relevant characteristics emphasizing relevant and then putting them in a sequence that you can manipulate in time. 

Rosner: Yes. Here’s another question on that new IQ test. You have half an hour, come back with a hundred dollars. They’d be like “Well that’s bullshit.” But is it? I mean there are plenty of ways to argue that it is bullshit but it’s not necessarily completely bullshit. There’s an argument that I’ve made recently, the argument goes like this that one reason that rich white kids do better than poor kids is intact households that have breathing space. Kid comes home from school, has dinner with two parents, listens to the parents have adult talk with each other, the parents have the leisure to be able to read or to be able to do something other than have two or three jobs just to survive but a poor kid in Chicago and when you say Chicago, you’re implying black. And so a kid in a poor household say with a single mom, an 11 year old who after school takes care of an eight-year-old and a five-year-old while the mom is working two jobs. All the talk in that household if there is much talk is either coming from the TV with kids shows or Easy Entertainment or it’s among the children. The mom gets home at 11 at night and the kids are in bed. Maybe the 11 year old’s awake enough to say hi to the mom. The mom’s tired and doesn’t have much to say and she’s certainly not going to talk over politics with a kid. So the kid gets exposed to less adult talk and has a less developed vocabulary.

So I believe that’s a true argument in terms of kids’ vocabularies. I think it’s also racist because it says that black people are poor but there’s another dimension to the argument. Along with that argument often goes the cultural emphasis. We know that and I’m sure there are studies but even without studies we can say that there are probably a higher percentage of black kids who earnestly aspire to be college or professional athletes versus say Jewish kids. My athletic aspiration was to avoid being laughed at in PE or to get a doctor’s note to get out of PE altogether which I did because I was just so shitty at it and it just wrecked me at school because that was the era of being shitty at PE meant you were a little F word.

My brother who’s almost 6’3 and was great at basketball; he had athletic aspirations. He was I think unusual for Jews statistically. At the Wechsler test, I show up at the Whistler office with my new IQ test and I say here’s a basketball situation. 11 seconds on the clock; you have the ball out of bounds and you’re down by two. Which of these things do you do? And it’s a multiple choice. Why isn’t that a legitimate question for an IQ test? Its knowledge that a black kid who aspires to play college ball would be better at than like I would and why is that reasoning any less relevant. Maybe I could figure it out. Anyway, that’s my argument that the same way that they’re snobbery about painting and sculpture versus needlework, there has been snobbery over styles of thought in making IQ tests. Comments?

Jacobsen: Fair.

[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.

Ask A Genius 839: Machines Will Come to Know

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/05/19

[Recording Start] 

Rick Rosner: A quick thing that just came up.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, quick thing you just came out. So, sincere disagreement. Go.

Rosner: All right, so we were having a disagreement about whether it matters whether an AI appreciates its own jokes or not. Basically we’re arguing about a very short window I think in the development of AI between when AI can do things at a human level of expertise which is now in some areas and when AI becomes fully integrated in various information modes and becomes conscious. So that period between when AI is just an imitation, just kind of this machine learning generator of somewhat sophisticated product and you can argue about whether it means anything because the AI isn’t really thinking. I’m arguing that’s a fucking short time window between now and I don’t know, 2028. In 2028, in 2038, you’ll still be able to build AIs that aren’t conscious but if you don’t give a shit or you find it’s an easy improvement to incorporate, like in 2038 it will be no problem to make conscious AIs.

So the argument about whether your machine understands or not becomes moot by the end of the 2020s. There will be arguments about when machines become conscious. Sometime before the mid-20s, 30s you’re going to have conscious machines. Do you agree?

Jacobsen: I agree on that point. I think it just depends on your point of view. So my disagreement wasn’t that they’ll produce jokes. I think the computers will very rapidly on a logarithmic scale work at a superhuman level in the production of humor. So they’ll understand the math, the statistical generation of humor with any language. Once it’s done with one language you can translate it into another. However, the idea of humor is a meaning contextualized in a body, so it’s a mind embedded in a body with a physiological reaction to it and then we call that humor.

Rosner: I disagree. I mean I believe laughing is a physiological reaction but the structure of the thing that generates the laughter is I don’t think body dependent; I think its information dependent.

Jacobsen: So maybe humor is actually the small category here and the larger category is something like insight or sort of play on words. 

Rosner: No, I think a joke is a particular type of presentation of information where a complicated setup is abruptly resolved by the punch line rather than by laborious gaining of experience, trial and error. If something happens abruptly you see cause and then immediately effect; guy slips on a banana peel… you just learn something not to do very quickly. Hammered home by the other guy’s misfortune and you laugh… boom. That’s something that I will look out for and it only took me three seconds of watching this guy go on his ass to get that little nugget of experience. 

Jacobsen: I take it in this context the shorthand of the information, the reaction to that; it’s certainly the physiological reaction. It’s maybe it’s sort of decoupling it from any evolutionary history and you’re just looking at the structure of tinctured information.  I mean there’s a Voltaire quote, “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it.” That has a structure of a joke, may or may not produce a laugh but it’s not an insight about anything necessarily. 

Rosner: It’s kind of like a Mark Twain and kind of pithy aphoristic kind of short little deal similar to the supposed Chinese saying “May you live in interesting times,” where the message is short but it contains more information than most short messages.

Jacobsen: Yes. So yeah, there it is. There’s a certain pithy constructions of language to a type of evolved organism produce awe if there’s some things or humor in other contexts but the general concept is more what you’re saying where you can decouple it entirely and it’s a tincturization.

Rosner: Well, its information presented compactly based on how we process information. Machines will come to know.

[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.

Ask A Genius 838: AI and Consciousness

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/05/19

[Recording Start] 

Rick Rosner: We’ve been talking about consciousness and physics and everything for nine years. And when we’ve been talking about AI and what’s to come early on and medium on four years ago, five years ago we were talking about how big data processing would change everything that humans have taken the low hanging fruit based on not having the ability to hold big data sets in our minds. Then all of a sudden the last year or year and a half, we’ve seen the actual consequences of being able to manipulate big data via machine learning. So when we were talking about this stuff five years ago, we didn’t exactly have an idea of how things would play out. We certainly didn’t expect them to start playing out so soon but my question is do we have a better idea based on just the last year and a half of how the… it’s not really the singularity but it’s not not the singularity how it’s going to play out. What do you think?

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Yeah, I think it’s going to be a slow bubbly thing. There’s going to be places where it progresses so fast, people get scared and regress in portions of that culture.

Rosner: You mean like after Obama was President, like it scared half the country into becoming big ass racists.

Jacobsen:  I think it I think it scared 10% of the population in it.

Rosner: And they got really loud and they dragged another 10% along with them.

Jacobsen: Yeah, I mean some people are just going to vote Republican because they’re a particular religious background or they make those statements or they just vote for party line because they’ve always voted that way. I mean a lot of people are just solid blue.

Rosner: I mean some people who are lifelong Republicans and they hold their nose and they vote for or they just miss out on like the stuff that we see every day on how crazy the Republicans have gotten. So I think AI will revolutionize medicine. I’m hoping sooner than we thought. I subscribed to a feed that is AI looking or just like browsing through tens of thousands of studies and drawing conclusions a lot of which are obvious I guess but the AI is doing it. It browsed around until it found like eight studies, a leaking type 2 diabetes, and food addiction and said all right there’s a link. And that was like yesterday’s little thing that it sent me. They trained it to look for groups of studies and to draw conclusions from those groups of studies and a lot of the conclusions it’s drawing are not surprising but it will obviously get better and better and AI will start changing medicine and it’ll get good at that pretty fast I assume. Do we start getting like years added to our life expectancies within the next eight years? What do you think?

Jacobsen: I don’t know. I think that’s all Rick. It’s hard because the way I think is spatially and statistically and then I put that into words. So I see this as sort of hills and valleys of population dynamics; portions of the population that will take on anything and some of the things they take on will be so new that it’ll actually be bad for the health. You’ll have others who are sort of more tentative and they’ll go about it in a reasoned way and that’ll be another 10% of the population.

Rosner: What I’m talking about is medical treatments themselves.

Jacobsen: Well that’s been going on for a century.

Rosner: No, but now with AI you can just brute force. I mean the kind of like drug studies they’ve been doing have been increasingly like big data driven, like don’t rely on insights just test 1500 different substances and see if any of them do anything. This automated just throwing shit into test tubes and not worrying about coming up with hypotheses just seeing what works.

Jacobsen: I mean it’s the wider view in information cosmology; everything is simulatable. So I think it’s just a matter of computation and the proper algorithm and knowing the system. So, I think the next step isn’t broadband human simulation, I think it’s, “Okay you have a problem with your pancreas, here’s our pancreas simulator with various inputs and here we’re going to plug in 200 different drugs we have or whatever based on your genetics and our scan of your pancreas to find out what the issue is and what will work with that” That’s as a halfway between sort of the ideal state of personalized medicine and the current state of medicine as general but leaning towards personalized medicine. 

Rosner: I guess what I’m asking is, like they say Jimmy Carter’s life like three four years ago, he had fatal brain cancer and then they found a personalized treatment that just killed it and the guy is still alive.

Jacobsen: I mean we are the sum of interrelationships of a bunch of different systems and those are all natural systems.

Rosner: So what I’m asking is, are we going to start seeing the mortality of almost all diseases, start getting knocked down or say the mortality of the diseases that kill 85% of the population, there will still be some resistant diseases but will we start seeing mortality just getting decimated?

Jacobsen: Yeah, there will be luddites too. I mean this idea isn’t original to me but I think there’s an argument to be made for relative stupidity in a population as an evolutionary driver for the smart people and population to get even smarter.

Rosner: Well okay, so what you’re talking about is behavioral changes to some extent where you tell people quit eating three big meals and start eating 10 tiny snacks a day and you will add an average of two years to your lifespan and most people just won’t put up with that shit. They’ll just keep doing what they’ve been doing but I’m also talking about simple medical therapies, drugs, engine and crisp or derived tweaks to fucking people that will be taken up by the vast majority of the population that are affected by those therapies because why not. If something will add years to your life and it’s just a matter of taking a pill, then informed people will take the pill or we’ll get the injection.

Jacobsen: Well, I interviewed like the world’s most sighted doctor; he’s in an epidemiologist. He studies disease for his career and he’s a distinction professor at McMaster University. We did maybe 10 or 12 interviews, something like a large number. I don’t know if we talked about this but basically another aspect of that is having the wherewithal and the background to know whether or not to do a surgery, that’s also a big thing. So people who tear their ACL, do you give them knee surgery or not? And what they started finding is you get a better sort of functional need for about six months after the surgery, you compare that to a control trial which is no surgery and for most people most the time after six months whether you have the surgery or not, you’re at about the same level of functionality. The consequences of the surgery are long-term a higher probability of arthritis and wear down of the knee.

Rosner: Well, I’ve got a similar thing or I put off getting hernia surgery for about eight years because I read a study that said that they meshes the way they do it now and that the outcomes with mesh in terms of paying afterwards were about the same as people who had no surgery and I didn’t want to fuck around with the mesh as long as I could push the hernia back in and then there came a time where I couldn’t push it back in.

Jacobsen: You were pushing on a hernia physically back in yourself?

Rosner: Yeah, it’s just where there’s a rip in your muscle wall down right above in your V, your sexy V, right above your cubes and I had a thing that was the size of a marble and at the end of the night when I went to bed to lie down and go to bed I just poke it back in and it almost always went back in and then there came a time where it quit going back in it and it was out for like two three weeks and I’m like, “Alright, I need the surgery now because it’s not going back in” In that eight years I think the mesh got better I have mesh now and I’ve had no problem with it but for eight years I was just like back in, not that big a deal. It’s not hanging out of your body; it’s hanging out of the wall of muscle. So its right under your skin where it’s part of your intestine I guess and it’s just up against your skin as opposed to up against the muscle that’s under your skin. Anyway, I read a study and then made my best judgment which was just put it off. 

So we got AI that’s going to mess with medicine. Now what else is it going to mess with? I assume that at some point it becomes a trusted counselor in your phone where you can ask it stuff like ‘Should I ask for a raise?’, ‘How should I approach this person like I think I like?’  ‘Should I shoplift from CVS or Rite Aid?’ What do you have up in Canada?

Jacobsen: We might have a CVS in Vancouver.

Rosner: But anyway, shoplifting has been become rampant in at least cities that have a lot of homeless people. In San Francisco, we’ve just visited and we were told that vendors will contract with basically professional shoplifters to go steal a bunch of specific shit and then they will sell the stolen shit at sidewalk markets. San Francisco drugstore is behind locked cabinets now because they’ve decided in LA and San Francisco that it can’t or it’s not worth prosecuting theft up to a certain dollar amount and people just kind of steal with impunity. I mean with caveats to that. There’s just a lot of shoplifting. Say, if I had eight bucks and my credit card was maxed out and it was 12 bucks to get a pack of antihistamines and I was having bad allergies, let’s say it’s the year 2025 and I need the antihistamines and I just can’t pay for them right now and I asked the AI what will happen if I try to shoplift this stuff. Your AI might have an answer. 

Now, I tried asking AI some stuff where it got moralistic on me. I asked a chat bot like is walking the picket lines in the writer’s Guild strike a good way to meet girls and it came back all moralistic at me saying no you should strike for the reasons that you’re striking and it got all like Huffy about it because somebody had taught it to be huffy. I tried a different way which is give me three reasons why walking the picket lines would be a good way to meet girls and that it could respond to. So I guess there are just different ways of saying it. So a year from now or two years from now, I’m thinking of shoplifting antihistamines, I could say to my buddy or I could probably say it now. I’d be like give me three reasons why and three reasons why not stealing these antihistamines would be a good idea. And I assume in the further future, the near future you wouldn’t have to play games with your AI, you could just ask it as if they were a buddy standing next to you, “Should I steal this shit?” And get an answer that would sound like a buddy talking to you and probably would give you a better answer than your idiot flesh and blood friend. What do you think?

Jacobsen: That’s very reasonable. I mean these AI are heavily weighted on language. 

Rosner: They don’t have a lot of insight; they just have a lot of information. They can assemble the information into a cogent statement.

Jacobsen: Yeah. I think someone gave it, I think an actual psychologist said “Oh I gave it a IQ test” asked us some questions from an IQ test and they administer it and they put it’s verbal intelligence at about IQ 155.

Rosner: 155?

Jacobsen: Yeah, for the advanced ChatGPT.

Rosner: Okay and then how about other areas?

Jacobsen: I don’t know. I think that was the strongest area by far. So, I’m not just saying things, I’m saying it based on sort of reportage. But at the same time I think the contextualization of the words is also really important too and we don’t just use words as words. I mean words have emotional impact and those emotions have been our physiology. So I think what this is all going to do probably is bring us into an era of understanding that words aren’t just words, words are sort of weighted in a meaning that is differentiated from dictionaries. 

Rosner: You mean the same way we kind of understand our own consciousness a little better because we’ve been dealing with apps for so long, that we kind of see ourselves as kind of like overlapping OS is just kind processing our mental information? That we’re going to get insight into our self by getting insight into the AIs all around us? Is that the deal?

Jacobsen: Well, I think we make what we are and I don’t think there’s any way out of that. Whatever structure that is produced comes out of our internal world.

Rosner: And so it’ll be impossible not to kind of come to understand ourselves because we’ve replicated ourselves. 

Jacobsen: Yeah, everything we make bears our mark. I mean it seems trivial but I think it’s very powerful. The fact that we paint on canvases, the fact that we produce symphonies or rap lyrics; these are human capacities put out and I don’t think it’s not so much of a coincidence that we start getting things like language systems. We start getting things like um a poetry generation or imagery generation. These are things that we do to a degree but they’re sort of outsourced and the extremeness of them where they start developing very rapidly beyond human capacity to superhuman capacity allows us to be able to say or see that they’re sort of exporting parts of ourselves to another domain and those things are really giving an insight that ‘oh they’re missing this part, they’re missing these other systems connected.’ So you have these language systems that are producing this phenomena, the experts are calling hallucinating. You’ve heard of this. It’s the idea that it produces or generates convincing text with lies in it. 

Rosner: So when we try to imagine the near future, what are we able to say that isn’t about it that isn’t obvious, like that isn’t generalities. Like yeah, that’ll lead to job losses and changes and types of employment, that’s like an obvious generality. I just read a tweet thread from Justine Bateman, the actor, you know Jason Bateman who’s been in a zillion things.

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: His sister, also an actor, a director, a writer and went back to school and got a degree in computer science and she’s got a lot of justifiable anger about stuff. I like her. I saw her in person being angry. I went to the bank and I was getting poor service and then this woman walks in with her mom and stands around for five minutes and gets poor service and is obviously pissed off and just leaves and I’m like wow, like I can relate. She was weirdly familiar and I figured out it was Justine Bateman who’s just kind of willing to embrace her anger and she wrote an angry tweet thread about we better this Writer’s Guild strike and any subsequent strikes by the Screen Actors Guild and directors and anybody in a creative guild that’s going to negotiate. These negotiations have to be stringent and ironclad or we’re fucked because she said we did seven seasons of Growing Pains which was her biggest show and if you love that show in a couple years and you say hey AI give me season eight of Growing Pains it’ll have the first seven seasons input and it will be able to give you plausible scripts and it will also be able to simulate the likenesses of the cast and give you another chunk of episodes that are just as entertaining and not weirdly different from the actual episodes.

And she says that agents will just go along with this shit as long as they get their 10% anytime. Some digital representation of somebody gets a job. It’s all up to actors, writers, directors, and producers to protect themselves because this shit is coming and it will be able to take over a lot of the creative tasks that flesh people currently do and I buy her argument that if you want a movie, if you want a spy movie with Chris Hemsworth and Ana De Armas that runs 75 minutes and involves a stolen nuclear weapon and travel to exotic foreign locales and a burgeoning romance, you can specify all that shit or you don’t even have to specify all that, you just throw in a few of the ingredients and AI in 2027 will be able to deliver that to you.

So, does that mean we just all become like dumb consumers? People are really sloppy about spelling now because spellings have been outsourced. Is it going to make us more creative or less creative? Because right now we’re getting bombarded with… three years of Covid, we watched everything. So we know everything.  

Jacobsen: A lot of the input it requires living organisms to continually produce output so then it can have its big database and so culture constantly evolves. So there’s an open question here. Do these large these LLMs; these large language models and these other algorithms for producing things based on big data and machine learning and then neural nets and deep learning produce enough novelty to keep themselves relevant? 

Rosner: Yeah, it’ll absorb all that because it’s fast, like the trope Carol pointed out was on the sitcom we were watching. The guy explains why another guy’s being an asshole and the asshole starts to feel bad and then the other guy goes, “I was just messing with you” and then “Or was I” and “I was just messing with you,” and she said that happens all the time in sitcoms. That going back and forth between serious and not serious, you can’t tell if I’m serious or not and it’s a thing she hates because she’s seen it too much lately. When half the shit that AI absorbs is the product of AI, won’t AI start coming up with its own tropes? That it’ll acquire a sense of humor and will start generating its own weird jokes? 

Jacobsen: So this goes back to the extremism of Alan Turing and the idea is the rope box, the way algorithms detach from a body or in a body. They will begin to sharpen their wits and this is sort of a broad-based cultural version of that or techno cultural version of that where they will begin to use what we have given them or they have stolen from us in some cases to sharpen their wits and then they’ll be performing at superhuman capacities. 

Rosner: So we’re going to be laughing at robot jokes? 

Jacobsen: Yeah.

Rosner: Not jokes about robots. 

Jacobsen: I mean everything that they have for a joke should have an underlying structure that can be abstracted and then regenerated. 

Rosner: But AI will begin to understand jokes and will begin to notice the same way that I’m reading AI’s generated studies or meta studies where it’s found a trend among studies and that that AI will start finding trends in human events and behavior that it can make new jokes about.

Jacobsen: Yeah. I think we can go back to another point we’re talking about earlier. Even though it will produce jokes at a superhuman level I don’t know if it’ll necessarily have an understanding of them although it can simulate an understanding through things like a really really advanced large language model.

Rosner: Right, but it doesn’t matter whether it understands.  I mean it yeah no it will kind of understand, it won’t appreciate jokes in the same way that we do because there won’t necessarily be a consciousness there or a fully formed awareness there but it will learn how to make good jokes, well structured jokes. 

Jacobsen: It’ll be like an easy bake oven. It can make a perfect piece of bread or cake; can it smell the cake? Can it taste the cake? Does it have a reaction to the cake? 

Rosner: But the deal is as consumers we won’t care whether it understands, whether it thinks the jokes it generates are funny.  All we’ll care about is, are the jokes funny and eventually they will be.

Jacobsen: Yeah, absolutely. 

Rosner: I’ve listened to hundreds and hundreds of hours now, just while driving, of different short stand-up routines and there are different types of comedians. Some people can get by mostly on timing and delivery. Some of the best comedy, some of the most legit comedy is finding an odd aspect of existence that nobody else has pointed out before and pointing it out and discussing how it affects our behavior or how we’re being fucked over. The cliché thing is what airlines do to people and people are still making jokes about the new shit that Airlines do to people as air travel gets shittier and shittier. Just finding shit and pointing it out, AI is certainly going to be good at doing that.

Jacobsen: And the way we understand, humor comes with a physiological reaction, it comes with a laugh and it comes with a good feeling. So, the computers will be completely decoupled from that. They’ll understand like the math of humor but it’ll be completely disembodied without any motion.

Rosner: But I’m arguing that it doesn’t matter.

Jacobsen: I would say it matters and it doesn’t matter depending on the angle you take.

Rosner: Well, I mean when we laugh, we laugh because we got a piece of information at a discount. A joke takes a complicated situation and quickly resolves it and you laugh because it’s like ‘ah’, that was going to be like a big pain for me to try to understand and remember and boom punch line resolves it and you’re like “Ha.” 

Jacobsen: Yeah.

[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.

Ask A Genius 837: Brakes From Family

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/05/18

[Recording Start] 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I know Carole and Isabella put the brakes on for you a bit because you tend to go full throttle and things, at least earlier in your life you did.

Rick Rosner: Yeah. Lazier, but yeah.

Jacobsen: You’ve had that phrase, lazy has replaced crazy and by crazy I translate that as a hyper drive in certain directions. Who do you think put the brakes on more, Isabella or your wife?

Rosner: Well, my wife. My kid has lived away from home for many years now but often my wife, her anxiety about what I might do to embarrass the family, isn’t just on her behalf but is for my daughter by proxy. She worries that something I put on Twitter or some other place where I’m not allowed like Instagram might embarrass my kid. And so yeah my wife has put on the brakes more. LA, like I’ve said before has a number of diluted, aspiring entertainment couples that that tell each other they’re brilliant, beautiful, and talented and kind of rev each other up. And Carol tends to see the pitfalls of things and is not super much a cheerleader. I mean she believes that I’m talented but she also believes that a lot of my efforts are doomed to failure which can take the wind out of my sails but any wind that she takes out of my sails is my fault because I need to be strong enough to withstand the reasonable objections of my partner.

It’d be great to have somebody who’s shared my delusions about what I might accomplish but that’s no excuse for not more aggressively pursuing my delusions. Often they’re not delusions. I’ve done some wacky shit like right now I’ve got big chunks of a manuscript of a novel that is extremely pertinent to what’s happening in the world and I believe the writing is decent and the whole thing I think is highly publishable and I think it’ll be successful once published. And Carol will say things to me like “You know that publishing is just a disaster now that the money’s been emptied out of it by the future we’ve moved into,” and that it’s super hard to get a book published unless you’re a celebrity. And in my view that’s just not super pertinent because the book is good enough and outrageous enough that it can overcome that. You remember Kevin, the documentarian guy? 

Jacobsen: Yeah.

Rosner: Well I mean that thing was sold and then it fell apart and now it’s out being sold again. Even though she knows that entertainment industry projects often take many years to come to fruition, she remains unconvinced that this thing will be a thing even though he’s coming out again in a couple weeks to do more filming. So, regardless of how skeptical Carol might be, it’s part of my job to move forward. Our kid has pursued her interests quite successfully and I’ve been very successful in not necessarily pursuing my direct interest but in doing things that I thought were fun which led to a career writing for TV. So, it’s not delusion. 

[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.

Ask A Genius 836: Evolving Jewish Views

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/05/09

[Recording Start] 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Addendum. So you’re reform Jewish.

Rick Rosner: Yes.

Jacobsen: You grew up reform Jewish?

Rosner: Yes. 

Jacobsen: Mom and dad were reform Jewish?

Rosner: Yes, further back there was Orthodox. My great-grandfather was a rabbi. My mom grew up in a more towards the conservative household. They kept kosher. I mean it’s not like we’ve been reform forever. Part of it is, growing up in Boulder, Denver there’s still a bunch of Judaism if you want to go after it but you’re not going to be as surrounded with Jewish people as you would be in… like Carol grew up with a bunch of Jewish friends in Los Angeles and if you grow up in New York City, you’re going to have a ton of Jewish friends. I had no friends growing up who practice Judaism and only one of my friends had even one Jewish parent.

Jacobsen: Has the family become more reformed over time or liberal over time? Or not believing in terms of some things over time or more conservative over time?

Rosner: Yes and no because my ex-stepsister was wild growing up and pretty wild into adulthood, moved from New York City back to Albuquerque during Covid because she thought it would be safer for her kids and she is barely strongly Jewish now. She is a proper Jewish woman. Her kids don’t know how wild she was. She has kind of gone back to Judaism.

My late brother had gone from reformed Judaism to being observant; the yarmulke all the time, prayers every morning, I think prayers before every meal, being strictly kosher, and going to Chabad all the time. He was a stand-up comedian and he had two different routines. He had the routines he did for military audiences because he was a lieutenant colonel in the Marines. So he could go do a show for a bunch of Marines or he could do his Jewish show at a Chabad and he did both of these like all over the world. So, half my family became more religious.

Jacobsen: How do you think your own view of things has evolved since you were younger?

Rosner: I think my evolution is similar to a lot of people’s where you hope that religion is true, in that you want the goodies, and the immortality is what I really wanted. I think that’s what everybody wants which is forever in paradise. Then as you learn more and more about the world, your belief that that’s a possibility grows less and less. You see what science can do in terms of explaining things and you talk about the God of the gaps which is that mysticism in religion occupies smaller and smaller gaps in knowledge. That’s the case for me personally where there doesn’t seem to be a lot of room for straight up religion-based immortality though I can see the possibility of technologically mediated extended life or resurrection but again that’s a long long shot.

[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.

Ask A Genius 835: Plato and Socrates

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/05/09

[Recording Start] 

Rick Rosner: Alright, so you just asked me what I think Socrates or Voltaire would think if they suddenly found themselves in a very religious era, for example, in the year 800 AD in Europe, when the Catholic Church ran civilization to a certain extent. The cultural life, the passing on of non everyday knowledge to the extent that was still going on, it was going on via the church. 

Socrates, I think would be annoyed, if he knew the whole history. When did Socrates live or his years?

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I think it was about 2500 years ago because I know Plato was 2500 years ago. He died 399 BC.

Rosner: Alright, so he would have been heartened by the rise of the of civilization via the Roman Empire except the Roman Empire was a mess in a lot of ways; it was corrupt and decadent, but they did a lot of stuff and they probably pushed knowledge forward some. If you were in Rome and if you weren’t a slave, life was pretty sweet in the Roman Empire but most people were not there and so life was pretty grubby. So, going from the year zero under the Roman Empire to the year 800 under the Catholic Church probably meant for most people life was roughly equally grubby I guess or maybe not because if you were like a stonemason on a huge Cathedral project, then life was maybe pretty sweet. I assume Socrates would have been cheerleading intellectual advancement and also cynical and disgusted with the lack of progress perhaps. 

Voltaire would certainly have been pissed off to find himself 900 years further into the past living in what to him would have been a very unenlightened age. I think an equally interesting question is what they would think if they woke up now and were competently briefed.  I think they would be pleasantly astonished by science and its products and appalled at our massive wars in the last century and how we are still teetering on the precipice of fascism once fascism was explained to them and destruction and now perhaps having to contend with disruptive constructed entities in the near future. I think for the most part they’d be kind of delighted and would also feel that maybe their intuitions were vindicated that even in this enlightened era, that we’re still huge assholes.

I’m assuming that all the great thinkers of history were pretty cynical that even if they espoused cheerful points of view they were smart enough to see the flawed packages that people are, that you might get some good shit but there’s a lot of venality.

[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.

Ask A Genius 834: Long Covid

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/05/09

[Recording Start] 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Is Covid over? Please tell me.

Rick Rosner: No, people are thinking and pretending it’s over because we are now three years and two or three months in. People are sick of it and nobody’s reporting results anymore. Testing is way down. Carol, my wife, works at a school and they still get a lot of cases and some of them are still severe. It’s not like Covid has become milder. Maybe the average case of Covid is milder because more people have either been vaccinated or have previously had it but that’s not necessarily true either because only 17% of people could get the booster of [00:59] the booster in America. LA went from reporting daily results to weekly results and the weekly results are not terrible. For a while, LA County population 10 million was averaging 3,000 new cases a week. The last couple weeks they’ve been down to 2800 and then to 2500 and change which is like 370 new cases a day on average which is not terrible except that testing is way down. So you can’t trust the numbers. The only numbers that I trust are wastewater statistics.

Jacobsen: Why?

Rosner: Because that is an aggregate of all the pee and poo of everybody within a sewage shed, an area that sends all its sewage to a plant like Hyperion in Los Angeles. So nobody is getting tested, it’s just that they’re sampling horrible sewage water to see how much Covid is in it and they’ve been developing this system in California and across the country for probably a year and a half and Covid is down-ish. It’s down as low as it was in October but not down as low as it was roughly a year ago. In a lot of sewer sheds or whatever you call them, measurable Covid levels were almost nil a year ago during the lull of the time. Now they’re down there and they’re staying down but they’re still much higher than a year ago even though the reported numbers which are as I’ve said crappy, say Covid is way down. So I tend to trust the sewage numbers but I’m hoping that they were just bad at reading sewage a year ago and they were getting readings of zero when it was maybe higher than that. So I can hope that we’re getting down to our lowest possible levels but I don’t think that’s the case. I think there’s still a healthy amount of Covid out there.

 I feel like a schmuck wearing a mask every place but I still do. I’m forgetting my mask more when I go out with Carol and then she has to give me one of her emergency masks. So that to me is either a sign of hopefulness or stupidity on my part. The head of the CDC, Rochelle Paula Walensky, just resigned. She was kind of loathed by people on all sides for being ineffective on Covid though there’s no way for her to win because the two sides; the crazy side and the evidence side are in complete disagreement and the people in the middle are like let’s go back to normal already and quit bugging us. So, whoever will be the head of the CDC will probably be just as loathed as she was.

New studies are coming out about long Covid because we’ve only had it for three years. That’s the longest you can have Covid, so it makes it hard to study long Covid but it seems to be that the damage from getting Covid over and over can be cumulative. You can be fucking yourself a little more each time you get a new case of Covid. So the people who say “It’s just like a bad cold, I felt bad for two days,” well, if you’re on your fourth or fifth round of Covid, you might be doing a lot of damage to yourself. So that’s where we stand. Covid going from pandemic to endemic; just this low level continuing to bubble on and continuing to make people sick but at a low enough level that people who want to stick their heads up their ass and pretend everything is fairly normal.

I’m hoping that as summer comes and there have often been lulls during the summer because people are outside more and in school less and so they have less opportunity to spread it and I’m hoping that in June there will be low enough levels. People being outside will lead to a durable drop, a drop that’s hard for Covid to bounce back from. And so that maybe the endemic level will go from one person in 3,000 in LA county having it to one person in five or 6,000 having it and even when it peaks again it maybe triples up to one person in 2000 and it can’t sustain it but that’s optimistic.

[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.

Ask A Genius 833: Boiling Down AI Talk

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/05/08

[Recording Start] 

Rick Rosner: Last time we were talking about AI and I just wanted to boil what we were saying down to its essentials which is that AI seems to be able to do a rough approximation of in task information processing at a level that is either comparable to human or enough in the neighborhood of that you could imagine that within a single task; like language communication or generating art. And the AI seems to be capable of doing things on an apparently human level. And then when you look at the entirety of what might be necessary for consciousness which might include different kinds of information; sensory input, memory, judgment connected to feelings about what the conscious being is experiencing. At this point given what AI has been able to do even if it is characterized as sophisticated fill in the blank or auto fill, it seems to be able to do that to a degree which indicates that the other levels of integrating information don’t seem insurmountable or mysterious.

I’ve said over and over that AI seems to be or will be competent at in task information processing; single task stuff. Then you can reasonably assume that consciousness consists of that plus another few layers of the integration of information but none of those further layers seem sufficiently magical or inscrutable that some version of super powerful in that it involves a zillion servers and just burns up a ton of electricity doing calculations or the AI version of calculations. But none of it seems insurmountable that the first conscious AI setups may take an incredible amount of hardware and power and may run slowly compared to human consciousness or maybe in other ways hampered compared to human consciousness. None of this seems undoable. Do you agree?

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Yeah. I mean I think that one big assumption in a lot of the AI conversations is sort of a magical spell; the idea of this extra human stuff that makes us conscious. It seems to be a matter of the style of processing, the degree of integration, the suppleness of what we deem human consciousness for most people instead of catastrophic things or very advanced age. So I think I don’t believe in a magical substance that makes something conscious. I believe it’s a matter of degree and style; the tone of the consciousness. In a more poetic term you could put it that way. 

Rosner: Yeah, the fleshiness of it, the desire for human contact that goes into the appreciation for beauty though. I mean there’s a human flavor to consciousness because the consciousness we’re most familiar with is human with all its built-in preferences and biases.

Jacobsen: Yes. 

Rosner: Another thing is that until recently we haven’t had the right information to get closer to being right about what consciousness is. For thousands of years, we didn’t have great stuff to work from. So for thousands of years we’ve been wrong about what consciousness is often usually which has given people, I think, a false impression that consciousness is more mysterious and harder to figure out than it actually is.

Jacobsen: I don’t even think there’s a distinction between a hard and a soft problem or easy problem of consciousness. I think it’s a matter of engineering. I think this is something that evolution builds with environmental pressures and I think in those naturalistic terms something about architecture that’s dynamic over time. That’s a very generic way of saying but it’s really the style of the information process that matters and we’re going to be talking about it. In my terms, it’s sort of computation with human emphasis.

Rosner: Yeah, like when people imagine AI consciousness, they imagine this kind of dry, emotionless, cruelly calculating consciousness.

Jacobsen: HAL 9000. 

Rosner: Yeah.

Jacobsen: Take the Jeopardy bot; it doesn’t have valence to say ‘I want this or this’ is ‘this is more salient to whatever drives’.

Rosner: Yeah, Watson the Jeopardy bot. Is it 10 years old now or more?

Jacobsen: Probably.

Rosner: Yeah and that thing is like super primitive now I think compared to what you’re getting now in terms of a facility of information retrieval. 

Jacobsen: Yeah. I mean there is an argument to be made that you need emotions to sort of limit and direct the information processing and also to close the gap just so you don’t have un-ending processing about something, just to say, ‘okay this is enough. Go do that’.

Rosner:  Yeah. Well, certainly you need emotions for whatever consciousness you have to feel like human consciousness. If you look at judge as emotions more abstractly, as you just did, as kind of resource managers that the artificially conscious entity has objectives and will evaluate the data it’s receiving in light of those objectives. And then you can say well the emotions are, how it feels about the information it’s getting, which is what we do. Like, if you’re out on a date and you see things that make you indicate that the girl might be horny for you, you feel good about that. You’ve got an artificial consciousness that has been taught to have objectives related to maximizing something, say money via trading on the stock market or its own security via its ability to make money on the stock market. It’s not an insurmountable problem to have the freaking artificial consciousness feel good and bad about how it’s doing trading on the stock market. 

Last week you mentioned this Turing quote from probably the late 40s or early 50s, where he said something like it’s impossible to think that computational entities by conversing with each other won’t eventually be able to do any human task as well as humans, right?  There’s that quote?

Jacobsen: Yeah and he said he will outstrip our feeble powers.

Rosner: Yeah, so he was anticipating the rise of AI when computers couldn’t even do as much as the 4 function calculator of 1974. They couldn’t do jack shit.

Jacobsen: He died in 1957 maybe.

Rosner: I think you said 1954. At that time calculators were glorified adding machines. Anyway, we’re now at the very beginning of AI that manifests something close to actual intelligence.

Jacobsen: Yeah and everyone or most people seem to be afraid of artificial intelligence. A lot of leading lights and people with the money and research and teams to lead this charge and have been, are warning about it and are scared about it like “Oh my God, what are we going to do?” Pump the brakes; take a sick month breather…

Rosner: There’s been a lot of that and then there’s been a lot of people saying that we were never able to put any fucking genies back in any fucking bottles and certainly this one’s so far out of the fucking bottle. Some of the AIs that have been freaking people out like Chat GPT cost some huge amount like 50 million bucks or something to fill with information. There’s a word for it but basically to educate or to train. It costs a lot of money to pump it full of information in a way that it can work its AI on it; a lot of money and a lot of electricity. But then, a few days ago I started working with Chat Bots that only cost like 300 bucks to train somehow. Those things are delivering results that aren’t appreciably shittier than the 50 million dollar AI chat bot. So yeah, the genie is out of the fucking bottle. 

Jacobsen: I’m not scared in the least. I mean my argument would be in line with Alan Turing and would be even stronger than anyone; or not necessarily anyone but a lot of the people that are here saying no we can’t stop it. I’m taking a different approach and saying this is a good thing and we should encourage it. We should encourage the advancement of artificial intelligence because we live in a knowledge and information era. In other words, we need them.

Rosner: Okay. I was working on a tweet that I haven’t reached a point of sending yet that is like you can freak out or you can go with it and hope and trust that a world with these AIs will still have room for you in it which might be Pollyanna-ish but I think it raises other questions. I mean AIs have objectives now. They’re trained to maximize certain things to be good at go, to be good at games, to be good at verbal communication but they’re not conscious. So they’re not conscious of their objectives of whether they are or whether they’re not. I mean we’re entering an era in which you have these entities whether or not they’re conscious that will have objectives whether they originate them themselves or whether they’re trained to have them and in most cases they’ll be trained but the question then is how do you go from this world we live in now to whatever world we’re going to end up in.

Right now humans have all the money. We make all the decisions, we own everything; anything that’s owned in the world is owned by a human or a human created body like a corporation. And so what gets owned in the future when things that will want to own things themselves, what will they want to own? Question one is will artificial entities want to own stuff. And I would say yeah. And then you’ve got to ask what they will want to own. There’d be a whole range of shit depending on what they’ve been trained to want and what they train themselves to want. 

Humans have had little control over what we want because as you said we’re the products of evolution that has stacked the deck as far as our desires. We haven’t had much free will in terms of what we want; we want to fuck, we want to survive, we want resources, we want to see beautiful entertaining things because those things are related to our other evolved objectives. Everything we want is because we evolve to want them or we’ve hijacked and perverted what we want, like there are some guys who like to fuck cars or there are furries who like to fuck other people in animal costumes.

It’s not like we’ve taken over our own desires and re-engineered them. We have kinks; we’ve taken our basic horniness and just like tweaked it a little bit and not very willfully, it’s just where you ended up. From where you’re jerking off journey takes you, it’s not that you’re reprogramming yourself intentionally. It’s just that you keep wanting the jizz and what makes you want to jizz is weird for some people. We’re still Evolution’s bitch. There will be some of that with artificial entities but they will possibly or we will as we become integrated with some of them, have the ability to re-jigger our objectives. It’s not unreasonable to think that artificial entities will want to maximize their resources; that they’ll want to survive. 

Now it you can train AIs or will be able to train AIs to not have indefinite survival as one of their objectives. They’d be task oriented and we could figure out how to engineer out the design, like they’d be like fucking salmon; they swim upstream, they lay their eggs or whatever salmons do and then they die because that’s their whole deal. But I would think that it would be fairly natural for artificial entities self-determine that they want to survive and that they want to maximize their resources in order to survive. They want to get rich because wealth gives them safety and potential for continued survival. I suspect within that, that one of the objectives of artificial entities would be to maximize information processing power. The thing that’s not talked about as much as some of the other aspects of AI is how much electricity, how much energy it takes to do whatever it is that they’re doing; the computation, the information processor doing. So, I assume that in a totally computational future that a currency, a money will be computational power and resources. Any comments?

Jacobsen: I think our categories of thought, probably that started with Aristotle, around thought and feeling and instinct or intuition will have to change when we start deconstructing the human mind. And I think those will then give us insight into how sort of other intelligences, I won’t call them artificial, or constructed or synthetic will more closely match human character. I think these are really old concepts. For instance, people use the terms emotion and feeling for the same thing often. And instinct and drive or they confuse sort of experiential bit and physiological based intuition, divine inspiration or the latter; it doesn’t really exist in my opinion. 

Rosner: I’ve read one book and I’m reading another about how what we think of as inbuilt natural emotions are cultural constructs. I mean it’s easy to argue that for things like love that love might mean different things across different cultures and something like schadenfreude. If it has like a bunch of syllables it’s probably like a culturally constructed emotion but these books argue that almost every emotion that we have physical reactions but that almost anything that we see as a basic emotion is something that’s developed by rubbing against a culture. Intuitively we feel like that we have an inbuilt rainbow of basic emotions and these brain scientists and sociologists have been finding out otherwise but I think on the one extreme you’ve got the Aristotelian categories of thoughts and feelings and I think on the other extreme is the idea that it’s all the same shit. It’s all just input; feelings are input from the emotional parts of your brain and thoughts and memories and all of it are just sets of pulses that develop networks of dendrites.

The more we learn the more we’ll be able to shift back and forth. It’s all the same shit, it’s just the shit of thinking within feedback systems and the old categories of thought and it’ll be similar to shifting back and forth between physics and chemistry. 

Jacobsen: It’s probably the way the feedback that distinguishes emotions from straight thought. Because when people take like these horse tranquilizer or something or some of these very heavy psychedelics, like their body just decouples and they report experiences of just being pure thought and the dorsal prefrontal cortex is the last part of the brain developed as the newest evolutionary and it’s the most important part of self-judgment thinking or thought. And so, if that is so, then that is just a very advanced part of the brain that takes a long time to develop and it’s functioning and it can listen to independent way without emotion; just thought upon thought upon thought, recursion, recursion, recursion but I think things like emotion and instincts and drives and the needs physiologically, they’re kind of networked and then they feed back up into that and then they come to consciousness and then we put words and labels on them. And so, I could very easily see that people have got this kind of hypothetical but the speculation they have diets and environments that breed a different internal sort of culture of organisms around and in them that changes what hormones and sort of neurotransmitter are produced and the ratio of them throughout their whole development cycle.

And so that can change the way that not just how we say okay you’re a different culture, you have a different language and the labels; not only a different structure of language for things but different label for things but different feelings and drives towards and about things. 

Rosner: Like pain for instance, is networked into you in a way that feels quite different from other inputs that pain leads to reflexive actions, pain is hard to fight. If somebody’s like pressing a razor blade down into your finger it’s hard to just keep your finger there, you become very focused on the razor blade. There’s less introspection going on unless if somebody’s razor blad-ing you every day then maybe you get used to it and you become better able to think while you’re being razor-bladed. Athletes talk about the loss of self when they’re really in some kind of athletic groove which is really the loss of self-talk, the loss of the internal narrative you’re so focused on the sport that’s happening around you that you are distracted from talking to yourself which some people experience as a transcendent state.

I mean all this stuff happens based on how things are networked into orconnected to the rest of the network; both conscious and subconscious. 

Jacobsen: Well, think about these Christian monks who would self flagellate with whips. It hurts but there was another part of the brain wired up to sort of take that input and feed it into that let’s call it transcendentalist pleasure because they think they’re doing God’s work.

Rosner: They’re tricking they’re networking into functioning… they’re redoing their networks. I don’t want to say they’re short-circuiting them but they’re like figuring out how to change pathways or exploit but it’s still fucking around with the overall network of inputs. So, at base everything is physics but you can ignore physics and do chemistry when it suits your purposes and it’s a pain in the ass to take everything back to Quantum Mechanics when you’re just mixing shit in a lab or when you want to do biology, you don’t need to necessarily need to take it down to subatomic particles for every fucking thing that happens in biology or sociology. So, at base everything is inputs and networks but in practical terms you need to talk about what a pain network might look like, what a fear network might look like, what the effect of horniness on your perceptions and behavior network might look like. So, not everything has to be taken down to individual little net nodes of neurons that are educating each other. Is that reasonable?

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: Okay. 

Jacobsen: Let’s call it a wrap today. 

Rosner: Okay. Thank you for all the 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.

Ask A Genius 832: ChatGPT and Substrate Independence

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/05/05

[Recording Start] 

Rick Rosner: Well, it started with me reading a tweet that said that cheap AIs can be almost as good as expensive AIs. Apparently for language model AIs you can spend millions of dollars pumping them full of information and get a chat bot who’s pretty good at chatting but this tweet said there’s some chat bots that have been trained, for a few hundred bucks, that do a pretty good job of chatting. So I went to one of them and I had a 3000 word back and forth with this thing and it seemed pretty good. It was kind of repetitive, I mean I was asking it about itself basically like ‘are there any questions that you prefer getting because they help you improve your skills faster’ and the AI writes back ‘since I’m just a machine I don’t have preferences. And I go, “How about a 100 years from now; do you think AIs will be sophisticated enough to have preferences?” And the AI’s like “A lot can happen in a hundred years.”

 Then it gave me like some standard boilerplate vs about stuff that we’ve talked about that the whole thing will have to be approached ethically, that everything’s going to be disrupted and that optimally all this stuff will be handled with fairness to everybody involved. I write back but looking historically, that’s not how it goes. Humans don’t develop new ethical understandings and systems until there’s already been a lot of suffering and the AI writes back ‘quite reasonably, there are certain risks.’ The responses were well phrased but also kind of repetitive and sounded a little bit canned as if a bunch of people had already been asking these chat bot similar things. So it had moved to this kind of boiler plate-y set of responses. It began almost every response with “as an AI language model.” It seemed to be trying very hard to make sure that people didn’t get the wrong idea about its capabilities, that people don’t anthropomorphize it. And this was a cheap one. Do you have to pay to chat to the more expensive ones?

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Yes, the ChatGPT Plus takes money.

Rosner: How much is it?

Jacobsen: I don’t recall how much but not much.

Rosner: I might use it to try cheating a little bit with my writing to see if it generates anything that I can tweak into something usable because I tried a couple prompts to see if I could generate usable writing that I could use and it just gave me more kind of boiler plate-y bullshit. I asked it what it thinks about humans dating animals and what are some reasons why that would be a bad idea or why would that be a good idea and it gave me some boilerplate bullshit about how it can’t you know help me make personal decisions. Anyway, what’s clear is that,  and tell me if you agree or not, is that these AI models can handle… if they can’t do it now,  it’s certainly within the reasonable horizon, that they can handle in task expertise at a close to human level. If you’re looking for verbal interaction a chat bot is able to have human level syntax and fluidity knowledge which is in line with what you can expect from most people. Most of the time you’re not talking to an award-winning poet, so you’re not going to get a high level of creativity, you’re going to get somebody telling you what they know or their opinions which are not exceptional . It’s just kind of the opinions that they have selected from the universe of common opinions that they agree with, right?

Jacobsen: Yes, generally I think computers are going to quickly match human competencies with things that can be made binary and then obviously surpass them. 

Rosner: So within a specific task like conversing or generating written work or generating art, they’re able to do that but that obviously doesn’t mean they’re conscious but it’s huge on a micro level. And I think once you start looking at cross node integration obviously you want a real time sensory input. I mean that’s one aspect of human consciousness; a thing could have slow consciousness based on not being able to get enough… needing a lot of buffering because it can’t absorb real world information as fast as we do but I don’t think that’s a huge technical hurdle. Maybe it is, there are probably issues with it but I mean the main hurdle between single task expertise in AI and human consciousness is integrating the various expert nodes, right? 

Jacobsen: There’s one assumption which is substrate independence. Well, three things; substrate Independence, embodied Independence, and the style of processing. So one, do you need a carbon-based evolved brain to produce consciousness?  Two, doesn’t have to be in a body that’s integrated with it very well and three, our style of processing; do you need that to make consciousness or can you get at it from different angles so the input’s the same hypothetically, the processing is different but the output’s the same. 

Rosner: So in our talks we’ve come to a couple conclusions. One is that consciousness is advantageous or an information processing system dealing with a lot of novelty, right?

Jacobsen: Yes. It’s sort of like having a quick purview on pertinent information then making a conscious choice. It’s almost like automated processing is picking a single thing out of a network and consciousness is really deliberating a field of choices than picking those. It’s kind of different. 

Rosner: Yeah, the field of choice is informed by expertise from a number of different expert nodes. Every part of the brain chimes in including memory and it’s a big associational net that you’re trawling with to pull in all the information that may be pertinent. So thing one is that consciousness is advantageous. Thing two is that consciousness isn’t a tough thing to create given that mammals are conscious and there are other beings that are conscious. Just about any sufficiently smart organism is also conscious because consciousness is advantageous and it’s easily developed given the right stuff with that stuff to be specified. Given enough brain stuff a species is going to evolve towards consciousness because it’s helpful, it’s super helpful and it’s not super expensive. It’s kind of expensive but it’s worth it.

So given that, it’s quite reasonable to think that doing all the reasonable things you think you would need to do to develop machine consciousness, if you do those things you’re going to get something that’s conscious with those things being huge associative net among various expert nodes plus memory. I asked the cheap ass AI about feelings and judgment and it’s like I’m an AI and I don’t have feelings. I’m like “Yeah but don’t you think eventually that we’ll be able to figure out how feelings work in humans and replicate those systems in AIs?” And the AI kind of bullshitted about couldn’t be pinned down. It had a kind of canned response to that, that there’s going to be lots of different things happening in the future. I feel like if I talk to a more sophisticated chat bot I might get answers that are slightly less canned. 

I haven’t previously done extensive talking to chat bots but it’s clear to me and I think to you that the micro level, the specific tasks, AI will be able to handle that shit at a human level if not now, then within a few years, right? I mean there is the creativity angle like when you’re doing AI art, the creativity is still coming largely from the human, the prompts from the human and then the AI is just skating through its library. I don’t know, maybe it’s not so clear. I mean a lot of human creativity is going to your own library of possible approaches to things and then picking out the one that catches your fancy and certainly AI can do that too um. 

What’s going on with self-prompting? Like all the art that you get from AI, most of the art, at least all the good art that I know of is a human typing prompts at the AI but there’s nothing to stop an AI from looking at a library of a billion different prompts and assembling its own likely prompts based on what it’s learned about prompts, right? 

Jacobsen: So when we talk about connecting nodes, we have very good example. We have text textual analysis or linguistic algorithms tied to visual algorithms, photorealistic algorithms. And so that you could say those are two sophisticated programs. You get them in one system that in a way is what we’re talking about with the human mind. 

Rosner: Yeah but that system’s still not conscious, it still doesn’t understand anything that it’s working with.

Jacobsen: It’s on the way though, it’s not fully integrated like it’s not turning visual information into a text for itself into ‘okay this is a picture of my mind that I’m going to draw.’ 

Rosner: I suspect that you get something that’s very close to consciousness depending on the number and variety of nodes that understand each other. 

Jacobsen: Yeah, so it’s almost like there’s the algorithm itself, there’s recursion within itself for self-understanding and then there’s a system of co-communication between those two nodes themselves and that’s a very sophisticated model but if that ramped up beyond kind of simple language encapsulation but it could be done. Why not? They’re all engineering problems. Consciousness is a natural phenomenon and it has been evolved. So it was engineered by an environment, a dumb environment over a long period of time. A smart engineer team over a shorter amount of time should be able to do it. 

Rosner: I’m guessing in a brute force way. There’s not a magical like hidden principle of consciousness. Magical is the wrong word but there’s not something hidden or non-intuitive about consciousness that needs to be learned before you can start building consciousness. I think if you take the elements of human consciousness, the ones we’ve talked about for years, and try to engineer them in; that will likely be sufficient to get a machine consciousness. What do you think?

Jacobsen: Yeah. I mean just these language production models, they aren’t producing language the way we do but it’s a way to get the same kind of output. 

Rosner: There’s another thing that’s going on. I think that the thousands of years of people getting consciousness wrong has convinced people just on an intuitive level that consciousness is hard conceptually and also as an engineering problem and probably harder than it actually is. What do you think?

Jacobsen: Yeah, I mean also a lot of more typically fundamentalists’ religious outlooks try to centralize a human specialness and I think consciousness is one of those last frontiers. I mean we aren’t special in most ways and the degrees to which we are special on a spectrum however you want to analyze it; language, level of integration processing, physical strength, dominance of the planet, reproductive cycle… however you want to do it, there’s a spectrum for all those things and for most of them we’re not really outstanding at all. And I think that is an argument for decentralization of human beings and I mean if you want to make it grandiose again I think that decentralization human is just a general process of looking at things more objectively. We aren’t central and the universe was not made for us. 

Rosner: Yes, speaking of not being special, this is on a totally different subject except that it’s just a personal thing. I quit benching with free weights for a very long time just because I figured I could maintain my strength well enough without needing to fuck around with weights on a bar but recently I’ve started using free weights again and at my strongest and with terrible form and with trampolining the bar off my chest dangerously, I could bench press about 1.77 times my body weight. 

Jacobsen: Nice.

Rosner: Yeah not now going back to it I’m at 1.02 times my body weight which is very disheartening. I’ve lost a lot of weight and being skinny like just bone and skin is not good for bench pressing. Anyway, I’m feeling very not special.

[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.

Ask A Genius 831: Did Rick Memorize the World Almanac?

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/05/04

[Recording Start] 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You had, not only had, but have a very interesting life history. There’s one thing in there that I had question marks about and I really don’t know the answer to. Off tape I phrased it wrongly that I thought you had studied or memorized The World Almanac.

Rick Rosner: No. So, I made it on to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and I made it into the hot seat and I think I made it up to the eight thousand dollar question but then ran out of time. And then there was a holiday or a hiatus. Normally on a quiz show if you run out of time you come back in the next episode. It maybe even filmed that same but it was maybe the Fourth of July holiday where it was going to be two weeks before I finished my time in the hot seat and in that two weeks we were going to, I think Disney World, and I took an Almanac with me just to continue trying to amass trivia for the next set of questions I was going to get, to see whether I could make it up to the high value questions, which having watched every episode of the show I thought I had a pretty good chance at.

I couldn’t carry an Almanac with me through Disneyland. So I tore the almanac into five parts and I’d take a little part with me when we went out with my wife and myself and our kid to just have something to look at for any pertinent information while we were standing in line. And I got back on the show and at 16,000 dollars I got a shitty question; what capital city is located at the highest altitude above sea level and there were several problems with the questions written for millionaire. One is the problem with questions written for any quiz show which is you can always make a mistake. And the fact checking process where you write a question you provide your source for the answer and then you send it to the fact checking department and they double triple check your answer. It should be a good question in terms of being well phrased and having a single answer and being factually correct and so they’ve the fact checking department. Somebody’s in charge of picking what questions would be good to ask on a show and that’s somewhat separate from the fact checking which is making sure that there are no problems with the question but even given that, bad questions sneak through.

If a bad question sneaks onto Jeopardy, it doesn’t necessarily destroy the whole game. Somebody answers and Trebek or now Ken Jennings or whoever’s the host, says right or wrong and maybe the person on Jeopardy who knows shit ton will say that’s wrong and then at break, the person says instead of that’s wrong I think you’re wrong or somebody else. Somehow somebody fig during the making of that episode comes back from break and say “We took another look at that question over the break and Lindsay was right and so we’re giving her credit for getting it right,” and they adjust it and they move on.

Or the question is caught later either before or after broadcast but a bad question on Jeopardy is one of 60 Questions, 61 if they make it through every single question and doesn’t necessarily affect the outcome of the game. Jeopardy’s pretty competent; they’ve been in the Jeopardy business for 40 years. A game of Jeopardy can survive a bad question but if you get a bad question on Millionaire, it’s just you answering a series of questions and if you get a question that’s fucked up and you’re not lucky enough to guess the correct wrong answer; the answer they think is correct, then you’re knocked out of the game and your time on the game is wrecked. So that’s problem one is just due to the structure of the game. It’s less forgiving of mistakes made by the show.

Thing two is, Regis Philbin was host at the time I was on and he had a show out of New York, so they did millionaire out of New York and all the experienced game show quiz show writers and fact checkers were in LA. So they had to hire a bunch of rookies and that meant they might make more mistakes and they did. They made a shit ton of mistakes and the question that knocked me off the show, they got their facts wrong. Coincidentally, the bad information in the question was taken from a very bad little list of about 30 world cities purported altitudes in the World Almanac; little thing that occupied the bottom one vertical inch of a page, a little teeny list. I happen to not have seen when I was studying the Almanac because that page was very close to the end of the chunk of Almanac as I torn it apart. 

An Almanac is about a 1000 pages and I had 200 page chunks so I could keep in my pocket one at a time while we went on rides. Say, a chunk of Almanac ended at page 420. Well that stupid list was maybe on page 416 and I just didn’t get to it. Had I gotten to it maybe I would have remembered the bad information on the bad list which didn’t contain the actual city that they were looking for which is La Paz Bolivia and I didn’t know the correct answer and Millionaire didn’t know the correct answer and I eventually sued him because you shouldn’t be able to get away with asking a multiple choice question without the correct answer to that question among the choices. I lost my suit because I’d signed a release pretty much giving him permission to do whatever the fuck they wanted. The judge I got didn’t consider that a contract, I think they call it a contract of adhesion, which is a fancy term and probably the wrong term, it’s been a while, that happened back 20 years ago. Contract of adhesion is a contract that’s inherently unfair. You can’t force somebody to sign a completely unfair contract.

You can’t sign force somebody to sign a contract that says if I fail to make three loan payments, you can cut off my toes or I don’t know what else, but it’s just an obviously unfair contract where the person is compelled to sign it by a power differential. There’s no negotiating a contract to be on a quiz show. You either agree to everything that they want you to sign or you’re not going to be on the show. You have no power and you want to be on the show because you have a chance to win a million dollars. So I think that’s the deal with contractive adhesion; if one party has all the power and the other party doesn’t have any power to negotiate away obviously unfair aspects of the contract, that’s not supposed to be allowed under the law but the judge didn’t see it that way.

[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.

Ask A Genius 830: Addendum to 829

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/05/03

[Recording Start] 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Addendum to last session. Go ahead.

Rick Rosner: One last thing is how crazy that a fucking whole industry and everybody in the fucking country now and North America, the whole fucking world is now talking about the shit we’ve been talking about for fucking forever and how fast it fucking 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.

Ask A Genius 829: Writer’s Strike and Boner Town

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/05/03

[Recording Start] 

Rick Rosner: Today’s May 2nd 2023, the writers’ strike; the first one in 15 years. Started at midnight and the first big issue is streaming where 15 years ago, 2007-2008, streaming was just getting going and streaming was basically three minute little productions on YouTube or trailers for stuff running elsewhere on YouTube. There was no place to stream shows as Netflix was brand new. Back then they sent you DVDs in the mail and you watched them and you sent them back. Now streaming is huge and a lot of people watch almost no non-streaming networks and get all their entertainment off of streaming but the shitty pay that was agreed upon 15 years ago is still in effect. So, that’s a big issue that if you do a show on streaming you should get paid as much as if the show was on a broadcast network or within shouting distance.

Another issue is the producers want to pay people a day rate which is we can hire you for a day and that’s terrible, that’s never been the case before. The shortest period for which you could contract a writer was like a week and even that was not really much of a thing. Generally six weeks was the minimum and often deals were for 13 weeks. So a day rate is a real fuck you to writers but the issue that’s the most interesting is writers are striking for a prohibition of the use of AI to write which is crazy because I don’t think even a year ago, maybe even six months ago that would have been a worrisome issue. Now if you go on Twitter, 95% of everybody tweeting, more than that, are supporting the writers and the people who are just being edgelord dickheads who are like, “Look out you fucking writers, you’re going to be replaced by AI and your writing sucks and AI could do a better job than you can anyhow.” 

So, it’s a thing and it echoes an issue from almost a hundred years ago though I don’t know when it was negotiated, well, 90 years ago, of recorded music versus orchestras for movies. People were arguing, I guess the Musician Guilds were arguing… I guess it was probably more in the 50s; I haven’t researched it. But that you can’t just use pre-recorded tracks; you have to score a movie, you need to have pay live musicians and the thinking is; A) you shouldn’t fuck over musicians and B) if you do fuck over musicians or in this case writers, then if you drive a class of talent out of the business then when you really need that talent they’ve gone elsewhere or just dwindled. So, when you talk about AI in screenwriting, people are thinking that you could probably…  I just saw it on MSNBC 10 minutes ago talking about how you could probably use, you maybe wouldn’t want to use it for dialogue though there’s plenty of dialogue that’s so cliché and predictable that you probably could use it for big chunks of dialogue but if you don’t use it for that you could at least use it to write an elevator pitch. 

Go to ChatGPT and say give me 200 words on a movie about a robot detective in the future and then you add details from the thing you’re working on and you get 200 passable words that make a semi-convincing pitch you can work from. Also, you could probably go to GPT and say I’m working on a screenplay about a robot detective in the year  2120 and what are some cases the robot could work on and ChatGPT could maybe come up with dozens and dozens of scenarios; some of them stupid and some of them usable. I don’t know exactly how to use ChatGPT, maybe you can turn to that at various points in your screenplay when you get stuck and say well what might happen now and again you might get 30 ideas and 28 of them would be just weird and dumb but a couple of them might trigger ideas and a couple of them might be decent. I know that there is software that already does stuff like this that that asks you questions about your screenplay “Have you thought about this? What are you writing?” 

I would think that they will get some prohibitions. I haven’t thought much about it but certainly part of an agreement would be that a studio can’t use AI for rewrites or to fill in dialogue, that a studio can’t use AI any place where they would get caught using AI. They can’t buy a pitch from you for a screenplay which I think is called just a screen story where you write a plot for a movie but it’s not in the form of a screenplay, it might be 10 or 12 pages where you lay out what happens in a decent amount of detail but certainly not the amount of detail and dialogue that you have in 120 page screenplay. 

Last time it went on for exactly a hundred days and I’m guessing it’ll go on and other people are guessing it goes on for at least that long because that’s how long it takes for people to get desperate to start running out of material to make but I assume when the agreements finally reached in September or October, it will have prohibitions like you can’t buy my 5000 word screen story and then turn it into a screenplay with chat GPT, you have to hire a person to expand that story into a screenplay because certainly what you could do now is you could plug that 5000 words into ChatGPT and get something resembling a screenplay and if you can’t do it now, you’re going to be able to do it a month from now. 

A year from now you’ll be able to do that plug a story into it and get a screenplay out of it and maybe 20% of it would be usable as is or with just changing a couple words in a sentence where two guys giving each other shit, the ChatGPT has access to every instance of two people giving each other shit for the past hundred years if it’s been printed or broadcast. So it would be able to do that and so that will be I would hope prohibited because that’ll be devastating. The studios; they come back with a prohibition that says “Well you’re not going to let us do it, you’re not allowed to do it either. You’re not allowed. Every word in the screenplay we buy from you, better come from you and not from ChatGPT.” But that’ll be less enforceable because what you want with regard to the studios is that they have to pay somebody to do the writing but when you’re writing in the privacy of where you do your writing, you’re generating material, maybe you’re replacing yourself but if you’re cheating using ChatGPT you’re still going to be the one who gets paid not ChatGPT. So, it could end up being a two-way agreement but only enforceable on one end. 

Also, the quality of decent writers will turn out their own words though it will be tempting to cheat to write a scene. I could see even a good writer wanting to know how that scene would play written by a chat bot. Anyway, there you go. It’s going to take a while to resolve it. It’s weird that we’re just 18 months into the era of being shocked that AI can produce usable stuff. And all of a sudden it’s an issue in the workplace, they’re enough to help shut down an entire industry and not just the industry where you’d expect to see robots among the most creativity reliant industries and that’s shocking. 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I agree with Alan Turing. I don’t think there’s any necessary operation mentally that human beings do that the computer cannot in theory do simply for the fact that a blind environmentally guided process with evolution can produce a mind and then those minds can produce things in a similar manner. It becomes an engineering problem. It is the scientific process of discovery.

Rosner: I think what Turing anticipated to some extent and what has caused most people up until now to maybe not take it as seriously as we have to now, is the idea of programming versus learning. And that’s where the self-driving cars have underperformed in that they rely a lot on programming, coming up with rules for understanding what shit is out there, what another vehicle looks like, what everything looks like; rules to figure out how to identify stuff and how to figure out what other objects are doing in the environment. And just programming something does not incorporate enough information. 

We’ve been talking for years, you and I, about Big Data. The high performing or  supposedly high performing AIs of now and in the future when they perform even better are relying on running just a shit ton of data into them. If you were going to modify that Turing quote that there’s nothing that the computers can’t do that humans can do you’d want to have an addendum given that you flood them with vast amounts of information examples to build their own mental models, there’s probably a technical term for it but I don’t know that term, so I’ll just say mental models. And there’s some indication that Turing had some inkling of that in one of the quotes you said yesterday which is that the AIs can talk with each other or whatever he called them and acquired with that way. 

You’re not telling AIs what to think, you’re giving AIs the wherewithal to figure out what to think like in those beer commercial and the pizza commercial, given the way they work, I guess there’s probably no way to tell AIs that people have exactly five fingers in most instances. In the beer commercial you see people with anywhere from three to eleven fingers grabbing a beer can and AI hasn’t been told the rules of physics it has to build or anything. It has to come to an understanding of it via a gazillion examples and I suppose once it starts to encroach on a rule that will lead to a compactification of its thinking around the rule. You can see in these early products that it has rough ideas of what things tend to look like but those haven’t been strengthened into rules for a lot of things; how many faces people have and how hands necessarily connect to the rest of the arms.  

Also, it’s like dreams in that the AI engines, I don’t know how they do it but they can render with great detail these images that haven’t been purged of easy mistakes because they don’t have the information. I mean they have a bunch of examples, they have information in the form of a bunch of examples but that information hasn’t solidified into mental maps of rules of number of fingers. I remember when AI had trouble with teeth and earlobes and glasses. Now I think if you go to this person does not exist, the AI now understands glasses or at least doesn’t fuck up by making glasses that would fall apart because the pieces aren’t connected like you would have done two years ago.

And so eventually it’ll arrive upon five fingers on people but it’s like dreams and the images are very precise and detailed but with a lot of fucked up-ness in them the same way dreams have a lot of fucked up-ness in them because they’re built from incomplete information. Whatever information your brain is able to grab on the fly as the dream unfolds your brain’s not entirely on and it doesn’t have recourse to outside to sensory experience. It’s all pulling shit from memory and incompletely but it’s running the same processing on this incomplete shit, so your dreams have a lot of fucked up-ness and stuff that just doesn’t if you were awake enough. Sometimes you can wake yourself up but when you realize what you’re experiencing is absurd but most of the time you don’t but when you look back on what you dreamed if you can remember enough of it, there’s a lot of ridiculous shit and for the same reason just incomplete understanding based on, in the case of dreams, incomplete information.

I forgot what the original prompt was… Oh the Coda and Turing. I mean it would have been nice if he lived for another 30 years because obviously like some of the time an understanding of shit is in the Zeitgeist. Newton and Leibniz, both come up with Calculus independently but at the same time. And other people were poking at relativity at the same time Einstein was but was anybody as far along in thinking about the future of computation and artificial thought as Turing was?  

Jacobsen: I think the term artificial intelligence is a misnomer. I don’t think that term fits at all. I mean take it from the big view of what you developed first and then you and I sort of talked about and developed a little bit together. If the universe is fundamentally data, then data makes the universe computable and it works because we can simulate aspects of the universe and its simulatability will imply that it’s data in some manner. And then taking it down a notch, less grandiose terms, you have a human computation which is sort of the main view of most psychology, neuroscience with computational neuroscience, for instance, and then you have the artificial intelligence which is computers which comes from the root for computation. So I think in both ways what you have really is computation in some vast kind of architecture happening in the universe but then at a lower level you have computation with human emphasis and then you have computation with whatever AI or in a more appropriate term has its emphasis. 

Rosner: I agree with you and I think a lot of people agree with you because people like to say machine learning which is a little bit of a step back from intelligence. It still has some of the same problems because learning implies like a conscious being, a thinking being who’s able to learn.  I mean there’s still some of the same problem but it’s not just a problem of terminology, it’s a problem of what figuring out where the differences are because probably at the micro level machine learning and little sets of neurons probably have generally similar systems. It’s probably unavoidably basic that if you want learning it’s going to be this kind of feedback loop with strengthening productive connections and lessening less productive connections. So, the micro of thinking and machine learning is roughly the same and then you have to figure out. It’s the way all the micros are connected that’s different in meet consciousness and AI. Do you agree?

Jacobsen: Yes.  I mean there’s aspects of human psychology we don’t take into account what people talk about because there’s an implied assumption and a lot of conversations around the singularity, the idea or the assumption being or hidden premise being that the brain is basically in a jar.

Rosner: Did you say brain in a jar?

Jacobsen: Yes. So, I mean what I think is going on is very sophisticated people, very smart people, very credential people and those that are not making a hidden premise in a lot of the conversation. They’ll talk about human computation, they’ll do a lot of reference to the brain, a lot of reference to the central nervous system and sometimes they’ll just talk about the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex to distinguish that part of the brain from the rest of the brain. Computers have a distinction in that their solid state, they’re in one place and outside of bludgeoning or something they’re not going to be really affected or some malfunctioning part or heat. Those are different variations of limitations for them.

For us, I think we’re going to find things that aren’t computation necessarily in the sense that we’re really thinking about better, sort of just part of the rhythms of the body that impact that computation in positive and negative ways that make the brain more adaptable in certain circumstances and that don’t in others. I mean a one example would just be age; hardening of the arteries, a reduction of oxygen capacity that impacts thinking, but I think there’s going to be other things that much more subtle like neural modulators that act as hormones physiologically to the body and then to the brain. 

Rosner: Just like boner town, how being horny like fucks up your thinking.

Jacobsen: Yes. They watch the blood flow go from the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, your sense of thought and self and sort of hindrance of bad behavior let’s say. That blood goes to the nucleus accumbens. So you begin to more or less  pleasure at the price of clarity of thought. And that matches any experience. So, there is hardware evidence in terms of the human brain to kind of back this up and actually process evidence in terms of love but I think when things get really sophisticated then we’ll really start to understand how being embodied is not just you’re in a body and there’s immediate interaction between nerve impulses from the brain and movement and in the intake of the senses to the brain to output movement. There will be other things. I mean a woman’s cycle, just having the monthly cycle. Men have their own cycles; things like declination of the rate of like testosterone probably age 25 to death.

Rosner: Yeah, my testosterone is obviously dropping. My hair’s not wanting to fall out as much so that’s less of a sure sign of that but my strength is down. I’m having harder time keeping muscle and building muscle and my dick’s noodlier. I haven’t had my testosterone measured in a long time; I still have a lot because it was high 15- 20 years ago last time it was measured. Anyway, I’m sliding away from the hyper masculinity which pisses me off by the way because I look at the old men in Congress who are trying to say that there are only two genders; the old Republican fuckers and you look at them and obviously those guys are super testosterone depleted and probably guys like Pence and Lindsey Graham probably didn’t have a high level of testosterone at any time. So those fuckers are closer to being intersex than I ever was and they’re the Arbiters of men or men and women or women, those fucking assholes.

[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.

Ask A Genius 828: Alan Turing’s Extremism

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/05/02

[Recording Start] 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I want to talk about Alan Turing’s extremism. I found one kind of extreme quote but I think it’s more or less correct. I’m saying this extreme even compared to some of the most let’s say zany or even “rational” extreme position of some futurists. So the quote is “This is only a foretaste of what is to come and only the shadow of what is going to be. We have to have some experience with the machine before we really know its capabilities. It may take years before we settle down to the new possibilities but I do not see why it should not enter any of the fields normally covered by the human intellect and eventually compete on equal terms.”

Rick Rosner: Alan Turing I think must have been born before World War I, right? He helped Britain win World War II and then he was driven to suicide in the 1950s, right? 

Jacobsen: He was June 23, 1912 to June 7, 1954.

Rosner: Wow! So he was not even 42 when he died, which is crazy. And he’s saying this stuff at least 70 years ago; I mean when there was barely anything that you could call a computer. So yeah, he saw a whole landscape the entire human enterprise being disrupted before there was jack shit to do any disrupting. So it’s a shame that he was hounded because it was illegal I think to be gay in Britain at the time. He was, as far as I know, well adjustedly gay especially for the time, where he wasn’t particularly closeted except where he needed to be professionally as far as I know. Like, he’d go on vacations to Mykonos and stuff where there were a lot of like-minded dudes and he’d just have dude time. What happened was he’d been with a male hustler and the hustler ripped him off and he filed a police report and then that led to the police figuring out that it was a gay thing and there were consequences because you couldn’t be gay and working in National Security back then because you were thought to be a blackmail risk from foreign spies. The upshot of it was that he had to consent to be chemically castrated which involved I think probably taking a shit ton of estrogen and he hated what the estrogen was doing to him.

I probably got like 60% of the details wrong except that I know that eventually he just put cyanide on an apple and ate the apple and it’s a shame because this guy not only won World War II but understood the future better than anybody else at the time. That might be an exaggeration but not by much.

Jacobsen: I found another quote.

Rosner: Is this the more extreme one? 

Jacobsen: I found it but I give that one as the third one. It’s from 1951. “It is customary… to offer a grain of comfort in the form of a statement that some peculiarly human characteristic could never be imitated by a machine… I cannot offer any such comfort for I believe that no such bounds can be set.”

Rosner: That’s ah freaking crazy because he’s one of the fathers of computing and huge in the realm of not just theoretical but he figured out how to crack the German Enigma coding machine. So he was tremendously practical but also super theoretical with the Turing test. He did theoretical work showing that a step by step computer is barely computer that could just flip zeros to ones based on a set of simple rules could compute anything given enough time. The pocket calculator was still 20 years away. Transistors were freaking five or seven years away. At best he was working with vacuum tubes, the integrated circuit was 20 years in the field and he’s coming to these conclusions not because he was a science fiction guy but because he was a fucking theoretical computing guy.

Jacobsen: And the quote that I came across where I’ve never seen such an extreme statement, especially from someone with such an authoritative identity in history and it goes, “It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers… they would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control” 

Rosner: That’s crazy. He’s thought to come out of the early 1950s and from somebody who’s not a science fiction writer. The idea that they would sharpen their wit through by conversing is in a nutshell what AI does to sharpen its widths. It freaking gets big data and works its way through a shit ton of data which is in a way like having a billion conversations and getting pretty good at conversing via absorbing though you could still argue not really understanding a billion conversations. I mean critics of being scared of AI now are all saying it can it can simulate but it doesn’t really understand but the path will be to simulate understanding better and better until it’s the equivalent of our understanding because as we’ve talked about, our consciousness and our understanding is in essence a simulation of some true understanding that can’t exist. There’s not like some magic Cartesian fluid beyond the real world that bestows thinking with its magic that we understand via simulating understanding to a high degree.

[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.

Ask A Genius 827: Equestrianism Into Television

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/02/23

[Recording Start] 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So we had a talk about equestrianism off tape and you had something to talk about, let’s talk about that.

Rick Rosner: Okay. You and I have been talking for about nine years now and from the beginning we were talking about things like consciousness and at some point we started talking about AI or we’re talking about alternate non-human types of consciousness. Are you familiar with the show Succession on HBO?

Jacobsen: No, I’m not.

Rosner: All right, Succession is by Adam McKay and a bunch of other very smart talented people and it’s basically a satire of the Fox News Murdoch family. It’s the story of an aging patriarch who’s a prick, who owns a media empire and his four kids, as the kids kind of jockey for power within the organization and that’s why it’s called succession because the dad is old and somebody’s going to have to take over for him sometime. So it’s about a mainstream kind of sleazy media empire but the show itself isn’t sleazy, it’s very prestige. It’s not a soap opera like some like you’d see on the CW, I mean there’s plenty of intrigue but it’s mostly a satire of how douche-y these people are within a more or less normal big business context. Unlike a show like Empire or Power where it’s all soapy and it’s all about like scandalous fucking and all that stuff. 

Anyway, last night the Roy family, the patriarch is Logan Roy and all they’re all named Roy and at a board meeting, one of the kids who’s in a strong position to take over the company tried to sell the singularity in a normal business context which I found shocking but also kind of… All the stuff we started talking about nine years ago is becoming more and more mainstream.  AI is all over the place. Nobody was worried about AI when we started talking and now it’s kind of fashionable to be freaking out about AI to the point where the people who actually know something are saying “Freak out about AI but don’t freak out about this AI because this AI is just a sophisticated form of auto fill.”

Anyway, let me finish talking about Succession. So among the things this company Waystar RoyCo owns is a set of amusement parks the way Disney owns amusement parks as part of an entertainment empire. Similar to Disney, Waystar RoyCo is trying to do planned communities. Disney has, starting 20-25 years ago, started experimenting with planned communities. If you like Disney as a product then maybe you’ll like living in a Disney neighborhood where we built the houses, we planned everything, and we built everything. So Waystar RoyCo is selling a community called Living Plus; it’s for people 55 and older and it’s not just a lifestyle but also an entertainment style where if you live in our planned community you’ll get VIP access to all our entertainment products and visits from the stars of our productions because they also own a movie studio and get to see the rough cuts of things and you’re in a privileged community. The main selling point that this douche bag, Kendall Roy is selling to the board and to investors is you’ll get to live longer and maybe forever.

The show set it up that he was going to crash and burn with this obvious bullshit but he sold it and the investors bought it. He did a good job and he was selling the freaking Singularity. Nobody said the word Singularity but it’s almost like it’s a mainstream cutting edge product now which A) means we’re on the right track because the shit we’ve been talking about forever is now the shit that everybody’s kind of talking about in various ways and I forget what my point B is but there you go. Also, if we wanted to and I don’t want to, we could take a look at all the movie TV lit products that are increasingly embracing the themes that we’ve been talking about for almost a decade.

[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.

Ask A Genius 826: Does the Big Bang have Issues?

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/03/31

[Recording Start] 

Rick Rosner: A few days ago I sent you an article on 10 things that are wrong with the current version of the Big Bang like observations that don’t match the theory because the Big Bang, in general terms, was laid out about 60 years ago or a little more maybe. Everything started from a single point and just exploded outward, space and everything but it’s been refined to account for the conditions of the universe now. It’s really hard to get the initial conditions to be such that they would create the universe we live in now. So this article listed eight problems with the Big Bang and almost all of them, maybe all of them are with the beginning of the universe. They can’t get conditions right and I haven’t read this article yet somebody sent me an article today saying that here’s a theory that says that there was the Big Bang and then a month later there was a second Big Bang but just for dark matter. So, all this stuff is a little bit ad hoc and just trying to get it to fit. 

I got to say that if the beginning of the universe isn’t just the beginning of the universe. If the universe has had time before the apparent age of the universe, then I’m pretty sure you can solve most or all of these problems; issues with entropy, the distribution of matter, and the clump-iness of matter. But if the universe has had, compared to the relatively a brief apparent age of the universe, if it’s had a gazillion times that amount of time to arrange itself, then all those issues go away. That’s all I got to say pretty much. One more thing; one reason people love the Big Bang, I mean there are a lot of reasons, that it’s very conceptually simple. Even though it doesn’t explain why, at first glance it explains how. Everything exploded outward and then it clumped up and formed galaxies and stars but another slightly more sophisticated reason people love the Big Bang is that it has the universe being the same every place which is one of those principles of physics that are cherished by people who do physics. The regularity, you don’t want to make special rules for just the place you’re at. Physics is about finding general principles that account for everything and saying “It’s like this right where you’re standing but it’s different every place else,” strikes people as unhelpful and bullshit. But the Big Bang has the universe every place at the same time. You don’t see the whole universe at the same time because you’re looking further back in time the further back you look.

Assuming that every place of the universe is at the same time, it just takes a while for that stuff to catch up to us the universe is the same throughout all space. It’s built on the assumption that if you could see the whole universe instantaneously, every part of the universe would basically look the same; the same kind of galaxies and the same spatial distribution of galaxies, it would be uniform in space. There would be no point in space that’s really much different than any other point. Yeah, one point might be in a galaxy and some other point might be outside of galaxies but it’s like a pattern in the books you always see, just a bunch of dots on a balloon and the surface of the balloon is the universe and those dots are regularly spaced and people love that.  But the Big Bang universe is not the same in time. There are no points in time that are the same because the universe is always expanding. 

And before the Big Bang one, there were two competing theories steady-state theory and Big Bang Theory and then there were a bunch of discoveries made which confirmed Big Bang Theory knocks steady-state straight out of the water. Steady-state had the lovely things of being uniform in space and in time. Steady-state theory said that whenever you had a part of space that just got too empty, that was too far away from um other matter, then maybe new matter just popped into existence. So every place you weren’t and every place you weren’t looking, new matter came along. So as the universe expanded, the new galaxies would form to fill those empty spaces and there was no evidence of that happening. So steady-state theory lost. 

Informational cosmology has the nice thing, if you’d like things being the same, it has the universe being roughly the same across time and it accounts for differences in the universe across space and time because it’s super nice to have things the same across space or across time or both. I mean it’s nice to have those things but nothing explains why that uniformity. IC explains why you’ve got uniformity where you have uniformity and why you have non-uniformity on massive scales. It gives you a structure that accounts for the massive scales what looks like uniformity up to a point across space and what is rough uniformity across time and puts everything in a structure. So, there you go, that’s all I got. Comments?

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why are we able to translate geometry into mathematics into information to make them computable? Why is their sort of symmetry between those ways representing the universe? 

Rosner: I mean the general answer is there are rules of existence and there are the rules of consistency. Things that exist cannot exist; that’s a big general principle. I mean except when they’re Quantum things and kind of be on the cusp of existence or non-existence but mega things; large existent things that definitely exist definitely exist and the contradiction is squeezed out as things come into existence. Things that are consistent and existent are generally embroiled with simple consistent systems like mathematics. For the most part, arithmetic is consistent and non-contradictory and it’s deep non-contradictory structure allows it to exist as a system that doesn’t blow up when you try to work with it and kind of means that things that exist materially embody some of those same non-contradictory structures because if they were contradictory they would blow up not like in an action movie but just in a way that they would preclude all but brief existence. 

So, self-consistency and often simple self-consistent systems underlie a lot of the things that can exist. When you say simple self-consistent systems I think you can qualify it and say simple manifestations of self-consistent systems because when you look at the universe and the particles in the universe the particles that contribute most to macro systems kind of have simple ways of interacting across macro distances and macro time but then when you get into the micro world of subatomic physics, you have all these short distances, super high energies, and super short life spans of particles. And you’ve got a whole shitload of particles and interactions and it’s as if you’ve got these simple macro manifestations but somehow to preserve the non-contradictory nature of highly existent systems, you’ve got these underlying structures that I guess are kind of required by the consistency of existence that they’re complicated but maybe they’re the simplest underlying structure that permits consistent existence.

It’s the consistency that shows up all over the place, the mathematical consistency that allows for large-scale consistency. What happens at one place and at one time, informs the rest of the universe and doesn’t change depending on where you’re looking at that point in space and time from. Things within the universe have an absolute existence that’s proportional to the amount of existence in the entire universe. It’s hard to make things happen magically or magically change parts of the universe because the whole universe is woven together in a self-consistent structure. That’s kind of a requirement of existence.

Now you could argue in a simulated universe, you could have violations of everyday physics because you’ve simulated a universe, you’ve replicated consciousness for the beings that you’ve put in that universe, they think they’re living in a natural universe or maybe not and you can fuck with that universe. I mean there are principles that we live in a universe that apparently doesn’t do that argues right before, I don’t know what exactly, for the prevalence of apparently natural universes over apparently over simulated universes or you could argue that a simulated universe requires the beings who built the simulated universe who themselves are maybe more are likely to be living in a naturally occurring universe. Then you have to argue about what naturally occurring means. You have us existing as space-time and matter that we think is naturally manifested among the information structures that the universe is built out of. 

Anyway, you got to define all these terms.  The deal is that existence, at least natural existence, requires high degrees of self-consistency and very low levels of violations of consistency even in a simulated universe because a simulated universe implies a universe that contains the creators of that simulated universe that may itself be a natural universe. You start getting into turtles all the way down arguments like “Can you have a simulated universe within a simulated within a simulated?” or “Does it make more sense that at some point you’ve got a universe where the physical interactions play out a 100% according to the principles of quantum mechanics.

[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.

Ask A Genius 825: Rick on a Another Podcast!

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/03/27

[Recording Start] 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, you’re going to be on a podcast tomorrow and you’re going to be talking about economics.

Rick Rosner: Yeah, even though I’m not super qualified but I know the topic is that Biden’s spending is not cheap; 1.8 trillion I think on infrastructure or I don’t know… anyway, a lot, trillions of bucks. The US has a third of a billion people. So stuff costs a lot of money. I know because I’ve read and it makes sense that US can pay for anything; just has to print money to do it. It’s not like we’re going to run out of money. We may run out of the authorization for money because Congress is full of assholes but we can always make more money. The risk of printing a lot of new money is inflation because if you suddenly double the amount of money that there is which has never been done or maybe only in cases of hyperinflation in other countries but the US has never doubled the amount of money. If you did, then you’d expect for there to be double the amount of money in people’s wallets and for the price of everything to basically double. 

The Republicans are always yelling we’re going to run out of money but that’s not the risk, the risk is inflation. I mean that’s what I know and then I’m sure I’ll be corrected by people who know more tomorrow but I was thinking about the future of capitalism, communism, socialism, and all the different isms and was trying to come up with a name for the system I think we’re moving towards and I came up with ‘Illusionism’. Throughout history, humans have behaved as if they have agency, have the ability to decide what to do and have the power to act upon it and all economic systems are more or less based on that idea humans but we are moving into an era of reduced human agency because we’re no longer going to be the smartest things on the planet.

Now AI is kind of oversold as being smart right now but humans plus AI which we’re not really at yet, the plus part. We have AI, we can use it but we’re not really merged with it but we will become more intimately linked with it and the people who are more linked will be smarter and basic humans won’t be the smartest thing and that means humans will have less agency. Even though humans have less agency, the economy of the world will still for the near and mid future depend on humans doing business; buying things, making things, and being paid. Our economies will have to keep kind of looking like they did and working the way they have even as humans become less valuable and stuff becomes cheaper because the new wave of technology will continue to reduce the prices of most things. I mean we haven’t seen it now inflation throughout the world for the past couple years but on average things get cheaper because it becomes cheaper to make things.

So you got things getting cheaper, you have humans becoming less valuable but humans will still want to do human things. The economy I think will become kind of an illusion that it’ll maintain various illusions that humans are worth what you pay them to work, humans will keep getting paid, humans will keep working, what they get keep getting paid for will kind of be less valuable but they’ll still get keep getting paid as if it is valuable, things will still cost stuff but there’ll be an illusion that certain things are valuable when they’re really just super cheap crap. So it’ll be okay to pay humans so they can buy stuff but the idea that human are valuable and the shit that they’re buying is valuable will become more of an illusion. So I call it illusionism. I should talk to somebody who actually understands economics in the future so they can tell me whether I’m full of shit or not. 

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Jacobsen: Where is this podcast?

Rosner: It’s streaming TV, it’s a thing called pod TV and for a while once a week I talk for an hour with a bunch of other people. Some of them are impressive. Well actually, the one impressive guy for sure is the former Comptroller General of the United States. He’s a guy who knows what he’s talking about. And then some other guys who do seem pretty knowledgeable and ladies. We talk about the state of media and when I get to do an economics hour we talk about economics and I try not to say anything too stupid and try not to talk too much when it’s something I don’t know much about.

Jacobsen: How long you’ve been doing this?

Rosner: I don’t know, months and months.

Jacobsen: Are they online now?

Rosner: I guess, I don’t know really how you access it but they’ll give me an hour if we want to do an hour a week if that’s something that you would find interesting. They claim they have hundreds of thousands of viewer. I don’t think they’re lying, I just think they’re a very tiny kind of TV, whatever it is, streaming TV deal. I don’t think they have hundreds of thousands of viewers tuning into me and these other people. I think it’s hundreds of thousands in the aggregate and I’m not sure what the aggregate is whether it’s per week, per day, or per month. If we could do a show where we talk about shit like we do, I think we’d probably have to fill an hour but I’m not sure about that because I think for the purposes of being consistently interesting, I think a half hour is plenty at least to start. Is that something you’d be interested in? 

Jacobsen:  I mean I could probably try it I guess. How did you find out about this?

Rosner: They emailed me a while ago and said that one guy had heard that I was smart and thought let’s have a smart guy on and so far I haven’t been kicked off. Anyway, just check out PODTV. 

What do you think about illusionism? 

Jacobsen: I think its part of an ongoing philosophical debate but yeah I think the general idea that we think we are in charge has been such a powerful force driving a lot of behavior…  I think there’s an assumption by calling an illusionism that free will is more or less an illusion in some sense because empirically I think that’s an unknown so far.

Rosner: I’m not arguing against free will. I’m arguing against free will be harder to exercise in the future whether or not it exists. Independence from the forces around you is just going to be tough. People are going to be knocked around and manipulated. Is that reasonable?

Jacobsen: Yeah, I think the structures are going to be more rigid at that control behavior than before. I mean before it was more nature so it’s less conscious, now it’s societies and technology and electronic grids and software and that sort of funneling people in certain ways and that’s much more directed than humans just in the natural environment.

Rosner: Do you have a better term like when you think of capitalism is a crappy term; communism is a crappy term because they’re clunky. Capitalism is like five syllables.

Jacobsen: Yes, I mean you always have to add –ism.

Rosner: Yeah, that stupid -ism is just… Is there a better term for this weird kind of puppet economy of the future?

Jacobsen: String-ism? 

Rosner: It feels like lubrication-ism or so, like you just got to keep it going.

Jacobsen: The way it all works. It’s just a limit on human behavior in some ways.

Rosner: We call it idiocracy because I mean the movie captured a lot of how it seems like it might be in that people continue to have their needs met even though the people are super dumb and shitty and their needs are met in super dumb and shitty ways which isn’t fair to the people of the future it’s not like people will be dumber it’s just that other stuff will be smarter.

Jacobsen: Yeah, that’s fair. 

Rosner: I’m not even sure that the consumerism side of it, another –ism, will be the most important aspect of it, the way it’s been for the past century.

Jacobsen: I think we’re going to have a new form of capitalism where it’s less centered around continuous or infinite growth. We’re going to hit a cap and basically that’s going to come around like really good farmland and minerals for circuits and things like this and battery parts but it’ll be kind of like there’ll be a really increased sophistication. A decrease in the growth level of capitalism but there’ll be a lot more social safety nets. So people will be valued less relative to technology more but the fact that people live longer and healthier, artificially value their own lives more and so people become more dependent on systems. So you have this kind of a really advanced form of the Nordic models where you have sort of capitalism with a lot of breaks and then the social systems but the social systems will have the kind of medicine and stuff that’ll be so advanced that you can’t even call it Nordic, it’ll be a step beyond that.

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Rosner: So what do you think will be the forces limiting growth? People making fewer babies?

Jacobsen: People making fewer babies, just land to be used on the earth. I mean if you kind of unwrap the sphere of the earth into a flat plane it’s not a lot left to kind of take. I mean climate change is expanding the water, so the surface of the earth is actually shrinking and the number of people continues to grow, so the usable areas of land are also decreasing. We’re also using a lot more resources and so all the types of things that require land just food, places for mining, minerals that we need…

Rosner: You want human enterprise to be constrained in some ways to help fight climate change; do you see that as being one of the limiters on growth?

Jacobsen: That will be one of the limiters. There will be disinformation campaigns as there are now to try to fight for the unlimited growth kinds of capitalism but something like a sustainable-ism maybe where you have a little bit of socialism, you have a little bit of capitalism, and then you have something else with a term I don’t even know to put to it that is just this third element. 

Rosner: What about people living more and more virtually towards the end of the century?

Jacobsen: Yeah, I think it’s happened since the 1990s, it just happened in front of a screen. I mean these North American kids, they’re either on Tik Tok or playing video games, or watching movies; that’s like a majority of their waking hours outside of school probably. 

Rosner: What about the concentration of wealth where just people can’t afford shit because all the old people have all the fucking money?

Jacobsen: Well that’s also a fact. It just depends on whether or not authoritarianism or democracy wins out internationally. If people would prefer less uncertainty then they’ll opt for totalitarianisms of various kinds like light to strong and then if they opt more for sort of a free roaming society, where it’s more of an evolved form of like direct democracy, where people don’t need representatives because they can just use their computer rather than getting someone to go like just sitting on a horseback and buggy back in the day so you needed a representative but if you don’t need that anymore because the functional limits of distance between people and what they want people to do for them or say centralized government then you just get rid of representatives all together and then you can vote for projects as you need them. It’ll be almost like a democracy leaning a little bit more to a form of anarcho-syndicalism. 

Rosner: That sounds like Corey Doctorow.

Jacobsen: Yeah, and he’s good, he’s very good as a futurist. He really knows his stuff. I’ve interviewed him and it was a great interview. So those kind of frontline fights really sort of nuanced technology, legal, and science kind of questions in battles that are fought between corporations and individuals and nations and groups are going to be those deciding factors that it’s just a small portion of people that really know a lot about that. It’s a weird fight, it’s like a shadow War happening where none of us even see it and let alone understand it because you have to be constantly updated about it. 

Rosner: What’s the syndicalism part of it? Is that people forming their own alliances?

Jacobsen:  Yes, basically, syndicates. Two or more people or larger groups of people basically formulating ways they want to organize on projects.

Rosner: So it’s gloppy anarchy; it’s like lava lamp anarchy where people come together to form. It’s not just every man for himself, it’s people forming groups to solve specific problems.

Jacobsen: Yeah but I still think there will be something akin to nation states although they’ll be greatly diminished with this kind of direct democracy. It’s not nostalgia but it’s sort of having a core structure.  It’s almost like as if states were fluid but the United States was rigid. 

Rosner: Okay and then there will still be some stuff that government might be better at doing than anarcho-syndicalism. 

Jacobsen: A 100%. There are very good examples some of the places like public healthcare, the US Post system is amazing I’m told.

Rosner: It is even with a Trump appointee trying to fuck it up.

Jacobsen: Yeah it is amazing. 

Rosner: I love the US Postal Service. They don’t always do right by you but they outperform your expectations.

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Jacobsen: Yeah and so I think we have a lot more internal fluidity, overall rigidity like a skeleton framework of a nation and you could call it a nation because there still will be the United Nations and so on. So you’ll have representatives in that sense but sort of a divergence of like middle management between International systems and National systems. The UN will still be functioning but I think the internal to nation things will be a lot more gloppy. The ones that are still totalitarian or gone to theocracy or whatever and I think all those systems like health care and post and new things that will come about that’ll be so mastered, that having a centralized government formulate them and run them just makes more sense, say personalized Healthcare rather than just Healthcare. 

Your personal data being locked away in some kind of like quantum encrypted cloud; that I think could all be sort of considered something like a Nordic plus. That would be a next step. So maybe I wouldn’t call it Nordic-ism but they do provide a framework that is workable and they tend to have the highest quality of life of any set of societies and then women are more free. And I think that is probably the best benchmark of whether or not a society’s healthy 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.

Ask A Genius 824: Computation and Artificial Intelligence and Principles of Existence

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/03/25

[Recording Start] 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I wanted to talk about artificial intelligence in the context of IC. So there’s this whole phrase in IC; the principles of existence those aren’t necessarily just the laws of physics but they certainly comprise them. And I don’t think anything not permitted by them exists but if things are permitted by them, then they exist. So, within that context they are entirely natural if they are allowed by the principal’s existence; human beings exist, our form of computation exists, and artificial intelligence in simple forms exists. So I think the term artificial intelligence… So, I think the universe as an information processor is fundamentally about computation in one word but a multi-faceted, multi-form type of computation and human computation has certain subjectivity to it and so I would consider that computation with human emphasis. 

Artificial intelligence, I would consider that another form of computation with different types of emphasis and in fact sometimes human character in them because we’re the ones making them. So it’s things that we’ve talked about. So I want to get your take on the idea that artificial intelligence, A) is not truly artificial in fact it’s as natural as human intelligence, just a different variation and B) you can take a unified frame of information processing by considering computation as a fundamental basis and then having different forms of emphasis. So you can have Homo sapiens having a particular type of emphasis. So computation with human emphasis, you can have “artificial intelligence”, computation with different emphasis, and things like that. I think that simplifies it a lot because it just gives you a basis and then you just see different outcroppings of different types of computation. What do you think?

Rick Rosner: Okay, so there’s a bunch of stuff going on. Let me start with computation. In the most basic sense computation is just doing basic logic and arithmetic operations and calculators can do it, people can do it with a pen and paper, we can do it in our heads, and it’s barely information processing the way we think of it. When we think of information processing, we think information processing is doing a lot of basic operations. To add 19 and 13 doesn’t take many operations. So you’d barely think of that as information processing but to take however many operations per second it takes to make a video game play, that’s information processing because we’re talking about billions of operations. So I’m sure when you talk to most people about information processing they think about stuff that goes on in modern computers which is millions and billions of operations and more, trillions. 

If you solve a video game, if you get all the way through Call of Duty, that computer’s probably done more than 100 billion basic logic gate flips with zero to one and all that stuff. We know that information is processing is inextricably linked to the processes of the universe that as the universe plays out, information is being processed at if IC is right, various levels. You’ve got the information that is within the universe’s processing purview, that is if I see is right and space-time matter and how they all play out is the universe processing information in what’s likely to be some kind of consciousness. That consciousness and the subconscious or unconscious parts of it are all part of purposeful information processing of an entity or linked sets of entities in a world beyond ours. 

Then at another informational level you’ve got what’s happening informationally as matter interacts with in the universe according to the information based laws of quantum mechanics. Not everything that happens, not every physical and interaction in fact most little teeny individual physical interactions according to the laws of quantum mechanics don’t impinge upon if the universe is an aware entity processing information. Most of the little quantum events in our universe don’t appreciably impact of the universe’s thinking. The interactions are too small and don’t leave a record but to get to computation and consciousness as we experience them in our world that is we’re conscious entities, a bunch of animals are conscious and now we have AI. People are starting to get the feeling that AI is something between computer-based computation and human conscious computation. How people have been feeling about AI has changed drastically in the past year or two. I was just watching like a second of Free Guy, the movie with Ryan Reynolds. I’ve seen it probably three times; it’s from 2021. Have you seen it? Probably not, you don’t see a lot of movies.

Jacobsen: No.

Rosner: Okay. It’s about an NPC, a non-player character, in a video game that becomes conscious and starts acting with agency and it makes for a movie I like but it was never a believable movie that this could happen within a video game. However, two years later the movie hits differently because now it’s easy to imagine that such a character in a video game via AI, it could start manifesting the behaviors seen by that character in the movie. What else is happening with AI is that people who claim to know about how AI works are claiming legitimately I think, I agree with them about AI doing things well enough or even better than humans in some ways like writing. Chris Cole just emailed some Mega members that GPT-4, an AI solved a mega level letter series problem. I guess somebody input into GPT-4 what the next letter in this series is, I don’t remember what the letters are, and it came up with the answer. 

And we all know at this point in March 2023, that you can give a verbal prompt to various AIS and they’ll give you an essay or a chapter or probably if you let it go, maybe even a whole book on some subject that would be mostly passable. It wouldn’t be the greatest chapter or book in the world but it would be usable. Somebody threw up on Twitter today, told some chat bot to explain Thompson scattering or some scattering at a refractive barrier or something and it got it wrong but in a way that the person who was posting the Tweet said that with a little more tweaking, that was a really good first effort and it would probably get it right. The major deal I think principle, is we’ve talked about it before but it applies increasingly much as the current crop of AIs do their stuff that the Turing test is obsolete and also there’s no one Turing test. It’s a whole range of awareness of the products of AI. 

The original Turing test which Turing called the imitation game took place on slips of paper being sent back and forth via a slit in a wall in the 1950s maybe, maybe the late 40s and Turing said according to this test that if you’re typing messages and sending them through a hole in the wall and getting typed messages back and after you do this for a while, there’s no evidence that you’re not talking with a person, then according to the Turing test, I might be getting this wrong, then what’s happening behind that wall is thinking regardless of whether it’s a human doing it or a computer doing it. Is that correct? Is that the right understanding? 

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: Okay. Now that we’ve been working with AI for a while, we know that AI can pass superficial and naive evaluation in a Turing type way. You look at a head shot made by AI and at first glance you can’t tell it’s a head shot. There’s a site that’s I think called ‘this person does not exist’ and you look at the people on that site and they look like photos but they were images generated by AI and if you had like two seconds to look at each of them and you didn’t know how to look at them, they’d pass your superficial Turing test. But if you know what to look for, you can see the tells that AI is still not great at; earlobes, earrings, backgrounds, maybe the rate at which photos become blurry with distance, and the depth of field. Those photos pass naive Turing tests but not educated Turing tests and that certainly applies to I would think any current product of AI that somebody who’s looked at a lot of the products of AI is able to tell what AI is as spit out. So the Turing test has fragmented or been replaced with some more sophisticated version.

Also, along with that more sophisticated version is an expert opinion that even though the shit generated by AI is good, it doesn’t reflect consciousness that there’s not a consciousness generating this stuff. Even though there’s a minority opinion among kind of educated lunatics or just people who come to the wrong conclusions that this stuff might be conscious. My opinion is no, that you could probably at this point design at a video game character that would kind of look like it was acting with independence and agency and would come up with surprising behaviors and sophisticated behaviors and then you have to define behavior. You have to be conscious to have behavior. What’s happening with AI is requiring a lot of definitions to have to be made more precise. 

Finally for this part of what I’m saying, I believe to have consciousness you need to have the setup that generates the feeling of consciousness which isn’t an emotion, it’s being within consciousness and feeling that you are within your consciousness which is as we’ve talked about at the very least broadband information sharing among a set of analytical nodes, right? That’s what we decided that that’s like a core necessity for consciousness?

Jacobsen: Yes, another aspect of that probably which we haven’t talked about much would be real time; it is constant input output of that complex multinodal networked information processing system.

Rosner: Yeah, the real time is tricky because you can imagine a thing being conscious in slow motion with the rate at which it experiences things being limited by the hardware.

Jacobsen: Well that’s also another thing. We know with ourselves the speed at which we process sound, smell, physiology, and sight are different speeds yet we have this illusion of this unitary sensory experience.

Rosner: Right, but the things that slow us down, it’s not really computation that slows us down or maybe it is, I haven’t thought about it enough but when you think about what slows us down… Like I said, it might be computation. It’s getting the signals processed and into your central consciousness that seems to lead to lags. I mean maybe if we thought about it and talked about it more, we would think that it’s also lags in central consciousness but central consciousness seems to be like via evolution to have adopted a way of keeping things seamless. When signals hit at different times, the way we’re arranged and the way we’re used to thinking, we’re able to handle signals arriving at different times without it making us particularly notice those lags or those lags making us crazy most of the time.

I’m thinking about with a machine-based potential consciousness, the actual processing, though now that I think about it I don’t know, probably AI could make that shit pretty efficient. I’m claiming without having thought about it a lot that you might have a thing that experiences, a kind of buffering that it can’t experience reality with the detail and think about reality with the detail you’d want in real time. So it would have to absorb chunks of reality and be slower at processing those little slices of reality than we are. It would might have to not work in real time but still would be conscious because it just doesn’t have the moment-to-moment processing power that we do but I don’t know, that’s a whole discussion to have but the deal is that current AI doesn’t have a lot of the hardware. It doesn’t have real time linked multiple analytic nodes.

Now people are working on linking verbal and visual, linking ChatGPT to a dolly so that you’ve got a thing that’s sending information back and forth between its verbal analytics and its visual analytics. And that’s a step in the direction of consciousness except that there’s no sensory hardware to speak of. It doesn’t have senses. It’s got inputs but these inputs are not broadband at all, they’re just like portals for entering information. That kind of hardware is not yet anywhere near our sensory input hardware. And I assume there are various choke points in AI where there’s just non-existent information processing nodes or systems that we have that we’ve evolved to make ourselves efficient thinkers that have yet to be incorporated into AI systems.

So you could have an AI, and somebody will do this pretty soon that animates a human-like character that appears to have agency but that is a very as if system, that character is not conscious. It is using huge big data to replicate human behavior and falls far short of consciousness. One last thing is, given that, then eventually we’ll have to examine human thought and behavior to see how far we fall into the as if system because we’re as if also. We behave as if we have consciousness with a degree of fidelity based on sophisticated powerful broadband information processing. That fidelity gives us consciousness, behaving as if we have consciousness with all this stuff that facilitates it makes us conscious. So in a way we’re doing the same thing that the shitty AI is doing, it’s just that our systems are so much better that we are actually conscious.

[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.

Ask A Genius 823: Addendum to 822

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/02/23

[Recording Start] 

Rick Rosner: So, what are we saying here?

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We are saying even if you take a shift from IQ tests and controlled psychometric psychological testing center case for the proper test into the real world, other confounding factors in the real world could make metrics that can use a naturalistic setting like a business technology invention or discovery success questionable in and of themselves. So, in either case, it becomes a problem of opaqueness up to a point.

Rosner: IQ tests were initially designed to fairly quickly tell you how smart somebody is so you can get them what they need, generally educational resources. And you can ask, “Is this helpful?” A teacher in a reasonable academic setting, let’s say a third-grade teacher with 28 students, has IQ scores for those 28 students, is going to be helpful as the teacher, by working with the students after the first couple months, be able to figure out who’s smart and who isn’t. Or do IQ tests to find hidden gems where there might be a kid who’s underperforming, but maybe that kid’s parents are getting a divorce, and that kid’s all fucked up but is smart, or the kid is fucking up because the kid is bored. I’ve never seen a study, not that I’ve looked for one, that tries to answer whether IQ tests are needed. I think they’re still kind of administered as a matter of course in schools at some point. By fifth grade, you’ve probably taken some kind of IQ test. Maybe I’m wrong, but it’s certainly not the big deal that it was when I was a kid. What do you think?

Jacobsen: It seems people use it in formal settings like the army, a little less in college admissions and so on.

Rosner: So there’s the ASVAB in America, Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. It’s an IQ test to see whether you get a shot at being enlisted to go to officer candidate school. In the NFL, they used to give a test called the Wonderlic. I think they phased that out because they decided it was racist. It was a 50-question IQ test, and somebody looked at it and decided this fucks over people from poor black kids, maybe. Those people may not be considered quarterbacks because quarterbacks are supposed to be the smartest players on the field and have the highest scores on the Wonderlic. If the NFL can do without the Wonderlic, everybody else can do without IQ tests, I don’t know.

Ultra-high IQ tests serve no diagnostic purpose and, in my mind, are best considered as a sport, and I’ve pitched this fucking sport a bunch. And also, I’ve been a part of four TV Pilots that try to turn thinking into a fucking sport, and it’s very frustrating because you could make a decent show about this kind of shit. That’s what it’s for meaningless performance, like the world’s strongest man competition. You take all these ridiculous fucking events holding like 300-500 pounds picking up balls that are like 30 inches in diameter and weigh 300 pounds. Very unwieldy; who can pick up the most balls and put them on pedestals in one minute? Who can drag a train, you know, to the farthest in one minute? These things that you have to be strong are shit to do, but it’s still a ridiculous fucking thing. You can do the same thing with mental acuity of some sort, and the people have tried to do this, and no fucking network has ever picked it up because they’re idiots.

Now that I think about it, when you look at the networks that have been pitched this shit, now there’s a deal, it’s a rule I developed; I would think that other people have the same rule that the development execs at the middling TV networks A&E, Nat Geo, Bravo; if they were better at their jobs, they wouldn’t be at these fucking middling networks. They’d be at Netflix or whatever the hot fucking network at the moment is. So these dumb fucks, which is where these brain shows get pitched, maybe those shows don’t go anywhere because they are being considered by dumb fuck because some of these shows are perfectly fine and would make for shows that are at least as good as other reality competition shows and maybe better if it’s a reality competition plus a personality revealing thing like Survivor but with smart people.

Another principle that I’m well familiar with, no fucking development exec, is that smart people can be just as asshole-ish as other people and just as interesting in their assholery. There you go; that’s what super-high IQ performance measures are for. It’s a fucking sport that hasn’t been turned successfully into a sport because the people with the power to turn it into a sport are fucking dumb shits.

[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.

Ask A Genius 822: Christopher Michael Langan, Marilyn Mach Vos Savant, John Sununu, and Richard Rosner, Christopher Harding, and Kevin Langdon

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/02/22

[Recording Start] 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: There’s an article by David Redvaldsen from Norway published in the peer-reviewed journal Psych. It examines the validity of the Mega and Titan tests by Ronald K Hoeflin. After a thorough review, the conclusion is that the Mega test can measure IQ at the one in a million level, while the Titan test can measure up to the one in several hundred thousand levels. On an SD-16 scale, the Titan test’s cap is 168+. You achieved the only perfect score on that test. The Mega test’s cap for one in a million is around 45 or 46. Marilyn Vos Savant, dating Ronald K Hoeflin at the time, raising concerns of conflict of interest, is the only person to score 46 on her first attempt. Chris Langan and you achieved the other two scores of 47.

Rick Rosner: On my second attempt.

Jacobsen: Right. I give more weight to first attempts. Getting feedback from a first attempt before taking a second gives you tacit information about your performance.

Rosner: Exactly. It doesn’t specify which items were incorrect but tells you how many were wrong. It also gives you the confidence to reassess and figure out the errors. For instance, I knew I had skipped one question on my first try, which I spent about a hundred hours on. I was also fairly sure about a few others I got wrong. So, for the second attempt, I wondered how much more time it would take, maybe another 40 hours, to find three more correct answers, which I did.

Jacobsen: The first attempt truly reflects an honest effort without any prior feedback, in my opinion. That qualitative aspect is crucial. Notable scores on the Mega test include Chris Langan with a 42 on his first attempt, your 44, and Marilyn’s 46.

Rosner: And John Henry Sununu, the former governor of New Hampshire.

Jacobsen: Yes, he was a significant figure under President George Bush Senior, even writing a book about him.

Rosner: There were also a couple of mathematicians who scored 45 and 44.

Jacobsen: Yes, that 44-45 range is essentially the threshold for entering the one-in-a-million category on a first attempt. These tests, considered ‘power tests’ at the time and perhaps even now, are designed to measure more than just quick thinking. They allow open reference books and as much time as needed, aiming to evaluate cognitive power, effort, motivation, and intelligence level to determine a marker of general intelligence. They’re tapping into multiple factors, including aspects of personality.

Rosner: Let’s delve into why this paper is significant, especially considering the relevance of ultra-high IQ tests.

Jacobsen: Right. To add to what I just mentioned, this indicates that one of these tests is among the most rigorously attempted, with large sample sizes and test items with precise, verifiable answers. This sets it apart from many alternative high IQ tests.

Rosner: The test was normed by Hoeflin based on about 4,000 submissions, probably ten times more than the number of people who have attempted any other ultra-high IQ test.

Jacobsen: However, one important caveat is that the individuals taking these tests are self-selected; it’s not a randomized sample. While it represents a certain segment of the population, it’s not reflective of the general population.

Rosner: Let’s discuss norming the test and determining the IQ scores corresponding to the number of correct answers.

Jacobsen: As a footnote, based on that paper, your IQ on the Mega test on your first attempt would be 167, SD 16, and 168+ on the Titan.

Rosner: Okay, let’s discuss how these ultra-high-end IQ tests are normed. The test creators ask participants to submit scores from other IQ tests or equivalent assessments, like the SAT. This process relies on self-reported scores, and although there’s no verification to ensure honesty, most people are likely truthful. Based on these scores, the test makers establish correlations. For instance, if you score 41 on this test and have a 158 on another, or a certain score on the SAT, they can estimate that a score of 41 corresponds to an IQ of, according to Hoeflin’s calculations, around 163 or something similar. That’s the general method for norming these ultra-high-end IQ tests. This paper is significant because it’s one of the first to lend credibility to these tests, which have existed since the late ’70s.

Jacobsen: There are three notable figures in this context: Christopher Harding, Kevin Langdon, and Chris Langan.

Rosner: Kevin Langdon was among the first to publish these super high-end tests around 1979-1980. They’ve existed for about 40 years but have often been dismissed by psychometric professionals as merely hobbyists’ work and not legitimate. This paper you mentioned is one of the first to give legitimacy to these efforts. However, I heard it’s a pay-to-publish journal.

Jacobsen: I’m not certain about that.

Rosner: I thought I heard you mention it. Some journals require payment for publishing and peer review.

Jacobsen: That’s a different discussion, especially considering the publishing costs. Even Harvard Library struggles to afford all journal subscriptions despite having a multi-billion dollar endowment.

Rosner: I’m not well-versed in whether this practice diminishes a journal’s legitimacy.

Jacobsen: To refocus, this was about psychiatric sciences and psychology. A serious effort to validate these alternative IQ tests must come from a psychometric professional and be published in a peer-reviewed psychometric journal. I’m not sure if that has been done yet.

Rosner: Regardless, this paper does provide a bit of legitimacy to these tests. For instance, the score I got on the Titan test, according to Hoeflin, was 190, but this article suggests it’s more like 168.

Jacobsen: Yes, 168 or higher.

Rosner: Significantly lower, right.

Jacobsen: It’s a 22-point difference. Christopher Langan’s first attempt was 163 SD-16, but he’s claimed scores between 190 and 210; others say 195. That’s an even wider gap. The discrepancy between your Titan test score and what’s claimed is smaller, about 10 points less.

Rosner: I haven’t reviewed the paper, so I can’t comment on whether its methodology is more convincing than Hoeflin’s. We can, however, discuss the implications.

Jacobsen: A side note: the most egregious exaggerations often appear in popular articles. People in alternative IQ communities tend to be somewhere in the middle, while the more serious assessments come from psychometricians. For example, popular articles might absurdly claim that some historical figure who never took a test had an IQ of one in three billion rarity.

Rosner: Langan was featured on the cover of Esquire magazine around 20 years ago, hailed as the smartest man in America, or perhaps the world. Similarly, I was featured on a Denver newspaper cover and even in a Domino’s sandwich advertisement. Domino’s launched sandwiches back then – quite delicious, especially if you like pizza-based sandwiches. The ad claimed I had a 200 IQ. They were later challenged, not due to my IQ claim, but because Subway argued that Domino’s made unfair comparisons in their ads. They claimed Domino’s only used delicious ingredients in their sandwiches, making Subway use less appealing items like lettuce and peppers. The ads didn’t last long, only about two or three weeks.

Jacobsen: There are both serious and not-so-serious efforts to measure high IQs. However, while he is a good journalist, Mike Sager’s article in Esquire was quite irresponsible as a piece of journalism.

Rosner: True, but in journalism, sensationalism often sells. No one wants to see a cover featuring Chris Langan with a headline saying he’s smart.’ It’s far more enticing to proclaim him as the smartest guy in the world, or at least in America.

Jacobsen: Let’s consider a more realistic scenario. Say Langan is in Mercer County, with a population of 3,000-4,000. He’s the most intelligent person there.

Rosner: That’s not a headline that grabs attention. People usually read articles looking for something more enlightening or extraordinary. But I get your point. Let’s delve into the implications. Assuming the article you mentioned, which I haven’t read, is accurate and the toughest IQ tests in the world can only measure up to 170.

Jacobsen: 170 plus, to be precise.

Rosner: Right, but that’s still lower than Hoeflin’s claimed reach of up to 190.

Jacobsen: Even so, 170 is pretty impressive.

Rosner: Yes, but by the standard deviation model of IQ, 170 doesn’t quite reach the one-in-a-million mark. I believe you need to hit around 172.

Jacobsen: It depends on the standard deviation used.

Rosner: Exactly. If we’re considering four standard deviations, that gets you around one in three million. You’d need about 4.75 standard deviations, which I think equates to an IQ of 176, to hit the one-in-a-million threshold.

Jacobsen: Yeah, yours would be one in a hundred thousand or something.

Rosner: Yeah. Let’s say just for the sake of this stupid discussion, stupid because it’s trivial. It’s splitting hairs.

Jacobsen: Remember that famous quote, the reason the fights are between people and societies in high IQ communities is…

Rosner: Academics. It’s taken because the stakes are so low.

Jacobsen: Yeah, there is so little at stake.

Rosner: Let’s say the toughest tests could only measure up to 170 or so, and I don’t know because I just don’t know. What is stopping tests from going higher? And it could be, ‘well, IQs don’t go higher than that,’ that’s possibility one. Possibility two is you can’t measure performances higher than that in any reasonable way except by looking at real-world achievements, which is what you just called out as a different form of IQ bullshit which is like looking at Einstein and Newton, historical figures, and saying based on what they did inventing calculus and writing Dr Faustus or whatever the fuck they did. They must have had IQs of 200. I mean, that’s an argument you can make or coming up with a theory of evolution that it takes real-world achievement to demonstrate IQs above 170.

Maybe so, but it’s certainly smarter to come up with the theory of evolution, even though the other guy contests Darwin’s invention claim. It was kind of in the wind then, and Darwin just came out with the most convincing in-depth argument. So, your IQ can’t blossom to its full above 170 potential except under special circumstances where super smartness meets an opportunity to come up with some super smart thing or where you don’t get fully flowered IQ without obsession, without some other extra mental quirks. You don’t get Einstein’s IQ without what Einstein called Sitzfleisch, the ability to sit down even though he works standing up and thinking about a problem for hundreds of hours. And you also don’t get Einstein without Einstein being born in 1879. The turn of the century is when you know science goes from being solved in a classical sense to being totally up in the air in a Quantum sense and about relativity. So Einstein was there to pounce on all that stuff.

So, various issues exist about what makes for a world-beating IQ. It may depend on external circumstances or other internal mental quirks. That’s what I got.

Jacobsen: Anyway, I think an important part of getting those scores so high does make an argument for the idea but per tests themselves. The idea is that you need other factors outside of just speed, and I think one of those is motivation, and another is the narrative around that motivation. So, how strongly are you driven to do something to take these tests and solve those problems? Also, the narrative you have for yourself to have that motivation is sort of a frame for that drive that motivation. I think those are really important factors. We can discuss that with you, but that is a big factor in your high performance.

Rosner: Taking these super high IQ tests is a minority activity. Even among the people who could potentially score high on these tests, a tiny fraction of those people take these tests. For one thing, you don’t get anything really direct for doing this stuff. It’s not a sport that’s recognized, there are no monetary rewards, the fame off of this is very iffy, the social cachet is non-existent, and the opportunity cost is huge that if you’re so smart the scores of hours you’re going to spend on this could be more productively spent in a zillion other ways. So, taking these tests takes a quirky situation and/or a quirky person. Just that means that you’ve got a self-selected weird group that automatically skews your sample and makes it questionable as to what it reflects about the supposedly normally distributed population about IQ.

Jacobsen: And so maybe there should be different statistical distributions when considering these other factors, but things like digit span, vocabulary, spatial rotation, and other things.

Rosner: We should talk about the three things you just mentioned. There are three subtests from standard, well-regarded IQ tests like the ways in the Stanford Binet, which consists of, depending on how thorough your tester wants to be, you can be given more than a dozen of these subtests. The test you just mentioned, all these subtests, a lot of them have a time component. Well, almost all of them have a time component, that’s how you test somebody’s IQ in a reasonable amount of time. You find a task where supposedly somebody smart will be able to complete more of the task in 90 seconds or something, right?

Jacobsen: I mean, the difference between these tests and a real problem solver is probably something like an extreme version of the difference between, in more normal circumstances, free weights and non-. Solving a millennium prize problem, making some big discovery, or inventing a new product of great utility to most people is a much more honest test of intelligence than an IQ test.

Rosner: You can’t use it like that because there are too many variables, and it’s just an uncontrolled kind of exposure to the world.

Jacobsen: True. I mean, it’s also, as far as I know, most of the billionaires came from rich families.

Rosner: So there’s another thing that came to mind: humble bragging regarding IQ. I know at least two people who are famous for doing that. Richard Feynman used to say that he had average intelligence; he just was inquisitive, used everything he had to think about things, and anybody could do what he did with his average intelligence. I think Francis Crick did the same thing, the DNA guy; it might have been Watson. It was one of the DNA guys. Even Einstein was modest. He didn’t go around bragging about their intelligence. They bragged about more egalitarian things: diligence and inquisitiveness, not just god-given intelligence.

Jacobsen: There’s also some sort of social lies that we tell, too. I mean, if someone is objectively more educated, they have a PhD versus an undergraduate degree. If they were to act as if they didn’t have that education, that wouldn’t be considered humble or modest; that would be considered psychosis because it would be a denial of reality. So you can be sort of honest but not brag.

Rosner: Yeah. You mentioned how most billionaires came from wealth in the first place.

Jacobsen: As far as I know, I haven’t looked.

Rosner: Yeah, but that brings up another thing, which is what’s been going on with Elon Musk, who has been recognized as an engineering genius. Then he bought Twitter, and all this information came out. I think he comes from a bunch of money and used it to buy many tech companies and retroactively have him listed among the founders, even though he wasn’t there when they were founded. He might be just some kind of fucking rich idiot, which is similar to Trump. If you look at it, Trump has time and finances; any period where we know how his money worked is when he was one of the worst businessmen in America. For instance, we know his finances for the ten years starting in 1985, when he lost 1.17 billion dollars, more than anybody else in America. He was the worst businessman in America from 1985 through 1994, and then more recently, his taxes came out for about six years in the 21st century, during which he lost another shit ton of money; if you look at what he did with the money he inherited, he would have done much better had he done no business and had just put his money into t-notes or certificates of the of deposit. So he’s a rich guy who is a fucking idiot who did nothing to increase his fortune, which buttresses your argument that a lot of billionaires had parents who were 100 millionaires and just didn’t entirely fuck up their business life.

[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.

Ask A Genius 821: Nine Years

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/02/22

[Recording Start] 

Rick Rosner: One of the themes of the talking we’ve been doing for the past nine years is that Republicans in America just keep getting worse. I think we’ve used the analogy of a black hole that in traditional black hole theory, you reach a point where the gravitational attraction in the collapsing matter is strong enough to overcome any other force and at that point nothing slows it down from then on and all the matter collapses into roughly a point in space. It’s a similar process with Republican pundits and leaders and people who are on the right word chunk of Republicans that there’s nothing stopping them from just collapsing into worse and worse badness. We’re not at the point of full-on fascism.  I mean the odds that we have something like Nazi Germany or fascist Italy happen is still low for a couple reasons. 

One is, we have the examples of the 20th century to remind people of what could happen. Two is, there’s just so many means of sharing information so that the cause of a lot of this collapse which is people lunatics and idiots and just regular folks being hit with a fire hose of messaging that deranges them because it’s not the sophistication of the messaging that makes people crazy, it’s the frequency of getting hit with messaging. Initially the Cambridge Analytica stuff was like “Oh, people are getting characterized and profiled with such precision that they’re getting hit with these messages that are tailored to mess with their minds.”  It says, “No, people are being divided into like five different silos, they’re not being precisely profiled but once they’re in a silo then they get hit with a thousand messages a day,” and that’s the problem but it’s also the solution to some extent because everybody else can exchange a gazillion messages and track all this bullshit and get irated at the bullshit that’s happening and make sure that everybody’s aware of it.

You’re tending to horses a lot and not following American politics. Immediately after the election talk in November 2020, Fox News attacked Dominion Voting Systems as part of their attack on the legitimacy of the election. Fox News along with other right-wing media and Trump himself and a bunch of Republican politicians said the election was stolen, that Trump, the best president ever, couldn’t have lost the election legitimately. And among the attack was an attack on this company called Dominion Voting Systems, saying that they have these machines that could be rigged and were rigged to stop Trump from winning. Dominion Voting Systems sent turns out Fox 3600 debunking emails. They just constantly sent Fox emails and tried to contact them in other ways saying we didn’t have any voting machines in this election and you’re destroying our business and what you’re saying isn’t true at all. 

So eventually that turned into a 1.6 billion dollar loss defamation lawsuit against Fox and this past week Dominion released a redacted version of a 211 page filing for summary judgment in the case which is almost never done by a plaintiff. Summary judgment is this thing that gets used increasingly in the American legal system where very few legal actions actually go to trial before a jury. They usually end before that and one of the means usually used by defendants is to file for summary judgment where you argue that given the facts of the case, there is no way that a non-insane jury, a reasonable jury could find any way but this way. You’re saying that the facts are so persuasive and so they prove your case to such an extent that you don’t need a jury trial because there’s no way that a jury could find other than the way we’re saying and the defendants usually say that.

Fox filed their own summary judgment in this thing. But Dominion filed this 200 plus page thing with all these redacted, not all of it should be for public consumption but Dominion said a lot of it should be for public consumption because the facts are so damning. And the facts are that they had hundreds of pages showing that Fox knew full well Hannity and Laura Ingram and Tucker Carlson, all knew and were emailing each other and calling each other and eventually giving depositions in which they said yes we knew that the claims of election fraud were fake; that we couldn’t say it on air because we were afraid of losing our viewers.

Scot Douglas Jacobsen: That’s crazy. 

Rosner: It’s fucking crazy and also there was an essay on Salon, the website today, where it argued that not only did Fox know it was bullshit and couldn’t say so because they don’t want to lose their viewers but the viewers themselves knew it was bullshit and didn’t care and just wanted to keep being told it because it made them feel better. So, this is where we are with Republicans and truth now. There’s no downside to lying. It’s like being a sports fan where you want your team to win by any means necessary. And it’s a fucking mess.

Jacobsen: Nightmare.

Rosner: Yeah and it’s very addicting for me where I don’t know if this is on purpose or what Elon Musk is showing himself to be very right wing and also kind of a charlatan. It’s like if you took Trump and replaced real estate with science and technology, you’d have Musk but one smart thing he did was to feed liberals like me all the feeds from Mike Pompeo, Lauren Bobert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, and Tucker Carlson himself. Tucker’s tweets show up in my feed and I can’t break myself away from just saying something shitty right back to him every time I get one of their tweets. It’s addicting because it’s infuriating and also my fucking traffic has gone up tenfold, 20-fold just from me saying shitty things back to these lying motherfuckers. It’s a fucking mess. 

Another thing saving is from fascism is that these fuckers are pretty inept. They failed to succeed in their coup in 2020 and the hope of everybody is if they get called out enough, decent people will show up and vote.  Another thing, Tucker Carlson; huge liar, proven liar… the speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy said that he would release all 41,000 hours of video of the attack on the Capitol on January 6th if he became speaker so that people could make their own judgments. So today or yesterday he announced that he’s doing that but only to Tucker Carlson and then Tucker Carlson will pick and choose clips among the 41,000 hours that will make it look like it wasn’t so bad and that it was an inside job from the FBI and Democrats and again more blatant lies. So that’s where we’re at. 

The fear is all it takes is one bad election where you get a bunch of people who are willing to throw out all the rules and you’ve got something like Germany in 1933 when Hitler wasn’t really winning elections, he just won enough of a presence in the whatever you call Germany’s government at the time, to get his hands on the levers of government and he shut all the protections for democracy there down. So I don’t think we’re there yet and I don’t think we’ll ever be there but it’s not a zero percent chance that we won’t get there.

[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.

Ask A Genius 820: Addendum to 819

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/02/21

[Recording Start]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Addendum.

Rick Rosner: So, the lesson here is always be prepared to lie and cheat because you never know when a situation may come up that will require you having non-rusty fake ID type skills. I haven’t had to use a fake ID in decades but here I needed to very quickly, at least I did it quickly, within half an hour I got the vax that I was denied. I used my ‘fuck around with records and lie a little bit and get what you want’ skills. You never know, especially in America, when Hitler will turn up again and you need to start like faking papers and lying to avoid the Gestapo, which the next time a Republican gets elected President. 

[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.

Ask A Genius 819: Legitimacy of Tests

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/02/21

[Recording Start]

Rick Rosner: So just a second ago before you started taping, we were talking about whether the Titan and the Mega are legit measures of ultra high IQ. So I’ve got a story from today which either makes me very smart or very stupid or neither. So that’s the whole spectrum. So I’m flying to Albuquerque at the end of the week to go to my niece and nephew’s bar/bat mitzvah. I have to get on a plane and I have to go to this big family event. New Mexico is a fairly Covid-y State and then at the beginning of April, Carol and I are stupidly foolishly going on a Cruise. 

So I wanted to get another booster to get all fresh antibodies for Covid. So I go to my local booster shop, Elements Pharmacy and they shoot me down even though my last booster was five and a half months ago which is plenty long for most of the antibodies to fade away but they say that the CDC has not okayed a second bivalent booster for anybody. I go but I got risk factors and I’m going to these group gatherings. He’s like “Nope, can’t do it.”  The CDC is slightly inept; they’ve been burned before by vaccinations for swine flu and stuff. They get hit from all sides and it makes them a little gun shy. I showed them my vax card which is actually two vax cards because I’ve had five of them and there’s only room for four, so they gave me a second one because I overflowed. They said, “No, you already had your bivalent and you can’t have it.” 

So I went home and I took out the second vax card so it just showed i’ had four and then I went to my local CVS and got it there. So I’ve been vaxed now six times. There’s supposed to be a state Registry of people’s vaccinations but apparently that registry isn’t entirely up to date. I kind of used fake ID for a fake absence of fake incomplete vaccination record to get the extra vax that I wanted which makes Carol nervous because she doesn’t want me to die from too many vaxes. 

[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.

Ask A Genius 818: Proof in Daily Living

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/11/16

[Recording Start]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, I was having this discussion about the concept of proof and evidence, and what constitutes a meaningless statement. I categorize proofs as confined to pure mathematics for mathematical proofs or logic for logical proofs. Everything else is statistical and varies depending on the study’s domain. Then there are meaningless statements, like “ideas sleep furiously,” which don’t fit into any of these categories.

Rick Rosner: Okay, we’re recording this, right?

Jacobsen: Yes. This relates to what you were saying about faith. How do you define faith, and how does it fit into this discussion?

Rosner: Before diving into faith, I want to talk about proof. I have these weekly debates with Lance, my conservative counterpart. When I assert something about Trump, such as his connections with the Russians, Lance demands proof. I cite deals with Russian oligarchs, but Lance dismisses them as insufficient proof. In our debates, nothing ever reaches the level of proof. Recently, I’ve begun to counter him by demanding he prove his claims. This leads to the broader question of what constitutes proof in daily life. We operate on many assumptions without having things conclusively proven to us.

Many things in our lives are known to the level of proof through experience. We understand everyday physics, like gravity and inertia, and Newton’s laws, through direct experience. For example, we instinctively avoid jumping off balconies because we know the consequences. This is experiential proof. Then there’s a less certain level of knowledge, like my belief that President Trump is a huge asshole. This would be hard to unprove unless, for instance, it was revealed he has frontotemporal dementia, which affects behavior. Even then, I’d still view him critically.

And then there are things I feel I know but aren’t as certain. Whether I actually know them doesn’t impact my daily life much. Take climate change, for example. I know it’s real, but if Lance asked me to prove it, my evidence wouldn’t be concrete. I could cite statistics, like the belief of 97 percent of scientists in climate change, but that’s not solid proof since I haven’t studied the detailed mechanisms. Nevertheless, it affects some of my behaviors, like feeling guilty about unnecessary car trips or trying to recycle, even though my understanding of climate change isn’t as direct as my understanding of gravity.

California now faces increasingly severe fires each year, far worse than before. We endure more extremely hot days. While climate change’s direct impact on my life may not be life or death, I am highly certain of its reality. Then there are lesser issues, like certain politicians. Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz, for example, seem like huge assholes, but my knowledge about them is limited compared to my 30-year awareness of Trump. I’ve only known about these other guys for around five to eight years and don’t read about them daily.

Regarding my understanding of how to pick up women, much of what I learned is theoretical, as I studied it after I was already with Carol and no longer in the dating scene. I believe in the socio-biological framework that suggests women seek stability and are more selective due to the greater commitment involved in pregnancy and child-rearing. Men, on the other hand, are perceived as more interested in spreading their genes. This knowledge, however, is somewhat speculative.

We live our lives without concrete proof for many things. We have experiential certainty about some aspects, like gravity, even though most haven’t studied advanced Newtonian dynamics or general relativity. For less critical matters, our understanding often rests on faith, based on common knowledge or sparse information. For instance, I’ve heard numerous anecdotes and tabloid stories suggesting John Travolta is bisexual, along with rumors from the entertainment industry. Do I know this for certain? No. Does it matter? Not really. It’s more of a faith-based acceptance.

A lot of what I think I know is vague and unsubstantiated, but it doesn’t impact my daily life significantly. If I were to evaluate the total information I possess, there’s a chance that much of it might be considered unreliable or ‘shit information,’ though it’s hard to measure. In contrast, my understanding of gravity is deeply ingrained and certain, far more so than my knowledge about Travolta’s sexuality.

Jacobsen: May I interject?

Rosner: Yeah, go ahead.

Jacobsen: From what you’ve said, I see at least three different thought paths. First, there’s the experience of gravity, which is a raw, physical observation of the world, repeated over time. Gravity, for you, is statistically real, an empirical form of knowledge, not faith-based. Second, I gather your approach to news consumption involves discerning more reliable sources from the unreliable ones. This seems to blend faith and trust or confidence. For instance, you may have trust or confidence in reputable journalism rather than blindly accepting claims, like those about John Travolta’s sexuality, from less credible sources.

Rosner: That example isn’t great journalism. There were occasional reports, like lawsuits against Travolta or pictures that suggested something, but they weren’t concrete.

Jacobsen: Fair point.

Rosner: I’ve lost track of the original point, but that’s not real journalism.

Jacobsen: Right. But with real journalism from trusted sources like Reuters or The Associated Press, you can have confidence in the information provided, like the connections between Trump and Russian oligarchs.

Rosner: Exactly. In that category, it’s more about trust or confidence in reliable information, as opposed to empirical observation.

Jacobsen: The third category seems to be straight-up faith, where beliefs aren’t necessarily based on gathered information or trust in a source but are simply held. These could be unjustified beliefs that many people have.

Rosner: That leads to a fourth category: superstitions and suspicions. These are things we might wonder about or semi-believe in, even if they’re not entirely true.

Jacobsen: Like angels and ghosts?

Rosner: I’m sure they don’t exist. However, I’m open to them in fiction for entertainment, and I acknowledge there might be gaps in scientific knowledge that could allow for mystical phenomena, though I find these gaps quite narrow. My own superstitions are more like compulsions.

Jacobsen: Those are my thoughts. Perhaps there’s a fifth category, which offers the closest levels of truth: logical and mathematical proofs.

Rosner: Most people aren’t dealing with that level of proof.

Jacobsen: True, and that’s why pure mathematics, for example, is such a specialized field.

Rosner: In coding, there’s a similar need for precision, akin to mathematical proofs. When building a program, you’re accountable for every process. I don’t think there’s a programming language yet that intuitively corrects your mistakes. It might be on the horizon, but I haven’t come across it.

Jacobsen: Like a mathematician for coding.

Rosner: Exactly. Imagine if it could understand that you’re trying to add a skin to a wireframe soldier in Call of Duty 8, but you’ve made an error and the skin is floating slightly above the frame. The software would automatically correct that. I’ve always found coding challenging because, like mathematical proofs, it demands such precision and has no tolerance for errors.

Jacobsen: So, coding, mathematics, and logic could be one category. Natural sciences, social sciences, personal beliefs based on experience, beliefs in general, and superstitions are other distinct categories. I think these encapsulate the ways we understand our world.

Rosner: Stepping back, it’s important to consider how knowledge actually functions in our lives. As evolved, conscious beings, we like to think we understand and control our actions. However, we live in a world tailored to our convenience, which allows us to navigate life with less understanding than we assume. We move from one familiar experience to another, some decisions being conscious and well-thought-out, while others are just automatic responses suited to beings of our nature in a world designed for us.

Our understanding, however, is often superficial. It’s like Plato’s Cave; our grasp of the world is somewhat vague. I’ve seen two science fiction shows recently, though I can only recall one, where characters are confronted with the underlying forces shaping their lives through big data analytics. In Westworld, for instance, people receive messages on their phones revealing truths about themselves, predicted by a big data analytics engine. It exposes the deeper structures of their lives, beyond their understanding, but clear to the analytic engine.

It’s often bad news for most people when they confront the stark realities about themselves, such as tendencies towards suicide, alcoholism, or various failures. This kind of revelation can lead to world chaos. Some people endeavor to discover their true selves. I’ve visited at least six therapists because my behavior was bothersome to others and I was encouraged to seek help. Although I never really wanted to go, thinking I was fine, my experiences with these therapists, combined with my efforts to write my autobiography over many years, have made me quite transparent to myself, which I value.

Within reason, when self-awareness becomes too painful, I retreat, just like anyone else. The world offers mechanisms to better understand ourselves, but comprehensive self-understanding or understanding of the world isn’t necessary to function well in it, as we live in a world designed for humans.

I watched “The Vow,” about NXIVM and Keith Ranieri, the leader of what was essentially a sex cult. He is now serving a 120-year prison sentence. His true motives are unclear. Early on, he may have been a manipulative grifter, but it’s possible that at some point he believed he was developing a beneficial system akin to Scientology, to help people understand themselves and improve.

“The Vow” tells the stories of people who joined NXIVM with the goal of self-improvement and professional success. While they were drawn into the cult-like aspects of NXIVM, they may have also experienced some positive changes due to the self-help content of the organization. Despite its sinister aspects, NXIVM did offer some degree of self-improvement techniques, much like Scientology, which was created by a con artist but still managed to compile various self-help methods from the 1950s.

Jacobsen: For the final question, would you say faith is good or bad?

Rosner: I’d argue that faith is, first and foremost, unavoidable. Considering our earlier discussion, we recognize that there’s a lot we don’t and can’t know. We’re certain about things like gravity, but when it comes to understanding what’s in someone’s heart or mind, that’s more ambiguous. For instance, I’ve watched Biden enough in the past six months to feel reasonably confident that he’s mentally sharp. He appears to be in command of the facts. But I can’t be entirely sure. Similarly, with Trump, despite claims on Twitter that he’s showing signs of dementia, he still communicates fluidly. His cautiousness walking down a ramp, attributed to wearing slick leather-soled shoes, seems logical. He wouldn’t want to risk a fall that would be widely broadcast. So, while I entertain the possibility of Trump having early dementia, I’m not fully convinced. It hasn’t been proven to me. Therefore, I accept on faith that Biden is mentally sound and that Trump isn’t significantly impaired. But, I can’t say I know for sure.

Most of what I believe has a substantial component of faith, which can be shattered by facts if probed deeply enough. We live in a world where our brains naturally engage in Bayesian analysis. We assess the reliability of our knowledge and weigh it against the risks of it being false. If something has significant implications for us, we strive to reinforce our knowledge, attempting to decrease faith-based beliefs and replace them with factual information.

Jacobsen: Is that the conclusion?

Rosner: Yes, that’s the end.

Jacobsen: Alright.

[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.

Ask A Genius 817: Following Davidson – More Icelandic Dick

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/11/15

[Recording Start]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I got a really weird introduction to this. When I was running for Secretary General of Young Humanist International in 2019 in late May early June, I won; a bunch of people didn’t go to the Whale Museum in Iceland, they didn’t go to the volcanic vents or volcano events museum, they went to the penis museum in Iceland. I didn’t know this was a thing and they sent some pictures and on some of the displays, it’ll be in a case and it’ll say ‘Penis donated by Tom Mitchell’ or whatever and on the display it will say audio presentation. [Laughing]

Rick Rosner: What’s the presentation?

Jacobsen: I don’t know. I have no idea. [Laughing] I’m going to Google it.

Rosner: Well I assume these are mostly weird animal penises like I guess pigs have curly penises. 

Jacobsen: Yeah. Oh sorry, it’s audio tour, Iceland. So at the Icelandic Phallological Museum, that’s what Google says, it’s open every day from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.  It looks like it’s in downtown Reykjavik. It’s at Hafnatorg 101, Reykjavík Island. There’s a bus that says 101 in Reykjavik, everything’s like that. it’s like a big city that’s a small town. 

Rosner: Yeah, it sounds like a really cool place to live.

Jacobsen: You and I should go there. 

Rosner: Yeah.

Jacobsen: It contains a collection of more than 200 penises and penile parts of almost all land and sea mammals that can be found in Iceland. So you will see a whale penis there, different whale penises. 

Rosner: Okay there’s a Legend, the John Dillinger that came from the death of John Dillinger who was, I think ambushed leaving a movie theater. He was a gangster in the 1930s and the legend is that when you get shot as you die you get a huge hard on because I guess the morgue picture that somebody smuggled out for the newspapers showed him under his sheet and he was tented out but obviously it wasn’t his dick, it was something else under the sheet. 

So, on Twitter somebody tweeted at me, a lady, saying “Are you the Rick Rosner who was in West Hollywood at this hotel? We talked about CHiPs and Erik Estrada.” And I wrote back, “No, that’s the other Rick Rosner. The Rick Rosner who created the TV show CHiPs but he’s a really nice guy” and we got to talking or tweeting back and forth of each other a little bit and the other Rick Rosner is a very friendly guy, kind of adventurous, and would make all sorts of friends. I could tell this lady trans and I just went ahead and followed her and then I checked out her Twitter feed to see what she was tweeting and who she was re-tweeting and apparently she belongs to a group of trans people who have enormous penises; they’re hot ladies with big old penises.

This is a thing in Japanese anime called Futanari which is hot girls with big dicks, comic strips because that’s filthy, it’s pornography where two girls like each other and then they start making out and then one of them has a penis and they have sex. I didn’t know that this was kind of a real thing though I kind of guessed it because I’m writing a book, a novel set in the near future and the main character has a girlfriend who’s a hot lady who gleefully has a huge dick. Having Trans people in your story is kind of like a fashionable thing to do right now. I kind of wanted to take it one step further but at the risk of being cheesy but now I know there’s a community of hot ladies who celebrate having just giant penises and it’s serendipitous because at some point maybe the book will be far enough along that I can go to this lady and say “Hey, can you say whether I got any of this stuff right?,” because trans stuff is tricky. If you just guess at it you’re going to get a lot of stuff wrong and possibly in an offensive way.

But anyway this whole thing got me thinking about penises and experienced viewers of pornography. When I was a kid pornography just was not very readily available. You were super excited if you found any. My friends and I, at least once dumpster dive for porn outside of a fraternity at the end of the school year figuring the Frat Bros might have Playboys that they’d thrown away, which they had and we found a few and these were highly cherished and passed around because there just wasn’t porn. But the porn at the time, it was a huge event. In about 1972 or maybe 1973, it was the first time that a Playboy showed a centerfold with pubic hair and it wasn’t until then everybody had been shaved; it’s just that they hadn’t shown anybody’s pubic region for the first 18 years of the magazine but they were in kind of a battle with Penthouse magazine. Penthouse was showing more than Playboy, so Playboy finally had to show a girl’s pubic area. 

I didn’t see hardcore pornography for about another year and that stuff was really sad; the people looked kind of ugly and miserable and it was just looked like a terrible enterprise and was not appealing at all except for it showed sex. And then it’s just much different from today where whether they want to or not, probably every kid by the age of 12 has seen boners because just they’re all over the place on the internet and often on Netflix. Netflix usually doesn’t show boners for pornographic purposes but they might show a dick for comedic purposes. Everybody’s seen fucking everything. 

If you follow a gentler slope into pornography, you know I started with a naked lady playing cards. Somebody found or had on the playground, that was just topless ladies in the 1950s. Once you’ve seen some naked lady porn, you generally move on to porn with people having sex and after you’ve seen enough of that, seeing a boner you associate it with a pleasurable pornographic experience because that boner is going to end up in a lady and that’s just dirtier porn. Porn needs to be transgressive. Christians like to present sex as something that can just love between two people who love each other and are married to each other. Even Christians get up to naughtiness or maybe they get up to more naughtiness, I don’t know but I don’t I feel like transgressive-ness is just a part of sex. 

So you need the penises in there because it makes the sex dirtier. Same with the cum shot, it just makes things filthier. It shows that the sex was real and nobody who’s made making the porn can pretend it’s just for artistic purposes just the way you could with just beautiful naked lady pictures. So, even if you’re heterosexual, you’re okay to have penises flying around as long as they end up in a lady or have a lady doing something with them. A penis is kind of essential for dirty porn. I mean you can have lesbian porn that can be reasonably dirty but really if you’re going to be having heterosexual porn where the penis goes in is a surefire way to make it sufficiently pornographic. 

And then I see all these ladies with giant penises and it’s just a weird thing that you’ve got a hot lady and you’ve got the penis, it’s pretty transgressive. Now I wrote a book more than 20 years ago where I tried to make it transgressive figuring. I mean there used to be a thing in books where books became notorious for being dirty, like Portnoy’s Complaint was a famous Philip Roth book of the 1970s where the main character was a Jewish teen who jacked off a lot or I guess then continued to jack off into adulthood or it just had some sex in it and nobody, no legit author had really written about jerking off before and that was part of what made the book notorious beyond its literary merit. 

And so I tried to do the same thing in the 80s and 90s writing a novel which I never really tried to get published after some initial attempts because my TV career happened. But the idea was the same that I put some stuff in it that was really dirty thinking that the dirtiness might help the book, might give it a boost if the quality of my plotting and writing was otherwise lacking but the time for that may have already been over and I just haven’t seen a lot of that in books lately. I guess some books have some sex but nobody cares about transgressive sex in literature anymore. 

I thought this would be a more interesting talk than it turned out to be with more insight. But in my book which I’ve tried to make a little transgressive anyhow, the book I’m writing now, the main character has a girlfriend who gleefully has a penis. The girlfriend has sex with people besides the main character and the main character is okay with it because the main character is handicapped in a very unusual way that kind of makes the main character think that he can’t insist on monogamy. And also the main character is getting laid with other people. Neither of them is monogamous and the shit they get into the girlfriends screwing around being non-monogamous helps with the main characters screwing around. 

The girlfriend is very attractive, its gone way out of her way to look like a super duper hot girl; various surgeries and keeps in shape and meticulously done makeup, the clothes that are body conscious and the main character is just like the dick is not that big a deal. The girlfriend doesn’t want to put her penis in the main character. So that’s not an issue and it’s just a whole thing and it feels like that there won’t be a lot of stuff that’s this extreme because the couple, they’re a little bit psycho in terms of being very dedicated to sexual adventure. But I do feel that like for most Trans people, the configuration of their genitals is something that people who date these people just deal with and it’ll be something that’s even more accepted in the future. 

I looked at the statistics because I was arguing with Lance, I brought this up before. The Conservatives like to say that Trans is a mental disease that makes you chop off your genitals and the argument against aid that’s just a shitty argument. And one thing that makes it shitty is that only about one half of one percent of Trans people mess with their genitals and I feel like that statistic, it could very well drop in the future as people become more and more okay with just keeping their genitals the way they are because genital surgery is just awful. It’s painful, it takes all sorts of maintenance; I guess often lifelong maintenance if you get a vagina. The final result of people often find less than satisfactory just in terms of how it is. The Trans person who’s gotten the surgery is not dissatisfied having gotten gender conforming surgery though they wish the surgical result was better. Or I would think that in the future there will be more fixes that make gender conforming procedures a little more satisfactory but in any case a teeny percentage of people mess with their genitals and most of these people have partners. Everybody’s just kind of I feel okay with it. So that’s all I got about all this stuff.

[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.

Ask A Genius 816: The Reserve Currency of 2110

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/11/14

[Recording Start]

Rick Rosner: The future of currency. Somebody was asking a panel I was on this morning, of some bullshitters and some people actually know what they’re talking about… I’m one of the bullshitters; if the dollar will remain the currency of record, what do you call it? I don’t know. 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The reserve currency. 

Rosner: The reserve currency into the future. And you can talk about whether it’ll stay the dollar or it turn into the yuan. But I would argue that around 100 years from now, the unit of value, which is not the same thing as the unit of currency, but the unit of value will be computing power. That civilization will turn so much to information processing and that it will become a resource that is measured, developed, hoarded, that it will become the prime index of value. Everything else will be measured versus that. And one more thing is that there maybe two indices of value based on that. One is the machinery to do a certain number of calculations per unit time. That’ll be one index in terms of servers, I guess. And petaflops; quadrillions of calculations per second. So the rate at which information can be processed but there’s also another index which is just the number of calculations that can be done and they may each be indices of value. Like, you might have a contract to do 10th to the 20t bit wise calculations and that might have a going rate in the year 2110.

[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.

Ask A Genius 815: Pete Davidson’s Dick

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/11/14

[Recording Start]

Rick Rosner: Pete Davidson is going out with another very pretty woman, Emily Ratajkowski. She is a model turned actress and author. She’s the girl from Alan Thicke’s kid , like from 10 years ago or eight years ago ‘Blurred Lines.’ Anyway, this has caused a lot of consternation among men  in an interesting way. Do you know Pete Davidson?

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I know him. I know the controversies in America around him. I am not surprised at these partnerships at all.

Rosner: All right, so women on Twitter will argue “Well of course he’s very successful at dating because he’s funny, he’s a nice guy” A rumor has it that he has a 10 inch dick or just some enormous penis; a rumor that has been reinforced by the theory that Kanye made all these anti-Semitic statements because, though I think he’s made him in the past too I don’t know, but because Pete Davidson is half Jewish and Kanye said that some Jew with a 10 inch dick is or was banging my ex or something like that. And everybody was thinking that’s Pete Davidson.

Women are all tweeting they can totally understand, that they would go out with Pete Davidson. And then men are very frustrated by this. They’re like “What the fuck?!” I would argue that it’s very frustrating to a lot of men that Pete Davidson does so well, A, because it’s not them doing so well but B, because Pete Davidson has things that are unattainable. When I first started trying to get a girlfriend I was during the pumping iron days of the mid late 70s and the understanding was if you got all muscle-y, girls would like you and that seemed detainable and was. It wouldn’t help you that much but it would help you some. But fucking being funny is, you can’t body build being funny. So guys look at Pete Davidson like he seems like a weirdo to me, whatever he’s got is ineffable, though they don’t know the word ineffable, to me I can’t do that. I can’t give myself a big penis if that’s what he’s like, if that’s part of the package. He just looks like a goofball to me and that just adds to the frustration because it doesn’t offer guys a clear path to sexual success.

[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.

Ask A Genius 814: A Small Library of Religious Beliefs of the World

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/11/14

[Recording Start]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I’m going to leave this one to you. 

Rick Rosner: Alright. So in your nicely appointed apartment you’ve assembled a small library of the religious beliefs of the world and I guess philosophical beliefs because you’re very interested in those belief systems and in the people who have those beliefs, right?

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: All right. So I was thinking about, I’m trying to write this novel about a character who is at the forefront of brain replication technology, including developing the technology to replicate your brain to the point that you can keep on living and thinking after you’re dead that you can duplicate your brain’s function outside of your brain. And this guy is thinking it seems like it works to a certain extent. But I really hope we’re not just the fucking Egyptians with mummy technology all over again which goes to a lot of people believe in science now, and a lot of people would argue that science isn’t a belief system, it’s the truth. But even if it is the truth, it’s a fucking belief system; the belief that if you test reality through experimentation and observation to see what comports with reality, then that’s what you should believe in, that’s still a fucking belief system, even though it happens to be a very effective belief system.

And we’ve touched on this before, that we can’t imagine anything that goes beyond science. You look at everything else at that people believed historically that it’s all turned out to be supplanted by other belief systems that seem to make more sense. So just using history, you’d kind of have to think that something will supplant science. But then people who believe in science will be like “How?” science is you look for the truth, you find it through experiment and then you verify it and all that. Yes, science will probably be supplanted, but it might be supplanted by big data science that comes up with shit that doesn’t even fit in human heads, analysis that just requires so much information processing power plus data that it would almost seem like magic to humans. So, I mean, science will be supplanted or at least science will change just like everything else. Every other previous belief system has been supplanted, though not exactly like every other belief system because at least we’ve been trying to squeeze out the nonsense. So that’s thing one.

Thing two is even believing in our own continuity from moment to moment, day after day, is a belief system, the one we’ve evolved to have. We live in our bodies and in our minds and the path of least mental resistance is to think that the amount of information that we carryover ourselves, our personalities, that we carry through life, that this is a fine way of doing things is, you could call it an evolved belief system that’s culturally reinforced, that we tell each other we’re the same person throughout life. We have one name; we have the same property day after day, the same relationships. Everything reinforces that we’re the same person though if you look at us informationally, we’re the fucking ship the completely different ship after ten years because all the pieces eventually get replaced except it’s worse than that. 

It’s just that, like, when we lose so much information over our lives and we tend to think that the information we lose is kind of trivial bullshit, that if it were important, we’d remember it. But how would we fucking know because we’ve forgotten it. Everybody’s had the experience of suddenly remembering something they hadn’t remembered in ten or 15 years. It’s like “Whoa, that’s really something interesting that I didn’t even remember I knew.” And you think that maybe that would have been handier within memory and it wouldn’t have taken this chance event to remind me of something that was kind of a big deal when it initially happened. We believe we’re resurrected on a daily basis when we wake up. And that’s fine, because not believing that would be a big pain in the ass. But it’s a belief system and the system what we’re believing in is far from perfect. And that is caused for optimism in developing the technology to resurrect ourselves, to be able to think outside our brains because if we could put up with the shittiness of our brains and all that we don’t recall, and our limitations of thought, we might be able to put up with the limitations of the technology we developed.

[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.

Ask A Genius 813: Addendum to 812

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/11/14

[Recording Start]

Rick Rosner: I mentioned that I thought there was bullshit going on with the polls. You’re not supposed to think that there’s bullshit going on with political polls, you’re supposed to believe that pollsters are trying their best using the best methodologies to get the most accurate picture of what’s going on. Then somebody can ask “Who gives a fuck? Just wait for the election to tell you what’s going on” And then people will say “No, you really want to pay attention to the polls to see which the close races are so you know where to direct your campaign money, your volunteering.” You don’t want to waste a lot of effort on an election that you’re going to lose by five percentage points when you could have put that effort into an election that only had a half percentage point difference that you could have overcome. 

But several weeks ago, I and it turns out a shitload of other people decided that this time around the polls were bullshit, that conservative pollsters were flooding the field with more frequent and just a proliferation of conservative leaning polls that said that people were very quickly turning away from the Democrats and towards the Republicans. Other people and I were saying maybe this is a technique to demoralize the Democrats out of voting and so I and a bunch of other people started tweeting the polls are bullshit this time around and just keep voting Democratic and it turns out I and everybody else who decided this were right based on the election returns. There was not this Red Wave building up and the conservative pollsters were just being fuckers. 

[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.

Ask A Genius 812: ‘Jizz Monster’ Men

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/11/14

[Recording Start]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Addendum.

Rick Rosner: It’s just crazy how young men like women and how old women like men; it’s crazy but not surprising.

Jacobsen: Yeah, it’s kind of like having two separate curves with the fair one being for men because it’s more gradual through an adult lifespan. It builds up, it peaks at a middle age, and then it sort of drops off. For women it’s kind of all the cards are at the start of the race.

Rosner: Yeah. No, it’s not fair. At the same time it’s okay if you use informed will and look at what makes you horny and then call it out and say “Yeah, that’s just my boner system that makes me act crazy and I don’t have to be a bitch to it. You don’t have to be Harvey Weinstein. Trump was maybe our rapiest president; you don’t have to do that. You can just feed off and avoid all the wreckage. When I tell people that, they say but for those people it’s not about sex, it’s about power and my response is so do without the power games. You can still do that and maybe it’s not as exciting to beat off to the internet as it is to manipulate Gwyneth Paltrow or Ashley Judd but you still don’t have to do it. 

The joy in fucking with people that way, you don’t have to be that bad guy to the extent that your horniness engine is contributing to that, you can look at your horniness engine and say just fuck off a little bit. Guys have to get the jizz out but like we don’t have to be monsters in doing 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.

Ask A Genius 811: Belief Systems and Dating

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/11/14

[Recording Start]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, so, what was the topic, belief systems or dating? 

Rick Rosner: Dating. We’re talking about like before you started taping that you just completely made your apartment like a grownups apartment. Like you decorated it, you made it all nice. 

Jacobsen: Yeah.

Rosner: I bet you it’s like everything’s neat in there. There are not clothes thrown all over the place.

Jacobsen: Correct. I have systems. I organized and updated everything. I turned this place around in three quarters of a year. I worked very fast. 

Rosner: Nice, and you put a lot of thought and effort into it. And when I was somewhat younger than you, but not a lot younger than you, I put zero effort into anything except trying to get a girlfriend/get laid.

Jacobsen: So we are not the opposite. However, you’re more forced and I’m more sort of just natural about it. 

Rosner: Yeah and I would argue that the era I was trying to get laid in, 70s and 80s, was itself kind of pathologically horny. You were expected to be horny and have sex whenever possible. It was a hedonistic era, and I was obsessed with hooking up. I would argue that your stance and most people’s stance is not to go crazy pushing it. It’ll happen when it makes sense to happen just in the fullness of time. I used the example of somebody I know who kind of hooked up in a way that I thought might have been desperate as a very young, unpromising man with somebody who turned out to not be right. Well, they turned out to not be right for each other and then later he became very successful and met people who were appropriate for him in the fucking fullness of time instead of jumping on the first sexual hand grenade.

Jacobsen: [Laughting]. 

Rosner:  And then you said there’s a study in the New York Times.

Jacobsen: There was a report on a study in the New York Times. There have been many reports on many major publications about some of the largest data samples available in online dating. The types of people who are attracted will be a self selected sample in some way. In other ways, the sample is so large it might simply be representative of the general population. What they find in some of these analyses of the data provided by these online dating apps is women peak in terms of attractiveness at 18, to men. So this appears to be a heterosexual analysis. Men, in complete contradistinction to this seem to peak at about 50. So there is an asymmetry it’s on the one factor of age. 

Rosner: Brutal asymmetry where 18 is the youngest age you can even look at, like, pornographic pictures. If women peak in attractiveness at age 18, then you assume that they’re still pretty attractive when they’re younger than 18, but you can’t even legally look at them when they’re younger than18, which is crazy in terms of what our sex drive does to us. Men focus are focused via our sexual evolutionary history on just pure reproductive fitness. And so any signs of age are signs that fitness is being lost. It seems like a socio biological argument that women look at men as providers or people who, in more general terms, as people who can take on the world. When we were on the Savannah, provider meant something entirely different but there was still the idea that somebody who’s made it into their older years that may be as a result of competence.

[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.

Ask A Genius 810: Is Aspartame Healthy?

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/11/14

[Recording Start]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, quick question. Do you think Aspartame is unhealthy or healthy? 

Rick Rosner: It’s probably healthier than sugar. Years ago, when I started drinking lots of coffee with lots of fake sugar, I Googled this to see and as far as I could tell the jury’s out, it can’t be that bad because there would be studies that say it’s that bad. But I remember there were some equivocal studies that said that maybe, so that’s question one. Is it really bad for you? I don’t think so. It’s certainly bad when they give rats, their own body weight in it every day but we don’t consume it like that. Question two is, and I haven’t looked this up, but it does it have calories? I guess. But does it fool your body into doing weird shit with your blood sugar because it’s very sugar like? I doubt it but I haven’t looked it up but overall, I’d say among the things you could do to yourself health wise, it’s not up there in terms of being super terrible is my guess, my semi informed guess.

Jacobsen: Unlike a lot of the current kind of social landscape, trust institutions for the most part, those sorts of chemicals in foods especially in Canada are healthy, I would assume. And I would take Aspartame in diet pops as one of those. The only thing I would think that would actually be unhealthy would be excess intake of the diet pop in lots and lots of caffeine. Caffeine after a certain point can be bad for those with preexisting sort of cardiovascular issues. 

Rosner: Yeah, but caffeine has all sorts of health benefits in normal doses. Like, a few cups of coffee a day is supposed to be pretty good for you. 

Jacobsen: Yeah. Harvard Health in one web resource points up to ten cups is okay. That’s a lot.

Rosner: When I went from no coffee for my entire life to four cups in the afternoon to stay awake, a couple of times my heart got a little gallop-y. But again, that kind of stuff is not super dangerous. Anyway, I had free coffee at work. So when I had work and needed to stay awake, then I would drink coffee to the point where my heart got a little bit of A-fib-y, but that’s all right. Should we talk about this other thing?

Jacobsen: Quick research on Canada Health. Allegation: Aspartame is especially dangerous for persons with diabetes. Not supported by the evidence. This is according to a governmental Health Canada website. Allegation: Aspartame causes cancer and brain tumors; not supported. Causes seizures; not supported. Causes allergic reactions; not supported. The Methanol and Aspartame is toxic and lead to numerous health problems including lupus and blindness and also mimics multiple sclerosis; not supported. And it has calories, just very little calories. 

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Rosner: It feels like it should be bad for you because it feels like you’re getting away with something with it, that you’re putting this chemical in you that trick your mouth into thinking shit is sweet, but it isn’t real. And so, I understand how it tempts lunatics into all sorts of dumb health beliefs that turn out not to be supported by research. And that’s a little bit the era we’re in. 

Jacobsen: I agree.

Rosner: To expand on that right now, I assume since we’re part of the same continent, you got the same shit going on that we do. We have three respiratory diseases going on right now. COVID hasn’t gone away and it’s gradually heading up for its winter spike though more gradually than the previous two winters we’ve had it. We’ve got bad flu because everybody, not everybody, but enough people practiced reasonable health measures in the previous two winters that maybe we’ve got less immunity or maybe the flu is a tougher version, but flu is bad this year. And then we’ve got this other thing that’s infecting and killing kids, that’s also respiratory. Yet only 12% of the people in LA County have gotten boosted and LA County is not a big science denying lunatic place but we have all this shit and then we have all these fucking idiots who are practicing COVID denial and mask denial. So with that going on, it’s consistent with that kind of lunacy that people would freak out about fake sugar.

[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.

Ask A Genius 809: Scott’s Friend in Chinese State Media

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/10/30

[Recording Start]

Rick Rosner: In U.S versus elsewhere?

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Yes, so I have a friend who left working for State media in China to come to Canada in their particular situation and describing it to me tonight over a call is that they felt it was very controlled. And I remarked that Chinese media, the way she was talking about sounded like American media to some commentators for people working for it or people that are just sort of paying attention a little bit to in terms of structural analysis. The Chinese media that she was mentioning is state media.

So there’s a lot of oversight and control and you don’t know whether your colleague really believes what they’re saying or not. There’s a lot of prefabrication of things rather than free flow honest journalism. For American media it’s not owned by the state, a lot of it is corporate and then there’s a lot of ideological stuff too. I mean Fox News is the kind of the easiest example of the Conservative side for instance. But the way she was talking about it when working for it, it sounded the same but the structural analysis would be different. So sort of the output or the process to getting the output seemed the same, the structure to get to that process, to get that output was different in each country but it’s still controlled.

Rosner: In the U.S right-wing media definitely has an objective which is to sell their message but let’s go to China which is I mean China is an entrepreneurial Communist dictatorship with the emphasis on entrepreneurial and dictatorship, that they want to be the dominant economic force in the world. Their policies which are exercised with dictatorial power are to get China to be this power. China has compelled its people to go from being rural to urban. China has more than 200 cities with more than a million people and a new city goes from under a million to over a million, I think like once a week they want to have some high percentage of their population living in cities by some date. 

The U.S already has a lot of that where I think 80% of Americans live in at least a decent sized town. So China wants a bunch of people just making shit and developing shit in cities and where the making shit and the economic developing of shit conflicts with the party line. Maybe the party line wins but I don’t think those conflicts are a huge percentage of that… I mean people do run afoul of the government and there are plenty of shortcomings like medicine outside of the big cities maybe in cities can be unresponsive and people can be super pissed at some people getting good medical treatment and other people being neglected. And it’s like fuck you we’re a dictatorship and you take what you can get but I’m not real hip to that.

But anyway, there are plenty of worldwide websites probably like YouTube and Twitter and all that, that you can’t get in China because they’re used to sending messages the government might think is subversive and they have their own version of these that are highly policed. As long as you your efforts are directed in a in a direction that’s work in a factory or go to school get highly educated to be like entrepreneurial… not in the factories I mean factory work is where you’re living in a dorm and working I don’t know how many hours a week that that can be super oppressive but you are probably making pretty decent money for China but it’s still miserable. But if you’re somebody who’s a member of the ruling Bourgeois class, life in China is probably almost as nice as it is if you’re Bourgeois in America.

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In America the government doesn’t control the message but there are controls on the message depending on who the message is coming from. The Murdoch family, Rupert Murdoch who’s 90 is a multi-billionaire because he’s built this conservative news Empire and a it’s a symbiotic relationship between Murdoch and Republican politicians and billionaire donors and gullible viewers. Fox wants Republican politicians to win; Republican politicians want their billionaire donors to be happy. There are all these calculations you see articles on where a billionaire will give 50 billion dollars in an election cycle to run ads and then you see that over the next year the politicians that those ads elected save that billionaire 215 billion in taxes. So the billionaires have a lot of money to throw at this shit and it pays off for them. So there’s a very consistent message coming out of Fox because they make a shitload of money.  

I’m sure Fox has divided, I don’t know that the billionaires are giving billions of dollars to Fox but everybody supports their business model and they’re able to pay their on camera talent like Hannity gets and fucking Tucker Carlson gets 30 to 35 million dollars a year. Fox is not obligated to be truthful, they’re only obligated to come up with takes on stuff that gets their viewers to vote the way they want them to vote. They’ve been sued, they’re being sued over this and in court they’ve claimed that they’re not officially a news channel even though their name is Fox News, that they are an entertainment channel and that any sophisticated viewer watching their products would know that you’re not to meant to take everything they say seriously, except their viewers aren’t sophisticated. The Republican party has for the last 50 years turned dumb people gullible people into a voting bloc because they’re easier to push around.

And then among non-Fox media, the emphasis is still on making money which is getting people to tune in which means they have all sorts of terrible habits in terms of what stories are covered and how they’re covered. This year the polls are political polls, seem to be particularly troublesome. I’ve read some articles that say that in the old days everybody had landlines, 20-30 years ago nobody had cell phones. You call people up on their home phones, ask if they want to do a survey and you might have a success rate at 25%. And now only one third of American households have landlines and when you call and people who still have them kind of hate answering the phone even though they still have a landline because every call is a nuisance call, a scam call, a cold call from some contractor, political calls and survey calls. 

So the rate of success when a surveyor is calling landlines is as low as 0.4% which means they have to robocall 250 people to get one person to agree to take a survey which means to do an 800 person survey, they would have to make 200,000 robocalls which is just fucked for everybody because that means they’re annoying hundreds of thousands of people just to get 800. It also means that when you’re taking such a small fraction of the population, what kind of people are going to say yes to taking a 20-minute survey when the vast majority of everybody says no thank you, which raises the possibility that you’re talking to fucking lunatics or people with an agenda. So the polls have gotten increasingly unreliable. 

In the polls, with eight days to go until the election, the percent of people who say they’re going to vote Republican and the people who are going to vote Democratic according to the polls are about 0.7% away from each other, which the news loves because everybody feels like they have to watch the news because the Republicans feel like the Democrats are evil and if they win they’re going to destroy America because that’s what Fox News right-wing outlets tell them. Democrats liberals feel legitimately based on the last six years that if Republicans get control that they actually will destroy America and the Republicans are not being quiet about this that they will let the U.S default on its debt which has never happened in history if the government doesn’t cut the Social Security and Medicare and just a lot of like blatant shittiness out of Republicans. 

So everybody is afraid and pissed off and watching the news because there’s no clear advantage for one side or the other which the news likes and there’s more shit going on with the polls. The conservative polls are the polls that give you results that say the Republicans are doing better, are flooding the ballot box by releasing polls more frequently than other pollsters like Rasmussen has been doing two Biden approval polls a week. So when the poll aggregators aggregate average out all these polls, Rasmussen is twice as represented as the pollsters who only do weekly polls and eight times is represented as the monthly polls. So there’s a lot of bullshit going on. The messaging just has a lot of problems with it.  

There’s both sides-ism where a lot of news sources try to present the Republicans and Democrats as equally bad which is bad because the Republicans are wildly worse than the Democrats. Oh! There’s a thing that just happened. The husband of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, her husband Paul Pelosi was beaten up by a lunatic in his underpants with a hammer. He’s got a fractured skull and a mangled arm. This guy used the hammer to break into the Pelosi’s house at 2 a.m. or something. You look at the shit that this guy has posted online and he started off as a different flavor of lunatic, years ago like a nudist but in the last couple years he’s turned into a right wing lunatic based on what he’s been posting. When he busted in with the hammer he started yelling “Where’s Nancy? Where is Nancy?”  So people on the left are taking this as a potential assassination attempt on Nancy Pelosi based on who he was asking for and based on just Occam’s razor, a crazy guy who’s been posting right-wing shit, breaks in and he’s been charged with attempted murder. He really fucked up Nancy Pelosi’s husband who’s 82 years old. 

So that’s what reasonable news sources are saying. Right-wing news sources are saying it may have been a lover’s quarrel because apparently and I’m not sure if this is true, but that’s what they’re saying. Paul Pelosi was in his underwear because it was 2 a.m. and a lot of people sleep in their underwear. So they’re saying well both guys were in their underwear, the other guy was in his underwear because he’s a nudist. So they’re saying it must have been a lover’s quarrel or they’re saying false flag or they’re saying male prostitute and let’s see what else. Others say like when the 82 year old guy managed to sneak in, I called a 9-1-1 on the phone and was somehow talking and saying my friend here. So the right- wing’s saying he knew the guy because he called him his friend which is also retarded because if a guy’s attacking you with a hammer or maybe has stopped attacking you with a hammer for a minute, you might call them your friend because you don’t want him to start hitting you with a hammer again.

Fox News has said it’s because the Democrats are soft on crime, is saying why didn’t they have better security, it’s all very suspicious. So it’s like this incident which has a fairly clear and reasonable interpretation has sparked this avalanche of a ridiculous bullshit from the right-wing pundits. I mean it’s just like senseless bullshit. So that takes us back to both sides-ism where a lot of so supposedly objective media tries to talk to Republicans spokespeople and Democratic spokespeople but the Republican spokespeople spew crazy bullshit that they don’t call them on because they want to keep these new shows like Meet the Press, want to keep getting these people to come on their shows. And if they called people who are being full of shit and fucking liars, fucking liars they might stop getting them on the shows. So U.S media is a mess.

[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.

Ask A Genius 808: Addendum to 807

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/10/30

[Recording Start]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This is an addendum to yesterday, please continue.

Rick Rosner:  Which was on following through…

Jacobsen: [Laughing] continue.

Rosner: All right. So I thought of one more huge area where I’m obsessive, which I guess falls under following through and that’s working out. I haven’t missed working out for a day, I haven’t skipped a day in 31.77 years and I’ve averaged 4.69 workouts a day over that period which, if it were one a day would be roughly a hundred and 48 years worth of daily workouts. So like, today I’m five sets into my third workout, so I have to get to at least 12 sets for this one and then I still have to do two more, which can be oppressive but I don’t allow myself to do fewer than five workouts a day lately over the past eight years. I think I’ve fallen asleep before the fifth workout three or four times in the past eight years but I think no times in the past five years. So that’s wildly obsessive to the point where my kidney numbers are often not good because the more working out you do the more muscle waste you generate and that’s how they calculate your kidney function.

It doesn’t mean that my kidneys are terrible, just means that the easy way that they calculate kidney function doesn’t work very well for me. So there you go; following through. But I fall down on a lot of stuff, the following through has to fit within my fear of obsessive compulsiveness. My dad had OCD; he’s involved keeping records, he’d never throw anything away from his CPA practice, walked around with 40 pens, a blazer would have two inside and two outside pockets and he’d put about 10 pens in each pocket. Right angles; he’d make sure everything all his papers were lined up at right angles. He had an office building and his papers would take over room after room especially as he became a sole proprietor but everything in these rooms even as the stacks overflowed onto chairs and the floor, everything would be oriented at right angles.

Now Carole is like a conscientious follow through-er, she follows through on the shit that people actually care about. She doesn’t like to let people down and she likes to do a good job. She’s worked at her current high school for a little over a year; she worked at a high school previous to that for about three years. Education is not a field that that attracts overly responsible people, maybe it does at the college level when you’re going for tenure, but a lot of people who end up teaching, ends up teaching because they’re a little bit lazy. It could be like working in a bar where you just kind of drifted into it and there you are, which means that she is the most responsible person in her office which tends to weigh on her because then everybody goes to her with everything. This is a fancy expensive liberal high school and that means the parents and the kids are pretty demanding and a lot of these demands just default to her because people learn that she’s the one who will get shit done. 

She doesn’t like that aspect of the job that the job keeps expanding because she’s very competent and conscientious but she does really like doing a good job and I’m a beneficiary of that because she makes dinner most nights and really won’t let me make dinner much, maybe once a year.

Jacobsen: [Laughing] what do you make?

Rosner:  The only thing I can really make, I mean I don’t do recipes but I can make an omelet, I can make scrambled eggs, I could boil pasta if need be. They used to make these ready-made meals at the grocery, like 15 bucks for a meal for two, it would give you all the ingredients and you just follow the instructions and whip it up. I could do one of those. I could follow a simple recipe but generally when I cook for myself, it’s not really cooking; it’s taking a can of chicken soup and throwing all the leftovers in the refrigerator into the can of soup. 

It may be that Carole’s ultra conscientious because she feels like her parents kind of fell down on the job, not her dad as much as her mom. She feels like she didn’t get enough of what she wanted from her mom and this continues because her mom now suffers from early dementia and even if she were ever capable of not frustrating Carole, that time is gone. I think Carole has reacted by becoming a person who gives people what they want or what she thinks they would want if she were them, which is just paying attention to people and doing right by 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.

Ask A Genius 807: Follow Through

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/10/29

[Recording Start]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So I’m going to ask you what’s your experience in all your 60 plus years with follow through and not on any and all aspects of life projects whatever?

Rick Rosner: All right, so my follow through is spotty. I think that this might be something that is more likely to happen among high IQ people than people who don’t have super high IQs. People are always expecting super high IQ people for shit to be correlated with that like if you’re so smart why aren’t you a billionaire or like why haven’t you done this or that or whatever and studies, I don’t know if they’re good studies or what they are but that above an IQ of like in the 130s fucking IQ doesn’t correlate with higher instances of anything; happiness, success, or sanity. Somebody with an IQ 160 is going to have the same degree of same roughly life experience, like the odds that this person does shit or experiences shit is the same at 160 is at 120. 

But I would say that going off into weird little cul-de-sacs might be something that is correlated with a higher IQ. I mean it’s certainly something you hear about with high functioning autistic people. There are a certain number of those people among high IQ people. When I went on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in the year 2000, they asked me a question that was factually flawed, that was missing the correct answer which I didn’t know in the seat. I took my best shot and I got it wrong according to what their answers were and then later I found out they fucked up the question; their research was shitty. I also found out that eight other people had been invited back on the show because they fucked up their question. And none of these people knew the actual correct answer when they were in the chair because you’re just a fucker in the chair answering questions while they have a whole research department on a show that at the time was making a billion dollars a year in ad revenue. They could afford to get shit right but in my case they said fuck you. You can tell I’m still a little bit obsessed.

Jacobsen: Yes. 

Rosner: I wrote them a shitload of letters and they said fuck you and so I sued them. They claimed that the phrasing of the question got them off the hook; they claim that they were asking for a different thing than the question was asking for. I’ve written for quiz shows and I looked at a 110,000 questions asked on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire around the world, I taught myself enough of each language or used whatever shitty translating shit they had in the year 2000. And then in the year 2001, once I filed suit to translate enough of these questions to look at them and see that they were full of shit, that the phrasing of the question absolutely meant what I thought it meant. They were asking for the absolute highest elevation Capital City among the world’s National capitals and this was part of the lawsuit but I looked at a 110,000 questions. That’s nearly 2 million words worth of questions.

And so that’s crazy obsessive. If you’re asking about follow through that’s fucking follow-through. Another instance of follow-through was I got hired to work on a show, as a writer by the network that I was suing. Jimmy Kimmel staffed me on his show and in the middle of all this I’m suing ABC and it’s an ABC show. So I became obsessed with doing a good job on that show and I would not let myself leave the office at night until I turned in 10 pages of material. 

Jacobsen: That’s a lot of writing. 

Rosner: Its insanity and it was very annoying to Jimmy Kimmel because like not all of it could have been good. I wrote a lot of pitches of like we could do this or we could do that. I mean I wish I could go back in time now that I know everything about writing jokes and writing for late night and I mean I’m a better writer now than I’ve been fired by Jimmy Kimmel for eight years than I was back then when I was turning in 10 pages a night. So that’s insane follow-through to the point where it really was just hurting how they thought of me at my job. 

When I was checking IDs in bars, I loved checking IDs. I loved catching people with fake IDs and I developed a whole methodology; a Bayesian methodology where people got to sign points based on various characteristics they either had or didn’t have. Like, they don’t know what year they graduated high school; that’s three points. They don’t know their zodiac sign; that’s 5 points. 7 points and above and I could feel statistically confident that they had a fake ID. All sorts of characteristics like fed into this point model and I had to be able to card 95% of everybody within 10 seconds or less because otherwise you piss off customers. So I had this whole fucking insane methodology. I taught it to the cops in my hometown.

At one point I was working in three bars. So I would work like three months with no nights off out of my love of working in bars; that just insane follow-through. I had a display box built out of clear Plexiglas that I hung in the bar next to where I carted people in Brentwood, California across from the restaurant where Ron Goldman worked. He was the guy who got his throat also slashed by O.J Simpson and he was working out of that restaurant. So anyway, the bar I worked in there was across from the whole fucking OJ deal but I had a fake ID display case where if we caught an ID I would just throw it in the case, there’s your ID it’s in the case, because I thought this would act as a deterrent. People will say “Oh you’re going to get fucked if you come here with your fake ID” because that was a fancy neighborhood and the bar was there before the neighborhood became fancy or as fancy as it was. And so they were always calling with complaints and we were always getting undercover liquor control cops hanging out trying to bust us for any fucking little thing.

So not letting people in with fake IDs was kind of a big deal. And so my obsession happened to line up with what the bar needed. So that was okay though I was fired from another bar, The Ore house for taking the ID thing too far. Another follow-through; I didn’t think I gave myself the best high school experience I could have had. So I went back to high school once to see if I could do it right when I was 18. So it wasn’t as creepy as when I went back at age 26 though at age 26 I wasn’t going back to give myself a good high school experience I just thought it would be a good place to sit and think about the structure of the universe. There you go, that’s not as much follow through as it is obsession. And then there are other things where I just haven’t followed through at all like I’ve been writing a book for 35, 40, 45 years. Have I gotten a book published? No. Do I write on the book every day? I should but fucking I don’t. So, bad follow-through. My wife has the highest level of everyday follow-through of anybody I’m aware of. Nowadays, people don’t ghost only people, they also ghost responsibility. The way we live our lives now, people have become increasingly ghosty.

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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.

Ask A Genius 806: AI Generated and Machine Learning Art

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/10/28

[Recording Start]

Rick Rosner: An AI generated, machine learning generated art is art where the subject is generated by the user, a human who types in a prompt ‘show me Jared Leto as Jesus on the cross in the style of Frank Frazetta’. So you get a muscle-y Jared Leto in a little fucking loincloth nailed to a cross. So the machine didn’t think “I’m going to do that,” you told the AI what to render. So anyway it’s the artist but you’re the client. So the AI is working from a huge ass database the same way Google Translate is working from a huge database that it develops networks of pseudo understanding within. I’m sure the AI notices statistical trends that the words bait and a lot of the time in certain contexts is followed by the word switch and it doesn’t know what bait and switch means, though it maybe develops of statistical correlation kind of Watson style with words like fraud. 

If Google Translate is translating something and somebody’s writing you committed fraud, you did a bait and switch on me and they want to translate it into Chinese, Google translate will have all these contextual clues, it’s bait and switch and not bait and a fishing rod or something like that because from the context. So anyway, big data plus all sorts of correlations gives the AI a pseudo understanding. It’s fake understanding because it’s not embedded in consciousness but at the same time it’s got a kind of a statistical Stochastic Bayesian basis that’s similar to a lot of our understanding. And all this is said without me ever having taken a class in this shit, so I doubt my heads up my ass but it could be. Anyway, we have big data understandings of shit in entertainment that previous generations did not have. 

So this guy named James Gunn was just named creative director of the DC Universe for movies. From now on he’s going to be the head honcho in charge of any movie that is made at whatever fucking Studio, I guess it’s Warner Brothers who has the right to make DC movies and I was just thinking how crazy this is because James Gunn is a creatively crazy person. He did The Suicide Squad which is the second; I think the first movie was just Suicide Squad. I think this one has a ‘the’ in it but anyway it’s the second Suicide Squad movie. Suicide Squad is a set of DC super villains who’ve been kind of recruited and coerced to fight for good but they’re all fucking weirdos and assholes. 

The first Suicide Squad movie was not great, you could get through it but Harley Quinn is probably the most famous member of The Suicide Squad. She started out as the Joker’s psychiatrist and then he seduced her and then did a bunch of stuff that drove her insane. So now she is an insane super anti-hero her own self. She’s been in three movies at least. The Suicide Squad, the second one, the good one by James Gunn is a great movie and it is so fucked up. It’s got all these fucked up superheroes that have… Have you seen this movie? I doubt it. 

Jacobsen: No. 

Rosner: All right. Well, it’s got King Shark; basically it’s a guy with shark skin and a shark head and he’s ferocious. He’ll eat anything and he’s indestructible because of his shark skin but he’s an idiot because he’s a shark. The Suicide Squad is being briefed on their mission by Viola Davis, who’s this very sinister leader of the government. So she’s the man and she’s taking questions from the all these fucked up superheroes and they’re raising their hands or just yelling out questions. And then King Shark raises his hand and he’s voiced by Sylvester Stallone in Stallone’s stupidest voice, raise his hand, Viola Davis calls on him and he goes “Hand” He just wanted to show he knew what his hand was called and it’s fucking delightful. He’s got a whole character art, he learns how to make friends and love and rat catcher number two becomes his friend. We find out what happened to rat catcher number one and she has a rat light that she shines it and it gathers like a quarter million rats from all corners of wherever she is and they become an overwhelming force and it’s all fucked up and it’s really filthy and it’s very bloody and it’s just insane.

If you took it back in time to 1955 and showed it to a movie audience there would be panic and bedlam and 80% of the audience would run out in horror and loathing and people would vomit and only the few weirdos would have be able to withstand the barrage of weirdness and perversity. We like this shit now because we have a huge fucking database. We’ve seen fucking everything and so we need entertainments now that are broke, that are just complicated, are based on everybody knowing everything and like inside jokes based on just everything. Not just inside jokes but like Bill Simmons; he was a sports writer who now sits atop a production Empire; he makes shows for ESPN and who knows where else. He did a documentary on the most recent Woodstock which happened just a few years ago and which was even more of a cluster fuck than the original Woodstock. 

He’s probably worth a hundred million dollars now and he started off as a sports writer and his ticket to great success was, he realized that people who read about sports know about a lot of other shit. Until him sports writers, to the extent that they used analogies at all, they used analogies from sports. They assumed that anybody who was a sports fan knew a lot. A baseball fan knew a lot about baseball and maybe quite a bit about of football and maybe some about basketball. Simmons realized you can take analogies, you can use shit from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to explain a situation in sports that the people who are avid consumers of entertainment, and sports counts as entertainment, consume all this other shit and you can use everything to inform everything and he became America’s most entertaining sports writer. Then he was recruited by Kimmel to write for Kimmel because this guy looks at a sports writer who’s not really a sports writer anymore and says you would be good at coming up with shit for my late night show, which he kind of was but he lasted probably a year or a year and a half on that.

Anyway, he went on to build an Empire based on everybody knowing everything and in order to make decent entertainment now, unless you’re going to do some fucking sensitive slow paced thing about a lady who works at the post office, whose post office is closing down because it’s in a very small town after a 100 years the U.S postal is trying to save money; that’s a movie I watched and I enjoyed but it was a very slow movie and it had no insight, unless you’re into one of those sensitive fucking movies. If you’re doing a blockbuster it has to be knowing and baroque and fucking insane to give people shit that they haven’t seen yet. It’s like that art that gets spit out of all those AI art making apps now that is very quickly learning every visual reference and combining them in ways that make people go fucking A. 

So, what I’m saying is this guy, this James Gunn guy who seems like a very nice guy, I follow him on Twitter, he got canceled for a while because he made some unfortunate jokes on Twitter 10 years ago. Then he apologized like crazy and said he might have made a couple jokes about pedophilia, which you could do 10 years ago. There’s an old man in Family Guy who’s always trying to lure the young boys in town into like a secluded place and it’s funny because it’s so creepy. But even Family Guy, I’m not sure, if it were a new show and I’m not sure they could do that now. Anyway, this guy who is not just a lunatic, he’s a very smart business person who has a finely tuned instinct for fucked up-ness and that’s a crazy thing, that it should be an asset in business knowing how to find stuff that’s novel and fucked up.

[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.

Ask A Genius 805: Artificially Intelligently Produced Art

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/10/18

[Recording Start]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I sent you four pieces of art which you have not seen. The subject line to the emails was something like AI or human made? Guess what? It turns out all four are developed by or made by AI, complete originals.

Rick Rosner: AI responding to verbal prompts.

Jacobsen: Text prompts that I put in myself.

Rosner: You type in some words and it goes to town and if you’re a skilled user of these AI art makers, you go through various iterations till you get a final product that strikes you as a place you wanted to arrive at; a nice piece of art. 

Jacobsen: Yeah, and I sent you three horses of different types and one topless woman.

Rosner: And I’m sure they’re fucking great. I’ll go look at them and I’ll be very impressed because I did the same thing. I tried one of these things but I’m no good at it yet. I used one of the cheap ones and I don’t know how to iterate it.

Jacobsen: They’re already at version two of some of them. So the second generation has already come along. So they’re higher definition, they’re more accurate. 

Rosner: The ones you pay for, you buy tokens and the tokens you spend them on works on and you get a piece of art and it’s like pretty good but then you spend another token to get it to take that piece of art and refine it further and these images are all over Twitter and I assume over all other visual social media people are sending them to each other and going fucking A because they’re very impressive and I was thinking of this art among the delights of tech that will be irresistible in the future. 

Jacobsen: But they have this thing like, I sent you the topless woman one because if you put like naked women or breasts or a naked man or whatever or something like that, it’ll develop the image or just before it does it’ll go ‘error occurred’ and so somehow people developing these programs have the idea that they’ve developed an objective smutometer that can measure the amount of smut on something and say you’re not allowed to see that. So I took a screenshot from my phone to show you it can develop them and well and then it tells you error occurred.

Rosner: And then what? It blurs them out?

Jacobsen: No, it just cancels it out.

Rosner: So it was working on a thing and then it hit a certain level of corniness and it cut out.

Jacobsen: No, it shows you full on and then it goes ‘oh no’ and then it stops. 

Rosner: Okay so people on Twitter were talking about how to dance around such prohibitions and apparently there is like that system that doesn’t want to show you what it doesn’t want to show you. People who are good at making the verbal prompts say that “Just add two words to your prompt” The prompt that got you a troublesome image, just add a couple meaningless words to it and it’ll give you the fucking piece of art almost exactly the way it was without the couple other words and somehow you’ve danced around it. It won’t give you like racist images for instance or something. I don’t know there was something that it didn’t want to give somebody and that somebody found a workaround. And then obviously what’s going to happen is somebody will develop one of these art makers specifically for porn and that porn will be some of the porn-iest porn that humanity has ever seen once people learn how to wield that tool.

Jacobsen: They have apps in some of these newer generations of them. You can upgrade and make videos.

Rosner: I’ve seen little snippets of that stuff too. All this stuff is not irresistible the way Tik-Tok is irresistible because it’s fucking art and people couldn’t give a shit sometimes, but some version of AI make like porn for instance, the porn that will be made with AI iterate tools like this will be irresistible. Among the naked picture stuff I look at are some cartoon images. I know like Adam Carolla would say I’m a fucking baby for jacking off to cartoons. Corolla likes jacking off to busty ladies in their 30s, that’s just his deal but he kind of makes fun of people who have immature tastes like he calls it the yummy phase; we’ve talked about it that people who never outgrew liking stuff that’s sweet, never learned to like the taste of beer or whiskey or cigars and I assume that Corolla’s tasted porn, he’d consider part of his mature developed tastes maybe. So yeah I’ve been known to look at muddy cartoons and there are some of them that go under the header like 3D cartoons in a space. 

Its art that’s as made as realistic looking with the flesh, body shapes, and contours as it can be made. It’s one of those things that were no good, just in the uncanny valley 10 years ago. This stuff is too creepy to like and then eight years ago it was it was okay and now the images as you’re seeing are pretty freaking realistic and we’ll only get more so. 

Jacobsen: Yes, I mean they work from Pixel up. So any next generation with more computing power and more sophisticated sort of neural nets simply be better more robust or more accurate especially around really nuanced things like hands and faces.

Rosner: Yeah. My kid is an expert on 17th century needlework. So I tried and my prompt was robot family in the style of a 17th century needlework sampler. Robot family was fine. Obviously a lot of people from the AI is very familiar with robots and families and maybe even robot families but the needlework was for shit. It didn’t look 17th century; it looked like very primitive like a child’s a needle point kit from the 1970s; primary colors and blocky shapes and no subtlety. So obviously the AI, it has less of a database for embroidery or for samplers. 

Anyway, once the AI gets a big enough database for all these different things like for hands, like six years ago I started messing around with an app called This Is Not A Person, which is an AI that continually uses machine learning to get better and better when I first started making faces of people who weren’t real on that thing, it had trouble with teeth it had trouble with earlobes, it had trouble with earrings and it had trouble with glasses. It put glasses on a lot of people but the glasses often didn’t make sense, they’d have like parts that just kind of ended nowhere and if they were real glasses they’d fall apart because they had parts that weren’t connected. I haven’t looked at it in a few months. Last time I looked it was fine on teeth, I think fine on glasses, fine on earlobes, still might be fucking up earrings and still has a big problem with backgrounds probably because backgrounds could be fucking anything. They don’t have to be part of a body or something. Just anybody can stand in front of anything. So the AI still does shitty backgrounds.

But with hands or with anything else you could talk about in art, once its database gets large enough and its interpretation of the database gets sophisticated enough, then you’ll get some really fucking great looking hands, like once it understands the relationship and understands is not the right word. I don’t know because that implies consciousness and this shit isn’t conscious yet but once it gets how hands work, how the flesh drapes, how the tendons work under the skin, how blood pumping through flesh gives makes it pinkish except where maybe it’s veins, etc. All these different things that we kind of intuitively know after a lifetime of looking at hands, we’ve developed our own algorithms and understandings for what makes a realistic hand without even knowing what our understanding of hands really consists of. AI will do that same shit and you’ll get really good looking hands and anything else. Once the AI sees enough samplers; 3000 of them or 15 000 of them, it’ll start giving, I don’t know how it like gets those images, and it’ll be a little tougher for shit like 17th century samplers because I’m not sure that there are 15000 of them remaining in the world. It’ll be part of its net of knowledge and it’ll start doing it halfway decent job, maybe not as good a job as ‘make me a car’ because there’s just more reference material.

[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.

Ask A Genius 804: Coffee Makers and More

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/10/18

[Recording Start]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So we were just talking about coffee makers and then he said they were up Lord of the Rings and then he said I don’t like old things.

Rick Rosner: I don’t like stuff set in the middle ages or in middle age equivalent. I think we just saw the new Lena Dunham movie which is set in the 14th century but has modern enough sensibilities that I liked it.

Jacobsen: Okay, so I added my own perspective and tastes which are I like old things but new values, well I like new things too. I just like new values but I like old things.

Rosner: Yeah, I like new values too but my wife and I kind of collect these mini mosaics.

Jacobsen: That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about where it’s like because your big thing is mosaics. I still have to mail back to you. 

Rosner: I still owe you; I need to mail you something. 

Jacobsen: Yeah, that’s true.

Rosner: It’s a weird feeling because micro mosaics are a product of the Catholic Church and A, I’m Jewish and B, the Catholic church has acknowledged it’s done some bad stuff historically and pretty recently. So, it’s a weird thing that I’m buying these products that were made in Rome. I bought my wife a couple crucifixes. So I got a deal on one because the Jesus had fallen off which was fine with us because as Jews we don’t believe that Jesus is the deity. But yeah it’s weird. Our kid is an expert in women’s art of the past so she’s constantly looking at stuff created by people who are subjugated by the deep sexism of the past. So yeah, I get the problem between the values of the past and the things of the past.

Jacobsen: Yeah it’s the idea of older music I like a lot. Those things are the rubric of classical music. I don’t necessarily mean the Box, the Beethovens, and the Mozarts. I mean more obscure ones like Orlando Gibbons, these are sort of the piano and sort of harpsichord and such. I like that stuff yet I don’t like the sexism of the time, I don’t like the slave master relations of the time, I don’t like the lack of democratic values, I don’t like the lack of freedom of association and expression at the time; those sorts of things. I don’t like the lack of universalism, I don’t like religion as a political tool or a superstition, and I don’t like the lack of empiricism; those sorts of things. 

Rosner: The Conservatives use that to try to set up culture wars here. Are you familiar with American culture wars?

Jacobsen:  I am Canadian; I’m one of the Canadians aware of the death of the culture wars in the United States.

Rosner:  Okay, but maybe for people who aren’t, the deal is that Republicans can be taken to task for their policy positions and their votes on stuff. The major so-called accomplishment of the Trump presidency was a massive tax cut for billionaires and stacking the courts with unqualified and super Trumpy judges. And then he politicized Covid, led to the most unemployed Americans in history. Covid is the deadliest event in U.S history having killed as many people as all our wars combined. So it’s tough for Republicans to campaign on their policies. So what they like to do is distract from the consequences of their shitty governance with culture war issues. If Democrats are allowed to govern then your kid is going to go trans and going to want to cut off his dick and turn into a girl and one of the culture war cudgels is trying to rile people up because progressives don’t want statues of Confederate War figures in public anymore. Those figures, those statues weren’t put up immediately after the Civil War, they were put up in the late 19th early 20th century; 30-40 years after the Civil War as a reminder to black people among other things to watch yourselves that we’re still around and we’re still going to maintain dominance.

Biden just announced that army bases will no longer be named after Confederate generals. And Conservatives like to say that we’re going to cancel Lincoln and that we’re canceling Thomas Jefferson and Washington because they had slaves. We canceled Columbus because it turns out Columbus was a terrible guy, he was even pretty much fired by the people who financed him after several expeditions because he was treating the natives so badly. But Conservatives are saying everybody’s going to be canceled because nobody from the past can live up to the standards of the present and it’s just a horseshit issue designed to distract people from Republican awfulness. Columbus Day in America has been changed to Indigenous people’s day which seems to me reasonable.

[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.

Ask A Genius 803: Addendum on 802

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/10/18

[Recording Start]

Rick Rosner: There’s a novel, it’s more than 20 years old now; it spends a long time, hundreds of pages talking about the two Americas of the near future; Jesus Land and the Tech Land. It’s called ‘The Rapture of the Nerds’ by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross. It’s their version of what happens when a big chunk of the population just sinks into G Evangelistic lunacy and politically conservative lunacy. This is even before Trump. And then in Neal Stephenson’s ‘Fall’, his novel before last, spends a little bit of time, maybe 30 pages in a fallen part of America where all the fallen lunatics live. 

We could talk more about that whether those visions are accurate next time we talk.

[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.

Ask A Genius 802: Late Stage IQ

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/10/18

[Recording Start]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Well, you want to talk about the world getting dumber and I want to kind of start that off with sort of late stage IQ. You’ve made this point originally I think. The idea that IQ as a cultural item has decreased over time in terms of psychology and stuff you’ll be using it for measuring certain things. It’s bare but it’s just not as important to most people most of the time anymore.

Rick Rosner: People don’t find it as useful as people 50 years ago did.

Jacobsen: Yes, even 20 years ago.

Rosner: Yeah. One reason is because we’re more aware of racism and other issues that might make IQ methodologies suspect but really I’m guessing the main reason is that people leave so many traces of themselves on social media and elsewhere, that we don’t need as many clues like IQ to help figure out what they’re about. If you’re looking at hiring somebody you’d be an idiot not to look at their social media. I’ve tweeted now over a hundred thousand times and working with you, we have more than a million words online and with the Lance we’ve got more than 200 hours of us arguing. So if somebody wants to know about me, you’ll find if you Google me but somebody else with as many traces online as I have, you wouldn’t need to know their IQ, you could just figure out what they’re about by just like reading up on them.

You and I started talking sometime in 2014 and at the time I believe that the smart phone, I think came out in 2008 maybe. So it hadn’t been out that long and we feel like we’ve had smart phones forever now and we forget what it was like before them. They were new back then and there were people who were doing all sorts of stupid shit because they have these amazing phones, mostly walking while looking at their phones. We’re used to that shit now; driving while texting, all that shit. I was of the belief that even though we were seeing stupid behavior from people with smart phones, that overall and eventually they would make people smarter having access to all the information in the world and all these apps that give you more power in the world, like ways that just help you navigate. Now, its eight years since we started talking. 

Ever since Trump, a huge segment of the U.S population has seemingly become inextricably believers in bullshit, just unpersuadable jackasses. You could argue that just because people believe stupid shit doesn’t mean they’re stupid. But I see the social media products of these people and these people, I believe, many of them, the loudest ones of them; the people who are active on social media pushing Trumpy type stuff are indeed on average stupider based on not just what they believe but their syntax and grammar and spelling. 

I know that phones will fuck you up, that if you’re unconscientious about just talking and speaking a tweet into a phone and just publishing it as is, it’ll go out with dumb errors but beyond that the Trumpy people are stupider. Now we’ve talked before about how you can believe a bunch of nonsense as most of the people through history have because we didn’t have the factual the data, the scientific evidence to not believe nonsense about the larger issues of the world but you could believe a lot of nonsense about big philosophical religious issues and still be quite smart in dealing with everyday things. If you’re a shoemaker you can be a smart shoemaker, if you’re a farmer you can be a smart farmer, etc. 

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And yeah you may believe in this weird religious and you may fully embrace 14th century Catholicism because that might be the best philosophical system that you have access to and even though a lot of its nonsense, you can be smart in everyday life but when you look at Trumpy people they look and act as if a lot of them aren’t overly smart in everyday life. I mean like the people who show up at Trump rallies are clearly lunatics or idiots. In American society there are probably more lunatics overall because there are more forces making people embrace lunacy.

We’ve talked before about being part of a real living human community; part of a small town or a neighborhood where you get feedback from people and if you believe a bunch of stupid shit, people will call you on it but now people get more input from their selected media which can drown out community input or turn entire communities into idiots and lunatics. So to that extent people have gotten stupider since we’ve started talking with each other, not everybody but a huge chunk of American society. And then we can look at the implications of that as the rest of the world gets smarter because people who embrace technology in a way that makes them smarter, which you can definitely do, are limited.

 I was just watching an episode of The Vow, Season Two, which is the HBO doc on Keith Raniere and NXIVM. This episode had interviews with people who got out of the cult and recognized it as a cult and people who left the cult because it fell apart because Raniere is in prison for life. But who maintain relationships with other people who were part of NXIVM and I guess there were adjunct junked organizations and who still believe in the claimed enterprise of NXIVM; it reminds me a lot of scientology which is human optimization which in itself is not a terrible or ridiculous thing. It’s just bad when bad people are doing it. Scientology’s pretty bad organization but I believe it’s possible to get positive effects from scientology for some people, if you take the right lessons, if you don’t let yourself be exploited. It’s tricky and maybe not the norm but human optimization is a not terrible individual objective. It may have been possible for people who had like glancing contact with NXIVM without going full cult to have gotten some benefits because when people think about how to adjust your attitudes and approaches to the world, they often come up with reasonable ideas about how to do that even as the their organizations sink into corruption and perversion.

But counter to all this is that we’re all just humans and have the same physical and mental equipment as dictated by our genes that humans did 90,000 years ago. Now we can optimize what we can do with that equipment but it’s still human and limited and the people in America who’ve been turned into idiots and lunatics certainly haven’t optimized themselves. It’s a bad time to not have optimized yourself, to have turned yourself into an idiot because beings in the world are coming who will be better than human, who will be technologically and biologically optimized to have better skills than just regular people who aren’t augmented.

[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.

Ask A Genius 801: Racial Stereotypes and More

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.

Ask A Genius 800: The American Dollar as the World’s Reserve Currency

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.

Ask A Genius 796: Time Travel is Impossible

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.

Ask A Genius 799: Addendum to 798

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.

Ask A Genius 798: Iceland’s Penises

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.

Ask A Genius 797: Crazy Stuff and LA City Council

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.

Ask A Genius 795: FDR and Canon

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.

Ask A Genius 794: LSD, SAT, Substance Use and Misuse

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.

Ask A Genius 793: Rick Hates Workouts

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.

Ask A Genius 792: Cat and Cheese

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.

Ask A Genius 791: Combinatorial Coding

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.

Ask A Genius 790: Scott, a Fraternal Douche

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.

Ask A Genius 789: A Frozen Head

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.

Ask A Genius 788: Equine Communication

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.

Ask A Genius 787: Longtermism and IC

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.

Ask A Genius 786: Heritability of IQ

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.

Ask A Genius 785: Putin and the Noosphere, and IQ

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.

Ask A Genius 784: Investigating High-IQ Societies

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.

Ask A Genius 783: You have to work.

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.

Ask A Genius 782: Nature’s Productions by Humans

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.

Ask A Genius 781: Catmatism, so Singularitarians, Transhumanism, Unitarians

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.

Ask A Genius 780: Slow Apocalypse, Nature

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.

Ask A Genius 779: Nonsense Jobs

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.

Ask A Genius 778: “…one more fucking know-nothing Evangelical asshole.”

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.

Ask A Genius 777: Rick’s Late Brother, Dave Rosner

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.

Ask A Genius 776: Metaphorical Physics

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.

Ask A Genius 775: Life and Beyond

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.

Ask A Genius 774: Film Project About Rick

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.

Ask A Genius 773: A Test or a Book

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.

Ask A Genius 772: 99 Days from the Mid-Term Elections

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.

Ask A Genius 771: More on the Turing Test

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]

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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.

Ask A Genius 770: Consciousness and the Rules of Existence

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.

Ask A Genius 769: Hopelessly Divided Consciousness

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.

Ask A Genius 768: Another Richard Feynman Quote

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.

Ask A Genius 767: Richard Feynman Quote

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.

Ask A Genius 766: Melania Trump Quote

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.

Ask A Genius 765: Michelle Obama Quote

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.

Ask A Genius 764: Boris Sidis Quote

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.

Ask A Genius 763: Raymond Chandler Quotes

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.

Ask A Genius 762: Giga Society

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.

Ask A Genius 761: Mom’s Death

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]

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.

Ask A Genius 760: Examples From History

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]

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.

Ask A Genius 757: “Evolution does not give a fuck.”

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: 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]

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.

Ask A Genius 759: Irretrievably Broken

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: 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]

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.

Ask A Genius 758: Evolution and the End of Human Dominance

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: 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]

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.

Ask A Genius 756: Too Soon Comedy

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]

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.

Ask A Genius 755: Why this last one percent of human history?

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

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]

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.

Ask A Genius 754: Richard May Credit for John Brennan

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]

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.

Ask A Genius 753: Cancel Culture

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

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]

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.

Ask A Genius 752: Richard May Credit for Alexis de Tocqueville

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 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]

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.

Ask A Genius 751: Googling Five Boroughs

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/05/17

[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.

Ask A Genius 750: Einstein Quote

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.

Ask A Genius 749: Status of Admissions to Mega Society Now

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 JacobsenHow 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?

JacobsenWhat 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.

JacobsenIt 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. 

JacobsenHow do Hoeflin’s tests compare to other people’s tests in the high range? 

Rosner: Well the problems are super stringent.

JacobsenWhat 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.

JacobsenWhat 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]

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.

Ask A Genius 748: Vonnegut Quote

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: 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]

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.

Ask A Genius 747: Mencken Quote

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: “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]

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.

Ask A Genius 746: Voltaire Quote

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]

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.

Ask A Genius 745:Addendum to 744

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: 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]

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.

Ask A Genius 744: Mitch and Mencken

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: “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.

Ask A Genius 743: Socrates Quote

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: 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.

Ask A Genius 742: William Congreve

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: 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.

Ask A Genius 741: Electrons as a Theory We Use

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.

Ask A Genius 740: Feynman Again, Mr., Seriously

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.

Ask A Genius 735: “Ramble Me Silly”

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.

Ask A Genius 739: Iphigenie auf Tauris from 1787

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.

Ask A Genius 738: Turing Test in the Interim

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.

Ask A Genius 737: Health Food Madness

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.

Ask A Genius 736: Democrats Control the Presidency

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]

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.

Retro-evolution in food and health care and its impact on modern culture

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.

Bibliography

Applebaum, A. (2021, Aug. 31). The New Puritans. The Atlantic

Bloch, K. L. (2023). The Unraveling of Academia: Have we entered the era of the anti-Enlightenment? The Jewish Journal. https://jewishjournal.com/cover_story/358238/the-unraveling-of-academia/ 

Coughlin, S., & Higgins, R. (2019). Re-remembering the Mis-Remembered Left: The Left’s strategy and tactics to transform America. Unconstrained Analytics. 

Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford University Press. 

Dawkins, R. (1982). The extended phenotype: The gene as the unit of selection. W.H. Freeman. 

Ernst, E. (2002). A systematic review of systematic reviews of homeopathy. British journal of clinical pharmacology, 54(6), 577-582. https://bpspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1046/j.1365-2125.2002.01699.x 

Frederick, T. V., & Balswick, J. O. (2011). The sexual division of household labor. Psychology, 2(5), 509-516. 

Hall, H. (2010). What is naturaopathy? The Skeptic, 16(2), 4-5. http://www.leg.state.co.us/CLICS/CLICS2011A/commsumm.nsf/b4a3962433b52fa787256e5f00670a71/b65fc1c23a93cfa58725784600712868/$FILE/110301AttachD.pdf 

Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.; First English ed.). Blackwell. http://books.google.ca/books?id=S57m5gW0L-MC&pg=PA3&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false 

Jacobsen, S. D. (2020). Naturopathy – How Not to be a Doctor and Harm the Public Good. News Intervention. https://www.newsintervention.com/naturopathy/ 

Kriegman, Z. (2022). I Criticized BLM. Then I Was Fired. Common Sense. https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/i-criticized-blm-then-i-was-fired 

Li, E. (2023). A Pediatrician’s Manifesto for the Modernization of Gender Medicine. Reality’s Last Stand. https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/a-pediatricians-manifesto-for-the?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email 

Linde, K., Clausius, N., Ramirez, G., Melchart, D., Eitel, F., Hedges, L. V., & Jonas, W. B. (1997). Are the clinical effects of homoeopathy placebo effects? A meta-analysis of placebo-controlled trials. The Lancet, 350(9081), 834-843. https://wellspringofhealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Homeopathy-Meta-analysis.pdf 

Lindsay, J. (2020). The complex relationship betweem Marxism and Wokeness. New Discourses, July 28. Retrieved January 21, 2021, from https://newdiscourses.com/2020/07/complex-relationship-between-marxism-wokeness/ 

Miller, A. L. (2018). Expertise fails to attenuate gendered biases in judicial decision-making. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550617741181 

Mueller, J. H. (2004). Research ethics: A tool for harassment in the academic workplace. In K. Westhues (Ed.), Workplace mobbing in academie: Reports from 20 universities (pp. 290-313). Mellen Press. 

Pinker, S. (2003). A biological understanding of human nature. In J. Brockman (Ed.), The new humanists: Science at the edge (pp. 33-51). Barnes & Noble. 

Pluckrose, H., & Lindsay, J. (2020, July 15). The two big falsehoods of critical social justice. Areo

Robertson, L. H. (2014). Native Spirituality: The making of a new religion. Humanist Perspectives, 47(1)(1), 30-37. 

Robertson, L. H. (2021). Year of the virus: Understanding the contagion effects of wokism. In-sight, 26(B). Retrieved March 1, from https://in-sightjournal.com/2021/02/22/wokism/ 

Robertson, L. H. (2023). How Woke puritansim can lead to fatal consequences: Reflections on the death of Richard Bilkszto. Humanistically Speaking(September). https://www.humanisticallyspeaking.org/post/how-woke-puritanism-can-lead-to-fatal-consequences-reflections-on-the-death-of-richard-bilkszto 

Samuels, D. (2022). How Turbo-Wokism broke America: Oligarchs and activists are playing for the same team. UnHerd. https://unherd.com/?p=446548?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups%5B0%5D=18743&tl_period_type=3&mc_cid=d6deab138c&mc_eid=bb998e3506 

Senapathy, K. (2016). Why Is Big Naturopathy Afraid Of This Lone Whistleblower? Forbes(May 31). https://www.forbes.com/sites/kavinsenapathy/2016/05/31/why-is-big-naturopathy-afraid-of-this-lone-whistleblower/amp/ 

Shang, A., Huwiler-Müntener, K., Nartey, L., Jüni, P., Dörig, S., Sterne, J. A., Pewsner, D., & Egger, M. (2005). Are the clinical effects of homoeopathy placebo effects? Comparative study of placebo-controlled trials of homoeopathy and allopathy. The Lancet, 366(9487), 726-732. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(05)67177-2 

Wright, C. (2022, June 23). I Got Thrown Off Etsy and PayPal for Expressing My Belief in Biological Reality. Quilette. https://quillette.com/2022/06/23/i-got-thrown-off-etsy-and-paypal 

Wright, C. (2023). Anatomy of a scientific scandal. City Journal

Young, C. (2021, May 25). “Cancel Culture,” Hypocrisy, and Double Standards. Arc Digital

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.

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.

Components of Blood are the Issue

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.

Ask A Genius 734: Russians Dead at War

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.

Ask A Genius 733: Zen and the Art of Shit Shovelling

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.

Ask A Genius 732: Joining the Y Again

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.

Ask A Genius 731: Frauds and Cheating

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.

Ask A Genius 730: Divots

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.

Ask A Genius 729: Cartoon Smokers

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]

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.

Ask A Genius 728: Immutability of One

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.

Ask A Genius 727: Math and Tattoos

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]

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.

Ask A Genius 726: Covid Numbers Dropping Fast

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.

Ask A Genius 725: 9/11

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]

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.

Ask A Genius 724: Russian and Ukraine Escalation

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.

Ask A Genius 723: Pinky Addendum to Lost Session

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.

Ask A Genius 722: Things as Beautiful

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.

Ask A Genius 721: High-IQ Societies

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.

Ask A Genius 720: New Work, New Place, New Comments

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.

Ask A Genius 719: Jewish Comedy

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.

Ask A Genius 718: Things Suck in an Age of Marvels

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.

Ask A Genius 717: Triumph of Make-Believe

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.

Ask A Genius 716: Neil hamburger, What? No, but Tell Me More.

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.

Ask A Genius 715: Truckers Be Protestin’

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.

Ask A Genius 714: John Baez’s Theory

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.

Ask A Genius 713: Interactions Among All Particles in the Universe Defining the Particles and the Space

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.

Ask A Genius 712: Addendum to 709, 710, 711

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.

Ask A Genius 711: Addendum to 709 and 710

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.

Ask A Genius 710: Defining Coercive Messaging

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.

Ask A Genius 709: Toxic Normative Structures

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.

Ask A Genius 708: Super Duper High-IQ People

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.

Don’t Mess With the Satanists

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.

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.

Anwaar Ahmad Should be Freed From Imprisonment

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.

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.

Nasir Ahmad: The Urgent Case for Release

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

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. 

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.

Rana Nouman Rafaqat Deserves Freedom

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

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.

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.

Anas Hassan Deserves Unconditional Release From Prison

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

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.

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.

‘Ayaz Nizami’ Still Has Death Penalty, Deserves Freedom

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.

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.

Freedom From Arbitrary Constraint

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

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.

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.

Miriam Alden on Brunette the Label and Horse Girl Aesthetic

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

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.

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.

Pith 780: Law makes percept

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/20

Law makes percept: Percept from laws of thought in principles of existence; both construct valence reciprocity in Nature.

See “Cognition.”

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.

Pith 779: What is Law without a frame?

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/20

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.

Pith 778: There’s a sense

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/20

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.

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.

Pith 777: The neverafter

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/20

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.”

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.

Pith 776: Ablaye Cissoko

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/20

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.

Pith 775: Never Forget

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/20

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.

Pith 774: “You’ve lived like a monk for a decade.”

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/20

“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.

Pith 773: Emotions

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/20

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.

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.

Unknown Interviewee

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): Unknown

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.

Personal Research on Blood Transfusions May Have Saved My Life

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.

Ask A Genius 707: May You Live in Interesting Times

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.

Ask A Genius 706: Getting Older and Lost Time, Wasting Time

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.

Ask A Genius 705: Addendum to “The Future Doesn’t Care About Us”

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.

Ask A Genius 704: The Future Doesn’t Care About Us

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.

Ask A Genius 703: Mysticism of Mind

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.

Ask A Genius 702: Evolution, Human Intention, Co-Opted

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.

Ask A Genius 701: Super Platinum Rule

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.

Ask A Genius 700: Gender Reassigned Politics and Ethics

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.

Ask A Genius 699: Golden Gone Platinum

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.

Ask A Genius 698: Awards in and for the High-IQ

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.

Ask A Genius 697: The Nature of Quantum Mechanics in IC

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]

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Ask A Genius 696: The Most of the Most and More

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. 

JacobsenYou’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.

JacobsenYou’ve always been upfront, even when you had a significant following on Twitter. You admitted to buying followers.

Rosner: Yes.

JacobsenThis 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.

Ask A Genius 695: Great Amateur Triumphs of Science

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 JacobsenWhat 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.

Ask A Genius 694: Claude Shannon and Information Theory

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.

Ask A Genius 693: Proficiency in Math

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.

JacobsenCould 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.

JacobsenLet’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.

JacobsenIs 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.

Ask A Genius 692: Reviewing Ask A Genius

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 JacobsenWe 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.

JacobsenWhat’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.

Ask A Genius 691: Conversations with the Dead

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.

JacobsenSo, 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.

JacobsenWho 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.

JacobsenHas my role been somewhat like corralling you?

Rosner: Yes, it’s been helpful, like a form of guidance.

JacobsenSo, I’ve been like a shepherd for eight years?

Rosner: Right, akin to Jesus’ role.

JacobsenLeading you to the Promised Land, so to speak.

Rosner: That’s more Moses’ job, actually.

JacobsenTrue, 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.

Ask A Genius 690: Pornography and Predilections

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: 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?

JacobsenI 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?

JacobsenI 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?

JacobsenI’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.

JacobsenYou 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.

JacobsenAbsolutely, 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.

Ask A Genius 689: Future Entertainment

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.

Ask A Genius 688: Horse-Kick Proof Watch

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/16

[Recording Start]

Scott Douglas JacobsenLet’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.

JacobsenHe 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.

JacobsenHe 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.

JacobsenWhat’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.

Ask A Genius 687: Covid and Longevity, and Health

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 JacobsenHow 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.

Ask A Genius 686: Physics of Creation and Annihilation

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 JacobsenWhat 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.

JacobsenInterestingly, 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.

JacobsenHe 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?

JacobsenEssentially, it’s about the cosmology or physics related to the creation and annihilation of particles.

Rosner: Okay.

JacobsenSo, 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.

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.

Ask A Genius 685: Messed Up Covid Schedules

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 JacobsenWith 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.

JacobsenThat seems reflective of the current American situation.

Rosner: Is that very American?

JacobsenYes, it’s similar in India and Brazil.

Rosner: Are you suggesting that people in other places are more productive?

JacobsenNo, 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.

Ask A Genius 684: Empathy Fatigue

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 JacobsenLet’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.

JacobsenMisinformation, indeed.

Rosner: It’s more than just misinformation; it’s intentionally dishonest.

JacobsenIt’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.

JacobsenI 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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JacobsenRecently, 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.

JacobsenPrecisely. 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.

Ask A Genius 683: Pandemic Literature

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 JacobsenYou 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.

Ask A Genius 682: History of Rick’s House

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 JacobsenCan 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.

JacobsenIs 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.

Ask A Genius 681: Michael Lewis

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 JacobsenCan 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]

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.

Ask A Genius 680: Being Spry

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 JacobsenHow 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.

JacobsenSo, 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.

Ask A Genius 679: “Don’t Look Up”

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 JacobsenCan 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.