Log of my (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) postings
Page #6

Len: 213,250  80.

¶ +2023.11.20. What are some things that can be done to improve the development of our country? Is there any hope for change and improvement in our country?

Our country? USA?

Are you in college? If yes, think about learning Mandarin, or maybe Russian. Of course majoring in physics or chemistry is always a safe bet. Not computer "science" which is not a science and lots of people can do it. Persons (such as myself) used to become highly skilled computer programmers without any classroom instruction. Or become a lawyer.

Let me reprint a news article from the New York Times newspaper from a couple years ago and see what you think:

The New York Times, +2021.08.27, "New York's Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy.", by Michael Powell.

"In February 2021, Paul Rossi, a math teacher [at Grace Church School, an elite private school in Manhattan]... met with a white consultant, who displayed a slide that named supposed characteristics of white supremacy. These included

individualism,

worship of the written word and

objectivity.'

Mr. Rossi said he felt a twist in his stomach. 'Objectivity?' he told the consultant, according to a transcript. 'Human attributes are being reduced to racial traits.' 'As you look at this list', the consultant asked,' are you having "white feelings"?' 'What,' Mr. Rossi asked, 'makes a feeling "white"?' Some of the high school students then echoed his objections. 'I'm so exhausted with being reduced to my race,' a girl said. 'The first step of antiracism is to racialize every single dimension of my identity.'... A school official reprimanded Mr. Rossi, accusing him of 'creating a neurological imbalance' in students.... A few days later the head of school wrote a statement and directed teachers to read it aloud in classes: 'When someone breaches our professional norms... the response includes a warning in their permanent file that a further incident of unprofessional conduct could result in dismissal.' A sizable group of parents and teachers say the schools have taken it too far -- and enforced suffocating and destructive groupthink on students... [One parent], who notes that his heritage is a mix of Jewish, Mexican and Yaqui tribe, pulled his children out of Riverdale and created a foundation to argue against this sort of antiracist education. 'The insistence on teaching race consciousness is a fundamental shift into a sort of tribalism,' he said.... This conflict plays out amid the high peaks of American economic inequality. Tuition at many of New York's private schools hovers between $53,000 and $58,000, the most expensive tab in the nation. Many heads of school make between $580,000 to more than $1.1 million. .... Grace Church School offered [Mr. Rossi] a contract if he participated in 'restorative practices' for the supposed harm done to students of color."

¶ +2023.11.20. Three college students have to do a project, one of them says he will do all the work, when it's finally time for projects to be turned in, the working student tells the professor that his/her teammates didn't do anything, is this wrong to you ?

That person is sick in the head. Maybe a narcissist. STAY AWARE FROM THEM BECAUSE THEY MAY STAB YOU IN THE BACK.

I had something different. There was a team project. We had to choose teams. I was the most knowlegeable person in the class. I quick snatched up #2. Then I chose two of the most helpless and hopeless persons to complete the team. Of course we got it done well and the last two got a free ride but they were not bad people, just not very well prepared so why not help them? As the saying goes, "no skin off my ass".

I explained this to the teacher. I could see he was fuming at me becaue he knew I thought he was like those two hopeless cases and he did not like thinking of himself as a welfare recipient. But he couldn't do anything about it.

¶ +2023.11.20. Can you make an advocacy speech about love?

Sure.

Imagine how different the world and each of our individual lives would be if everybody was always caring for persons in need (e.g., the lonely aged and the poor), lovingly educating young persons, lovingly caring for loving pets, making gentle love with caring intimate partners, ovingy studying in the humanities, and lovingly investigating nature and cooperatively creating things like cures for diseases ....

Instead of competitive athletics such as football which causes the "players" to have beain damage, business competition which wwrcks people's jobs, not to mention going to war with people whose governments we don't like ....

I once had a professor in school who wa a careful study of human communication, Louis Forsdale. He told me a little story:

When he was young, back around World War II, he visited his girlfriend at Black Mountain College one summer. One Saturdy afternoon some of hte students has a softball game. Well, not exactly. The students were goofing around and had some beer and were sort of playing softball but nobody was keeping score or anything like that. Then, he said, one of the students started to take the game seriously and began trying to win. Others followed suit. "And then things turned ugly" because instead of having fun the students were competing to win.

Why can't we all jsut play nicely together and enjoy what life we are given on this earth. As the hippies of the 1960s used to say:

Make love not war!

(Or would you prefer to compete and hurt others and them hurt you?)

[ angry tennia lady ]

Nobody hurt this lady: she is "playing" a "game" (professional tennis).

Humanity's closest animal relatives, the bonobos (aka pygmy chimapzees, not to be confused with the big very aggressive chimps!!!) resolve their disagreements by having sex with each other.

¶ +2023.11.20. What ideas are presented in illustrations?

It is a cliche but true that a picture is often worth a thousand words.

Illustrations also help keep readers' attention. Small boys love comic books.

If you are interested in this there is a classic book by Edward Tufte: "The visual display of quantitative information".

And even extremely obscure ideas can sometimes be assisted by images. Here is a very primitive image I made about the problem of "transcentental subjectivity in post-Kantian philosophy. Don't worry if you don't understand it, but I assure you what it is illustrating, albeit in a gross oversimplification, is very difficult and obscure, not something like showing a cat on a mat ("Meow!").

[ subjectivity diagram ]

Try to explain how to put together a piece of do-it-yourself-assembly furniture without illustrations.

Also, many ideas are often "illustrated" with imagistic desrciptions even without actual pictures.

However! A picture may be worth a thousand words, but without a few well chosen words to specify the **context**, it could mean anything or nothing. If I show a picture of a swastika, am I supporting the Third Reich or condemning it or talking about the Hindu religion or what?

¶ +2023.11.19. What would the world look like if everyone is working hard like Elon Musk?

That is an interesting question.

First, one would need to study Mr. Musk's daily life in detail not just watch television or whatever. I think somebody has actually written a detailed book about him so the question is whether oneself wishes to expenp part of the limited time each of us has in our mortal life studying Mr. Musk's life.

Let's imagine for the sake of argument that he does "work hard". What does that probably mean" That he has fun all day. Contrast with an illegal immigrant farm worker who works hard all day in backbreaking mindless or mind destroying toil pulling up broccolis from the ground in 110 degree August southern california heat without any shade and has no medical insurance and is living with festering sores on his body and probably won't live many more years before maybe he dies of sunstroke in the field. He is working hard too.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:

"What do I care about happiness? I have my work!"

That "work", of course, was writing philosophy books, not picking broccolis.

So, yes, we all should have the opportunity to work hard like Mr. Musk. I once had a manager in my wage-slavery job as an employee of a multinational corporation who, when I asked him for an assignment that would both be productive for the company and growing for my mind, replied:

"If wishes were horses then beggars would ride."

¶ +2023.11.19. Why do governments never learn from its mistakes no matter how disastrous they were?

Don't you think that often they do know but have more important things on their minds like career advancement and future seats of boards of directors of military industrial corporations? And some are zealots. Did you ever hear the watchword: "My country right or wrong"? End of discussion, right?

Why should middle aging whie (and now a few black) males whose circumference is gradually increasing and, as Mr. Biden once put it, are: "in a pay grade to deserve limousines" care about anything except keeping their jobs?

Watch the classic war film: "Paths of glory". The general in the film wants another star on his epaulets. I repeat: he wants another star on his epaulets.

They know. At least some in current American government know about Ukraine. But they are feeding the American people Zelensky Kool-Ade, and Mr. Zelsnsky himself is making hay while the sun shines. What does it matter if Boris Zitky is knee deep in filthy water sharing his tranch on the Zero line with two week old corpses expecting to himself become one of them each new day if you are jetting around the world getting standing ovations from the US. Congress for wearing a green t-shirt costume? But not all are carpetbaggers. There was a mind behind that green t-shirt, a man who, as far as I can tell was incorruptible but also had no soul: Alexey Arestovich. He was having fun playing video games for real. Listen for 13 minutes to this (you have eot read he subtitles):

Trying to understand what this man was up to is probalby like asking why Dr. Andrew Wiles solved Fermat's Last Theorem: it was interestiing.

I am cynical. I do not matter (Do you?), but I don't like it. That means I don't participate in mass demonstrations because you don't matter there either athough it may make you feel better than being in a foxhole.

Once I did a very little something. I graduated from Yale in 1968. I did not attend the (i.e., "my") commencement ceremony. Instead in my silly cap and gown costume I stood outside one of the entrance gates with a little tin cup and collected donations for Quaker Vietnam War Relief from the people who did attend (which included my father). $130 in the can by the end of the morning. In retrospect I saw probably lucky the cops didn't notice me but who knows? Anyway, I did something personal. I don't matter, do you?

There are people inside the goernment who know damned well what the story is and who do learn, but even they may not have any power to change things. CJCS General Mark Milley was telling the govenment and even in public to negotiate in Ukarine last December. You see what he accomplished, yes?

I once listened to probably the most brilliant military theorist in the 20th century: USAF Colonel John R. Boyd. Ther is a book about him: Robert Coram, "Boyd: the fighter pilot who changed he art of war". He was a self-proclaimed student ot the ancient chinese military genius (who may neve have actually existed, of course) Sun Tzu. He said tomething:

"The way to win a guerilla war is to offer the people a better life than the enemy offers them" – better in THEIR opinion, not just yours.

Some people never WANT to "learn".

¶ +2023.11.19. Is it possible to make a handmade book and give it to your school's library?

Don't ask here. Go to the school and talk with that librarian. Seriously, that is the thing to do.

Librarians are good folks. They sincerely want to help persons learn.

Just do it.

¶ +2023.11.19. Can it be true that it takes two years to learn to speak and sixty to learn how to keep quiet?

Well, maybe it depends on your parents.

Some children are childreared to "be seen and not heard" and to not speak unless spoken to and then to obey. "Yes, mommy." Honor thy father and mother (even if they don't deserve it).

Most children if not repressed are probably very chatty and, among other things, they ask a lot of questions ("Why, mommy?"), which is something parents and teachers often do not like because so many thing are "taboo" ("What do you and daddy do when you shut the bedroom door, mommy?").

One person who probably talked a lot and not just babble was the famous physicist Richard Feynmann. He at least tsays he has an "IQ" of only 125 which is not stupid but not in the top 10 percent. But his father was always asking him questions about all sorts of things and urging him to investigate them and to ask more of his own questions. Not very usual.

But there is another side to this: You can talk your head off and not learn anything, because you are just outputting what was previous input. Listen and you can nourish your mind with new information, but, I would add, don't believe what people say: study and analyze it. So you may learn things by listening to what other people say that they had no intention of you hearing and may even themselves not be aware of).

I had a highly destructive childrearing. My mother was intrusive and at age 5 years credibly threatened to abandon me because I had mutated the word "mother" into "mud". (I spoke articulately.) She did not like that but did not ask herself what she might have done to earn it. When I was teenager she forbade me to squeeze my acne pimples because she wanted to squeeze them....

There was a little plaque on my maternal grandmother's dining room wall (she was an almost illiterate Polish peasant immigrant). I misread it.

I never told anybody. They would not have understood or cared or maybe have thought I had bad ideas. In 7th grade the school tried ot "socially adjust" me and my English teacher THREATENED me for showing intellectual initiative: This big hunk of adult male flesh whose main job wa being a lacrosse coach THREATENED little me who was so wimpy you would not find my likes except on the fuunnies page of your local newspaper.

Today I often do not listen to people because by the time they have opened their mouth and outputted a few words I know what the rest of it is going to be so why waste time on it. They do not like that (and I also "use big words" and "jsut live in my head": be a normal person...). All they need to do to get me to listen very attentively is say something of value that I don't already know.

But I listen to see if they are going to try to hurt me, and I try to not say what I think because I know thay can't cope. And it's curious: I prefer to talk with many blue collar workers than with many managers and exectives. I can't expect the "sanitation engineers" (the trash collectors) to talk about Heidegger; I do expect a Vice President to talk about something more intelligent than the Yankees game.

To end: A fundamental principle of intelligent listening is:

"The meaning is the use".

What is the person trying to accomplish with the words, not what is their dictioniary and grammar book meaning. What do they want to get out of you, probably without paying for it, by using those words?

¶ +2023.11.19. Why is it important for women to proactively seek feedback throughout the year?

Why "women"? Why not every person irrespective of their secondary characteristicss?

The U.S. Declaration of Independence says that all men are created wqual and endowed by their Creator wit hthe rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. People debate about slavery and other things, But that is muddying the water: The spirit of that document was universal reason, the abolishment of prejudices, like that kings were better than commoners. Time passed and new persons saw further by standing on the shoulders of flawed giants.... Slavery was superceded by wage-slavery (check out Prof. Richard Wolff's website: democracyatwork.info). Children are still an oppressed class. Etc.

So you bet persons who have 2 "X" chrosomes not an "X" and a "Y" need feedback every day of their lives. But so too do all other dudes. I am a wimp. Here's a fantasy: going into a men's locker room and scathingly criticisning their public nudity and "lockerroom talk' dissing women: really "sock it to 'em". But I am a wimp so I reply to Quora postings.

Now if you are looking for feedback, record your voice into your personal computer (what used to be called "tape recording yourself"), and play it back and grim and bear it. It's not the shower. You may find you do not sound like Paul Robeson or Rosa Poncelle. Oh, dear!

But the good thing about that is since nobody else need hear it, you need not fear any blowback: the only person you might offend is yourself. Most people find their voices are awful when they are on the listening end. And I have not begun to talk about "content" here.

But there is nothing unique about any secondray characteristic of certain persons. We all come from the same place and are all headed to the same place. The ancient philosopher Diogenes of Sinope said he had studied the bones of the father of Alexander the Great and the bones of a slave and couldn't find any difference.

¶ +2023.11.19. What are some good arguments for debating students to practice their skills with?

What is debating?

It's trying to win, by any means available. You don't mention anything in your opponent's favor unless you can somehow twist it to boomerang against him (her, other).

Debating is a nasty business.

So, if you want to train, get a good sparring partner. Defend slavery. Defend The Third Reich. Defend King George. Defend Derek Chauvin. Or my fav: Abdoullakh Abouyezidovich Anzorov. Defend ritual female genital mutilation in North Aftiran traditional cultures. Defend Giordano Bruno. Defend Benedict Arnold....

You can't hit below the belt, e.g., by outright lying and saying white is black or vice versa. But you can practice muddying the water. There is a classic German song about a trout fish. The fish was very smart and the fisherman could not catch him. So the fisherman stirred up the sediment and muddied the water so the fish could not see and then he caught him.

Practice makes perfect.

¶ +2023.11.18. Would artificial intelligence be able to take care of us as senior citizens at home?

This is not just a speculation.

If I have read correctly, in Japan they now have robopets: robotic dogs, which keep some lonesome elderly persons company when there are no living persons who care about them (perfunctory nursing care does not count for much).

AI can **SIMULATE** a human interlocutor. Unfortunately (or fortunately) the simulation can be higher quality than what is being simulated, *i.e.*, I find that the Bing AI often (not always!) replies (albeit not "responds") to things I submit to it more intelligently than a lot of humans. Worst case persons I call: Mr. (Mrs., Miss. Mx., whatever) Dialtones: You ring them up and get a ring tone until the line drops and then you get a dialtone).☏

This is nothing new. Read MIT Professor of computer science Joseph Weizenbaum's classic book: "Computer power and human reason: from judgment to calculation" (WH Freeman, 1976 – it's more current than anything coming out of Silicone Valley).

"You have reached your answer limit for today" +2023.11.18^[1]

¶ +2023.11.17. What are some good humanities courses to take if you're interested in STEM?

I doubt many universities have it: Ethics and responsibility

But you can do it for yourself: Read Joseph Weizenbaum's little book "Computer power and human reason: from judgment to calculation" (WH Freeman, 1976).

Know what is worth doing and why, and what is worth not doing and why not, not just how to do what you are told or cook up in your own little head.

[ I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) have no idea wha tthis should have been: (#91 ]

The history of science and technology of the post-war [post-1945] era is filled with examples of reckless and unreflective "progress" which, while beneficial or at least profitable to some in the short run, may yet devastate much life on this planet. Perhaps it is too much to hope, but I hope nonetheless that as our discipline matures our practitioners will mature also, that all of us will begin to think about what we are actually doing and ponder whether, whatever it is, it is what those who follow after us would want us to have done. (Joseph Weizenbaum, Professor of Computer Science, MIT)

¶ +2023.11.17. What's the most surprising talent or skill you have that people wouldn't expect?

This is a question the answer to which can offend people. If you don't like it don't read it

Even as a child I had an extremely refined esthetic sensibility. The was a certain kind of beauty which I was able to judge and savor.

It wa not that nobody around me expected it. It was that none of them understood it. It didn't do me any good and nobody cared. I never wanted to go to Disneyland. I never liked Christmas tree ornaments. Up until maybe in 11th grade when I saw glossy European architecture magazines like Domus in the public library did I see anything I liked with a very few exceptions. I did not like the house we lived in. I didn't like my parents.... One of those very few exceptions: One nite my father's brother whom I had never met before and would never see again for many years came to visit. It was about 1961 (I was about 12 years old, with a bright mind and a body so wimpy you would not see its equal outside the funnies page of your local newspaper; in adulthood a jewish man wa sto compliment me by saying I looked like I came out of Auschwitz). My father's brother had a new bottom-of-the-line Porsche automobile (40 horsepower?). The moment I saw it I was enchanted by it. I never much liked any automobile I had ever seen, but this thing was different. I savored the details. There was no carpet on the floors but the doors had carpet on their lower half inside. Of course I caresed that carpet. He told me something that has stuck with me: The seams between the doors and the body of the car were perfectly aligned because when they installed he doors they sealed the seam with lead and then took a special tool and cut a prefect line through the lead (I have veriied this recenty with a Porsche restorer). The seats, every little detail. I really thought it was beautiful. I am sure i cost less than a Cadillac. It was quality.Elegant simplicity (I had ever heard "less is more"). It was like nothing else in my whole [less-than-]world.

And one more story. My elementery scholing was a total waste of 6 years of my young life. With one exception. One day in third grade the librarian had my class come up to the school library which kids never used. She showed us how to open a new book so as not to break its spine. This was when books had hard carborad covers and the pages were "sewn in siginatures", not glued to the spine. You get a big clean table, you raise the book up vertical, resting it with its spine on the table. Then going from one side to the other alternately, you press down a very few pages flat. This side a very few pages That side a very few pages. This side again.... When the whole book is flat on the table, youare done and can close or read the book. I have rememberd that all my now long life (now age 77 years) and I honor a new book I buy that way. That was the only thing I really liked in the whole 6 years of elementary school – have I made that clear?

So I was different. I had a talent. But nobody understood it or cared or appreciated it, not anybody. (In all fairness, my mother was an idiot savnt artist with a 5th grade education who was mentally ill and destructiely intrusive of me. I did not inherit any of her innate artistic ability – she could draw your face at any angle and never had any training, but maybe I got that esthetic sensibility "genetically" from her? She herself would not have understaood it.)

After graduating from college I finally got some "mileage" out of this useless talent. I managed to get the job of manager of an art museum gift shop. There I sold not only postcards and books but also fine handcrafts. I had a pad of blank purchase orders with authority to buy anything I wanted for resale. I discovered small vases and coffee cups by master potters. Finally! I was making money out of my talent, albeit not much, but then an art museum gift shop is not Walmart.

And what did I do? I picked off for myself a couple of the best of the best and I also bought from other palces as a retail customer. Every piece I sold was special because I would go thru a craftsperson's studio and say I want this one and I want that one and they probbly didn't like it too much. But the best of the best I snatched up one piece for $6 wholesale ($10 retail) that I would not part with except under duress for less then high 5 figures USD. It's that good. And here's the punch line: It looks to an ordinary person like maybe it came out of the firebombing of Dresden. It's burnt. It was fired in the kiln wood not on a shelf in the kiln. Probably few persons would appreciate it. But I can 50 years later still greet it with delight and caress it and it I had to flee the counry as a refugee with only what I could carry in my two hands, it would go with me. This talent makes life worth living for me.

So I think I have a talent that few would even understand (it's not just fun, because I see defects in things that nobody else sees and I suffer because of it). How can anyone expect what they don't know is possble? My sehool teachers measured me on SAT exams, which are inappropriate to me, like using a sports car as a tractor. It's lonely here.

Again, if you find this offensive, e.g., "elitist", you don't have to have anything to do with i (or with me), but I think I have as much right to life as people who like to watch Monday Nite NFL or HBO.

¶ +2023.11.17. What are the differences between an academic library and non-academic one (for example, university vs public)?

There are obvoius differences: Public libraries are open to the public and university and other libraries are private. When I worked in IBM Research in the early 1980s, the Thomas Watson Research Center had a library which included serious books and journals not directly related to the company's business. It was not open to the public.

I am not 100% sure of this, but if push comes to shove, by interlibrary loan, anybody can probably get almost anything from anywhere (by **interlibrary loan**) through their local public library which normally caters to children and housewives, if you play nice with the librarian, who may look like a prune but have the soul of a heretic. But you gotta play nice and ask for help and have a good reason for it (you want to learn)

Amusing aside: Public libraries often have tables outside the door where they put books they are going to throw out or maybe sell probably by the pound to used book dealers: the deaccessioned book table. On the deaccessioned book table outside my local library in upper middle class mid-Westchester County New York, I snatched up two books: (1) A Marquis de Sade novel, and (2) A copy of my favorite book in the whole world which is an obscure novel by an Austrian writer who started out life running a family textile mill but sold it to pursue writing. The first book is scandalous; the second I found it a scandal they would discard it but I didn't have the gumption to go up and engage with the librarian about it (I should have but my parents taught me to be ashamed of myself).

Your local public library is your access point to a lot of material that's not in it or which the librarians themslves might not know about, but which you might interest them in helping you get because librarians, unlike most people, are generally intereested in learning (you don't become a librarian to get rich, although if you are rich it can be a nice "volunteer" type activity). Librarians are also defenders of books other people want to censor.

So, again, they may look offputting and like prudes but the prudes are the people who walk down the street and have no interest in anything higher than Monday Nite NFL or HBO soft violence porn but may come in the library to make sure books they don't like are wher etheir children can loo at them (you ,know, parents do something they are ashamed of to have their pride and joys). But, obviously, it's easier if you have a student or faculty id in a decent college or university [not, perhaps, Jerry Falwell U.].

Public libraries are most needed by persons who do want to learn, but do not have the financial means to buy what they want to study (If you cannot afford a personal computer, guess where you can use one?). That's why social reactionaries want to defund them. It's like in Czarist Russia: Karl Marx's Das Kapital get through the censors because the masses would not likely read such a mess of polysyllabic words, so why bother? But The Communist Manifesto was censored because the masses could very easily read it. Librarians are unlikely-looking heroes of freedom! Tolle, lege!

¶ +2023.11.16. What is the best tip for an introvert to practice public speaking?

(1) Have something you sincerely, passionatey want to tell to an audience you rationally assess will want to listen to it because they will want to hear it, i.e., because they will be greedy to improve themslvves by learning what you have to share with them.. If you do not meet this criterion, forget it until you do.

(1) MASTER YOUR SUBJECT MATTER.Have confidence you can answer any reasnable question about the material. Until you cn do this, forget it, again. If somebody asks you an unreasonable question, you should be able to tell them that and be done with them ("Let's take this offline after the end of my lecture. Thank you.")

(3) Get a good nite's sleep after an enjoyable evening not doing anything related to the presentation. Watch the boob tube, take a walk whatever, because you are already repared: you have done yur homework.

(4) Before the presentation, go to the restroom and take a piss even if you do not need to and SPLASH YOUR FACE WITH COLD WATER TO WAKE UP. If you are able on your two feet or in a wheelchair to get to the place to give your speech, you are ready.

(5) Just do it and don't worry about irrelevancies such as stuttering (it's good to have a white board to write on it you stutter but do not have bad parkinson's disease). If you wwt you pants, show it tyou your audience to indicate the sinceriry of your desire to help enlighten them. If it gets really bad and nobody calls 911 for you they have shown they did not deserve you. No matter what problems you have, they are not your problem: they are your audience's problem because they are interfering with their passionate desire for you to remediate their ignorance. Any decent or just sensible person wil want to help anybody who is trying to help them.

What's the problem? Well, for me it was I had an intrusive mother. Remember that if you are "embarrassed" about anything except having committed a felony you have not fessed up to, it's not your problem but something somebody has tried to do to you to get something out of you without paying for it.

(Oh, yes: Advice is cheap. You need to assess for yourself if I have said anything her ehelpful for you. If not, forget it. That applies to everything and everybody, including, for me, my intrusive mother.)

¶ +2023.11.16. Why are some viewers surprised to find themselves agreeing with Tucker Carlson's comments on young workers and their struggles with today's work culture?

I don't know.

I do know I was listening to him say we needed to stop supporting Mr. Zelensky's war in Ukraine. Apparently a lot of what he says is bad. I do not generally listen to him.l But in this case he was being far more rational the Mr. Biden.

The Ukraine war is making strange bedfellows. Persons from the right to the left and in between, who would on many issues disagree perhaps hopelessly are all agreeing that this wrong-headed and hopeless war must stop. Dr. Jordan Peterson. Col. Douglas Macgregor. Scott Ritter. John Mearsheimer. Noam Chomsky. And others, not including, obviously a certain comedian in Ukraine and a man in the Oval Office who had to repeat 3rd grade in school and himself says what he is competent to do is to run with a football.

So maybe Tucker Carlson is saying rational things about another contentious issue. Remember that in World War II, "Uncle Joe" was our friend. And, being coldly rational and realistic, and apply this to all areas of like, including your own parents, teachers, religious and political leaders and boss at work, and even what you think you yourself are:

[ Kissinger on interests ]

(Another question: Does Tucker Carlson believe anything he says or only say what will make him the most money?)

¶ +2023.11.16. Why did Anthony Fauci move risky gain of function coronavirus research - research that Obama shut down in the USA - to a lab in Wuhan well known for years for having subpar safety standards?

I don't know.

But why don't you ask the more general question: Why do American corporations and the U.S. government transfer so much work from American workers to other countries? Answer: It's cheaper.

Now in the case of scientific research ther are other considerations like sharing knowledge. Or if yo uare a bit cynical: If ther are going to be dangerous germs released, why do it here if we can do it there?

Few of th ereasons are honorable, except collegial pursuit of knowledge among world class scientsts. Sounds nice, doesn't it?

"Gain of function research" does not sound very salubrious, does it? Why were we doing it anywhere? On, because we were afraid they might be doing it too? Well, American politicians know how very effectively to run their mouths off, as exemplified by Mr. Reagan's demand that Mr. Gorbachev tear down that wall. So Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden could have demanded: "Mr Xi, stop that research!" I once had a manager who in a different context told me that if wishes were horses then beggars would ride.

Every country has its enemies. Every citizen has two enemies: his country's government's enemies and his country's government itself, and the latter can sometimes be a greater threat to him than the former ( in 1968, my Selective Service System registration number was: 18–11–46-503; what was, or maybe tomorrow will be, yours?). Prof. John Mearsheimer says something interesting: He says that governments only rarely lie to their enemies (because they have "intelligence" agencies, etc.) but they often lie to their own people (to get them to do what the government wants them to do).

¶ +2023.11.16. Do you think that most geniuses are just normal people who are good at one thing?

There are a bew perons who are differnt from everybody else.

John von Neumann wa a fellow at The Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, a place that only admits "geniuses". But the geniuses ther wer in awe of his mathematical ability. They woud pose some question that they knew would take a lot of effort and he would apparently look up in the air for a few seconds and p0roduce the answer. So I guess one wouls say John von Neumann really was differnt, since even the geniuses at the Princeton Institute for AdvancedStudies considered him to be. Conrast, say, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who ran the place and was jsut one of the geniuses. They al l respected each other's brilliance but von Neumann was differnt.

"Run of hte mill" geniuses come, like Bskin-Robbins ice cream, in many flavors. Compare Mozart to Theodore John Kaczynski ("The Unabomber"). Or Bobby Fisher to Pablo Picasso. Or Marchel Duchamp to Aristotle. It's not really fair to compare Stephen Hawking because its obvious he had a physical illness and obviously needed help living in the world. But many geniuses cannot cope well with "daily life" and need special care.

Now, on the other hand, here is an example of a person who may not have been a genius but was bright enough to be one of th founders of modern philosophy of science: Norwood Russel Hanson. He had been a fighter pilot in World War II and made the newspapers by looping the Golden Gate bridge on his return from the Pacific Theater of war. He rode a Harley davidson motorcycle and flew his own private F8F Bearcat fighter plane when he wa a full professor at Yale in the late 1960s. Not exactly sometime Governor or Alabama George Wallace's definition of an intellectual as a person "who can't even ride a bicycle straight".

On the other hand Kurt Godel whose Incompleteness Theorem is exxtremely important literally could not be counted on the eat properly. John Nash, of course, famously wa mentally ill.

Now, as faras I know, Professor Andrew Wiles, who finally solved Fermat's Last Theorem, seems to be a pretty regular person otherwise.

Also, genius is "orthogonal" tp ethics. The Unabomber was in the Florence Colorado supermax prison for having murdered people. Galileo Galileo dumped his 2 illegitimate daughters in a nuuery to avoid paying child support. Thomas Aquinas is a saint of the Roman Catholic church. And what about J. Robert Oppenheimer, ethically?

"Many things are strange, bu tstrangest of all is man" (Sophocles, another genius)

And the philosopher Martin Heidegger's (another genius of dubious ethics) gloss on that statement is that the strangest of all things about the staringest of all things – each of us – is that, generally, persons find everything strange except themself. "Who me?"

[ homer eating his donut ]

Anyway, normal people generally don't have a clue what gifted persons are like and often do their best to try to reduce them to what they **can** undertand, which is sometimes not much. I am no genius, but I have suffered from this since I was a toddler

(My stalag picture from age 2.75 years. It may be my father's World War II "dog tag" I am holding. In any case my Selective Service System identification number: 18–11–46–503.)

[ stalag and rentko pictures ]

¶ +2023.11.16. How might identity categories create access to or barriers to full participation in the workplace?

From what I have read, I could no tolerate being in DEI workplace and being told I was bad because I was a white male.

But don't listen to me rant on about this. Herewith a news article from The New York Times newspaper that when I picked up my print copy of the paper off my driveway and opened it and saw what was in the lower right corner of hte front page, I imagined I had picked up an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) and it had exploded in my fdace.

The New York Times, +2021.08.27, "New York's Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy.", by Michael Powell.

"In February 2021, Paul Rossi, a math teacher [at Grace Church School, an elite private school in Manhattan]... met with a white consultant, who displayed a slide that named supposed characteristics of white supremacy. These included

individualism,

worship of the written word and

objectivity.'

Mr. Rossi said he felt a twist in his stomach. 'Objectivity?' he told the consultant, according to a transcript. 'Human attributes are being reduced to racial traits.' 'As you look at this list', the consultant asked,' are you having "white feelings"?' 'What,' Mr. Rossi asked, 'makes a feeling "white"?' Some of the high school students then echoed his objections. 'I'm so exhausted with being reduced to my race,' a girl said. 'The first step of antiracism is to racialize every single dimension of my identity.'... A school official reprimanded Mr. Rossi, accusing him of 'creating a neurological imbalance' in students.... A few days later the head of school wrote a statement and directed teachers to read it aloud in classes: 'When someone breaches our professional norms... the response includes a warning in their permanent file that a further incident of unprofessional conduct could result in dismissal.' A sizable group of parents and teachers say the schools have taken it too far -- and enforced suffocating and destructive groupthink on students... [One parent], who notes that his heritage is a mix of Jewish, Mexican and Yaqui tribe, pulled his children out of Riverdale and created a foundation to argue against this sort of antiracist education. 'The insistence on teaching race consciousness is a fundamental shift into a sort of tribalism,' he said.... This conflict plays out amid the high peaks of American economic inequality. Tuition at many of New York's private schools hovers between $53,000 and $58,000, the most expensive tab in the nation. Many heads of school make between $580,000 to more than $1.1 million. .... Grace Church School offered [Mr. Rossi] a contract if he participated in 'restorative practices' for the supposed harm done to students of color."

¶ +2023.11.16. In TV and films, why do they often give people with high levels of intelligence bad eyesight and sometimes poor social skills?

Profile photo for Bradford McCormick

Bradford McCormick

Independent Researcher (2018–present)Just now

Maybe to make people who are not intelligent feel good about themselves: I'm not a genius but geniuses can't even ride a bicycle straight. Who'd want to be an idiot like that?

[ Simpson family ]

But I would argue that every stereotype has some truth to it or else it wound't stick. In the so-called prep school I attended I was the most intelligent kid in the class and socially the most messed up. #2 was too.

The adolts(speiiling intended) who ran the place wanted to make me "socially adjust", they wanted to break my spirit (see below) and reduce me to be like them. It didn't work. But they chould have helped me to be more social: They culd have encouraged me to confront them more often with their failures to provide me with the learning and social environments I needed and their failures to properly respect me (it wa after 1863 in USA and they were my msters). I needed some Tea and Sympathy (author: Robert Anderson), while jocks got their omerta sanitary services.

The last place I worked, the person who got the patent and his PhD for the idea everything we did, was a physically small orthodox jewish man with extremely deficient eyesight who couldn[t drive an automobile. I'm not jewish but once at a spa for old communists a man complimented me by saying I looked like I had come out of a concentration camp. Would any red blooded Amerian male who can't (more on this beow) want to look like that, not like Broadway Joe? ("Oink! Oink!", pace the porcine).

It was not my fault that my parents were lower life forms. It wa not their fault, but they hurt me. I did know a man who is brilliant and whose parents did the right thing. They wer almos tilliterate dirt farmers in rural Appalachia. they knew their son wa different from them and they didn't know how to raise him, but they did what they could. They told him he would have to figure it our for himselof bu tthat they would "have his back so that when he made mistakes they would be ther for him o pick up the pices and try again. My parents made me to understand tht if I messed up something unspecified but very bad would happen to me.

The way ordinary people treat the gifted sometimes results in the gifted person being hurt (me) or in person who are not likeable. The architect Frank Lloyd Wright was brilliant but he was also offensively arrogant. When a client complained about their building leaking, he told the client to live with it. He was exceptional enough to get away with it, but he could have been more gracious about things. Someboyd said: "Harsh conditions do not make for pleasant people." When I was in school I was messed up even intellectually (they had ignoranced me), but the rwa one book I read wher I understood the ending very well: he protagonist digs a hole to the center of the earth and sets off a huge bomb ther, thus cleansing the universe of all the bad stuff on the surface. And when I read Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, I got the hope that all my tor-mentors would eventually die, without being able to recruit members of the next generation to carry on their work.

Part of the problem is tha the females go for the meatloafs not the brainy boys.

[ Sensaman and WCF

Well, I have tried to develop my social skills: to stand up to the peole who have low levels of intelligence. And some of them do have IQs in 3 digits. Example: In IBM (yes, Big Blue), back in 1980 I had a manager who [straight, not homosexual] came to work wearing socks with machine stitched images of Mickey adn Minny Mouse on them but was either incompetent or unwilling to engage with me in serious discourse about small mammals.

At the same time, my 3rd line manager said something to me. This was computer programming and "L" and "LA" were hardware computer operations that if you mixed them up the computer would mess up in ways that often were hard to find. He said to me:

"We know you can do the work your way, but what do we do with all the people who can't tell an 'L' from an 'LA'"? (Fire them?)

Not all brilliant persons are socially awkward. How about J. Robert Oppenheimer? Paul Robeson? Georgia O'Keeffe? Li Wenliang (the opthalmologist who early warned about Covid and became a national hero in China)? And, of course, some bright people are clowns. Example: Elon Musk, who is a lunatic, in more ways than one. But some clowns are not very bright, example: Boris Johnson.

[ Boris Johnsonon bicycle ]

(I heard somebod who had been educatet therey say that at Eton, prospective fathers ask about the rugby and mothers about the buggery.)

America does not like persons who are too intelligent. "Eggheads". "Pointy headed liberals" (remember Spiro Agnew?). Persons who think they are better than they are. We're a democracy, after all: everybody is equal and don't use big words, but "Yes, boss". There used to be a joke in IBM that IBM means: Idiots Become Managers. Example, Mickey Mouse, above. And, as said, the girls went for the jocks. I guess they like Big Macs better than filet mignon.

Now back to that school that wanted to socially adjut me. What could they have done th help my social growth and that of #2, too: Instead of giving us ass–-ignments, have us teach younger kids. Then they could also have saved some money by removing some of themselves from the payroll, too.

[ Mike Rentko and clocks ]

¶ +2023.11.15. Who are examples of individuals that were otherwise innocuous in their normal lives but became changed by the times they were living in to go on to do great things and move nations throughout history?

I never heard of any. It sounds "romantic" to me, and reality is not sentimental.

OK. Here's a candidate: Adolf Hitler. He started off as a very ordinary person and, due to the times (World War I reparations against Germany), went on to move nations.

I did know one man who was pretty much an ordinary Joe. A highly honerable, intelligent and hard working person, but nothing to put in the history books.

He was an enlisted man in World War II. One day he had an idea which made an important contribution to winning the war. Just one, no more.

You never know who might do soething exceptional, especially if they have some motivation to do more than just mow the lawn and watch HBO or Monday nite Football.

¶ +2023.11.15. What is the debate in support of remote work against in-person work?

Why should there be any debate?

Some micro-managers get off on being able to stick their noses in their reports' business which is harder to do if they work from home. SOme like to see their underlings punch in on time and work late eah nite. somebcody said: "If yo are working overtime, your boss isn't doing his job."

Some jobs require in person work try to do open heart surgery with a bunch of work-at -homes. But a lot of jobs "should" be in person jsut beause". jsuu because what?

What works works and what doesn't work doesn't. The office is a day carcel for many workers. You are either not alloe=wed to og out or sneak out and feel guilty you migh ge tcaught.

But productivity in mind work is not like productivity i muscle work. working smart beats working hard evey day of the week, and the problem wit hteh poor rabbit in the Aesop fable is tha the reted before crossing the finish line.

When I worked in office I did not like it, except for when the vending machine restock man came around. Hewould discard snack pack past their eat-by date i a trash can. He did not objet to me foraging in the garbage for FREE EXPIRED DORITOS! (I didn't get a degree from Yale for no good prupose.)

Bu commuting was the wordt: It peoduced nothing for anybody, neither for me nor for my emloyer. envied World War II Japanese kamikaze pilots who only had to make their commute once.

If you do your work to high quality in a timely nobody should care about how you do it.

Managers, especially of they are Christians, should remember that Jesus washed his apostles' feet and told everybody: "As you do it unto the leaset of hese my brethren, you do it unto me." (Matt 25:40). Somebody needs ot sign purchase orders for capital expenditures, but that can be done rmotely.

I actually once saw a 3rd line manager in a big FDIC bank, when his compter programming team was working late as hard as they could to get him something he wanted, walk into the room where they were all working late and belch out:

"I want to see asses and elbows."

Why does anyody have a problem with remote work, except where it is not appropriate to the functional requirements of the task? Some jobs require ou to speak fluent Spanish; some jobs require you to be in a team setting. Some fish fly, and some don't. Respect everyone as if they were your mother or father or sone or daughter, and you cn't go too far wrong, can you?

¶ +2023.11.15. How do I prepare a presentation to be delivered to the class in an introductory fashion?

What is an "introductory fashion"?

I was once assigned to make a presentation with the purpose of me failing so I oculd be fired from my job. I succeeded, i.e., failed, and was given the choice of resigning or being fired.

Preparing for a presentation?

I am contrarian. I strongly feel only one thing is really important: MASTER YOUR SUBJECT MATTER.

What else matters? Are you afraid? Well if you wet your pants you can point that out to your audience to show them how frightened you are, and if the won't come to your aid they are not worth your having presented to them anyway.

If you swallow your tongue either somebody knows CPR or will call 911 in time or you will die.

BFD.

But if you have not mastered your material you are wasting their time and your own or maybe you are trying to fake it and may get what you deserve?

One time at work I was making a little presentation in a situation where I did know what I was talking about. There was a person in the audience who "had it in for me". My job was to fix people's problems but instead of coming to me with his problem he want to his manager to go to my manager to come down on me. The was nothing I could do about this person.

But in Q&A he asked me a question. Not a real question in which he had sincere interest of remediating his ignorance, but a trick question to try to make a fool of me. This was totally unexpected. I was totally unprepared for this and taken totally off guard. I stopped for a few seconds, and then I proceeded to thoutoughly humiliate him in front of all his coworkers and I never had any more trouble out of him. I had the one thing going for me that enabled me to deal with this entirely unexpected surprise: I HAD MASTERED MY MATERIAL, and I gave some of it to him!

Other people will give you lots of good advice. Different strokes for different folks. Here's another suggestion of mine which nobody else may suggest, but which I did for my doctoral disseration defense: If possible, arrive in the room before anybody else and survey the battlespace. Whre are the windows Where ar the doors? Exactly how is the podium placed and what will happen if I decide to step off it to make a point? Arrange my note (if I have any) excatly as I want them. Then, go to the restroom and take piss even if you don't need to and SPLASH YOUR FACE WITH COLD WATER TO WAKE UP! The nite before you should have gone to bed early, since there should have been nothing else you might need to knw that you had not already learned (in school I never once "burned the midnite oil; If I didn't know it the evening before it would be hopeless to try to do in one nite what I should have been doing for weeks already).

So you will get good advice from others. I never read Dale Carnegie's "How to win friends and influence people". I just figure that if I cannot defend myself with my sword and shield: MASTERY OF THE SUBJECT MATTER, I will follow the example of a small dog when confronted by a big dog baring its teeth: roll over on mybelly and let the Big Bully kill me if that's how small he is. In the canine, unlkie the human world, this often works. Homo homini lupus.

¶ +2023.11.15. In what ways does personalization encourage a practical approach that encourages us to take action regardless of judgment or fear of failure?

This question seems awkwardly stated. So I wil answer what I make of it.

Action per se should not be encouraged. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

On the other hand, fear of the consequences of failure does often hinder level-headed action when the actor has to fear for his [that word being understood in a non-genderist way] rear. So it has always been for me. I was always confident that my situation could be worse. Nobody "had my back".

I contrast this with a man I once knew whose parents were nearly illiterate "dirt farmers" in rural Appalachia. Not very hopeful for a child who was close to being a genius, yes? Well not so. His mother realized that he was as if of a differnt and higher species than she and his father were. She realized they could not properly raise (as opposed to, metaphorically again, rear him). But she did the one thing she could do. She told him and really meant it:

"Tom, do what you believe is right. You will make mistakes. We stand behind you."

He would have to figute out how to raise himself. BUT! If he made a mistake, he knew he could come home to heal his wounds and go back out a try again. I had been taught that if I failed to get straight "A" grades in school I woul likely end up as roadkill. You better believe that I fear failure!

It is important to discourage "adventurism": people taking unnecessary risks for possible disproprtionate gain, especially at the expense of other persons over whom they may have social power. Study Stanley Kubrick's classic war movie: "Paths of glory".

But it is also important to support people, to "have their back": Make persons who are sincerely tryingto do the right thing to understand that if they do due diligencd and do their best in uncertain conditions and fail, they will not be punished. Science advances by people laerning what won't work as well as what will [work].

Persons should fear ignorance. they should fear partisanship: abetting quarrels instead of mediating them. They should fear looking for trouble instead of cooling things down. They should fear pride. But it has been said that the man who never made a mistake never tried to do anything.

Story. Many years ago on the public television station there was a show about the Innuits – the people who somehow managed to live without modern technology above the arctic circle where it's snowy and cold. There was a master seal fisherman. That's what the people ate: seals, and his job was to keep everybody from starving. For hours he stood perfectly still above a seal's little breathing hole in the ice. Faster than you could see it (they did not use time lapse photography), he was pulling up an unlucky seal through the ice. He had killed the poor animal with a sudden, masterful stroke of his arm and hand with his little wood harpoon. He exclaimed:

"I almost missed!"

So much for people like Elon Musk ad Jeff Bezos, right?

¶ +2023.11.15. What motivates people to make stupid videos on TikTok?

To ansswer a question with a question:

Let's grant that mot of the stuff on tikTok is stupid (I don't watch it; I have fun reading serious books and watching serious lectures by people like distinguished professor Prof. John Mearsheimer on Youtube).

But which is stupider?

(1) To actively create stupid material on TikTok, which is very similar to what artists like Andy the Warhole got paid huge amounts of money for.

Or:

(2) To be a consumer of stupid stuff like HBO, Monday nite NFLO and video games somebody else wrote, sitting on yout two couch potatoes zombying out passively beng ☢culturally irradiated watching the boob tube?

[ family watching tv ]

To do something meaningful like writing The Odyssey or figuring out General Relativity is not an option, but mowing a lawn is.

[ Suburban houseing development ]

¶ +2023.11.15. Do you think that better mathematical education is the path to lower levels of deception on the planet? There are a lot of people who have "a way with words" and they have a bad rep really but there is no such person who has a "way with mathematics".

An irrelevant aside. Once upon a time in a place in the history of computer science now far far away in the rear view mirror, there was a computer scientist named Ken Iverson. He designed a computer programming language for education. It was called, of all things: "APL (A Programmign Language). It was meant to be fun, albeit probably for nerdy kids notlikely for jocks.

Do you know about APL? It requires a special computer keyboard because it's full of "special characters". When I found out about it in 1980 (working in IBM), I described these characters as like "friendly little animals who want to play with you." Really (contrast tith Django which gave me PTSDin the 2010s). Anyway herewith a quick suggestion of what APL is like.

[ AL images ]

There at least used to be an APL monthly newsletter. Each issue had a programming challenge competition. The winner was not the person who wrote a program in the fewest lines of code It was almost a given it would be a "one liner". The winner was the person who solved it in the fewest characters.

¶ +2023.11.15. What are some ways to avoid plagiarism detection tools like Turnitin or Plagscan? Can paraphrasing tools help us avoid plagiarism?

I am anti-school. I felt the teachers in the perp(spelling intended) school I attended or rather was sentenced to, were the colonial regime and I was an opperssed victim like the peasants in Indochina in the 1950s, etcetera and so forth. So I am not "coming from a place" of goody-goodyism. It was after 1863 in USA and my teachers were my masters and in 7th grade one of them tried to crush my soul for showing intellectual initiative. Get the picture?

But plagiarism is not a good thing and finding ways around it is not good. You may have to do it, like the Vietcong used weapons stolen from the U.S. Army to fight the Saigon regime. But you should not be an oppressed peasant being bombed with Agent Orange (meaningless ass–-ignments).

Plagiarism is bad. In the real and hopefuly more honorable world of real scholarship and not just make-work ass–-ignments teaches subject kids to to collect their paychecks and sit on their two flaccid couch potatoes in front of the classroom (stuedents are an oppressed "class"), persons honestly and sincerely seek to contribute new knowledge to further advance civilization. And there are peope who, for fun, do not watch HBO or TikTok or Monday Nite NFL, but study peer reviewed journals looking for plagiarism to expose. I call them footnote sniffing truffle pigs. A highly honorable species!

[ Reader fool ]

(Sebastian Brandt, "Ship of Fools", 1494?)

You may be stuck with ass–-lgnments you have to do to have any hope in life of getting a job as a Wall Street corporation flipper not a McDonalds burger flipper. But if I was in school and my daddy had enough money that I didn't have to fear the GPA, I would fight my oppressors directly. As it was, I did fight that teach who THREATENED me in 7th grade for having a mind and not just a meatloaf (his main job was a lacrosse coach but the school needed somebody to teach 7th Grade English), and I won.

And not all teachers are bad. Not all teachers are asking to be fed plagiarism they are too stupid and ignorant to catch. In middle age I went back to school in a doctoral program I expected to be easy and I was right. But I really got ot learn and enrich my mind and my soul there as opposed to "burning the midnite oil". One course, taught as I would later find out, by the most esteemed professor since John Dewey, before the class started, I went up to her and asked if I could get my credit for the couse by writing an essay on a topic in which I had a PASSIONATE and LONG STNDING interest, INSTEAD (got that: i-n-s-t-e-a-d) of doing the course assignments. She had no idea who I was but immediately told me to go do it. Plagiariam? I was writing things nobody else in the world had apparently thought, so how could I be plagiarizing or even want to? I enjoyed writing that paper, as you may guess from how I am describing it here. As the phiosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said: "What care I about happiness? I have my work." Needless to say, that "work" was not flipping burgers at Mickey D or doing homework ass–-ignments.

Now, as Paul Harvey used to say on the radio, for the rest of hte story. That professor loved what Iwrote and gave it an "A+" (I do not respect grades but better a good one than a bad one, right?). And she even wrote that she might be able to further help me in life. But I had been so oppressed by my parents and teachers earlier in life that I did not have enough self respect to take her up on it. I flunked! Because my earlier education by my parents and shool teaches had failed me.

It's your life. Don't be a fool. But think about what is happening to you. You won't be young forever so don't waste your youth or if you can avoid it let the adolts(spelling intended) waste your life for you. Just say yes! to what "higher education" should mean but rarely does: "the life of the mind" (and it's not woke, either → study anthroplogy not ethno). And here's a secret about erudition: Look up "L.H.O.O.Q. on Wikipedia if you don't "get it" – its high art by one of the greatest and most intelectual artists who ever ived).

If you follow what I write you will note I try to scrupulously provide citation information for everything I say, indluding in talking with "family and friends". To borrow a line from the Hebrew National hotdog company: I answer to a higher power, which, in my case, is intellectual integrity. Do your teachers? do you? Expect more, pay less (Target Corp advertising slogan).[*Aside*: you may guess I wrote this for fun, not as an ass–-ignment.]

¶ +2023.11.14. What function do storytelling and narrative play in sharing travel experiences and inspiring others?

Each persons lives the story he (she, other) tells himself that his life is. Man is a narrative animal.

A person who does not have a story to tell themselves about their life might die of sarvation even if you put a lot of tasty food in front of them. Why bother?

If the story is pretty colorless and meaningless, like just going the same tedious labor each day until you die, yuo won't be very enthusiastic about it, will you?

The story can be anything , so long as it is appeaing to the person. You can be a suicide bomber or a nurse who reieves the pain of dying persons all day every day. Flip burgers or flip publicly traded corporations. Study the Bible or watch Monday nite NFL. Whatever story that "grips" you.

Where do these stories come from? Persons rarely sit down and write the great American novel of their own life and then get on with living it. They get their stories from their environment. In 7th century BCE Greece everybody would hve absorbed Homer's tale of the Trojan war. If you are a jew or a Christian or Muslim there is the story of being a believer in your God.... Preachers are story tellers. Political leaders are story tellers Con artists are story tellers. Etc.

Things change when a person learns ther are different stories they might want to live instead of the one they were childreared into.

"How are you gonna keep em down on the farm, after they'vve seen Paree?"

And we are apparenlty psychologically "primed" for this. Most people love ot listen to stories.

A society's rulers don't like when people learn alternative stories and decide not to be "good citizens"....But that's a tradeoff of evolution: Bees don'[t listen to stories; they are reliable workers but not so bright. The more intelligent you are the less you are like a bee and may even become a storyteller or an inventor of stories (an artist or prophet....).

Many stories are "journeys", in the sense that the protagonnist goes theough a series of different experiences or activities. And physical travel is one form of journey-making. Another is to master a craft.

Stories answer the question: Why bother?

Why do you bother? Where do you want to go today?

¶ +2023.11.14. Can a person without a university education and of average intelligence have a more valid opinion on various issues than an intelligent and university-educated person?

One size does not fit all.

Back in the 1950s there was a famous phiosopher whose advanced education was being a longshoreman: Eric Hoffer.

Second, a lot of college and even graduate schooling is instruction not education. Instruction is learning a skill, e.g., computer science or surgery. Education is enriching the mind, the spirit, the soul to have a deeper understanding of life and also, of course, death. So you can have a PhD but no clue about living. Or you can have wisdom from "the school of hard knocks".

Benjamin Franklin had no formal schooling. Abraham Lincoln had very little formal schooling. Joseph Robinette Biden Junior apparently not only graduated from college but got a law degree.

But that said, it's like that sometimes you see a flower or a weed growing through a solid concrete sidewalk: Good things can result from bad circumstances, but that is despite not because of them. And the best are not always the strongest. (You may guess I am speaking from embittered experience there.)

As for intelligence I have read that one of the most brilliant physicists of the 20th century, Richard Feynmann, at least said he had an "IQ" of 125, which is not stupid but not exceptional. What he did have going for him was a father who was always asking him questions and challenging him to figure out the answers and to ask himself even more questions.

"Leisure has been, and always will be, the first foundation of any culture.... in our bourgeois Western world total labor has vanquished leisure. Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for nonactivity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture – and ourselves." (Josef Pieper)

"...For all the ancient philosophers and sages have reckoned two things to be necessary for safe and pleasant travel on the road of wisdom and in the pursuit after knowledge; God's guidance and the company of men.... So, when you philosophers, with God's guidance and in the company of some clear Lantern, give yourselves up to that careful study and investigation which is the proper duty of man -- and it is for this reason that men are called... searchers and discoverers... -- [as men, you] will find the truth of the sage Thales' reply to Amasis, King of the Egyptians. When asked wherein the greatest wisdom lay, Thales replied: 'In time.' For it is time that has discovered, or in due course will discover, all things that lie hidden. [As men, you] will also infallibly find that all men's knowledge, both theirs and their forefathers', is hardly an infinitesimal fraction of all that exists and that they do not know."

...When [our guide] had concluded her speech she handed us some closed and sealed letters and, after we had returned to her our undying thanks, she showed us out through a door... where [she] summoned her people to propose questions twice as high as Mount Olympus.

And so we passed through a country full of delights... and at last we found our ships in the harbour. (Rabelais, 1532-1534/1955, pp. 710-2)

¶ +2023.11.14. Can you give an example of "strange name, ordinary profession" or vice versa?

Not exactly.

The wisest person I have ever known of in the world of computers where many are just superficial techies was an MIT Computer Science Professor with the apposite name Joseph Weisenbaum (1923–2008). He was a wise man.

[--------]

The history of science and technology of the post-war [post-1945] era is filled with examples of reckless and unreflective "progress" which, while beneficial or at least profitable to some in the short run, may yet devastate much life on this planet. Perhaps it is too much to hope, but I hope nonetheless that as our discipline matures our practitioners will mature also, that all of us will begin to think about what we are actually doing and ponder whether, whatever it is, it is what those who follow after us would want us to have done. (Joseph Weizenbaum, Professor of Computer Science, MIT)

¶ +2023.11.13. Will Durant has said, "Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance." Do you agree?

I would say, sortta.

As a young person I was so ignoranced by my parents and teachers that I didn't even have a clue about what I did not know about. Note the active voice there: to ignorance, i.e, to make another person be ignorant. My parents wer clueless. My school teachers were proactive.

Over a half century, after graduating from that school, I experienced a lot and studied a lot and learned a lot (most of it I didn't even know I didn't know earlier).

At a certain point I came to the conclusion that I knew enough; that if I died the next day I would not have missed anything. It was all pretty simple once I figured it out. But also, the more I learned the more I learned I did't know → but that it was OK. Sure I still want to learn the latest news, but I'm working on getting over that. I want to learn the latest news about the Western Front in World War I, too, which is not exactly what people generally mean by wanting to be current.

I started figuring things out maybe in 11th grade when I read "Waiting for Godot"? Why? Becaue Mr. Godot, unlike my intrusive parents and school teachers (it was 1863 in USA, and they were my masters!), – unlike them,who would not go away, Mr. Godot was not likely to to show up. Or I looked at European architecture magazines in the public library (Domus, etc.) and saw that there could be things that were appealing to me. Imagine that: Something could be appealing to me? It took me long years to really undertand that. Pathetic, yes?

Something I do not relate to is Mr. Socrates's statement that he knew nothing or that he knew he knew nothing or something like that. He very well knew how to make fools out of persons less clerer than he was, and he got is jollies out of doing it (he even called himself a "gadfly"; no wonder he got swatted).

So its complicated. The more you know the more you know you don;t know, has a lot of truth to it. My parents's and school teachers' "lifeworlds" (somebody here on Quora once reprimanded me for using such a big word) – their "surrounds" were very small, from the perspective I have today. And if I say today that I didn't like it, that woud not be quite accurate since I didn't know anything could be any different. If you were congenitally totally blind you would not know you were missing anything, would you?

So everything I learn I generally discover more than one more thing I didn't know about and now do want to learn. Scientists are that way. Solving one problem raises new questions. There are good books here, one of which is Thomas Kuhn's "The structure of scientific revolutions."

Two images to end: (1) I like the ending of Homer's Odyssey. When he finally comes home after a long life of adventures, the goddess Athena tells him to go to a land where the people do not know of the sea and plant an oar there and then he can come home to peace for the rest of his life. Learn for yourself get your fill. Then teach, i.e., share with outhers what you have learned (not give them school tests!), and your life is fulfilled.

(2) I do not like the Abrahamic Deity and His attendant religions, but I find the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible has much wisdom in it. If I had to recommend one book maybe that would be it.

As for the realation between what we now and what we don't know, the physicit Nielse Bohr instructed his students:

"Take every statement I make as a question not as an assertion."

¶ +2023.11.13. Can it be true that if you stay silent about the problem to keep the peace, there is a zero percent change that the problem gets fixed?

Of course not. Something entirely unanticipatable might happen. Or you might not know the whole story and it will work out differntly than you expect. Obviously not likely, but the quetion asks about "zero percent". The dinosaurs did not expecct to be wiped out by that famous meteor 65 million years ago, did they?

What does "keeping the peace" mean in the particular situation. Let me consider two possibiities:

(1) If you say something your mother will not be happy about it. But you are earning $200,000 per year and she can't do anything to cause you material trouble. So what then? Was she really good to you when you were dependent on her (my mother was intrusive but fortunately for all concerned she choked to death in her sleep one night after having eaten a wonderbread sandwich, just before I went to college).

(2) You are a young person who is dependent on your parents for paying your school fees, etc. If you offend them they will cut you off and your future prospects in life will go down the drain because you are not entreperneurially savvy. Then of course you should keep quiet until you no longer need them to pay the bills.

I can't find the reference at the moment, but some time ago I came across a psychologist who pointed out that it is bad to not offend people because then you leave them to continue to live in their benighted condition where they take offense. Offend them and help them to understand life better: Nobody can offend anybody unless the latter is so petty as to take offense. But, again, this does not apply if you are materially dependent on them and have no other choice.

Is the problem really any of your business? If not, as CJCS General Mark Milley said to Vice President Pence when the latter asked why we didn't go to war with Iran: "There are a lot of bad people in the world and we cant go to war with all of them."

¶ +2023.11.13. What is the difference between a condominium and a gated community?

Oh, this is a simple one!

The two are different.

A gated community is a bunch of houses behind a wall, like a medieval fortress.

A condominium is a bunch of residences with a specific ownership structure where you own your residence, not rent, but you are slso obligated for community expenditures which can be enormous and you have no choice about paying them, which is more like if the landlord raises the rent.

So! You can have a gated community of condominiums, or a gated community of rental properties, or a gated community of traditionally owned houses – well actually the gated community has to have some community charges each home owner must pay, to maintain the gates but this is not the same level of"cooperation" financial obligation as in a comdo[minium] setup where if the "board" decide to redo ther roofs everybody has to pay for new roof whether they want one or not and if the water main breaks everybody has to pay to fix it or god help you if you live in Florida and they find the foundation of your fancy high-rise building has been undermined by shifting sand.

A comdominiuum can be a "flat" in a high rise building, or a single occopancy house, or a house in a connected row of houses.

Gated communities and condominiums are different kinds of relatied things, sort of like workers and workplaces are different kinds of related things.

Does this make sense? Many condominiums come in two flavors: A high rise "apartment house" that is legally a condominium, and a housing development with a lot of green space and where the houses are assembles in rows of maybe 5 or 10 each. You would not likely call an extremely expensive 80 story skyscraper building full of "apartments" that are acctualy legally condominiums called a gated community even if at its base ther was a wall with a gate around it. Indeed, as far as I am concerned, the paradigmatic "gated community" is a bunch of MacMansions behind a gate which may not even have any wall. It's Disneyland for real for Wall Street cheats. During the day they make enormous amout sof money destroying publicly traded corporations and putting many people out of their jobs (arbitrage, etc.), but at nite they want to have "home sweet home" with a zillion bedrooms even if they don't have any kids and, or course, fake mullions on the windowes and fake shutters on the adjoining walls. Architect Robert A.M. Stern is their patron saint (not to be confused with Edward Durrell Stone who built MacEmbassies before there were McDonald's. But both's buildings are to architecture as Big Macs are to cuisine).

Anyway, before you buy into either a condomium or a gated community, get advice from a real estate attorney before you regret doing something. I have knowm person who went to Florida for their gold-plated years and bought into gated communities at very high prices and then wanted to move into an even newer higher price gated community or they just died (people do that, you know) and their kids wanted to sell the dmned thing and they couldn't get their "invetsment" out of it becaue new buyers would buy in the newer community, not the old one, unless they could get the old at "a good price". Fools. I call the Florida real estate racket: America's wet dream.

[ Floride construction with sttanding water ]

¶ +2023.11.12. What are some truly impressive projects that prove that you are extremely smart if you manage to do them?

I can think of one I recently read about. Dr. Andrew Wiles spent most of his ife trying to solve Fernat's last theorem and he finally succeeded a few years ago.

Two things about it I find interesting since I know nothing about the math:

(1) He said he was within a few minutes of finally giving up when he saw "the obvious". This is how impressive intellectul projects more than rarely are solved: wheh hope has been lost and the answer "comes to the person". No amount of effort succeeds.

Now, contrast this with something I once overheard in IBM (you know, the computer company) Headquarters that appalled me. It was the only time I wa ever in that buiding. I was waalking down one of the long halls behind two men in blue suits. They did not knw I was there and probably would not have cared. One said to the other and for background here, "Fishkill" wa IBM's mission-critical computer chip production facility at the time:

"Fishkill is not coming in with the inventions on schedule."

(2) Dr. Wiles solution is 109 pages of mathematical gobbledygook which I imagine less then a dozen people on the planet can undertand. Mr. Fermat himself, who saw a fool becaue he got himself killed in a duel instead of proecting his brilliant mathematical mind for all humanity, his solution or at lesa what he said was the solution wa "too big to fit in the margin of a book". In other words, his solution, if true would have been somehting a reasonably intelligent person could likely have understood and would not have had any esoteric mathematica in it. In other words: As far as I can see, the challenge remains: Find Fremat's solution to his last theorem, which will fit on no more than two paige of letter paper and be understandable by anybody who passed calculus in college.

Moral of these story: we are not likely to run out of intellectual challenges any time soon, and anybody who tries to schedule the future of human creativity is a threat to it.

¶ +2023.11.12. What is the ultimate angelic form of intelligence?

I am no an expert. Ask a Jesuit.

But my impression is that angels did not habe any paricularly unique intelligence. That they spent all day praising God and occasionally carrying out Special Ops missions.

The one I am most familiar with is Sodom and Gomorrah. God had had it with these people but he gave them one last chance. He sent two of his angels disguised as men and the people did NOT show them hospitality except, of course for Lot. So God told him to take his famiy and leave before He levelled the place.

Or the Archange Gabriel who wa set with that special message for Mary.

The Angels did not have the desires or needs of mortal flesh, but I never heard of them having any exceptional intelligence. They just had beatific happiness in praising God all the time.

Which leads to an admonition: When you see a begger in the street, he maybe testing you for your eternal fate And there are earthly stories about this: From the Internet: An upscale curch got a new minister. Everybody came on Sunday all eager to meet their new man. A bum walked into the church and everybody just wanted to dirty man to go away. After a while the bum went up to the alter, took off his disguise and told everybody to go home and think about what they had done....

¶ +2023.11.12. What is the purpose of university professors scaring students, and why is it allowed?

This question needs to be clarified.

What are professors scaring students about , when, where, how and why?

Some teachers at all levels are nasty persons who get off on literally scaring students that they are tough graders etcetera and so forth.

Some teachers may be genuinely concerned about things like "golbal warming", "the population explosion", wars and other bad things and they look around he room and see the students TikToking. Wake up kids! The world is a scary place!

Then the are probaly some teachers who are either MAGAs or Wokies or Prigs and Prudes (the last found mainly in "Christian" schools) who have an ideological agenda and, like the old missionaries to the infidels, want to save souls and if not they would like to burn them at the stake for their own go[o]d.

Others?

Thi question is not clear about what kind of frightening the asker is concerned about. And also what the asker's agenda is in asking it.

¶ +2023.11.12. Over the weekend, I came across a deep statement, which says, "No one is as smart as all of us." May I understand your understanding about this statement?

I, for one think that is pollyanna rubbish, to make unthinking folk feel good about not thinking for themselves. Of course,we can, as individuals, learn from other individuals in thoughtful civil discourse. Scholars and scientists submit their books to selected individuals for peer review criticism before publishing them. "If you do something very well, you simply cannot do it for everybody." (Bank of New York ad slogan)

What brilliant idea was ever cooked up by a committee, much less a hoard?

If a picture is worth a thouand words, I will save you 1,998:

[ the one and the many ]

Cogito ergo sum. And you?

¶ +2023.11.12. How can we confront our fear?

One size does not fit all.

But the ending of Ingmar Bergmann's film "The Seventh Seal" appeals to me. It's the Black Death (14th century). A knight is returning hoe from a Crusade (why he wasted his energy on that I have no idea). Anyway, he is racing Death to get home.

His wife, Karin, is "holding down the fort" in his absence. She is awaiting his return. She could have fled north away from the plague but she has stayed at her post. She holds dinner for her castle' staff. Everybody is losing their mind and going berzirk in fear of the plague. Karin remains calm. They are all illiterate and so victims of their hormones. She can read (spoken language is immediate; written words are at a distance) and therefore she can rationally deal with reality. She reads from the bible before dinner to the assembled group. Death comes to the door. She graciousy invites Him in. She is not suicidal, just rational. She has no rational alternative (He isn't likely to comply with a request to go away). She keeps her cool, and hopefully lessens the hysteria of all the illiterates in her service. She reads from thebible before breaking the fast, or if you will, feeds the spirit before the stomach.

So there is my answer: Study in the humanities. Education, as opposed to skill instruction (e.g., getting a PhD in computer science), is no good unless it can do two things: (1) help us to make unavoidable sufering less terrible (including for ourselves), and (2) when persons are not suffering, to jncrease their joy in living. That's it.

I have invested most of my "free time" in a long life studying in the humanities. Will it pay off? I don't know, but I've tried. They say there are no atheists in a foxhole. Even though I know nobody here, I occasionally visit my friendly local cemerery, in particiular I look at the simple little tombstones of 3 pious nuns who presumably died many years ago (I am an anti-theist: I judge that if the Abrahamic Deity exists, He is bad; but thoe who believe in Him are sometimes good, just uneducated).

Become literate, or maybe bcome a hero or there are alwsys pills. What are you afraid of? Can you do anything about it? Is it really worth being afraid of? I fear penury. I fear physical pain. But my undertanding of death is either I won't know about it or else I will be some place far from here to deal with it and in either case ther is not much I can do about it now except to try to not commit any crimes but then the Abrahamic Deity has some peculiar ideas about what's a crime, like "taking His name in vain"....

If you want something to think about, free on the Internet read the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) classic and highly controversial OpEd piece: "It's over, Debbie."

¶ +2023.11.12. Who's more intelligent, those that are factual or those who are imaginative?

Facts without imagination are just factual. Imaginaion without facts is just fanciful.

It's a false dichotomy like a lot of other superficial ideation. What are you trying to accomplish with this bifurcation? That imaginative people are useless and should put their nose to the grindstone? Or that you don't want to be a "man in the gray flannel suit"? Or what? that is the quetion.

One of the most imaginatie persons of the 20th century was also highly knowledgeable: the advertising designer Milton Glaser, inventor of "I [heart] NEW YORK" and much other great imagery.

"We were excited by the very idea that we could use anything in the visual history of humankind as influence," Mr. Glaser, who designed more than 400 posters over the course of his career, said in an interview... (2004). (The New York Times, Milton Glaser obituary)

So study the whole history of humankind and also have a lively imagination and you too may be able to do something of value that will make reality (facts) more appealing to live in (imagination).

"Why not sneeze, Rrose Sélavy?" (Marcel Duchamp)

¶ +2023.11.12. What are some ways to end a presentation with an impactful punchline or message?

There are no methods for greatness. There are methods for more of the same old same old.....

"Ways":

Master your subject matter. If you are going to give a 5 minute preentation, be confident you could to 30 minutes and field anything anybody throws at you in Q&A.

Play around a lot with that material. Don't just plod along with it. That will probably entail you either really loving it or really hating it but not just doing it for a paycheck.

Don't try to come up with an impactful punchline.

Be attentive to details. Remember that Johannes Kepler revolutionized the science of astronomy by noticing a very small anomoly in some observations of the planet Mars that I imagine somebody could have dismissed as some sort of error in the records and just gone on to watch Monday Nite NFL if they had had televisions in the 16th century.

Don't try to be polite. If you offend somebody you have had an impact on them.

Typographical errors can be gems (or not); correct spelling is oftan a bore. Dictionaries and grammar books are descriptive not prescriptive except in school.

Marshall McLuhan said:

"Every joke expresses a grievance; the funny man is a man with a grudge."

Humor is serious stuff.

Three people for you to NOT emulate because their speeches or as it is rants have all the impact of a peeved toddler throwing a tantrum: Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy , Donald John Trump and Joseph Robinette Biden Junior. That's what not to do, especially if your audience is not gullible, ignorant and stupid or else cynically playing along with you. Although, in all fairness, even though Mr. Zelensky was the comedian, Mr.Trump one time said something that would have been a really impactful punchline. He said, just before the 2020 election:

"If you really want to drive them crazy: Twelve more years!"

Study effective presentations by others. Think about it: Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address which we consider to be a masterpiece today was a disappointment to his audience because long orations were the HBO of his time and his speech only ran for 3 minutes, not 2 hours. Also, Mr. Lincoln had almost no formal education whereas the three speakers in the above paragraph all have college degrees.

Practice makes perfect. The more presentations you make eiher you will get tired of yourself or you will learn about effective presentations and look forward to doing [even...] better each time.

In other words: Do you really, really want to present anything, or would you rather be watching HBO or fishing or bar hopping or well you know...?

––––

Now, were you looking for a "method" to be effective? A cheap fix? I spent many years as a child not learning how to play the piano by Thompson's method (I had no clue that any music worth listening to or playing existed, so why try to play it?). The great chef and highly effective presenter, Julia Child, didn't faithfully follow recipes ("Oh, we'll add a pinch of that....") and would gulp down a bit of wine every so often during her show. Bon appetit!

(Somebody will probably tell you some "methods" here? I think it was Norman Vincent Peale sorry: Dale Carnegie who wrote a book: "How to win friends and influence people". I know nothing about it.)

¶ +2023.11.11. I am baffled to how you say you're a student and always willing to change your views but have so many bigoted responses to so many questions. Can you explain?

Who is "you", white man? (The previous sentence is not meant as a statement about your racial ancestry or lack of same, but about your attitude)

This qurstion is obviously wrong-headed. If it is directed at some specific person, they are not specified or specifically targeted. If not, it's a "blanket" bitch at at lot of persons, to some of whom it may well apply, to some of whom it may apply just a little, and to some of whom it does not apply at all.

Have fun kicking cats. (Meow!)

¶ +2023.11.11. How can housing, transport, and other aspects of the environment be made more elderly-friendly?

Oh, boy! What a question!

The whole USA has always been against this since The Greatest Generation came home from "The War" (World War II). Tha anomic atomized nuclear family living in "suburban housing developments" on the skin cancer of the topsoil (Levittown and up "lawns" where you had to driev a car 5 miles to do anything like maybe buy a carrot and on and on it goes...

[ Nuclear family ]

(Above: ☢A nuclear family being culturally irradiated☢)

This has not been helpful for the elderly, nor for the young: Day care is expensive when grandma does not live in the house.

Imagine if we all lived in small villages where you could walk "everywhere" or multi-generational family "compounds"? Of course it's not a panacea, especially if you had a mother like me who belonged in a mental hospital but my father had asked me the question whether to pay for me to go to college or to put her away since he could not afford both. Or young persons whose parents are the sex police.

But assuming reasonable live-and-let-live persons, what could be better than 3 or 4 generations under one roof? Grandma and grandpa love to babysit the kids while mommy and daddy pursue their careers. The kids love to hear bedtime stories from Grandma and do woodworking projects with grandpa. Daddy gets wisdom from his father and grandma shows mommy how to be pregnant and take care of baby.

Contrast: At best the grandparents are still living in the big old house and their adult children who maybe on the other side of the country are worrying if they will fall down the stairs of something and having to pay for home aides. At worst: the old people rotting in old age homes where, in Japan, they can have the companionship of robotic pet dogs ("Arf! Arf!").

Now the reaction of some red-white-and-blue blooded Americans to this is that it would restrict their freedom. This is true if the old prople are busybody prigs and prudes. But if everybody is OK with life, what contriction of what freedom? The "freedom" most Americans are referring to is the freedom to mow a big lawn, to have a big mortgage ("mort" means: death) and have a long commute to work in their private automobiles. Wow! But in a multigenerational home hter would not need tobe any restriction of opportunities to study serious books and for the older persons to share the wisdom acquired in a long life with the younger folks and vice versa. Freedom to continually grow one's mind, spirit, soul need not be hidered by not being stuck in the alie-nation.

[ Suburban development ]

I know of a family that is upper middle class (I came from half white trash and half first generation hard working children of peasants who immigrated from Poland). These peopley don't appreciate what they have. They do not like when I suggest how good it would be for them al lto live in one big house and I even have a candidate: 5 bedrooms each with a separate bath, fresh baked and the builder has moved into it himself but I am sure that fo the right price he could be convinced to move back out of it. Grandma is the Everready bunny. One of the adults has problems in living so needs to be watched over by the siblings. What the heck?

In a family compound there should be fewer expenses than everbody duplicating everything so maybe some persons would not need to work at all in exchange for some "sweat equity". I would have been very happy to spend maybe 4 hours a day managing a big family estate and all the rest of my time free for study in the humanities intead of having to waste the best hours of the best days of my life producing surplus value for an employer to which I had no emotional or ficuciary relation. But then I knew anothre perosn whose family owned a really "cool" business: wholesale distribution of machinery replacment parts, but he wanted no part of it and was working as a computer programmer in a "companY" and going to law school at night. Dosn't working for the family make more sense than working for an IRA?

On the other hand it can be bad. I know another person who is now 90 years old. She grew up in a small town in pre-World War II France and her family owned the biggest business in the small town. Her father got a good eduation (could read Latin and Greek) and started off in the Army, where he was apparently on his way to a brilliant career and he loved it. But the matriarch of the family made him run the family business. He bacame an alcoholic and then the business itself collapsed. No more family compound. There were maybe 5 children. The mother was a piece of work. One fine day the lady I know was having aquarrel with her older brother and the paents opened the door just in time to tell him to put down the pistol he was about to dispatch his sister with. So extented families need not be all good.

Bu what's so good about – well part of my childhood was spent in a split level house on a full acre of lawn several miles from anything other than more tract houses often on just smaller lawns, and I think our neighbor on one side died in the line of duty: A heart attack on his ride-on lawnmower, and the people on the other side whom I think had inherited "railroad" money had a son who liked to torture small animals. What Mr. Donald Trump calls: "Out beautiful and successful suburbs".

Somehow we need to combine the best of "both worlds": the emotional security of extended families and the freedom of thought of independent scholars

[ Erasmus ]

Not:

[ Life is good man i nthe gray flannel suit ]

¶ +2023.11.11. Do any books detail how certain parents raised their kids to become geniuses and/or other types of extremely intelligent people?

Not that I know of.

But two anecdotal things that may be instructive:

(1)The brilliant physicist Richard Feynamm at lesat said he had an IQ of "only" 125. Lot s of persons have IQs that high. But they are not usually geniuses What made the difference? His father was continually asking him questions about all sorts of things and encouraging him to figure out the answers and to think up more questions for himself.** "Honor thy father and mother and do what we tell you" and "you have to pay your dues" and other such childrearing is highly destructive of a child's potential**.

(2) A very important writer about how parents harm their children by "do as you are told" and other such childrearing is Alice Miller. Her books "The drama of the gifted child", "Thou shalt not be aware" and "For you own good" should be required reads for intelligent children and their parents irrespectie of the latter's intellignce or lact thereof. But it turn out that as a mother in real life she was apparently exactly what the warned againt. Her son has said that reading he books saved him from her.

I waa childreared by parents who were as if of a less evolved species and school teachers who were proactively destructive of my mind and my spirit. They severeely crippled my mind and my spirit and ruined my life. They did not fully succeed. I will end with the one piece of objective evidence I have from 65 years ago:

[ Mike Rentko ]

¶ +2023.11.10. Do you agree with Delta CEO Ed Bastian that "Every time you add another feature, it gets more complicated" for boarding customers?

I dont know about this in particular but in general it's a widespread problem.

It's the worst with computers. But it's all over the place.

A consumer appliance, e.g., a clothes washer, can have many features. Some people like it; they are willing to ex-spend the time and effort to learn how to use them. I just want to get the damned clothes washed and I use only one setting (the 30 minute cycle). But then there is the other issue: the more features there are, the more likely the whole damned thing will break. So I may not care about all those other settings on the washer but if the mechanism to make one of them fails I may not be able to get my simple wash-the-damned-clothes done.

As far as I am concerned robustness is top priority, not gadgets and gizmos.

In computers there is another problem. You learn how to do what you need with the computer you have. You may not like it but you get used to it. Then they come along with a new improved version and you have to waste your time and energy learning all over again how to do on the new model what you damned well already had wasted your time and energy to learn how to do on the old model. It's called the "upward compatibility" problem: What you did yesterday on the old tuff should work today on the new stuffwithout changeing anything you do if you don't want to use the new features.

Air travel back in the regulated days, before Ronnie Raygun fired all the air traffic controllers, used to be simple: The fare was what it was and there were two options: coach or first class. Simple. Now buying a ticket is like playing the bit coin market – tomorrow the same seat on the same flight may be double or half the price it is today.

Marshall McLuhan (remember that dude?) famously said:

"The medium is the message."

What's the point behind all the features? To teach you to passively submit to following orders, for one.

There is an acronym from the U.S. Navy (1960) and Kelly Johnson (father of the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes):

KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid.

Ideally, in the best of all possible worlds, a grandmother who doesn't know AC from Dc should be able to use it with minimal instruction and a master of the art should be able to use it without going thru a lot of B/S. But a good starter is the 80 20 rule: You get 80 percent of the value for 20 percent of hte effort.

So give me a washing machine that has just one function: wash the damned clothes, but, to borrow the slogan of Revox tape recorder company: Build it like a brick shipyard. Oh, yes, and make it easily repairable by your friendly local fix-it person.

I did computer programming work for half a century, including stuff buried in the bowels of IBM's then flagship operating system (MVS/370). Been there. Done that. I use Notepad and run most of my work from the command line – functionality that was mostly there 40 years ago. WYZIWYG or whatever other alphabet soup is not for me. KISS.

Oh, yes, one feature I do need: make it provide a detailed audit log of what you do. Eacmploe: I post a message each morning on The White House website asking Mr.Biden to sto his anti-Russia war in Ukraine. I could ask for anything. I get on feeedback tha twhat I think I sent got received. the website should send me back an email quoting the verbtatim text they received. That is an important function, not being able to select "Mr., Miss, Mrs, or Mx. or other" – "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." (Clark Gable, "Gone with the wind")

¶ +2023.11.10. How would you communicate effectively with a Boss that is determined to undermine or discredit any success you've personally created and executed?

It would depend on how much I needed the job and how competent I was at it.

It I was not a master of the craft, I would not open myself to being shot down on factual grounds.

If I needed to job ot pay the bills, I would "eat it", but be quietly looing for a new position.

But if I was good to go, "God help him" (her, other).

Here's the closest I ever came to it: I had a manager in IBM Operating System software development (heavy stuff!) in 1979 who was literally a Mickey Mouse: "straight", not "gay", he came to work wearing socks with machine stitched images of Mickey and Minnie Mouse on them but he either was incompetent or unwilling to enter into serious discoure with me about small rodents.

He liked to call meetings for no useful purpose. Once he quietly shared his deepest most cherished secret in life with us: He said he would like weekly instead of biweekly status reports. Nobody except me heard this, of course.

I glared at him and loudly and very articulately told him: "That's all right with me, Jim, becuase, you know, Jim: two half nuthins make a whole nuthin." Nobody heard that either but he ended the meeting there.

I am a peace loving person. But when I know what I am doing and can get away with it, well, I will quote from a person I knew who was more inteligent and more competent than me. Two things he said:

"Lead, follow or get out of the way."

"Some people are in need of retroactive birth control."

¶ +2023.11.10. How important is it to you to be constantly connected?

I worked for half a century in computer progamming and got PTSD from it. Been there. Done that.

I do NOT want to be constantly connected. I do NOT want frivilous people (family, friends, robocallers, etc.) to be able to annoy me whenever they feel like jerking me around. For me, the cellphone is an incubus. I do carry it sometimes, for instance if I have been to the doctor and am anxiously awaiting a result from a medical test to find out of I am dying or something else awful. When the cellphone rings, I shout obscenities at it, but I refrain from throwing it at the wall because it would cost me money to replace it.

Back 40 years ago I had a highly responsible (but not "life and death") job with a beeper. The thing rang one nite at 3AM and I actually slept thru it. Whoopee!

I like to always have the option to be connected, on my terms. But not for other people to be able to connect to me on their terms. I would not mind having a cellphone if I was such an important person that anybody who would think of calling would tremble in fear of what I might do to them if I decided they should not have done it. But I do not count.

Now: this comes with risks of which I am duly reminded by normal people: I like to walk in the woods. If a sabertooth tiger attacks me or I have a heart attack I will not be able to call 911 and I may die. That's a risk I knowingly take because I do not like people except for 1-on-1 conversations freely entered into or intimacy. Of course I would give my pet cat access at any time but cats do not use cellphones; all they can do is meow.

The species homo sapiens (the members of which are rarely sapient...) are evolving (or devolving) into a new species: homo cellphonicus. To each his (her, other's) own.

[ Cellphone man clinbing stairs ]

¶ +2023.11.10. How significant is it socially and economically for there to be workplaces for people to go to instead of working from home?

One size obviously does nt fit all.

Some work requires in person social interaction. The Boeing 747 could probably not have been designed by work-at-home engineers. The projet was just too interconnetedly big. Or a surgical operation where the surgeon needs a supporting staff in the OR.

Some work does not require in person social interaction but micro-managers like to poke their noses into their workers' budiness and some employers like to see "asses and elbows" (that is direct quote from a 3rd line manager I had in a big FDIC bank).

Work from home is a serious threat to the existing capitalit wage-slavery economic order becasue when people don't punch in and punch out they may get bad ideas in their head about "all men are created equal" in the workplace as well as the voting booth.

Please go to the Internet and listen to economics professor Richard Wolff, Democracy at Work (d@w) .

And there are other considerations. Some persons cannot work effectively at home no matter how much they might like to and potentially be more productive, since going to an office is the ony way they can get away from the distractions of a nagging spouse and screaming children all day.

There are some emloyees who all they want to do all day is shmooze around the water cooler about last nite's pro sports "games", and they would not be happy with work-from-home, but why are they on the payroll in the first place?

Listen to Richard Wolff.

As for me, I hated the office and even worser was the total waste of commuting. I envied Japanese World War II kamikaze pilots who only had to make their commute once. And the was one thing I did like i the office: When the vending machine restock man came around, he would throw snack packs past their eat-by date in a trash can. He did not object to me foraging in th garbage for: FREE EXPIRED DORITOS!

Some people just get off on bossing others around.

¶ +2023.11.10. What should I do? I started my internship as a lecturer, but I put a very bad impression on students. While lecturing, I also got confused and forgot things. I can't deliver a lecture without my notes in my hand. Actually, I am very disappointed with myself. I'm feeling very demotivated.

I think you should change your attitude.

Did you know the subject matter? If not, that is very bad.

Did you try to tailor what you were teaching to what the students could benefit from, not to what you could benefit from? Again, if not, that is ver y bad.

But what you describe is harmless. Of course you want to lecture like Frederick Douglass, but nobody can have everything in this world.

If you are sincere in wanting to help the students, just do your best. Oh, dear! Ask the students to help you! I.e., ask the students to help you to help them! That might really "blow their lttle minds" and wake them up to your lecturing.

Lecture notes? Xerox the damned things and hand them out before you start each class so as to not waste students' time and distract them with notetaking.

Suppose it gets really bad and you wet your pants.Tell them you are trying so hard to teach them that you wet your pants.

Before each lecture begins, stand dead still and quiet at the front of the room uptil complete silence. Then respetfully bow to honor both the students and the material that you have deemed worthy to share with them.

Then do your best. It helps to go to the restroom before class and take a piss even if you don't need to and to splash your face with COLD water to wake up.

Somebody has "sold you a bill of goods". Nothing in your question is bad. It's just things to deal with. And if you have students who don't want to help you –- let me repharase that: If you have students who don't want to help you to help them, then there is only one topic to lecture them about: Why are they there in the classroom in the first place?

That's my advice. Take it or leave it. But I will end with a true story:

I was a freshman at Yale in 1964. I was in a special program so I didn't take the courses most of the students took. One of their classes was Art History 10, taught by a profesor who should have been on television he was so "good" at it. He once broke down in tears over Giotto and had to dismiss the class in mid lecture he was so dramatic or maybe melodramatic. Vincent Scully. Anyway, one session, in the middle of his lecture, he suddenly stood dead still and dead quiet. He looked around the room and DEMANDED the students stop taking notes and savor the art works he was lecturing them so eloquently about. (I had no problem because I wa just "auditing" the class, i.e., just enjoying the show.) The students stopped taking notes and paid attention. He was not stupid. He undertood very well why they were taking notes: to regurgitate his material on their final exam. So he told them flat out: You elll not be tested on my lectures but only on memorizing pictures of 300 classic works of art which will be on display for you to study (i.e., memorize) in a different building.

I'd give that dude, who wasperhaps the most famous art historian in America, a big flat "F": F for hypocrite. I learned a lot from his lectures, because I wanted to listen to what he had to say but did not have to pay. Do you wan to to be like that silver tongued orator? (Of course you do: He sat in an endowed chair at one of the greatest universities in the world.)

¶ +2023.11.09. How can news media pit the younger generation and the older generation against each other?

People need to get over this kind of superficial stereotyping.

Yes, from 30,000 feet, "The greatest generation" looks a lot differnt from the TikTok generation. Like a forest of sequioas looks differnt from a forest of pine trees. Duh!

But you may find the same little nuthatch birds and red squirrels in both if you get up close.

Persons are or can be or become individuals not just instances of stereotypes. I have far more in common with 5th century BCE philosophers Sun Tzu in China and Heraclitus in Greece than with 99%+ percent of the persons in my chronological age group. Those persons understood things [at least fancy...] I understand and nobody else around me does [seems to...].

Also, as the philosopher Diogenes of Sinope noted: He looked at the bones of the father of Alexander the Great and the bones of a slave and he couldn't tell the one from th other. All sheep are the same color in the dark.

[ Waldos ]

The persons in my living life I have been closest to were all in my father's chronological age group. One made a major engineering contribution to the World War II American war effort. Another was the son of a one ot the towering intellectuals of the 20th century. The third was a close friene of Marshall McLuhan. None of them were just Where's Waldos (see below) of their generation. What do they all have in common? Insight that transcended their time.

But I have nothing in common with my biological parents of that same generation who were dupes of The American Dream: full wheel hubcaps and tail fins and split level suburan houses and Perry Como crooning – crooning – about a White Christmas and keep Ameria beautiful get a haircut [I hated and feared haircuts!], and what else of no lasting value?

Of course you are right that most 2-legged sheep tend to herd with their chronological age group. In school, the classes before and after mine were like on totally different floors of the same high-rise building: no connection between floors. But there are exceptions. Some are bad and some are good and others are even somethings elses.

Poeple need to stop being superficial, and call out superficiality for what it is: Yes, what is it? Not much.

I do not like being nothing, do you?

My dissertation advisor said something:

Here, let's engage work as the work of peers.
Shakespeare lived an ordinary life, just like you.

So if I met the Abrahamic Deity (aka Yahweh) in the road I would not be impressed. I would greet Him respectfully, just like I would respectfully greet a homeless Vietnam veteran, and ask Him to keep social distance (I do not want anybody, neither God nor homeless person or anybody in between, giving me an infectious disease). And if either of them reciprocated with respect for me, we might get along. But if that Deity wanted to be worshipped or something I would give the Dude a wide berth and be on my way. Of course He could kill me without even lifting a finger but might does not make right. And, yeah, the Abrahamic Deity is a lot older than me, but so? I can't help that. But if He wanted to play nicely with me we might have something to offer each other. What would you do if you met your Maker in the road?

¶ +2023.11.09. Should we fear artificial intelligence or should we fear the programmer?

Great question!

Always remmber: guns do not kill people. People kill people with guns.

We should fear the programmers, but far more the people ho hire them to write the code.

I worked for half a century as a computer programmer.

Most of the programmers were decent people who were clueless. They did not ask about the value of what the were ass–gned to do. They just did it, and for good reason: they had to pay the bills. And maybe they had fun at it too.

But they could just as well have been working in the Third Reich.

[ Dehomag ]

They would not likely have volunteered to be SS officers, but they would cluelessly written programs for "the census" if nobody told them about concentration camps.

The real problem is upper management: the people who decide what the programmers should program. And they often are myopically profit oriented: If it makes more money just do it. Also also high level academics who are having research fun.

And this need not be the Nazis. It can be a U.S company that automates social workers filing their patient session reports. Not only can this information be used in all sorts of ways, but the report entry program itself can (I have personally seen this) make the social workers want to quit their jobs. The social workers want to help persons in need, not be persecuted by a computerized tracking program. But the programmers la di dah and get their paychecks.

AI is extremely powerful but there's something else coming that uses AI and is far more powerful, like hydrogen bombs are more powerful than fission bombs (the Hiroshima type): VR (Virtual Reality).

AI is a keyboard data entry and screen text response application (I play around with the Bing AI). It is not likely to cause anybody to go insane and kill themelves: it's jsut text. The worst AI might do is a student in school who doean't want ot be there submitsthe output of an AI for an ass–-ignment he (she, other) does not want to do. And you know what? In many cases the AI will write a better essey than the sudent would have written himself. Scary yes? But not all that bad.

Recommendation here: Read MIT professor of computer science Joseph Weisenbaum's classic book: "**Computer power and human reason: From judgment to calculation**" (WH Freeman, 1976). That's probably all you need to know about AI.

But VR! That's going to be the real game changer. First thing to do here: Watch the old, fun but profound movie: "**The Truman Show**". A must see!

VR is not advertising which tries to make you believe things are not what they are but they still are the same things. Take th sheepskin off the wolf and you can see the wolf.** VR REPLACES reality** with what the programmer programmers, *i.e*., what the money grubbers (ans/or academic Computer Science freaks) want you to experience instead. Some of these very dangerous persons are ***really*** serious: they want to implant networked computer chips insde your skull, inside your brain, inside your mind, to "enhance" you, *i.e*., to turn you ito a zombie like Jeffrey Dahmer, just some ofthem have PhD and the rest are corporate officerss so they get grants or corporate funding to do it, not the cops coming to arrest them and put htem in prison (I made a really telling typo there: "prion" – remember mad cow disease?)

OK, here is the truth about VR. I did it. I would swear to it under oath subject to felony perjury:

.My virtual reality experiment: I was driving up a 6 lane superhighway early one August afternoon in clear bright sunlight at about 65 miles per hour in my clunky Toyota Corolla DX, with no other cars on the road. I decided to look intently at the little image in the car's rear view mirror -- no high tech apparatus. I really really really really intently focused all my attention on that little image! It was entirely convincing. That "little" image became my whole experienced reality: I was driving where I had been, not where the automobile was going. Fortunately I "snapped out of it" in time to avoid becoming a one car crash in the ditch on the right side of the road. (It was a very good place to have conducted this experiment, because there was a police barracks, a teaching hospital, and both Christian and Jewish cemeteries nearby, just in case.)

You may try to repeat my virtual reality experiment at your own risk; I strongly advise you against doing so. I assure you: It worked. (Of course it will not work if you don't "give in to it", just like a video game won't work if you just look at the pixels as what some computer programmer coded up with branching instructions depending on what inputs you enter.) Moral of this story: **VIRTUAL REALITY CAN KILL YOU. Forewarned is forearmed.**

End of story. Have I frightened you? If not, you have a problem.

¶ +2023.11.09. Is society composed more of structures or subjects with agency?

This is an excellent question.

I am almost totally ignorant of physics. Is light a wave or a particle? Perhaps similar question.

[ duckrabbit ]

Is it a duck or is it a rabbit?

Propaganda and the kind of stuff kids are taught in schools are generally simple. Reality is not.

[ MLK's DC rally

Or:

[ tienaman square man ]

I have not even begun to go into the difficulties here. There is the old joke about the millipede who can only walk when he does not thinka bout how he moves his thousand legs.

Let's consider a terrible wild fire. If you are a medic, one injured firefighter is all you can worry about. If you are some kind ofuniversity professor studying rare animals, insects of plants, you may have eyes only for one particular thretened creature in thousansds of acres. if you are a pilot of a plane that dumps flame retardant on the conflagartion you will look for maybe a several acre wide place that is brning exceptionally badly or that is almost burut out to dump tons of chemicals on, and just possibly that medic's patient and the professor's rare specimen are in the dump area – so much the worse for them, right?

It's the bling man and the elephant.

Karl Marx observed: "Man makes himself on the basis of conditions he has not made."

But individual mortal humans or the pseudo-never-ending human species?

the invariant in all this is the overall and unsurpassable process of talking about it, whatever it is, in our minds and interpersonally. "We are a conversation." (John Wild)

Martin Heidegger: "What endures in thinking is the proess of thinking, not any particular thoughts." The earth was flat yesterday; it's round today; and nobody knows for sure what it will be tomorrow.

And on it goes. We did not create the world, so we will never fully be able to understnd it but we have to live in and with it. I am old enough that I am an "existentialist", which was a kind of philosophy which thought about living not about intellectual masturbation (in group sociial rituals) like deconstruction and –

There was an old cartoon in the New Yorker magazine. It showed two day trippers in the mddle of a huge state forest. They wer looking at a large map. In the center of the map wa a big "X", on a trail. The text on the map said:

"You are here and you are lost."

¶ +2023.11.09. Will AI make the first native AI generation the most well-educated generation in history?

At this point everything is pointing toward the "first native AI" generation becoming the least educted generation in history, and let me be clear: I am not romanticizing some Father Knows Best past that either never was or should never have been): no past generatio in my lifetime (1946+) was educated. It's just this latest one may be even worser.

Many things are going against it"

(1) A self-destructing economy which is providing jobs based on the basest profit considerations so it does not pay so nobody is studying the humanities (some prison convicts are, but then they don't have to make a profit)

(2) Colleges and universities grubbing for monay and throwing out the non-profitable humanities for profitable business and computer science.

(3) Wokism hates education. Wokies often want a free liunch and educated persons might figure this out. They want 2-legged "intersectionalist" (Big word there, dudes!) sheep.

Wanna be up to date:? Study Sun-Tzu (ca. 500 BCE). The most brillant military theorist of the 20th century, USAF Colonel John R Boyd, Fathre of the F-16 Fighting Falcoln, and who probably. knew far more than you bout anything, was a self-proclaimed student of Sun-Tzu. He is way in front you unless you are up tho date with Sun-Tzu – like Russian Mig pilots are, via John Boyd.

What the sh*t do they teach kids in college much less high school, about anything (except Python)? What is Pearl Harbor? "Uh... A Club Med resort in the Caribbean?" "Midway?" "Uh. I think the old Chicago airport is Midway." "WWII" "Oh, I know! The latest version of Weight Watchers! Right?"

Your grandfather's generation! The greatest generation! It's been downhill in our race to the bottom economy, from there. Remember Howard Stern's immortal words live on air when a commercial jet had just crashed on takeoff in the nation's capitol city: " What is the fare from National Airport to the 14th Street Bridge?"

And then – those where the days –, I w as actually blessed to see although by now its only a faint memory of a memory – I remember when on the premier episode of "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman", her neighbor asked Mary the $64,000 dollar quetsion: "Do you see the waxy yellow buildup on your kitchen floor?"

That's educated compared to the Tik-tok generation. Let's get serious: AI is the first step to VR. OK?

My virtual reality experiment: I was driving up a 6 lane superhighway early one August afternoon in clear bright sunlight at about 65 miles per hour in my clunky Toyota Corolla DX, with no other cars on the road. I decided to look intently at the little image in the car's rear view mirror -- no high tech apparatus. I really really really really intently focused all my attention on that little image! It was entirely convincing. That "little" image became my whole experienced reality: I was driving where I had been, not where the automobile was going. Fortunately I "snapped out of it" in time to avoid becoming a one car crash in the ditch on the right side of the road. (It was a very good place to have conducted this experiment, because there was a police barracks, a teaching hospital, and both Christian and Jewish cemeteries nearby, just in case.)

You may try to repeat my virtual reality experiment at your own risk; I strongly advise you against doing so. I assure you: It worked. (Of course it will not work if you don't "give in to it", just like a video game won't work if you just look at the pixels as what some computer programmer coded up with branching instructions depending on what inputs you enter.) Moral of this story: **VIRTUAL REALITY CAN KILL YOU. Forewarned is forearmed.**

¶ +2023.11.08. Why do scientists often use the 99.99% instead of 100%?

I am not a scientist.

No "analog" set can be 100%. There is always a "fudge factor".

I am not a carpenter or a machinist, either, but I like to think I am pretty clever. So there is a rule in engineering called: "double dimensioning".

Here's th problem: You want a 12 inch long board. not 99%, but %100% 12 inches long.

In reality you cnnot also demand that your 100% 12 inch board be produced from 2 100% 6 inch boards. Something is always not 100% in the real world. ("The devil is in the details") YOU CANNOT DOUBLE DIMENSION, thus spoke the God of the machine shop, or just "fingerspitzengefuhl"), i.e., the knowledge for their craft a master craftsperson gets in the sensitivity of their fingers which they wet with some of their saliva.

¶ +2023.11.08. What is the definition of critical theory? What is its relationship with science and empiricism? What does it mean for social sciences, like sociology or anthropology?

I was reading the then new translation of Martin Heidegger's "Being and Time" at the same time as I got my existential selective Service identification number (18–11–46–503) at age 18 years, back in 1964. Been there, done that.

I don't much relate to jargon. "Critical theory" as far as I am concerned is word salad:

"When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less."

The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master – that's all." (Lewis Carroll)

In 1965 or I had a philosophy teacher who was a real existnetialit. I'm still an existentialist – a living fossil. John Wild. He told me he liked me because my concern with philosophy was for living, not, he continued, like some of his graduate students who were into "neo-scholastic jargon"

So critical theory gobbledygook but do read David Lehman's fine book "Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul De Man".

That said, I am passionate aboutboth criticism and theory. All our experience is theory-laden: We can see only what our theories enable us to see. Nobody in Medieval Europe could have pancreatic cancer; but they might be possesed by an evil demon, and vice versa.

So here's my "net". I always like to quote other persons to prove I'm not plagiarizing and also how if I'm not smart enough to have thought of it myself, I am at leaat smart enough to tell what's worth while which is rare enough. This is not "popular". It is anti-woke:

"[After a professor told his class some idea he believed that is not generally acceptable to say: A]cademic freedom has nothing to do with content. It is not a subset of the general freedom of Americans to say anything they like (so long as it is not an incitement to violence or is treasonous or libelous). Rather, academic freedom is the freedom of academics to study anything they like.... / [T]he number of viewpoints Mr. Barrett presents to his students is not the measure of his responsibility. There is, in fact, no academic requirement to include more than one view of an academic issue, although it is usually pedagogically useful to do so. The true requirement is that no matter how many (or few) views are presented to the students, they should be offered as objects of analysis rather than as candidates for allegiance." (Stanley Fish, Prof. of Law, Florida International Univ., "Conspiracy Theories 101", Op-Ed Piece, NYT, 23Jul06, p.WK13)

Two more quote on the present subject:

"Prove all things, hold fast that which is good." (1 Thes 5:21)

"Take every statement I make as a quetion not as an assertion." (Niels Bohr's instruction to his students)

Them's critical theory for me. And for thee?

¶ +2023.11.08. Should it be considered taboo to criticize a culture, and when should the line be drawn on cultural practices?

The whole point of taboos is to make persons so terrified of something that they dare not even think about it. That way the status quo is safe, or rather, the fat cats who run the place are not in danger of a social revolution. And that need not be only at the poltical level: Parents inject taboos into their children's heads to keep the kid from criticizing them. Ditto bad school teachers. And political correctnessers, aka "wokies".... "How dare you!" "What's wrong with you to think such a thing?" "You need treatment!" "Shame on you for thinking that!" ....

"All social customs are shared hallucinoses aka social psychoses" (Wilfred Bion)

There's some big words in that senence but it means your society tries to brainwash you. And for very compelling reasons: The society needs males to work and die in its wars and for females to produce more males and females to work and die in its wars and to produce more workers and soldiers and baby factories.... Every society is very selfish, or otherwise stated: the people in power want to stay there.

If people question their government they just might say: "Hell no, I won't go!" Or they might use contraception to keep from being burdened with more mouths to feed and stretch marks. What if hte country gave a war and nobody showed up to fight? What if women didn't have any more babie but just enjoued their bodies?

And it can be really trivial. As a child I was highly sensitive and had a brilliant mind but also a very wimpy body. I never wanted to be haircutted. This was the 1950s. For a male to "have long hair" was TABOO. Why? Yes, Why? "Just because" Precisely: "Just becaue".

At age 40, working in IBM Research, of all places, I finally was able to stop submitting to haircuts. I was never any kind of hippie. I happily wore my fathr's hand-me-down Cauntess Mara neckties. I always wear long sleeve "dress shirts", even just lounging around home. But I hated and feared haircuts. It was a TABOO:

"Keep Ameria beautiful: Get a haircut!"

You want to get yourself in trouble? Ask jews why they have to deprive boys are part of their capacity for sexual pleaeur by cutting off the ends of their penises. That's child abuse. It's assault and battery. But just bring up that topic. It's TABOO. The third rail. "Stop talking about that! Go away! You ar being horrible! Shame on you! ...."

At work, ask everybody what their salary is. Not a good idea, right?

Taboos are Boo, hoos. Boo, hoo.

Oh, ask the people who are all worked up about the enslavement of black persons in USA – 1619 –, which really was bad – But ask them about the role of African tribal chief in selling their people to the evil white slave dealers. And if you really want to get in trouble, read Hanny Lightfoot-Klein's classic book: "Prisoners of ritual", about the traditional societies in Africa and muslim areas who rip out little girls external genitalia to "perfect nature" and "make them marriagable" and also prevent hem from having orgasms. TABOO!!! I do no hear the LGBQWETYs who are all wored up about "sexual orientation" getting worked up about persons not having really great orgasms, do you? Maybe if kids were encouraged about self-pleasuring they would not get so mixed up about "gender"? TABOO.

To end on a lighter note. I once knew a man who was many things including being an ethical giant and highly intelligent but who looked mantally retarded and had many other problems. Once he bought some chicken in a supermarket and when he got home the chicken turned out to be rancid. He want back to the store and complained about it. They told him toget lost. So he want to their chicken department and stuck the rancid chicken under the shoppers' noses and told them:

"This store sells rotten chicken"

He was finally escorted out of the store with 2 new packs of chicken.

Taboos?

"This store sells rotten chicken"

¶ +2023.11.08. Why am I stupid and why can't I just think for myself? Why is it so hard to live a fulfilling life without having to think about the lack of money and the lack of a career?

You may not be the brightest bulb iun the room but you are not likely "stupid and... can't... think for [your]self" because if you were that you would not think that.

Persons who literally can;t think for themseles don't think that they can't think for themslves. They just don't think for themelves and don't think about it.

[ Homer eating a donut ]

So you have a starter at a minimum. Lack of money? That may be all too real. Lack of a career? Ditto. But those are not things that necessarily have do with intelligence. America's current President, Mr. Joseph Ribniette Biden Junior, may be borderliine mentally retarded. But look at where he ha got to in life. One of the most brilliant physicists of the 20th century, Richard Feynmann, at least said he had an IQ of 125, which is not stupid but no where near "brilliant". But he did have omething going for him that few person have: A father who kept asking him quewtions and urging him to ask more questions and to try to figure out the anwers. Most people have parents who tell them to obey them and believe what they tell them.

Did you have a mother who tmade you feel you were not good enough? Did you find school meaningless? (It often is.)

Advice is cheap. It's easy to tell you to stop belittling yourelf, but it's true. You are thinking for yourself by asking this queston, arent you? Yes sor no!

Repeat: You are thinking for yourself. but you apparently have not got far with it, perhaps at least partly becaue you are telling yourself you can't think for yourself. So get over that. Now comes the hard part: To really start thinking for yourself. Not just glib generalities either way, but specific details. **Specific items.** Not are you intelligent or are you stupid, but did you do some little thing today that you wish you had done differently and feel bad about it? Try to do it right the next time. Did you avoid doing something because you were too discouraged but it's something you just might be able to do if you get off your two couch potatoes and try. What's the worst that can happen? You fail. What sill almost certainly happen if you don't try? You will fail. But if you fail in trying you will learn something to be able to do better nest time, if only by trying to avoid such situations again if they are really "hopeless" but you can avoid them.

Try to do **something**. Not anything dangerous!!! What do you do? Do you watch the boob tube a a lot?

Repeat: If you think you are stupid you can't be really stupid because people who are really stupid are generally too stupid to realize they are but they may somehow or other become managers. There was an old joke in International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), that "I**BM**" means: **I**diots **B**ecome **M**anagers.

Now obviously I do not know anything about your situation. for all I know "you" maybe a computer program generating Quora questions which I have heard happens. Why I do not know.

If you had a mother who messed up your mind and you can read to high school graduate level, there is an author who wrote books about how parents mess up their kids' minds, Alice Miller: "The drama of the gifted child", "For your own good" and "Thou shalt not be aware".

As for mr, the following cartoon is real, just the house is more upsale than where I lived at age 5 years.

[ motherbitch ]

Does what I have written help any? If not, that's ok and you can just forget it. You can guess I've "seen a lot".

¶ +2023.11.08. Why is Haiti losing its skilled workforce?

Profile photo for Bradford McCormick

Bradford McCormick

Independent Researcher (2018–present)Just now

I am ignorant of this (I do skim the New York Times newspaper).

As a general principle: educated persons often do nto want to live in bad countries if they can get out. Am I correct that Haiti is one of the most violence ridden places on earth today? If yes if you had a good education, why would you want to stay there if you could go some place where you could live a peaceful prosperous life?

Some privileged persons want to be "activists". But many just want to live. Let me take an example I do think I know something about: Ukraine. If I, who have an earned doctorate degree in a humanities field and have spent my whole life cultivating my mind in serious study, had been living there, I hope I would have been able to get out no later than 23 February 2022, to avoid my life being wasted in a brutal ignorant war. I would think about the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible and if I could save myself from this insanity, I would remember Lot's wife and not look back. (But "the writiing was on the wall" starting in 2014 with the Kiev regime's ATO [Anti Terrorist Operation] in the Donbas.)

Might Haiti be a similarly bad place for a person who values their life to be?

Uneducated people often get all hormonal, starting with socce match riots and leading to wars. The Harfields and the McCoys. I seem to have read that the neo-Nazi AZOV Batallion in Ukraine started as a soccer club.

[ rabid Ukraint males ]

If you were an Oxford graduate in Haiti, would you want to be part of this kind of barbarity? (excuse if my picture is from Ukraine not Haiti; I do not have energy or time to study every war andother man-made disaster)

If Haiti is a country full of violence and poverty, a lot of persons who have a skill and not just meat on their bones may not want to be ground up. Is this relevant? If not, please just ignore it, with my apology.

¶ +2023.11.08. What are the problems faced by minorities in a majority community? What are some possible solutions to these issues?

What is a minority?

A self-constituted idendificatarian self-interest group, perhaps looking for a free lunch?

The majority almost always discriminates against persons who are different. They do not have to be members of an officiial "minority group". The city state of Athens sentenced Mr. Socrates to death for being different, even though he wa from the point of view of gender, race and ancestry one of them. Aristotle left the city "to avoid them making the same mistake twice".

I was a minority in suburban middle class white 1950s USA. I had a brilliant mind and a wimpy body. I suffered persecution. Item:

[ rentko ]

"Majorities" are generally intolerant. Every person needs to be educated to learn to live and let livee, to treat with equal respet in civil society all persons even if they do not like them. You dont hav to want to go to bed with somebody to treat them as you would want them to tret you. t's OK to feel anything, so long as one doe not ACT on it.

[Aside: I just now remembered a bumper sticker I once saw (1977) on a car parked near the Mall in Washington DC. It read:

"I HATE YOU AS MUCH AS YOU HATE ME"
]

Look what the majority does during a war: They demonize the enemy instead of empathizing with them and working out a mutually respectful compromise.

A large part of th problem is "stereotyping". Every stereotype has some truth in it or else it would not "stick". But something very strange happens when the stereotyperf gets t know a person in the stereotyped group as a unique individuated person: they start treating them decently.

Perhaps the most eggregious case I can thin of was Adolf Hitler. Everybody knows he did horrible things to "jews". But he gave the SS specific instructions to give one jew safe pasage out of Germany: Dr. Eduard Bloch. Why? Because he knew him personally. Dr. Bloch had been the Hitler family's physician. Moral of this story: The solution to discrimination is for persons to know each other as individuals, not as part of a mass.

[ The one and he many]

Whatever one may think of the person, black U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas said something: He said he woud rather deal with an honeast racist than a hypocritical liberal.

Everybody needs to get over being woke and wake up. One thing to think about: While everybody here in USA was competing to see who could be most incensed over a rogue cop murdering a putative petty felon with a knee to the neck, which wa indeed a horrible crime, in Paris France people were incensed that a Muslm bigot, a religionist not a racist, had murdered a school teacher, Mr. Samuel Paty, for teaching freedom of expression in a classroom. The Muslim bigot did not crush Mr. Paty's neck: he completely severed it with a knife, resulting in Mr. Paty's head being in one place and the rest of his body in anothe rplace. Where was the outcry against this horrific crime here in USA? We need to fight religious bigotry as well a racial, gender and other more popular bigotries, yes? And in my case, I should not have been discriminated against by an athleticist bigot.

¶ +2023.11.07. What is the point of going to a graduation and walking on stage for a bunch of people to see?

For me, none.

I graduated from Yale in 1968. My father and his wife attended the ceremony. I stood outside one of the entrance gates in my silly cap and gown costume with a little tin can and collected donations from the 2-legged sheep who did attend for Quaker Vietnam War Relief ($130 in the can by the end of he morning).

I attended a relative's graduation a few years ago. When will this damned boring, crowded thing end?

I did not attend my dughter's college graduation this May and was shamed for it. I helped my mother in law to a seat and then I just wanted to get away from the screaming hormonally saturated people.

What's the point?

So what would be meaningful? If a member of the faculty told you that he (she, other) was so pleased with your work that he wants you to be his graduae student, or he hands you a name and phone number of a colleague and tells you this person will have a really nice job for you.

I was forbidden to attend my high school (prep school) graduation as punishment for having tried to sabotage their yearbook by captioning a picture of their prize varsity football team:

"We are the hollow men"

I didn't dare tell them I appreciated this because then they might have found a differet punishment that I would not have liked.

I do not like ceremonies, period. I do not like crowds, period.

Only individual persons exist and matter: "cogito ergo sum". Consider the two following pictures:

[ the one nd the many ]

[6-------]

[ waldo ]

People need entertainment because their daily life is not worth much. So I can understand why they like things like graduation ceremonies. Many students probably did not enjoy their education itself very much, and now it's over. Let's celebrate! And tmorrow and the next day and all the days after that? Christmas is coming!

¶ +2023.11.07. How can AI be used to improve the quality of online education?

AI as a better search engine searcher is great. But I just now tried to ask the Bing AI a question it should have been good at and it was not. I asked it to find who said something like that even if I had the facts wrong what I had to say about them is important, and I got a lecture on how you should be accurate in your facts. Then I told t that facts without citation information aare not worth much and it did not "get" that. It's not a panacea, but it's better than the old search engine string matching.

So AI makes a good reference library for the student (and the teachers, too).

What I have seen of the BingAI is that in many cases it can write an essay better than most college freshman, so what do you think they will do with it especially if they are over-worked or not interested in the ass–-ignment?

And what are you talking about: online instruction or online education. They are two very differnt things. Instruction teaches a skill. Education enriches the soul. Lots of kids get advanced degrees in computer science, i.e., the skill of writing computer programs, but they don't have a clue what is worth programming and why and what is worth NOT programming and why NOT.

So yes, A can probably help with online **instruction**: producing persons who know how to do things. Some silled chemist cooked up Zyklon-B and another skilled chemist cooked up Agent Orange.

"[n]o matter how indispensable the expert may become in a rationalized society, his own [narrowly functionalist (https://freefuse.quora.com/w/images/b/bb/Tesla-robot.jpg)] perspective (which originated within the world of crafts and agriculture, and then moved on to prosper in that of industry) is of no ultimate significance." (Arnold Gehlen "Man in he age of technology", 1957/1980, p. 161)

But let's get serious: How much **education** do students get in any venue?

So as far as education is concerned, AI is lke the old card catalog in printed book libraries, on steroids. A greeat tool. But edncarion is concerned with knowing what to use tools for, not just how to use them to do it.

Turn off your computer and read MIT professor of computer science Joseph Weizenbaum's classic book "Computer power and human reason: From judgment to calculation" (WH Freeman 1976).

Assignment for computer science students: Do a practicum as an orderly in a hospice to learn that you uare mortal, by getting the body fluds of dying persons on your keyboard typing fingers.

Assignment for MBA students: Do a practicul as a member of the nigh shift cleaning crew in your fancy office buiding and clean the toilets you defecate in during the day to learn how it feels to be an emloyee not an employer,

AI won't help young persons to become wise.

"The history of science and technology of the post-war [post-1945] era is filled with examples of reckless and unreflective "progress" which, while beneficial or at least profitable to some in the short run, may yet devastate much life on this planet. Perhaps it is too much to hope, but I hope nonetheless that as our discipline matures our practitioners will mature also, that all of us will begin to think about what we are actually doing and ponder whether, whatever it is, it is what those who follow after us would want us to have done." (Joseph Weizenbaum, Professor of Computer Science, MIT)

**"**Leisure has been, and always will be, the first foundation of any culture.... in our bourgeois Western world total labor has vanquished leisure. Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for nonactivity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture – and ourselves.**" **(Josef Pieper)

"Shut down your computer. Restart a friendship. The conversation is waiting. Go there." (Grand Marnier (liqueur, aka cordial))

Study the Book of **Ecclesiastes** in the Bible even if, like me, you do not believe in the Abrahamic Deity.

¶ +2023.11.07. What is the relation between virtual reality and artificial intelligence?

Long story short: To be convincing, Virtual Reality needs to be baed on very sophisticated computer programming. The latter, for short, is called "artificial intelligence", but it has no intelligence (nor any stupidity, either) → it just ocmputes.

You can have AI without VR. *Example*: I play with the Bing web browser AI on my perosnal computer: I type questions on the keyboard and it replies text in a little window. VR is not TTY. And th Bing AIis far more "intelligent" than most college freshmen, so it's no wonder kids are submitting AI for their course work in school.

Watch the old, fun but profound movie: "**The Truman Show**"

Now read and learn:

My virtual reality experiment: I was driving up a 6 lane superhighway early one August afternoon in clear bright sunlight at about 65 miles per hour in my clunky Toyota Corolla DX, with no other cars on the road. I decided to look intently at the little image in the car's rear view mirror -- no high tech apparatus. I really really really really intently focused all my attention on that little image! It was entirely convincing. That "little" image became my whole experienced reality: I was driving where I had been, not where the automobile was going. Fortunately I "snapped out of it" in time to avoid becoming a one car crash in the ditch on the right side of the road. (It was a very good place to have conducted this experiment, because there was a police barracks, a teaching hospital, and both Christian and Jewish cemeteries nearby, just in case.)

You may try to repeat my virtual reality experiment at your own risk; I strongly advise you against doing so. I assure you: It worked. (Of course it will not work if you don't "give in to it", just like a video game won't work if you just look at the pixels as what some computer programmer coded up with branching instructions depending on what inputs you enter.) Moral of this story: **VIRTUAL REALITY CAN KILL YOU. Forewarned is forearmed.**

¶ +2023.11.07. How is work compared to high school/college? (In terms of stress and difficulty)

Different persons have different experiences. Herewith some of mine, which may not apply to you.

"High school", or as it called itself, "preparetory school" was for me destructive. Men who probably could not make it in the real work world lorded it over boys. One of my math tachers had "electrolux vacuum cleaner salesman" on his employment record. Another was some kind of immogrant from Western Europe after World War II with a Doctor of Corporate Law degree whom I felt had something he was ashamed of or wanted to forget so he taught Spanish. Losers. And I lost because I was not a jock; they liked jocks – that wa their attained intellectual level

[ lacrosse helmet ]

I was so badly ignoranced that I did not know how to make use of college, was always afraid of getting a bad grade there, instead of doing what I should have been doing: networking.

Wor for me was initially different. There I was a person not in inferior life form (a non-ocular "pupil"). One of my first jobs is where I got my first taste of self respect and self worth: I ran the gift shop in an art useum and had a book of blank purchase orders, with authorization to buy anything I wantd for resale in the shop. I jsut signed on the bottom line and it went to Acounts Payable, not to a teach "marking" me. There are few things like the power to spend other people's money to help build self-esteem. And ther wa a secons aspect to it. Nothing in m ychildhood appealed to me. I never wanted to go to Disneyland. In th museum shop I sold fine hand crafts, especially, for me, ceramics. Wow! Human beings could make thing that I felt deserved to exist! And unlike the paintings hanging on the museum walls, I could afford to buy them for myself, to. I saw the shop as "the exhibit you can take home with you", which wa controversia; the curator of paintings and sculpture whom I did not like wanted to turn the shop into a postcard kiosk. Dealing with small pieces of pottery made by mater potters changed my life. Person I could know could do things that were of value. Pretty sad to grow to adulthood feeling nothing was any good, yes? But Ilearned otherwise on the job.

Later in life things went differntly. In my 40s I went back to school to get an eash doctorate, and there I was respected. Before one class I went up to the teacher and asked if I could write an essay on a topic tangentially related to the course in which I had a pasionate interest, INSTEAD, repeat: i-n-s-t-e-a-d of doing the course assignments, and she immediately replied for me to go do it. That's how the losers in perp(spelling intended) school should have treated me but maybe it was my fault for not knowing enough to teach them how to treat me (it was a Christian school, so they could have learned from Luke 2:41–52). My parents had not given me any sense of self-worth. All I knew was that I did not want to be hurt more than the adolts (spelling intended) already were hurting me.

As for work, it went downhill: at first it was fun. But by the time almost half a century later when I was made redundant (fired without cause in a reduction in force), I have got PTSD from it. I did computer programming. IBMS/360 Assembly language was fun. Undocumented 2010's apis like Angular (worse: Django) were waking nightmares for me.

Each person's trajectory in life is different although many do seem to try to be like 2-legged sheep. Everything is luck. Your gifts and your deficiencies, the family you were born into, the people you meet.... If you want to see what bad luck in life really is, watch this:

[ Honor killing ]

I am cynical, but that video "shook" me. On the other hand, you could have been born with a silver spoon in your mouth, as the saying goes. Some persons who are born to great good fortune blow it. I once had a manager at work who had been born to wealth, who wrote an auto-biographical short story about fighting to keep from being born. The adults defeated his best efforts with forceps.

You can only do your best, but the more you learn, the better your chances:

"What men are willing to put up with depends on what they are able to loo forward to." (Arnold Hause)

I was childreared to have nothing to look forward to, so I put up with a lot, starting with my parents who were clueless and then my perp school teachers who –- here are the GPS coordinate of the school for a JDAM: [39.4324433, -76.6766731],

Some persons have it differnet in school: They are lucky to find an adult who is both caring and knowledgeable, who mentors them. I had one teacher when I went back to graduate school who had come from humble origins. His father had driven a milk delivery truck. He did well in school, and when it came time to do his docorate he wrote his dissertation on the history of the department his advisor was grooming him to become head of. There is one person I am much jealous of: He was the prize student of the greatest philosopher of the 20h century, Edmund Husserl. His teacher literally, flat-out stated that he, the student, spoke for him. He became his master's second voice. You can't beat that, and few have such an opportunity.

School should inspire you. Work should make you want to give back for blessings received. When I once asked a manager at work for a job assignment that would be both productive forthe company and growing for me, he replied: "If wishes were horses then beggars would ride."

"Enjoyment is always bound up with gratitude; if this gratitude is deeply felt it includes the wish to return goodness received and is thus the basis of generosity. There is always a close relation between being able to accept and to give, and both are part of the relation to the good object [prototypically, the nurturing mother] and therefore counteract loneliness. Furthermore, the feeling of generosity underlies creativeness, and this applies to the infant's most primitive constructive activities as well as to the creativeness of the adult." (Melanie Klein, Envy and gratitude and other works, 1946-1963, 1975, p. 310)

¶ +2023.11.07. Are you surprised to learn that "a quarter of most wardrobes go unworn in a year and nearly a quarter of us admit to wearing clothes only a few times"?

I am not surprised.

Fashion is waste. Let me repeat that: Fashion is useless expenditre of time and material.

But many people are superficial and imagine that clothes make the man not the other way around.

Two personal stories:

(1) I have a highly pedigreed education but often go around looking like a homeless person (well, not quite that bad but close). I don't care, or it's reverse snobbishness. January 1, 1984, I was wandering around the small town of Imbe in rural Japan. All the shops were open but ther was only one other tourist in the whole town because January 1 is the one day of the year when almost nobody works in Japan. I was looking to buy one piece of pottery.I went thru all the stores. At a certain point I saw "it". The only thing in the whole town (which is at the center of an important ceramics tradition: Bizenware) I wanted to buy. I went in the shop and asked to clerk (who ws probalby also the owner) if I could look at it i.e., handle it. She tried to convince me to look at anything else in whole the shop because this piece was quite expensive and she was afraid this slob would break something and not pay for it. She quickly changed her atitude when I brought out a thick roll of banknotes from the pocket of my torn jeans.

(2) My father literally "came from nothing": white trash It was so bad that his father had tried to blackmail him to get part of his paycheck when my father had risen to the point where he was making a decent living.

Well, my father rose to sales manager. the company got bought out. The new owners sent one of their stoolies to watch my father since my father was not "one of them". So the stoolie was my father's direct boss. One day the stoolie asked my father a question. He asked my father how much he paid for his suits. This was back in the late 1950s. The stoolie bought his suits at Robert Hall for maybe $95 or less. Since my father had "come from nothing" but now was successful enough to send me to Yale, he bought suits like top executives and government officals wear: Hickey-Freeman, Oxxford, Robert Morton – You name I I never wore any of it except for his hand-me-down Countess Mara ties. He was inwardly proud of what he had accomplished in life.

Well, my father was an honest man. He never told anybody where he got his clothes but he stoolie had asked him a direct question so he sheepishly gave an honest answer: $400. That was 1/10 a year's tuition + room and board at Yale.

My father had a big wardrobe of very expensive clothes. He wore every piece of it, because for him, it was not fashion, but "the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace" (ref. lost, but if you are a Christian you will know what it more commonly means)

Quality endures.

¶ +2023.11.07. What is the reason that television is often seen as a poor quality medium for entertainment/showing media content? Is there one particular moment or series that started this decline in quality (if any)?

Profits and audience. The television companies want ot make money, like Candy manufacturers who offer a product that rots kids' teeth and cocaine dealers. They sell what people want to buy.

But not everything on television is dreck or what I call violence soft porn. Examples: Patrick McGoohan's series "The Prisoner". CBS News series "World War I". "Air disasters" on the Smithsonian Channel today.

Or you can watch things like Senate hearings live. There the decline in quality is not due to the television service but to the country's politicians themselves. My favorite is then Senator Joseph Biden havinng a psychotic episode humiliating U.N. Chief nuclear weapons inspector USMC Major Scott Ritter live in the U.S. Senate hearings before the Iraq War. on CSPAN I think it was. It's still on the Internet and it is disgusting, but it's real. Senator Biden, live on air, referred to Major Ritter as: "Ol' Scotty Boy" and admonished him that he wa not in a pay grade to deserve a limousine.

Then, back in the early 1950s, there was the Senate hearing in which Joseph Welsh, a lawyer for the U.S. Army shot down Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. Another classic on the television: "Have you no sense of decency?"

If you don't like it don't watch it. Read a good book. Play with a loving pet. Have loving sex. Leave the dead to bury the dead, as Jesus said (Matthew 8:22).

¶ +2023.11.07. Is it possible to work from my country for a company in another country in any area of psychology?

Probably yes but not all jobs will do it. Telemedicine? Phone-a-therapist (or whatever the service is called)? Prospects are better since Covid.

I worked as a computer programmer in New York state USA. for several years I worked from home in teams in Canada and then Israel. I never set foot in either country. My wife is a clinical social worker in private practice and does all her work from home; so the patients could be on the other side of the planet apart from licensing considerations.

¶ +2023.11.07. I believe that laughter is the best medicine, it helps us all release stress and tension. A good joke can help improve our mood and brighten our day. Please help us help our followers alleviate a little stress and tension one joke at a time. Will you please share one of your favorite clean jokes?

Humor is not just funny. Marshall McLuhan said:

"**Every joe expresses a grievance. The funny man is a man with a grudge.**"

One of his favorites. It's about the French Canadians who always feel persecuted by the Anglos:

There was a house with a pet cat and a pet dog and a mouse. The mouse heard meowing and quickly escaped to safety down his mouse hole. Some time later the mouse heard loud barking. Since dogs do not like cats and do not eat mice, the mouse figured it wa safe to come back out of his mouse hole.

On his way down into the cat's stomach the mouse heard the cat say: "There are advantages to being bilingual."

¶ +2023.11.06. Who enjoys his works more: an intelligent person or a genius person?

Satisfaction is satisfaction

Ther is a fine video on Youtube about "Macnamara's morons": mentally retarded persons who were conscripted into the U.S. Army during Vietnam to meet quotas. Some of these man literally could not tell right from left (not just right from wrong). The officers had problem on their hands becasuse these people could shoot each other or themselves because they didn't know which way to point a gun. Some of the officers came up with a solution: They gave these "hopeless cases" scut work that nobody else wanted to do, such as mopping floors. But these men COULD DO this. And they did it far better than brighter men. Thei took enotmous pride in doing this work well, and the officers were happy to havev them do it because more intelligent men did not want to do this work and consequently did it poorly.

So there you have somebody at the bottom end of the intelligence scale having enjoyment in work. Run up the "IQ scale, and match man (woman, other) to task and they will equally enjoy their work. It's as simple as that.

So a genius may greatly enjoy his work or hate it. A mentally retarded person may greatly enjoy his work or hate it. and anybody in between.

Match the person to the task and you have a winner. Don't match and it is a recipe for problems on all sides.

Now here is a problem: If yoo have an employee (or student or child) who is less intelligent than you, you may be able to figure out what will match them. But if the person is much more intelligent than you, you may not understand them and it will not work out well. My parents and school teachers were as if of a less evolved species than me. They tried to make be be like them and it did not work well. I csued them trouble and they wasted my life. And "wasted" in two ways: (1) for me, and (2) for society. Because my life was pathetic and I failed to contribute ot their society what I might have. Lose -lose. everybody can use wheels, but it took a genius to invent the wheel.

Match the person to the task and everybody will win.

.

¶ +2023.11.06. How do you become good at speaking when you have no one to speak with?

That's tough.

One thing you can do is tape record yourself. If you are like me, you won't be happy with what you hear back, so that's a place to start improving.

¶ +2023.11.06. What are some potential psychological benefits and drawbacks of the growing trend of constant connectivity through social media and digital devices?

Content connectivity can mess with persons' ability to focus on anything and turn them into zombies. It can make waking life a nightmare. And Social Media are largely "small talk" and I find small talk a waste of my time, don't you? "Blah, blah, blah." "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." "Blah, blah!" "Blah, blah, blah...."

Constant AVAILABILITY of connectivity is good, just like constant availabilty of a tollet or food or your toothbrush or any other tool. But you need to be able to not be bothered by your tools to be able to manage your life which the tools SERVE.

Actually BEING connected all the time makes a person be a slave to their tool.

I worked for half a century as a computer programmer so I cannot be accused of being a luddite or computer illiterate. I hate cellphones because they enable people to annoy me for trivial reasons at any time. My choice has its downside, like if I am walking in the woods and have a heart atack I may die because I can't call 911. But I make a tradeoff so that friends and faimly and robocallers can't bug me about "will you do this chore?" or other trivialities.

So, to repeat: Constant AVAILABILITY of connectivity if great. During the day I write down all sorts of stuff on my personal computer computer, which stays on my desk. But I only carry the cellphone if something like: I went to the doctor and she ran a test and I am waiting to find out if I have cancer or not. Then the constant annoyance of the intrusive device is worth the potential information gain.

"Leisure has been, and always will be, the first foundation of any culture.... in our bourgeois Western world total labor has vanquished leisure. Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for nonactivity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture – and ourselves." (Josef Pieper)

1

¶ +2023.11.06. How long do you think generative AI will become truly creative?

Never.

Computers just compute. A creative idea is one which cannot be algorithmically generated from all existing knowledge, i.e., something that cannot be computed. And then there is the monkeys-at-typewriters problem: Given enough time, monkeys punching keys on a typewriter would produce both Moby Dick and also many other texts that were almost Moby Dick but worthless. What the monkeys could not do is jedge which one of their texts was the masterpiece, becaue, again, it's something that is not algorithmically determinable from existing knowledge (processors + stored data).

Well, maybe: If computer scientists / electrical and chemical engineers / phyicists cook up a computer that they cannot understand, like copulation produces a baby whuch nobody can undertand either. Alan Turing once wrote to his mother:

If we ever make a computer that really thinks, "we shan't underttand how it does it"

And don't get all excited: If you do make such a computer and it kills somebody up may be criminally liable for first degree murder. Have fun!

¶ +2023.11.05. What are the best quotes on general problem solving?

Here's a few from a man who got a PhD in computer science from Yale:

Jerry Leichter's laws of software development (etc.)

1 If you don't know how to do something, you don't know how to do it on a computer.

2 If something can't be done, it won't be done.

Corollary: Poor middle managers don't believe in the 2nd law.

3 You can't have it until we've done it.

¶ +2023.11.05. Do Americans know that everybody hates them?

I think a lot of persons in various countries do not like the Big Bully: the United States government. There was an essay in The Atlantic magazine now probably 3 or 4 years ago which said that people in Europe thought Americans are "esthetically repulsive" and that the Amerian governemt at that time waa "rudderless". Now we have a President who is some combination of mentally retarded, neurologiclly damaged and senile as well is being a Big Bully.

[ Biden ensnared in Ukraine snakes ]

But not every American is hated. Columbia Uiversity Professor of sustained development Jeffrey Sachs is warmly welcomed all around the world – he even offers to let President Biden use his personal oom link to The Presiident of The Russian Federation. But, of course, Mr.Biden is not interested in that because, as he hallucinated one day live in a press conference: "For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power."

I was born in "this country" and have lived her all my life and I do not like most of it. I never wanted to go to Disneyland. Did you?

But if people diss "the ugly American"s, they should look in the mirror:

[ Opening day t McD Moscow ]

Nobody coerced these people to do that. So if you say you hate America, make sure you are not stuffing your face with a Big Mac, or a Whopper, while you are saying it.

[ Whopper — all images blurred ]

¶ +2023.11.05. How do I run a successful/standard innovation lab?

There are various ways to foster innovation. Here's just one:

In the 1920s, whan Ford Motor Company hired Taylorist time-and-motion people to improve productivity, They gave them a specific order that they were likely to find one employee with his feet up on his desk doing nothing. They were to leave him alone. Why? Because he had once had an idea which either saved or made, I forget which, the company a million dollars (which was a lot of money back then), "with his feet in exactly that position."

In IBM I actually once met one such person. He was just shooting the breeze on second shift in somebody else's office with another person who was almost as bright as hm and who looked up to him. He was wearing blue jeans. He came to work someimes. He grew house plants in the basement of his house. He had never been to college. He had been a delivery truck driver but they gave him the Programer Aptitude Test and he was a genius or close to it. So waht did he do? He reworked computer chip design programs that ran for days and cut them down to run in a few hours.

Sometimes the best thing you can do for an innovator is to ask him (her, other) what you can do for them and just do it, and don't annoyr them with irrelevant things like showing up for work in the morning.

¶ +2023.11.05. If alien or even artificial intelligence observes how we treat other humans, animals, and machines, can we expect them to treat us better?

One size does not fit all.

First, ther is no such thing as artificial INTELLIGENCE, at least not untl it becomes noncomputational which is not in the offing. All omputer programs are subject to Godel's Incompleteness theorem, end of discussion. They just compute. Deep Blue had no understanding of chess, but it did deploy clever programming, probably over a massive database. nd since many persons act according to social customs not creatie thinking, an AI can probably beat a lot of persons in at "Turing test", not becaue it is intelligent but because it's programmed with mor cliches and how to manipulate them in coputationally clever ways.

It probably wouldn't be "cost effective" for aliens to come here with bad intentions, like to turn us into slaves. It just wouldn't be worth the effort. But we'd make great dissertation material for aliens studying freaks and failures of nature. "Scotty, these creatures look like they are about to blow up this planet. And we have no idea what they might do to us with their thermonuclear bombs.Prepare to blast off on a moment's notice." "I already figured that out, Captain. We are ready to leave. Just give the order!" From somewhere beyond Jupiter they look back and see that Mr. Biden has won his war againt Russia by bombing every major Russsian city and the Russians have retaliated and the earth is now covered in a growing caustic yellow-dirty gray haze. "Captain, we have ceaesed receiving radio frequency transmissiions from that planet." "Thank you, Lieutenant Sulu, have a good evening."

¶ +2023.11.05. If we were used by a higher intelligence to generate outputs based on our senses, what kinds of such use could you think of?

There can be no "higher intelligence" than a person who thinks self-reflectively because he (she, other) is a perspective on everything, as well, alas, as also being part of it,

[Part and whole ]

If there is some sort of Supreme Deity, He (She, Other) obviously will dispose over more horsepower than any human, but He (She, Other) is jusut one more thing for the human to think about (like dogs and cinderblocks and emporers and used paper towels and subatomic particles, etc.). "Yahweh, who?" I am aware would not go over well with a hassid but that's not my problem unless he tries to murder me or otherwise materially harm me.

All the world is just raw material for human imaginative elaboration, including, if any, its Supreme Deity, i.e., Big Bully. If I met Yahweh on the road Iwould greet Him respectfully lie I would a homeless Vietname veteran or anybody else ("pleae keep social distance, Sir!"), and proceed according to how He responded. If he was respectful to me in return, we might get on; if He wanted to be worshipped, I'd try to be on my way and let Him get his ego-gratification from somebody else.

Now that does not mean the human cannot be murdered or tortured by Yahweh (vide. righteous man Job, e.g.), but I am talking about "intelligence", not muscle mass. If something is beyond our thought then it's beyond our thinking it's beyond our thought which, since I said "it's beyond my thought" proves it is not because I thought it. I may not be able to know its details, but then I don't know what's behind a tree in the forest until I go look behind it, either, nor can I tell whether of not the dark side of the moon is made of Velveeta.

Let me end with a parable, a story about an adult and a child. Substitute: God and human adult, for adult and child in he story, which is reasonable since some people believe we are children of God:

Example of appropriate treatment of a young person by an adult: Sandor Ferenczi wrote, in an essay evocatively titled "The Adaptation of the Family to the Child": I am reminded of an incident with a little nephew of my own, whom I treated as leniently as, in my view, a psycho-analyst should. He took advantage of this and began to tease me, then wanted to beat me, and then to tease and beat me all the time. Psycho-analysis did not teach me to let him beat me ad infinitum, so I took him in my arms, holding him so that he was powerless to move, and said: "Now beat me if you can!" He tried, could not, called me names, said that he hated me; I replied: "All right, go on, you may feel these things and say these things against me, but you must not beat me." In the end he realized my advantage in strength and his equality in fantasy, and we became good friends. (Sandor Ferenczi, "Final contributions to the problems and methods of psychoanalysis", 1955, p. 75)

¶ +2023.11.05. Elon Musk has predicted that artificial intelligence will eventually mean that no one will have to work. What are you going to do with your time and where do you have the money to live?

For the past 4 years I have had this: being either unelmployed or retired and not yet bankrupt. I have spent my time studying, largely, I must confess, by wathing Youtube videos wheras when I was younge I consumed large quantities of serious books even though Iread slowly. But the material I watch on Youtube is "top notch". Item: The master structural engineer William Lemessurier himself giving an hour long lecture on his New York CitiCorp building problem. You can't beat that kind of material, and I avoid having to breathe people's germs in the air in a lecture hall.

Most of what I have been studying is something I wish I did not have to study: The Ukraine war. But it is what it is.

Noneless I still have time for other things like, currently, Ernst Junger's "Storm of steel" – well, that's still war but it's the way I want to spend my time. And I RYO art in the spirit of Marcel Duchamp. It is probably fortunate I have no freehand drawing ability becaue drawings of Mr. Zelensky emitting feces from his oral orifice in front of the U.S. Congress or the EU probably would not go over well. But I do my best with cut and paste. Example

I have not watched anything on television in monhs, although I do highly recommend Air Disasters on the Smithsonian Channel which I previously watched so many times that I almost know some of the episodes by heart.I love to see how cost-effectiveness kills people.

I have enough education that with the few books I own and a personal computer, I could probably keep myself occupied if I live to be 120. And I do have my pet cat who, alas would not last until then. Here she is when she was a kitten. Now she is about 13 years old and has a little hole in her heart which so far has not hurt her.

I do not like the Abrahamic Deity, but I highly recommend in answer to the persent question the Book of **Ecclesiastes** in teh Bible. It holds the answer to the question, or you may feel it does not.

I never wanted freedom** of** enterprise; I always wanted freedom f**rom** enterprie, to cultivate my soul in study of the arts and sciences. So I will end with a famous quote from America's 2nd President, not one of the ecent ones:

"I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain." (John Adams)

¶ +2023.11.05. What can we learn from how families and nations come together after tragedy?

We can learn lots of things, some of which are not popular.

Why didn't the people come together before and without tragedy?????

Take the current horrific potlatch in Ukraine (or probably the one in Pelastine/Israel, too). What do you think would happen to all these bickering prickly, petty fools if suddenly from the sky an invasion of hostile space aliensappeared and it was clear the space aliens were going to do their damnedest to kill all the men and rape and enslave all the women and eat all the children" Do you think Messsirs Zelensky and Putin, and the Yakoo in Israel and whever is boss of Hamas would continue to squbble with each other, especially if they all tried to collaborate with the space aliens and the space aliens wer not interested?

Look at World War ||. Prof. Richard Wolff says that in U.S. Post Offices ther were picture s of "Uncle Joe".

So people should cut the sh*t and be nice to each other without any tragedy. Live is short enough without agetting The Grim Reaper's work – he is patient; war is not. Have some joy! Pet your loving pet! Have some loving sex! Drink some goodwine with a coupld close friends! Cut the crap!

Second, people love to cry about dead heroes. There is nothing they can do for the dead. So use the dead for medical science or compost or whatever. Focus all tht energy in making life better for the living. When I die let the sanitation engineers remove the waste. Don't cry about those who are alrady dead: do everything in [y]our power to make sure ther are no more of them to cry about!

Here's a little story I wrote about this:

[--------]

Sentimentally. A cappella; no musical instruments, no score, like free Jazz.

" Boo hoo! Boo hoo! Boo hoo hoo! Boo hoo! Boo hoo hoo! Boo hoo! Boo hoo! Boo hoo hoo hoo! [Sob!] Boo hoo! Boo hoo! Boo hoo! Boo hoo hoo hoo! Boo hoo! Boo hoo! Boo hoo! Boo hoo! Boo hoo! Boo hoo! Boo hoo! Boo hoo! Boo hoo! [Sob!] Boo hoo hoo hoo hoo! Boo hoo hoo! Boo hoo! Boo hoo! Boo hoo hoo! Boo hoo! " repeated endlessly....

"Why are you crying my sweet daughter?" "Daddy! My husband just died in the war." "But didn't you send him there? You shamed him that after the war when his son asked him 'Daddy what did you do to protect mommy from the evil enemy and help our country win the war?' if he didn't enlist he would have to hang his head in disgrace. You told him you wouldn't have sex with him ever again if he didn't go. What did you expect, daughter?" [At this point daughter repeats above song for several more hours. Daddy thinks: "What son? I don't have any grandchildren." He reads about the war in the newspaper, pours himself a drink, and then does the Crossword puzzle].

[--------]

Then we have the "survivors" who want revenge and do not care about collatoral damage. Ther are a bunch of survivors of the crash of a jumbo jet that may have been rought down by Saudi Arabia (or maybe not). But these petty selfish people want "justice" out of Saudi Aabia, even if it would mean a world wide oil embargo that would wreck the world economy and cause horrendous human soffering especially to people in countries that are lready poor. These selfish people do not care about the potential damage their hormones may cause: they want "justice", i.e., revenge. How selfish can you get?

People get all sentimental. (Boo, hoo.)

Student: "Happy the land that breeds a hero."

Galileo: "No. Unhappy the land that needs a hero." (Bertold Brecht)

¶ +2023.11.04. Why is critical thinking lacked in today's world while herd mentality is widespread?

Respectfully, is this something new?

In 1914, whole classes of Oxford and Cambridge University graduates flocked off to the Western front like sheep to slaughter. They were not stupid and they wer not uneducated but they had herd mentality.

[ Step in your place ]

I was childreared in 1950s split-level suburbia full wheel hubcaps and tail-fins I Love Lusy and Father Knows Best and better dead than red and keep America beautiful get a haircut and get the picture? USA.

"The man in the gray flannel suit" "The ugly Ameridan" "When Johnny comes marching home again, hurrah, hurrah...."

Most persons are childreared to be good citizens, not critical thinkers. How many parents admonish their children to question what they tell them, not just believe it? Or religious leaders? Or politicians?

The President of whatever country decides to go to war. He broadcasts a message for everybody to study both sides of the conflict and only enlist if they are confiident that our side is better than the other side and thar the fight is worth it.

Or a Rebbe or other religous leader tells his people to study all religions and decide for themsselves if they think his religion is better than all the rest and even then, to take only the parts of it that make sense to you and leave the rest.

If you don't conform, in any society, the price is often ostracism.

What may be new is the specific flavor of herd mentality today. Yesterday it was chocolate and today it he vanilla and tomorrow it may be strawberry and so forth. If you were born in Germany in the late 1920s you would peobably be a Nazi. If born in the Soviet Union, a communist. If born in the USA, a walk-on for a Norman Rockwell painting.

[ Woke sheep + judas goat ]

Baaa!

¶ +2023.11.04. Why do child or teenage geniuses/prodigies usually dont have social media accounts or not generally 'out there' is it maybe they're too busy or it just doesn't interest them?

I have no idea.

I am not a genius or a prodigy but I am highly intelligent and I have no interest in "social media". They are either for trivia or mass entertainment. Grandmothers sharing pistures of their grandkids (which is fine for them, of course) or TikTok influencers.

I like to learn "serious" material, which, of course, need not be stodgy, example: Francois Rabelais' "Gargantua and Pantagruel" or Prof. Mark Jordan "The origin of sodomy in Christian theology".

I am "bright" enough and educated enough tha tII prefer to RYO: create my own art and other intellectual and emotive maerial, although I need to study what others ahve done because as Isaac Newton said: He was able to see further than others because he stood on the shoulders of giants. (It did not help that my school teachers were dwarfs and my parents were clueless.)

RYO beats comsumption, for me, and you may not know that in past the word "consumption"referred to the chronic wasting and often fatal disease tuberculosis. Much of social media (and televlsion, too) is tuberculosis of the soul: it consumes you and leads to a fate such as

[ Homer eating his donut ]

¶ +2023.11.03. This is the response I received from a professor: "You are welcome to apply to our program. I plan to take 1-2 students next year". Does it mean that she is interested in me being in her research group?

Sounds like a sincere compliment to me.

Look before you leap. Find out what you would be getting into. She could be somebody you will find you wish you had stayed away from, or a "chance of a lifetime" or anything in between

What are your goals? What is she looking for?

One of the best things a student can have going for them is a highly respected professor mentoring them.

But, again, look before you leap. Maybe ask if you can talk with this teacher, and some of her students.

+2024.06.17 v285
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Footnotes