Intelligence and Survival

        I don’t know how much sense this makes, but I just thought something that I thought worthy of recording: “It’s no wonder that intelligence doesn’t pass in direct lines; if it did, we’d just band together and kill the others”—or outperform them, or what not.
        Could this be true? I mean, you can’t do away with the intelligent ones—you need them. But too many together, especially related, is a danger to everyone else. But why didn’t it happen, then? We are all somewhat intelligent; obviously it’s a survival trait for us. But only a few are very intelligent; this has always been true, and is still true in apes. Why didn’t the smart ones beget more smart ones and become dominant? Are lots of smart people self-destructive? This is very important.

Life

The first thing a person must do to gain control of his own life is to develop a view of how the world works and of his place in it.

Science and Philosophy

I have finally decided that science and philosophy are worthless without each other. Science without philosophy—solid philosophy, not a scientist’s philosophy which says he can play with his toys for as long as he likes—is directionless and dangerous. It will provide solutions with no guarantee that the solution is not worse than the problem. Never any real answers. Philosophy without science is not really philosophy at all, because it’s not looking at the real world, only what sounds good or feels right. Only at the confluence can truth and answers be found.

Insecurity

Insecurity is a sane and normal reaction when you are changing or doubting your value system. It’s a mark of being true to yourself; your emotions telling you, “just because it makes sense doesn’t mean it’s right, and just because it seems right doesn’t mean it’s best for you!” Don’t deny, cover up or be ashamed of your insecurities. Face them. Understand why you’re insecure, what you’re afraid of, then examine whether that fear is legitimate. You’re not bad to be afraid, because it’s yourself you’re looking after, which is right!

Historical writings

        Histories should be divided into two parts (not necessarily in the same work): narrative history and factual (factal?) or evidential history. The former is normal history: telling a tale, piecing together of facts within a framework of tapestry to weave a coherent and interesting story.
        The second or evidential history is a far more rigorous, scientific document. It delineates the facts gathered, the conclusions reached, the connections between, and—most importantly—the entire evidential chain back to its original sources, so that no conclusions are based on others’ data or conclusions without an understanding of how they reached their answers, so as to point up where errors may gave occurred, and to be able to understand not only the lineage and origins of the data (in order that the reader might draw her own conclusions) but also its degree of sureness and veracity at every point, thus giving first an indication of the likely accuracy of the current conclusions, and second a way of making apparent what of the conclusions must be called into question if any of the sources are proven wrong, without invalidating the entire work.

I also believe that history writers, after completing their research, should read a book of their favorite fiction, or perhaps Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—which does an excellent job of expository philosophy while reading like a good novel—before writing their narrative history, so that they won’t write sentences like the above.

Slavery

Here is the test of slavery—is your work something you do of your own choice, or do you work for fear of punishment from other people? By this definition, nearly all children are slaves. It is also possible to be in a slavery situation of your own devising, where a simple choice will release you. No, members of the military are not slaves; they are indentured servants. They knew what they were doing when they signed up. Draftees, on the other hand, are slave warriors, unless they were given the choice to renounce their citizenship to avoid being drafted.

More Work

So—time to write about what I originally meant to write. Work. What is work? Work is the effort we put out in order to achieve our goals and dreams. How perverse then, that we (or just I? ? ?) are taught as children, by school, by parents, that work is the unpleasant thing you must do or else get in trouble which keeps you from doing the things you want! Perverse. Insane. How—why—do we do this?

Occult

I think it would greatly behoove me to study occult magic. I started on a book about it last night, and it seemed to me nothing more than sophisticated Zen-like mind control—or mind access. I think it would work—as far as possible, anyway. And if magical powers were stored inside the mind, that would be how to get at them.

Genius

Genius: the ability to come up with new ideas.

Answers

        Last night was a good night. I have finally made a positive difference with my new ideas. Admittedly, this seems like one of the most obvious of my ideas, but, as I know all too well, just because something seems obvious, that doesn't mean that anyone actually knows it! Myself included. So—Elizabeth was wanting to know what happened after death. She said it had gone past grieving or fearful wishes into clinical curiosity [2007: Someone close to her had died recently; I don’t recall who]. So I told her. And it worked. She found (as I have) that the logic was irrefutable, given our current knowledge of physiology and chemistry. Which only reaffirms my conclusion that it is only quite recently, in our modern scientific age, that it has truly been possible to supplant religion with personal, logical, scientific knowledge, at least as far as the answers about the Universe go. Not to say that there haven't been people before now who have believed in a real, physical, non-supernatural universe—they've existed at least since the Renaissance. But their belief was also based on faith—not as much blind faith as the religionists, perhaps, but faith nonetheless. They didn't—couldn't—really know the answers to questions like How did the Universe come to be? What happens when we die? What is life? Why are we here? They could only have faith that logic and science and the human mind would one day find answers to the questions. And their faith has been justified. But it is only in the last 50 years that we have evolved modern genetic theory, the only thing which can allow relative surety in the large human answers. Everything before was merely shrewd guesses and extrapolation. The people I have been looking to for answers—Rand, Pirsig, Asimov, Heinlein—are my grandparents' age. Even people of my parents' generation—Card, for example—grew up in an age which believed in the power of hard science to solve any problem on one hand, while on the other, was very suspicious of this powerful, distant Science thing and was not, generally, personally aware of the personal philosophical ramifications of science. Besides which they were—as a generation—raised by staunch religionists. That's very difficult to get past. It has long been my belief that it takes two full generations for a social change to completely take effect. So what I'm saying is that it's possible that the reason I feel like the only one with the answers, and get so frustrated with all of the above-named genius authors for knowing only parts of the truth and not seeing the whole, is that my generation is the first with the tools to put all these pieces together, living in an environment where people who think as differently as I do do not have to carefully hide their views to be able to live and interact with society (a result of my intellectual forebears' efforts? If so, thank you), and I am not alone, but instead in the vanguard of a new way of thinking.
        And these people who went before me are not deluded geniuses possessed of almost-truths, but pioneers laying the groundwork, clearing a path for me—us—to build on and lay a foundation for the future, making the best conclusions they could form from the knowledge they had—just as I do. For I fear it will be for the generation that comes after me—my intellectual descendants—to actually do the work I envision. That's OK. It's enough for me to make the vision possible.

        How I want to be different from them is by writing down my misgivings. They were all so sure—and so wrong in many particulars, however true their overall vision was. I'm sure the same is and will be true of me. But what I have always—always—wanted to do is separate those things I am certain of from my speculations, no matter how sure of them I feel.

        So the likelihood—the great likelihood—is that there are several others out there who have found much the same answers I have. Are they just like me? Do they have my goals and dreams, my strengths, my exact beliefs (or better)? Probably not. How many Heinleins were there? How many Rands? One of each, who did what they did. But these people—these brothers and sisters in mind—are out there. I just have to find them. I think I have already found one—Nooreen. She just hasn't had time to develop the ideas yet.

Reaction

A reaction can be defined as the act of energy changing form.

Obstacles to capitalism

There are, as I see it, two obstacles to the perfect capitalism—that is, where quality wins. First is lack of access and open information. This creates situations where low quality wins, merely because people don't know about, or can't get access to (often because the low-quality businesses have tried to block that access & information, or override it with noise) higher quality products.
Second is the shortsightedness of man. This is why Standard Oil did so well; even though people must have known what could happen, they didn't believe it would, or didn't think they could make a difference, and went to the cheaper place and let the older places go out of business. There are other effects, as well, but mostly along these lines. This is primarily a cultural thing.

Update: 7/9/2007: I’m not really going through my journal entries to comment on them at the moment; I’m just republishing them on my blog. But I can’t let this one sit. I wrote this long before I had an Economics education, and it’s not bad. The first part I definitely still agree with; information access is a major economic problem creating many disequilibria. But I’m not so sure about the second. The problem that was obviously foremost in my thoughts when I wrote this was the Apple/Microsoft problem. But first, that may not be as big an economic problem as I had thought, however I may dislike the outcome. Peter Klein has some interesting insights on this subject. Second, the Standard Oil case I refer to—where Standard would come into a small town across from a local gas station, drop their prices, drive the local station out of business, and then hike up their prices higher than the local station’s ever were—is apparently apocryphal. So much for high school History class. Third, I now think that the other major obstacle to a properly working capitalism (besides artificial constraints imposed by government) is externality problems (a topic that deserves its own long post, so I won’t elaborate here).

Intellect

• Intellect is an emotion. You know what is right because it feels right, because it makes sense, because all of the pieces of that particular puzzle in your head fit in places that feel appropriate, that feel right. People consider intellect as part of the consciousness, the ego. It is not. Only the choosing mechanism itself, that calls on and decides to use the intellect, is that.
• Your mind will come up with answers—or at least with questions—on its own, if you encourage and let it. Lots of them. Don't worry about why—it just does! You are not your intellect. You are only your memories and thoughts. All the ideas and emotions come from somewhere deeper. You don't need to know how it works to use it, and in fact if you insist on knowing how it works before you use it, you'll never find out, because you'll have no means to find the answer! Exactly why this should be true I am still unsure of as yet, but I am sure it's true.

• Make sense of everything. This does not necessarily contradict the above. Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it doesn't make intuitive, gut sense to you.
• Every piece of knowledge that you encounter, either take in and understand, or admit you don't understand it and put it aside. Never allow yourself to partially understand something, taking it in and making it your own without comprehending it fully. Understanding your own emotions is the first, most important key to this.
        This is what I did with Ayn Rand. I allowed her to convince me that what she said was right, to believe it was right, without fully understanding why each thing she said was right.
        You will never succeed until you understand what you know, and as you get new data, understand that, and integrate it into who you are. This is the key.

Dying

If you have nothing worth dying for, you have nothing worth living for.

Wrong

The opposite of wrong is not right; it is another wrong. Right lies between extremes of wrong.

Work

Most people only want to worry about whether they’re doing their job well, not how much money they’re going to make. To put it another way: People want to focus on providing or creating value, not what reward they will get for it. Let them. Institute systems which reward hard work, dedication and value, not grubbing for money or jockeying for position. The greatest reward should go to those who provide the greatest value. Although it is every person’s job to look out for themselves, and no papa-knows-best system should presume to usurp that duty, nevertheless a person should not have to think much about it; they should just receive what they’ve earned. In other words, the honest man should not have to worry about unjust treatment. He should be on his guard and be able to protect himself, of course, since no system with any freedom in it can be perfect in that way, but when the upstanding members of a society (without whom there would be no society) band together to create the rules which govern them, they should be intelligent enough to achieve their goals, while being flexible enough to change them if they are incomplete or wrong, but only then. Our present systems fall somewhat short of this mark.

History

With history, it is not always so important to ascertain what did happen so much as what could have happened; what fits in with all the evidence and makes sense. After all, that is the prime purpose of history: to learn from the achievements and mistakes of the past and to see how we got to where we are.

Desire

Desire comes from inside. The specific manifestation of these desires is molded by experience, but the basic desires themselves are inborn. This is the starting point of all human activity.