Category Archives: science

Fooled by an old trick

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Hero?

My main character of the weekend, Color of Reverence. No points for seeing a theme here.

No, I did not bite on a Nigeria scam. It is much more trivial than that, barely noticeable. But I need to learn from small things. Despite my lofty aspirations, I still make mistakes. And as St Teresa says, God preserve us from excusing ourselves with “I am no saint”. (She admits in her Way of Perfection that she used to say that before. Of course, by the time she wrote this, she probably already was a saint…)

Me, I am not a saint (except in the most generic sense, as synonym for God’s people, if even that.) Nor am I a hero, but I play one on the Internet. And that’s where I made my mistake, which I think may be instructive for others too.

I joined the online superhero game City of Heroes during its closed beta, a great honor in my view, and played it probably literally every week for about 7 years. Usually more than once a week too. No exception for vacations (but then I don’t actually travel during my vacations, I write). It is only the last year or perhaps even less that the game has begun to gradually fade from my life, like so many other things do eventually.

It is a good game, too. I don’t mean just in value of production, but in production of value. You take on the role of a hero with slightly superhuman powers, and defeat criminals, protect the innocent (and sometimes the not quite innocent, when they need it) and gradually grow more powerful and famous over the course of this practice. So it kind of reinforces traditional values.  In the words of one of the scripted bystanders on the streets of Paragon City: “Forget those postmodernist deconstructionists! Itland is a real hero, plain and simple.” OK, the “simple” part may not be my favorite, but still.

Now as my life is moving toward its final exam (not that I am in the least hurry!!), I find a little less time for gaming than I used to. And that means my visits to City of Heroes have been quite irregular and mostly short. This suits me: When I play the same game for too long, I become kind of immersed in it and it begins to invade my real life with flashback moments and such distractions. And generally a feeling of emptiness after hours of playing. I don’t want that to happen.

But this weekend was double XP weekend, in which the rewards of virtue are doubled – both the experience points and the influence. So this makes it easy to make rapid progress on a character. I took advantage of this and played a lot this weekend.

I did not ask myself seriously why I would want to make rapid progress in a game I now only play sporadically. It is not like I actually need to do that. The fact that there was a reward took precedence over the fact that I did not need the reward.

This is really the same motivation that makes a lot of women go wild when there are sales. If things are on sale, they temporarily forget that they don’t actually need (and perhaps not even want) the thing. “But it was on sale!”

A voice in my head says something similar exists for sexual temptations. Perhaps it is a general human trait. Certainly it combines with greed to make a good scam. The typical Nigeria scam is based on the notion that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Once you start getting one each week, they are a lot less tempting. ^_^

So I ask my heart to learn from this mistake, although it would have been better to learn without mistake. At least you can learn from mine!

You forgot the technology

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Staring at cell phones

Seriously? Just how far have cell phones come? A lot further than in the 1970es. But then a lot of things have changed since then.

Economists are none too cheerful about the life of common workers in the USA. The plight of the low-paid wage earners is well known, I think – their work has increasingly been outsourced to other countries, one way or another; and if not, then taken over by new immigrants, some of them illegal. As more and more advanced industry moves to China and elsewhere, the hungry ghost of unemployment nibbles at the toes of even those who used to feel safe.

But salaried workers are not quite as lucky as one may think, either. Adjusted for inflation, they earn approximately the same as two decades ago, but they work longer and harder for it. The standard of living was slowly rising, but largely based on loans and especially mortgage.  In the two decades before that, the family income  was rising for another reason: More women entered into paid work, whereas in the past many married women had stayed at home. This is rare now, and that process is pretty much complete a couple decades ago. Where a man could earn enough to buy a house and feed a family, husband and wife now both work overtime to keep the house – if there is work to find.

Well, it is not always and in all places that bad, but this is the overall trend. While the richest are getting richer, the lower middle class (and not very low either) has to run just to stay in place. Or so it seems, when measured by the standard tools of the economists.

They forgot the technology.

***

I don’t mean the technology at the workplaces. Economists are acutely aware of that. How much productivity has increased because of email, how much is lost to Facebook, stuff like that. This is not what I am talking about.

40 years ago, even if you were filthy rich, you were unlikely to have several million tracks of music. And even if you had such an obsession, you definitely did not bring millions of songs with you in your car. But today, a teenager on the school bus can choose between these millions of tracks while listening to Spotify on his smartphone.

40 years ago, you could not carry hundreds of books with you wherever you went either. And you certainly could not decide that a minute from now you would have bought an uncommon book and begun reading it. Buying a new book required going to the bookstore and pick one from those that were available. If there were other books, you did not know about them, unless you got the help of a librarian or some other scholar. In the case of books that were not broadly popular, it could easily take weeks to procure them. Now, you can do it while waiting for the elevator.

40 years ago, you could not chat with friends on another continent, or call them almost for free, or hang out with them on video chat. International calls were hideously expensive, and of course you had to call at a time when the person was in the house so they could hear the telephone.

The Internet and mobile phones may be the most obvious of the new technologies, but there are many others. I doubt there were pulse watches at all, even for the rich (although we did have digital watches in the 70es, if memory serves). Incandescent light bulbs were the only way to light the house, even during a heat wave, emitting 90% heat and 10% light instead of the opposite.

Medicine has quietly made a lot of progress. This is a good thing, of course: Back then, heart infarcts were common, arrived suddenly, and usually led to death. These days it is more common than not to  spot the warning signs long before an actual lethal infarct, and treat the condition with medication or, if worst comes to worst, surgery. Diabetes can be diagnosed years before it shows symptoms. Several types of cancers can now be treated that could not in the 70es. The downside is that health care costs have exploded. There is some hand-wringing over this, but the main reason for the huge cost is that we can treat rare illnesses that we used to just give up on. It is generally agreed that being rich and dead is not the best possible outcome. Better to be poorer but still alive!

Cars are safer too. Back in my childhood, 40 years ago, safety belts were still fairly new and highly optional. Now, there is a wide range of security measures to prevent collisions and save your life should a collision happen anyway. And by the way, modern cars pollute far less and also use less fuel.

I am sure I could continue this way, but the point is: You may be working more (and maybe you even are not allowed to read this at work) for the same pay, but on the other hand you can perform miracles that were science fiction a generation ago. That is a cause for celebration, surely! Please take a moment to appreciate how lucky we are to be born in the Age of Wonders.

 

Why are Christians stupid?

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Guys are all moronic idiots!

Also, let us not forget the tendency to see the stupidity in people who are unlike us. This is an automatic psychological mechanism to make us feel smarter.

I have met a number of interesting people on Google+. This social network is particularly well suited for meeting people you are NOT already friends with, unlike a certain other social network. It has more of a sourdough effect, growing through contact – you see someone comment something sane on a friend’s post, and you can start finding out more about them (in so far as they allow it). So due to my nature, I have added a bunch of intelligent, curious people to my list of acquaintances. They are almost all atheists, either missionary or functionally. But why are atheists generally noticeably more intelligent than Christians?

The answer is, “because you live in a Christian country”. Most English-speakers do. And in such a country, most people are raised as Christians, in theory at least. (The behavior they actually see while growing up may be somewhat different from the creed. As Mitt Romney’s guardian spirit says in The Next President: Americans worship Mammon, but officially they worship Jesus Christ.) If you don’t have more intelligence than you need to hold a job, you probably don’t spend it on being contrary. You go with the crowd, and stick to interests that are less abstract.  So the people who break out tend to be the smartest ones.

It is easy to test this, because there are countries in which it is not normal to be Christian. In Japan, for instance, only less than 1% are Christians (although some attend Christian rituals in addition to those of other religions – church weddings are popular, and Christmas is almost universal.) You don’t see Japanese suddenly convert to Christianity simply because they are stupid. Clearly it is not the stupidity that does it.

A more relevant example is my native Norway, which used to be a Christian country, in theory. Actually, it still is according to its constitution, but people just politely ignore that now. The elderly are often still Christians, as they were raised that way. But from my generation (around the age of 50-60) and downward, it is more like 10% who are Christian. Most people are agnostic or rather, they are atheists but don’t stir up trouble about it. So does this mean that 90% of the Norwegian population is as smart as the smartest 10% of the US population? Well, Norwegians may think so. We tend to have a ridiculously high self-esteem. But judging from such factors as the frequency of very high education, we don’t excel. Clearly the loss of religion does not come from a sudden surge of intelligence, and neither has atheism made us geniuses.

On the contrary, we are now in a situation where stupid people just accept atheism without thinking, and mindlessly parrot atheist fantasies that are at odds with science. For instance that millions died in the witch hunts (the actual number is a few thousand, not that this is not enough) or that Christianity caused the Dark Ages (the Germanic migrations did, whereas Christianity provided the last refuge of literacy during that time), or that  Christians burned down the Great Library of Alexandria (burning it down was a fairly regular occurrence, even Julius Caesar did it according to Plutarch, and later so did Aurelian; its final destruction happened under Islam. While Christians destroyed the temple, contemporary pagan scholars make no mention of books being destroyed. Nobody knows where and when they met their end.)

Stupid people tend to have a stupid understanding of religion. And so do most smart people, because it is not really something they think a lot about. The main difference is that they don’t just do whatever their parents did, but try to create an identity of their own. In this generation, in English-speaking countries, atheism is often a part of that. In the 60es, Hinduism and Buddhism were popular. Who knows what it will be next time. Happy Science, perhaps? It certainly seems to be a hit among the upper classes of Japan, as a religion that subtly implies that intelligent people are spiritually superior, born to rule and that it is for the best of everybody that they control the power and money in society. I guess we could be worse off than that.

The fourth dimension: Time

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Thanks to the mysterious power of the human mind, we are able to remember the past and even anticipate the future. Although the latter in particular is sometimes … not exactly … exact.

In order to consider the things that may go beyond time, we should first consider time itself. It is a fascinating phenomenon. We all know it, or that’s what we think. But do we really?

The world that we live in with our senses is a 3-dimensional world. We do not actually sense time, we reconstruct it by intuition. This is an important point for what I am trying to show, so please let me give it some time…

When I look at my computer screen, I cannot see it as it was an hour ago, or how it will be an hour from now. In fact, I can only see it as it is in this particular moment. Likewise when I hear something, I can only hear what sounds hit my ear at the moment. When I touch, I can only touch what is there right now. I cannot actually feel time. But thanks to memory, I can create the illusion of seeing time. By combining sense images from short term memory with newly arrived sense images, the brain constructs the illusion of movement and change, in other words the work of time.

But of course this illusion is not a delusion. Time really exists. We may not be able to sense it directly, but we reconstruct it inside our mind. What we perceive as time with our mind is very similar to the actual dimension of time that exists in the outside world. Or at least this is what almost all of us agree on. There are some scientists who think that time does not really exist, but they don’t have much effect on our actual thinking, since we all know from experience that time is real.

One time you have too much time on your hands, feel free to Google “Does time exist?”

If there is a consensus, it is that time certainly exists for humans, and presumably for the expansion of the universe and the increase of entropy, but laws of physics otherwise work just fine both ways. Entropy is a fancy word for “less order”, so perhaps we perceive time because the content of our mind becomes more and more messy?

In any case, the fact remains that time is real to us humans, and furthermore, it is useful. Thanks to our mastery of time, we can make cakes, and many other useful things.  Making cake requires not only ingredients, but also time.

While I am baking a cake, the cake does not yet exist, except in the future and in my mind. I cannot see it, I cannot touch it, and I certainly cannot eat it. And yet the cake is not a lie! I am so certain of the cake that I will happily tell people about it and even invite them to come eat it, even though it does not exist. It is not a hallucination, it is anticipation. You may search all over the house and conclude that no, there is no cake. I am quite aware of that, thank you! That is why I am baking it! Your insistence that the cake is all in my head is scientifically true but quite irrelevant, since the cake will arrive in due time if you leave me to my baking.

In order to bring forth the cake, I must follow the law that governs time, which is the law of causality, the law of cause and effect. It is not enough to wish for cake, even wish very strongly. It is not enough to visualize the cake and think positive thoughts about the cake. The Law of Attraction does not attract cakes until someone bakes them. So even though the cake is all in my head, it must also activate my hands in order to become real.

In addition to anticipation, we also have memory, which is why we experience time at all. If we did not have memories, or if they were not conscious, we would not have a concept of time. By all account most of our furry and feathered friends don’t have much of an idea of time. They can recognize things from the past, when they see them (or smell them). But they show no sign of being able to travel in time with their minds. We, however, do this easily. I can close my eyes and wander through the house where I lived a year ago, even though it was razed to the ground late last summer. I my mind I can walk from room to room. Again, this is not a hallucination, even though the house certainly isn’t there. I am not even in the same spot where it stood. And yet I have no doubt to its reality. It is just that it was real in the past, not in the present.

By our mind powers of memory and anticipation we can travel in time, but only with our mind. Our bodies remain drifting on the time stream along with everything around us. Yet when we return to them, we can use the knowledge we have gained from our time travel to steer our bodies toward the destination we desire. Well, if we get it right, which we often don’t. The future is hazy at best. Still, with more and more experience (and purging our tendency of wishful thinking) we can get better at navigating through time.

So even though we cannot directly perceive time, much less travel through it, we can still reconstruct it with our mind and get a pretty good picture of it. That is pretty amazing! Humans are awesome. But it does not stop there. If I am allowed, I will go one step further and visit the dimension beyond time, which relates to time in much the same way that time relates to the other three dimensions. And same as for time, it will all be in my head – until I act on it, at least.

But for now it is sufficient for me to show the nature of time as relates to humans. If you can grasp this, you are close to wisdom. Conversely if you are wise (and some of you are), you probably already know this. More about this next time, if any.

 

Exercise, fat or diabetes

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You could also go to a gym, but it costs money and people snicker at you if your clothes are more fancy than your skill.

Now that the ice has left the roads here on the south coast of Norway, I once again make it a habit to take a brisk walk outside when it does not rain too much. I generally burn 700-800 calories for each trip. How much is that? If you take a common drinking glass from the kitchen and fill it to the top with pure white sugar, that’s about 800 calories.

Obviously I don’t celebrate my trip with a glass of pure sugar. But I do get more hungry the more I exercise, and so it will always be for us who are in the normal weight range. (The weight range that is described as “normal” for your height in books and websites is actually what I call the “recommended” range, although it was supposedly normal in the 1970es when smoking was common. Today what’s normal extends some 10% higher.)

Walking and other light exercise, then, is not really a means to lose weight unless you are obese or quite a bit overweight. Some people simply have a constant appetite  or eat for social or emotional reason, and the only alternative to eat less is to exercise more. In fact, for some their appetite will decrease after exercise, because the body’s natural system for regulating appetite will begin to function again. But for us of unremarkable shape, moderate exercise will not make us lose weight permanently. We would have to exercise more and more to do that.

So why walk up and down the hills if not to fit into the clothes of last summer or the summer before that? Well, basically it is to remind the body that it is still inhabited. In an effect known as “hormesis”,  the body reacts to small challenges by starting a repair system that repairs not only the small damage caused, but also some of the accumulated damage from the passing of time. There are a few toxins that are known to have hormetic effect in very low levels, among them ordinary alcohol, but the safest and most efficient hormesis by far is regular exercise. It may be slightly habit-forming, but not to the same degree as alcohol.

For me in particular there is a second reason to keep walking. I am diagnosed with “pre-diabetes” since last year, although I may have had this condition longer than that. You see, this is a purely technical term: There are no symptoms, and the health effects are uncertain. (Pre-diabetes usually appears as part of “metabolic syndrome”, which impairs health in ways not related to blood sugar.) The blood sugar is slightly higher than usual, but not enough to cause damage. The problem with pre-diabetes is that there is around 10% chance each year of progress to actual diabetes, which is bothersome, expensive and potentially deadly.

By exercising regularly, I clear out part of the sugar that is stored in my liver and my muscles. You see, people with pre-diabetes and diabetes II produce enough insulin, but the body starts ignoring it. (Or, for pre-diabetes, not taking it quite as seriously as it should.) Insulin gives an order to three types of cells:  Muscles, liver and fat cells. The order is to grab sugar from the blood and store it. Muscles and liver store it as glycogen, kind of “tightly packed sugar” that can be quickly made into sugar (glucose) again. Fat cells convert the sugar into fat, which can not be made into sugar again but is burned at a slow rate in daily life. Fat can also be burned at a high rate by long bouts of exercise at moderate levels.

I am already around 20 pounds less than I was at my fattest, so I know it is not the fat cells that fail to take action. They have plenty of room. But after 2005 I have not been able to digest much fat, so I live mostly on a diet of carbs. (It is that or not living at all, really, so the choice is pretty easy.)  Because of this there is always plenty of sugar in my blood, and my liver and muscles easily fill their storage space. This leaves the poor fat cells with all the rest, and they are evidently not up to it, thus the pre-diabetes.

So basically if you eat carbs, you need to exercise to clear out the storage in muscles and liver. Otherwise diabetes is likely. If you eat fat instead, you still need to exercise to slow down the aging, but the chance of diabetes is small as long as you stay well below your maximum weight. A high-fat diet also raises the risk of angina and heart infarct. So there really is no “silver bullet”, no cure for all. At least not yet. I am sure scientists all over the world are still looking. Until then, I intend to keep walking.

 

Partly free will

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Rihoko in a towel on the bathroom scales.

Snacks and students. We apologize for any other temptations that may occur, but hopefully this journal entry will help you get a more realistic perspective on it. (Also, I actually watched the anime where this picture comes from, and she did not drop the towel.)

In my previous post, I argued that our will must in principle be free, or there would be no point in doing anything or assigning meaning to things others do. (In fact, we probably do assign too much meaning, especially to some people. But more about that soon.)

Now, saying that our will is free in principle is very different from saying that we always do what we will. That depends on something much more tricky, namely resolving who “we” are. The general notion that the human mind is like a pearl, made of the same stuff all the way through, is not supported by observation. (OK, there are some people whose mind is like a pearl: Small and simple. I don’t think any of these are reading this.)

As I said in passing: We are not alone in our head. You may certainly think so, but that only leaves you with a concept of self that is either at odds with itself or running from one position to the other constantly. All of these are valid viewpoints, and just as good as saying we are not alone in our head, I think. Possibly better, if the other phrase creeps you out. Then again, a little bit of creep may be a good thing. As it is, we tend to have a terribly naive view of what goes on in the human mind. Bitter fruits follow from this.

One concept I have mentioned from time to time is the difference between “hot” and “cold” states of mind. Cold states of mind (I rather consider them lukewarm) are the ordinary relaxed situation where everything is familiar and in control. (OK, that may not be ordinary to all, but I hope it is fairly common.) In this situation, we tend to think we are in control of our own body and mental faculties, as they say.  Memory, imagination, logic and so on.

The “hot” states of mind are those associated with primal emotions, such as fear, anger, lust and (surprisingly) disgust. In these states of mind, we view the world in a completely different light. While we may still be in control of our body, the “we” that is in control is not the usual “we”. Rather it has entirely different priorities and sees things quite differently.

One famous experiment is to ask people whether they are willing to put a live earthworm in their mouth for a reasonable amount of money. Not enough to live happily ever after, but worth a few hours work perhaps. A pretty large number of people will agree to this when the deal is talked about in a relaxed office setting framed by bookshelves etc. But once the worm is actually wriggling in front of you, only approximately 5% of the population can actually overcome their disgust. (These 5% are probably dangerous people, but that is beside the point today.)

Another interesting scenario that is not used in research for obvious reasons is sexual intercourse. Generally speaking, a sexually inexperienced woman has a hard time voluntarily going through with sexual intercourse under most circumstance. This problem is in our culture usually overcome with alcohol. Conversely, a sexually experienced man has a hard time NOT going through with intercourse if he has first started in that direction, and this causes even much more problems. (Also, alcohol does not help for that, except in extreme quantities!)

Anger and fear are states of mind even children are familiar with. And unfortunately, adults often react in much the same way as children in these situations, despite their very sincere promises to the contrary before the situation arose. The sincerity when in a “cold” state of mind is not faked, but it is also not particularly closely related to what you will actually do once you get into a “hot” state of mind.

One study showed that a complete stranger in the corresponding hot state was better able to predict a person’s behavior than the person themselves had been while in the cool state of mind.

And that only covers the sudden, intense challenges. There is also the creeping temptation challenge, the eroding of willpower through a long period of moderate temptation.

Here again test subjects (read: students) are available. For temptations are usually used snacks, such as chocolate.  Before the experiment, the test subjects and the researchers make an agreement that the test subject will not eat the snacks, usually with some reward being offered for fortitude. However, if the student is left with the snack long enough, the probability of snacking gradually rises toward 100%. It never quite reaches it (since starving students is illegal) but it keeps climbing. It is not possible to know in advance when a particular test subject will cave in, but when you run hundreds of them through the test, you get a curve that repeats nicely with the next large batch of volunteers. Even though each individually has free will, in practice we can predict how many of them won’t use it! Just not who.

Of course, in a manner of speaking the snackers do use their free will: They voluntarily choose to eat the snacks rather than get the reward. But their decision at the time is largely independent on their decision before (or after) the deed.

Having more than one temptation at the same time makes it harder to resist each of them. If the students get to play computer games, it is easier for them to abstain from snacks; if they have games around but aren’t allowed to play, it becomes harder to resist the snacks than if there were no games in sight in the first place.

Willpower can be built over time, luckily. Unfortunately, it can also be eroded over time.

But perhaps the most important thing we can do in this regard is to build habits. Habits are cobwebs at first, chains at last, as the saying goes. It is pretty easy to understand that if you are a couch potato, you cannot just get up one day and run a marathon. But in the same way, there lies a lot of work behind a life where people can resist temptations or the strong impulses of fear, anger, lust or disgust. Beginning with what is doable and sustainable is the key, unless you have some kind of divine intervention (or human companions that can keep guard over you at all times). Just like there are thousands of barely used exercise bikes in the basements and sheds of first-world nations, so there are thousands of discarded New Year’s Resolutions. If each of these had been taken in use slowly, gradually, cautiously, they might have had more success.

Of course, I don’t mean to diss divine intervention. I’m all for that. But unless you have a pretty close relationship with the Divine, you should probably have a Plan B as well. Just saying.

 

 

Two types of genius

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Even an idiot will achieve greatness if they just think, and read, and write, and listen, and keep doing this year after year. Of course, getting an idiot to listen in the first place is usually the problem!

I want to write some more about the different between genius and genius, or between intelligence and intelligence, since it is important and I myself did not understand it when I was young. As I would have wished others to do unto me, so I should now do unto others.

I grew up thinking that intelligence was basically the raw processing power of the brain, as measured by modern multi-type IQ tests. There is indeed such a “general intelligence”, as well as a number of more specialized talents that may be called intelligence. And the upper end of the IQ scale is labeled “genius”, an already well known word.

A brain with a powerful processing ability can accomplish much, when assigned to a task suitable for it. (This varies somewhat with talents, but there are many tasks that are suitable for general intelligence.) Our modern “information society” depends to a large degree on the work of smart people, most of them specializing in fairly narrow fields. The more the minds adapt to that particular field, and the field adapts to the people who work there, the more effective they become.

It is really amazing what wonders we are surrounded by today. For instance, I have a computer in my shirt pocket that has higher screen resolution than the computer on which I used to play Daggerfall during the early years of this journal! And it also holds a library of books, all in my shirt pocket, while being able to play any of millions of songs stored elsewhere in the world. The combined might of genius is awe-inspiring. I want you to hear this from me.

Because what I will say next may seem (falsely) to contradict the above. I will talk about a different form of genius, a different form of intelligence. We could call it “cultural intelligence” as opposed to “neural intelligence”. While the neural intelligence becomes stronger by concentrating more and more into detail, the cultural intelligence grows by expanding into an ever broader view. While the first form of intelligence takes us deeper and deeper into matters, the second lifts us up to see ourselves and our world as if from a higher place.

By calling the first and commonly defined intelligence “neural” (not neutral!) I mean that it is defined by its limit which is the brain’s capacity for processing information at a certain speed, which varies from person to person. As the person becomes attuned to his work and the other way around, we come closer and closer to this limit, and the law of diminishing return sets in, never quite grinding to a halt but slowing ever more.

The other form of intelligence, however, presents the exact opposite kind of curve, the exponential curve (known in my generation from the population graph and more recently in the growth of computing power in the world, which rises faster and faster until nearly vertical). The speed at which the “cultural genius” of a person grows may be limited by their neural intelligence among other things, but it just follows the same curve at a more cautious pace from the start. Given enough time it will still reach its rapid climb. The one thing that stops it in the dedicated genius is the natural expiration date of the brain, or other vital organs should they fail first. If such a person lives to old age keeping their wits, there almost seem to be no bounds.

Again, while the neural genius is fed by specialization, the cultural genius is fed by expansion, by taking on ever new knowledge, new experiences, new modes of thinking. For the engineer, learning a new language in the middle of life is a distraction; for the philosopher, it is more like a necessity.

In reality, it is possible to some extent to combine these, to be a philosopher engineer. But this is rare and probably a constant battle. Such a person is extremely powerful (at least potentially), but also extremely rare. I would think the late Steve Jobs, for instance, would fall in this category. A fascinating life but not one free from conflict.

Now as for the ordinary person, we have more or less of the native, neural intelligence. I used to have quite a bit of it, although I am sure it has shrunk some over the last decade or two.  But if you don’t, there is no reason to give up and sit down in front of the TV with a sixpack of beer. The amazing thing is that the second form of intelligence is still available.

You may be a slow reader, and may need to read a book six times to really grasp it, while I usually get by with one. But like in the fable of the hare and the tortoise, steady does it. If you take care of your health and live to a decently old age, the knowledge that builds up inside you will start to gain “compound interest”, as everything you learn will raise the value of everything you already know. Eventually, almost everything will remind you of something else. Like the final phase of a jigsaw puzzle, the things that made no sense suddenly light up and find their place.

Let me stress this again: The path of “cultural intelligence” is open for even the most ordinary, as long as you have the will and the patience to pursue it. Hold on to it and don’t give up, and all you need is time. In ages gone by, these people were called “sages”, or “wise old men” and “wise women”, and highly respected. In our age, the blinding speed of progress driven by neural intelligence may seem to overshadow this. But the truth is that there will always be many who need the help of the sages. And let us not forget that this path is its own reward: The ever growing brightness and the astounding view as your mind rises higher, this is a joy that cannot be bought for gold or praises. Please, consider it.

Not enough Sims 2!

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When sims have permanent platinum mood – an unshakable mind – growing older is a cause for happiness. They will spend their elder years calmly and eventually pass on without fear.

It would seem a safe bet that people won’t regret on their deathbed that they have played too little The Sims 2. But once again it seems I am the exception to the rule. Although it is a bit early to say, I hope! But I already regret, and repent, not having played The Sims 2 as much as I should.

Well, not the game in general, but a particular project that takes up a large part of my separate Sims game journal. “Micropolis” (not to be confused with the game of the same name, which I heard of quite a bit later) is a simulated neighborhood in which I act as the guardian angel, inspiring my little computer people to achieve their goals and help each other create a Utopia by building their own inner strength and the ties of love and friendship.

Starting in the near future (sometime between now and 2050) six families come to a deserted farming village in the foothills of a mountain chain. All of them have lost loved ones and everything they owned in the great hurricane that destroyed their hometown. Starting from nothing, with a modest amount of borrowed money, they begin to create a new life for themselves and their children. This is the start of the story of Micropolis.

I play with stricter rules than those that are built into the game. The Near Future is seen as a time in which the economy in particular is harsh: It is hard to get any job without college education, which costs quite a bit of money. Houses are expensive and there are no subsidies, interest rates are high, and property taxes are increased fourfold. For people without jobs, without skills and without friends, the challenge seems almost insurmountable.

Over more than 50 years, we follow the small band of refugees through snapshots of their lives and their conversations with their guardian angel. Together they seek to combine their immediate needs and wants with their long-term aspirations and the greater plans for the whole society. They fish their own fish, grow their own vegetables, and gradually acquire useful skills and begin to climb out of debt. They raise children who eventually go to college, sometimes taking childhood friends or high school sweethearts with them. The children come home and get jobs or start shops. The small cluster of tiny homes becomes a village. Later large apartment buildings begin to appear, and the nearest neighborhoods also take part in the growth. They face new challengers: Climate chaos and mutating viruses. But through it all they continue to thrive under the constant guidance of their guardian angel.

More than money, the true wealth of Micropolis is its people, their skills and generosity, their friendships and love, their families and hospitality. It is these that makes Micropolis a small Utopia, a place anyone except the hardcore liberal would love to live.

I wish I had continued to write it, because it expresses my view of life very well and in a manner I think most people can understand if they have the spare time (it is a very long story). But I got distracted by other shiny things. And most of all, my laziness caused me to give it up. Writing the story itself was not so onerous, but due to the length of the story it became necessary to provide background summaries for all the families and eventually all of the sims. Keeping these info pages up to date was quite a bit of work compared to what you see of them, so I got fed up. I regret that now.

Many people these days (and probably in the past as well) do not understand well the concept of guardian and guiding spirits. The independent thoughts from their subconscious torture them, mock them or drive them to do reckless or outright damaging things.  That is not how it should be. I hope that my fiction can illustrate the kind of world I live in, which is basically the exact opposite. Long may it last.

Respect and shooting laptops

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Not a conservative thing to do. Not good and proper use of handguns and laptops and fatherly authority.

By now I guess most people have seen the video of this guy in cowboy hat shooting his daughter’s laptop. (Or possibly the laptop he lent her, she was just 15 so probably could not afford her own.) I am not sure I even need to link to it, but hey. Here’s one copy, for as long as it last.

Now, some of my friends are conservatives, and I’m not ashamed of that. But I am ashamed that they so quickly side with this guy. I can see why, in America: There this total war or ideology, where the liberals and conservatives generally disagree on everything. If they were to agree on anything by now, one of them would need to quickly change their mind! One of these things is that liberals want law-abiding people to not have guns, so of course when conservatives see this guy has a gun and ain’t afraid to use it, they assume he is one of them.

Let us call him on that.

See, I grew up around guns. OK, those were rifles, but that doesn’t really make things better. We learned to use them while we were still growing up, and to maintain them, but we also learned something else: We learned to respect them. Guns are not can openers. They are made for ending lives. Handguns, of course, are specifically made for ending human lives (although they can also be used on rabid animals). Rifles can also be used for hunting, but the point still stands. These things are specialized bringers of death. As such, they command a particular respect. Life is sacred, certainly human life is. A tool for taking life earns a kind of “mirror” sacredness from this. It is something you treat with respect. You use it for practice, and if the Light is merciful, that is all you will ever need it for. You don’t use it interchangeably with any random tool. Unless you lack respect. This guy does that.

This point is important. What he does shows a lack of respect. A lack of keeping things to their proper use. That kind of respect, or knowing what is proper, is what being a REAL conservative is all about. Bringing handguns into a family dispute is very far from proper. So no, he did not point it at his daughter. Seriously, that’s setting the bar really low. Like in the grass somewhere. You have to be pretty inbred to do that and tell the world, since you’d get hauled off by the sheriff the next day. So, shooting office equipment is pretty much as far as he can get away with. In any case, it is not proper, it is not respectful toward the power and purpose of a weapon.

But if you don’t get that, let us continue with his next disrespect, which is for the value of useful things. Rather than just confiscating the computer, perhaps formatting it, perhaps selling it, perhaps giving it to charity or whatever, he thinks it is a good idea to destroy it. To teach his daughter a lesson. Yes, and what is that lesson? That he is willing to completely destroy what he has invested money and time in? That is a very useful message for a kid to hear, given that there is nothing parents have invested so much time and money in as their children. I am sure she is thrilled to know that. But let us get back to the “useful thing” part.

Let’s say she had been driving a car recklessly – would it be OK to take a sledgehammer to the car and reduce it to rubble? To send her a message?

If she’d sneaked a boyfriend into the house and made out there – would he set the house on fire, to teach her a lesson?

Destroying perfectly useful things is disrespectful. Of course, he could probably afford it, given that they had hired help in the house and such. I am sure he could afford it. So if you could afford another house, would it be a good idea to set fire to one of them? I don’t think so. It is what we used to call “wanton destruction”. It is disrespectful to those who made a useful thing, and it is disrespectful to those who could have used it. I know people these days are throwing away stuff, but conservatives usually try to have a yard sale or flea market or something. Just destroying them is more of the hip urban lifestyle.

I don’t really need to point out that belittling his daughter on YouTube was disrespectful to her. At least she deserved it. After all, she started it! But… a father sinking to the same level as a 15 year old, having to make sure everyone knows that he got the last word, that he is The Man – that is not dignified. Sorry man, but that is beneath you as a parent. If you filmed it and showed it to your daughter, OK. But having to compete with an underage girl for status is… well, not conservative. It is not dignified, it is not proper. If this guy has any living parents, I hope they don’t have Internet access. This is just embarrassing.

See, respect is not something you can take. It is something you get. You cannot make people respect you except by living with integrity, by being a honest and righteous person. What you’re doing is intimidation, not the same thing.

Now, to demand respect from others and not show respect where you should, that is not integrity. That is hypocrisy. You want to be respected but you don’t show proper respect for things and for people and for yourself. There is no denying that this girl showed a horrible lack of respect and propriety. And there is not much doubt where she got it from, either.

Sims 3: Imaginary daycare

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Sim children at day care

I made the day care provider female because I forgot that in this game there is actually sexual equality, so men are allowed to be surrounded by children not their own. Don’t try this at home, kids.

If you wonder where I’ve been the last few days, the answer is I have a new favorite game, as I mentioned, Sims 3: Generations. (Actually The Sims 3 is the game, which you must have first, and Generations is an additional expansion pack.) But more specifically, I’ve been playing a home daycare provider. It’s one of the most fun things I can remember playing.

OK, this surprises even me. It seems rather out of character. Of course, my character in the game is not suited for this, since he is a loner, and gets a mood boost from being completely alone, and a negative mood from having a crowd around. (A crowd being more than two other people, it seems.)

So I made this woman who is family-oriented, nurturing, friendly, charismatic and good. (I’ve only ever used the last for my own character, and I’ve stopped doing that after some more self-reflection.) Still, the fact remains that I as the player of the game enjoy it greatly.

Day care is kind of fun. Each morning from Monday to Thursday  (not Friday for some reason?) people show up and dump toddlers on your floor.  You don’t need to go to work, you can run around in your underwear and make pancakes until the last minute. When the kids show up, you feed them and change their dirty diapers, play with them, cuddle them, teach them to walk and talk if you feel like it, or just watch them play with their toys. There are no stomach flues, nobody bites each other or pulls each other’s hair. That said, it is pretty hectic.  But then at sunset, the people show up again and whisk away the children, so you have the evening for yourself and can sleep all night.

It may not sound like fun – it does not really read like fun, I admit – but I really enjoy it. Being surrounded by kids is something I … well, I can’t say I miss it since I don’t really think about it normally, but it was something I enjoyed when I was young. In the Christian Church of Brunstad, there used to be lots and lots of children. I think there may still be more than average, but back then it was more family-centric than the Catholic Church. (That is also one reason why I could not fit in, as I would never have a family of my own.)

In the secular society of Norway, arguably the world’s second most feminist country after Sweden, men are watched carefully when they spend time with children, as it is assumed that they will try to have sex with them. There is a lot of writing in the newspapers when this happens, and sometimes when it is just suspected as well. Fathers are generally allowed to be alone with their own children, but once the parents break up, it is not unheard of that the mother argues for sole parental rights on the grounds that a man can’t be trusted around children.  Unfortunately with the sad state of humanity, this is probably often the case as well.

Anyway, in real life I am not going to quit my job as a software call center problem solver to re-educate myself for day care. I think most of my midlife “crisis” is over by now, and it seems to mostly have caused a new interest in books of timeless wisdom and metaphysics. But kids are kind of fun, in their own way. At least imaginary ones. Also, if computers could convey smell as realistically as they do sight and sound, I might have second thoughts about being surrounded by simulated toddlers!