The analogy of man to computer has been made many times by many people. I want to look at the programs that human beings run in their minds that cause suffering and find out what can be done about it. Thinking is an experience, so these thinking apps are also experiences. These programs can be seen as trojan horses that take up brain resources, eventually crashing the computer and producing anxiety and depression. I will create an abbreviated version of this page in time, but for now, some of the writing will be thick.
App 1. Emotional selfish memory. Let your emotional memories fade if they will.
In our present, we have memory. Memory is the storage of impressions of different arrangements of objects, since physical objects change their location and make relative changes in other objects. The objects that affect us, as they move, make impressions that are maintained in the brain, and which the brain refers to in the present. The brain is always in the present, it's physical structures have been affected by the movement of other matter.
The memory of pain lengthens it, gets us into the habit of routine, trying to avoid that pain, but actually drawing us near to it every time we retrieve that memory. Memory will act in us without effort. When we apply effort to it, we are ever in dread and anxiety. So, when possible, we leave memory out of our emotional lives, let the memory of past traumas fade away effortlessly. That memory will act when it needs to, but we should not give it artificial importance and persistence and say "I will never forget X", because what you are vowing to is that you will always be miserable and we shouldn't give any person or situation that kind of power to make us miserable.
App 2: Self-focused Time. Be in the present awareness.
We know of time by memory. If we didn't have memory, we would always be in the present and would have no concept of time. Scientists are not sure if time exists or not. The universe rather appears to have multiple configurations, and we call time to be when we experience different configurations, or change. However, all configurations are one, none better or worse and the sum of all configurations are the universe. If the universe has a limited set of configurations, then time is an illusion. If it has infinite configurations, then time may be real.
Time for us, is simply memory and a concept of the future, and that concept is the past. So we become stuck in the past, the familiar, just like a rat will make his nest and return to it, and to hunting spots that have worked before. This is balanced with exploration, which often has an antidepressant effect or cause. Some persons, as the age, become fixed in limited action loops, through mental stagnation, beliefs, memories, that they are stuck reliving over and over again.
If the universe is a limited set of configurations, the present contains the past and future, so there is no need to dwell on them, but to keep focused on awareness of the present. If you have had the pain of a breakup of an important relationship, do not resist mourning it if you have the capacity to mourn it. If you don't, similarly, don't attempt to produce an artificial mourning in hopes of social conformity. If someone dies and you are not at all rattled, don't attempt to be miserable or question if you cared and bring unnecessary suffering upon yourself. However, if you mourn, remain in the present, feel it fully, observe it, and continue to observe in the present as it withers away as all feelings do. Don't say, "I will never forget," again, that is equivalent to, "I promise to always be miserable." Do not give artificial persistence to it through rumination, if you have the capacity not to. Also, don't blame oneself if you do not have the capacity. My attempt is that my words may influence you to be happier, but if they do not, it was just not meant to be so don't take on unnecessary blame if you cannot. What does not happen, could not happen.
Emotional attachment to time and memory is a trojan horse that will crash the computer of the mind. The past cannot be changed but you can take up brain resources worrying about it. The future is unknown, and likewise cannot be changed, and if you worry about what fears could happen, you can worry infinitely, there will not be enough brain resources or lifetimes to worry about all the things that will happen, and that will create an infinity loop that will take up all brain resources and crash the computer, creating anxiety, depression. So, be in the present, the past if over, the future is unknown, all you ever have is the present. Also, affective forecasting as it is called in psychology, that is, prediction about how we will feel in the future, has been shown to be a failure in humans. You never know how you will feel in the future and the best prediction is how other people who are already in a situation feel. For example, if you say, "I will feel great when I am finally a doctor or lawyer," yet if studies say doctors and lawyers are notoriously stressed and have very high suicide rates, then probably that is how you will feel once you are a doctor or lawyer. You may have better reasons for doing things, than the false forecasting of emotional states.
App 3, Regret - Let regret fade.
The regret app, makes us feel ontologically like we should go back in time and change something. Obviously we can't do that. What it is really for is to cause us to do better in the future. That being the case, we can safely let regret fade once the lesson has been learned. Regret is a trojan horse with loops that will crash the computer.
App 4. Choice / Freewill / Blame-repent-blame loop
Choice is the experience of the process the brain goes through while appraising actions of which it is not easy to tell which of predicted outcomes are better. When someone puts a gun to our head and forces us to do something, we don't consider that much of a choice or an exercise of freewill because we feel like we did not have a choice because the prospect of being shot in the head or other body part is so much worse, the decision is made for us, but really, it's not otherwise different than any other decision to take an action. One could have decided to be shot or take his chances. What we call reality is a simulation run on our organic computer, and choice / freewill are crude descriptions of this simulation, yet we come to believe they are absolute realities. What we observe about the universe is that it appears to be deterministic. It could also be random. Neither of those admit of freewill, and it is only our received programs and language that even tempt us to want to make such a claim. There is no freewill. We just haven't come up with a better way of describing our experience.
In a deterministic universe, that which has happened, could not possibly have been different. Humans behave deterministically, so blame is not an ontological reality. It is a program that we use that has the effect of urging us to punish others when they do something to harm others or the group. We secondarily use it to blame ourselves, but alot less. Therefore, blame is only needed so long as you need it in order to identify and correct your behavior or the behavior of others. Once enlightened, you will not need it at all. You will be able correct behaviors without emotional dwelling on the issue.
Since one's actions are not perfect or complete from a self-in-time view, incomplete action-freewill- responsibility-blame-repent-incomplete action becomes an infinity loop that will take up the resources of the computer of the brain and crash the brain, producing anxiety and depression.
App 4. Self
Self is the ultimate app. When we were babies, self was not yet fully installed. We simply experienced the world without awareness of being separate from it. We would examine our own hand for as long was we would the object we hold in it. We were simply a perspective, the world, and other people. When I look at my baby niece, 1 year old, I see her face and am aware of myself and she smiles. I imagine as she does this, she sees herself smiling, but in fact, all she sees is me smiling, she is little aware of herself smiling. As far as she knows, I'm almost always smiling because that's what I look like when she looks at me. Anyway, the self program contains these other programs and negotiates between them.
The self program develops over early childhood and either continues, grows, diminishes, or expires. We are predisposed to develop it genetically in our DNA and epigenetically. When we are kids, we merely observe and react naturally. People give us a name that we learn to respond to. They assign our actions to us, mostly our negative actions because they pose a greater threat to our safety. We learn to control this conceptual entity that we call ourselves. Without this concept their is just our simulation, our world-perspective. Sometimes, under the influence of some drugs, the self dissolves or diminshes, and their is just pure choiceless awareness. Some drugs diminish the self, make you feel a part of everything but leave you the ability to become a self.
Drugs of course have negative impacts on health, they are not needed to dissolve the self and we can lose the self and retain the ability to be selved as needed for technical goals and survival. These programs need to be balanced. They should not be taken as an absolute reality. They are part of our programming and simulation. You should have control over them, to use when needed, and discard if they are totally unnecessary.
Lesser apps that can create viral infinity loops that will crash the brain
1. Absolute right / wrong. There is not absolute right / wrong.
These are functional definitions which can apply to actions, they are not absolute. They depend on what we decide are beneficial versus injurious, they aren't just right or wrong, no matter whether they are beneficial or harmful. There are actions that are beneficial to our continued existence, and things injurious. If you believe they are absolute, their can be no end to blame, and your computer will crash.
2. Belief - Have no belief. Use information without any absolute belief in it.
Belief is an attempt to escape from something one fears but claiming to know something exists or is the case which is not in evidence, such as god or heaven. You simply don't know, but you usually disregard what others have made up, so you should do so in the case of god, heaven, nirvana, etc. You can face reality without fear with choiceless awareness. You will have no need of belief. Since belief is a delusion, reality will continually provide evidence that your belief is wrong, you will be endlessly wondering why god allowed your family members and yourself to suffer, why bad things happen to good people, etc, and your brain will crash.
Belief also leads to a stagnant brain. When scientists, who are supposed to be free of belief, begin to believe in their theories, they stunt the progress of science. As one grows older, when one has belief, one begins to grow not wiser, but dumber, because one has stagnant beliefs, reliving the same pattern of thoughts, becoming a caricature of oneself. Instead, keep the mind young by having no beliefs. You can use information and weigh the probability that it may be useful without having belief.
3. Accomplishment / Achievement motivation - Replace with meaning motivation
That's all for now. Leave comments on other toxic apps that crash the brain.
Tuesday, September 27, 2016
Saturday, July 16, 2016
What is Real Education: Discussion
Our educational system is messed up and archaic,. I'm not blaming teachers, that's a red herring. I'm taking responsibility. We are one organism and our educational system is failing. Teachers are doing the best they can under the circumstances.
Why it is failing is because corporations want to continue to produce impotent education and get a fat government check for it. They want to continue to make silly tests that shut people out of higher education. The model is competition but unfortunately, there are two ways to win a competition, you can make yourself better than the rest, or you can make everyone else worse than you. Unfortunately, we have taken the latter route. High class people pay for slightly better education, but lack of resources in poor communities insure they get bad education. However, the education at 'good schools' is also bad, the advantage one gets at good schools is better conformity, better behavior, and mostly, better connections and networking with upper class people. Sometimes they have some useful programs to teach real technology, but often they don't. They just have stricter rules and teach upper class culture, which gives them the advantage. Look at the rapist Brock Turner, in line to serve only 3 months for rape, because he's a white Stanford kid. http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/06/us/sexual-assault-brock-turner-stanford/ Meanwhile a black student convicted of rape is in line to serve 180 months http://www.voanews.com/content/former-vanderbilt-athlete-sentenced-fifteen-years-campus-rape/3420248.html That is the extent of the power and privilege that comes with upper class culture. The black student will get 60 times the punishment for the same crime. Yes, there is white privilege, there is upper class privilege, but if you have to tell someone that, it's probably pointless to talk to them on the issue at all.
Back to education, it is 2016, kids need to learn that which is useful to them. They need to learn to manipulate the things in their environment, especially the technologies but also nature. They should know how a car, a computer, a TV works, and how to fix them. They need to learn that which empowers them. They need to learn about human relationships. They need to learn thinking strategies, what I call algorithms, which I will demonstrate in a separate article. They need to learn different life paths they can take to success or they aren't completely lost when they leave grade school. They need to learn law, applied law, meaning laws that apply to them and the situations they may encounter. They need to learn how to participate in government. They need to learn real history, not that white American supremacist, pro-war, kings and queens stuff they teach in the schools. Most people were not kings or queens or warriors. What was everyone else doing while the handful of elite were waging war? That is history, not the politics of a small group of people. They need to learn about their health and wellness, and medical information, lots of it. I've seen so many people taking medications they have no idea what it is, and it seems unconcievable to me. However, their reading level is often so low, they know if they were to look it up, they still wouldn't understand much about what it is so they don't bother. It's a disempowered attitude, and it makes doctors into tyrants.
What they are learning now is what you can call the white New England culture model. Saying "ain't got no" is considered lack of education, when it isn't, that's just a different culture, it is fully equivalent to 'don't have any'. Lack of education is when you drive a car and watch a TV everyday and don't know how they work. It's not being able to read a nutrition label and see that something that says "low fat" is actually full of sugar and is NOT good for you. It is not being able to see the context of systems like government, schools, companies, scientific studies. Some people say the conditions surrounding a scientific study cannot effect the study because scientists weed out all outside influences. If you can see the financial and social context, you know that is far from true, and has now been pretty definitely proven. Scientific studies have recently been scandalized. Children need to learn how to argue effectively, and not that ancient spiel about logical fallacies alone. People don't understand logical fallacies at all, and they are ancient. There are very many ways to examine an argument, not the handful of fallacies from ancient Greece and Rome for goodness sakes. When you see someone doing nothing but pointing out logical fallacies in Greek or latin, you know that person is likely an idiot without thinking ability.
Everything the child is taught needs to be applied knowledge, applicable knowledge. They need to learn chemistry in a way that allows them to manipulate chemicals in their environment in ways that are useful. Math needs to be applied. You need to learn how to count money, how to calculate distances, how to understand probabilities in ways that apply to real life. This idea that education should be divorced from reality serves the corporate socialist system and takes power away from the people. Real, true, useful information is well protected. It only gets out when humble genius's decide to share it with the world rather than hoarding it in secret patents.
So, how do we redo our educational system? I think the education we have gotten was so bad, adults need to redo their own education. I propose we make computer programs that teach us applied chemistry, electronics, computer science, earth science, argumentation, thinking strategies, history, etc., in a way that is geared toward the attainment of a particular useful goal. The main goal of education is to empower people to improve their health, happiness, and longevity. You go through 12 years of education, and learn little more academic information than someone who didn't go to school at all. You do learn other valuable things, mostly things they aren't teaching, but which you learn from experience. But anyway, the scam needs to end. We must demand real education. After all, we are paying for it regardless. It may be that individuals will have to do this on their own, and as they are out-competing those who go to schools, governments may finally take notice and fix the scam in our educational system.
Lastly, the blame game has to stop. You don't blame teachers or students. It is all of our failure and it is due to our ignorance and greed. What the individual is, the society is. We are greedy and ignorant, so are our schools. Either we don't know how to educate people, or we aren't trying to, we're just trying to make a buck off government funds. We have to change.
What do you think?
Why it is failing is because corporations want to continue to produce impotent education and get a fat government check for it. They want to continue to make silly tests that shut people out of higher education. The model is competition but unfortunately, there are two ways to win a competition, you can make yourself better than the rest, or you can make everyone else worse than you. Unfortunately, we have taken the latter route. High class people pay for slightly better education, but lack of resources in poor communities insure they get bad education. However, the education at 'good schools' is also bad, the advantage one gets at good schools is better conformity, better behavior, and mostly, better connections and networking with upper class people. Sometimes they have some useful programs to teach real technology, but often they don't. They just have stricter rules and teach upper class culture, which gives them the advantage. Look at the rapist Brock Turner, in line to serve only 3 months for rape, because he's a white Stanford kid. http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/06/us/sexual-assault-brock-turner-stanford/ Meanwhile a black student convicted of rape is in line to serve 180 months http://www.voanews.com/content/former-vanderbilt-athlete-sentenced-fifteen-years-campus-rape/3420248.html That is the extent of the power and privilege that comes with upper class culture. The black student will get 60 times the punishment for the same crime. Yes, there is white privilege, there is upper class privilege, but if you have to tell someone that, it's probably pointless to talk to them on the issue at all.
Back to education, it is 2016, kids need to learn that which is useful to them. They need to learn to manipulate the things in their environment, especially the technologies but also nature. They should know how a car, a computer, a TV works, and how to fix them. They need to learn that which empowers them. They need to learn about human relationships. They need to learn thinking strategies, what I call algorithms, which I will demonstrate in a separate article. They need to learn different life paths they can take to success or they aren't completely lost when they leave grade school. They need to learn law, applied law, meaning laws that apply to them and the situations they may encounter. They need to learn how to participate in government. They need to learn real history, not that white American supremacist, pro-war, kings and queens stuff they teach in the schools. Most people were not kings or queens or warriors. What was everyone else doing while the handful of elite were waging war? That is history, not the politics of a small group of people. They need to learn about their health and wellness, and medical information, lots of it. I've seen so many people taking medications they have no idea what it is, and it seems unconcievable to me. However, their reading level is often so low, they know if they were to look it up, they still wouldn't understand much about what it is so they don't bother. It's a disempowered attitude, and it makes doctors into tyrants.
What they are learning now is what you can call the white New England culture model. Saying "ain't got no" is considered lack of education, when it isn't, that's just a different culture, it is fully equivalent to 'don't have any'. Lack of education is when you drive a car and watch a TV everyday and don't know how they work. It's not being able to read a nutrition label and see that something that says "low fat" is actually full of sugar and is NOT good for you. It is not being able to see the context of systems like government, schools, companies, scientific studies. Some people say the conditions surrounding a scientific study cannot effect the study because scientists weed out all outside influences. If you can see the financial and social context, you know that is far from true, and has now been pretty definitely proven. Scientific studies have recently been scandalized. Children need to learn how to argue effectively, and not that ancient spiel about logical fallacies alone. People don't understand logical fallacies at all, and they are ancient. There are very many ways to examine an argument, not the handful of fallacies from ancient Greece and Rome for goodness sakes. When you see someone doing nothing but pointing out logical fallacies in Greek or latin, you know that person is likely an idiot without thinking ability.
Everything the child is taught needs to be applied knowledge, applicable knowledge. They need to learn chemistry in a way that allows them to manipulate chemicals in their environment in ways that are useful. Math needs to be applied. You need to learn how to count money, how to calculate distances, how to understand probabilities in ways that apply to real life. This idea that education should be divorced from reality serves the corporate socialist system and takes power away from the people. Real, true, useful information is well protected. It only gets out when humble genius's decide to share it with the world rather than hoarding it in secret patents.
So, how do we redo our educational system? I think the education we have gotten was so bad, adults need to redo their own education. I propose we make computer programs that teach us applied chemistry, electronics, computer science, earth science, argumentation, thinking strategies, history, etc., in a way that is geared toward the attainment of a particular useful goal. The main goal of education is to empower people to improve their health, happiness, and longevity. You go through 12 years of education, and learn little more academic information than someone who didn't go to school at all. You do learn other valuable things, mostly things they aren't teaching, but which you learn from experience. But anyway, the scam needs to end. We must demand real education. After all, we are paying for it regardless. It may be that individuals will have to do this on their own, and as they are out-competing those who go to schools, governments may finally take notice and fix the scam in our educational system.
Lastly, the blame game has to stop. You don't blame teachers or students. It is all of our failure and it is due to our ignorance and greed. What the individual is, the society is. We are greedy and ignorant, so are our schools. Either we don't know how to educate people, or we aren't trying to, we're just trying to make a buck off government funds. We have to change.
What do you think?
Fractal government
Fears of a global caliphate or that you should be okay with their culture are overblown. If you don't like the culture you can use money and resources to go educate them.
We should be held responsible for these things, responsibility is not blame. And not just our predecessors messed up. We messed up. I was here paying my taxes, going about life, and not protesting when the illegitimate Bush Administration decided to go make a mess of the whole region. Same thing with the Obama Administration. We are all complicit. Our only excuse is ignorance and powerlessness. but those are convincing excuses. We therefore have responsibility, not blame. No one truly has blame because their is no such thing as freewill. Blaming a human is ontologically equivalent to blaming a car. If your car messes up, you gotta fix it, not blame it. If it's way too messed up, you may have to destroy it, but we want to limit that when it comes to human being. Some of us want to limit that.
Even if none of it was our fault, we still have responsibility. If your house is burning down, it doesn't matter who or what caused it, you have responsibility to fix it. It's the same with climate change. The cause doesn't matter, we need to try to slow it down to give us time to adapt.
What can we do? Unfortunately, we are uneducated and powerless and have very little connection to our politicians. So first we have to regain our own power and freedom. We need advanced education to do that. We have to outcompete and oust corporatism, but they have all the money and all the resources. We have the people, and if we can also add the intelligence, we can win, change the system, and stop it from being a war-bucks scheme.
Many businesses, and a few individuals know, the easiest way to get guaranteed money is to get it from the government. In my city, the two largest employers are the military, and the school district. So what we have is a covert welfare state. But instead of just giving people a handout, we make them go to war and disperse impotent education for a paycheck. We do this because we have plenty of money but few jobs in our country. But the socialist corporate system has figured this out. Yet, that's not even the worst of it. When the banks went bust, they just went for the straight handout. No public works or charity work, just give us the money. And we went for it, which means, the next crash is coming. Imagine it, when these banks failed and the government bailed them out, people got fat checks for their failure. Imagine that. Most people are embarrassed when they have to get government checks for failing at their job, but corporations had been milking the government for a long time and they are smart enough not to despise a government check.
If the country is socialist, the better model may be straight democratic socialism rather than corporate socialism. Note, I'm not saying the country should be socialist, I'm saying, if it already is, we want democratic socialism rather than corporate socialism because corporate socialism is inherently fragile. It is building a complex structure with cheap materials.
Capitalism is ideally fractal, meaning each individual person is a capitalist, a business entity unto himself, and then people come together and make companies that are business entities. That makes it such that if one part fails, it doesn't take down the whole structure. Corporate socialism concentrates money and resources among the few and leaves everyone else vulnerable, uneducated, and dependent of their very next paycheck. That's a fragile system because if the people at the top fail, everyone fails because they were waiting on that next paycheck and with the banks failing, it may not come. So they have the gun to our head and we are insuring their failure, giving up some of our labor, working for free, to continue to inflate their pockets. And, setting them up to fail again, even worse.
The human body is fractal. It is made of cells wrapped in a membrane and the human being is full of cells and wrapped in a membrane. Cells have receptors, we have senses. We are fragile in that our powers of regeneration are not as good as say a starfish but we evolved where there were no guns that could poke a whole in you so easily.
So we have to regain local power. That may mean withdrawing from corporate work, finding local work for locally-owned companies, starting your own business and not selling it to corporations. But mostly it means getting educated and educating everyone else.
We should be held responsible for these things, responsibility is not blame. And not just our predecessors messed up. We messed up. I was here paying my taxes, going about life, and not protesting when the illegitimate Bush Administration decided to go make a mess of the whole region. Same thing with the Obama Administration. We are all complicit. Our only excuse is ignorance and powerlessness. but those are convincing excuses. We therefore have responsibility, not blame. No one truly has blame because their is no such thing as freewill. Blaming a human is ontologically equivalent to blaming a car. If your car messes up, you gotta fix it, not blame it. If it's way too messed up, you may have to destroy it, but we want to limit that when it comes to human being. Some of us want to limit that.
Even if none of it was our fault, we still have responsibility. If your house is burning down, it doesn't matter who or what caused it, you have responsibility to fix it. It's the same with climate change. The cause doesn't matter, we need to try to slow it down to give us time to adapt.
What can we do? Unfortunately, we are uneducated and powerless and have very little connection to our politicians. So first we have to regain our own power and freedom. We need advanced education to do that. We have to outcompete and oust corporatism, but they have all the money and all the resources. We have the people, and if we can also add the intelligence, we can win, change the system, and stop it from being a war-bucks scheme.
Many businesses, and a few individuals know, the easiest way to get guaranteed money is to get it from the government. In my city, the two largest employers are the military, and the school district. So what we have is a covert welfare state. But instead of just giving people a handout, we make them go to war and disperse impotent education for a paycheck. We do this because we have plenty of money but few jobs in our country. But the socialist corporate system has figured this out. Yet, that's not even the worst of it. When the banks went bust, they just went for the straight handout. No public works or charity work, just give us the money. And we went for it, which means, the next crash is coming. Imagine it, when these banks failed and the government bailed them out, people got fat checks for their failure. Imagine that. Most people are embarrassed when they have to get government checks for failing at their job, but corporations had been milking the government for a long time and they are smart enough not to despise a government check.
If the country is socialist, the better model may be straight democratic socialism rather than corporate socialism. Note, I'm not saying the country should be socialist, I'm saying, if it already is, we want democratic socialism rather than corporate socialism because corporate socialism is inherently fragile. It is building a complex structure with cheap materials.
Capitalism is ideally fractal, meaning each individual person is a capitalist, a business entity unto himself, and then people come together and make companies that are business entities. That makes it such that if one part fails, it doesn't take down the whole structure. Corporate socialism concentrates money and resources among the few and leaves everyone else vulnerable, uneducated, and dependent of their very next paycheck. That's a fragile system because if the people at the top fail, everyone fails because they were waiting on that next paycheck and with the banks failing, it may not come. So they have the gun to our head and we are insuring their failure, giving up some of our labor, working for free, to continue to inflate their pockets. And, setting them up to fail again, even worse.
The human body is fractal. It is made of cells wrapped in a membrane and the human being is full of cells and wrapped in a membrane. Cells have receptors, we have senses. We are fragile in that our powers of regeneration are not as good as say a starfish but we evolved where there were no guns that could poke a whole in you so easily.
So we have to regain local power. That may mean withdrawing from corporate work, finding local work for locally-owned companies, starting your own business and not selling it to corporations. But mostly it means getting educated and educating everyone else.
Thursday, May 5, 2016
What is Intelligence? Part II The Smart Generalist
As a disclaimer, since I will be talking about intelligence, morality trumps intelligence. It's not that easy of course to be moral with little intelligence; however, we will all get old and some of our brains will become feeble but that does not make us useless. One can still be moral.
The writer, me, is not a genius or a sage. I am a smart generalist. My IQ was measured at 144 in middle school, more or less around genius level, I however disavow that IQ is a measure of raw intelligence. I believed in IQ at the time and wanted to do well on the test, so I did. Back then, I was very quick and sharp, of course that fades with age, but it is made up for with greater content knowledge and wisdom. It is possible to calculate an intelligence score using these factors; a score that can be tested against the idea of IQ
I am able to continue spending time writing on this topic because there is at least one target of increased value here, if we can figure out what intelligence truly is, we can possibly measure intelligence and increase intelligence. People with increased intelligence may be healthier, happier, and less violent. It may be possible to for people to take their power back from totalitarian governments and corporations if they are intelligent.
Intelligence can also be considered information processing ability. We will look more into this, as calculations can be made of the amount of information someone is processing. We will also talk about condescension. Put simply, if one person's intelligence contains your information ability and content and more than that, that person can only condescend as the other person will not have the tools, the information content and thought strategies, to understand your position.
Also, the information processing ability of persons in a population can have dramatic effects for that society. For example, presently, March 5, 2016, presidential candidate Donald Trump has gained the support of many Americans, despite demonstrating sexism, racism, violent plans and behavior, and lack of understanding of basic issues, and promises plans that would be disastrous if carried out such as deporting all illegal immigrants on day one. He has the support of people who have never voted before, but who like the celebrity character he portrays on a television show called 'The Apprentice'. They are unable to research his past statements or understand the dynamics of his 'inheritance to bankruptcy to paid celebrity' pattern and what that means about the claim that he is good with money. They then become programmed to ignore valid information and thus the memes that cause them to support him also cause them to stop learning, and this become dumber since knowledge decays like any information on physical media. So, if we could raise people's information processing ability, they can be more informed and make better decisions about who to vote for, or the need to completely fundamentally change our governance, reduce government, and give that power to individuals.
Being intelligent and having an education is not the same. Particularly, those with an education sometimes do not have the ability to create and perform strategies to mutate and use their content knowledge. The single algorithm they know is to believe what they are told and to repeat it. They have content knowledge, and a single algorithm they were given, rather than something they mutated themselves. Also the algorithm, 'belief', that they are using, causes them to close their minds to other content knowledge and strategies. Why are people taught this way? Because dominated societies, civilizations, governments, corporations, need to get many people on the same page, and they can specialize. They don't need the populace thinking independently because they take on the executive, and decision-making roles.
What we want as a society is a large number of people who are at least at the stage of being a Smart Guy or Smart Generalist (SG), basically someone with common sense and reasonably high ability in all aspects of intelligence listed, has high knowledge of many fields, and may also specialize in something but will not specialize in one thing and be dumb at everything else. They are simply basically intelligent, creative, able to think independently, and they have basic content of basic social and cultural knowledge, sufficient to effectively navigate their own particular social context. They are able to argue effectively. They are likely to be reasonably healthy-looking for their age. If they don't know something they need to know, they are able to seek out the correct information and incorporate it. Many people who often make false assertions lack information processing ability to the extent they cannot look up the right answer, locate the right answer, and understand it and due to that are always carrying misconceptions. The most important aspect is to be creative, meaning having the ability to independently mutate strategies and algorithms to solve a problem. No one has given him the algorithm to use to solve the problem, he is able to come up with one that produces a desired effect. The non-content knowledge aspects are most important to producing the Smart Generalist because people who are conscious are actually experiencing lots of information at all times, so everyone whose consciousness is not severely muted is being flooded with and dealing with information. So people will get content, being smart is about being able to interpret, process, create strategies, and carry them out effectively. So the smart generalist could be a survivalist living in the woods with a partner in Alaska living completely off the land, no education. But if you tell him about the political landscape then ask his opinion, he can give as good an opinion as someone who had been following it everyday for years, even though he had not known anything about it before. He has thinking ability and strategy. He will hear the names of the political players, their positions and automatically memorize them and process that information to produce very useful views on the situation. An analogy is a computer programmer, since they deal with information. There is a problem he wants to solve. He is able to, without anyone telling him how to do it, produce a program to help solve the problem, all on his own. There are people, though it seem incredible, who have no ability to mutate and create new information processing strategies and output new content. They can only believe what they are told and repeat it. So one way to identify a Smart Generalist versus the simpleton, is that you can give them unfamiliar content that neither have ever been exposed to and a problem, then ask them to discuss it from their own thinking. The Smart Guy will be able to mutate new information on the spot and speculate intelligently. The simpleton, or rather in this case, the False Intellectual (FI), no matter how 'educated', will be unable to intelligently discussed it because he hasn't read about it before and no one has told him what to think. The False Intellectual has only content knowledge and culture, but does not have creativity or the ability to mutate information and produce new strategies and content. I have even observed FA's assert that it is illegitimate to think for yourself. He felt scientific thinking an legitimate thought consists only of believing what you have been told by those considered authorities. That is infantile, so this is a person on a lower level of psychological development, an Intellectual Juvenile (IJ). One would only have intellectual discussion with such person when there is a possibility you may teach him something or if you are learning things and enjoying the discussion. You should not put your hopes on convincing the person because they are not able to be instantly bumped up to a higher level of development anymore than they can grow their brain physically larger in order to comprehend you.
The ability to quickly mutate new information and deeply think in real time we will call thought productivity.
I am often arguing online and someone will assert something demonstrably wrong and I will have to look it up for them and show them the answer. I previously assumed that since we are arguing about things with political implications, they are simply asserting and spreading propaganda that they know is false. However, I discovered these people often simply could not google the information, read it, understand it, and produce coherent views. Their social information ability level is the level of gossip. They can only hear claims, select the ones they like, and believe them, and so are at the mercy of propagandists, PR people, and thinktanks. By age 40, they are taking at least 4 medications they don't know the name of or what it does. If you tell them, they will not remember it the next day, nor can they suggest a better medication to their doctor. Hence, it is found in an interesting study in Europe that people who had higher IQ as children did not make more money than those with lower IQ, but were healthier, even when controlled for confounders.
Now, Let's go back over the aspects that comprise our cognitive theory of intelligence and if they can be improved and possibly how to improve them, We will see how we can use them to calculate intelligence also. Also, what it may look like physically.
This is the easiest to improve. Just read and go out and explore the world. Create a large diversity of experiences. Content knowledge depends on long-term memory and working memory. You want a large amount of content memory, then the ability to focus on and apply as much of this information as you can, which is working memory. Memory is a city of tools, and working memory is like the tools you have at hand to use right now, the amount of tools you can use quicly at once, and how quickly you can retriever other tools.
The Smart Generalist has content knowledge at around 8 points, theoretically. Someone needing to rise to the level of the smart guy would need to do alot of reading in history, science and technology, philosophy, and the fields that most applies to ones success and desires in life and take the time to try to comprehend and understand the reading. There then needs to be hands on experience of complex activities like sports, hunting, and of course extensive social contact, which is incredibly important.
These are algorithms that you apply to information to produce new content or actions.
The Smart Generalist has lots of algorithms in his memory and can create many more easily. The simpleton only has one, belief. The False Intellectual only has the ones he has gotten from teachers or reading.
Physically, this is the same as content knowledge; however, since the strategies can be applied to many different types of information, it will have more connections throughout the brain if it is used often for many different purposes. We will latterly go over things that increase synaptagenesis.
This ability can be demonstrated and measured by having a person produce information-dense discussion of an unfamiliar subject and proposing newly mutated solutions to novel problems.
Choosing a strategy and performing it.
This can be demonstrated same as the above, having people choose and apply a newly mutated strategy to an unfamiliar problem, a real problem not an artificial problem with one right answer.
Physically, this is the actions of the neurons, growth, and making connections. It is movement and metabolism. It is the use of extensive connections and many different brain areas.
Strategy performance and the content of strategies combined are the most important factor in intelligence, if you had to choose just one aspect to call intelligence. It is not content knowledge, it is the ability to process content to produce creative solutions.
This is the accuracy and efficiency of carrying out strategies. This is like being good at math. It does not require creativity. The Academician will have content knowledge and ability to perform operations. This is what is mostly called intelligence and tested for. It is however very limited and can be done much better by computers, while creativity cannot yet easily be achieved by computers.
This looks physically like the performance of strategies described above. It is the movement. Content, theoretically, can be contained on a brain that is frozen, performing no operations, or on a hard-drive. Performance requires movement or electromagnetic action in the brain.
This is the second most important aspect of intelligence. It allows one to perform meta-operations on content knowledge and strategies. To categorize science from belief.
Physically this looks like hyper-connectivity or hyper-communication across neurons, because a philosophy like science applies to alot of the information in one's memory.
The Smart Generalist has deep philosophical reasoning, even if he has never read philosophy.
Working memory is also very important, and it includes both the present environment, and the mental tools available for use quickly. For example, a person looking at a periodic table of elements has nearly the same ability as someone who has memorized it, because if he can see it and read it, it's in his awareness, his memory, it just goes away, mostly, when he is no longer looking at it. With our present ability to look up information on computers, it is probably a waste of time to memorize things you can quickly look up. Instead become better at deciding what needs to be looked up and quickly making effective use of it.
Working memory is probably difficult to change or increase as it is basically the scope of one's awareness of both the environment and one's own mind and body. Having larger brain regions that are involved in conscious awareness or more efficiency in these regions. Substances that increase one's awareness can sometimes increase working memory, usually stimulants used to improve intellectual performance, but these are likely to have side effects that eventually destroy intelligence. There may be more natural choice, such as microdosing natural hallucinogens, not to get a hallucinogenic effect but a slight increase in awareness.
Therefore an enriched learning and technological environment can be a huge part of one's intelligence. Those with lots of technologies and who are good at using them will easily improve their working memory, but only while they have access to those technologies. In the future, we will likely become well integrated with such technologies. Not that we will turn into robots but that we will be able to obtain information even more quickly and easily than a google search.
The Smart Guy has a decent memory. However, having a photographic memory or perfect autobiographical memory appears not to give a person much of an advantage, though most people believe incorrectly that it does. However, if one is not able to mutate creative strategies, good memory of content is not as useful.
That's enough for now friends, please leave comments and especially questions and conundrums we can think about.
We will subsequently talk about the following:
What combinations create what thinking types?
The Dunning-Kruger Effect
Social intelligence, being able to tell when you are being fooled
Calculating how much information someone is processing
Condecision
Effects on society of information processing ability
Does being a Smart Generalist equal riches and success?
What if you meet someone way smarter than you? What relationship should you have to them?
How different or similar are individuals?
The writer, me, is not a genius or a sage. I am a smart generalist. My IQ was measured at 144 in middle school, more or less around genius level, I however disavow that IQ is a measure of raw intelligence. I believed in IQ at the time and wanted to do well on the test, so I did. Back then, I was very quick and sharp, of course that fades with age, but it is made up for with greater content knowledge and wisdom. It is possible to calculate an intelligence score using these factors; a score that can be tested against the idea of IQ
I am able to continue spending time writing on this topic because there is at least one target of increased value here, if we can figure out what intelligence truly is, we can possibly measure intelligence and increase intelligence. People with increased intelligence may be healthier, happier, and less violent. It may be possible to for people to take their power back from totalitarian governments and corporations if they are intelligent.
Intelligence can also be considered information processing ability. We will look more into this, as calculations can be made of the amount of information someone is processing. We will also talk about condescension. Put simply, if one person's intelligence contains your information ability and content and more than that, that person can only condescend as the other person will not have the tools, the information content and thought strategies, to understand your position.
Also, the information processing ability of persons in a population can have dramatic effects for that society. For example, presently, March 5, 2016, presidential candidate Donald Trump has gained the support of many Americans, despite demonstrating sexism, racism, violent plans and behavior, and lack of understanding of basic issues, and promises plans that would be disastrous if carried out such as deporting all illegal immigrants on day one. He has the support of people who have never voted before, but who like the celebrity character he portrays on a television show called 'The Apprentice'. They are unable to research his past statements or understand the dynamics of his 'inheritance to bankruptcy to paid celebrity' pattern and what that means about the claim that he is good with money. They then become programmed to ignore valid information and thus the memes that cause them to support him also cause them to stop learning, and this become dumber since knowledge decays like any information on physical media. So, if we could raise people's information processing ability, they can be more informed and make better decisions about who to vote for, or the need to completely fundamentally change our governance, reduce government, and give that power to individuals.
Being intelligent and having an education is not the same. Particularly, those with an education sometimes do not have the ability to create and perform strategies to mutate and use their content knowledge. The single algorithm they know is to believe what they are told and to repeat it. They have content knowledge, and a single algorithm they were given, rather than something they mutated themselves. Also the algorithm, 'belief', that they are using, causes them to close their minds to other content knowledge and strategies. Why are people taught this way? Because dominated societies, civilizations, governments, corporations, need to get many people on the same page, and they can specialize. They don't need the populace thinking independently because they take on the executive, and decision-making roles.
What we want as a society is a large number of people who are at least at the stage of being a Smart Guy or Smart Generalist (SG), basically someone with common sense and reasonably high ability in all aspects of intelligence listed, has high knowledge of many fields, and may also specialize in something but will not specialize in one thing and be dumb at everything else. They are simply basically intelligent, creative, able to think independently, and they have basic content of basic social and cultural knowledge, sufficient to effectively navigate their own particular social context. They are able to argue effectively. They are likely to be reasonably healthy-looking for their age. If they don't know something they need to know, they are able to seek out the correct information and incorporate it. Many people who often make false assertions lack information processing ability to the extent they cannot look up the right answer, locate the right answer, and understand it and due to that are always carrying misconceptions. The most important aspect is to be creative, meaning having the ability to independently mutate strategies and algorithms to solve a problem. No one has given him the algorithm to use to solve the problem, he is able to come up with one that produces a desired effect. The non-content knowledge aspects are most important to producing the Smart Generalist because people who are conscious are actually experiencing lots of information at all times, so everyone whose consciousness is not severely muted is being flooded with and dealing with information. So people will get content, being smart is about being able to interpret, process, create strategies, and carry them out effectively. So the smart generalist could be a survivalist living in the woods with a partner in Alaska living completely off the land, no education. But if you tell him about the political landscape then ask his opinion, he can give as good an opinion as someone who had been following it everyday for years, even though he had not known anything about it before. He has thinking ability and strategy. He will hear the names of the political players, their positions and automatically memorize them and process that information to produce very useful views on the situation. An analogy is a computer programmer, since they deal with information. There is a problem he wants to solve. He is able to, without anyone telling him how to do it, produce a program to help solve the problem, all on his own. There are people, though it seem incredible, who have no ability to mutate and create new information processing strategies and output new content. They can only believe what they are told and repeat it. So one way to identify a Smart Generalist versus the simpleton, is that you can give them unfamiliar content that neither have ever been exposed to and a problem, then ask them to discuss it from their own thinking. The Smart Guy will be able to mutate new information on the spot and speculate intelligently. The simpleton, or rather in this case, the False Intellectual (FI), no matter how 'educated', will be unable to intelligently discussed it because he hasn't read about it before and no one has told him what to think. The False Intellectual has only content knowledge and culture, but does not have creativity or the ability to mutate information and produce new strategies and content. I have even observed FA's assert that it is illegitimate to think for yourself. He felt scientific thinking an legitimate thought consists only of believing what you have been told by those considered authorities. That is infantile, so this is a person on a lower level of psychological development, an Intellectual Juvenile (IJ). One would only have intellectual discussion with such person when there is a possibility you may teach him something or if you are learning things and enjoying the discussion. You should not put your hopes on convincing the person because they are not able to be instantly bumped up to a higher level of development anymore than they can grow their brain physically larger in order to comprehend you.
The ability to quickly mutate new information and deeply think in real time we will call thought productivity.
I am often arguing online and someone will assert something demonstrably wrong and I will have to look it up for them and show them the answer. I previously assumed that since we are arguing about things with political implications, they are simply asserting and spreading propaganda that they know is false. However, I discovered these people often simply could not google the information, read it, understand it, and produce coherent views. Their social information ability level is the level of gossip. They can only hear claims, select the ones they like, and believe them, and so are at the mercy of propagandists, PR people, and thinktanks. By age 40, they are taking at least 4 medications they don't know the name of or what it does. If you tell them, they will not remember it the next day, nor can they suggest a better medication to their doctor. Hence, it is found in an interesting study in Europe that people who had higher IQ as children did not make more money than those with lower IQ, but were healthier, even when controlled for confounders.
Now, Let's go back over the aspects that comprise our cognitive theory of intelligence and if they can be improved and possibly how to improve them, We will see how we can use them to calculate intelligence also. Also, what it may look like physically.
1. Rote content knowledge (aka CK, knowledge). 10 points
The Smart Generalist has content knowledge at around 8 points, theoretically. Someone needing to rise to the level of the smart guy would need to do alot of reading in history, science and technology, philosophy, and the fields that most applies to ones success and desires in life and take the time to try to comprehend and understand the reading. There then needs to be hands on experience of complex activities like sports, hunting, and of course extensive social contact, which is incredibly important.
2. Strategy content (Creativity or SC): 10 points
These are algorithms that you apply to information to produce new content or actions.
The Smart Generalist has lots of algorithms in his memory and can create many more easily. The simpleton only has one, belief. The False Intellectual only has the ones he has gotten from teachers or reading.
Physically, this is the same as content knowledge; however, since the strategies can be applied to many different types of information, it will have more connections throughout the brain if it is used often for many different purposes. We will latterly go over things that increase synaptagenesis.
This ability can be demonstrated and measured by having a person produce information-dense discussion of an unfamiliar subject and proposing newly mutated solutions to novel problems.
3. Strategy choosing (SC): Creative action
Choosing a strategy and performing it.
This can be demonstrated same as the above, having people choose and apply a newly mutated strategy to an unfamiliar problem, a real problem not an artificial problem with one right answer.
Physically, this is the actions of the neurons, growth, and making connections. It is movement and metabolism. It is the use of extensive connections and many different brain areas.
Strategy performance and the content of strategies combined are the most important factor in intelligence, if you had to choose just one aspect to call intelligence. It is not content knowledge, it is the ability to process content to produce creative solutions.
4. Performance of operations:
This looks physically like the performance of strategies described above. It is the movement. Content, theoretically, can be contained on a brain that is frozen, performing no operations, or on a hard-drive. Performance requires movement or electromagnetic action in the brain.
5. Philosophical and meta-knowledge:
This is the second most important aspect of intelligence. It allows one to perform meta-operations on content knowledge and strategies. To categorize science from belief.
Physically this looks like hyper-connectivity or hyper-communication across neurons, because a philosophy like science applies to alot of the information in one's memory.
The Smart Generalist has deep philosophical reasoning, even if he has never read philosophy.
6. Working memory WMP+:
Working memory is also very important, and it includes both the present environment, and the mental tools available for use quickly. For example, a person looking at a periodic table of elements has nearly the same ability as someone who has memorized it, because if he can see it and read it, it's in his awareness, his memory, it just goes away, mostly, when he is no longer looking at it. With our present ability to look up information on computers, it is probably a waste of time to memorize things you can quickly look up. Instead become better at deciding what needs to be looked up and quickly making effective use of it.
Working memory is probably difficult to change or increase as it is basically the scope of one's awareness of both the environment and one's own mind and body. Having larger brain regions that are involved in conscious awareness or more efficiency in these regions. Substances that increase one's awareness can sometimes increase working memory, usually stimulants used to improve intellectual performance, but these are likely to have side effects that eventually destroy intelligence. There may be more natural choice, such as microdosing natural hallucinogens, not to get a hallucinogenic effect but a slight increase in awareness.
Therefore an enriched learning and technological environment can be a huge part of one's intelligence. Those with lots of technologies and who are good at using them will easily improve their working memory, but only while they have access to those technologies. In the future, we will likely become well integrated with such technologies. Not that we will turn into robots but that we will be able to obtain information even more quickly and easily than a google search.
7. Total memory (performance)TMP+:
8. Physical brain health, healthy metabolism, and brain speed.
We will go over substances and technologies that may improve brain health and performance.
The Smart Guy reasonably protects his health and will tend to look generally physically healthy. Not all of them, but as a trend they will be more physically attractive than simpletons or False Intellectuals (sometimes referred to as nerds).
9. Intellectual habits
Simply put, bad habits like willful ignorance decrease intelligence. Habits like open-mindedness may improve intelligence. The person who does lazy thinking, rejects expansive information, literally seeks ignorance is called a Thought Slob (TS). He is the obnoxious person, often right-wing, but sometimes left-wing, Christian, Nation of Islam, or Zionist. He is proud of his lack of sophistication and ignorance.
10. Learning ability
This overlaps with many of the aspects already mentioned but it included again because the brain is such a complex information system we have surely missed some aspects and we will include those here. The smart guy has a pretty good ability to acquire content knowledge. He can comprehend the things he reads and hears.
He has a wide context in which to interpret the information he receives.
We will subsequently talk about the following:
What combinations create what thinking types?
The Dunning-Kruger Effect
Social intelligence, being able to tell when you are being fooled
Calculating how much information someone is processing
Condecision
Effects on society of information processing ability
Does being a Smart Generalist equal riches and success?
What if you meet someone way smarter than you? What relationship should you have to them?
How different or similar are individuals?
Tuesday, May 3, 2016
What is Intelligence? How to get the Smartest People, Part I
Here's my views on intelligence
I'm trained as a psychologist which is a branch of the humanities and politics despite what you've been told but I can accept that. And the adultery between the sciences and humanities is good in my opinion. Anyway, the point is, I will not sound like a computer programmer or neurobiologist.
Information is any virtual data byte, modeled on any medium, be it on paper or in human brains, or in cells. By virtual I only mean that it is not tied to a medium, though it has to have a medium. In addition to content knowledge, you have relationships between information, which are descriptors of information (like metaphor). And operations to process information and produce an output. You also have to decide what strategy to use to process the information, and you have your catalogue of strategies.
Here's how that breaks down as a cognitive theory:
1. Rote content knowledge.
Like information on a hard-drive, may be text, visual, audio data, etc. I'll call this rote information. In 1+1=2, the rote content is 1,1,2. Kim Peek, autistic savant, had lots of content knowledge from books, but lacked basic abilities. So basically, he had lots of content knowledge fewer strategies for transforming that content and making it useful. To be intelligent, you want a larger quantity of rote content knowledge; however, as the example of Kim Peek shows, even having a tremendous amount does not make one intelligent (as Kim Peek could not dress himself, navigate basic social situations, and other things we take for granted)
So, RC+
Another form of content knowledge is strategies:
2. Strategy content:
Strategies are the operations that produce an output from a piece of content knowledge input. It may be an algorithm. Strategy content is the rote information content of a strategy, rather than the performance of the strategy. One would want to maximize the quantity of strategies. So, SC+. In 1+1=2, the strategy content is addition (other strategies could be multiplication or division). These are strategies that one can do to numbers and there are of course many in mathematics.3. Strategy choice and performance (SCP):
The performance of a strategy and the ability to pick the right strategy to apply to a problem is another aspect of intelligence. This is a quality centered in but not limited to the brain. In the equation 1+1=2, the SCP aspect is that when presented with two separate oranges and someone asks how many ya got, you are able to choose the strategy of addition and to perform the operation to get the correct answer. The person who is able to do this is called creative and wise, creative when it's applied to novel problems and wise when applied to everyday issues. This includes the ability to make useful value judgements and do cost-benefit analysis. And far more importantly and too frequently neglected is the ability to make decisions under uncertainty.
4. Performance of operations:
Another aspect is the effective performance of operations. In the example 1+1=2, the simple performance to get the right answer is what is meant.
5. Philosophical and meta-knowledge:
This is the ability to apply philosophical frameworks to knowledge. For example, taking a scientific approach, or a belief approach (to knowledge). One would want a greater content of philosophical strategies, and the ability to correctly choose and apply a framework to knowledge. For example one may have a strategy of privileging a scientific approach over a religious approach. Science and belief are only two algorithms for how to frame knowledge, there are many others and the intelligent person has many and applies them creatively. In the example of 1+1=2, one can frame this as cardinal numbers, ordinal, etc., meaning there are different philosophical frameworks from which to see these numbers and the intelligent person has many. Essentialism is a philosophical system that denies all other philsophical frames, thus, someone who is only essentialist or absolutist denies this form of intelligence. Many people are unaware that 1+1=2 is not just absolutely 'right'. It is an information fragment that requires a philosophical frame and fits in many frames, not just one. There are also frames where the statement is not correct.
6. Working memory (performance) WMP+:
Working memory is a performance variable of the amount of memory available for quick real-time use and ability to retrieve these memories. It also includes real-time awareness of both past memory, present memory, and present awareness capacity. Present awareness capacity is one's present awareness of mind, body, and the outside world. This includes such abilties as walking and swallowing, which do not seem like important intellectual activities but are in fact very important. In fact, swallowing difficulties can cause health problems and death in infants and others, while falls are a major causes of disability and death for older persons. These abilities have important intellectual aspects.
Attention difficulties are a well-researched intellectual challenge. So the most intelligent person has clear and effective attention to his thoughts, his body (can effectively move, swallow, and interpret pains intelligently and modify behavior accordingly for positive health outcomes), his environment (can see danger in his periphery while focused an absorbing task), and has excellent memory retrieval.
Present awareness is memory and hence has a small, unnoticeable delay.
7. Total memory (performance)TMP+:
Total memory is content and retrieval of long-term and short-term memories. The most intelligent person has a great ability to store and retrieve memories.8. Physical brain health, healthy metabolism, and brain speed.
The mind and body must be healthy for greater intelligence. This includes speed of learning, literal speed of the brain, and effective metabolism.
9. Intellectual habits
One's habits, emotional and intellectual affect or comprise intelligence.10. Learning ability
Some examples:
Kim Peek. Very high content knowledge, performance of operations, memory, and retrieval. Low awareness, philosophical understanding, physical health, social performance and creativity. Though considered a savant, he was also considered mentally challenged. He was also unable to use creative strategies to apply all of that information in a useful way.
Krishnamurti (philosopher). The appeared to have very high philosophical understanding, but disavowed academic learning, thus lacking alot of academic content. He also disavowed 9 to 5 work and intelligence tests. If you had to choose one of these people to have their ability, you would most likely choose Krishnamurti who was able in all useful ways rather than Kim Peek who had lots of content knowledge and retrieval but was incapacitated by social and mental disability.
People with sky high IQ and photographic or perfect autobiographical memory do not rise to be the most powerful persons or the greatest innovators. This means that these measures do not indicate the greatest intelligence, or that these intelligences alone will not suffice to produce exceptional outcomes.
What's wrong with intelligence tests?
Intelligence tests basically don't measure independent thinking and creativity which are the strongest indicators of intelligence. It pretends to measure strategy and performance but the truth is, those who do well have learned by rote the strategies to be used to choose the 'correct' answer. So it is a demonstration of only content and performance, no creativity or independent thinking. However, those who score highly can safely be said to have the content knowledge and performance ability, yet they will not necessarily have creativity or independent thinking ability.
These tests can measure rote content knowledge, and mathematical operations and strategies but again it is done in an essentialist and artificial context and hence the correlations that are sometimes found with success measures are most likely confounded. High technology employers understand this and many are recently giving less weight to education or even rejecting those with degrees but no demonstration of ability to produce value. Employers have always rarely used test scores for hiring.
Also, most effective intellectual performance is the result of practice at a specific skill or job, rather than a general intelligence factor.
Intelligence tests are good for identifying low intelligence aspects, like an inability to read, but once ability approaches normal intelligence, differences in scores are less informative.
Specific intelligences and general intelligences:
Most intellectual performance for work and school depends on practice, not a general intelligence factor. So if one wanted to become good say, at coding, studying math isn't going to do it. You have to practice coding.However, all of the factors I have expounded are general intelligence factors except perhaps content knowledge. It is not likely for one to be 'smarter' than those of normal or great intelligence, except smarter at specific things.
It is however possible for one to be 'smarter' than someone of sufficient intelligence or one's past self if one were to have significantly better functioning of the intelligence factors listed, greater working memory, greater total memory, greater operation performance, greater thinking speed and brain metabolism, greater creativity, more strategies and ability to apply these to problems, and greater philosophical understanding. The latter are most amenable to change and practice. One could learn basic decision-making strategies and when to apply them.
How to become generally smarter:
Becoming specifically more intelligent is simply a matter of practice, but can one become generally more intelligent, at many things or all things?Increase quantity of general decision- making and performance strategies:
One could learn or practice general thinking strategies and heuristics. One might research the work of Nassim Taleb and the works that he references for greater understanding of heuristics that apply to many areas of life and the understanding of probability and decision-making under uncertainty. Here are some examples of such heuristics from Nassim Taleb:
- "If something looks irrational – and has been so for a long time – odds are you have a wrong definition of rationality.
- Never take investment advice from someone who has to work for a living.
- Being an entrepreneur is an existential, not just a financial thing.
- The first one who uses “but”, has lost the argument."
Creativity: Unique solutions to novel problems. It's not clear that one can improve creative ability but it's worth a try. So one would practice by doing, fixing real problems with creative solutions.
Philosophical and meta-knowledge: One can increase this by studying philsophy with an open-mind. Kuhn, Feyerbrand, are good places to start on philosophies of knowledge.
Working memory, total memory, and speed of learning:
It is quite difficult to increase any of these, from what we know. There are some nootropics such as donezepil may improve memory and supplements like creatine that can provide greater brain energy. Exercise of course improves brain health and neurogenesis. It is important to keep healthy to slow the natural decline of brain metabolism.
There are memory champions who mostly claim to have no innate advantages at memorizing things, but who use strategies they have learned so these may be worth learning.
So basically, study philosophy, probability, decison-making under uncertainty, and heuristics. Also, exercise, sleep, and protect your health.
Intellectual habits. Good intellectual habits like having integrity, admitting when one has been proven wrong and changing one's mind when one is wrong are necessary. One can improve one's habits to increase intelligence. One thing to do is get ready to be wrong and to quickly change your mind to the stronger argument rather than trying to hang on to weak arguments that you have come to identify with. Stop identifying oneself with any arguments.
In argumentum:
In argumentation, the person of greater intelligence will often run into the Dunning-Kruger effect. Greater knowledge tends to induce humility and lack of asserting one's position over others, while ignorance engenders a false confidence and assertiveness. Thus, in arguments, the stupid one thinks he is right because he is stupid. How do you know if you have over-matched your opponent (and thus will eventually become embarrassed)? If you know all that your opponent knows and more and also have more thinking strategies and philosophical strategies, you have over-matched your opponent and should not expect a good debate. You should leave immediately if you do not want to deal with embarrassment. It is like arguing with a child, you are likely to become embarrassed at having taken a child seriously. Also, the child will not admit defeat and will be unable to appreciate the points you are making.
Philosophical strategies and heuristics are important because they can trump alot of content knowledge that is irrelevant. Many mistake quantity of data with truth and relevance of data. One can be a believer of and genius at a volume of literature or pseudo-science that is fully illusory and wrong, despite the amount of data.
Next, I will examine:
cognitive versus physical explanation of the information processes
How to find the smartest people.
How to find intelligent people for work and school (intelligence is not the only factor in success at work and school, conscientiousness is probably the most important factor).
Stay tuned and please discuss.
This is a work in progress.
Sunday, March 13, 2016
Who's the Smartest? On Condescension
On condescension.
1. The man who knows the world is the middle east can't help but condescend to the man who thinks his cave is the whole world.
2. The man who knows the world is the Africa and the middle east can't help but condescend to the man who knows the world is the middle east.
3. The man who knows the world contains all of the continents can't help but condescend to the man who thinks the world is merely Africa and Asia.
4. The man who knows the world is the whole planet can't help but condescend to the man who thinks the world contains only the continents.
5. The man who knows the world is the Milky Way can't help but condescend to the man who thinks the world is just planet Earth.
6. The man who knows the world is the universe can't help but condescend to the man who thinks the world is only the Milky Way.
7. The man who who knows he does not know but can understand and use the concept of the possibility that the world contains the universe which may be part of a multiverse can't help but condescend to the man who thinks he knows absolutely that the world contains only the universe.
a la:
1. The man who knows he does not know of the existence of gods and other unseen religious entities can't help but condescend to the man who thinks he knows his god created and rules the universe. His understanding contains the knowledge or the primitive religious mind and much more, while the man with the primitive religious mind cannot comprehend the mind of the wiser man.
For example, the wise, open-minded man, without beliefs of any kind, can easily predict the beliefs of the primitive religious mind. All he has to do is check the man's religious text and he can tell him what he believes better than the primitive religious man can, whose false sense of confidence often causes him to have not well studied his own beliefs. However, the primitive religious mind cannot predict or contain the non-believing thinking of the wise man.
Therefore, the man who can use information without belief can't help but condescend to the believer, just as an adult can't help but condescend to a child.
The non-believing wise man can't help but condescend to the Christian, the Muslim, the radical vegan, and the atheist. He knows what they believe because they have dedicated themselves to absolute belief in an easily accessible book or ideology and the public rhetoric and commentary of religious authorities. The absolute 'knowledge' of the believer cannot help but create conflict between believing groups and within the individual, who is told to have absolute belief in oppressive practices and practices of self-denial fit for a time period several centuries ago but preposterous in present times. The believer does not have his own beliefs, his own thinking, but is filled with the thinking of warring tribes in the Middle East. He emulates that violence.
How do we release ourselves from the shackles of absolute belief?
Saturday, February 13, 2016
Enroute to Market by Daryl Seldon
En route to Market by Daryl Seldon
for Silke
A butterfly flew fast through my view and as it shooed issued ‘coo-coo’!
Dazed, amazed, I stayed the way a visit to pay the fairest maid.
Few steps elapsed before a black, magnificent cat did cross my path.
It started to bark! The cat did bark! Or has my heart and brain infarc’d?
Onward I jogged through densest fog till prod the paw of the oddest dog,
In chase of fowl but ceased his prowl to bow and proudly vowed ‘meow’!
Scandalized, I wiped my eyes but met the same surprising cry!
Yet pushed aside my mind’s demise pursuing the apple of my eye.
Beautiful eyes, delicious pies, for she I did this morning rise.
I sent a text to my friend, my best, that he might check my mind’s arrest:
the cat barked loud the dog meowed
the butterFly coo-cooed on by
what could make my mind so crazed
as to the market I make my way???
He peered inside his learned mind, versed in cure of every kind:
you’re but in love with this lovely maid
with the beautiful eyes and tasty cakes
so be at ease and make your way to the market and say,
Happy Valentines Day!
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